The Fourcast

Back in early December 2020, the first vaccinations for COVID-19 began in the UK, after months of despair and restrictions. But after a summer where concerns were raised over the numbers of BAME people dying in the community, should they have been offered a vaccine early?

Our Home Affairs Correspondent Darshna Soni has spent the year telling the stories of Black and brown families affected by the virus and reflects on whether enough is being done to protect people of colour during the pandemic.

This episode originally aired on 9th December 2020.

Sources: BBC, ITV, CSPAN

There’s a huge conversation going on right now, with women speaking out about how safe they feel, following the Sarah Everard case. Amongst the outpouring of grief, concerns are being raised about indecent exposure, or as many call it, flashing, an issue that’s widely underreported. But depressingly common.

Today, our North of England Correspondent, Clare Fallon, has been looking into this issue for over a year and questions whether we are taking this offence as seriously as we should. 

Millions dead, multiple waves, ships quarantined; a world in crisis. One hundred years ago, humankind was hit by a deadly pandemic during the final months of the First World War: the Spanish Flu.

Now, we're living through another pandemic: Covid-19. What have we learnt and what have we forgotten from one hundred years ago - and will we make the same mistakes again?

Today, we speak to the historian Professor Nancy Bristow and the epidemiologist Professor Gabriel Scally about the past, present and future.

It's responsible for killing tens of thousands of thousands of people, and yet it continues to be shipped worldwide from Yorkshire.

The weedkiller, Gramoxone, is one of the most toxic pesticides in the world. On top of being responsible for thousands of accidental deaths, it has become one of the main means of suicide in poor rural countries around the world. 

The company Syngenta, which produces the herbicide here in the U.K, say it's safe if used correctly. But Channel 4 News has obtained hundreds of internal company documents which show they knew their own safety data was flawed but continued to sell it. 

Channel 4 News' Senior Producer Nanette van der Laan and Chief Correspondent Thomson have spent weeks delving into this story of profit before safety that has cost lives all over the world.

And a warning this episode deals with issues of suicide which some may find distressing.

Sources: Public Eye, Calabash TV, The Ring of Fire

War is raging in a Northern part of Ethiopia, in a region called Tigray, and unspeakable crimes by soldiers are being committed against women. Few journalists have been able to see first hand what is happening, but our Africa Correspondent Jamal Osman gained rare access to the area and spoke to women who told him their accounts of soldiers using rape as a weapon of war.  

The UN has called for the leaders of Ethiopia to protect their civilians and condemn sexual violence by soldiers.  

And after months of reports of war crimes, this week finally, the Nobel Peace Prize winning Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed said that any soldiers found to be raping women or looting communities will be held accountable. 

Clips: Al Jazeera, Sky News, BBC, Youtube: Tigray Open Air Museum 

Poland already had some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe, but new changes have effectively banned them completely. 

Many women now have to travel abroad to seek abortions or risk performing them at home.

It is the latest move by the ruling Law and Justice Party, that the EU has accused of a “political takeover of the judiciary and the systemic collapse of rule of law”, in a throwback to the days of communist rule.

Anja Popp has been to Poland to speak to those affected by this ban - and the politicians pushing it through.

As the Covid vaccine is offering new hope around the world to end the pandemic, the biggest growing threat to people’s health is the surge in disinformation, conspiracy theories and fake news.

Anti-vaxxers and vaccine hesitant voices have become even louder. As many countries in Europe resume the rollout of the AstraZenaca vaccine after having paused it for some days, the damage in people’s confidence in the jab will be hard to heal.

Having spent time hearing from people who don’t trust the vaccine for various reasons and others who deny Covid’s existence altogether - Ayshah Tull and Paraic O’Brien chat about the potentially devastating impacts on these views. 

On Friday 28th September 2018, Jamal Khashoggi visited the Saudi consulate in the Turkish capital to get some documents so he could marry his fiancée. He was told he would have to return to pick up the document a week later. He visited the consulate again on 2nd October but this time, he did not leave.

Today’s podcast is about justice. If a man is cut into pieces inside a government building - if his body is still yet to be found - if it is beyond reasonable doubt who did it and who ordered it - why is it that justice still eludes his fiancée and his family? Our foreign correspondent Jonathan Rugman is the author of The Killing in the Consulate and explains why despite a recent US Intelligence report revealing that the order to capture and to kill came from the Crown Prince - he will not be sanctioned.

Sources: Axios, CNBC, C-SPAN, Sky News, BBC News