Marcel Theroux tries to find out who is benefitting from the enormous gas and oil reserves in a country riddled with corruption.
Sonya Saul finds that more than a decade of exposure to the global free market has changed little for the poorest 40% of the population who still live on less than two dollars a day.
Saira Shah travels to the centre of a sleeping sickness epidemic, and discovers that potentially lethal cocktails of chemicals are being injected into patients who are denied a safe drug owing to the lack of financial incentive for the major pharmaceutical companies.
Jonathan Miller investigates the fate of the Ambonese people on the island of Maluku in Indonesia as that country takes part in a bitter religious war between Muslims and Christians.
Juliana Ruhfus finds that the lucrative mining of the ore coltan from which tantalum is extracted, and used in the production of mobile phones, is at the root of the war in Congo.
Marcel Theroux investigates life and conditions in Chechnya and how European governments are deliberately ignoring Russian atrocities and oppression in order to maintain good diplomatic and business relations with Russia.
Sandra Jordan looks at the American policy of trying to solve its cocaine drugs problems by eradicating coca production in Bolivia and the consequences and effects this has on the country and its population.
Saira Shah finds that the oil boom in Colombia has caused an increase in misery and violence for much of the population.
Imran Khan travels around Pakistan to reveal attitudes towards America, Osama Bin Laden and the military campaign and bombings in Afghanistan.
Jonathan Miller looks at the economic growth of China and the price behind such economic success in terms of society and the treatment of workers.
Kim Willsher reports on the impact of the European Union's fishing agreement on fishermen in Mauritania.
Sandra Jordan investigates why so many young Palestinians have turned to violence in their struggle for self-determination.
Marcel Theroux finds that government repression has driven young people towards joining the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and asks if the "War on Terror" will accelerate the process.
Juliana Ruhfus visits at a country blighted by war and poverty and ruled by warlords, and asks if America's attempts to control Islamic extremism in the country will only further radicalise its population.
Jonathan Miller investigates Al-Qaeda's alleged Southeast Asian connections, including the kidnap gang Abu Sayyaf.
Burhan Wazir investigates the ultra-nationalist groups who are redefining modern India.
Jonathan Miller finds that security forces have been committing human rights abuses against civilians in their attempts to suppress a rebel army fighting for independence.
Sandra Jordan reports on how refugees deported back to El Salvador have established the gang culture they grew up with in the US.
Sandra Jordan investigates the causes and human cost of the on-going Maoist rebellion in the world's only Hindu Kingdom.
William Wallis witnesses the horrors of a civil war born out of economic recession and fuelled by ethnic hatred.
Juliana Ruhfus reports on a nation torn apart by economic collapse, political anarchy and gang warfare.
Sandra Jordan reports from Ciudad Juarez where more than 370 women have been murdered, at least 137 of them subjected to rape.
Farai Sevenso investigates the role of child solders in the 17-year-old war between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan government.
Zaiba Malik investigates claims that the government's attempts to eradicate the world's worst methamphetamine addiction problem have led to state-sanctioned executions in the street.
Juliana Ruhfus asks if a frantic effort to regain the West's confidence is pushing Kenya's Muslim population towards extremism.
What is it like to be a young person in Israel today, trying to live a normal life against a backdrop of conflict and the ever-present threat of suicide bombings?
Sandra Jordan investigates the reality of occupation and resistance in Kashmir.
Farai Sevenso takes a look at law and order in South Africa and accompanies a private security company on patrol.
Juliana Ruhfus investigates the strength of Al-Qaeda in Yemen and the attitudes of the people to the US, Al-Qaeda and the "War on Terror".
Zaiba Malik finds that economic problems are adding to political turmoil and ethnic violence between those of African and Indian origin.
Sam Kiley reports on the US occupation of Afghanistan.
Sandra Jordan reports on the activities of American evangelicals spreading American values along with Protestantism.
Sam Kiley finds that Angola is developing into a capitalist country and a potentially important supplier of oil to the US.
Sandra Jordan studies Hugo Chavez's relationship with the US and reports on his overwhelming referendum victory achieved in spite of US funding of opposition groups.
Sam Kiley investigates the trafficking of children in India for the sex trade in Calcutta and Bombay.
Sandra Jordan reports that members of the indigenous population are rejecting western capitalism and its influence.
Sam Kiley investigates the worsening of tribal conflicts in Papua New Guinea.
Sandra Jordan investigates the spate of violence in rural areas of the south of Thailand, where it is unclear who is fighting who.
Sam Kiley travels to the heart of the Amazon in Brazil and reports on the rise in the use of unpaid labourers.
Peter Osborne travels to Iraq and joins a US Infantry Division based in Baqubah, near Baghdad.
Aidan Hartley reports on the increasing strength of the Islamic Courts Union, which the US alleges to be linked to Al-Qaeda.
Sandra Jordan visits Gaza as the Israeli forces complete their withdrawal from the territory and asks whether the Palestinians will choose violent resistance or diplomatic negotiation as they continue to seek an independent state.
Sandra Jordan investigates what US military aid and advisers are really doing in Colombia, in the name of the War on Terror.
Sandra Jordan gains access to Tamil Tiger training camps and examines the effects of the long-running war between Tigers and government.
Aidan Hartley travels to the Dandora slums near Nairobi where gun crime and abject poverty show the growing divide between rich and poor.
Khaled Khazziha, in a refugee camp, meets Mohamed Abdelaziz, President of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, a country not officially recognised by Morocco.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinay looks at the impact of the government's pro-life policy on women as illegal abortions have left 80,000 seriously injured.
Sandra Jordan reports from Kathmandu during the pro-democracy demonstrations of April 2006.
Matthew McAllester travels to Diyarbakir to find out about the rekindling of a war between Turkish troops and the Kurdish PKK group.
Ramita Navai examines the plight of those Indonesian workers who, with their passports retained by their employers, are abused and treated as slaves.
Peter Oborne finds evidence that the Janjawiid have crossed over from the Darfur region of Sudan into Chad to commit atrocities against civilians.
Aidan Hartley uncovers evidence of UN troops supporting the Congolese government in a war against local militia.
Khaled Khazziha films in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, with the permission of the local drug-lords who run it as a state within a state.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy reports on a huge rise in illegal immigration that has led to an increase in racism and xenophobic violence.
This week’s Unreported World travels to one of the remotest places on earth, where journalists are forbidden to work and usually arrested when they arrive, and where a bloody conflict between government forces and locals is rarely glimpsed by the outside world. Reporter Evan Williams and Director Siobhan Sinnerton spend three weeks undercover in West Papua, an outlying province of Indonesia in the Western Pacific, which is home to the world’s biggest copper and gold mine. Getting in to West Papua is extremely difficult. Obtaining official journalist accreditation is virtually impossible so the team have to film clandestinely” They begin their journey in Wamena in the remote western highlands. Waiting inside a safe house, hiding from the Indonesian authorities, they meet a group of tribal warriors who have travelled for days to be there. They tell Unreported World that at least 12 of their friends have been killed by the security forces, and claim that thousands more have been killed in a campaign which could wipe out their ethnic group. West Papua’s tribes lived in stone-age isolation until they were discovered by Europeans in the 1930s. Indonesia annexed the area in the 1969, after a group of selected West Papuans voted for annexation, but the rest of the population were not allowed a chance to vote. Since then hundreds of thousands of Indonesians have been subsidised to settle in West Papua, and they now control most of the commerce – leading to seething resentment and conflict between the two groups. In the company of guides from the West Papuan underground, the team trek deep into ancient forests to tribal villages affected by the conflict. At one village they find the inhabitants crying and wearing mud as a sign of mourning for their children who have been allegedly killed or “disappeared” by the security forces. Some mothers are so heartbroken that they have mutilated themselves by cutting off their fingers. But while some grieve,
Sandra Jordan exposes how India's aspirations for a superpower economy are resulting in an increasingly bloody civil war.
Ramita Navai exposes how areas of the country’s capital have degenerated into violent lawlessness in a three way battle between gangs, vigilante groups and the security forces.
Matt McAllester reports from Ogoniland where he witnesses extreme poverty within one of the richest oil fields in the world.
Kate Seelyle reports from Lebanon as it struggles to rebuild following Israeli bombardment.
Sandra Jordan reports on the perilous three-month journey taken each year by thousands of migrants desperate to get into the USA.
Kate Clark investigates how Western intervention has produced a Mafia-style state in northern Afghanistan.
Evan Williams on how an increasingly influential far-right nationalist movement is trying to persuade the Japanese government to rewrite the country's constitution and become a nuclear power.
Aidan Hartley takes a look at the militant Union of Islamic Courts, which has effected the most successful Islamic revolution since 9/11.
Sandra Jordan reports on the UN's battle against armed gangs in Cite-Soleil.
Aidan Hartley reports on the human cost of the West's demand for goods such as mobile phones and MP3 players.
Evan Williams reports on the conflict over cocoa, which has claimed hundreds of lives and forced thousands of people into refugee camps.
Hamida Ghafour finds that President Evo Morales's policy of land reform in favour of the indigenous people has led to confrontation with the land barons.
Ramita Navai witnesses the rapid development of this Chinese city, and finds that the rights of workers and citizens are being compromised.
Evan Williams investigates the claim that the Mugabe government is using the supply of Aids drugs and food to influence upcoming elections.
Sam Kiley evaluates the prospects for peace between the Albanian and Serb populations as Kosovo plans for independence.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy reports that eight years after independence, elements of the group that spent years fighting the Indonesian army are now threatening the democratic regime.
Sandra Jordan sees the Israeli government stand by as West Bank settlers consolidate their power.
Aidan Hartley investigates the human and environmental cost of the biggest gold rush of modern times.
Evan Williams investigates allegations that political parties are fuelling Kingston's shockingly high murder rate by arming and funding violent gangs in return for votes.
Ramita Navai reports on the plight of India's dalits (literally "broken people") - the 170 million "untouchables" at the bottom of a deeply ingrained caste system.
Sam Kiley reports from Cape Flats, an impoverished township outside Cape Town, which is now in the grip of a crystal methamphetamine drug epidemic.
Kate Seelye finds out how Colombian drugs traffickers have turned one of the world's poorest countries into the main transit point for hundreds of tons of cocaine smuggled into Europe every year.
Jenny Kleeman travels to Honduras, where a war has broken out between adults and children, with police death squads allegedly killing children like vermin.
Aidan Hartley discovers that as Beijing is being remodelled into a shiny new Olympic city, up to 1.5 million people have been forcibly evicted from their homes.
Evan Williams finds that while ethnic violence is fuelling a break up of the country, the Kurds in Northern Iraq are quietly consolidating their hold over 40% of Iraq's oil reserves.
Hamida Ghafour travels to Buenaventura, at the centre of the Colombian cocaine trade, controlled by private armies working for the cartels who make millions of dollars shipping their drugs to America.
Sandra Jordan travels to Sri Lanka and discovers that a new and sinister phase in the country's 30-year civil war is taking a grim toll on civilians.
Sam Kiley reveals that extremist Hutu groups behind the murder of a million people in less than 100 days in Rwanda now hold bloody control over an area the size of Belgium.
Evan Williams visits the Zabbaleen, a Coptic Christian community in Cairo living and working in rubbish in ghettos overrun by rats, who claim that they are treated as second-class citizens.
Aidan Hartley reports from the Sonoran Desert in Northern Mexico, crossed every day by thousands of illegal immigrants from Central and South America, desperate to reach the USA.
Kate Seelye reports on the consequences of a total ban on abortions, with women scared to visit hospitals and doctors afraid to carry out life-saving operations on female patients.
Sam Kiley discovers a nation where political dissent is stifled, corruption is rife, and where little of its huge wealth reaches a population racked by poverty, alcoholism and suicide.
Ramita Navai finds out what it's like to live in this poor, extremely overpopulated, flat country on the front line of climate change.
Nima Elbagir meets an Arab militia accused of being an important element of the Janjaweed, blamed for the atrocities in Darfur.
Sam Kiley finds Israel and Hamas on a collision course, each new 'incursion' or 'terror attack' seemingly driving them on towards outright war.
Evan Williams visits the only country in the world to recognize Voodoo as a state religion.
Jenny Kleeman reveals how the record high price of gold brought about by the global financial crisis is affecting some of the earth's most isolated people.
Aidan Hartley finds the government, UN and NGOs all refusing to acknowledge the high birthrate as the major cause of poverty, violence, homelessness and pollution.
Ramita Navai reveals that hundreds of people have been killed for body parts to be used in traditional medicine and meets a man who admits to torturing and killing people as part of his trade - as a 'healer'
Jenny Kleeman investigates the allegations varying from fraud to physical and sexual abuse being faced by some of Kerala's 3,000 holy men.
Aidan Hartley reports on the continuing bitter ethnic conflict between Georgians and Abkhazians which has cost thousands of lives over the last decade.
Tanya Datta reports on a nationwide peasant uprising against farmers of genetically-modified soya who are mainly Brazilian and seen as colonists partly responsible for the almost total deforestation of the eastern provinces.
Evan Williams reports on an armed rebel group's efforts to seize control of the country's resources from the 135 families who hold economic and political power, as hundreds of students, activists and left wing politicians disappear without trace.
Nima Elbagir finds Venezuelans turning to the spirits of dead gangster criminals for protection against crime.
Seyi Rhodes finds schools on the front-line in a battle for hearts and minds between the Thai government and the extremists among Muslim separatists in the ethnic Malay south.
This programme reveals how the demand for cocaine has led to thousands of deaths in Mexico.
Unreported World reveals the devastating effects of child marriage and pregnancy in Nigeria, where nearly half of all girls in the country's northern states are married by the age of 15, often to much older men.
Nima Elbagir finds the child soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army being told that they are engaged in a war against the entire world as they take over villages and wage a campaign of terror
Jenny Kleeman reveals how, at the same time as Pol Pot's accomplices are put on trial, Cambodia's people are once again being brutally driven from their land, this time by a property boom fueled by tourism.
Ramita Navai reports that 200 girls and women have been victims of honour killings in the past year alone and that a new law outlawing honour killings may have led to a huge increase in forced suicides.
Seyi Rhodes finds that ten years on from one of the most brutal conflicts in recent history, a population which has lived through rape, torture and public executions is served by just one psychiatrist
Aidan Hartley visits a country locked in a vicious cycle of environmental disaster, hunger, poverty and reliance on international aid
Oliver Steeds witnesses North Koreans who flee to China, forced to live in miserable conditions and vulnerable to being sent back to hard labour camps, some commit suicide, others are easy targets for sex traffickers and some are even sold into marriage to Chinese husbands
Aidan Hartley visits North East India, where vast subterranean coal fires burn out of control beneath towns and villages, children mine coal day in day out, and half a million people are being moved out of their ancestral villages to make way for the coal mines fuelling India's growth.
Peter Oborne finds that the resurgent Taliban and increasingly powerful criminal gangs are creating levels of instability and lawlessness that many liken to the period before the Taliban's first rise to power
Unreported World travels to one of the most remote parts of the world, to investigate the growth of 'witch' murders in Papua New Guinea. More than fifty people accused of being witches were tortured and murdered last year in two provinces alone and the programme reveals that the problem is now spreading from remote highland areas into the towns. Reporter Ramita Navai and producer Katherine Churcher meet the victims, the so called witch hunters and the police struggling to keep order.
