Dateline: Mar 6
Dateline's video journalists travel to the United Kingdom to report on student protests and discontent.
- Published by David Knox
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This Sunday, Dateline’s video journalists travel to the United Kingdom to report on student protests and discontent, and also report from South America and Haiti.
Winter of Discontent
The streets of central London have become a battleground for the economic future of a nation. The battle is over the largest cuts to public spending in decades as the UK government tries to slash one of the biggest deficits in Europe. Amid widespread protests and discontent, video journalist Evan Williams has been to meet some of the people worst affected.
He joins students on the streets of London, where violent demonstrations over university fee increases and cuts in education spending have hit the headlines.He then travels to the north of England and meets people already struggling, who are now facing cuts to welfare benefits and community services, and even the prospect of losing their homes.
With echoes of the 1978-1979 Winter of Discontent in Britain, could it become a Summer of Rage? Or is it necessary pain to ensure the country’s future economic prosperity?
Happy Juice
Western tourists are travelling from all over the world to a remote part of the Peruvian jungle in search of a ‘magical potion’ they hope will change their lives.
Video journalist Giovana Vitola joins them in their search along the Amazon River for Ayahuasca – a drink made from local plants administered by Shamans, and credited with curing conditions such as depression, alcoholism and drug addiction.
She meets some of the people, including some Australians, who now make a living in the jungle, extolling the virtues of the plant-based brew to tourists and guiding them through their hallucinations and sickness to what they hope will be a better life.
But the medical community is more sceptical, dubious about the benefits and concerned about the physical and mental side effects.
Haiti Cholera
When Dateline reported on the cholera outbreak in Haiti last year, it had left 300 dead. Now, over a year on from the 2010 earthquake 4,500 have been killed, and up to 200,000 could be infected. Reporter Alexis Monchovet recently traveled to Haiti, to report on the impoverished country’s latest crisis.
The quake left hundreds of thousands homeless and living in filthy camps, where poor sanitation has created a fertile breeding ground for the disease.He finds a desperate battle not only to try and treat people, but to clean up water supplies and provide education about a disease, which some are still unaware of.
Dateline airs Sunday at 8.30pm on SBS ONE.
One Response
This episode is a pretty good one. The situation in the UK is a dissastrous one. This story really emphasises how fortunate in australia we really are to be able to still learn and study and not have to worry so much about the huge cost of education. My prediction is that if Britain wheather this storm and get out of it without debt they will have alot of poor homless angry people perfect breading ground for a revolution of some kind. The British Government better fix their finances properly because if they dont it could happen again. We could be seeing more british imigrents as a result of this measure. As far as the story goes about happy juice i think anything which is new and hpefully safe is worth a try. The Drug coompanies have a n absolute death grip on the western nations and any alternative to them is a good one. People have to understand that their are plants and nuts and fruits and vegetables which can do the same thing as manufactured drugs wehich in most cases are just as dangerous.