China is incurring huge expenditure in transferring and consolidating the Chinese population in Tibet. Massive investment has been made to build a network of modern highways all over Tibet. China can also boast of having laid the highest railway track in the world that connects Lhasa with Beijing. In fact, China often complains that its civilizing mission in Tibet is costing the government and peo
One of the most formidable leaders that the world has ever seen, Mao was undeniably a brilliant political and economic mind, despite his role as a progenitor of 20th Century Communism and a homicidal despot.This program tells Mao’s unusual story – how he decided, early on, that he must “destroy” his country in order to liberate it through reconstruction.In the process, he harnessed the Chinese
Taking Control Vladimir Putin, after eight years as president of Russia and four more as prime minister, is stubbornly holding onto power. He has announced his intention to return as president and declared his party the winner in parliamentary elections that are widely seen as fraudulent. In Moscow 100,000 protesters have taken to the streets in the largest demonstrations since Putin took office.
Richard Hammond reveals the engineering inspirations behind the tallest road bridge in the world – the Millau Viaduct in France.He fires three quarters of a million volts from his fingertips to see how the power of lightning cut the steel structure quickly and accurately. The huge piers – 340 metres high, and which would look down on the Eiffel Tower – were positioned to millimetre accuracy wi
One hundred years ago, the Herero people of Namibia were nearly exterminated by German colonial soldiers in what has become known as the first genocide of the 20th century.In the colonial period, the Herero men, women and children of Namibia were rounded up like cattle and put into Germany’s first ever concentration camps. Four years later, three-quarters of the entire Herero nation had
For centuries we have dreamt of reaching the center of the Earth. Now scientists are uncovering a bizarre and alien world that lies 4,000 miles beneath our feet, unlike anything we know on the surface.It is a planet buried within the planet we know, where storms rage within a sea of white-hot metal and a giant forest of crystals make up a metal core the size of the Moon.Horizon follows sci
Our Sun has served Earth well for almost five billion years. It has bathed us with heat and energy and sustained life on our planet. But like people, our home star is mortal.In five billion years, it will stop nurturing its planetary offspring. In this documentary we voyage some five billion years into the future to see how the Sun will eventually end its existence and affect the future of life
This a documentary film on the role of Joseph Stalin during World War II. The film combines narrative-led documentary segments, interwoven by dramatic re-enactments, with actors representing main political figures of the period.The documentary carries information newly available to the public, from the Soviet archives, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.British historian Laurenc
Falling In the third episode, Professor Brian Cox takes on the story of the force that sculpts the entire universe – gravity.Gravity seems so familiar, and yet it is one of the strangest and most surprising forces in the universe. Starting with a zero gravity flight, Brian experiences the feeling of total weightlessness, and considers how much of an effect gravity has had on the world around us.