Reporter Evan Williams and director Paul Kittel travel to the Brazilian city of Recife, a beach paradise visited by thousands of British tourists every year. They uncover allegations that the police are involved in death squads that have murdered thousands of 'undesirables', including hundreds of street children, every year.
Unreported World uncovers the largely hidden but bloody conflict in the Russian Republic of Ingushetia. In a country to which few Western journalists have been able get access, Unreported World reveals allegations that hundreds of innocent civilians are disappearing and being tortured and murdered by the security forces in an increasingly violent campaign that threatens to turn into another Chechnya.
Unreported World uncovers a deepening sectarian conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Philippines. The battle for land on the southern Filipino island of Mindanao has already claimed 100,000 lives and created a humanitarian disaster with 600,000 people being driven from their homes.
Unreported World travels deep into the Peruvian jungle to investigate how the government's auctioning off vast tracts of the Amazon rainforest to global corporations has led to violent clashes with thousands of indigenous tribal people.
Unreported World reveals how Liberia is facing a child rape crisis. Six years after the end of a brutal civil war in which rape was routinely used as a weapon, children still face the daily fear of being attacked, and the west African country's hospitals are overwhelmed with child victims - a quarter of them under four years of age. Reporter Jenny Kleeman and director Matt Haan begin their disturbing journey in the Liberian capital, Monrovia. They meet Mercy, a six-year-old girl who was abducted and raped two weeks previously. She is now taking drugs to try to stop her from contracting HIV and lives in a safe house, run by a Liberian charity, many of whose inhabitants can never return home; reporting the rape is seen as disgracing the family, especially if the perpetrator is a relative.
Bus drivers in Guatemala City are being murdered at a rate of one every other day as part of a campaign of extortion that threatens to bring the city to its knees. Extortion is the main source of income for Guatemala's criminal gangs, earning them millions of dollars a year, and the drivers are killed to instil fear as the gangs maintain their grip on the city. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Matt Haan begin their journey at Santa Rosa on the outskirts of the city. A bus driver has been shot at nine in the morning. The family have already arrived at the scene and are distraught. The bus company owner says he doesn't know why his driver was shot, but eight other divers have been killed on the same route in the last year.
As the French and British governments discuss how to deal with migrants camped outside Calais, Unreported World travels to the European Union's eastern border, to the illicit crossing points for hundreds of thousands of Afghans making their way to our shores. Reporter Jenny Kleeman and director Jacob Waite begin their journey on Turkey's north-west coast, just eight miles from Greece and the EU. It's 2.40am and the team come across a people smuggler and 25 migrants - men, women, children and even toddlers, all from Afghanistan.
Escalating violence in South Sudan has claimed more lives in 2009 than the conflict in Darfur, but has been largely ignored by the western media. Reporter Ramita Navai and director Julie Noon uncover a disturbing new trend of women and children being directly targeted. More than 2000 people have been killed in 2009 in South Sudan, and a quarter of a million people displaced. The unrest is threatening to destroy the 2005 peace deal that ended Africa's longest and bloodiest civil war, which lasted 22 years and saw over two million people killed.
Unreported World highlights the tragic plight of Nepal's child widows, some of whom are as young as thirteen. Many face abuse and servitude for the rest of their lives, ostracised by their families and communities, and often forced to sell their bodies to provide food and shelter for themselves and their children. Reporter Yemi Ipaye and director Katherine Churcher begin their journey in south-eastern Nepal. Nearly half the country's population live here and child marriage is prevalent. The team meets frail and fragile 14-year-old Gita, who was forced into marriage against her will by her parents when she was just 11 years old. At 13 she became a widow, and has been ostracised, treated with contempt and told that she's cursed. She says her parents are trying to get her remarried and that they sometimes beat her.
Unreported World reveals shocking evidence that Burmese refugees fleeing the country's brutal military regime are being detained and then allegedly sold by Malaysian immigration officials to Thai human traffickers. Reporter Aidan Hartley and director George Waldrum travel to Kuala Lumpur to highlight how the refugees are forced to exchange one hellish existence for another. Living in complete fear of the state, the refugees claim they are being rounded up and subjected to bloody whippings and indefinite imprisonment in overcrowded detention camps. As Unreported World reveals, for some this is just the beginning of a horrific journey into the trafficking network, where men, women and children disappear into a world of slavery and prostitution.
Unreported World travels to Israel to reveal how the rapid growth of Jewish 'fundamentalists' is creating tension within Israeli society and endangering any negotiations on a peace deal with the Palestinians. Reporter Evan Williams and director Alex Nott begin their journey in the Mea Sharim district of Jerusalem. It's the heartland of ultra-Orthodox Jews known as the Haredi, or 'those who fear God'. They find a poor, overcrowded part of the city where everyone is wearing clothes in the style of 18th-century Europe, from where most of their ancestors came. 'We are the real Jews,' says one community leader, 'everyone else in Israel just happens to be born Jewish.'
Unreported World goes undercover to investigate how the increased Chinese presence in East Africa has lead to a huge increase in elephant poaching, with potentially devastating effects on tourism and the local economy. The team also hears astonishing claims that when Chinese president Hu Jintao travelled to Tanzania for a state visit, his officials left with large quantities of illegal ivory. Reporter Aidan Hartley and director Alex Nott begin their journey at a conservation area in northern Kenya, run by Kuki Gallman. She says that elephant poaching has risen from six animals in 2007 to 57 in 2009, just in her small area. It's not long before the team discovers the carcasses of several elephants, killed for their tusks. Local gamekeepers say that poachers spray herds indiscriminately with AK 47s, killing babies, mothers and pregnant elephants. Kuki says it's the highest death toll for decades and elephants are at risk of becoming extinct in the area.
As the world's attention focuses on recent sectarian violence in Nigeria, Unreported World provides an exclusive report on the events leading up to the latest round of bloodletting. Reporter Peter Oborne and director Andy Wells were the only television journalists in the town of Jos in the immediate aftermath of a previous outburst of sectarian violence, which left 500 people dead. There, they uncover the truth about the convulsion of barbarism that is afflicting a country, and which is rapidly spiralling out of control.
Unreported World is granted rare access to the Pakistan headquarters of what the US and UN say is a front organisation for one of the world's biggest terrorist networks, and the organisation behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks. While the group says it's a charity set up to help the poor, reporter Evan Williams talks to insiders, government ministers and terrorism experts to investigate the truth about an organisation that has expanded its activities from Kashmir to attacking western targets outside Pakistan. Williams and director Will West begin their journey in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province. They have a meeting with Asadullah, a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba - 'The Army of the Righteous'. The terrorist organisation has been directly blamed for the Mumbai attacks that killed 173 people, and a string of other deadly attacks in India. Asadullah tells Williams he and 26 friends fought in Kashmir, but he was the only one who survived.
Unreported World travels to Malawi to reveal that children as young as three are being illegally employed to produce tobacco, much of it destined to be consumed by British smokers. Malawi's children suffer health problems from handling tobacco and some are trapped in bonded labour arrangements, leaving them unable to escape. Little seems to be being done to protect their health and wellbeing. In Mchinji district, reporter Jenny Kleeman and producer Julie Noon find a group of 15 to 20 children sorting tobacco by the roadside. Emilida and her three children - including her three-year-old son - have been working there since dawn. She tells Kleeman the four of them will get about 80 pence for a day's work. The air is thick with tobacco dust and Emilida says it makes the family feel unwell.
Unreported World gets a rare glimpse into the Karen region of Burma. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Simon Phillips spend two weeks trekking through forests to reveal the devastation the Burmese army is inflicting as it intensifies its war against the Karen people.
As the US prepares to withdraw from Iraq, reporter Evan Williams and director Matt Haan travel to the most dangerous part of the country and find increasing religious, ethnic and political violence in this oil-rich region threatening to spill into bloody civil war once the troops leave.
Unreported World descends deep underground into Bolivia's silver mines to find boys as young as 13 working long hours in deadly conditions. The thick dust and poisonous gases in the mines mean the children face the near-certainty of crippling lung disease and a life expectancy of little more than 35 years. The mines are centered around Potosi in the Bolivian Andes, the highest city in the world. Looming over it is a legendary mountain, the Cerro Rico. It has been mined for hundreds of years and is now being exploited by co-operatives of up to 10,000 miners. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Matt Haan meet 14-year-old Jose Luis, who works with 400 other miners at the San Jacinto mine, one of the largest on the mountain. He tells Rhodes that he's working in the mine because school starts in a few days and he needs money for a new uniform. Like most of the 200,000 people in Potosi, he comes from an indigenous Indian background. Although the indigenous people have recently won a decades-long struggle for political freedom in Bolivia they are still poorer than their white compatriots.
Reporter Ramita Navai and director Alex Nott visit El Salvador as it experiences its worst gang violence in a decade. Many of the gangs' hitmen are children who kill and die with appalling frequency but accept it as part of normal life. Navai and Nott expose another disturbing trend: the torture and murder of young teenage girls - victims of a gang culture that regards them as sexual objects.
Unreported World meets the USA's new middle-class homeless: families struggling to hold down jobs that pay so little they're forced to live in tent cities or their cars and receive little help from the government. Reporter Ramita Navai and producer Clancy Chassay begin their journey in Chicago, one of the country's manufacturing centres, which has been hit hard by the effects of the worst financial crisis in decades. St Columbanus church is one of 600 charities across the city that gives out emergency food rations.
Unreported World investigates how Colombia's indigenous people have been targeted in a string of massacres perpetrated by guerrillas, paramilitary groups and the security forces. Colombia's government claims success in its war against left-wing FARC guerrillas and in restoring law and order. But the country is still beset with a conflict that is killing thousands. And as Reporter Aidan Hartley and director Katherine Churcher discover at a jungle massacre site where the pools of blood are still drying, behind the continuing violence there is a state of complete impunity. Nobody can explain why the massacre happened. Soldiers claim civilian attackers with pistols have murdered eight people. But local witnesses say they heard sustained bursts of automatic gunfire, hinting at the involvement of security forces.
Unreported World visits the 'malaria capital of the world' in northern Uganda to investigate why this preventable and treatable disease is still such a problem.
While the world's focus is on the fight against the Taliban, Unreported World reveals a hidden result of the conflict in Afghanistan: a huge rise in the number of children addicted to opium and heroin in a country now said to have the youngest drug addicted population in the world.
Manila is one of the world's most overpopulated cities. Reporter Jenny Kleeman and director Richard Cookson find the Philippine capital stretched to breaking point, with mothers four to a bed in maternity wards, primary schools with a thousand children in each year, and graveyards with no more room to bury the dead.
In the mountains of southeastern Mexico, Unreported World finds 400 members of an indigenous community, who are fighting for independence, holed up in bullet-ridden homes and surrounded by a militia in an unreported war.
Zimbabwe is supposedly enjoying political stability under the coalition government formed in 2008. However, Unreported World finds a country still gripped by terror and violence.
Pakistan's floods may have receded but their catastrophic consequences continue. Reporter Peter Oborne and director Simon Phillips discover that incompetence and alleged corruption have caused poor areas to be flooded and rich ones protected. And in a country whose institutions are failing the people they are supposed to protect, they find ordinary Pakistanis striving to rebuild their lives.
The Central African Republic is a country obsessed with black magic, where nearly half the prison population are convicted witches. In villages and the capital witchcraft is used to explain every misfortune and it is such a powerful weapon that it is a feature of almost every family quarrel or village dispute. And, as Unreported World reveals, it's often the most vulnerable who are singled out.
As more young couples reject arranged marriages in modern India, Unreported World investigates a wave of violence that's left hundreds dead across the country's northwest states. Reporter Annie Kelly and director Katherine Churcher reveal that, despite Indian law giving everyone the right to marry who they want, increasing numbers of young couples are facing death at the hands of their own families for defying centuries of tradition.
Unreported World investigates Senegal's Islamic schools. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Simon Philips reveal how many young boys living in the religious schools are subjected to abuse, and forced by their guardians to beg on the streets for their survival. And they meet those trying to save the children from exploitation and abuse.
Unreported World investigates Senegal's Islamic schools. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Simon Philips reveal how many young boys living in the religious schools are subjected to abuse, and forced by their guardians to beg on the streets for their survival. And they meet those trying to save the children from exploitation and abuse.
Unreported World meets remarkable people fighting back against leprosy in India, where millions affected by the disease are pushed to the margins of society, ostracised by their friends and families. Based on targets set by the World Health Organization, the Indian government claims it has eliminated leprosy. However Unreported World reveals the numbers of new cases in some areas could be much higher than previously estimated.
Unreported World travels to eastern Congo to witness the remarkable work of one man who liberates the child soldiers who have been forced to fight in one of the world's longest-running conflicts. While they are fortunate enough to film the moments several dozen youngsters are released, the team also discovers that hundreds more are being abducted as rebels and the army prepare for a new round of fighting.
Reporter Jenny Kleeman and director James Jones travel from Italy to Africa to reveal how human traffickers are using black magic to coerce and trap Nigerian women into a life of prostitution in Europe. Women are made to swear an oath of loyalty to their traffickers in an elaborate ritual that compels them to pay back extortionate sums of money. If they ever break free or report their traffickers, they believe they will be cursed.
In 2010, more civilians were killed in political, ethnic and criminal violence in Karachi than in terrorist attacks across the whole of Pakistan. While the state seems unable to control the violence, reporter Peter Oborne and director Edward Watts spend time with a few courageous individuals who are risking their lives to hold the line against anarchy in Pakistan's largest city.
Reporter Oliver Steeds and producer Matt Haan travel to China to follow one father's inspirational search for his son, who was abducted and sold into slavery. They expose one of the untold stories behind China's economic boom, discovering how thousands of young men with mental impairments have been kidnapped and forced to work in brick factories. The team meet 62-year-old farmer He Zhimin in Sanyuan town in central China. He Wen - his son who has the mental age of a child and used to live at home - went missing last June.
Unreported World exposes the plight of hundreds of children in Burundi locked up for years without trial in adult prisons, among some of the most dangerous criminals in the country. And they meet one man who has dedicated his life to freeing them; Pierre-Claver Mbonimpa is the only hope many of these children have. Burundi has no juvenile justice system and children above the age of 15 are tried as adults. By law any child under that age should not be imprisoned, but in a country recovering from civil war and where record keeping is scant, many underage children are slipping through the net and are being locked up.
Mexico's drug wars have been well reported, but there is a frightening, new phenomenon that is going largely unnoticed. A growing number of journalists are being killed or 'disappeared' as they try to report on drug violence and the growing links between the cartels and the corrupt police and politicians. Reporter Evan Williams and Director Alex Nott travel to Ciudad Juarez, on the US border, to experience the daily life of a journalist who has been called one of the most courageous women in Mexico.
Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Alex Nott arrive in Abidjan, the commercial capital of the Ivory Coast in West Africa, to report on the escalating political crisis. Instead they find themselves one of the few television crews to be there as terrifying violence tears apart a city that had been described as the Paris of West Africa. For four months President Laurent Gbagbo has clung to power - despite losing elections. As the team arrives fighters loyal to Alassane Outtara, who has won the UN-backed elections, are advancing towards the presidential palace.
In the Sinai desert, thousands of African immigrants fleeing conscription, torture and conflict in East Africa risk being shot by border guards and held ransom by people smugglers as they try to get to Israel. The director Paul Kittel and his reporter arrive in the Sinai desert in north-east Egypt just over a month after the revolution that toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Smuggling from Egypt to Israel has gone on for years, but now the smugglers are focused on people rather than goods.
Unreported World travels to Indonesia to meet young environmental activists battling to save endangered species such as orang-utans and sea turtles. Reporter Aidan Hartley and producer Rodrigo Vazquez visit a vast market where critically endangered animals are sold as pets or for the Chinese medicine trade, and uncover allegations of corruption and harassment of the campaigners. Borneo has one of the planet's last big forests, but every hour an area the size of three football pitches is cut down to be used for palm oil production. The Unreported World team joins one team of young, local environmentalists who are trying to rescue the orang-utan, which, because of the loss of its habitat, is heading for extinction.
New Unreported World reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy visits South Africa. Seventeen years after it was freed from apartheid, he finds a country in which violent protests against corruption and the lack of basic services mean its ambition to lead the continent as a prosperous democracy hangs in the balance. Simmering with anger, South Africa's people tell Krishnan they feel a sense of betrayal they will tolerate no longer.
Ramita Navai and Wael Dabbous spend two weeks living undercover in some of the most dangerous parts of Syria with members of the opposition movement determined to overthrow President Assad's brutal dictatorship. One of the few teams to avoid the ban on foreign media operating without official permission, they meet the protestors and the victims of the bloody crackdown, and visit the clandestine hospitals set up in private homes by doctors who risk torture or death for treating the injured.
Jenny Kleeman and Suemay Oram travel to Uganda to investigate hydrocephalus: a preventable yet misunderstood condition that affects a quarter of a million babies a year in Sub-Saharan Africa. They visit Africa's only paediatric neurosurgery hospital and meet the mothers in a race against time to save their babies' lives.
Miracles, expensive cars, exorcisms and bodyguards: religion is big business in Nigeria. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Matt Haan travel to Lagos to reveal the extraordinary world of the millionaire preachers. By promoting the dream of escaping poverty, they have turned their churches into corporations, which are changing the face of Christianity. Every Sunday millions of Nigerians crowd into thousands of competing churches. The team visits one church in Lagos run by Dr Sign Fireman, an up-and-coming preacher who is attempting to break into the big time. They find 2000 people at an event billed as the Burial of Satan. After a rock star entrance, Dr Fireman begins his service by exorcising the demons in his congregation.
Unreported World reveals the huge personality cult around Vladimir Putin as it follows the extraordinary actions of the mass youth movement dedicated to protecting the interests of the Prime Minister and Russia. As Putin announces his intention to return as President, reporter Peter Oborne and director James Jones meet some of the young people who are utterly devoted to him, have seemingly limitless resources, and appear to be above the law. Outside the American Embassy in Moscow the team films members of Nashi, or 'Our People', as the movement is called, spray-painting 'Russia Forward' in six-foot letters, following criticism of Russia by the American Defence Secretary. The police step in, but it soon becomes clear who is in charge as Nashi members bully, shove and chase away the officers in an extraordinary display of strength. Nashi's headquarters are in a £20 million house in central Moscow, decorated with murals of Putin and quotes from his speeches. Oborne joins Nashi's weekly political meeting, which reveals a sinister side to its patriotism as anti-western and racist views come to the fore among some members. Masha Kislitsnya, Nashi's Commissar, describes how her experience growing up as the daughter of a single mother in the 1990s formed the basis for her admiration for Putin. She recalls that her family lived in dire poverty while the government was in collapse following the fall of communism, with the shops often empty of goods. Everything changed for the better, she says, when Putin took over. Oborne also meets 21-year-old Nashi members Victoria and Oksana. They believe Putin has restored pride and prosperity to Russia and say joining Nashi was a way to express their adoration. They show and describe their favourite pictures of their leader, declaring that they are fanatics and that they worship him. Critics say Nashi's true function is to build a personality cult for Vladmir Putin, while bullying, intimidating and harassing his
Unreported World meets members of the Palestinian Paralympic team hoping to qualify for London 2012. They find athletes struggling to train in the conflict zone. In a territory where those who die fighting the Israelis are considered the true heroes, the Paralympic team goes completely unrecognised by its own people. Nobody knows who team captain and discus thrower Khamis Zaqout is, despite the international medals he's won since he helped establish disabled sports in the Occupied Territories two decades ago. This is in spite of the fact that the only athletes representing Palestine in London will be disabled ones, since there is no Palestinian Olympic team. Reporter Aidan Hartley and director Richard Cookson meet Khamis as he struggles to find a taxi to take him to the gym. He introduces them to the rest of his eight-man squad at the training ground: a little patch of green in an overcrowded enclave of bombed-out buildings and shanties. The news is that, as things stand, only four Palestinians are going to qualify to make it to the Games. The athletes are shocked and tensions boil over. Mohammed Fanuna, a partially sighted long jumper and javelin thrower, loses his temper. The news is too much for him to take when he also has all the other daily worries of living in Gaza - the air strikes, the siege, the lack of freedom to travel, the poverty - and of course his disability. Another very worried young athlete is 20-year-old Abed Abuwatfa, who invites the team back to the home he shares with his parents. Abed tells Hartley that the suspense over whether he will qualify for London is adding to the pressure on him to give up sport and find a job. Three of Abed's cousins are deaf and his two sisters are also disabled, placing an enormous burden on the family. In Gaza it's common for poor people to marry into their extended families, which is a major reason why it has one of the highest rates of disability in the world. The team learn that there's
Across India more than 60,000 children go missing every year. Unreported World explores the dark side of the booming economy, as many children are kidnapped into domestic slavery for the growing middle class and businesses, and others are kidnapped for ransom by those desperate to share some of the country's new wealth. In Delhi alone seven children go missing every day. Reporter Evan Williams and director James Brabazon discover that the capital has become a major destination and transit point for tens of thousands of children being trafficked into forced labour, prostitution, begging and drug running.
Trinidad has become the murder capital of the Caribbean. While half a million tourists soak up the carnival atmosphere every year, the government has introduced a state of emergency to try to stop the gang violence that results in a murder on average every 17 hours. At 11pm in the capital Port of Spain the atmosphere changes as a strict curfew comes into force and the normally bustling city becomes a ghost town. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Will West are only allowed out because they have obtained a special curfew pass for journalists.
Indigenous people in Honduras are risking their lives diving to dangerous depths for lobsters destined for North American and European diners. Overfishing means they must now dive as deep as 150ft to land their catch. Each time they dive, they risk paralysis or death from the bends. Reporter Jenny Kleeman and director Daniel Bogado travel into the Caribbean with divers on board a lobster diving boat. Kleeman discovers that while companies and consumers care about buying tuna that's caught in a way that doesn't harm dolphins, we don't seem to care about lobster that's caught in a way that has left hundreds dead and thousands paralysed.
Unreported World investigates the effect of controversial emergency legislation on Australia's Aboriginal population. The government has used this legislation to take control of many Aboriginal settlements. It said this was help to end violence and child abuse, and combat the alcohol abuse that ravages many Aboriginal communities. Reporter Oliver Steeds and director Ed Braman begin their journey in Alice Springs - visited by tens of thousands of Britons every year for its aboriginal art galleries and tourist sites - where alcohol addiction is still ravaging the lives of the country's original inhabitants, many of whom live in desolate squatter camps on the outskirts of town.
As George Clooney campaigns against the atrocities being committed in Sudan, Unreported World has filmed extensive documentary footage from the war zone. Aidan Hartley and Daniel Bogado gained rare access to the Nuba Mountains to film the heroic doctors who are saving children in a largely hidden war being perpetrated on civilians by one of the world's most brutal dictatorships. The Nuba Mountains region, in the South Kordofan oil fields upriver from Khartoum, is a troubled part of Sudan where a civil war has continued since the 1980s. Nuba always fought alongside its southern black African Christian neighbours against the Arab Islamic regime in Khartoum, but the region was left behind in the peace accord that led to the independence of South Sudan in mid-2011. In June 2011, President Omar al-Bashir's forces launched fresh attacks against opposition supporters in Nuba, many of them Christians and black Africans. The Unreported World team highlights how government forces are carrying out almost constant aerial bombardment of civilian settlements, driving them from their fields so they cannot grow crops, while banning relief deliveries by international agencies. As soon as they arrive in Nuba, Hartley and Bogado are caught in an air raid by Sukhoi ground attack jets firing rockets as terrified families dive into foxholes while explosions rumble in the surrounding villages. In another incident soon after, the team films traumatised children running into caves to hide from Antonov bombers. The impact of Khartoum's refusal to allow medicines into Nuba is clear as doctors are forced to carry out operations on shrapnel-wounded children without anaesthetics and almost no medicines apart from traditional herbs. Hartley and Bogado visit the Catholic Mother of Mercy hospital, the only functioning hospital for a million civilians trapped by the war. Made for 80 beds, it has 500 patients. The situation is so dire that even the medical staff are not eating
nreported World gains unprecedented and exclusive access to the Baghdad Bomb Squad. Nine years after the invasion and with the British and the Americans gone, Iraq still faces almost daily attacks from those trying to foment political chaos and sectarian hatred. Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Alex Nott spend time with a small band of brave Iraqi officers trying to prevent further murderous attacks. With modest resources and great courage in the face of terrible danger, four 12-man squads work around the clock defusing bombs or investigating crime scenes where a device has detonated. The Unreported World team joins one team as they begin a morning shift, when the bombers are at their busiest. Twenty-nine year old officer Rawad Yassin, who has already spent six years in the bomb squad, tells Guru-Murthy that his family have urged him to leave the unit but he feels a responsibility to his fellow officers. Travelling in convoy they are called out to the suburb of Karrada. They believe they are heading to an unexploded device but on arrival find the aftermath of detonated device. The target was a senior military commander in charge of the Ministry of Communications Protection Force. Several of his staff have been killed, and more than a dozen injured. As the team head off, reports come in of other bombings around Baghdad. Another unit finds an unexploded device right outside Iraq's Oil Ministry. Unreported World reveals extraordinary footage showing how a 'sticky bomb', which is fixed under the car of a Brigadier General, is made safe. In the last two years more than 30 bomb disposal experts have been killed across Iraq. Guru-Murthy speaks to someone close to one of those killed trying to defuse a vehicle bomb. Ali Hameed shows Guru-Murthy video footage of the incident which left his partner Ali Latif with terrible injuries. Hameed says since the incident he's been living with severe psychological stress. The bomb squad believes Sunni extremist
The team begin their journey on set with Saba Sahar - an actress, screenwriter and Afghanistan's first female film director. In a country where few women work at all, Saba is directing her sixth production - a TV series about the Afghan police force. The only woman on set, Saba has complete authority, even over the real policemen who are acting as her extras. As well as directing, Saba is playing the heroine, who's a female cop succeeding in a man's world. Saba's high-profile job is provoking some of the most dangerous people in the country. The drug lords and the Taliban have threatened her life. 'Each morning when I leave the house I think I'll never see my family again. I might be killed,' she tells Kleeman. Kleeman and Lang meet Salim Shaheen, Afghanistan's most prolific film director. He's directed and starred in over 100 low-budget, high-octane movies over three decades. With a large fan base, Salim has a huge influence on ordinary Afghans. He takes Kleeman on to the film set where he's in the middle of directing a fight scene. Salim fears the departure of foreign troops from Afghanistan could mean the end of his career. 'There's going to be a civil war here,' he warns. 'If the Taliban come back, films will be banned. I'll have to leave the country.' Like Saba Sahar, Salim's life has been threatened. 'Every second we are under threat,' he tells Kleeman. 'Every minute our lives are in danger.' The team meets a Taliban fighter. He tells Kleeman that cinema goes against their interpretation of Sharia law and should be outlawed. He has a warning for Salim and Saba: 'They should be told that what they are doing is wrong first,' he says. 'If that doesn't stop them, we will punish them according to Sharia law.' The punishment, he says, is death. Everyone the team meets is convinced the Taliban will soon be back in power, and Afghanistan will soon return to fundamentalism. But Kabul's DVD bazaars are booming. Salim takes Kleeman into a ma
Wrestlers are superstars in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this vast and troubled country, wrestling is a passion, allowing fans to forget the poverty, violence and ongoing civil war for the duration of a bout. Contests are televised and reported on the sports pages and attract thousands of fans. In the capital, Kinshasa, Unreported World reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Wael Dabbous find some of the superstars of the sport practising 'black magic', and uncover allegations that many fighters are involved in gang violence and political intimidation. Like other countries where wrestling is popular, there's a tradition in Congo of fighters wearing masks and customised costumes. But alongside the theatrics common to wrestling elsewhere, Congo's version has incorporated the belief in black magic, or fetishe, which is genuinely feared by many. The film begins with an amazing scene. Rhodes and Dabbous visit a wrestling match in Kinshasa to watch Congo's champion wrestler, Nanga Steve, taking on Super Angaluma, a fetishe wrestler famed for using black magic to defeat his opponents. The street bout is held in a ring surrounded by hundreds of spectators, many of them young men. To the crowd's delight Super Angaluma uses fetishe to try and defeat Nanga Steve, sacrificing a chicken to help him unlock supernatural powers. Despite this, in a classic denouement, good triumphs over evil and Nanga Steve is victorious. In this city of eight million people - the third largest in Africa - Steve and the other star wrestlers aren't just celebrities: they're figures of power and influence. Steve tells Rhodes that some wrestlers are major forces in gangs called 'Kuluna' that are terrorising the city. While some fighters like him are celebrities, others struggle to make a living, which he says explains the attraction of the gangs. The team also meets Armand Lingomo, a veteran wrestler who's watched as his sport has become entangled in criminality and Con
UNICEF estimates that there may be as many as 100,000 street children in Ukraine. Marcel Theroux and Suemay Oram go underground in Kiev to meet some and find out what their life is like. Ukraine has invested billions in infrastructure projects for the 2012 European football championships. While the fans will enjoy the facilities, most of them won't know that living around them - and beneath their feet under the country's cities - are thousands of young people left on their own to survive dangerous, subterranean lives. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, years of economic hardship have hurt Ukraine. The result has been a lost generation of teenagers who have run away from broken families, alcoholism and abuse. They suffer awful living conditions and embarrass the Ukrainian government, which in June will host the European Championships as part of its efforts to project a modern, European image with luxury shops and a thriving culture. Many of the teenagers inject drugs or sell sex, and face serious health risks including syphilis, hepatitis, and HIV/AIDS. In some cities, close to 20 per cent of youngsters living on the streets who were tested were HIV positive. Theroux and Oram journey underground through pitch-black basements and passageways under the streets of Kiev. Their guides are a group young people who have made their home at the end of a warren of dark corridors. Outside, the temperature is below minus 20 degrees. Underneath the city's Soviet apartment buildings, hot water pipes are helping keep the street children alive. The team finds 13 who have set up home together, surrounded by mounds of rubbish, which indicate they've been living rough for some time. They've been sniffing glue to take away the feelings of cold and hunger, and the effects are starting to become obvious. Longer-term use causes brain damage. The leader of the group is Vanya, a 29-year-old ex-prisoner. He tells Theroux he can't work because he has no ident
In Cameroon there are fears that the practice of eating bushmeat - wild meat hunted in the rainforest, including endangered gorillas and chimpanzees - could trigger a new global pandemic of viruses. Unreported World investigates. Reporter Evan Williams and director James Brabazon also meet the British woman battling the trade and looking after the animals orphaned by the slaughter. Eighty percent of all meat eaten in Cameroon is bushmeat. To understand how the trade works, the team travels to the Dja Reserve in the south east of the country, where the tracks and clearings created by logging companies have opened up the once-impenetrable jungle to bushmeat poachers. Williams meets some of the wardens trying to combat the poachers. There are only 60 wardens to cover the 2000 square miles of the Dja Reserve. Until 2009 they were funded by the EU. Now they're on their own and it's dangerous work. One warden has already been killed by poachers this year and many have been injured. Williams and Brabazon walk into the forest with the wardens and meet a group of indigenous Baka people, the so-called pygmies. They tell Williams that people come four or five times a week looking for all sorts of bushmeat and hire locals to go and hunt for them. One warden tells Williams that the local hunters get around 25 to 30 Euros for a chimpanzee. But the Baka have something even more shocking to reveal. Eating gorilla meat has wiped out one of their neighbouring villages: 25 men, women and children died. There was only one person who survived, and that person didn't eat the meat. The team heads back to the capital, Yaounde, to meet Professor Dominique Baudon at the Pasteur Centre. He's on the frontline of protecting both Cameroon and the world from the threat of new viruses emerging from man's contact with apes and in particular the preparation and consumption of bushmeat. He tells Williams he believes within the next 20 years new viruses, possibly similar to
Six months after its revolution, Libya is still riven by factionalism, militias and violence, as the armed groups who overthrew Colonel Gaddafi cling to territory and power. Tripoli's streets are ruled by the gun. The police have tried to remove roadblocks manned by militiamen and have been driven off in a hail of gunfire. Reporter Peter Oborne and director Richard Cookson talk to fighters from the powerful Zintan militia who have controlled the country's main airport since they seized it from Gaddafi forces. They've been involved in tense negotiations with the government about handing it over but the talks appear to have stalled. Across town, the team finds militiamen streaming into a government compound. The government is offering payments of £10,00 to each fighter in an effort to persuade them to return to civilian life. It has reportedly already paid out around a billion pounds in this way, but that hasn't bought stability. At another roadblock, furious militiamen say they haven't been paid yet and vow to fight on. In the coastal city of Zuwara the team finds another gun battle taking place between two rival militias, with constant gunfire and artillery overhead. One fighter says the battle has been going on for three days and claims his militia are the true representatives of the revolution and are battling Gaddafi loyalists in the militia from the neighbouring town of Regdalin. By dawn, the battle has claimed more than 20 lives, with hundreds wounded. The two sides arrange a truce and Oborne and Cookson cross the line to enter Regdalin. The man in charge of the local military council that rules the town - like most other towns in Libya there is little government authority - denies the townsfolk are Gaddafi loyalists. The conflict, he tells Oborne, is about territory, while others say battles like this are really about who controls nearby smuggling routes. The team moves on to the town of Gharyan, where civilians have formed anoth
In the run-up to the 2012 US election, Krishnan Guru-Murthy meets the talk-radio hosts broadcasting to a country more polarised than ever before.
