The Documentary Podcast

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'Indocumentados’: America’s undocumented migrants Aug 11, 2024

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The US is home to around seven million undocumented migrants from central and south America. Many have been in the US for years, providing a vital workforce for many sectors of the US economy. But they have no health cover, or workplace benefits and many live under the constant threat of deportation back home. As Americans prepare for another presidential race where immigration is likely to figure high again on the agenda, Mike Lanchin travels to the state of Maryland, to hear about the lives of some of its large undocumented Latino population. He speaks to Maria who gets up at 5am for work, but has no holiday or sick pay. He meets Delmi, who has been using false papers to get work, and Toño who came to the US as an unaccompanied minor but now has a temporary work permit.

The Fifth Floor: Vietnam's matchmakers Aug 10, 2024

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According to the UN, from 2008-2018 over 18,000 Vietnamese citizens a year married foreigners. The vast majority of them are women, and many find their foreign husbands through special matchmaking agencies. Thuong Le from BBC Vietnamese has been looking into this profitable and controversial business.

Produced by Caroline Ferguson, Hannah Dean and Alice Gioia.

(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)

BBC OS Conversations: Gen Z and power change in Bangladesh Aug 10, 2024

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After weeks of student-led demonstrations and violence across Bangladesh, which caused the deaths of hundreds of people, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has fled to India and resigned after 15 years of controversial rule. Many of those left behind are celebrating what they are describing as a second independence. The man brought in to temporarily lead the country – the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus – has called on young people to help rebuild the South Asian country. Generation Z, who are mostly in their teens and 20s, have played a large role in forcing political change. Hosts Luke Jones and James Reynolds bring some of those young voices together to hear their thoughts and hopes for the future.

Heart and Soul: Digital grief Aug 09, 2024

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New digital technologies including AI have started to find a place in the grieving process, sometimes alongside more traditional religious rituals. 'Grief tech' concepts are springing up across the world, aiming to mask the finality of death for those left behind. Nkem Ifejika, who lost his mother three years ago, samples some grief tech products. He meets Stephen Smith, creator of StoryFile, a system which enables him to interact with his late mother almost as if he was interviewing her on video in the here and now. He talks to Japanese media artist Etsuko Ichihara, who has developed a robot that mirrors the physical personality, speech and gestures of a person who has died. And Nkem hears from Justin Harrison, who has been working on recreating the essence of his late mother’s personality.

The Global Jigsaw: The Taliban’s war on women Aug 08, 2024

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A bonus episode from The Global Jigsaw looks at how the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan has led to the erasure of women from public life. There’s a UN-led campaign to recognise it as “gender apartheid”, but the international community is divided and lacking leverage. Three years after the group took the capital Kabul, our experts explain what life is like for half of the population and why women have become a proxy for the nation’s image of itself.

Producer: Kriszta Satori, Elchin Suleymanov Presenter: Krassi Twigg

The Global Jigsaw looks at the world through the lens of its media. Think of us as your media detectives, helping you get past the propaganda and misinformation. The Global Jigsaw comes from BBC Monitoring, which tracks, deciphers, and analyses news media in 100 languages. At BBC Monitoring, we don’t just speak the language, we understand the narrative. So we can help you untangle the context and single out rhetoric from reality, deception from truth. For more episodes just search The Global Jigsaw wherever you got this podcast.

Bonus: The Engineers - Intelligent Machines Aug 08, 2024

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This is a bonus episode for The Documentary of The Engineers: Intelligent Machines. This year, we speak to a panel of three engineers at the forefront of the 'Machine Learning: AI' revolution with an enthusiastic live audience.

Intelligent machines are remaking our world. The speed of their improvement is accelerating fast and every day there are more things they can do better than us. There are risks, but the opportunities for human society are enormous.

‘Machine Learning: AI’ is the technological revolution of our era. Three engineers at the forefront of that revolution come to London to join Caroline Steel and a public audience at the Great Hall of Imperial College:

Regina Barzilay from MIT created a major breakthrough in detecting early stage breast cancer. She also led the team that used machine learning to discover Halicin, the first new antibiotic in 30 years.

David Silver is Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind. He led the AlphaGo team that built the AI to defeat the world’s best human player of Go.

Paolo Pirjanian founded Embodied, and is a pioneer in developing emotionally intelligent robots to aid child development.

Producer: Charlie Taylor (Image: 3D hologram AI brain displayed by digital circuit and semiconductor. Credit: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images)

Solutions Journalism: Going bananas Aug 07, 2024

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A killer fungus is ravaging plantations of the Cavendish banana worldwide. It travels through the soil at lightning speed and chokes the banana plant so its leaves shrivel up and die. The disease is known as Tropical Race 4, or TR4 for short, and it has spread across the globe from Australia, to the Philippines, Pakistan and Mozambique. Now TR4 is widespread across Latin America. In Colombia where 30,000 people are employed in banana plantations, the government declared a state of national emergency when the fungus first arrived on farms in 2019. An international community of scientists is experimenting with different techniques to try to halt the spread of TR4 whether that's through gene-editing, selective breeding or injecting microbes into the soil.

Assignment: The Italian town where praying is a political issue Aug 06, 2024

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The Italian town of Monfalcone on the Adriatic coast has an ethnic make-up unique to the country. Of a population of just over thirty thousand, more than six thousand are from Bangladesh. They’ve come to help construct huge cruise ships, providing labour to do the type of manual jobs which Italians no longer want to do.

For years, they worshipped at two Islamic centres in the town. Then, in November, the town’s far right mayor, Anna Maria Cisint, tried to effectively ban collective prayer there, along with stopping cricket - the Bangladeshi national sport - from being played within the town.

She says she is defending Christian values. Her critics say she is building walls rather than bridges. For Assignment, Sofia Bettiza travels to Italy to discover how the country is dealing with the increasing numbers of legal migrants coming to work in a country which needs their labour.

In the Studio: B-girl Ray Gun Aug 05, 2024

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Known to many as breakdancing, breaking sprung up in the economic and social unrest of 1970s New York, as a form of expressive protest. Today, it is also a globalised and dizzyingly virtuosic competitive dance sport - and now it is making its debut at the Paris Olympics. We follow Australian competitor Rachael Gunn (B-girl Raygun) as she hits pause on her day-job as a university lecturer and prepares for her debut on the Olympics stage. In conversations across the final 100 days, as she practises at home in Sydney, tests out new moves in the UK, and gets settled in Paris, we hear about the challenges of training, experimenting, and honing her performance.

Erasing Hong Kong Aug 04, 2024

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Hong Kong's history is being revised and erased - it's early origins, colonial legacy, post 1997 handover period and the crucial years since the mass 2019 democracy protests are being uprooted, overturned and rewritten by a government guided by the ruling Communist Party in Beijing. This 'rewriting' of history is being enforced in schools, universities, libraries, the local media and online. This process has seen library shelves raided, museums closed for 'review', art galleries censored, media archives wiped, commemorations and memorials banned. Every department of government seems affected - library users asked to scour the shelves for 'banned' books, the arts sector to purge itself of 'anti-China elements', the annual commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre shut down. Democracy activists, authors of children's books, students, and newspaper owners have been jailed for holding contradictory views, telling alternative narratives. All in the few years since 2019 and Covid-19. Hong Kong is a changed place - a place where memory wars are being fought, where history and your interpretation of it can lead to long prison sentences or exile.

This audio was updated on 13th August 2024.

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