Foreign Correspondent - Season 17

Which way is Mecca in space? Helen Vatsikopoulos ponders this and other imponderables when she meets Malaysia’s “it” man, the hunky former male model Dr Sheik Muszaphar Shukor, who’s become the country’s first astronaut.

For 50 years David Frost has shared the world’s stage with the powerful, rich and famous – and this week he shares it with Foreign Correspondent’s Mark Corcoran.

What would you do if you discovered your adopted children were stolen and trafficked, and not willingly given up by their parents, as you’d believed? South Asia correspondent Sally Sara investigates the insidious trade of children in India, and joins an Australian family in their moving search for the truth.

In Antarctica the race is on for scientific supremacy and to find an ice-scientist’s Holy Grail … a 1,000,000-year-old ice core. It’s thought that’s where the secrets to understanding global warming have been snap frozen. And the best place to look – the vast Australian Antarctic Territory.

South Asia correspondent Sally Sara with the cricket tragics of Lahore, as Pakistan is wiped from world cricket's tour map.

Washington correspondent Tracy Bowden uncovers one of the biggest killers in America - the US health system. Lack of insurance is now the third leading cause of death in the US, after cancer and heart disease.

Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian-born economist who says aid is killing Africa. In her new book, Dead Aid, she argues that official aid is easy money that fosters corruption and distorts economies, creating a culture of dependency and economic laziness.

Cholera is a preventable disease, yet there’s an epidemic raging in Zimbabwe. At least 4,000 are dead, and some 90,000 infected. Filming secretly and posing as tourists, reporter Andrew Geoghegan and producer Mary Ann Jolley uncover the true extent of the crisis.

China’s exponential growth took Australia along for the white-knuckled ride. It fuelled our resources boom and had economic optimists forecasting decades of good times. How things change.

He’ll have you believe he’s a quiet goat farmer and a keen horseman who just happens to think he might make an ideal Indonesian President one day. But looks can be deceiving and there’s little doubt Prabowo Subianto’s pursuit of Indonesia’s top job will be ruthlessly efficient and purposeful.

When people in remote villages in Zanskar get sick, chances are they’ll turn to the “Oracle”. The Oracle is a faith healer who goes into a trance so a Tibetan spirit can take over and dispense medical advice. It’s all part of a complex system of folk healing that has spread to this isolated district in north-west India, from neighbouring Tibet.

He's in the fast lane to the top in South Africa but there’s powerful evidence the man following the trail blazed by Mandela has been on the take. Reporter Andrew Fowler investigates whether Jacob Zuma - the man most likely to become the next President of South Africa – took bribes from a French arms company.

They were hiding for their lives, hunted by gunmen who’d brought India’s biggest city to a standstill. In this chilling ‘insider's’ account of a terrorist siege, two Australian business people tell of their remarkable survival trapped inside Mumbai’s Oberoi Hotel, during the attacks last November.

It’s turned out some fearsome warriors in the past but can America’s prestigious military academy West Point manufacture the brass that will ultimately prevail in what’s now being dubbed ‘Obama’s War’ – Afghanistan?

How and why did a bunch of illiterate, dirt poor Africans transform themselves from simple cray-fishermen into the fearsome, gun-toting gangs mugging giant, sophisticated shipping off the coast of Somalia and gouging multi-million dollar ransoms? Marauding foreign fishing fleets took their lobsters.

Very few have seen it in the wild but those who have say it’s the most beautiful of the big cats. The Snow Leopard prowls the roof of the world in dwindling numbers. Can it be saved?

For more than four decades, tens of thousands of Colombians have been kidnapped or killed in South America’s longest-running civil war. Now Colombia’s hard-line president Alvaro Uribe insists it’s coming to an end. But will this country's most popular president ever, win the right to run for a third term in office? And at what cost to South America's oldest democracy?

It was big, it was shiny and it was brassy. Few things symbolised the wealth and optimism of a post-war America more than the big car and the Motown sound. And perhaps few things symbolise the decline of American capitalism more than the sight of the country’s biggest car makers going cap in hand to Washington begging for a bail out. General Motors has until June 1 to come up with a survival plan, or face bankruptcy.

Every year thousands of young Australians pack their backpacks, book their EuRail passes and make for Europe, leaving their parents to worry and fret about their wellbeing and their ability to cope with foreign languages and customs. God forbid anything should happen to them.

They're big men with even bigger secrets. The cloistered world of Sumo hides myriad rituals and traditions, bone-jarring training schedules even humiliating and painful punishment. As scandal rocks Japan's venerable sport, Foreign Correspondent opens the door on life inside a Sumo stable.