Indonesia is in the grip of a smoking epidemic with the proportion of child smokers rising dramatically. And Unreported World reveals how young children are risking their health further by harvesting and processing tobacco bought by one of the UK's biggest cigarette companies. Aggressively targeted by global tobacco giants and with minimal controls on advertising, Indonesia is the world's fastest growing cigarette market. Ninety million people smoke; smoking-related diseases kill 200,000 Indonesians a year and the numbers are rising. In 2011, tobacco companies spent £142 million on advertising in the country. Cigarette adverts are everywhere and the companies also sponsor rock concerts, football and badminton tournaments and cycling events. A senior tobacco industry insider tells Unreported World reporter Jonathan Miller that tobacco giants such as Philip Morris and British American Tobacco have, in his words, been 'milking a cash-cow,' following their takeovers of big Indonesian tobacco firms. He says they aggressively target young adults. Philip Morris has recently confirmed that rapid sales growth in parts of Asia, led by Indonesia, have offset a substantial decline in sales in the west. The firms agree that they target young adults, but the slick, exciting ads seduce children, too. Indonesia's new Health Minister, Dr. Nafsiah Mboi, tells Unreported World that she wants to end what she sees as her government's dependence on the tobacco industry. But it's a difficult job. Tobacco is as crucial to the Indonesian economy as the financial sector is to Britain's. The industry provides ten per cent of national income and 10 million jobs. And, as Unreported World reveals, not all of those 10 million are adults. In Malang, East Java, the team learn that it's not unusual to see children working on farms. But green tobacco is dangerous stuff; toxins are absorbed through the skin and workers can suffer acute nicotine poisoning. Miller sees two
The Dominican Republic provides almost 20% of professional baseball players in the United States. In a country where many are very poor, the sport is one of the few routes out for young men. But the cost of failure at 18 years old can be devastating. In the United States, Major League teams can't sign a player until he has a high school diploma, usually at the age of 18 or 19. Dominican Republic law allows children to leave school at just 14 and sign when they're 16, so the US teams can sign them up earlier. As a consequence, the teams pay the most for players when they're 16. But these boys know they have a limited shelf life. In two years they will be worth a lot less and may have missed their chance to get signed at all. Everywhere reporter Seyi Rhodes and producer Daniel Bogado look, people are playing baseball. There are tens of thousands of young hopefuls but only around 350 get signed up by American teams each year. Of these only two per cent will make it to the Major Leagues. Rhodes and Bogado travel to the small seaside town of San Pedro de Macorís, which has produced more Major League players per capita than anywhere else in the world. They meet a bunch of boys living together and training before hopefully getting a try-out. One of them tells Rhodes how baseball was his only way out: 'My neighbourhood is poor; there is a lot of crime. They kill a lot of people there. In my family the majority are criminals. The only one who went into baseball is me.' Paterson Segura is only 16 but already throws as fast as a professional. He's been plucked from poverty and intensively trained into a product for US scouts. If he's chosen, he could fetch hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Paterson tells Rhodes that he dropped out of school two years earlier to focus on his baseball full time, against the wishes of the grandmother who raised him. He's very aware he's got a limited time now to make it before he's too old and misses out
Mogadishu is one of the most dangerous cities on earth. Unreported World meets the remarkable British Somali man who has mortgaged his life in London and left his family behind to set up a chain of restaurants in the Somali capital. Cooking is his contribution to the peace process in this war-torn country. Ahmed fled Somalia when he was a boy and settled in Britain. He trained as a chef and set up a successful restaurant in West London before returning to Somalia. But Ahmed's success running restaurants has made him a target of jihadi organisation Al Shabaab. One of his restaurants has been hit by a double-suicide attack, leaving 20 dead. Ahmed is determined to carry on. The stakes could not be higher: his business, his marriage, even his survival. After 21 years of civil war a new government in Somalia is hoping for peace, but still battling Al Shabaab, a militant army loyal to Al Qaeda. The new government has no power, depending for its survival on a 17,000-strong African Union army that has pushed back Al Shabaab insurgents since last year. But the militants still stage guerrilla attacks, bombings and assassinations. There's no gunfire in Mogadishu on the day reporter Aidan Hartley and director John Conroy meet Ahmed at his beachfront café - cooking for a clientele that includes other Somalis returning home from exile in the UK. But just a few days beforehand, two suicide bombers had blown themselves up in his city centre restaurant, called the Village. The attackers shot customers and then exploded their bombs, murdering 20 people. Al Shabaab gloated over the deaths and has promised to strike again. Ahmed takes the team to see his bombed cafe. It's a gruesome sight. Where one of the bombers detonated himself, fragments of his body and blood have been blasted all over the walls and ceiling, together with the remains of several other people. But Ahmed tells Hartley that he's staying put: 'I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to rebuild
Young clubbers in Mumbai are being arrested, assaulted and accused of being prostitutes in a police crackdown on the city's nightlife. Reporter Jenny Kleeman and director Alex Nott investigate why a policeman dubbed 'Inspector Killjoy' is now enforcing long-forgotten laws and how being caught up in the raids can change young women's lives forever. The film looks at the fault lines where East meets West and where generations clash as India changes. The team is taken to one of the city's best-known clubs - the Blue Frog - by Nisha Harale Bedi, a former Miss Mumbai. It's a place where models and Bollywood stars come to party, but it's also one of over 200 venues the police have raided this year, under 60-year-old licensing laws that many feel are out of step with modern Mumbai. The policeman leading the crackdown, Assistant Police Commissioner Vasant Dhoble, has detained at least 1000 clubbers on suspicion of anything from taking drugs to selling sex. Nisha tells Kleeman how during one raid she was forced into a bathroom and strip searched. Female clubbers have also been humiliated when the police have accused them of being prostitutes in front of local TV cameras. Karishma Ramesh Kadam was born in a slum and is now a shop assistant who aspires to the glamorous lifestyle that Nisha and her friends enjoy. The first time she ever went clubbing she was caught in a raid. Dhoble told reporters he'd been tipped off that prostitutes were soliciting from the club, and he arrested all the female customers. They were imprisoned for three weeks and then released without charge. Karishma tells Kleeman she was strip searched and beaten, but the worst thing was that the raid had been filmed and photographed by journalists who publically branded her a prostitute. Her family say she's brought shame on them. They won't let her come home and refuse to speak to her. Karishma says she has tried to kill herself twice since they rejected her. The Unreported World tea
Unreported World examines the increase in sexual assaults and harassment in Egypt. The programme reveals claims that young men are being paid to carry out horrendous mob attacks on women. It is claimed that this started under the Mubarak regime and it is suspected by some to still continue. Women have been at the forefront of the Egyptian revolution but are now often fearful of taking part in the regular public demonstrations. Sexual harassment is not a new problem in Egypt. In a 2010 United Nations survey, more than 80 per cent of women surveyed said they'd been sexually harassed. But there are signs that the problem has got worse with the breakdown of public order since the revolution. Reports of mob sex attacks are on the increase. Reporter Ramita Navai and director Dimitri Collingridge meet a young woman who has recently survived such an attack. Nihal was out at a protest in Tahrir Square with four other women. She managed to escape but her friend suffered an ordeal that is typical of these attacks. She was stripped naked and dozens of men raped her with their hands. Nihal's friend sustained internal injuries and couldn't walk for a week. She has since fled Egypt. Nihal too was severely traumatised. Nihal has become involved in Harassmap, an anti-sexual harassment movement that charts mob attacks and allows women to log sexual harassment. In the last two years the team has received more than 900 reports from women across the country. Despite the publicity on the issue, the women themselves are worried about speaking about their personal experiences. It's a taboo subject and many of them are even afraid to tell their parents what they've suffered. Even when women decide to go to the police, they say they rarely receive help. Twenty-one-year-old student Dina has been the victim of several assaults. She claims that on one occasion she managed to alert a nearby police officer, but that he refused to help, telling her the attack was her fau
Glamorous young Russian socialite Ksenia Sobchak has swapped high-profile TV stardom for a life leading political protests against President Putin, who also happens to be a close family friend. Unreported World reveals how far Sobchak is risking her livelihood and privileged lifestyle to confront the strongman of the Kremlin, who has dealt ruthlessly with other political opponents. Sobchak is one of the most famous people in Russia, known by millions as the presenter of Russian Big Brother, and a member of the elite that made fortunes following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her father was the mayor of St Petersburg and mentor to Vladimir Putin, a family friend. A quick search of her career highlights on YouTube turns up clips of her dancing lasciviously, fighting with a boyfriend, and being carried home to her apartment in a drunken stupor. So, when Muscovites took to the streets in December 2011 in a series of unprecedented mass protests against electoral fraud and the Putin regime, they were amazed when she joined them, telling them she had a lot to lose in fighting their cause. Since then, she's changed her image and started going out with Ilya Yashin, a political organiser. She's still using her celebrity, but now to oppose the regime of a man she's known since she was a child. And she's suffering the consequences. By opposing the government, Sobchak has swapped a life of privilege for one of uncertainty. She's been banished from mainstream television to a tiny cable station, where she hosts a political discussion programme. In June 2012, armed police raided her apartment. Reporter Marcel Theroux and director David Fuller follow Sobchak as she records an hour-long interview with Katya Samutsevich, one of the Pussy Riot protestors. It's Sobchak's idea to film the interview outside with the cathedral the protestors invaded. At Sobchak's suggestion, she and Samutsevich wear prison jackets. It's a well-calculated tease, but the Kremlin
Unreported World meets the Burmese villagers fighting for their ancestral lands as foreign investors flood in to a nation rich in undeveloped resources. After 50 years of military dictatorship, Burma is finally re-emerging from isolation as a pariah state. The release of political dissident Aung San Suu Kyi and the moves towards a more open society are the end of the story for some. However, economic development is leading to new social unrest as tensions build between big business and local people. Reporter Evan Williams and director Wael Dabbous travel to the north of Burma, close to the country's famed second city Mandalay. It's the centre of a farmers' resistance movement against some of the most powerful forces in the region and the stakes couldn't be higher. On one side is what is believed to be one of the biggest undeveloped copper mines in the world; on the other, villagers who refuse to leave the land their families have farmed for generations. Plans show that the mine will entirely demolish a mountain range of 33 small peaks and displace thousands of farmers. In the village of Wet Hmay - right in the middle of this contested land - Williams meets cousins Aye Net and Thwe Thwe, the two women who are leading the campaign against the mine. Their trenchant resistance has made them unlikely leaders for farmers who say they are being tricked into signing over their land and forced out by intimidation. 'I will not accept any amount of money to leave this land,' says an impassioned Aye Net in the shadow of an encroaching pile of earth from the mine, 'It is the land our ancestors lived on and we have to pass on to our grandchildren.' Williams and Dabbous stay with them for two weeks as the women try to repair a community being torn apart by the pressure, try to organise protests and seek the support of Burma's politically powerful Buddhist clergy. The monks - who rose against military rule in 2007's 'saffron revolution' - tell Willi
Paralympian wheelchair basketball star Ade Adepitan is granted access on a rare scale to some of Cuba's most famous basketball stars, to investigate why some of them have defected to the USA just as the country seems to be opening up. Adepitan and director David Fuller travel to Ciego De Avila, six hours east of Havana, and home to the best basketball team in Cuba. Many of the Ciego Buffalo stars are in the national team, but some of them have made headlines for reasons not to do with performance on the basketball court. Nine months previously, Cuba's government allowed the national team to visit the US territory of Puerto Rico. Within hours they defected, along with three players from other clubs. Adepitan talks to some of their fellow team members, who had the chance to defect, but chose to return to Cuba. 'They went to look for economic improvement,' one of them tells him. 'Players here don't earn very much.' Some of the Buffalo players are good enough to play in top international leagues but, they explain, while ordinary Cubans are now allowed to leave the country for up to two years, high-value people like surgeons and sports stars are not given the same right. The Cuban government says that the players are trained and maintained by the state, so they should stay in Cuba. But that's not what some of the fans tell Adepitan. They say they want their basketball players to travel abroad and play for the best teams, developing their skills and ultimately improving the Cuban national team. And, while self improvement is also high on the agenda of those players considering defecting, the economic effect of the decades-old US trade embargo on sports stars who could be millionaires in other countries also comes into play. The government provides free state education and health care, but there's a shortage of housing. Adepitan and Fuller visit the home of William Lewis. He's one of the top basketball players in Cuba, but lives in a small hou
Aidan Hartley reports from his home town in Kenya on an extraordinary project to rescue the children who live on its streets. Together with director Wael Dabbous, Hartley highlights the inspiring work of the Restart Centre in Gilgil, which is providing a safe shelter for children at risk. The Centre is run on a shoestring budget raised from private donations. Conditions are basic, but crucially, it represents safety for the 70 children who live there. Many of them ended up living rough as result of the bloody chaos which engulfed Kenya following disputed elections five years ago. More than a thousand people were killed, many families were broken up and thousands were made homeless. Hartley and Dabbous follow Restart worker Dan Nderitu, who spends his nights seeking out Gilgil's street children. The first time they meet him, he's in a race against time to rescue two small boys: Ken, seven, and his ten-year-old brother Julius. Ken and Julius' family have sunk into extreme poverty. Their mother abandoned them and a year ago they began sleeping rough. They both want to move off the streets and into the Restart shelter, but in order to take them in, Dan needs the government's permission. He's trying to reach the government Children's Officer who needs to sign the paperwork for Ken and Julius - but her office is chronically underfunded and the process painfully slow. Dan's work is urgent because, during Unreported World's time in Kenya, the country is about to hold general elections, and if there's violence, he fears the children could be even more at risk. Unreported World also films the Restart Centre's children's choir which campaigns for the elections to be peaceful. Many of those Hartley meets, such as Pilot, the youngest member of the choir, saw their families collapse in the violence following the previous election.
