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Perhaps it is no surprise that our programme Stem Cells and Miracles drew a passionate response from viewers given the film's emotive subject. We received emails from people suffering long-term illnesses now considering the controversial treatment which remains unproven. We also heard from people who have visited clinics, paying thousands of pounds to doctors promising a cure. Below are just some of the comments we received, giving a flavour of the debate surrounding stem cell therapy, and there's more :

"A brilliant programme, many thanks. My wife had a brain stem stroke, aged 23, in 2000 and we are hopeful and confident that one day there will be stem cell treatment to make her well. These charlatans taking people's money and trampling on hopes and dreams should be outlawed UNTIL they can prove their claims in medical journals and to reputable medical centres. One day stem cell treatment WILL be mainstream and then my wife and I can go forward. Until then, thanks to Panorama and the like, showing these disgraceful mercenaries for what they are."
- Aaron Broome

"I watched Panorama tonight on stem cell treatment and felt it was a little negative. This weekend we decided to raise £11,000 to take our daughter to Germany's Xcell-centre to receive stem cell transplantation for her condition, Cerebral Palsy. We are more than happy for you to follow our story as it is different to the one televised in that the Centre we are attending is a registered clinic backed by the German government."
- Sarah Westcott

"I would like to say that as a former patient of the Beike company in China (twice) I received 4 injections of stem cells which I felt helped my illness which is hereditary ataxia SCA1 for around 10 months before I felt some ailments coming back. The second time I had 6 injections which has lasted over 1 year. I now feel some symptoms coming back? I am a 39-year-old man and went over there very open minded about it all as I have lost a lot of family members through this illness and found that it improved some things in the illness (not all!) some. So it annoys me that even if people feel better for the treatment these professors need a piece of paper to prove it? I have spoken to 3 other patients with the same illness as me and all told me the exact same results as me? Anyway good programme and let's hope it pushes this corrupt government into doing something faster as most people want."
- Brian MacNeill

"I have to say I'm disappointed on the program that aired. The program, I feel, was completely negative. The illnesses that stem cell therapy claim to help are so very devastating that most people who suffer from them are scrabbling for any hope that there may be some form of cure available. It also makes me angry that western medicine dismisses foreign treatment when the UK or the US refuse to even research into domestic stem cell treatment. I am frustrated as Panorama failed to show any positive results for this treatment that would allow people to make an almost informed decision. I understand that it is not a scientifically proven procedure however I ask is there any evidence to prove it does not work. I feel the program makers have a responsibility to show "the other side" of this treatment where positive results have been shown."
- Jaemey Stewart

Another week and another heated topic - . It has certainly kept the nation talking with and provided plenty of material for comedians and alike. So, Panorama decided to marry the very serious subject of the use of taxpayers' money with a bit of tongue-in-cheek treatment by appointing our very own MP for Panorama, Shelley Jofre, in Is your MP working for you?
Shelley's manifesto? To investigate how much money she can bring in without breaking the rules. Of course Shelley's change of career is entirely fictional, but the funds she found available to real MPs are not. This leads us to question whether MPs' expenses are just the tip of the iceberg. Certainly, major is now on the agenda.

Following the issues raised in Panorama's Is Your MP Working for You?, you can check up on your Member of Parliament and see what they have been doing, what they have been spending and who else they might be working for.

´óÏó´«Ã½ News Online has prepared a detailed list of what each MP has spent using the Additional Costs Allowance system. Just and search by your own constituency to find out more.

The Register of Members' Interests is also available online. you will find details of outside, paid employment by your MP and, as of August 2008, MPs were required to also register which family members they employ using their staffing and office budgets. They are not, however, required to release salary information.

The Code of Conduct for all MPs is set out .

Among other things, it clearly states that "members have a duty to uphold the law and to act on all occasions in accordance with the public trust placed in them".

The Code outlines in detail the seven general principles of conduct in public life. They are selflessness, objectivity, leadership, integrity, accountability, openness and honesty.

To find out more about the principles of public life, as prescribed by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, you can watch former chair of the committee, as he discusses what they mean and how the ongoing expenses scandal has seen them violated.

A range of MPs and outside observers have offered their views on how the system can be best reformed. Some of those interviewed by Panorama express their views

A broader look at what has been proposed in recent weeks, along with a range of opinions sent in by you, can be seen

Is Your MP Working for You?, Monday, 25 May, ´óÏó´«Ã½ One at 8.30pm, or on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

The MPs' expenses uproar continues to dominate the news, with attention turning now from the revelations to the mop up operation.

