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Foreign Correspondent
Season 21 • Episode 20 • Rise of the Machines
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Foreign Correspondent Season 21, Episode 20: Rise of the Machines
Any comfy views you have about your personal security, privacy and safety are about to be seriously challenged. Foreign Correspondent sounds the alarm on the swarms of private and government drones gathering in American skies and surely bound for the rest of the world. Live streaming cameras and the ability to carry other payloads. Tens of thousands of them. But who's at the controls? Police, immigration patrols, journalists, protesters, paparazzi? You? Watch Foreign Correspondent Season 21, Episode 20 Rise of the Machines in HD free online. Enjoy high-quality streaming of Foreign Correspondent Season 21, Episode 20 and share your thoughts in the comments below!
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26 episodesThe Ka-Ching! Dynasty
In China they're setting blistering speed records. From the go-fast, rich kids quickly amassing stables of super-cars to the developers building sky-scraping hotels - start to finish - in just 14 days. One local rich list estimates China has almost a million millionaires, 600 billionaires and the numbers keep growing at a staggering rate. Private jets are flying out of showroom hangers at mach 1. The economic transformation of China has been electrifying, but with Europe teetering and the U.S. plodding can the biggest tiger of all keep on roaring? The super-rich you'll meet in our 2012 return certainly think so.
30 min
A Bavarian Fairy Tale
If Europe's going down the gurgler why are the good burghers of Bavaria singing, dancing, laughing and toasting their good fortune over a litre of beer or six? Well, they have a secret. They even have a word for it that only Germans really understand. It's called Mittelstand and it's made many of the businesses in this uber enterprising part of the world solid, successful, optimistic and fearlessly forging into the future. Germans have another word for how that makes them feel about the many of their basket-case neighbours in Europe: Schadenfreude - a kind of delicious pleasure at the misfortune of others. If only they didn't have to prop them up.
30 min
Girlpower!
They're two women from utterly different worlds so what do a seasoned Australian television producer and a 19 year old student from Kabul, Afghanistan have in common. It's a shared hope for the ascendency of female rights, aspiration and opportunity in one of the most dangerous and oppressive places on earth. The outsider is shaping some of the country's TV drama, tackling confronting issues that challenge the orthodoxy. The teenager is boldly fighting violence in the street and at home. It's a massive battle against an age old order but don't discount her - Noorjahan Akbar isn't about to take a backward step.
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Meet the Frackers
There's a new resident moving into America's cities and suburbs, peeking over backyard fences and casting a shadow over shopping malls. Some folks are being right neighbourly and are welcoming the new arrival. But many more are fretting about how the stranger might dramatically impact their safe and peaceful suburban lives. It's setting neighbour against neighbour and dividing communities. Honey, meet the Frackers.
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The Almighty's Dollar
If life's two certainties are death and taxes then who blinks first in a face-off between God and The Taxman? Italians are buckling up for very bumpy, very bleak ride into economic gloom and doomdom but many are asking if everyone's paying their way - particularly the very wealthy. The Catholic Church for instance. As a get-tough Government doles out some harsh medicine, it has at least signalled the Church may need to toss a lot more into the collection plate. But will it come to pass?
30 min
Building the Perfect Bug
Bird flu is already aggressively lethal so why did laboratory researchers engineer a super strain that can be contracted far more easily, just like normal flu? It's a question that has provoked raging arguments within the scientific community and provoked an extraordinary reaction from security agencies worried about the prospect of bio-terrorism. At the moment there's a tense truce between the camps but inevitably the research projects will publish their work. Some experts also believe it's only a matter of time before the bug itself leaves the lab and goes to work on a very unprepared world.
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The Road to Mandalay
Have visa, will travel. Sounds simple, but until now, it just wasn't that easy for journalists to visit one of Asia's most fascinating and under-reported countries. Now Burma has lifted the curtain and the ABC's South East Asia correspondent Zoe Daniel and her crew have been able to travel widely and openly there for the first time, talking to ordinary Burmese and showing the rest of us what this beautiful place looks like. It's still early days for the reform process and no-one really understands why the changes are happening, but one thing seems clear - Burma will be the next hot spot on the tourist trail.
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They Paved Paradise
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Sayonara Baby
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Miss Tibet
It's unquestionably the world's highest national beauty pageant, it may also be the world's smallest but it must be right up there with the strangest. Certainly when you think of Tibet you're far more likely to think of the Dalai Lama, Buddhist spirituality and the struggle for an independent homeland. You're less likely to summon images of a wanna-be Donald Trump-style impresario in silver threads, swimsuit shoots by mountain streams and beautiful girls aiming to be the next top beauty on top of the world. That's the Miss Tibet pageant and - perhaps surprisingly - it's as catty and competitive as any beauty contest. But is it, as its promoter claims, all about liberation and empowerment or is it a cynical exercise in exploitation? And what will the Dalai Lama make of it all?
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Any comfy views you have about your personal security, privacy and safety are about to be seriously challenged. Foreign Correspondent sounds the alarm on the swarms of private and government drones gathering in American skies and surely bound for the rest of the world. Live streaming cameras and the ability to carry other payloads. Tens of thousands of them. But who's at the controls? Police, immigration patrols, journalists, protesters, paparazzi? You?
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