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S2019 E4 Secret Sardinia
本集简介

Secret Sardinia– a story of sickness, secrecy and cover-up ...

Sardinia is an island cut in two. Along the white beach-studded Costa Smeralda, a magnet for the rich and famous, a villa can fetch close to $150 million.

"That house is owned by the head of Volkwagen," says realtor Lorenzo Camillo as he takes reporter Emma Alberici for a sail on his yacht. "Ah there we are - there's the famous Berlusconi villa."

But more than a third of Sardinia – including much of its waters – is off limits to locals and visitors, whatever their celebrity. This area is controlled by the Italian military, rented out for some of the world's biggest war games and home to Europe's biggest bomb test site.

This has many locals riled. "Islands, little islands have disappeared, erased by missiles shot from the land, the sky and the sea," says former Sardinian president Mauro Pili.

Pili has also recorded the destruction of some of Sardinia's unique nuraghe - turret-like stone Bronze Age structures built some 3500 years ago – by test bombs.

But it's not cultural vandalism or restricted movement that most concerns Sardinians. In areas near the test sites, there have been high rates of cancers, birth defects and early death.

Giancarlo Piras recalls what the doctor said when his son Francesco, who had served as a soldier at a bombing range, got pancreatic cancer at age 27: "By any chance has your son been in contact with radioactive material?"

Children were born with deformities including missing limbs. In one village in one year, one in four new born babies had some kind of defect. Sheep grazing on the test sites gave birth to grotesquely twisted lambs. Their shepherds too had phenomenally high rates of cancer.

Tissue samples from man and beast showed high levels of a highly toxic material used in many bomb tests. "The longer they lived in the area, the higher the quantity," a nuclear physicist tells Alberici.

As public pressure grew for a full accounting, the military pushed back. "If they didn't want us to see something they wouldn't show it to us. They feared we could find something unusual," says an MP who headed a parliamentary inquiry.

Generals went on the front foot, blaming people's illnesses on close inbreeding. With much fanfare, they announced a scientific inquiry. But as Alberici reports, evidence shows they nobbled it.

上一集
2019/01/22 S2019 E3
Vanilla Slice

Behind our craving for vanilla-flavoured ice cream, cakes and chocolate, or for vanilla-scented perfumes, there's a rattling tale of fast money, skulduggery and the precarious fate of an iconic animal.

A few years ago, the humble vanilla bean sold for $80 a kilo. Now it's $800. In vividly beautiful, dirt-poor Madagascar, supplier of most of the world's vanilla, that means good times roll.

Vanilla is the best, vanilla is the crazy money. No income better in Madagascar - and I think the world! – Yockno, who is swapping tour guiding for vanilla farming.

By day, Prisco is a hustler who buys and sells vanilla in the street. By night, in a seedy bar, he sings of his love for the bean, and what it can get him…

Girl, come and weigh the vanilla, there's enough for whatever you want! – Prisco's song lyric

Prisco is a bit player in a vast vanilla ecosystem. In the vanilla hub of Sambava, brokers plough money into shiny multi-story mansions. In big export warehouses, women sort their way through hillocks of beans. They're frisked before they go home, just in case they've filched any.

In rural areas at harvest time, small farmers guard their crops overnight from roaming thieves. If the farmers catch them, justice is swift and sometimes deadly.

They can do crazy things to them – Yockno, tour guide and vanilla farmer

Long before the tense harvest, there's an operation that demands the utmost delicacy. Each vanilla flower must be hand-pollinated – a trick invented by a 12-year-old slave boy in the 1840s. Using a tiny thorn, Yockno shows reporter Adam Harvey how it's done.

So what I do is push this tongue up….

It's all precision – and timing. Each flower is ready for pollination for only one morning each year.

…. and I press softly the male to the female. So now it's done.

Vanilla is surely sweet for Madagascar's people, but not for its most celebrated characters – the exquisite lemurs popularised by the Madagascar movie. High vanilla prices are putting pressure on the lemurs' habitat as forest is illegally cut to grow the beans.

But as Harvey and the Foreign Correspondent team trek deep into the jungle, they discover – to their delight – that lemurs are hanging on defiantly. Our cameras capture them – bamboo lemurs, white-headed lemurs and critically endangered silky safakas, one of the world's rarest mammals – in all their glory.

下一集
2019/02/05 S2019 E5
The Promised Land

On his sleepless nights, Imran paces the floor grappling with ghosts from half a world away and many months past.

I'm wide awake and I call my friends' names. ‘Hey Zainal! Hey Faisal! Where are you?' But they're not here, they're on Manus – Imran, 24, Rohingya refugee who spent nearly five years on Manus Island

But come daylight, Imran can revel in his new home - Chicago, 14,000 kilometres from Manus. It's been more than seven years since, aged 16, he fled persecution in Myanmar. Along the way he was held hostage by people smugglers and detained in Indonesia before making his fateful journey to Christmas Island. Now, thanks to a refugee deal with the US, he has a job and is finishing school.

I'm free, that's all that matters to me. People have been welcoming and I am loved. So, it's home, it definitely feels like home – Imran

An old friend of Imran's from Manus is also making a new life. Amir was 14 when he left Iran. Now 25 and living in Vancouver on Canada's west coast, Amir has a job in tourism and is set to study law. His good fortune flows from a chance meeting with Chelsea Taylor, a Melbourne nurse who worked on Manus and talked her Canadian-Australian parents into sponsoring him.

You rescued me from an island which so many governments and so many countries were not able to do – Amir, to Chelsea's parents Wayne and Linda in Vancouver

Correspondent Eric Tlozek first met Amir and Imran on Manus Island more than 18 months ago. He follows them from behind the wire to their new lives in North America in the most intimate and detailed account so far of life for Manus refugees.

In Canada and the US, Tlozek meets Australian expats, like Wayne Taylor and fashion designer Fleur Wood, who are pitching in to help ex-detainees now that Australia is done with them.

When I heard about them being resettled in America I knew how little help they'd be getting - Fleur Wood, co-founder of Australian Diaspora Steps Up

Nearly 500 ex-Manus and Nauru detainees are scattered across the US, receiving only brief and basic support from the government. Wood's group hustles to find them housing, bedding and clothing.

When Wood searches for some Rohingyas who are just off Nauru, she ends up at a rundown building in North Chicago where four men share a tiny apartment, eking out casual work, dishwashing and cleaning. One is seriously ill.

After five years on Nauru, these men aren't coping with their newfound freedom in America. They still want to come to Australia. Bizarrely, some even want to go back to Nauru.

But for those who are faring better, life is what you make of it.

You can be in the worst place on this planet and make it a heaven for yourself. And you can be in the best country on this planet and make it a hell for yourself – Amir in Vancouver