The Documentary

China's Belt and Road Initiative stretches physically with infrastructure projects across the globe, but there is one initiative that is the most ambitious yet - The Space Silk Road. The space race is heating up with new entrants like India and private companies like SpaceX, but it is the Chinese who are set to dominate by 2045. Central to the Space Silk Road is a controversial station in Patagonia, Argentina. The Espacio Lejano Ground Station has a powerful 16-story antenna, with an 8-foot barbed wire fence that surrounds the entire compound. Katy Watson asks astronomers, space engineers and Argentinian residents, how President Xi's Space Silk Road is impacting their universe.

The Iranian government is not coy about its silence tactics. Since Iran's Woman Life Freedom Movement began on 16 September 2022, unlawful executions, imprisonment, physical and sexual abuse has dominated headlines across the globe. It is estimated that tens of thousands of people have received some form of government retribution – and at the heart of it is a complex surveillance system that aids security forces in its endeavours. The Supreme Cyber Council oversees digital rule in the country, and combined with FATA (the Cyber police), BASIJ (volunteer law enforcement working with Iran’s security forces) and surveillance spy software amongst other things, clamping down on dissent has never been easier. We speak to the women on the digital frontline between the state and their communities, investigate how court summons are issued based on social media posts and talk to experts about Iran’s surveillance tactics.

Johnny, Rocky and Rambo were performers in the world’s last travelling dolphin circus and inside a Bali hotel swimming pool. This is the story of the fight to shut the circus down and the long journey to try to return the performing dolphins to the ocean. We hear why the world’s most famous dolphin trainer changed sides - playing a role instead in the fight for their freedom. It is the story of how Femke Den Haas, the Indonesian campaign director of the Dolphin Project, teamed up with former trainer Ric O'Barry.

Industrialisation, modern cityscapes and strong economic growth promote an image of a youthful, vigorous Malaysia. But the country is now ageing rapidly, and this sudden transformation seems to have caught many - including the government - by surprise: Despite their country’s development, millions have little or no retirement income and face destitution or dependence in their golden years. What little provision is available was compromised during the Covid pandemic when the government allowed workers to withdraw retirement funds just to survive lockdown. Those who did so can now have almost nothing left in their accounts. Without any universal pension, many older Malaysians rely on their families – but younger relatives are often struggling in a low wage economy and find it increasingly difficult to provide for anyone but themselves. As Claire Bolderson reports, Malaysians may have to change their attitudes to retirement and to saving if they are to avoid the spectre of serious poverty in old age.

Peruvian singer Lenin Tamayo has been dubbed the founder of ‘Q-pop’. He combines traditional Andean folk music with K-pop inspired instrumentation and dance. His songs mix Quechua – one of Peru’s indigenous languages, and the official tongue of the Inca Empire – and Spanish. Lenin first launched his career when his videos went viral on TikTok. Now, he’s working on his second EP. Presenter Martin Riepl follows Lenin for five months uncovering Lenin’s process of fusing two very different musical styles.

Africa is home to around one-third of the world's languages, but only a smattering of them are available online and in translation software. So when young Beninese computer scientist Bonaventure Dossou, who was fluent in French, experienced difficulties communicating with his mother, who spoke the local language Fon, he came up with an idea. Bonaventure and a friend developed a French to Fon translation app, with speech recognition functionality, using an old missionary bible and volunteer questionnaires as the source data. Although rudimentary, they put the code online as open-source to be used by others. Bonaventure has since joined with other young African computer scientists and language activists called Masakane to use this code and share knowledge to increase digital accessibility for African and other lower-resourced languages. They want to be able to communicate across the African continent using translation software, with the ultimate goal being an "African Babel Fish", a simultaneous speech-to-speec

Why are exams so stressful? Chinese journalists Wanqing Zhang and Eric Junzhe share personal memories about the infamous Gaokao exam in China, which this year reached a record of 13.42 million applicants; and India correspondent Soutik Biswas reports on the exam scandals threatening the future of millions of young people in India. Plus: why do we have recurring nightmares about exams? Caroline Steel from CrowdScience has the answer. If you also have questions about exams, email them to crowdscience@bbc.co.uk. Produced by Caroline Ferguson, Alice Gioia and Hannah Dean.(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)

