Foreign Correspondent

Imagine a world without wild elephants. For some in the frontline of animal preservation it’s not a difficult image to conjure. In Africa, one veteran wildlife campaigner believes it could be a reality within the next 20 years. The reason? A rampant, illegal trade feeding China’s voracious appetite for ivory. The Asian giant’s burgeoning middle class can’t get enough of the stuff so Africa’s elephants are being hunted and slaughtered like never before. Foreign Correspondent goes undercover to expose this shameful, devastating trade.

It’s a fiercely protected state secret in Israel. No-one dares speculate openly about the identity of an infamous mystery prisoner or even enquire about what he may have done. A blanket suppression order has been issued on The Case of Prisoner X, even after his equally mysterious death in custody. Who was he and what could he have possibly done to be jailed in a super-secure, stand-alone cell in a prison where his guards didn’t even know his name? And what is it about the case that warrants a dramatic, all-points ban on coverage, even hinting that the ban itself didn't even exist. Now, some key answers as a Foreign Correspondent investigation follows a trail from Israel all the way to suburban Australia.

Italy is famous for its style and world class art, music, food and fashion. So how come the country that brings us Ferraris and Ferragamo hits a sour note when it comes to political and economic leadership? Emma Alberici investigates the paradox of the modern Italian state – a country where one in five workers is still employed in the manufacturing sector yet has a crippling two trillion dollar debt.

When 20 children died in a hail of gunfire in Sandy Hook, Connecticut there was an outpouring of global grief, a sense of national shame and very quickly a growing mood that this was an atrocity that would dramatically change minds and perhaps America’s gun-toting ways. Just a few months on those hopes and the political will to reform gun-laws are receding fast. One big reason - three big letters: The NRA. When deadly mass shootings happen, Americans don’t put down their guns, they race to the store to buy more, such is the success of the National Rifle Association’s spin, rhetoric and influence. How do they do it?

Even in a place where women and girls are, so often, treated appallingly it was beyond belief. The case of Jyoti and the bus trip home that became a hell-ride of unspeakable sexual violence and inhuman brutality. It stopped India dead in its tracks. Protests rose up screaming ‘enough is enough’, while the outside world was shocked by the scale of India’s endemic, rampant sex crime. Will the plight of one woman change a nation’s shameful ways? The case of Jyoti may just be a turning point for all.

Imagine a mighty, pristine river system. Then put a lid on it and imagine it underground, coursing through yawning, cathedral-sized limestone caverns, pressing gently past prehistoric bones and sustaining an abundance of unique wildlife as it pushes inexorably to the sea and a vital role flushing mangroves and succouring reefs. Seems like a great foundation for one of the world’s fastest growing tourist projects right? Wrong, say environmentalists who fear the tearaway development atop the magnificent Yucatan Aquifer in south-east Mexico will spell its demise.

What makes an 11 year old boy start wetting the bed? Try missile attacks on your town, for starters. Ibrahim lives with his family in Aleppo, Syria, where his father has left his job as a laundryman to fight for the rebels who are trying to topple the government of President Bashar Al Assad and his mother struggles to keep her six children safe amid the chaos and psychological trauma. They invited ABC Middle East Correspondent Matt Brown and cameraman Mathew Marsic to spend a week living with them, amid the bombs, death and destruction, for this revealing portrait of a family at war.

Ireland is known as a nation of horse lovers. They like to hunt on them, race on them and punt on them. They generally don’t like to dine on them. So they’ve been horrified by recent revelations that many of the frozen foods sold in their supermarkets as beef also contain substantial amounts of horsemeat.

The US and its allies, including Australia, invaded Iraq ten years ago to end the regime of terror of Saddam Hussein. But did they end up sponsoring the use of some of the same torture methods themselves? In this disturbing investigation by Guardian Films and BBC Arabic, it’s revealed how a retired US colonel played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq.