In war-torn Gaza, 'Location, Location, Location' means finding an apartment in one of the highly sought-after areas that are usually not shelled or hit by missiles. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and producer Daniel Bogado examine what must be one of the world's most unlikely property booms. They meet Essam Mortja, an estate agent and property developer who says his property business is booming. He shows them some of the glitzy properties he's helped sell at prices of up to US $3 million. Property prices for luxury villas and apartments in elite areas like El Remal are on par with London and New York. The area is right by the sea and has stunning views, but there's one other reason why the prices are so high. It's where the UN building is located, which means Israeli planes are less likely to bomb the area. Israel did bomb the UN HQ in 2009 but it caused an outcry - and property prices show that Gazans think it is unlikely to happen again. Essam explains how the conflict with Israel has been a driving force behind this incredible real estate boom. Israel's blockade against Hamas means that movement of people and goods are restricted. Two million Palestinians are trapped in this 25-mile strip of land, making it one of the world's most crowded places. Prices go up in any place with low supply and high demand. But also, every time there's conflict, Israel destroys some homes, which worsens the housing shortage and drives prices up even further. Gaza's property boom has made many real estate agents and property speculators like Essam extremely wealthy. Rising property prices have sparked a building frenzy in Gaza. The Israeli blockade restricts building materials as Israel says Hamas uses them to build military bunkers. But Gaza's entrepreneurs are smuggling building materials through tunnels from Egypt. According to some estimates, 90% of all buildings being built in Gaza are constructed with materials brought through tunnels. The Unreported T
Unreported World meets the NHS doctor who is risking his life by providing front-line medical care to the victims of the conflict in Syria. Dr Rami Habib is a paediatrician who was previously based in Leicester. He's living in the northern Syrian town of Salma, which is bombed and shelled by government forces almost every day. But he's determined to stay and keep the hospital going. Salma used to be a holiday destination. Dr Habib had bought his parents a flat in the town and was visiting when war erupted. He took the difficult decision not to return to his wife in the UK and instead to stay in Syria to ensure that Salma had a doctor. The town is just 20 miles from the ancestral home of President Al-Assad, but is in the control of the anti-government rebels. It's a strategically important target and the front line is just over a mile away. As a result of the daily bombardment, the town's population of 70,000 has shrunk to 5000. Those who remain are mostly rebel fighters and a few civilians determined to stay despite the terrible danger. Reporter Evan Williams and director James Brabazon travel with Dr Habib as he crosses the border from Turkey, bringing life-saving medical supplies for the hospital. Travelling by road is extremely dangerous as vehicles are targeted by government troops; and the last 500 yards into Salma are the most dangerous. To avoid detection, they switch off their headlights and drive in the dark. Dr Habib's first hospital was hit by a barrel bomb - a massive improvised bomb made out of a cylinder packed with explosives and shrapnel - dropped from a government helicopter while he was inside. The building was badly damaged and his new field hospital is now in the basement of an apartment block. Facilities are basic and the town's water supply has been cut off for months. Dr Habib's staff have been forced to find an alternative source of water, which is now pumped in from a spring two miles away through a one-inch pipe.
As Education Secretary Michael Gove expresses his admiration for education systems in the Far East, Unreported World travels to Hong Kong to meet the students aiming for success in one of the most competitive exam environments in the world. Reporter Marcel Theroux and producer Lottie Gammon meet the millionaire Lamborghini-driving 'super tutor' who has made his fortune from parents desperate to get their kids into university. Richard Eng has made his fortune coaching school students to get through the final year Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE). The team films him in action at Beacon College - whose 40,000 students come from schools all over Hong Kong - where they've signed up for long evening classes on top of a full day at school. There's no coursework in Hong Kong; everyone's fate is decided by the exam. Three quarters of Hong Kong's students have extra tuition to prepare them for these final year exams. Richard's success is built on his perceived ability to give his students a competitive edge. One of Richard's students is 17-year-old JJ. Theroux visits his small apartment, on the 19th floor of a public housing estate. JJ's dream is to be a PE teacher and he needs to pass his exams to get into university and teacher training. Neither of his parents had been to university and they've scraped together the money to send him to Beacon College as his school had a low success rate in getting students into university. But JJ is competing with students at elite schools, with pushier parents, and who have been tutored since kindergarten. The pressure is getting to him. He's running a temperature but says he can't afford to skip class. JJ tells Theroux: 'I was talking to my English teacher about exam pressure. Tears welled up and I started crying.' The great promise of education in Hong Kong is that a public exam sat by all allows children from any background to excel. But in a city as unequal as this one, with large disparities
Bangladesh is one of the most dangerous places in the world to drive a car. Reporter Clemency Burton-Hill and director Elizabeth C Jones take to the roads of Dhaka with a group of young women who are learning to be professional drivers against extraordinary odds: on top of dreadful drivers, teeming traffic and huge potholes, these learners are battling entrenched social taboos as they try to enter a profession almost entirely dominated by men. Inside the residential driving school, the young women - many of whom have come from difficult circumstances - live, sleep, eat and study together, swapping life stories and forging friendships. Their driving tuition, both in the classrooms and on the roads, is intense: 8am to 6pm every day except Fridays. Dhaka has appalling traffic and more than 20,000 people die on Bangladesh's roads every year. Before the women get anywhere near the wheel, however, one of the first issues they are taught about is 'gender sensitivity'. As female drivers, prejudice, discrimination and abuse are as likely to await them as potholes, traffic jams and exhaust fumes. Twenty-year-old Mafuza was forced to leave school when she was 14 and marry a man she'd never met. Having divorced her husband after he allegedly mistreated her, she has retreated back to her village with her two-year-old daughter. Nobody else in her village drives a car, but she dreams of becoming a professional driver to provide her parents with much more income. She also hopes to be an inspiration to other women in the village by proving that women - even young, divorced women - can be equal to men, and can forge an independent livelihood despite the prevailing social taboos. Twenty-one-year-old Konika claims she was so badly beaten by her husband that she lost her baby during the ninth month of her pregnancy. Now divorced, Konika is making good progress, but worries that she can't stop her legs from shaking whenever she drives. Competition for jobs at the end of
Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Daniel Bogado travel to Yemen to reveal the scores of young men locked up in prisons and awaiting execution for crimes they are accused of committing while they were children. And they meet the lawyer who, in a miscarriage of justice, was sentenced to death himself at the age of 16 and who is now on a mission to save others who should never have been given the death penalty. The Unreported World team accompanies Hafedh Ibrahim as he enters Taiz prison to meet a new young client. It's the same prison where Hafedh was once held on death row and where he was marched, handcuffed, from the cells to the execution spot and told to lie down on the sand ready to be executed. Hafedh tells Guru-Murthy how, according to Yemeni law, as a juvenile he should never have faced the death penalty. His campaigning from inside prison paid off. He describes hearing the phone call coming in to cancel his execution three minutes before he was due to be shot. Yemen has one of the world's highest rates of gun ownership. In this tribal society boys are given guns and expected to become men. The prisons are full of young prisoners convicted of murder. According to Yemeni law, offenders under 18 cannot be sentenced to death. But most people here don't have documents proving their age so juveniles are often mistaken as adults. That problem is intensified by the fact Yemeni culture has tended to treat boys as adults at the age of 15. Hafedh is in the prison to meet Abdul Rahman, a boy accused of murder. Abdul hasn't been tried, but has already been in prison for nearly two years. His sister claims that he killed her husband. Abdul says that he's being framed and in any case, he was 16 when the death took place. Hafedh has Abdul's birth certificate, which he says should prove that he's telling the truth. However, he tells Guru-Murthy that many judges don't accept ID documents as proof of age and believe that any murder
Unreported World reports on the huge growth in cosmetic plastic surgery in Brazil. In Brazil, plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons is not frowned on like it can be in the UK, and having a surgically enhanced body is sometimes seen as a status symbol. Plastic surgery procedures have gone up by 40% in two years and there are now 10 times more plastic surgeons in Brazil than in the UK. Brazil is second only to the USA in the number of plastic surgery operations carried out each year.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Wael Dabbous travel to Afghanistan, gaining rare access to the secret houses that shelter women hiding from violent husbands or from families who have tried to kill them for refusing to take part in arranged marriages. Improving women's rights was supposed to be one of the great legacies of Britain's involvement in Afghanistan, but Unreported World reveals that, as international forces start to pull out, powerful religious hardliners are trying to roll back new laws that protect women.
Reporter Kiki King and director James Brabazon travel to Caracas, the kidnap capital of the world. With exclusive access to the Venezuelan police force's elite Anti-Kidnap Squad, the Unreported World team follow officers as they fight back against the kidnap gangs with a mixture of brute force and technical ingenuity. More than five people are kidnapped in Venezuela every day. The country is awash with illegal firearms, with a politicised and barely-functioning judicial system and prisons effectively run by the gangster inmates.
Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Frankie Fathers join some of China's many millions of male lonely hearts on their search for a wife, and meet some of the 'Love Hunters' working to find them an ideal bride.
Reporter Ade Adepitan, director Daniel Bogado and a group of Mexican former hospital patients gain access to Mexico's psychiatric institutions to secretly film the horrific and inhumane conditions endured by the thousands of men and women known as 'The Abandoned Ones.'
Reporter Mary-Ann Ochota and director Suzie Samant travel to Delhi to meet the remarkable children who run the only newspaper in India campaigning on the problems that street children face.
Unreported World investigates the shocking effects Egypt's political unrest is having on the country's tourism industry and the unique archaeological heritage. Reporter Aidan Hartley and director Alex Nott find ancient archaeological sites being plundered by armed looters; people who previously worked as guides trying to survive without money or food and the corpses of horses and camels that used to carry tourists lying in piles in the desert next to the pyramids. Egypt's economy has always relied on tourism, but since the army toppled the Muslim Brotherhood in a bloody coup, tourism has collapsed. The Giza Plateau is home to one of the Seven Wonders of the World and it used to have 10,000 tourists visiting every day. Now it's eerily quiet, with the average number of tourists more like 10 a day. Emad Abu Zuba and Hima Abdurahman are tourist guides who offer camel rides at Giza. Before the crisis they did a brisk business but they can't remember when they last had a tourist client. Hima hasn't made any money for 14 days in a row and Emad says that people can't afford to feed their animals any more. He takes the team into the desert near the pyramids to show them the results. They find several piles of up to 50 dead horses lying in the sand. Emad says: 'Today if you saw 1000 horses, maybe next month you'll see 2000 of them. The third month you will see 3000 of them. One horse can feed one family. If you are going to count how many horses that are dead, it means the whole of that family has no money to live now.' The collapse of law and order, together with the collapse in tourism, is having a devastating effect on the country's archaeological treasures. The army and police have imposed a midnight curfew in Cairo, leaving the sites out in the desert unguarded. At the most famous tourist site in the world, archaeologist Monica Hanna reveals how armed looters are now plundering the network of ancient and unexplored tombs and temples for treasure. Eve
Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Wael Dabbous travel with a local midwife into the jungles of the Central African Republic where, after heavy fighting, rebels have overthrown the government and medical teams can reach areas that have been inaccessible for years. The murderous Lord's Resistance Army has used the recent chaos to relocate from neighbouring countries and is killing people and kidnapping children. Olga Yetikoua is employed by the International Medical Corps and faces a daily struggle to save the lives of mothers and babies in a country that's one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth.
Reporter Evan Williams and director Laura Warner travel to Nepal to investigate the growth of 'voluntourism', where Westerners donate time and money to help vulnerable children in Kathmandu's orphanages. Filming undercover in orphanages, they discover that many children are not orphans, but have been taken from impoverished parents. The team discover evidence that such children are mistreated and used by orphanage owners to attract money from donors. The orphan industry is now so lucrative that children are a valuable commodity.
Channel 4’s critically acclaimed, award winning world affairs strand returns with a startling film from the Indonesian island of Java - home to the planet’s most polluted river and a textile industry supplying some of the world’s biggest fashion brands.