For millions of us, our phones or computers are the first place we go to look for romance. Dating apps are a multi-billion dollar business, and for a good few years it’s been booming. But recently there’s been discussion about whether they’re in decline, with fewer downloads and some regular users saying they feel burned out by their experiences on them. For some, the novelty has just worn off. Others have been put off by interactions with people they’ve been matched with. Host Luke Jones hears from three people who have decided they don’t want to meet people this way any more. Faith, a 27-year old Nigerian woman living in the UK says the final straw for her came when her date phoned her to arrange where to meet. “I could hear a girl’s voice in the background. I said ‘Who is that?’ and he said, "That’s my girlfriend, she stays with me". "He said oh they’re just going through a separation just now so they decided to take a break so he decided to download a dating app." On the other hand, there are success stor

Ibiza is an island of contrasts. A place which triggers thoughts of raucous partying, superstar DJs and excess. But it's also an area of raw natural beauty, rugged hills, with a rich spiritual history. No-one knows this duality better than Kim Booth - she's experienced both faces of the Balearic paradise island. Kim first visited as a party go-er tourist and 30 years on, she’s now a resident offering an alternative side to Ibiza. This tiny island island swells from a few hundred thousand residents, to over a million when tourists flock there over the summer months. But what pressure does this put on the people and the nature of Ibiza? After working in PR and for some of the biggest names in the music industry like superclub Pacha and dance label Defected Records, Kim chose a different path. Facing personal traumas in her life with the loss of her mum and her brother being murdered, Kim turned away from the parties and discovered the Red Road indigenous teachings. After experiencing this wisdom in Central and

The BBC's Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent, Marianna Spring, speaks to parents, teenagers and social media company insiders to investigate whether the content pushed to their feeds is harming them. We hear what happens when two teens give up their phones for the week, and ask: should teenagers give up their smartphones?

The Peregrine Falcon is not only the fastest animal on our planet, but also the most widely distributed bird of prey, found on every continent apart from Antarctica.In the 1960s Falco Peregrinus was close to extinction, but it has since made a remarkable comeback, hailed as a global success story of conservation.Recent decades have also seen the trend of this speedy raptor notably settling, nesting and flourishing alongside us, in man-made environments around the globe.Broadcaster, naturalist and writer David Lindo, a.k.a. ‘The Urban Birder’ travels from a hospital in London to a museum in Madrid and a power station in Kentucky, to explore how an iconic, apex predator is bouncing back from the brink, thriving in cities and towns across the world.Along the way David highlights their incredible hunting ability and how both our responsibility for the decline of the Peregrine and our pervading fondness for it, have helped to contribute to its astounding recovery.Image: Getty images

For the last thirty years Indian journalist Amitabh Parashar has been investigating why a group of midwives in his home state of Bihar were routinely forced to kill baby girls. In a series of shocking interviews, the midwives explain what happened and how a remarkable social worker brought change. Together they began to save baby girls destined to be killed. Decades later BBC Eye finds a woman, who was possibly one of the girls. What will happen when she returns to meet the only surviving midwife? A warning, this program includes upsetting content. The Midwife’s Confession was produced by Anubha Bhonsle, Purnima Mehta, Debangshu Roy, Neha Tara Mehta, Annabel Deas, Rob Wilson and Ahmen Khawaja. The editors were Daniel Adamson and Rebecca Henschke. It was mixed by Neva Missirian. Image credit: BBC Eye

From the journey from cocoa to chocolate in Ivory Coast. The price of cocoa - the essential ingredient in chocolate - has more than quadrupled on the international market in the last two years. Yet many of those growing it have not benefitted. In fact, drought, disease and a lack of investment have led to catastrophic harvests and, therefore, a drop in income for many small producers of cocoa, especially in Ivory Coast. This West African country is the world’s largest producer of cocoa - up to 45% of the world’s total. Most of the growers are small-scale, poor farmers. There are now calls for these growers to get a bigger chunk of the chocolate bar and, in so doing, to help ensure future production. John Murphy travels to Ivory Coast to delve into the world of chocolate production.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam in 1976, was only two years old when his family were made refugees by the war. They ended up in Texas, in the US and in his early twenties, he decided to return to the city his parents had once fled. Here in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, Tuan has become an artist of many mediums. Telling stories through film, sculpture and installations, his work often explores how memories haunt the present and the power of art to heal. Reporter Eliza Lomas joins Tuan in his home studio and workshop, as he shares his process for creating an ongoing series of resonant mobile sculptures. Made from once highly explosive bomb material left over from the war, Tuan reflects on how beliefs in animism and reincarnation inform his work, and why he’s drawn to transforming these objects of war, which are still excavated on a daily basis in Vietnam, into resonant sculptures of peace.

