Samuel Leibowitz is a member of an ultraorthodox Jewish sect and has been in prison for the last 9 years for drug trafficking. Released from prison he plans to return to his community in North London to try and live once again the life of an observant Hasidic Jew.Samuel comes from Stamford Hill a closed community in the United Kingdom that is hostile to the media and has almost never bee
Mankind has always been fascinated by the possibility of life beyond Earth, the idea of other civilizations thriving on distant planets captivates the imagination we are driven perhaps by the hope that humanity is not alone in the universe and by science's promise to always seek the unknown.On August 15th, 1977 a massive radio telescope operated by the Ohio state university detected an unusua
Hundreds and thousands of men women and children are maimed and killed every year by light arms often trafficked illegally or even openly in a grey area of near legality used by governments to sponsor armed factions. This is the story of how individuals and states have profited from civil wars around the Mediterranean shores. These are wars that have flooded the heart of Europe with their refugee
Extinct, the very word is chilling it means that a species no longer survives in this world. Already there have been five great extinction events in the history of our planet. What if the next species to be obliterated were us?We pay little regard to the planet-sized mechanism churning below our feet and above our heads, we humans are after all the apex species of planet Earth. We flourish, w
In this BBC Panorama special we are invited into Alder Hey, Britain's largest children's hospital located in Liverpool and what we find is disturbing. The hospital is treating younger and younger children for health problems that are very much preventable. Many of the problems witnessed are the direct result of the children's lifestyle, from obesity to alcohol misuse, from rotting baby teeth to
In April 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster focused the whole worlds attention on Ukraine. Tens of thousands fled the area, a whole city was abandoned, it was a catastrophe that still reverberates today with Chernobyl being on the frontline of war and now a cache of new evidence from secrets files in Ukraine reveals the role of the soviet KGB.The KGB files contain warnings that the atom pla
In 1958, nine years after coming to power Moa wanted to bring China out of its almost medieval state of underdevelopment. He launched a program of industrialisation in towns and in the country intended to take China into the promised land of the socialist paradise in less than 15 years, it was the Great Leap Forward. But the crazy dream quickly became a nightmare and dragged 650 million Chinese p
Just under 1500 years ago something terrifying happened to the world's climate something nobody could understand the sun began to go dark and rain the color of blood poured from the skies. Clouds of fine dust enveloped the Earth and winter gripped the land for two whole years. Then came drought, famine, plague, and death. Whole cities were wiped out civilizations crumbled and nobody knew what had
Russia is the largest country on Earth and home to nearly 150 million people, now with Vladimir Putin well into his third term as president it's starting to feel like the cold war era all over again. The west has imposed though sanctions against Russia and relations are the frostiest since the cold war so television personality Reggie Yates travels there to find out what life is really like for y