On the one hand, there has been damage control - scores of MPs writing cheques to pay money back, some MPs suspended, others no longer able to stand in the next election. Perhaps the biggest casualty of all, Speaker Michael Martin, is standing down after intense pressure and criticism over his handling of the situation.

Read today's latest story

On the other hand, Gordon Brown has announced "big changes" to centuries of parliamentary history and an end to the approach to how members rule themselves.

Unsurprisingly, the toll this has all taken on Westminster's reputation has been huge, but it is not as though MPs have been immune to scandal in the past.

The wave of sleaze scandals in the 1990s, primarily surrounding Tory MPs Nigel Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken, led then Tory Prime Minster John Major to ask Lord Nolan to clean up politics.

Nolan's came up with seven principles of public life which all MPs were encouraged to follow. They are: Integrity, selflessness, objectivity, leadership, openness, accountability and honesty.

While the backlash looks set to rumble on for a long time to come, here at Panorama we are interested to know where expenses fit into those principles of public life.

Despite what may have been good intentions, Sir Alistair Graham told Panorama that for many, expenses were seen as a nice little extra benefit on the side:

"I think [MPs] developed this culture of it's alright to fleece the allowance system because we're badly paid. I think they were given a nod and a wink by whatever prime minister or chief whip to say, 'well look if you're struggling a bit, well you know, use the allowance system to do the best you can.'"

This all begs the bigger question on MPs' behaviour in general. We will be looking beyond the expenses row, to other areas of MPs' working lives. In this new climate of transparency - and public scrutiny - which facets of public life might an angry electorate consider to be 'dishonourable' conduct, whether or not they fall, technically 'within the rules'?

Watch Is Your MP Working for You? Monday, 25 May, ´óÏó´«Ã½ One at 8.30pm.

Several Panorama programmes, some recent and others stretching back several months, were back in the news over the past few days. Among them is - the nurse who was struck off the register last month for secretly filming care of the elderly for Panorama at the Royal Sussex County Hospital - is to appeal against the decision taken by the

The domestic security service did not have the manpower to do extra checks on the 7 July ringleader before he led the attacks in central London in 2005, a report has said.

But the declined to criticise MI5, which it said had other priorities.

With the lifting of reporting restrictions in April 2007, revealed the truth about what MI5 really knew about the London bombers.

In The Six Billion Dollar Man Panorama explored how Sir Allen Stanford has yet to face charges for the multi-billion dollar fraud he has been accused of carrying out by US regulators.

Last Tuesday, we learnt that the chief investment officer at the Stanford Financial Group, Laura Pendergest-Holt, has been with conspiring to obstruct the American investigation into the firm.

The SEC, the financial watchdog, has described the alleged fraud at Stanford Financial Group as a "fraud of shocking magnitude".

Our programme You Can Run... investigated how much information is held on the nation's adults, and how difficult it is to run away from the data trails we leave in our wake.

Now, with the launch of , England's children will have nowhere to hide.

The controversial allows the details of 11 million children and young people aged up to 18 years to be accessed by professionals, in order to see which other services and people were in contact with a child.

The government says it will enable more co-ordinated services for children and ensure that none slip through the child safety net. The chief executive of children's charity Barnardo's welcomes this as a way of making it easier to deliver better co-ordination of services.

And as the fall-out of Baby P's appalling death continues, has said it is "truly sorry Peter suffered and died", after the found that a catalogue of failings by the NHS meant a series of opportunities that could have saved the toddler's life were missed.
Read more .

The man once described as Westminster's "sleaze watchdog" has told that MPs' abuses of their expenses amount to a failure of moral leadership that has changed political life in the UK forever.

"It has been depressing to see such a failure of moral leadership," said Sir Alistair Graham, former chair of the .

Sir Alistair's comments came in an interview with Panorama as part of an ongoing investigation into the MPs' expenses scandal that has engulfed British political life in recent weeks.

Sir Alistair left his job in 2007 of the need for a wide-ranging "ethics package" aimed at cleaning up the public's poor image of their elected representatives to Parliament.

Speaking to Panorama, Sir Alistair said the already low level of trust that the public has for politicians has been further diminished by the scandal.

Sir Alistair said ongoing surveys of the public mood reveal that the trait they most seek in their politicians is honesty and a willingness to admit mistakes.

Sir Alistair also warns that the deepening scandal could open the door for extremist parties in Britain to gain a toe-hold in mainstream politics.

