Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchNuns killed in Algeria
In the early 1990s, Algeria was engulfed by a brutal civil conflict, as armed Islamist groups fought the state and civilians lived in fear. Foreigner…
1 month, 3 weeks ago
The origins of World Press Freedom Day
In April 1991, journalists from 38 African countries came together in Namibia for a week-long seminar to discuss the need for a free, independent and…
1 month, 4 weeks ago
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' relati…
1 month, 4 weeks ago
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 Universi…
2 months ago
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 C…
2 months ago
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 an…
2 months ago
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 r…
2 months ago
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 fou…
2 months ago
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 woo…
2 months, 1 week ago
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 i…
2 months, 1 week ago