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. Air Date : 17th-Feb-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 17th-Feb-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 24th-Feb-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 3rd-Mar-2009  Read More

South Asia correspondent Sally Sara with the cricket tragics of Lahore, as Pakistan is wiped from world cricket's tour map. Air Date : 11th-Mar-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 11th-Mar-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 17th-Mar-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 17th-Mar-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 24th-Mar-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 31st-Mar-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 7th-Apr-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 7th-Apr-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 15th-Apr-2009  Read More

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? Air Date : 21st-Apr-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 28th-Apr-2009  Read More

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? Air Date : 6th-May-2009  Read More

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? Air Date : 19th-May-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 26th-May-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 2nd-Jun-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 9th-Jun-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 16th-Jun-2009  Read More

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? Air Date : 23rd-Jun-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 30th-Jun-2009  Read More

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? Air Date : 7th-Jul-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 14th-Jul-2009  Read More

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? Air Date : 21st-Jul-2009  Read More

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? Air Date : 28th-Jul-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 4th-Aug-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 11th-Aug-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 18th-Aug-2009  Read More

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. Air Date : 25th-Aug-2009  Read More