Beth Rodden escaped her kidnappers, and pushed her body to its limit, following the climber code of whatever hurts makes you stronger. She married her boyfriend Tommy Caldwell, who had saved them by pushing their captor off a cliff in the Kyrgyz mountains. They became the first couple to free climb the Nose in Yosemite National Park. To the world she was a record-breaking athlete, but inside she was crumbling, haunted by that moment in the mountains. It would take her 15 years to face it head on, and in doing so she redefined what it meant to be a climber.

Beth's book A Light Through the Cracks: A Climber's Story is out now.

Clips are from NPR and the Associated Press.

Presenter: Emily Webb

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Beth Rodden was on a dream climbing expedition in Kyrgyzstan when she was kidnapped by Islamist militants. She and her friends spent days moving between hiding places in the mountains, fearing for their lives as food supplies dwindled. Then, six days in, the group found themselves at the edge of a cliff with a single young guard. They had a chance to escape, but it came with a huge ethical dilemma.

Presenter: Emily Webb

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Audio for this episode was updated on 6 June 2024.

Setsuko Thurlow knows what nuclear war looks like.

She was a 13-year-old schoolgirl when an atomic bomb was dropped on her home city of Hiroshima, Japan. Most of the places she knew were destroyed in an instant. Narrowly escaping death herself, Setsuko became a witness to the aftermath of atomic warfare, and the things she saw that day would compel her to spend her life fighting for nuclear disarmament.

Archive was from British Pathé

Presenter: Jo Fidgen

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

In 2016, when Jenny Söderqvist and Helene Åberg’s car exploded in the middle of the vast Kalahari desert, their supplies and only lifeline to the outside world went up in flames. No rescue would come. The two friends from Sweden would spend the next five harrowing days lost in the wilderness and stalked by lions, until their salvation appeared to them in the most unlikely of forms: a tin of Spam.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Mistaken for a terrorist, and detained without trial. Art became his refuge.

Pakistani taxi driver Ahmed Rabbani was arrested in 2002, labelled a terrorist and spent 21 years in US detention, including time in a CIA secret prison. Incarcerated without trial or charge, Ahmed was subject to enhanced interrogation, or what he describes as 62 different types of torture. When he was transferred to a cell in Guantanamo Bay, Ahmed would pick up paint and pastels and find solace through art – creating vistas he could only imagine.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

On the day his mother disappeared in December 1989, 11-year-old Collier Landry started looking for evidence.

He suspected his father, a rich and well-respected town doctor, had something to do with it. This is the story of Collier's fight to get justice for his mother, and the detective who believed him.

Collier's film is called A Murder in Mansfield.

Presenter: Asya Fouks

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How Ustad Noor Bakhsh, a Pakistani shepherd in his 70s, became a folk music star

After hunting for four years, Pakistani ethnomusicologist Daniyal Ahmed finally finds Ustad Noor Bakhsh, an elderly shepherd and master of the electric benjo – an obscure stringed instrument with typewriter keys. With Daniyal’s help, Ustad Noor would go from serenading his goats in the jungles of Balochistan to performing for revellers on the European festival circuit.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

The epic quest to find an elderly Pakistani musician and his unusual stringed instrument

Daniyal Ahmed is a flute player and anthropologist who spends his time searching out and documenting folk music across Pakistan. In 2018, he was mesmerised by a video clip of an elderly man – described as a “poor fisherman” – expertly playing a benjo, an obscure stringed instrument that looks like a cross between a guitar and a typewriter. So began Daniyal’s hunt for this mystery master musician.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Erika Cheung went from a trailer park to a top tech company job, but something was off.

She knew how to work hard, growing up in a one-bedroom trailer, she dreamed of pursuing her passion for science and helping others. So Erika was thrilled to land her first job out of university at a booming tech company promising a revolution in healthcare. Fronted by the glamorous and wealthy Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos claimed to have the technology to be able to tell from a few drops of blood whether someone had a range of diseases. That was not true. And it took Erika, one of their most junior employees, to blow the whistle – at great personal risk.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Maria's grandmother was forcibly taken by Australian officials, but made a daring escape.

As children Maria Pilkington's mother and grandmother were both among the Stolen Generation, removed from their homes to be trained as domestic servants for white families. It was part of an Australian policy dating back to the 1930s to remove mixed-race children from any Aboriginal influence. But Maria's 14-year-old grandmother escaped, with her sister and cousin, by following a pest-control barrier that went right through Western Australia back to their home. The girls' extraordinary three-month, 1400km walk home became the Hollywood film Rabbit-Proof Fence, based on a book written by Maria's mother.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen