Crossing Continents Folgen

After the terror attacks in Paris, the world's attention turned to an inner-city district of the Belgian capital, Brussels, where several of the attackers came from. Molenbeek has been notorious for many years as a breeding-ground for Islamist extremism - and the Belgian government vowed to "clean it up". But do the authorities really have any plan to prevent the radicalisation of young Belgians? Tim Whewell has been travelling back and forth to Brussels since the Paris attacks to talk to local people as they hold up a mirror to themselves and search for explanations - and attempt to have a dialogue with a sometimes dysfunctional state. Lode Desmet producing.

Brazil is in crisis. Confronted with a massive downturn in the economy, its currency has crashed, while its political class sinks in a quagmire of corruption allegations linked to the state oil company, Petrobras. In the northern state of Maranhao - dominated for decades by the powerful Sarney family - a new governor from the Communist Party of Brazil is attempting to bring a fresh broom to one of the country's most undeveloped states. Already he claims to have cut expenses by millions of Reals just by removing seafood and champagne from state banquet menus. But the malaise runs deep in Maranhao. In the small community of Bom Jardim, a 25-year-old mayor is under house arrest accused of skimming the education budget and running council business remotely using WhatsApp. And with the cancelling of a project to build a huge Petrobras refinery, Maranhao is feeling the economic pressure. Linda Pressly reports from one of Brazil's least known regions.

A fuzzy team photo from the 1980s sends Tim Whewell on a journey to track down football players from a small town in northern Syria who were once the champions of Aleppo province. In the last four years of war their hometown, Mare'a, has become a war zone - bombed by the Assad regime, besieged by Islamic State, subject even to a mustard gas attack. And the civil war has torn through what was once a band of friends - some now pro-rebel, some pro-regime. They're scattered across Syria and beyond, some fighting near Mare'a, some in refugee camps abroad. What have they gone through since they won that cup? And do they think they can ever be reunited? Shabnam Grewal producing.