Anorexia nervosa
The American singer, Karen Carpenter, died in 1983 of anorexia nervosa. She was one half of a world famous brother and sister duo called The Carpenters. She was aged just 32. Up until then anorexia ne...
29 Mar 202110min
South Africa takes on big pharma
At the end of the 1990s, tens of millions of people across Africa had been infected with HIV and in South Africa hundreds of thousands of people were dying from AIDS. People were demanding cheaper dr...
25 Mar 20218min
The woman who got America talking about sex
Dr Ruth Westheimer first became popular on a radio show in New York in the early 1980s. Her frank and open approach to giving advice on all sorts of different questions about sex soon made her a TV pe...
24 Mar 20218min
Jamaica’s ‘drug lord’
The Jamaican government issued a warrant for the arrest and extradition of the drug lord Christopher Coke, otherwise known as “Dudus” in May 2010. The United States wanted him extradited to face char...
23 Mar 20218min
The Ulster Workers' Strike
An early attempt at power-sharing in Northern Ireland ended after protestant workers went on strike and bomb attacks killed dozens in the Republic of Ireland in 1974. Matt Murphy has been hearing fro...
22 Mar 20218min
The dirtiest chess match in history
In 1978, the World Chess Championship between the Soviet champion and convinced communist, Anatoly Karpov, and the dissident and defector, Viktor Korchnoi, turned into one of the most infamous clashes...
19 Mar 20219min
Mars-500 isolation experiment
In 2010, six men were locked inside a simulated spacecraft on earth for 520 days. It was part of an experiment to see how humans would cope if cooped up together for the duration of a potential trip t...
18 Mar 202113min
Alva Myrdal - the woman who made modern Sweden
In 1982, the Swedish social reformer, writer and diplomat, Alva Myrdal, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on nuclear disarmament. She was only the 7th woman in history to win the award, w...
17 Mar 20219min
