Columbia space shuttle disaster
The US space shuttle Columbia broke up on its way back to Earth on 1 February 2003. It had been in use since 1981. Iain Mackness spoke to Admiral Hal Gehman who was given the job of finding out what w...
1 Feb 20238min
Czechoslovakia's 'Velvet Divorce'
30 years ago this month, Czechoslovakia split into the separate states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It was a rare instance of a state separating without a single life being lost. Thanks to this...
31 Jan 20239min
Palestine Post bombing
Mordechai Chertoff was the foreign editor on the Palestine Post (precursor to the Jerusalem Post) when it was bombed on 1 February 1948. He tells Lucy Williamson how, despite the attack, the newspaper...
30 Jan 20238min
Invention of the MP3
Professor Karlheinz Brandenburg from Germany spent more than a decade developing MP3 technology, which was developed to convert audio into digital form.He had been working on it since 1982.It compress...
27 Jan 202310min
Albert Pierrepoint: Britain's executioner
Using archive recordings, Alex Last tells the story of Britain's most famous hangman. During the 1940s and 1950s, Albert Pierrepoint was responsible for the execution of some of Britain's most notorio...
26 Jan 20238min
Smolensk air disaster
In 2010, a plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczyński, crashed near the Russian city of Smolensk, killing everyone on board. It was one of the most tragic moments in modern Polish history. Th...
25 Jan 20239min
Japanese death row guard
Yoshikuni Noguchi spent time as a guard in one of the prisons in Japan that would carry out the death penalty, and witnessed the hanging of a condemned prisoner in 1971, before going on to become a la...
24 Jan 20238min
When Britain tried to censor the Troubles in Northern Ireland
Frontman of punk-rock band The Undertones, Paul McLoone, recalls the “weird, slightly funny, slightly sad, slightly surreal” time he was the voice of IRA commander-turned-politician, Martin McGuinness...
23 Jan 20239min
