Emperor Haile Selassie overthrown
Haile Selassie was Emperor of Ethiopia. His dynasty ruled for centuries, supposedly descending from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In 1974 he was overthrown in a coup by a Marxist-Leninist milit...
9 Sep 20249min
Giant Gonzalez: from NBA star to WWE wrestler
In 1988, Jorge Gonzalez was a basketball star in Argentina and became the first athlete from this country drafted by an NBA team, the Atlanta Hawks. He was over 2.5m tall due to gigantism, which led t...
6 Sep 20249min
Apollo 13
On 13 April 1970, a Moon mission almost ended in tragedy, after an explosion on board the spaceship.Fred Haise was one of the Apollo 13 astronauts. In 2010, he spoke to Richard Howells about how they ...
5 Sep 202410min
The end of the Irish marriage bar
Until 1973, married women in Ireland were banned from working in state jobs.It was one of the longest lasting marriage bars in the world.Rachel Naylor speaks to Bernie Flynn, who postponed her wedding...
4 Sep 202410min
Ramesses II's 'mummy makeover'
In 1976, the 3,000-year-old mummy of Ramesses II was found to have a fungal infection.The embalmed body of the Egyptian pharaoh was flown from Cairo to Paris for a once-in-a-deathtime makeover.It rece...
3 Sep 20249min
I led the 'Umbrella' protests
On the 26 September 2014 Nathan Law stood on a makeshift stage outside Hong Kong's central government complex and chanted ‘Democracy Now’ and ‘Freedom’ into a microphone.He was leading hundreds of pro...
2 Sep 20248min
The woman who spoke to the space station
Amateur radio enthusiast Maggie Iaquinto spent a year trying to make contact with Russian cosmonauts on the Mir space station using special equipment. It took careful planning as she had to know when...
30 Aug 20249min
Guatemala's disappeared
More than 200,000 people were killed during Guatemala's 36-year civil war between the military and left-wing rebels which ended in 1996. Of these, an estimated 45,000 people were forcibly disappeared,...
29 Aug 20249min
