The Documentary Podcast: Archive 2008

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.

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.