Reporter Evan Williams and director Marcel Mettelsiefen travel to Baghdad to meet the extraordinary young dancers and musicians at Iraq’s only music and ballet school, who are battling to keep their art alive against the rising tide of sectarian violence in the city It’s the run up to the elections at the end of April and up to 300 people are being killed in Baghdad every week by car bombs and assassinations. But, hidden away from the violence, the school is a refuge of culture and artistic expression. 162 students from across the city attend and ranging from six to 17 years old, they are chosen for their artistic ability for music and dance. The school’s star student is 17-year-old Leezan Salam, who has studied there for ten years and is just two months from graduation. “When you enter the school you enter a place of hope and peace. Outside you hear the sounds of car bombs and gunfire. Inside the school, everything is beautiful,” she tells Williams. Pianist Mohammed Ramsey is one of Leezan’s best friends and they are both on the brink of the biggest decision of their lives: what to do when they leave the school. Leezan will have to leave Iraq if she wants to continue her ballet. Mohammed’s future as a piano player is uncertain. Every day they, like the rest of the pupils, risk their lives by crossing Baghdad to reach the school. Just six weeks ago Leezan and Mohammed’s best friend – musician Ali Nouri - was killed by a bomb as he went home from school. He used to take Leezan home every day until one day she heard a bomb had gone off. “I called Ali’s phone and a stranger picked it up,” she tells Williams.”I said “Who is this?” The guy said “if you know this person call his family. Please. Call the family and tell them he’s dead’... As Williams talks to Thena Ibrahim, the School Registrar, they are interrupted by a chilling reminder of the violence outside. Seven car bombs have just been detonated across the city lea
This powerful edition of Unreported World documents the lives of Thai children as young as seven who fight in the brutal sport of Muay Thai, knocking out their opponents with elbows, knees and feet, as well as fists. It can leave the kids brain-damaged, but adult gambling on these unpredictable fights is big business, and their families put enormous pressure on the kids to fight and win. The film records one child as he runs miles inside a rubber suit in 30-degree heat to make the weight for his fight. Reporter Mary-Ann Ochota and director Daniel Bogado follow 11-year old Nat Thanarak, one of the best child boxers in the North of the country. He is preparing for the biggest match of his career so far, against a 12- year old champion from another province. Nat will get a fee for the fight, but his chance of earning big money comes from gambling. His whole village has raised a stake to bet on him. If Nat wins, he’ll get a cut. There are more than 30,000 professional child fighters taking part in Muay Thai, which is considered one of the toughest martial arts in the world. Although they sometimes fight for a fee of as little as £4, their winnings can make them breadwinners for their families and local heroes in their villages. Nat trains seven days a week, four hours a day, before and after school. As well as getting fit for the fight, he also needs to make the weight for his category. And to do this, he needs to shed three kilos – ten per cent of his body weight – over the next week. He dresses in a rubber sweat suit designed to help him lose water while he runs 8km in temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius. Nat’s mother works as a nanny in Bangkok, sending home money when she can, but it’s not enough to support the family. Nat’s dad doesn’t have a job and tells Ochota that if his son wasn’t boxing, he would have to find work in Bangkok, leaving Nat to live with their grandparents. While Nat trains, the team films some of the fights held ev
Reporter Marcel Theroux and Director James Brabazon travel to South Africa, a country where at least thirty vehicles are carjacked every day. The country’s cars are routinely fitted with satellite trackers, so that if they are carjacked by thieves an armed response unit can track them. The Unreported World team is in the country’s capital, Pretoria, a city where this type of crime is acute. They are with Andries Hlongwane - who works for a private security firm– following him as he chases the gunmen and recovers stolen cars. It’s dangerous work for a private security industry that now accounts for seven per cent of all jobs in South Africa. Theroux and Brabazon begin the film in hot pursuit of a carjacked vehicle. Andries and his partner find it abandoned, but they keep their guns drawn - there’s a good chance the carjackers are still watching to see if anyone has followed the car’s satellite tracker. The team waits for police officers to arrive to help out, but suddenly across the road they hear the cries of a woman being robbed. Andries races to her aid, his gun drawn, and chases of the robbers. A few minutes later a passing driver warns the team he’s just driven through a gang of armed carjackers at a junction less than 100 yards away. The police arrive and almost immediately there’s a fusillade of shots. Just five minutes from the South African parliament, the carjackers have no compunction about firing automatic weapons to make good their escape. Next Andries scrambles into action to track down a hijacked delivery van. He finds it abandoned in a poor township. The shocked driver tells Theroux he’s convinced the gunmen were going murder him The hijackers eventually fled with the equivalent of around £30 in cash and a few loaves of bread. The police turn up to investigate, but locals tell Theroux it’s a rarity to see the police in this township. The lack of police protection in many areas is one reason that explains the 400,
Unreported World visits a remote area of Madagascar where the dead make the rules. A set of taboos, handed down from long-dead ancestors, controls what you eat, when you work and every aspect of how you behave. Reporter Kiki King and director David Fuller visit the town of Mananjary, on the isolated east coast, to reveal how one taboo against twins leads to children being abandoned and mothers becoming outcasts. No one is sure how the taboo against twins, and the belief that they bring bad luck, arose, but most stories talk about an ancient battle that caused a tribe to flee their village. One mother forgot one of her twins and when the villagers returned to save it, they were all massacred. The tribe's elders then declared it taboo to raise twins. Ursula, the mother of twins Giovanni and Venua, says that when they were born her husband told her to abandon them and refused to recognise them legally. Ursula refused to give them up and moved in with her sister and mother. Then her mother got sick and died. She tells King that her family and neighbours blamed the death on the twins: 'Everyone said that her death was her punishment because she didn't respect her culture: the ancestors.' King and Fuller also meet Carolin, who is considered especially unlucky as she has given birth to three sets of twins. She says she has had to move house around 30 times, because her neighbours feared the twins. Now she lives in a tiny tent and is struggling to feed her family. Living alongside her, in what amounts to a small refugee camp for twins, are six other families who have all had to flee their villages. The nearby CATJA orphanage is home to a dozen sets of twins, but none of them are orphans; their parents are alive and living nearby. Over the years, hundreds of twins have passed through the centre, which is funded by a French charity. While the team are there, an abandoned newborn twin is brought in. Nobody knows who she belongs to; only the villag
Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Adam Pletts manage to film on both sides of the lines in the Lebanese city of Tripoli, where Sunni Muslim fighters are besieging an Alawite neighbourhood in a conflict mirroring that happening in Syria. Guru-Murthy uncovers a vicious low-level war of sniping, assassinations and kneecappings, and meets commanders and gunmen who revel in killing their neighbours, and whose hate has taken over their lives. The Unreported World team visits the house of one of the local Sunni commanders, Abu Ali, who used to run a snooker hall. Together with his 30 fighters, Ali monitors the Alawite houses in Tripoli's Jabal Mohsen enclave, located on the hill above the Bab al Tabbaneh Sunni district of the city. Also at the house is one of Abu Ali's henchmen: a man whose speciality is kneecapping those Alawites who have to venture from their neighbourhood into the city centre. He tells Guru-Murthy that he has so far kneecapped around 45 people and is planning to shoot more in the coming days. The Alawites regularly return fire into the Sunni district. In the streets around Ali's house, keeping out of sight of the Alawite guns is part of daily life, with sniper curtains hanging across side streets to block the view. The team cross to the other side of the frontline, to meet Kamal Sana, a former taxi driver. He and his friends are remembering a neighbour who was shot by a sniper a few days before. The windows of Kamal's children's bedroom have been blown in by a mortar landing outside. Kamal's wife, Rola, says that over the last three years living here has become terrifying. But this is their family home and they don't want to leave. Kamal tells the team about the automatic weapons he keeps at home and says his fighters use 'anything it takes' but he's not willing to discuss where the weapons come from. Kamal's neighbour, Ali Assir, tells Guru-Murthy that he used to be a taxi driver until he was dragged out of his car in T
In an eye-opening episode, reporter Ade Adepitan and director Andrew Carter travel to Kingston to investigate the growth of homophobic attacks in Jamaica and to meet the gay and transgender group who've ended up living in a storm drain, where they suffer shocking violence, attacks and insults because of their sexuality. Jamaica has a reputation for intolerance of homosexuality. Male gay sex is punishable by 10 years' hard labour and violent hostility is entrenched in the island's culture. Unreported World meets one group of gay and transgender people who are now living in a gully, which is usually designed to carry floodwater and rubbish from the city. It's hot, crowded, infested and filthy. But it's the only place these 25 people can call home. There are no facilities: cooking and washing-up are done in the gutter. Water comes from a broken pipe under a road bridge. And it's not in a poor part of town, but in the middle of New Kingston, the capital's business district. Most homosexuals in Jamaica work hard to hide their sexuality. Those who are openly 'out' are in the firing line. Krissy, who's 21, was born male but believes her true gender is female. She says she didn't feel safe expressing this at home, so she's lived on the streets on and off since she was 12. Apart from her sister, she hasn't seen most of her family for years. Krissy tells Adepitan that together with other homeless gay and transgender friends, she initially lived in a squat. But, under pressure from the neighbours, the site's owner chased the group away and levelled the place. They went from squat to squat, being moved on each time by police or landlords, and eventually ended up at the gully. Many of those living in the gully didn't finish school, and without an address it's difficult to get a job. Sachaberry, who has been homeless for two years, says the only way she can make a living is by selling her body. But it's a dangerous business. She tells Adepitan that o
In 2014 people shouldn’t die in pain. Access to palliative drugs ought to be a basic human right. Morphine was isolated by scientists more than 200 years ago and has been sold by medical drug companies since 1827. It is relatively cheap, very safe when used under medical supervision and stops excruciating pain dead. And yet according to the World Health Organisation around 80 per cent of the world’s morphine supply is consumed by six rich countries.
Unreported World provides a unique view of what life is like for the health workers battling Ebola in Sierra Leone and the families affected by the virus. As the only television crew to spend two weeks embedded in field hospitals and quarantine units, reporter Shaunagh Connaire and director Wael Dabbous were in Sierra Leone at a critical phase when there was still a chance to contain the virus. In the time they were there though it was clear the battle to contain it was being lost. This Ebola outbreak has claimed nearly 2000 lives. The World Health Organization warns the virus could ultimately infect more than 20,000 people. Without the bravery and determination of those battling the virus, the figures would be far higher.
Unreported World investigates how dog thieves are stealing thousands of pet dogs from family homes in Vietnam to meet the demand for dog meat. The crime wave has provoked outrage across the country and led to the mob killing of scores of dog thieves. Reporter Nelufar Hedayat and director Daniel Bogado reveal disturbing evidence of how dogs are stolen, transported and slaughtered in an illegal trade that has shocked the nation.
Unreported World visits Lebanon to reveal the plight of some of the most vulnerable refugees fleeing the war in Syria: disabled people, many of whom are children. Talking to the children, their families and the organisations trying to help them, producer David Fuller and new reporter Giles Duley, a photographer who lost his legs and an arm to a landmine in Afghanistan, reveal how the refugees and the Lebanese government are struggling to cope as the crisis worsens.
Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Billy Dosanjh meet some of the thousands of young Russian models hoping for a career in fashion. Demand from the Far East is driving the search for new models and the Unreported World team follow the trail, from scouting in shopping malls in Siberia to attending casting calls in China, where the work and conditions are a lot harder than the models had hoped, and models can end up in debt to their agencies.
Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Hugo Ward travel to India where the government's drive to help the country's development through widespread electrification is pitting villagers who want the benefits of electricity against campaigners who are worried about the environmental impact of vast open-cast mines on the forests that provide a livelihood and food for tribal communities.
Reporter Ade Adepitan and director Nick Blakemore travel to Honduras to meet the inspirational head teacher who's battling to give his pupils the best chance of survival in one of the most dangerous places on Earth. San Pedro Sula has the highest murder rate in the world. Two notorious gangs - Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 - are fighting for control of the city. The only way out for many families is to attempt the dangerous route into the US. In the four months before Unreported World's visit, 2500 unaccompanied children from the city were arrested crossing illegally into the United States. Adepitan and Blakemore are in Chamelecón, at the centre of the gang battle. They are there to meet Hector, an extraordinary head teacher trying to convince local kids that education is the way to a better future, rather than risking their lives with the people smugglers.
Libya is so dangerous most foreigners have left. Embedded in Tripoli's fire station, reporters Seyi Rhodes and Laura Warner gained a vivid snapshot of life in a disintegrating country.
Reporter Kiki King and Director Daniel Bogado visit Uganda to follow the inspirational work of the sign language teachers who are trekking deep into the countryside to transform the lives of deaf children and adults, who have never been able to communicate until now.
A unique, devastating insight into the last days in the battle between Kurdish fighters and Isis for the Syrian town of Kobani
This episode meet the young children participating in the dangerous sport of bull-riding. This action-packed, eye-opening episode visits Texas to meet the young children participating in what has been described as the world's most dangerous organised sport: bull-riding
Unreported World meets the brave - and very funny - comics risking their security by satirising Zimbabwe's politicians online.
Unreported World meets the health workers risking their lives to vaccinate children against polio in Pakistan, where the Taliban have issued a decree against vaccination
Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Director Daniel Bogado are in Cambodia meeting families torn apart by the Khmer Rouge genocide, now being reunited by reality TV.
Ade Adepitan visits Cameroon to investigate how unscrupulous agents are preying on young footballers desperate for a career playing for teams in Europe and the Middle East. The programme reveals the plight of those who end up destitute in European cities when the promise of a contract never materialises, and meets others who don't even manage to leave Africa, having lost their families' life savings.
In South Africa, reporter Evan Williams and director Laura Warner meet the Black Mambas: the world's first all-female anti-poaching unit, who are battling to save the rhino from extinction
In the disputed territory of Crimea, Marcel Theroux meets Tatar families worried about what Russian rule might bring and a young woman who hopes to become the first Tatar winner of Miss Crimea.
How some Chinese hospitals use drugs and electric shock therapy to 'cure' gay people
Medics in Malawi are performing 15-minute operations that allow blind people to see.
Reporter Giles Duley visits a remarkable clinic for victims of acid attacks in Bangladesh.
Morland Sanders meets aid workers trying to reunite families divided by war in South Sudan.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy meets the television journalist in Sicily who's risking his life to expose the Mafia bosses whose tentacles still reach far into almost every aspect of life
Kiki King investigates Mexico's fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar surrogacy industry.
Marcel Theroux investigates the growing national scandal in South Korea of modern-day slaves, many of whom have learning difficulties and worked for years on a remote island chain.
Child preachers in Brazil are attracting large crowds and becoming celebrities, as the country's fast-growing evangelical movement gains religious and political power
Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Victoria Bell are in Malaysia, where the government has declared transgender people to be enemies of Islam. There they meet the Trans women who are forced to live in what human rights groups say is one of the worst places in the world to be transgender and accompany the country's religious police as they crackdown on anything considered ‘un-Islamic'.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Patrick Wells travel to Venezuela, where they are joined by a family's frantic door-to-door search for medicines for their desperately ill daughter. This is one of the thousands of families who are affected by the shortage of drugs and medical equipment across the country. The episode visits a hospital lacking items as basic as antibiotics, and if doctors decide to speak out they are labelled anti-revolutionaries. The show will reveal how one of the world's biggest oil producers has been crippled by an economic disaster.
Reporter Fazeelat Aslam and director Karim Shah reveal how thousands of families living in Pakistan's richest city, Karachi, are suffering from chronic water shortages as a result of climate change, mismanagement, corrupt officials and criminal gangs. Their eye-opening report shows how drastic the situation has become, with families who are running out of supplies sometimes having to spend half their salary buying water illegally from criminals, or wait up night after night to see if community water taps will be turned on for a couple of hours.