It’s a disintegrating nuclear waste dump in a paradise – nearly 100,000 barrels of low level radioactive material sitting on the edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire – the most earthquake prone region in the world. Many of the barrels are rusted and ruptured. The indigenous Tao people of Orchid Island fear widespread contamination and want to know why and how the promise of a fish cannery and jobs actually turned out to be the delivery of a nuclear dump and a toxic legacy. As they rage against a powerful mainland nuclear power company, many more Taiwanese – shocked by Japan’s Fukushima disaster – are joining in.

It’s come to symbolise the ultimate back of beyond. Timbuktu. But recently the far away place was catapulted front and centre into world focus as Islamic militants laid siege to the place and aimed to take control of the rest of magical, mystical, musical Mali. Islamist control would see a treasure-trove of antiquities and important historical documents obliterated and there's little doubt the music too would die. According to some, it would almost certainly become the Afghanistan of Africa and a new entrenched frontier of Al Qaeda and terrorism. It appears the old colonial power in these parts, France, has managed to wrest Mali back from oblivion, but is it not safe and sound. In one of Foreign Correspondent’s most challenging journeys, we go in search of the spirit and essence of amazing Mali, all the long, long way to Timbuktu.

After a gruelling journey through mesmerising Mali, the Foreign Correspondent team finally reach their destination – the legendary town of Timbuktu. They find a community traumatised by the events of the past year, when they were forced to live under the strict rule of a bunch of gun-toting religious extremists who imposed Sharia law, carried out public floggings, banned music and most forms of public entertainment, and destroyed religious shrines and books.

Imagine how you’d feel waking up one morning to discover that much of the money you’d put in your bank for safe keeping had been withdrawn. And not just by some opportunistic fraudster. A substantial slice of your savings, your company’s accounts, even your pension fund had been compulsorily acquired by the venerable Central Bank. Cypriots don’t need imagination. It’s happened. They call it - with all the black humour they can muster - The Haircut, but it’s less of a trim and more like a scalping. It has grave repercussions for Europe and the rest of the world.

After blowing the lid on the secret identity of Israel’s Prisoner X, Foreign Correspondent can now reveal why Israel went to such extraordinary lengths to keep Melbourne man Ben Zygier and his unexplained offences hidden from public view and scrutiny. In this follow up to the explosive, global scoop Prisoner X – the Australian Connection we unearth answers to some persistent questions. What could Zygier have possibly done that called for such measures and why – even after his death – is Israel still determined to keep his activities under wraps.

In a hidden corner of Asia, where two dramatically different and rapidly changing nations collide, a disturbing trade is taking hold that’s endangering lives around the world, including many in Australia. With money to burn, China’s non-stop party people are turning to drugs in unprecedented numbers turning neighbouring Myanmar into a meth-lab and driving a resuscitation of the bad-old days of big-time trade in the Golden Triangle’s devastating narcotic heroin. Foreign Correspondent returns with this explosive investigation.

The epic size and industrial scale of the new Asian drug supply is staggering. Intercepts of the methamphetamine Ice or the ingredients necessary for its manufacture are toted up in tonnages. But given authorities only manage to uncover a fraction of the trade that begins in Myanmar, pours into China and flows on to places like Australia, then a deadly dangerous drug is in overwhelming flood. Foreign Correspondent concludes its investigation of The Other China Boom, tracing a disturbing trail all the way to Australia’s front door.

It’s the ultimate double-header for sports fans – the World Cup and the Olympic Games. So you’d imagine that for football-crazed, sports-mad Brazilians all their Christmases have come at once as they prepare to host the greatest shows on earth, back-to-back. Actually, many of them are pretty conflicted – thrilled the carnivals are coming but angry that so much money is being burned to stage them, while their cost-of-living skyrockets, hospitals and schools crumble and their transport systems cough and splutter in gridlock.

In a tiny school in a far-flung pocket of India in July this year, 55 children sat down to eat their free, government-provided lunch. Soon many of them would be writhing in agony, some would die within hours, others would perish after failed treatment in hospital. 120 million children across India eat their free lunches every day, but the deaths of 23 has shocked the nation and the world. A special Foreign Correspondent investigation sheds new light on a dreadful incident.

