Revolutionspodcast.com continues with the history of the Mexican Revolution. In Episode 9.11 Not Quite President Madero, Francisco Madero has seen off Porfirio Diaz, but he hasn’t yet been elected in his own right. He thought that it would be a shoo-in, but all of a sudden all these other contenders come out of the woodwork. And (spoiler alert!) after finally being elected, in episode 9.12 No Peace, he finds that incumbency doesn’t necessarily mean that your problems are over.
BBC Outlook has some interesting true stories, often (but not always) related to crime. In The Fraud and the Missing Boy, a private investigator has his suspicions when missing American schoolboy re-appears after three years. His family is overjoyed…but is this really a happy ending?
The History Hour. A one-hour program contains about four stories of events from history, told from an eyewitness perspective. Vera Brittain: Anti-Bombing Campaigner has five very different stories. Vera Brittain wrote Testament of Youth, her autobiographical account of World War I. But this is about World War II, when she spoke out against the saturation bombing of Germany. There’s also a segment on the Omagh bombing in Ireland in 1998, the biggest single atrocity in the Troubles, killing 29 and injuring some 220. It also looks at the arrival of television in South Africa in the 1970s, going straight to colour, the African-American photographer whose coverage of Martin Luther King’s funeral won him a Pulitzer Prize, and the invention of the instant noodle.
WWI: Britain’s Conscientious Objectors examines the treatment of Britain’s First World War conscientious objectors. It also revisits the nuclear weapons inspections in Iran, the CIA’s first coup in Latin America in Guatamala in 1954 from the point of view of the son of deposed president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, what happened to Eastern Europe’s dancing bears, and the culling in Wales of a sacred bull.
Rough Translations This American program produced by NPR looks at an American issue from the perspective of somewhere else in the world. But this time is really IS about translation, because the episode The Apology Broker looks at the concept of “sorry” and the way that it is interpreted in different languages. Japanese has many gradations of “sorry” and they came into focus when a Japanese woman living in America orchestrated an apology from the Mitsubishi company to one of the few living POWs who were sent to Mitsubishi as slave labour during WW2. It’s a really good episode.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 