Foreign Correspondent presenter and reporter Mark Corcoran, who has spent a decade observing the dangerous world of South Asian narco-politics, takes us on a journey through Afghanistan's dark political underbelly.

How did a 15 year old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, shot by a policeman in Athens six months ago become a cause celebre? Why was his name and the manner of his death invoked by students, anarchists and even terrorists as epitomising all that is wrong with the Greek government?

In a Venezuelan slum a young girl practices on her clarinet and dreams a big musical dream. On a stage in New York City an 80 year old clarinettist takes his final bow to rapturous applause. The two are worlds apart but joined by the profound, elevating forces of music.

It’s raw, it’s instant and it’s rocked authoritarian Iran and riveted world attention. It’s the phenomenal new-media broadcast by Iran’s angry, dissenting young that’s capturing a disturbing, perhaps defining collision of rebellion and repression. Digital dissent vs. bullets and batons - will the new technologies bring change in Iran?

A perilous year undercover - ducking the authorities and informers and risking decades in jail – has resulted in an unforgettable Foreign Correspondent with a team of Burmese cameraman capturing the plight of a pitiful new cast of Burmese – The Orphans of the Storm.

Kilometres of high concrete walls snake through Belfast in Northern Ireland - graffiti daubed and grim. They divide Catholic neighbourhoods from Protestant. They’re called the Peace Walls. But do they keep the enduring hatred and suspicion locked outside or inside?

The Uighurs. Who are they and why is the Chinese government flattening vast tracts of their magnificent cultural capital, Kashgar? Is it for safety or to secure against separatists and potential terrorism?

It's an idyllic tropical atoll, but amid the coconut groves are billions of dollars of high-tech surveillance equipment. Mark Corcoran reveals a hitherto top-secret, Club Med style nuclear missile test range which "sees" everything that moves across a third of the globe and in deep space.

When Venezuela’s socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez lost his best enemy and saw global capitalism teeter you might think he’d be jumping for joy. Not so.

A year ago Foreign Correspondent flew into the scandalously unsafe skies over PNG to examine why the nation’s aviation industry sustains so many fatal accidents and dangerous incidents then struggles to examine those crashes and near misses and fails to apply stricter safety standards.

They’ve been scarred so deeply they’re shockingly disfigured and yet they’ve refused to bow their heads or withdraw from the world. They’re the remarkable women who’ve survived acid attack and who have overcome their injuries to transform their lives.

It’s a staggering national habit and it’s grown into a juggernaut of a killing machine claiming an annual toll eclipsing the Aceh tsunami. Welcome to the warning-free, smoking free-for-all that’s become Big Tobacco’s big new frontier.

Are mobile phones the new blood diamond? Is our insatiable appetite for the latest electronic gadgets actually fuelling despair, deprivation and oppression in another part of the world … even threatening the survival of central Africa’s magnificent gorillas?

Most African adoptions don’t have a Hollywood ending. A Foreign Correspondent investigation in Ethiopia exposes a booming international adoption trade out of control – mothers duped into surrendering their children and some foreign families unsure if their adopted child was really an orphan after all.

In Iceland, the financial crisis is called the kreppa and a year after it hit, the whole country is still well and truly in it. Thousands are losing their homes, unemployment is ten times higher and Britain is demanding it pay back billions of dollars lost in Icelandic investments.

He’s got money to burn, enormous political and personal power, and well, a problem. Beautiful women. Why can’t Silvio Berlusconi behave himself and why do Italians shrug off his sexual escapades and say so what?

Paul Kenyon travels three thousand miles along the most dangerous illegal immigration route out of Africa. Many die crossing the Sahara, or at sea on the way to a better future in Europe - but can the survivors convince those who follow, that Europe in recession is no longer worth the risk?

In California massive wildfires are met with massive force – but it comes with a multimillion dollar price tag. With fires on the increase around the world, is money and manpower the answer or is there a better way?

It’s claimed Japan’s ferocious and feared Yakuza murder, extort and intimidate according to an honour code. But where is the honour in the squalid new enterprise now adding to their billion dollar criminal turnover?

What brought down Air France flight 447? The families, friends and fellow workers of the 228 people who perished when the Rio-Paris flight ditched in the Atlantic mid-year are all desperate for answers. But with airlines relying on outmoded technology that may never happen.

With its giant wind farms and pedal-pushing population, Denmark looks like a model global citizen setting a shining green example for all comers to the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Look a little closer though and there are some grubby realities.

Foreign Correspondent’s 2009 spins to a close with an inside look at the stories, characters and issues that moved, provoked and enthralled our audience. It’s a fascinating, behind the scenes edition featuring some things we didn’t show you along with updates, insights and candid reflections from some of the team.