Crossing Continents

Twenty years ago, the Kurdish region in Northern Iraq achieved effective autonomy after the first Gulf War, establishing a liberal constitution and a democratic assembly. The region is booming economically, thanks to its huge oil reserves. But things are not that simple on the ground. In February, there were protests in the city of Sulaimaniya against corruption and the dominance of the two partie...

The Amazon rainforest is perhaps the world's greatest single environmental asset. For years the accepted wisdom has been that the remorseless tide of destruction there is unstoppable. Justin Rowlatt travels to Brazil to question this conventional account and finds that over the last five years rates of deforestation have plummeted by more than half. There is now serious and credible discussion abo...

Sir Ernest Shackleton has a heroic place in the annals of Antarctic exploration, famously for his expedition on the aptly-named Endurance in 1914. He intended to cross over the Antarctic landmass. Instead, his ship became stuck in ice which eventually crushed it. Shackleton and his crew made a desperate voyage in three small boats to Elephant Island, where they split up. The men on the island were...

Jill McGivering, the BBC World Service South Asia editor, investigates the discovery of thousands of bodies in mass graves in Indian Kashmir. Human rights groups suspect they are just some of the victims of "disappearances" at the hands of the Indian military in this contested region. The authorities respond that the bodies are in fact those of militants who have infiltrated from Pakistan. Will an...

The world economy has pinned its hopes on China's economy, which depends on over 150 million migrant workers and their labour. The system of internal migration, based on the idea that workers do not settle in the places they work, has sustained an economic miracle and rapid development. But the country has seen a summer of unrest, with rioting among migrants in the Pearl River Delta and angry reac...

Ed Butler reports on a cycle of abuse in the orphanages of Bali. Some seventy orphanages now populate the island, housing thousands of children, many recruited from poor families, on the promise of a decent diet, education, and healthcare. But in some cases the promises are empty, as unscrupulous owners abuse and exploit the children - using them for free labour over long hours, and forcing them t...

In 2000, President Robert Mugabe introduced "fast-track land reform" to Zimbabwe in a wave of often violent takeovers of mainly white-owned farms. Led by veterans of the second Chimurenga - the Zimbabwe War of Liberation of the 1960s and 1970s - the takeover was seen internationally as a disaster. It was widely reported that cronyism and corruption meant only the country's politically-connected el...

The main focus of the violence in the North Caucasus these days is in Dagestan, Chechnya's neighbour. Shoot-outs between police and Islamist militants occur almost daily, and suicide bombings and assassinations have become common. In response, the authorities use what many see as excessive force and the violence spirals still further. In the past two years suicide bombings in the Moscow metro and...

Rupa Jha investigates how local-level campaigners against corruption in India face threats and violence - despite promises that the government will stamp out graft. She tells the stories of two whistleblowers in two different states who faced ferocious intimidation after they tried to challenge powerful individuals on the take. Producer: Ed Butler.

Mukul Devichand goes on the road with young children travelling alone on a journey of desperation, danger and hope - south from Zimbabwe and across the border to South Africa. Producer: Judy Fladmark.

David Shukman reports on the thousands who have become ill from the toxic dust that blanketed Lower Manhattan after the Twin Towers collapsed on Sept 11th. The buildings released a cocktail of deadly carcinogens including, asbestos, lead, mercury and PCBs. Frontline responders such as fire-fighters, police and emergency medical workers breathed in the contamination for several weeks as they toiled...

On the 18th of February 2011 a Palestinian engineer by the name of Dirar Abu Sisi boarded a train in eastern Ukraine. He was travelling to Kiev, where he hoped to apply for Ukrainian citizenship. But when the train arrived at its destination the following morning, Mr Abu Sisi was no longer on board. He had vanished. For more than a week, nothing was heard from Mr Abu Sisi, a manager at Gaza's main...

