Witness History

In Bolivia, on 25 October 1984, President Hernán Siles Zuazo announced he was going on hunger strike. He was trying to stop the booming cocaine industry in his country. It was the second time he had taken the job of president and he had been on hunger strike several times before. His daughter Marcela Siles, tells Laura Jones about her father.(Photo: President Zuazo. Credit: Getty Images)

For two years, José Luis Peñas risked his life making secret recordings that revealed one of Spain's biggest corruption scandals.It forced the ruling party from power and brought down Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in 2018.José Luis Peñas speaks to Ben Henderson.(Photo: Mariano Rajoy (right) moments after resigning. Credit: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Pool via Getty Images)

On the 11 January 1998 in Mumbai, India, the first World Laughter Day took place.It was the idea of Dr Madan Kataria, a medical doctor who wanted to test the theory that laughter is the best medicine.He tells Gill Kearsley how this unusual event started. (Photo: World Laughter Day in Mumbai in 2016. Credit: Arijit Sen/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

In 1970, Natalia Makarova became the first female ballet star to defect to the West from Russia.The dancer claimed asylum during a UK tour, nine years after another Russian dancer, Rudolf Nureyev, had defected.Natalia later joined the American Ballet Theatre in New York. She wouldn’t return to her home country for almost 20 years.Jane Wilkinson has been looking through the archive to discover the reasons behind her defection.(Photo: Natalia Makarova in New York, 1980. Credit: Brownie Harris/Corbis via Getty Image

The fate of Louis-Charles, son of the last king of France, was for years shrouded in rumour.The little boy was said to have died in prison in 1795. But for years, rumours spread that he had been swapped with an imposter.It wasn't until a team of scientists took DNA samples from the heart of the imprisoned boy in 2000 that the mystery could be laid to rest.In 2021, Prof Jean Jacques Cassiman and historian Deborah Cadbury told Claire Bowes about the extraordinary tale.(Photo: Drawing of Louis-Charles being separated from his mother Marie Antoinette in 1793. Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

On 1 April 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage.Four couples were chosen to take part in a collective wedding at midnight which was broadcast on TV.Hélène Faasen and Anne-Marie Thus tell Dan Hardoon about the wedding they thought they'd never have. (Photo: The four happy couples cut the cake. Credit: Marcel Antonisse/ANP/AFP/Getty Images)

On 13 March 1989, the Canadian province of Quebec suffered a nine-hour electricity blackout. Much of the state's infrastructure was damaged, but the power companies couldn't find any obvious cause. Physicist Aja Hruska was one of the only people in the country that knew the answer to Quebec's problem. A solar flare ejected by the sun had hit the earth's magnetic field, creating electrical havoc.And the damage could have been avoided if her warnings had been properly acknowledged. Aja shares her memories of that day with Eva Runciman.(Photo: A solar flare erupts from the sun. Credit: Photo 12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

In 1937, the Hindenburg airship burst into flames during its mooring in New Jersey, in the US, killing 35 of the 97 passengers and crew.

The wingsuit is the ultimate in extreme sports clothing. The aerodynamic outfit allows base jumpers and skydivers to free-fall for longer before opening a parachute.The road to creating it was littered with casualties, but in 1999 skydivers Jari Kuosma and Robert Pecnik developed the first commercial wingsuits.In 2019, Jari told Jonathan Coates how exciting, but also how dangerous they can be.(Photo: Jari in his wingsuit. Credit: BBC)

In 1985, British scientists made what would turn out to be one of the most important environmental discoveries of the 20th century - finding a hole in the earth’s ozone layer.The British Antarctic Survey, based in Cambridge, had been monitoring ozone levels for more than 30 years using the Dobson Ozone Spectrophotometer.But it was only when they compared previously uncharted figures from the 1980s with the previous decade that they made the shocking finding, as Jonathan Shanklin, the man who compiled the data, told Jane Wilkinson.(Photo: Ozone hole in September 2006. Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)