Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week from the 1970s did astronauts

down tools in space?

They interpreted it down there as a strike

and we were not going to talk to them.

Very tense two orbits that we had discussions with them.

Were we spelled our frustrations, ain't there's?

Plus, we've got the author of a 1970s book that predicted the end of civilization, starting,

oddly enough, in 2020.

Using our computer model, growth continues through until about 2020. Using our computer model, growth continues through until about 2020, at which point you begin

to see serious problems and finally there's overshoot and decline.

We'll join the team that successfully sequenced the Ebola genome in 2014 and is this the oldest later in the podcast, but we begin in the has taken steps to carry out more federal executions before he leaves office,

but the broader picture shows the actual number of executions carried out across the US

has been falling in recent years. However, more than 2,000 prisoners remain on death row.

Ibi Caputo has been looking at one particular case from the 1990s.

It's the story of a death row inmate, Frankie Parker, who in confronting his own mortality,

turned to Buddhism and became something of a cause-celeb.

I'm pretty rare in the Buddhist community.

I mean, here's a death row inmate, a Buddhist. That's kind of like a virgin prostitute. They're very rare.

In 1984, Frankie Parker, who was addicted to drugs and alcohol and going through a bitter divorce,

kidnapped his ex-wife and murdered her parents.

He also shot and injured his ex-wife and a police officer.

...