American Vice-President Dick Cheney has walked the corridors of world power for three decades. Cheney’s remarkable life story involves the relentless accumulation of power in every form. Elected for a second term, he continues to be one of the most powerful and well-connected men in the world. The fifth estate will show how he accomplished this, what it involved in terms of costs for others and wh
The 900-day siege of Leningrad created heroes as well as victims, and gave the city a taste for independence. Dr John Barber relives the city’s struggle, and explains why Stalin felt so threatened by the former capital that he purged 2,000 of its inhabitants.Stalin was always suspicious of Russia’s former capital. Its huge cultural, scientific and economic importance, its historical role as t
Episode 1: Island of Marvels Madagascar, the world’s oldest island, broke off from Africa and India and has been on its own for more than 70 million years. In splendid isolation, it has evolved its very own wildlife – more than 80 per cent of it is found nowhere else. And that wildlife is quite extraordinary. In this episode, we reveal the island’s most bizarre and dramatic places, and the unique
Where does one begin with the IRA? In the 17th century with the first Protestant settlers in the Northeast of Ireland? With Patrick Pearse's seizure of the GPO building in Dublin in 1916? With the Partition of Ireland in 1921? With the bombing campaign of the 1950s? In 1968 with the first civil rights marches? With the arrival of British troops on the streets of Belfast and Derry in 1969
Female prisoners experience the liberating effect of creative writing with the help of inspirational poet Leah Thorn. Poet Leah Thorn is writer-in-residence at HMP Bronzefield, a high security women’s prison in Middlesex. Through her workshops we meet a variety of women striving to find a voice through creative writing. Personal histories, emotions and inner conflicts are revealed through their
Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread sent back to be disposed of is enough to supply Austria's second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivation of soybeans to feed Austria's livestock while one quarter of the local population starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated gre
In mid February 2013, the Cecil hotel of Los Angeles received complaints of a peculiar dark tinge to the hotels drinking water. People described how it had a funny taste and a strange odour. One guest even detailed how "the shower was was awful, when you turned the tap on the water was coming black first for two seconds".A maintenance worker was sent to investigate the tanks located on the roo
Scientists behind Sixty Symbols (Ed Copeland, Roger Bowley and Tony Padilla from the University of Nottingham) are doing their best to answer what actually is the Higgs Boson.Named after Peter Higgs, an Edinburgh University physicist, the Higgs boson is crucial to understanding the origin of mass. The Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle
With the Coronavirus death toll now surpassing 1,000 in mainland China it seems only appropriate that we take a look back in time to the year 1918. It was a year that saw the First World War come to an end, millions had died in the European trenches and the world was exhausted by war. However it wasn't long until a new horror gripped the world, it was a terrifying virus that would eventually claim