"I think that because people have lost so much trust in the mainstream parties, in what they see as a crucial area of their behaviour, it creates an opportunity for those on the fringe, on the extreme, to make themselves more credible as politicians and therefore for people possibly to elect them."

He also said the practice of allowing MPs to use their housing allowance for mortgage interest should be ended completely, with the allowance only available for rent for suitable accommodation near Westminster - in keeping with the spirit of the housing allowance.

"If you've got a case for a second property because you are a long way from Westminster...tell us what arrangements you want to put in place. If it involves renting some property then we'll pay for that rent for as long as you need it."

Sir Alistair said it is obvious that the amount of effort that was being put into buying, repairing and then selling taxpayer-funded properties and pocketing the profits was time and effort that should have been spent fulfilling their duty to their constituents.

And it is this apparent abandonment of their duty to taxpayers - the seven principles of public life set out by Sir Alistair's predecessor, Lord Nolan, - that Sir Alistair feels is at the crux of the unfolding scandal.

Those principles are objectivity, selflessness, integrity, leadership, honesty, openness and accountability.

"I think you could pick any of those principles out and they've been breached in the way that Members of Parliament have behaved - not all - but a fair number have behaved
in dealing with their expenses."

While Sir Alistair said he believes that Westminster will get through the current crisis, he tells Panorama that the Parliament that will emerge needs to be "radically different".

"We'll get through this expenses business and then we have to see have they really got the insight now into what the public want from their politicians and ensure that it effects all of their behaviour not just in the narrow area of expenses."

To find out more about what the Panorama team has found, watch Is Your MP Working for You?, Monday, 25 May, ´óÏó´«Ã½ One at 8.30pm.

The man once described as Westminster's "sleaze watchdog" has told Panorama that MPs' abuses of their expenses amount to a failure of moral leadership that has changed political life in the UK forever.
"It has been depressing to see such a failure of moral leadership," said Sir Alistair Graham, former chair of the committee on standards and public life .
Sir Alistair's comments came in an interview with Panorama as part of an ongoing investigation into the MPs scandal that has engulfed British political life in recent weeks.
Sir Alistair left his job in 2007 warning of the need for a wide-ranging "ethics package" aimed at cleaning up the public's poor image of their elected representatives to Parliament.
Speaking to Panorama, Sir Alistair said the already low level of trust that the public has for politicians has been further diminished by the scandal.
Sir Alistair said ongoing surveys of the public mood reveal that the trait they most seek in their politicians is honesty and a willingness to admit mistakes.
Sir Alistair also warns that the deepening scandal could open the door for extremist parties in Britain to gain a toe-hold in mainstream politics.
"I think that because people have lost so much trust in the mainstream parties, in what they see as a crucial area of their behaviour, it creates an opportunity for those on the fringe, on the extreme, to make themselves more credible as politicians and therefore for people possibly to elect them."
He also said the practice of allowing MPs to use their housing allowance for mortgage interest should be ended completely, with the allowance only available for rent for suitable accommodation near Westminster - in keeping with the spirit of the housing allowance.
"If you've got a case for a second property because you are a long way from Westminster...tell us what arrangements you want to put in place. If it involves renting some property then we'll pay for that rent for as long as you need it."
Sir Alistair said it is obvious that the amount of effort that was being put into buying, repairing and then selling taxpayer-funded properties and pocketing the profits was time and effort that should have been spent fulfilling their duty to their constituents.
And it is this apparent abandonment of their duty to taxpayers - the seven principles of public life set out by Sir Alistair's predecessor, Lord Nolan, - that Sir Alistair feels is at the crux of the unfolding scandal.
Those principles are objectivity, selflessness, integrity, leadership, honesty, openness and accountability.
"I think you could pick any of those principles out and they've been breached in the way that Members of Parliament have behaved - not all - but a fair number have behaved
in dealing with their expenses."
While Sir Alistair said he believes that Westminster will get through the current crisis, he tells Panorama that the Parliament that will emerge needs to be "radically different".
"We'll get through this expenses business and then we have to see have they really got the insight now into what the public want from their politicians and ensure that it effects all of their behaviour not just in the narrow area of expenses."
To find out more about what the Panorama team has found, watch Who is Your MP working for? Monday, 25 May, ´óÏó´«Ã½ One at 8.30pm.

The tragic life and death of Baby P dominated Panorama's week as we broadcast our second film of further revelations.

The programme team uncovered news that which could have potentially saved Baby P - now known of course as Peter - were revealed by his own mother on videotape in the presence of a social worker - but never passed to police.

Baby Peter's mother told a social worker about a new man in her life just a few months before the child died. That man, her 32-year-old boyfriend, was found guilty of causing or allowing the toddler's death.

