Inside the Cuban thaw
On 17 December 2014, United States president Barack Obama and the leader of Cuba, Raúl Castro, announced the normalisation of their countries' relations, ending 54 years of hostility.The announcement ...
30 Apr 10min
Peter Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment
In 1971, the region that is now Bangladesh fought for independence from Pakistan. At the time, Peter Singer was a philosophy lecturer at the University of Oxford. Horrified by the suffering in Banglad...
29 Apr 10min
Car-free Sundays during the global oil crisis
In October 1973, the Netherlands was the only western European country to face a full oil embargo from the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, OAPEC.During the global oil crisis, they ...
28 Apr 10min
The world's first perfume archive
On 26 April 1990, the world's first perfume archive opened in Versailles, France.The idea behind L'Osmothèque was to create a collection of scents and preserve their memory.Perfumer Jean Claude Ellena...
27 Apr 10min
The Tabasco floods
In 2007, the Mexican state of Tabasco experienced its worst flooding in 50 years, with more than a million people affected. Eighty per cent of the region was under water, with people having to be res...
24 Apr 10min
The clean-up of Chernobyl
The disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Ukraine, on 26 April 1986, was the world’s worst nuclear accident. The explosion in reactor four caused radioactive parts to be spread over the ne...
23 Apr 10min
Canada's war in the woods
In 1993, plans to log one of Canada’s ancient rainforests sparked the country’s largest act of civil disobedience. It was known as the war in the woods. For months, protesters blocked a remote logging...
22 Apr 10min
Europe’s long drought of 2011
In 2011, after months of little or no rain in central and eastern Europe, water levels on some parts of the Danube River fell to their lowest level in 70 years.It’s one of Europe’s busiest shipping ro...
21 Apr 9min