Abigail Austen is a former Parachute Regiment officer who in 2007 became the first British army officer to change her gender, before serving for four years alongside the US Army in Afghanistan. Now, together with director Will West, she returns to the battlefield at the invitation of her former Afghan colleagues. For this shocking edition of Unreported World, Austen and West have secured unique and extraordinary access to a turning point in the battle against Isis and the Taliban across Helmand and Kandahar provinces, and are the first western television crew to revisit Camp Bastion since the British army withdrew. Following the end of coalition combat operations at the close of 2014, Afghans have been leading the fight against Isis and a resurgent Taliban. In 2015, the Afghan army has lost ten times more soldiers than the British lost in 15 years.
Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Simon Rawles visit America's murder capital - Chicago - where someone is shot every three hours. Black-on-black deaths in the first two months of the year are double what they were last year. The team are guided around the most violent neighbourhoods by volunteer ex-gang members who risk their lives as they try to halt the vicious cycle of violence caused by revenge killings. Chicago is where Obama started his political career, but in his final Presidential year, his backyard is still plagued by violence, and there's less financial assistance to help deal with it. While few people blame Obama for that, many black people here feel there's less hope for the future than there ever has been.
Krishan Guru-Murthy travels to Israel to reveal how tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors are spending their final days living in poverty, struggling to afford basics such as food and heating, despite the German government paying around 90 billion dollars since the end of the World War II in reparations linked to Holocaust survivors across the world. There are about half a million survivors, some 200,000 living in Israel, and compared with the wider population of elderly people, Holocaust survivors are more likely to live in poverty. Many are dependent on help from volunteers, and the suicide rate among survivors is three times that of the wider old-age population. Since shortly after World War II, the German government has paid billions of dollars to an international body, the Claims Conference, which uses the money to help survivors across the world.
Monday 2 May 2016 is the World Anti-Doping Agency deadline for Kenyan athletics to put its house in order. In this Unreported World, which transmits three days before that critical date, Ade Adepitan travels to Kenya to hear allegations of continued doping and corruption. Kenyan long-distance runners often dominate at the Olympics, at World Championships and on the professional marathon circuit. As Adepitan says, 'Running to Kenyans is like football to Brazilians: they absolutely love it.' But Adepitan finds Kenyan athletics in crisis. Since 2012 more than 40 athletes have failed doping tests. The International Association of Athletics Federations, run by Sebastian Coe, has suspended the CEO of Athletics Kenya as a result of allegations - which he denies - that he's requested bribes from athletes to suppress positive doping results. The World Anti-Doping Agency has given Kenya a succession of deadlines to show it's tackling doping, all of which have been missed.
Unreported World visits the Islamic Republic of Iran for the first time, to take a rare look at the reality of life for young Iranians. With nearly half of 18 to 35-year-olds single, the country is in the midst of a marriage crisis. In response, the government has set up an official online matchmaking site. But, as reporter Shaunagh Connaire and director Adam Patterson discover, behind this new website is an army of traditional matchmakers fielding calls from mothers in Tehran who want to find spouses for their sons and daughters. Tehran brims with contradictions. Many young Iranians are shunning marriage and enjoying newly popular ways to meet people, such as Instagram. But it's hard to combine the search for love, commitment to the rules of Islam, and respect for the traditions the older generation think are important. No wonder so many young Iranians find it easier to stay single.
Channel 4's multi-award winning Unreported World returns with a powerful new episode from Yemen revealing the catastrophic effect of the Saudi-led coalition's bombing campaign, which is being carried out using British-supplied weapons. The bombing, together with a naval blockade on Yemen's major port, has resulted in a humanitarian emergency threatening millions with starvation. Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Patrick Wells are the first international crew to film in Hodeidah port, which is critical to Yemen's food imports and has been disabled by bombing.
Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Daniel Bogado travel to India for a heart-warming report on new matchmaking schemes and events being set up by people with disabilities to help others like them find a husband or wife. Marriage is a national obsession in India, and Unreported World meets the suitors battling prejudice about their disabilities while also navigating the complexities of caste, religion and parents' expectations.
Among the million-plus refugees in Germany are tens of thousands who've fled Middle Eastern countries where being gay can get you killed. Reporter Shaunagh Connaire and director Rebecca Kenna spend time with three such refugees, and discover that gay refugees in the refugee camps and shelters of Berlin and Cologne face violent attacks and abuse from fellow refugees and migrants, with the hatred and dangers they faced in the Middle East following them to Germany, and with the attacks also feeding into the wider political debate about the challenges of assimilating refugees without compromising German values.
Reporter Ade Adepitan and director Vicki Cooper investigate the legacy of Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide dropped by US Forces during the Vietnam War. Some Vietnamese doctors believe Agent Orange is causing life-threatening health problems in a new generation of children. Dr Phuong campaigns tirelessly to demonstrate the connection between Agent Orange and children born with deformities. The Agent Orange used during the war contained dangerous concentrations of a chemical called dioxin, which Dr Phuong and many scientists believe can lead to genetic mutations. Dr Phuong tells Adepitan that her research showed that birth defects in Agent Orange sprayed areas were three or more times higher than other places. Doctors are also worried about the fact that there are still areas heavily contaminated with dioxin.
Reporter Benjamin Zand and director Jessica Kelly go underwater in Malaysian Borneo to investigate an impending environmental disaster, as the actions of fishermen threaten the 600 types of coral and hundreds of species of reef fish. As fishing disputes in the region force commercial fishermen into shallower waters, many more locals are turning to destructive fishing methods and, although the authorities are clamping down, it's proving almost impossible to police.
Seyi Rhodes gains access to one of the most notorious prisons on Earth: Haiti's National Penitentiary, where 80% of inmates have been locked up without being convicted of any crime.
Tania Rashid and director Simon Rawles are in South Africa to investigate why there is such a demand for skin bleaching products in the Rainbow Nation. The government has passed strict laws to protect people from creams containing potentially dangerous chemicals which can lead to serious health complications, but as Unreported World reveals, many are still on sale widely and endorsed by celebrities. A recent study found an incredible one in three women in South Africa use skin-bleaching creams, and there are more than 500 different products for sale. In downtown Johannesburg the products are everywhere - despite the ban on any product selling itself as skin-lightening or whitening.
School is supposed to be a sanctuary for children to grow and learn in safety, but millions of girls across Africa are being manipulated, threatened and sexually abused by those who are supposed to be looking after them: their teachers. Reporter Kiki King and director Karim Shah visit Mozambique to investigate the disturbing phenomenon known as 'sex for grades', where teachers force schoolgirls to have sex with them in return for good grades, or their deserved grades. The Mozambican Ministry of Education found that 70% of schoolgirls are either facing this kind of harassment or witnessing it.
Animal trafficking has seen an unprecedented spike in recent years, threatening dozens of species with extinction. Reporter Ade Adepitan travels to the remote city of Iquitos, Peru, where undercover filming reveals the scale and brazen nature of backstreet dealers and market traders selling protected wildlife for bush meat and the international trade - both illegal practices, yet seemingly ignored by the local police
Marcel Theroux meets one of Russia's biggest families as he investigates the Russian Orthodox Church's resurgence alongside a movement that promotes family, God and country, but that has a darker side
The USA is in the grip of an illiteracy crisis, with nearly one in five adults now unable to read. Reporter Kiki King and director Jessica Kelly visit Detroit, a city where two thirds of high school students struggle with basic reading and where things have got so bad that a group of high school students are suing the state of Michigan for failing to teach them adequately.
Unreported World travels to Lebanon where an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees have fled the war. Reporter Shaunagh Connaire and director Andrew Carter reveal that, despite offers of assistance from the international community, some of those most in need - refugee children with serious medical conditions - are suffering and dying while they wait for help. The UK, other European countries and the US have promised to help the most vulnerable children and resettle them. However, Unreported World discovers that there are limits - on medical grounds - as to who is being accepted on some of these schemes, resulting in some of the sickest children and their families being left stranded.
It's a year since decades of military dictatorship came to an end in Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi began leading a new era of civilian government. But the woman hailed around the world is now being criticised for failing to bring real freedoms to many in the country, and the fighting against various rebel groups has intensified. Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Karim Shah travel to the country to investigate whether its fledgling democracy is already under attack.
Correspondent Seyi Rhodes and director Kate Hardie-Buckley report from the set of the hit South Korean TV show that's made defectors from North Korea into TV stars. Now on My Way to Meet You mixes showbiz entertainment and shocking personal testimony, with South Korean celebrities quizzing the defectors on what life's like across the border. More than 400 defectors have been interviewed on the show. Their stories chart the very latest about life in North Korea under Kim Jong-un and for many South Koreans it's become a major source of information about their northern neighbour. Rhodes meets 26-year-old Eunhee Park, who's become one of the show's stars, and recently arrived 25-year-old Suuyeoung Lee, who's about to make her first appearance on the show. Their stories help lift the lid on what life's currently like in North Korea.
Unreported World reporter Sophie Morgan and director Patrick Wells visit the Samoan islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to investigate an epidemic of obesity. American Samoa has the highest rates of obesity in the world: up to 93% of people are overweight or obese and one in three have diabetes. Samoa is not far behind. The governments of Samoa and American Samoa are trying to tackle the crisis but both remote Islands are still being flooded with unhealthy processed food from abroad, as well as fatty offcuts of meat that are seen as unfit for human consumption in many other countries.
Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Jessica Kelly are in Senegal to explore the national obsession with competitive wrestling. It's one of Senegal's fastest growing sports and offers young men the opportunity to earn big money in a country battling poverty and unemployment. Unreported World meets some of the superstar wrestlers treated like gods and worshipped by entire neighbourhoods, as well as up-and-coming fighters pushing their bodies to the limits in the hope of making enough money to support their families.
China's aspiring musicians are global citizens, inspired by US hip-hop, British punk and the slick routines of Korean pop. But as reporter Marcel Theroux and director Sarah Collinson reveal, they face the special challenges of working under increasing censorship and a deeply authoritarian government.
As the Republic of Ireland prepares for a referendum on whether to alter legislation that makes abortion illegal in almost all circumstances, reporter Shaunagh Connaire and director Kate Hardie-Buckley meet women and families on both sides of the debate, and document the dilemmas medical staff face working under the current laws, in this moving and powerful episode.
In a summer of hurricanes and floods around the world, the incident that has taken most lives has been little reported. On 14 August, torrential rain triggered a huge mudslide that destroyed the small town of Regent on the outskirts of Sierra Leone's capital Freetown. Some estimates put the number of dead at over 1000, and the difficulties in recovering bodies means that the true figure may never be known. Reporter Seyi Rhodes travelled to the country just days after the mudslide, witnessing the terrible destruction and spending time with the survivors and rescue teams as he investigated the causes and devastating results of this natural disaster. His report provides a moving, first-hand perspective from the people whose families and homes have been torn apart.
India has long struggled with religious violence, but in recent months the problem has taken a gruesome new form. Across the country, gangs of Hindu men have lynched Muslims who they accuse of killing cows or eating beef. Known as cow vigilantes, in some instances mobs have killed or injured more than 150 people since 2015. India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has made a plea for calm, but 2017 is set to be the worst year for attacks to date. Reporter Mirren Gidda meets a group of vigilantes, unconnected to any killings, who take her on one of their nightly hunts for people who may be harming cows. She also meets Muslim families who've lost loved ones to the mobs, among them a mother whose 16-year-old son was stabbed to death. Her report is an emotional account of the tensions and violence spreading across India, and provides a detailed look at why the vigilantes do what they do.
Reporter Ade Adepitan and director Eric McFarland travel to Tanzania, where 400 women died in witch-hunts last year, twice as many as in the year before. Many others were attacked and ostracised. More people in Tanzania believe in witchcraft than anywhere else in Africa. But some people think that there's more behind recent witchcraft attacks than a fear of the supernatural.
Every year around 300,000 British tourists visit the white sand beaches and turquoise waters of Cancún, the jewel in Mexico's $20 billion tourism industry. But after a spate of brutal murders, the US government has warned travellers about the risks associated with growing violent crime in the city. Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Patrick Wells travel to the country to investigate why the murders are taking place and whether Cancún risks going the same way as Acapulco: once the premier tourism resort in Mexico, but now one that virtually no foreigners visit.
Reporter Yousra Elbagir and director Jessica Kelly visit the Mowasah hospital in Jordan where Doctors Without Borders surgeons are offering life-changing surgery to help innocent victims of the wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It's the only hospital of its kind in the Middle East, and as well as battling their injuries, patients - many of them children or still in their teens - have had to make extraordinary journeys to get there. The Unreported World team follows their stories and investigates the challenges facing a generation who have known only war. Some are victims of Isis, but many are victims of Saudi airstrikes in Yemen and coalition airstrikes in Iraq.
Sophie Morgan reports from Australia where leaked footage of the shocking treatment of young prisoners - most of them Aboriginal teenagers - in a juvenile detention centre in the county's Northern Territory has sparked outcry and a government inquiry. Ninety-four per cent of young people held in detention centres in the Northern Territory are Aboriginal, although they make up only a quarter of the state's population. Morgan and director Simon Rawles meet one of the boys at the centre of the scandal, who reveals his harsh treatment behind bars. The team also investigates a hidden issue that makes these young prisoners' situation even more upsetting. Unreported World discovers recent evidence suggesting that as many as two fifths of these young prisoners have an intellectual disability known as foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, linked to their mothers' use of alcohol during pregnancy.
Channel 4's multi-award-winning foreign affairs strand returns for a new series with a film following a volunteer ambulance service in Somalia's war-torn capital, Mogadishu. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Sasha Achilli accompany the extraordinary team who risk their lives braving bombs, gunfights and al-Shabaab militants to get sick people to hospital in a city where the government struggles to cope and where they are many people's only hope.
Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Kate Hardie-Buckley travel to Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar, where the air quality can reach more than 100 times the accepted limit and is causing a public health disaster. A layer of smog caused by coal smoke blankets the city. The smog is full of floating soot particles, some of which are small enough to bypass the body's defences, causing fatal illnesses including respiratory disease, heart disease and cancer. According to Unicef, cases of respiratory infections have tripled here over the last 10 years as pollution surges. The team visit a children's hospital where senior paediatrician Dr Oyenbileg tells Theroux that respiratory illness is the biggest killer of children under five, as they are more susceptible to respiratory diseases such as bronchitis and pneumonia.
Reporter Rania Abouzeid and director Karim Shah travel to Kabul where the population, long used to living with bombs and gunfights, face a new danger: criminal gangs who kidnap for ransom. Often their victims are children. The Unreported World team join the lead detective of the police anti-kidnap squad as they attempt to reunite kidnap victims with their families.
Unreported World goes undercover with a private detective agency in Delhi owned by a woman. The explosion in online dating and matchmaking apps in India has led to a huge rise in the number of private investigators tasked with exposing love cheats or checking out a fiance's suitability. However, as reporter Nelufar Hedayat and director Charlie Mole discover, some agencies are using questionable tactics in their attempts to uncover the truth.
This documentary series offering the lowdown on hard-hitting issues from around the globe continues. Here, reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Eric McFarland visit Johannesburg to meet miners who are risking their lives to descend deep underground in South Africa's abandoned gold mines, hoping to scratch a dangerous living from whatever ore remains. With the mines controlled by violent gangs and surrounded by lawless settlements, the pair's miniature cameras capture the stark reality of life at the end of a gold rush.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy travels to El Salvador to reveal what life is like for deportees from the US who are sent back to the gang-ravaged country following Donald Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration. President Trump says his government's latest crackdown is aimed at removing criminals and illegal immigrants, in particular members of the notorious Salvadoran-American street gang MS-13. However, official figures show that an increasing number of those who are being deported have no criminal record.
