In October 2023, for the first time in the history of the Catholic Church, women were allowed to participate in and vote at the Synod of Bishops, a religious gathering that had previously been reserved only for bishops. The landmark event came amid calls from feminists in many countries for the ordination of women priests and a more inclusive Church. Since the 11th century, only men have been allowed to be ordained as priests and perform the sacraments.

The US-Mexico border is the most dangerous land frontier in the world, according to the United Nations, but it's also the one with the most crossings. Since January 2023, 2.3 million migrants have been apprehended by border police after entering the United States illegally, an all-time high that does not include migrants who got through without being arrested or taken charge of, or those who died trying to cross. The situation has become unmanageable for Texas border towns like Eagle Pass,...

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has made saving the Amazon rainforest – now a key condition for a trade deal between the EU and South America's Mercosur bloc – a priority for his government. A year after Lula came to power, his gamble has paid off: deforestation has been halved in the Amazon. But this success comes at the cost of sacrificing another ecosystem that's just as vital to Brazil: the Cerrado. This savanna has already lost half of its natural vegetation due to intensive...

Thirty years ago, more than 800,000 people were killed during the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. Among them were several dozen members of Dafroza Gauthier's family. A few months later, the young woman and her French husband decided to track down those suspected of taking part in the mass slaughter who had taken refuge in France. Journalists Thomas Zribi and Stéphane Jobert followed the Franco-Rwandan couple in their quest for justice. They bring us this special 52-minute documentary.

UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, is on the brink of collapse. Since the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, the agency has come under suspicion, accused of being too close to the terrorist acts of Hamas. Many donor countries have suspended their financial contributions as a result. Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of UNRWA, is fighting body and soul for its survival. For one month, our reporters followed him across the...

From the post-war period until the mid-1980s, thousands of children were forcibly taken from their young Belgian mothers and sold to adoptive families by Catholic institutions. Today, many victims are desperately trying to trace their origins and demanding answers from those responsible for this scandal. Our correspondent Alix Le Bourdon reports from France and Belgium.

In Iran, the death of 22-year-old student Mahsa Amini triggered an unprecedented uprising that is still having repercussions. Arrested on September 13, 2022 by Iran's morality police for wearing an "ill-fitting" headscarf that did not fully cover her hair, Amini died three days later in hospital, provoking a wave of anger and protests across the country. A new generation of women is now daring to defy the mandatory Islamic veil law imposed by the mullahs. Who are these young women ready to...

Long dominated by the United States, the Asia-Pacific region is grappling with an increasingly assertive China. Tensions are mounting around Taiwan and in the South China Sea, both in the air and on the water, with numerous incidents of late involving Chinese fighter planes, collisions between ships and reefs being turned into military outposts. Filmed in Japan, China, Taiwan and the Philippines, our documentary explores a new "cold war" pitting President Xi Jinping's authoritarian China...

More than two decades after prostitution was legalised in Germany, the issue is once again sparking debate. The conservative opposition in parliament is campaigning to reform the 2002 law that made sex work legal. Former chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party claims that the goal of improving the situation of sex workers and curbing human trafficking has not been achieved – rather the reverse. According to several studies, the overwhelming majority of women working in prostitution in Germany...

Located one hour from Madrid, the Toledo Training Command centre is one of the largest military training centres in Europe. Hundreds of Ukrainian civilians who have volunteered to head to the front are training there as part of the EU Military Assistance Mission in support of Ukraine (EUMAM), set up in October 2022. Spain is one of the EU's key training providers, having already trained 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers. FRANCE 24's Rémi Cadoret, Armelle Exposito and Bertrand Aguirre report.

Our reporter Constantin Simon managed to secretly enter Myanmar, where he filmed the fighting between the rebels and the ruling junta. He also followed a rebel commander. FRANCE 24 brings you his exclusive 25-minute report.

In the run-up to February 7 presidential elections, repression has increased in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic in the Caucasus that borders Iran and Armenia. Any opposition to President Ilham Aliyev is silenced. Human rights activists, journalists and political opponents are on the receiving end of the regime's wrath on a daily basis. Our reporters Karina Chabour and Roméo Langlois met victims of torture who are denouncing a violent system of repression. They also looked into the...

