Four Corners - Series 2006

Four Corners returns for 2006 with a whistleblower... and revelations of a powerful insiders' club...

There's road rage over private tollways... Have deals between politicians and tollway bosses killed off grand new visions for public transport and decongested streets? Are they creating a road monster that leaves Australians addicted to cars?

Jack Thomas has become the first person to be convicted under Australia's new terrorist funding laws.

Kid watching is very grown-up business. The 12-and-unders are a demographic that marketers ignore at their peril.

One Sunday last December, 5000 Australians gathered at Cronulla, singing and waving the national flag as they "reclaimed" the beach. Fuelled by drink, the crowd became a mob, hunting down and beating anyone who looked Middle Eastern.

It's cheap, highly addictive and ultra-powerful. "Ice", or crystal methamphetamine, is now more popular than heroin, playing havoc with the minds and the bodies of nearly 50,000 Australians.

Seven got life sentences and two are facing death by firing squad - but the blood of the Bali Nine will not stain the hands of this country's crimefighters.

"I sold your wife."

For Saddam Hussein, it must have been a no-brainer. He would pay $200,000 to a top UN official. In return, Saddam would be showered in billions.

In the space of four days, Australians have witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of their Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister each submitting to rigorous, sustained and public interrogation at the Cole inquiry.

All of London was on edge when a young electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, headed off for work on 22 July last year. The previous day, four would-be suicide bombers had attacked the transport system. A fortnight earlier, a series of suicide bombings had killed 52 people.

Many thought he was dead or wounded. But when he dramatically appeared this week in an Internet video, firing off an automatic weapon and anti-American rhetoric, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi looked very much alive.

The Westpoint collapse...Ticky Fullerton digs into the scheme that has wiped out the life savings of thousands of Australians. Who's taken their money? And why did regulators let it happen?

In the hours before he killed himself in April last year, Campbell Bolton wrote a long note in which he told his family how sorry he was for the pain he was about to cause them. "It fills me with grief when I think of what I have done to you," he wrote.

Murder, drugs, extortion, robbery, gambling, prostitution... for 40 years, this has been the daily business of the Aryan Brotherhood, according to US law enforcers.

There's another story buried deep beneath the horrific headlines about sexual abuse in indigenous Australia.

Imagine being about to give birth, cocooned in a speeding car on a night-time dash to a hospital that's still hours away, every bump, every brake to dodge a kangaroo sharpening the pain and discomfort.

To his fans, research psychologist Harry Harlow was a 20th century hero, a scientific pioneer who revolutionised the way we raise our children today.

As Australian troops stand between the warring factions in East Timor, Liz Jackson reveals the power plays and intrigues that are tearing the infant nation apart.

If your late model car goes missing, don't expect to see it again soon.

"Do no harm." It's the ethos of medicine, the bedrock principle for all its practitioners.

"The price of petrol is disgusting, absolutely disgusting..."

For decades the Liberal Party has carried itself proudly as a broad church, home to a wide spectrum of ideology among members. Now a bitter factional war is playing out in Australia's biggest state that many say is disenfranchising grassroots members and threatening democracy.

Breast cancer stalked Becky Measures. It had struck 14 of her female relatives, killing some of them.

Four Corners often explores extravagant claims and tall tales. Rarely though does it meet a character quite as colourful as author Gavin Menzies.

Not long after dawn on August 15, 2004 a teenage girl was dragged through a town square in the Iranian provincial city of Neka, past a crowd of people to the spot where a mobile crane had been converted into a makeshift gallows. Atefah Sahaaleh was 16 years old. She was hanged that morning for crimes against chastity.

A member of a 'raskol' gang talks about rape as a ritual part of crime. A career truck driver on the highland's highway picks up a teenage prostitute - just part of his routine. A 'hostess supervisor' at a Port Moresby brothel explains that he may tell clients to use a condom with his girls but that sometimes he is too tired to bother. These are voices from Matthew Carney's intimate report on how Papua New Guinea became a hot spot for the AIDS virus.

Cares and crowds are forgotten. Sand crunches between your toes, there's salt on your skin and sun on your back. Here is where blue ocean meets virgin bush, and a golden stretch of beach is all yours for camping, swimming and quiet reflection.

Heat waves and cyclones; droughts ravaging farmland; rising seas swamping beach havens; forests drying up and species dying out; the Barrier Reef and Kakadu, icons of nature, doomed.

It's a battle for your body and for your money - a tug-o-war between two powerful forces: the marketing pressure to eat more versus the social pressure to weigh less.

The dust settled long ago at Ground Zero. But the world is still searching for clarity after 9/11.

They were ordinary suburban Australians setting out on a big overseas adventure... to cheer on the Socceroos at the World Cup, or take in the sights of Europe. They would climax the trip with a visit to ancestral lands in southern Lebanon where they would rekindle family ties, rediscover their heritage and relax.

They've launched controversial forays into election campaigns in Australia, New Zealand the US. Now the Exclusive Brethren are drawing more unwanted headlines, this time accused of trawling for dirt on the sex life of the NZ Prime Minister's husband.

It was a signature TV news image of the 1990s: the bush as battleground, greenies blocking bulldozers, shouting slogans and trading insults with angry timber workers.

Two weeks ago a leaked US intelligence assessment gave powerful new ammunition to critics of the Iraq war.

From Iraq to Solomon Islands and Afghanistan to East Timor, Australia's Army is stretched tight. The burden of overseas deployments weighs like a straining kitbag on the back of each of Australia's 22,443 regular soldiers.

From marginal to mainstream, once furtive but now flaunted, cosmetic surgery is being eagerly explored by Australians from teens to pensioners, female and male.

Each week more than a thousand Australians are delivered the cruel diagnosis: they have dementia - incurable, untreatable, terminal.