The Last Days of Yasser Arafat
The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in November 2004. French doctors treating him at the military hospital in France where he died said Arafat had an unidentified blood disorder and gave the cause of death as a stroke. Since then there have been allegations that he was poisoned. Leila Shahid was the Palestinian ambassador to France in 2004, and was with Yasser Arafat during his final days. She's been talking to Louise Hidalgo about that time.Picture: Yasser Arafat attending Friday prayers at his headquarters in Ramallah a year before his death (Credit: Antoine Gyori/AGP/Corbis via Getty Images)
22 Marras 20189min
The Story Behind The Man Who Shot JFK
What did Lee Harvey Oswald do for two years in the Soviet city of Minsk? And why did the American authorities let him return without any fuss in 1963? A few months later he would be arrested for shooting the US President. Vincent Dowd has been listening to archive accounts of Oswald's time in the USSR and speaking to Anthony Summers who has written about the assassination of President Kennedy.Photo: Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22,1963, during a press conference after his arrest in Dallas. Credit: AFP/Getty Images.
21 Marras 20189min
The 'Braceros', America's Mexican Guest Workers
During the last years of World War Two, the American government began hiring poor Mexicans to come to work legally on US farms. The scheme was known as the 'Bracero' programme and lasted until 1964. Mike Lanchin presents archive recordings of some of those involved in the programme, using material collected by the University of Texas at El Paso. Photo: A group of Mexican Braceros picking strawberries in a field in the Salinas Valley, California in June 1963 (Getty Images)
20 Marras 20189min
The Funeral of the Duke of Wellington
A man recorded by the BBC shares his memories of the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. The Duke was given a state funeral after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. The British General was credited with preventing Napoleon Bonaparte from establishing a European empire. Frederick Mead was just five when he went with his parents to watch the funeral procession go by.PICTURE: The Duke of Wellington. Oil on canvas (photo by Imagno/Getty Images)
19 Marras 201811min
Britain's Little Blue Disability Car
For decades disabled people in the UK were offered tiny, three-wheeled, turquoise cars as their main form of transport. They were known as Invacars and they were provided, free of charge, to people who couldn't use ordinary vehicles.They were phased out in the 1970s because they were accident-prone and people were given grants to adapt conventional cars instead. Daniel Gordon has been hearing from Colin Powell, who was issued with his first Invacar at the age of 16.Photo: an Invacar. Credit: BBC
16 Marras 20189min
Japanese Murders in Brazil
When WW2 was over, a fanatical group of Japanese immigrants living in Brazil refused to believe that Japan had lost the war. They decided to punish their more prominent compatriots who accepted that Japan had lost. The extremists killed 23 people. Aiko Higuchi remembers the tragic day in February 1946 when her father became their first victim.Photo: Some members of Shindo Renmei (Tokuichi Hidaka is the first from the right) in picture taken by Masashigue Onishi in Tupã, state of São Paulo, Brazil, in the beginning of 1946, before the killings. Credit: Masashigue Onishi/Historical Museum of Japanese Immigration in Brazil
15 Marras 20189min
The Shah in Exile
In November 1979, Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran after Washington agreed to allow the deposed Shah into the US for medical treatment. It would be more than a year before the US embassy hostages were released and the crisis irreparably damaged American-Iranian relations. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to diplomat Henry Precht, head of the Iran desk at the US state department during those tumultuous months who argued against letting the exiled Shah enter America.Picture: protestors in New York demonstrate against the admission of the Shah of Iran into a New York hospital (Credit: Michael Norcia/Sygma/Getty Images)
13 Marras 20189min
Jewish in Imperial Russia
Pearl Unikow was a young woman who grew up in a segregated Jewish community in Russia before WW1. Her stories, recorded in Yiddish in the 1970s, provide a rare account of traditional Jewish life. Her granddaughter Lisa Cooper wrote a book based on those recordings. Dina Newman has been listening to the tapes and spoke to Lisa Cooper. Photo: Pearl Unikow (in the middle of the back row) with her cousins, circa 1920. Credit: family archive.
13 Marras 20188min