French holiday makers crowd its taupe beaches, frolic in salty shore-breaks and crowd the cafes and hotels in its centuries-old towns and villages. Inland, hunters from all over Europe stalk quarry through some of the richest and most precipitous hunting grounds they’ll ever know. It’s one of the most popular destinations in the Mediterranean. It’s also one of the most deadly. Corsica has the highest murder rate in Europe and lately the assassins have been training their gun-sights on very powerful, very prominent local identities. Why is this holiday haven also a venue for so much bloodshed?

In most places it’s an unremarkable scene. But here - as the bright, attentive eyes of young girls take in the detail of a reading class – it’s powerful, poignant and hopeful. For this is a western extremity of Pakistan where until recently a particularly brutal, local brand of the Taliban enforced their ruthless view of the world, one in which girls are denied a modern education. The army has driven the extremists from the town and villages here but how long will their hold last and how long will the young girls of South Waziristan go to school?

We get up close and personal with the ageing rock stars of Rapa Nui - Easter Island's mysterious stone statues. While scientists race to save the gigantic statues, the locals hope those same statues will save their community.

Their lives intersected in a war zone where the crack combat doctor and the foreign correspondent shared one of the most harrowing days of their lives. Sally Sara tracks down Marc Dauphin - a life saver shattered by PTSD.

Sally Sara met the 'can-do' combat doctor in Kandahar. But when he made it home he struggled with PTSD. So many returned soldiers are ticking time bombs. Sally Sara investigates the impact of PTSD and how to beat it.

Going to school in Taliban-controlled Swat Valley, Pakistan was a dangerous act of defiance and Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head. Incredibly, she survived. Now Malala is a global icon for education.

Would you work for $2.13 an hour? That's the tough new reality for two former professionals you'll meet in this disturbing assessment of America's economic reality.

Around the world there’s a loud, proud fight for equality. And in some places significant battles are being won. The right for same-sex partners to marry under law and recognition that gay couples should enjoy the same financial and social benefits as heterosexual couples. In many places there’s good reason to celebrate advances but not in Russia. There the fight is to stay out of jail, or avoid stinging fines for openly identifying as gay. And draconian anti-gay laws are effectively licensing vigilantism as gangs target the LGBT community. Why the crackdown and will the billion-dollar Sochi Winter Olympics become a global protest point?

Earthquakes. Tsunami. Nuclear Emergency. The chilling set of dominoes that dropped in March 2011 and devastated northern Japan have now largely coalesced into one word - Fukushima. First, the intimidating power of the earth’s natural forces that lifted ships and deposited them inland, that swept and crushed entire towns and communities and that took thousands of lives. Then the intimidating, destructive power of a ruptured, crippled nuclear plant, tainting the sea and land and rendering swathes of heavily populated areas, uninhabitable. For North Asia Correspondent Mark Willacy it’s been a dominant and defining story. Now - as he visits the hot-zone one last time - a new and disturbing development.

In multi-cultural Britain police struggle to deal with honour crime as women from south-Asian and middle-eastern backgrounds are controlled, abused and sometimes murdered by their families. Foreign Correspondent investigates.

It’s a question that should have a straightforward answer. Are critically endangered Sumatran Tigers safer in poacher-infested jungles that are being razed for agriculture and consumed by development or are they safer in the care of an Indonesian zoo? If that zoo is Java’s Surabaya Zoo then it’s a very close call. The zoo was once something of a wildlife wonderland, now it’s more of a house of horrors. And the plight of the resident Sumatran Tigers in particular raises pressing questions about whether or not Indonesia cares deeply enough for its threatened indigenous creatures, inside zoos and in the wild.

The monster waves & wind of Typhoon Haiyan caused destruction & despair on Bantayan Island, but it's a forgotten corner of the typhoon tragedy. Little help has reached them but the islanders are determined to help themselves.