Sahar Zand reports from Mauritania in West Africa, where young girls and women are being force fed up to 10,000 calories a day because, when it comes to marriage, big is deemed beautiful.
Seyi Rhodes explores Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's impact on the country's LGBT community, amid reports that Brazil is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be LGBT
Marcel Theroux meets people - including children - who've fallen foul of Pakistan's strict blasphemy laws, and the lawyers and activists who are determined to see them sentenced to death.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy meets Vittorio Brumotti, a fearless TV reporter who's taking on Mafia drug-dealers and gangsters in southern Italy.
In Madagascar, Unreported World investigates the extraordinary stories of children locked up in adult prisons for up to three years before their cases are heard in court.
Reporter Sahar Zand travels to Nicaragua, where President Ortega has launched a crackdown on the independent media in a country gripped by civil disruption and economic chaos.
Ade Adepitan reports from the Republic of the Congo on the plight of the Baka tribe, who are under threat as the forests where they hunt are turned into a national park.
Exploring the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian's rampage through the Bahamas. When Dorian hit the region back in August, it sparked worldwide headlines. In its aftermath, reporter Seyi Rhodes uncovers the dark story of how Haitian migrants have been left homeless and now, prohibited from rebuilding, are being deported by the government. They live with families who are in hiding after their homes were wrecked and their documents lost. Their futures are now uncertain with the government threatening jail sentences and heavy fines.
Adnan Sarwar meet pupils, parents and teachers trying to survive at a primary school caught in a turf war between lawless drug-dealing gangs in Cape Town, South Africa
Sahar Zand meets Iraq's new social media stars. They've got millions of followers, but, as Unreported World finds out, fame can have deadly consequences.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy travels to Mali, where continual fighting has severely impacted tourism and threatened the upkeep of significant historic sites
Karishma Vyas visits California to meet the "TradWives" - a growing movement of women in the United States who idolise Donald Trump, embrace traditional family values, reject feminism and are working hard to secure his reelection.
Sahar Zand reports on the adverse impact of locusts across Kenya and neighbouring countries, which are devouring crops and threatening millions with starvation. Filmed before the UK went into lockdown, she visits Kenya, on the trail of immense swarms of the insects - the biggest for 70 years. In a country in which agriculture provides a livelihood for more than 80 per cent of the population and where over a million people live on the edge of hunger, even a small swarm can eat the same amount of food in a day as 35,000 people, threatening millions with starvation and economic collapse.
Adnan Sarwar follows the trail of migrants dicing with death as they attempt to cross the frozen Alpine peaks marking the border between Italy and France. Braving altitudes of up to 2,500 metres and temperatures as low as minus 20, many have died in their attempt to seek safety, having been denied asylum in Italy or threatened with deportation back to the countries from which they fled.
A report from Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, as young protestors risk everything to defy the military junta's coup. As the death toll in the city mounts, cameras witness the early optimism and hope of a protest movement disintegrate as the security services launch a brutal crackdown on unarmed civilians. The Myanmar government says it is responding to protests that harm the stability of the nation, using non-lethal force. However, as pressure to release political prisoners and journalists intensifies, so does the bloody crackdown.
Violent hurricanes and severe drought have decimated once fertile areas of Central America, with the region's rural poor worst affected. Hunger and child malnourishment is widespread, prompting an exodus of migrants to the United States. Reporter Guillermo Galdos tracks the journey of Gonzalo, who desperate to give his family a better life, risks his own by employing a network of people smugglers to illegally enter the US. The film reveals how climate migrants have become a valuable commodity in a booming trade and in a region controlled by crime cartels, some are paying the ultimate price.
The battle to save Thailand's wild tigers from poachers and smugglers, who have made millions from their sinister and sometimes deadly trade. Reporter Jonathan Miller travels to the last safe haven of the near-extinct Indochinese tiger and meets the rangers and conservationists fighting to protect the endangered tiger. Thai wildlife enforcement agencies are determined to crack down on the illegal trade in both live and dead tigers. However, they are struggling against a lucrative and murky industry that supplies an insatiable demand from Vietnam and China for trophies and quack medicine.
In the city that never sleeps, the documentary discovers a homelessness epidemic in New York's shelter system, made worse by the Covid crisis. Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy witnesses the harsh reality of addiction, fear, violence and intimidation in a system meant to be helping the city's most vulnerable men, women and children. With one epidemic feeding another, there is now more homelessness in New York than at any time since the Great Depression, and it's disproportionately affecting black and brown people.
In Maiduguri in Nigeria, Yousra Elbagir meets some of the thousands of couples getting married post-lockdown, despite the terrorist group Boko Haram laying siege to the city
Seyi Rhodes reports on the migrants being beaten back from the European Union by border guards on the notorious Balkan Route. A once-welcoming Europe is now closing its doors, and Serbia has become a bottleneck for thousands of people trying to get through the increasingly hostile route. Rhodes meets beaten and bruised men trying to leave Serbia, and witnesses the families living in government camps too frightened to make the journey. He also hears how the animosity is fuelling a small but growing right-wing political movement.
In Chiapas, one of the poorest states in Mexico, Coca-Cola is king. Residents in the state drink on average 821 litres a year, almost 16 litres a week, five times the national average. Reporter Guillermo Galdos travels to San Cristobal to meet one family who sell the beverage, but are experiencing first-hand the consequences of a sugary lifestyle. Blighted by ill-health, they rely on Coca-Cola for an income. Galdos investigates the region's growing diabetes crisis, where the deadly combination of Covid and sugar is sending people to early graves.
Jamal Osman travels to the Democratic Republic of Congo, to investigate the dirty business of cobalt mining and the toxic cost for miners and their families of going green.
Reporter Minnie Stephenson meets the young female surfers riding the waves of change, seeking new roles in Senegal, a predominantly Muslim state going through changes.
The last survivors of the so-called `comfort stations" in wartime Asia, where hundreds of thousands of women were forced into sexual slavery and exploitation by the Japanese military. Krishnan Guru-Murthy follows 92-year-old campaigner Lee Yong-soo, known affectionately as Grandma Lee, who wants justice before it's too late. On a journey to the South Korean capital of Seoul, Lee recounts how she endured rape, electric shocks and torture at the hands of her captors.
As rich nations celebrate the success of their Covid vaccination programmes, most people in Africa haven't even received one life-saving injection. As variants of the virus emerge from unvaccinated populations, Seyi Rhodes visits South Sudan to investigate the reasons behind vaccine inequality. Poor of non-existent distribution of the vaccine is only one problem as Rhodes meets many people convinced by claims that vaccines are deadly. As anti-vaxx sentiment grows amid a stalling rollout, Rhodes meets a pro-vaxx preacher in a refugee camp with a David-versus-Goliath task.
With the pandemic leaving many Thais cash-strapped and jobless, huge numbers of farmers and traders alike have turned to crypto to boost their fortunes. Though cryptocurrency is volatile, prone to scammers and market manipulation, Thailand remains a crypto-friendly nation, keen to harness new blockchain innovations in a new technological era. Jonathan Miller travels to north-eastern Thailand to meet a rice farmer who's trading crypto using a smartphone, solar panel and online tutorials. However, in Bangkok, a man who made and lost nearly a million US dollars represents the downside to crypto.
Ashionye Ogene travels to the bustling market of Kantamanto, in Ghana's capital city Accra, to meet the traders struggling to sell the clothes the UK no longer wants. In 2019, roughly 63 million kilograms of clothes were imported into Ghana from the UK to 30,000 traders, who relied on good-quality second-hand clothes to make a living. However, what isn't sold is going to waste and contributing to an environmental catastrophe. Mountains of waste exist on the outskirts of the city, much of which can take up to 200 years to decompose, with excess waste spilling over into the city's slums.
Life on the front line of a bloody drug war in Ecuador, where rival drug cartels have taken over the once peaceful city of Guayaquil in a bid to control lucrative new drug routes to Europe and the United States. The Sinaloa and Nueva Generacion organisations have recruited local gangs into their deadly battle to gain exclusive control of the city ports. The Ecuadorian government is keen to show it is taking on the cartels, so reporter Guillermo Galdos joins police Major Stalin Armijo as his unit patrols the deadly streets of Guayaquil.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy reports from St Louis, Missouri, highlighting a drugs epidemic that has killed more people than Covid and is disproportionately affecting black people. Opioid painkiller fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and much cheaper to buy. Its devastating effects are being felt across the US, but particularly in rust belt middle-America towns like St Louis, which not only has one of the highest murder rates in the States, but last year also saw 436 overdose deaths. Guru-Murthy meets residents trying to dull the pain of their life with fentanyl, learning that many of the city's addicts are homeless or prostitutes.
Figures suggest nearly one in three women in Pakistan have experienced domestic violence from a man they know personally - with hundreds if not thousands, of women murdered, assaulted or kidnapped each year. The formation of Pakistan's first Gender Protection Unit means that female officers are at the forefront of attempts to reverse the deadly trend. Reporter Fatima Manji follows the work of those who are striving to provide the most vulnerable women with a safe environment to seek justice. Meanwhile, a more conservative counter movement is also finding its voice in a campaign against what they describe as female `vulgarity" that weakens family values.
The city of Houston is at the centre of a sex trafficking crackdown. There are more reported cases of child sex trafficking there than any other city in the United States. Across its state of Texas it's estimated at least 80,000 children and young people have been forced into the industry in recent years, usually by people they know. Reporter Yousra Elbagir tracks the heart-breaking search of one mother looking for her daughter, who was trafficked into prostitution when she was just 15. She also follows the private detective and armed bounty hunters trying to rescue teenagers from Houston's seedy underworld.
Sumo wrestling is a centuries-old tradition that has its roots in the Shinto religion. Its top wrestlers hold God-like status. All aspiring wrestlers must first be recruited by a stable, where professional sumos eat, sleep and train. However, life inside a stable is shrouded in secrecy. Reporter Sahar Zand heads to Japan to examine the darker side of sumo, from health issues to claims of bullying and concerns of head injuries.
Events taking place in Guatemala, where a silent crisis of abuse and child pregnancies is robbing a generation of their youth. Reporter Anja Popp discovers that girls in rural districts are particularly vulnerable, with no phone signal and no neighbours. She follows one dedicated case worker trying to reverse deep-rooted attitudes towards women in a country still reeling from the legacy of a brutal civil war.
How, in Kenya, tensions over food are getting deadly as the Horn of Africa suffers its worst drought in 40 years. Reporter Seyi Rhodes travels the length of the country following herdsmen, farmers, and poachers - all competing with each other to survive on a shrinking supply of fertile land. In Turkana, Seyi discovers a dystopian scene, where grasslands have turned to dust and it is impossible to grow the land or raise cattle. For many poaching has become a necessity, placing the inhabitants of Tsava National Park, one of the world's biggest game reserves, at risk.
Guillermo Galdos reports on a psychedelic drug derived from toad venom, being sold in Mexico as a possible cure for mental illness and drug addiction. Galdos meets meets controversial doctor Gerry Sandoval, who demonstrates how he catches toads and extracts their venom as he claims the popularity of the natural drug has now made it more valuable than gold on the black market. Concerns are now mounting around the safety and sustainability of the unregulated drug, amid fears of negative long-term effects.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy reports on the political paralysis gripping Lebanon, where public services are in tatters, power cuts are routine, and because of hyperinflation medicine is expensive and in short supply. Across the nation, over a million people have been locked out of their bank accounts, able only to withdraw a few hundred pounds of their own money a month. Guru-Murthy interviews Riad Salameh, long-serving governor of the Central Bank, who since their discussion has charged with money laundering, illicit enrichment and embezzment.
The alarming rise of leopards attacking humans as growing cities and lethal wildlife clash
A report from Tennessee, where tensions over whether drag queens should be able to perform in front of children are resulting in their performances being banned in public. On a wider scale, at least 15 Republican-controlled US states are now introducing legislation to stop drag performances where they can be seen by youngsters. Minnie Stephenson meets those on each side of the divide, including drag queens who feel they are the latest target in a wider LGBTQ+ crackdown.
Symeon Brown investigates how one influential preacher in Kenya could have led hundreds of men, women and children to their deaths. So far 429 bodies have been exhumed from graves in Shakahola Forest, where Pastor Paul Mackenzie is accused of inviting his followers to meet Jesus and witness the 'end of days'. Mackenzie denies any wrongdoing, but Symeon tracks down the survivors and the families searching for loved ones to find out if this was mass suicide - or mass murder.
Anja Popp goes inside Mexico's illicit exotic pet trade, investigating how owning a lion or tiger has gone from being the indulgence of drug lords to a mainstream obsession. The Mexican state of Sinaloa is home to the notorious Sinaloa cartel. Exotic pets have become a trapping of Mexico's wealthy elite here, in what has become the world's fourth largest illegal trade after drugs, guns and people trafficking. Popp meets Jesus, who built a house in uptown Culiacan around his young tigers Simba and Nala, but as they grew up, they became riskier to manage. Jesus bought his tigers legally, but lax law enforcement means that many people don't. And it becomes clear that pet owners across Mexico have bitten off more than they can chew, with many resorting to extreme medical practices to make their dangerous pets less dangerous. At a pet sanctuary on the outskirts of Culiacan, Popp discovers hundreds of big cats rescued from the illicit market. In Mexico City, she meets a smuggler who claims t
Taiwan is currently living in limbo as the self-ruling island is viewed by China as a renegade province, with Beijing vowing to unify by force if necessary. As Taiwan's autonomy strengthens, the threat of war grows. Krishnan Guru-Murthy follows the democratic nation's civilians, who are learning how to shoot weapons and save lives, as the Island prepares to protect its way of life. These 'preppers' are determined to defend their country against a Chinese invasion.
On the outskirts of Bucharest lies the family home of a woman claiming to be Europe's most powerful witch. It's here that Miheale Minca is planning an ambitious but controversial establishment that she hopes will give women from her minority Roma community a new chance at life. Ashionye Ogene reports on this coven of self-proclaimed witches, determined to open Romania's first ever witch school. She meets one of its first trainees, who is learning the art of rituals and potions that she hopes will win her wealthy clients at home and abroad.
The once-quiet suburbs of Sweden's major cities are the epicentre of a vicious turf war between rival gangs competing for the drug trade. The fierce competition has resulted in a series of tit-for-tat killings with almost daily shootings and bombings. More than 45 people have been shot dead so far this year. Paraic O'Brien steps onto the frontline of Sweden's deadly gang war, as the country becomes one of the most lethal for gun crime in the whole of Europe.
Across the US, a battle's raging on university campuses over freedom of speech as students divided by the conflict in Gaza fight for their voices to be heard
Unreported World meets the pregnant women fleeing war-torn Haiti. But reporter Guillermo Galdos discovers an immigration crackdown at neighbouring Dominican Republic's hospital doors.
