Season 17
42 episodes · Feb 17, 2009
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- S17E1
Ramadan In Space
Feb 17, 200930mWhich 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.
- S17E2
The World According to Frost
Feb 17, 200930mFor 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.
- S17E3
Stolen and Sold
Feb 24, 200930mWhat 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.
- S17E4
What Lies Beneath?
Mar 3, 200930mIn 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.
- S17E5
Young Lions of Lahore
Mar 11, 200930mSouth Asia correspondent Sally Sara with the cricket tragics of Lahore, as Pakistan is wiped from world cricket's tour map.
- S17E6
American Emergency
Mar 11, 200930mWashington 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.
- S17E7
Is Aid Killing Africa?
Mar 17, 200930mDambisa 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.
- S17E8
Left To Die
Mar 17, 200930mCholera 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.
- S17E9
The Big Smoke
Mar 24, 200930mChina’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.
- S17E10
The Farmer Wants a Country
Mar 31, 200930mHe’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.
- S17E11
Children of Zanskar
Apr 7, 200930mWhen 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.
- S17E12
Jacob Zuma
Apr 7, 200930mHe'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.
- S17E13
Trapped in Terror
Apr 15, 200930mThey 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.
- S17E14
The Young Guns
Apr 21, 200930mIt’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?
- S17E15
Pirateland
Apr 28, 200930mHow 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.
- S17E16
Cats in the Clouds
May 6, 200930mVery 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?
- S17E17
The Third Amigo
May 19, 200930mFor 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?
- S17E18
Detroit: Ain't Too Proud To Beg
May 26, 200930mIt 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.
- S17E19
One Night in Sofia
Jun 2, 200930mEvery 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.
- S17E20
Sumo Confidential
Jun 9, 200930mThey'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.
- S17E21
The Bulldozer
Jun 16, 200930mForeign 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.
- S17E22
A Greek Tragedy
Jun 23, 200930mHow 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?
- S17E23
Bravo! Encore!
Jun 30, 200930mIn 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.
- S17E24
The Rebellion Network
Jul 7, 200930mIt’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?
- S17E25
Orphans of the Storm
Jul 14, 200930mA 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.
- S17E26
Us and Them
Jul 21, 200930mKilometres 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?
- S17E27
The Uighur Dilemma
Jul 28, 200930mThe 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?
- S17E28
Rocket Island
Aug 4, 200930mIt'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.
- S17E29
Total Control
Aug 11, 200930mWhen 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.
- S17E30
Return to the Fatal Sky
Aug 18, 200930mA 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.
- S17E31
A Brave Face
Aug 25, 200930mThey’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.
- S17E32
80 Million a Day
Sep 1, 200930mIt’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.
- S17E33
The Congo Connection
Sep 8, 200930mAre 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?
- S17E34
Fly Away Children
Sep 15, 200930mMost 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.
- S17E35
Hook, Line and Sunk!
Sep 22, 200930mIn 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.
- S17E36
Berlusconi and the Beautiful
Sep 29, 200930mHe’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?
- S17E37
Europe or Die Trying
Oct 6, 200930mPaul 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?
- S17E38
California Burning
Oct 13, 200930mIn 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?
- S17E39
Without Honour and Humanity
Oct 20, 200930mIt’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?
- S17E40
Flight AF 447
Oct 27, 200930mWhat 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.
- S17E41
Winds of Change
Nov 3, 200930mWith 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.
- S17E42
Thanks for Watching
Nov 10, 200930mForeign 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.