Some men and women decide to spend their lives together despite knowing from the outset that they have almost nothing in common. More and more South Korean men are finding their wives abroad, be it in Vietnam, China or Thailand. These multicultural partnerships are a response to a national crisis: South Korea's low marriage rate. Our reporters travelled to Vietnam and South Korea to investigate.

Norway has just authorised commercial deep-sea mining on its seabed, which is rich in rare and precious metals. This announcement has whetted the appetite of mining companies, which are developing robots and drones to collect the rocks, located at a depth of 3,000 metres. Billions of euros are at stake in the exploitation of these so-called critical minerals, which are essential for building electric vehicle batteries and solar panels. But deep-sea mining could prove devastating for ecosystems.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a team of archivists has been tirelessly sorting, pasting and reassembling documents that were destroyed by the Stasi, the East German secret police. Nicknamed the "Puzzle Women", these heroines of collective memory face the Herculean task of piecing together these files: the paper fragments are sometimes tiny, and the number of archivists is only a fraction of what would be required to complete the job without recourse to new technology. Meanwhile,...

Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, is facing increasingly strong opposition inside the Vatican. The conservative clan of the Roman Curia – the powerful governing body of the Holy See – accuses him of a laxist vision of Catholic doctrine, particularly regarding the status of homosexual couples and divorced people in the Church. Our Rome correspondent Natalia Mendoza reports from the Vatican’s corridors of power on this growing conflict between tradition and modernity.

While the world's attention is focused on Israel's devastating war in Gaza, violence is also taking place every day in the occupied West Bank. Our senior reporter Roméo Langlois has been to West Bank villages that are regularly the scene of raids by extremist Jewish settlers against Palestinians. Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, this violence has escalated, sometimes with deadly consequences.

In this award-winning documentary entitled "N'en parlons plus" ("Forget About It"), we follow a young Frenchwoman's journey to find out the painful truth about her family history. When Sarah became a mother, she decided to break the silence surrounding her family's past. Her grandfather was a Harki, an Algerian who fought alongside the French army during the Algerian War. After Algerian independence in 1962, the whole family fled to France. But instead of being welcomed with open arms, the...

Since the start of Sudan's brutal civil war in April, mass killings of civilians have been perpetrated in the West Darfur region. Our team investigates atrocities committed against the local Masalit ethnic group.

Forty years ago, on October 15, 1983, a handful of young people set off from the southern French city of Marseille on a long march north to Paris. They were demanding equal rights and a stop to racist crimes blighting France at the time. By the time they reached the French capital on December 3, they were flanked by tens of thousands of demonstrators. FRANCE 24 brings you a special 50-minute documentary looking back at this historic event and its legacy.

FRANCE 24 brings you the stories of people on the front lines of climate change. From Kenya to Panama via Greenland and Australia, our reporters James André and Achraf Abid went to meet the Indigenous people who live in harmony with nature and whose daily lives are being turned upside down by global warming. Don't miss our series of four special reports. In this last episode, we take you to Panama.

FRANCE 24 brings you the stories of people on the front lines of climate change. From Kenya to Panama via Greenland and Australia, our reporters James André and Achraf Abid went to meet the Indigenous people who live in harmony with nature and whose daily lives are being turned upside down by global warming. Don't miss our series of four special reports. In this third episode, we take you to Australia.

Ten years ago, French radio journalists Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon were murdered by a commando from al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in the north-eastern Malian town of Kidal. Since then, the security situation in Africa’s Sahel region has continually worsened. Today, the vast area stretching from Mauritania to Sudan has become a no man's land for journalists, a black hole for news.

FRANCE 24 brings you the stories of the people who are on the front lines of climate change. From Kenya to Panama via Greenland and Australia, our reporters James André and Achraf Abid went to meet the Indigenous people who live in harmony with nature and whose daily lives are being turned upside down by global warming. Don't miss our series of four special reports. In this second episode, we take you to Greenland.