bbc World Service Documentary Archive podcasts

Campaigners for improving maternal health have been lobbying the G8 to get the topic on the agenda for the next meeting in Japan. In programme two of the series Health for All, Uduak Amimo asks is there enough political will to combat maternal mortality?

As the world counts down to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Gerry Northam investigates China's claims of 'vigorous growth in the public practice of religion' but he discovers people are still being persecuted and oppressed for practising religion.

In the third part of this series, Audrey Brown travels to Atteridgeville, a township outside the capital, Pretoria, to explore what really lay behind the recent attacks by South Africans on foreigners.

Is health for all a fact or just fiction? Helen Sharp asks if the world has the will, people and money to deliver basic good health to everyone.

This week's Assignment tells the story of the Burmese cyclone through the eyes and ears of the few BBC journalists who managed to get into the country after the disaster. Hear the story of the cyclone unfold told by those who witnessed it first hand. That's Reporting The Cyclone, from Assignment this week.

In 1998, a truck bomb exploded outside the American embassy in Nairobi. Over 200 people died and thousands were injured. It features an extraordinary interview with the FBI agent who tracked down and questioned a suspected al-Qaeda bomber. It was Osama Bin Laden's first major strike in his jihad against America.

In the second part of this series, Audrey Brown travels to South Africa to explore how privilege and access to resources is increasingly being seen as an issue of colour.

Sheila Dillon reports on the work of restaurateurs, farmers, fishermen and activists to restore the culinary heritage of a devastated city.

Baseball may be the United States' national sport - but this year, 2008, almost half of all its professional players come from overseas - and some 40 per cent of them from the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti. For Assignment David Goldblatt visits Haiti to report on what has become a significant export industry for this country of nine million people.

In the third part of this series, Peter Taylor investigates The Paris Plot, the hijacking of a plane in Algiers on its way to Paris; a plan to use a plane as a weapon of mass destruction.

Fourteen years after liberation and 60 years since the beginning of what was then 'apartheid', Audrey Brown explores and uncovers the extent to which race still plays a part in everyday life for those living in South Africa.

More than 30 years after the end of the Vietnam War, Bomb Hunters, tells the stories of the people living in Xieng Khuang in Laos and how they survive in a land still littered with unexploded ordnance.

The new mayor of Rome Gianni Alemanno was once a so-called neo-fascist - a supporter of anti-democratic, right wing radicalism. And his election has come at a time of mounting ethnic tension in Italy. As Christian Fraser now discovers in Assignment, there are fears that Rome could be about to suffer the return of hard right, authoritarian rule.

In the second part of this series, Peter Taylor investigates how two events in 1987 contributed to the beginnings of the road to peace in Northern Ireland.

The powerful story of a young Iranian woman called Leila, sold into prostitution at the age of nine by her own family and sentenced to hang aged 18.

Argentinian film director, writer and tango enthusiast, Edgardo Cozarinsky, talks to artists, dancers, novelists and other Argentinians about why psychotherapy and tango have such a pervasive hold on the Argentine mind and soul.

The town of Auroville in southern India was built in 1968 on the basis of a utopian ideal - that a community could live in peace and harmony without having to worry about food and shelter. But forty years on there are unsettling allegations of abuse emerging from the City of Dawn. For Assignment Rachel Wright visits Auroville and tells the disturbing story of a dream gone wrong.

In the first part of this series, Peter Taylor reveals how events unfolded in the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane on a flight from Tel Aviv to Paris which ends with a bid to rescue hostages from Idi Amin's Uganda

In Taxi To The Dark Side, American film-maker Alex Gibney reports on the use of torture by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Was the torture the work of a few rogue soldiers, or officially approved by the Pentagon?

Dr Thomas Hargrove, an American scientist kidnapped by FARC, is reunited with the family's German neighbour, who was part of 'Team Tom' which organized the negotiations.