The appalling circumstances of Peter's death - he had more than 50 separate injuries and had been seen on at least 60 occasions by professionals during the eight months he spent on the child protection register - have led to a huge fall-out.

Last Wednesday, the Children's Secretary, Ed Balls announced a series of an extra £58m to be put into the recruitment and retention of social workers and allowing members of the public to sit on child protection boards. These changes follow Lord Laming's report into child protection in England.

The announcements were not without criticism. Though welcoming the extra money, the Association of Directors of Children's Services, said it was disappointing that there was not more money for immediate frontline services.

Perhaps not surprisingly at this time of heightened sensitivity, Friday also saw news of a in England. Figures for March were the highest ever recorded with some experts saying that this may be related to the Baby P case.

Panorama's NHS whistleblower Margaret Haywood was backed by Health minister Ben Bradshaw who condemned the decision by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) to strike her off.

Ms Haywood secretly filmed problems with the care of the elderly at the Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton in July 2005 for Panorama Undercover Nurse and was found guilty of misconduct following a fitness to practise hearing in April.

Mr Bradshaw echoed the Royal College of Nursing's statement that the decision was "unduly harsh".

Ms Haywood is currently considering an appeal.

The move towards a came a step closer on Wednesday with Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's announcement that Manchester will start a pilot scheme this autumn where anyone over 16 in the city will be able to sign up for a card.

Elements of the controversial scheme were addressed in Panorama's film You Can Run... broadcast in September last year. Reporter Simon Boazman investigated how much information was held on him and how secure it was. The results of the investigation surprised even him:

One of the played out this week with news that the last surviving member of the board which oversaw the bank's ill-fated expansion is set to retire.

Deputy chief executive Gordon Pell will retire early next year with a pension pot worth £9.8m.

Panorama looked at the RBS story in March with the film What Happens After Sorry? asking what went wrong and who was to blame?

The RBS needed a £20bn bailout from the government and thousands of shareholders lost life-savings leaving the bank's then chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin to apologise to a select committee - an apology which did little to dampen public anger.

Sharp eyes and minds on the forum spotted that the Panorama 1964 film on Mods that we posted on the web team blog last week wasn't in fact the full film.

No need for conspiracy theorists to get to work, we simply thought the three minutes or so we posted would give people their fill. Not so it appears, so by way of apology here's some more of that film. Hope you enjoy it.

After making a Panorama film, "Destination Europe", Paul Kenyon's sense of injustice at the plight of migrants trying to reach Europe fuelled his writing of a book about one man's harrowing story.

I am Justice: A journey out of Africa "carries the agony and hope of Africa in every page" according to the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Fergal Keane and here Paul Kenyon tells us why he felt compelled to write the book:

"It sounded Biblical: 27 men shipwrecked in hostile seas, men-eating fish, a tempest, hymns and prayers bellowed to the moon.

I was on the Mediterranean making a Panorama about the most dangerous migration route in the world, and we'd tracked down a group of survivors with an extraordinary story.

I didn't know it then, but it would come to occupy my life for the next two years.

It all began in the summer of 2007, when a picture was flashed around the world of a group of in the middle of the Med. They were fully clothed, some in coats and jeans, others in tracksuits, but there was no clue as to how they'd arrived, or how they could possibly escape.

I took the image to the editor of Panorama, who commissioned a programme straight away.

It turned out the men had set off from Ghana, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, crossing the Sahara desert, and heading northwards to the coast of Libya.

Once there, they'd made contact with a gang of people smugglers who'd packed them into a makeshift boat, and told them Europe was only a matter of hours away. Days later, having run out of food and water, their boat had capsized alongside a fishing net.

One of the men was called Justice Amin.

I interviewed him for the Panorama programme after he was rescued and airlifted to Italy. He was suspicious and guarded, but there was a spark there, a spark of defiance and menace and a fierce untamed intelligence.

Over the months that followed, I kept in touch, and his story gradually began to unfold; the grim and monotonous poverty of his single room shack in Ghana, how he'd been abused by his medicine-man uncle, his capture and torture in a Libyan jail.

On occasions he was in tears down the phone.

The Panorama programme did well, but I couldn't shake off my sense of injustice.

Every year thousands attempt the journey from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. We've grown accustomed to their images, even desensitised; a series of blank faces being led away by Italian police or hauled into lifeboats.

I decided to write the book to fill in behind those faces, to give them a history, a family, ambition and purpose.

I hope we can see a little of ourselves in there.

