logo
episode-header-image
Jan 2021
52m 6s

Buddhist on Death Row

Bbc World Service
About this episode
How US inmates turned to Buddhism to face execution in 1990s Arkansas, and we look at the history of the death penalty in the US with Prof Vivien Miller. Plus, the truth of a space "strike", the 70s book that predicted global decline in 2020, sequencing the Ebola virus and we hear the world's oldest song. Photo: Anna Cox and inmate Frankie Parker. 
Up next
Yesterday
The evacuation of Tristan da Cunha and Japan surrenders to China at the end of World War Two
Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We start with a BBC archive interview where one woman recounts what it was like to survive the earthquake and landside in 1961 following the volcanic eruption in Tristan da Cunh ... Show More
59m 50s
Oct 4
India's nine day tea strike and the birth of the Excel spreadsheet
Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes.Tea expert Sabita Banerji talks about the history of tea in India. We look back at how women teapickers in 2015 fought for justice - and improved the lives of thousands of tea plantation workers.We hear the ... Show More
59m 20s
Sep 27
The origins of Indian cinema and the start of Scouting
Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes taking us from India to Texas. Professor Sunny Singh, author of A Bollywood State of Mind, discusses the origins of Indian cinema in 1912. And we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of Bollywood ro ... Show More
1 h
Recommended Episodes
Jan 2023
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 lawyer. He describes in detail what he saw. Yoshikuni began speaking out to cast l ... Show More
8m 57s
Nov 2020
The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin | 36
At the beginning of the 1990s it seemed as if the world was taking a new turn toward peace. Germany was reunited, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and an historic peace deal was reached between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Middle East Peace Agreement, signed in 1993 ... Show More
37m 55s
Mar 2020
The Ebola virus
Some 300 people died during the first documented outbreak of the deadly disease occurred in the 1970s in the Democratic Republic of Congo - then known as Zaire. The virus was named after the river which flowed close to the village where it was discovered. Two doctors, Dr Jean Jac ... Show More
8m 57s
Jun 2022
The killing of Vincent Chin
In June 1982 a young Chinese-American engineer was murdered with a baseball bat by two white men in the US city of Detroit. The lenient sentences the perpetrators received sparked an Asian-American civil rights movement with protests across the US. At the time, America was going ... Show More
12m 25s
Apr 2023
Branch Davidians Revisited @ 30
It's been 30 years since the deadly stand-off in Waco, Texas that killed 75 people, including 25 children. Among the dead was David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians, one of several Doomsday cults that made news at the end of the 20th century. On this episode of History ... Show More
44m 6s
May 2021
The trial of South Africa’s 'Dr Death'
The trial of a South African doctor accused of multiple murders under the Apartheid regime. Wouter Basson, nicknamed 'Dr Death' by the country’s media, was alleged to have run a secret chemical and biological weapons project in the 1980s to eliminate perceived enemies of the gove ... Show More
9 m
Aug 2020
Surviving Saddam
Zainab Salbi grew up in the inner social circle of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in the 1980s because her father worked as Saddam’s personal pilot. It was a world of apparently glamorous parties on the River Tigris, but where the slightest falling-out with the dictator coul ... Show More
9 m
Listen to millions of songs and podcasts on Anghami