Tsunamis and Caster Semenya
The History Hour23 Des 2023

Tsunamis and Caster Semenya

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.

This week, we hear from Lumepa Hald who survived the devastating tsunami that hit Samoa in 2009 but suffered a tragic loss.

Our expert guest, Prof Tiziana Rossetto, looks back at some of the worst tsunamis in history and how they have shaped our landscapes.

Plus we talk to Caster Semenya, the gold medallist who faced questions over her gender at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.

There’s also an interview with Peter Greste, one of three Al Jazeera journalists sentenced to seven years in jail in Egypt.

We also look at the mystery surrounding the death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda with his driver, Manuel Araya.

And finally we talk to singer Dafydd Iwan, the “bad boy of Welsh politics”, who was arrested for defacing an English sign. He wanted official recognition for the Welsh language.

Contributors: Lumepa Hald – survivor of the tsunami that hit Samoa in 2009. Tiziana Rossetto - Professor of Earthquake Engineering at University College London, UK. Caster Semenya – world champion runner who faced questions over her gender. Peter Greste – journalist sentenced to seven years in prison in Egypt. Manuel Araya – driver of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Dafydd Iwan – singer who campaigned for official recognition the Welsh language.

(Photo: Devastation at a beach in Samoa after the 2009 tsunami. Credit: Getty Images)

Episoder(467)

The Oka Crisis

The Oka Crisis

A watershed moment for Canada's indigenous people as Mohawks take on the developers, the birth of UKIP in Britain, memories of the poet Irina Ratushinskaya who died earlier this month - plus dance music with ballet star Nureyev's defection and illegal raving in England's countryside.(PHOTO: A Mohawk activist confronts a soldier. Credit: IATV NEWS)

15 Jul 201750min

The Roswell Incident

The Roswell Incident

In July 1947 a US rancher found some debris in the New Mexico desert - did it come from an alien spacecraft? Witness hears from the son of one of the US servicemen who investigated the incident, and from Dr David Clarke, expert on UFO history at Sheffield Hallam University.Plus the first Tamil suicide bombing; a hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure discovered in an English field; a sex scandal in the USSR during perestroika; and the first non-stop journey around the world in a hot air balloon.PHOTO: Major Jesse Marcel at Fort Worth, Texas with balloon debris from the Roswell incident - copyright Alamy

8 Jul 201750min

The History of Modern Tourism

The History of Modern Tourism

In a tourism special we look at the original low-cost transatlantic airline, based in Iceland, the 1960s Hippie trail. Also the journey that led to the best selling Lonely Planet travel guides, political tensions caused by a luxury resort on the Red Sea and how Disney came to Europe.(Photo: An Icelandic Airlines advertisement from May 1973, in New York's Fifth Avenue (US National Archives)

2 Jul 201750min

Italy's Secret "State-within-a-State"

Italy's Secret "State-within-a-State"

Murder and conspiracy among Italy's elite, an Italian atrocity in 1930s Ethiopia, Christians in the Korean War, Japan hosts the first Body Worlds, and Asian Americans struggle against racism and violence in the 1980s. Photo: Robert Calvi, head of Banco Ambrosiano, who was convicted of fraud but released on appeal shortly before his murder (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

24 Jun 201750min

The Woman Who Stopped Equal Rights in America

The Woman Who Stopped Equal Rights in America

Phlyllis Schalfly, the woman who defeated a law to guarantee gender equality in the US; plus, the first performance of the Beatles hit "All You Need Is Love", a forgotten WW2 disaster, Berber rights in Algeria, and the volcanic eruption on the island of Montserrat.PHOTO: American political activist Phyllis Schlafly smiles from behind a pair of podium mounted microphones, 1982. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

17 Jun 201750min

The Six Day War 1967

The Six Day War 1967

Soldiers from both sides on the battle for Jerusalem; plus Robert Kennedy's assassination, the child who fought slavery in Pakistan, and the cousin of Anne Frank Photo:Israeli forces advancing in the Sinai desert during the Six-Day War, June 1967. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

10 Jun 201750min

Operation Lifeline: Canada's Refugee Revolution

Operation Lifeline: Canada's Refugee Revolution

How private citizens in Canada sponsored Vietnamese boat-people. Plus the first ever charity rock concert for Chernobyl, the actor who stared in a Hitchcock murder movie, America's first ever female rabbi and Mr Sanitation brings clean toilets in India. Photo: A Vietnamese boat crowded with refugees runs aground on the Malaysian coast. 1979 (BBC)

3 Jun 201750min

Brown v The Board of Education

Brown v The Board of Education

The 1954 US Supreme Court ruling that led to the end of racial segregation in US schools, the Iranian woman protestor whose death on film shocked the world; the start of the worldwide dieting franchise, Weight Watchers and who was Alexander Hamilton?(Photo African American student Linda Brown, Cheryl Brown Henderson's eldest sister (front, C) sitting in her segregated classroom.Credit: GettyArchive)

20 Mai 201751min

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