In December, Ghana turned on the taps and began pumping its first commercial oil. Production will top 100,000 barrels a day this year -- enough the government believes to more than double the country's economic growth. At the centre of this oil rush is the once sleepy city of Takoradi. Already things are starting to change here: new businesses setting up to service the offshore oil industry, an in...

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Central Americans leave home and travel north overland, hoping to make a new life in the United States. This has always been a difficult journey. Now it is perilous. Mexican drug cartels have seen a business opportunity in the migrants: they are being systematically kidnapped en route, and held to ransom. Often they have been killed, and Mexico is currently inv...

Tim Judah travels to Senegal to report on the Mourides, an increasingly powerful Senegalese Muslim movement that stresses the importance of hard work Many of the African street sellers in cities like Paris or Rome, and on Mediterranean beaches, are in fact Mourides. Far from being chancers who washed up on Europe's shores and now barely scrape a living from selling fake designer handbags or miniat...

Lucy Williamson reports from Seoul on the dangerous trade of the people brokers, smuggling desperate people out of North Korea to the safety of the South. She investigates the way the South Korean government tries to integrate refugees from the North into their own modern, open society - and the challenges this creates for people who have only known poverty and extreme political repression.

Crossing Continents joins a British doctor volunteering to help women and children stranded in Tunisian refugee camps while the men fight Gaddafi's forces in the mountains south of Tripoli. Producer: Bill Law.

The BBC's Kim Ghattas has gained exclusive, behind the scenes access to the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during one of her recent overseas visits. Code named "Special Air Mission 883", the trip took eight days, covered thirty thousand miles and touched down in four countries in the Middle East and Africa. Kim joins what is affectionately known as "the bubble", the travelling band of dip...

Early-onset Alzheimer's has stalked a poor extended family in Medellin, Colombia. The family carries a dominant gene that means that half are at risk. The disease strikes family members as young as 25 and by their 40s sufferers are in the grip of full-blown dementia. Alzheimer's is by and large a disease of the developed world, if for no other reason than that people in the developing world don't...

Following the discovery that Osama Bin Laden was living close to the heart of Pakistan's military establishment in Abbotabad, Owen Bennett-Jones investigates the ties between elements of Pakistan's army, intelligence and government with jihadi and Taleban forces. Producer: Rebecca Kesby.

In South Africa a mining company whose owners include the grandson of Nelson Mandela and the nephew of President Jacob Zuma has left thousands of its employees without work and, they claim, without pay. Back in 2009 the company, Aurora Empowerment Systems, bid R605 million (£55 million) to take over two gold mines on the outskirts of Johannesburg, despite having no experience in mining industry. A...

Lucy Ash revisits some of the significant stories covered in recent years and discovers what has changed since our initial reports. In some instances, there have been attempts to bring suspects to justice. In 2009 Crossing Continents uncovered disturbing evidence of alleged atrocities by the Kosovo Liberation Army during the Kosovo War ten years ago. Since then a trial has opened in the capital Pr...

David Goldblatt looks at whether Berlin's alternative culture is under threat from commercial pressures. Or do developers and artists need each other to exist? Berlin has long been a magnet for artists from within Germany and abroad. After the wall fell in 1989 they flooded into the vast deserted buildings left in the Mitte area of the former East of the city. But over the last few years developer...

Three years ago Bill Law travelled to Egypt for Crossing Continents to meet five extraordinary women who were fighting for human rights and equal pay for women in Egypt. For this programme, Bill returns to Egypt to tell the story of the unfolding revolution through the eyes of those very same five women. Their stories are a unique insight into how the revolution came about and raise questions abou...

The Ecuadorian Amazon region is one of the most bio-diverse on the planet. In one area, nearly 600 bird species, 80 kinds of bat and 150 varieties of amphibian have been recorded. And it's possible that the density of one of the rarest wild cats, the jaguar, is twice as high as anywhere else in the world. This is also home to two of the last uncontacted groups of indigenous people in the world, wh...