Politics

Get yourself connected

More than one billion pounds is controlled by unelected quangos in the South West an investigation by Phil Chamberlain has discovered

Redwatch

A campaign has been launched to shut web site which targets anti-fascists

ID Centres to open

Details on 69 new processing centres for passports and identity cards have been revealed

Nuclear dumping

Dozens of sites are on a previously secret list of places considered as possibly suitable for dumping nuclear waste.

Deathlist

New research on the number of people who die fleeing to Europe

Life on the road

Gypsies talk about how local authorities in the South West are failing them

An Unfair Fight

The ruthless tactics used by some firms to keep trade unions out

Workers of the world unite

Unions are following corporations and going multinational, as Group 4 Securicor discovered during a labour dispute in Indonesia

MI5, Double Cross and the Welsh B&Bs

How the security services planned to keep their German double agents holed up in Welsh hotels in the event of an invasion

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A lack of political will and police resources is allowing the West to loot antiquities wholesale

Prison labour

10,000 prisoners now work for private firms while in prison -and some well known high street names benefit from the cheap labour

Britain's most wanted

Interpol's secretive red notices are only for the most sought-after criminals on the Continent 

A nice little earner

As if fighting crime was not too much of a task, hundreds of police officers have also registered incomes from other businesses as diverse as aromotherapy and children's entertainers.

Vital link

Family Liaison Officers explain how they help distraught relatives of murder victims and aid investigators

DNA trail

The law if failing to keep pace with advances in DNA science

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Down-and-out in Tallinn and Bratislava

To claim state benefits in Britain, you have to navigate your way through a suspicious and largely hostile bureaucracy. With ten new countries now members of the European Union, jobless Phil Chamberlain went to find out what kind of welcome they would give him abroad.

A Walk on the Wild Side

Exploring the hidden history and countryside around the South West's largest shopping centre

The Miners making Bath safe

Dozens of Welsh miners are working beneath the streets of Bath making sure the city remains safe. Phil Chamberlain went to meet them.

Workplace worship

From football stadiums to shopping malls industrial chaplains are bringing the church to unusual places. So who needs ministering on the production line?

Armageddon out of here

Come the fall of civilisation I plan to be prepared

Future imperfect

How the military and big business make use of futurists

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The woman with seven personalities

There is a blink, a little shake of the head and a slight refocus of the eyes. Helen is back. I shake her hand again and introduce myself, again.

Ten minutes previously I had done the same thing but then Helen had been Adam, a chatty 10-year-old boy. Now she is Helen, a quietly spoken 35-year-old who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder or multiple personality disorder.

Life after prison for the innocent

"I don’t want to be here. I’d rather be back in my cell"

For a man who has just been released after seven years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, it’s not the first thing you expect him to say.

Student daze

From film director Alex Cox, to the co-founder of the Rough Guides and the man who put Brittany Spears in a schoolgirl uniform - Phil Chamberlain asks some Bristol and Bath alumni to recall their best and worst student experiences.

The most dangerous country to be a trade unionist

Congressman Wilson Borja, former leader of the Colombia’s main public sector union, has survived numerous assassination attempts and was shot three times in one attack in 2000. He now travels with a retinue of 14 bodyguards.

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Among the many films competing for the Oscars this March there will be plenty involving people at work - but you’re more likely to see a talking lion or a boy wizard than a shop steward. So what is it about unions that cause directors to turn camera-shy?

Top censored stories

A new book lists America's top stories which never made the front page. But what do media professionals in this country think are the great unreported scandals?

Injustice sequel

The makers of an award-winning documentary about deaths in custody, which had to stage underground screenings to beat police lawyers, are making a sequel.

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Small is beautiful

Millions of pounds are being poured by the military into universities to research nanotechnologies with little debate about the outcome or the risks.

I Robot

If you are going to have a laboratory to design the latest robots then the University of the West of England’s Dupont building is what you expect.

Recruiting the computer criminals

The thousands of students start set to start college computer courses are a target for organised criminal gangs.

Who is watching who

Phil Chamberlain meets the people running the thousands of CCTV cameras in the west

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Going underground

Phil Chamberlain looks at the network of bunkers and command centres the MoD keeps buried in Wiltshire

Ready when called

Bob Millard was part of a secret stay behind army set to disrupt the Germans in the event of an invasion

Hot rods

If you regularly travel by train through Bristol then it is likely that, at some point, you would have shared the line with a small but deadly flask of nuclear waste.

Watch the skies

Somerset is the UFO reporting hot spot of the South West according to recently released files from the Ministry of Defence.

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The wild west at the heart of Europe

European Union expansion may have ushered in a bright new future for 74 million people across ten countries, but in Kaliningrad – an obscure slice of Russia cut off from the motherland by Poland and Lithuania, and home to 926,000 Russian citizens – the story is very different. This territory is marooned, surrounded on the west by the Baltic Sea and on all other sides by countries that now belong to both the EU and NATO.

Remembering the Holocaust

Since Latvia, along with Estonia and Lithuania, achieved independence its people have had an ambivalent approach to marking the Second World War. Years of Soviet occupation and a rarely discussed role in the Holocaust have not made it the relatively simple matter it is in this country.

But others do have something to remember. In Liepaja, the tiny Jewish population unveiled its memorial to victims of the Holocaust last June – and the hope is that Latvia will remember a little bit of its past even as it rushes into a bright new future with the European Union.

Hidden deep in the Carpathian Mountains in northern Transylvania, there is little to attract outsiders to Ruscova. 

But one man links this obscure Romanian village with the pomp of 32 Smith Square, London. He is Michael Howard, leader of the Tories and, possibly, the next Prime Minister of Great Britain.

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A nasty taste in the mouth

The organic market is still dwarfed by the ‘regular’ food industry. However the difference is that the annual current growth for all UK food and drink sales is only around three per cent. It means that organic produce is the strongest sector and consumers are prepared to pay a premium for organic produce.

The problem is that where there are profits there are also people willing to cut a few corner and take advantage.

The trade in fake titles

Thousands of people are being conned into buying fake titles that will make them 'Lords'

Location, location, location

Phil Chamberlain hears the horror stories from landlords and tenants on renting in Bath and Bristol

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STDs on the rise

There’s a move in some parts of the medical world to be a bit more cuddly when it comes to the sexual illnesses.

Syphilis, herpes and the rest are no longer sexually transmitted diseases, they’re sexually transmitted infections which is a little less judgemental. Now, some would like to call them sexually shared infections to go that extra, politically correct, mile.

Whether you’ve got a dose of the clap or an SSI you’re not alone – overall infection rates have risen dramatically in the last few years.

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Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Survive

Riot! Civil insurrection  from Peterloo to the present day

Kingdom Come

The strength of the wolf: The secret history of America’s war on drugs and The political economy of narcotics: Production, consumption and global markets

Hollywood politics and society

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