A bonus episode from the Lives Less Ordinary podcast.In 1982 Mississippi, two boys, Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, aged 10 and 11, embarked on a crazy mission: to remake Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot-for-shot in their back garden - and the long-forgotten tape that resulted would decades later end up bringing them face-to-face with one of their heroes.For more extraordinary personal stories from around the world, go to bbcworldservice.com/liveslessordinary or search for Live Less Ordinary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.Presenter: India Rakusen Producer: Edgar Maddicott

Why are people in Pakistan struggling to use messaging apps and social media? BBC Urdu's editor Asif Farooqi explains why this might be more than just a simple internet glitch. Plus, we hear from colleagues who speak Spanish, Arabic and Bulgarian about their favourite filler words and sounds.Produced by Alice Gioia and Hannah Dean.(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)

Mpox causes a headache, fever and a blistering rash all over the body. There have been more than 1,200 cases in parts of Central and West Africa since the start of this year. The milder version is now circulating in other parts of the world but the much stronger, possibly deadlier strain, called Clade 1b is also on the rise. A few weeks ago, the World Health Organisation announced that mpox constituted a public health emergency of international concern after an upsurge of cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and other countries in Africa. Host Luke Jones brings together survivors from the UK and Nigeria to share their experiences. “I thought that I was dying,” said Harun in London. “Nobody knew what it was and I was getting worse every day. I remember looking at a bottle of water and I started crying because I wasn’t able to drink.” We also hear from three doctors about some of the challenges they face - from a mistrust in medical professionals, to a belief that mpox is not caused by a virus an

Dr Aleksandra Janus is a Polish Cultural Anthropologist with a Jewish background from Warsaw, Poland. Living in the capital flattened by Nazi bombs and then recreated by Communism, her multi-layered identity has always conjured mixed feelings about former Jewish memory and cultural spaces. As President of the organisation, Zapomniane Foundation (which means forgotten in English), one of her jobs is to trace mass graves in forests, cityscapes and death camps across the country in cooperation with local villagers, WWII survivors and non-invasive scanning technologies. Alerted by her friend Karolina Jakoweńko, she's come across an interesting proposition – an historic synagogue in the area of Poland that belonged to Germany before WWII. Once owned by a thriving Jewish community who were exterminated by the Nazis, now decades later the synagogue is in the hands of a private owner and Jewish people no longer live in the village. Synagogues in Germany were at first destroyed by the Nazis but not this synagogue – it

In a bonus episode from CrowdScience - How do fish survive in the deep ocean?When listener Watum heard about the Titan submersible implosion in the news in 2023, a question popped up in his mind: if a machine that we specifically built for this purpose cannot sustain the water pressure of the deep ocean, how do fish survive down there? In this episode, we travel with marine biologist Alan Jamieson to the second deepest place in our oceans: the Tonga trench. Meanwhile, presenter Caroline Steel speaks to Edie Widder about the creatures that illuminate our oceans, and travels to Copenhagen to take a closer look one of the strangest deep sea creatures and its deep sea adaptations. But even fish have their limits! Scientist Paul Yancey correctly predicted the deepest point that fish can live, and it all comes down to one particular molecule. So is there anything living beyond these depths? Well, there is only one way to find out…CrowdScience takes your questions about life, Earth and the universe to researchers hu

For more than six months, a BBC Eye team has been investigating extremist settlers establishing a new type of illegal settlement known as a “herding outpost”. Some have been sanctioned by the UK and US governments for forcing Palestinians from their homes as part of a “campaign of violence and intimidation”. In this documentary we tell the story of the Palestinian communities living on the frontline of their outposts. We expose how some of these settlers have been supported by two powerful organisations in Israel, one which describes itself as “an arm of the Israeli state”.Image credit: BBC Eye