But beneath it all is a grim undertow, the one I've felt ever since meeting Justice Amin two years ago, and it comes in the form of a question: if I was faced with such grinding poverty, would I have the courage to do the same?"

Pakistan has been back in the headlines with news last week of . The government said the action was taken to push out militants and block routes that linked to Taleban controlled areas.
Panorama's Jane Corbin visited the troubled region late last year for Britain's Terror Heartland. On the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan she met people fighting on both sides - those in the Pakistani army as well as would-be suicide bombers.
On her return Jane blogged about coming face to face with young men willing to give their lives for their cause. She was surprised to find how vehement the hatred could be, but also how easy it was to exploit young minds.

Welcome news last week that Panorama's Britain's Homecare Scandal has resulted in an investigation into the .

MSPs are to look into the practice of that the programme revealed were used to award contracts to the lowest bidder.
South Lanarkshire was one council featured in the programme that was using this system. Panorama went on to reveal that the provision of elderly care in the area raised serious concerns which the council is now investigating.

As Panorama returns with more revelations in a on the appalling death of Baby P, a look into the archive shows that, unfortunately, we have been in this situation before.

The refrain is all too familiar: a child dies in appalling circumstances, social workers and the authorities are publicly criticised and wholesale changes in child protection are called for.

This was certainly the pattern when in April 1974, Panorama investigated the physical abuse of children, reporting on the estimated two deaths per day in the UK of children at the hands of adults.

The film was made in the aftermath of the death of seven-year-old Marie Colwell, who died in January 1973 after a sustained period of violence at the hands of her step-father despite repeated calls to social services that she was being abused.

As well as the Colwell case, the film also looked at the tragic deaths of several other children who had been known to the authorities and tried to ask what can be done to offer children real, tangible protection. In this clip, Marjorie Turner, the-then chief nursing officer in Ealing, London, spoke to Julian Pettifer about the need to protect children.

Marie Colwell's death caused a national outcry and the report which followed in effect created the modern child protection system much of which we still know today; such as the child protection register, recently revised and renamed as the Integrated Children's System and the creation of the cross-party case conference system.

Over thirty years on, following the deaths of countless children - some of them familiar names, many simply just a statistic - and the subsequent official reports and inquiries, Children's Secretary Ed Balls is determined to make a difference.

He says he moved quickly to send in to review Haringey's child protections. He also requested a and set up a looking into the pressures facing front line social workers, a change in the culture in children's services, bolstered inspections and more support for the profession.

He told Panorama: "Will it bring back the little boy who died in Haringey? No, I can't do that. But can we try to make sure that we don't repeat that kind of tragedy in the future? Yes, we can."

There are many great British bank holiday traditions; determined but ultimately doomed DIY projects, staring from stationary car windows in lengthy traffic jams or simply avoiding the predictable rain.

One tradition though which has largely been consigned to history is the invasion of south-coast seaside resorts by teenage youth cults; namely the Mods and Rockers.

The seaside battles between the sartorially elegant and their leather-clad rivals fuelled much sensationalist media coverage in 1964.

As news of the fighting and arrests filtered out, these youngsters found themselves at the .

In fact, the Easter weekend shenanigans were pretty much the over a drug-taking, mindless, violent youth.

Of course there have been quite a few scares since.

Newspaper headlines from March 1964 screamed 'Wild ones invade seaside' and '97 leather jacket arrests; youngsters beat-up seaside' as fighting broke out in Clacton-on-Sea.

The trouble caused enough outrage for Panorama to investigate the groups and work out whether this would be become a regular feature of future bank holidays.

The results were strikingly candid; providing a snapshot of working-class youth at the point where deference to the establishment was beginning to wane.

The Mods preached a hedonistic take on life; enjoying drugs, music, clothes and violence to a lesser or greater degree and set a blueprint for many a youth tribe to follow.

The Rockers seemed more about .

Perversely for a group with an anti-establishment reputation, the Rockers citied Mods lack of education and class as factors behind their behaviour. The reality though was that both groups were predominantly working-class.

The battles may have ceased almost as quickly as they began; but they have become the stuff of legend, immortalised in the album, film and now stage play .

But as with any legend, it has tarnished a little over the years amid claims that many seaside punch-ups were actually .

Both groups still thrive today albeit in smaller, underground circles. Yet witness singer Amy Winehouse's plentiful tattoos or the resurrection of the Rockers haunt the in north London, or the continued vogue for modish Fred Perry clothing and their mainstream influence is still evident today, although the violence is thankfully consigned to the past.