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 coming up in this edition 30 years on

We recall one of the biggest charity events ever held.

They're not just holding hands, they're stretching them.

4,200 miles, 4 time zones, across 2 deserts and 2 mountain ranges.

Also, we join a Chechen separatist leader

lured into the Kremlin for peace talks.

We remember the Ethiopian Jews airlifted to Israel in the 1990s and using contemporary archives the execution of Anne Berlin

second wife of the English King Henry the 8th.

It was a scandal of Europe. It was commented on across all the courts of Europe because of the charges against

her adultery with five men plotting to kill the king.

That's all to come and as you can tell from that list, we are as ever using a mix of first-hand recollections and documented

contemporary writings. We begin though with a story which for those directly

involved is of the most personal nature and one which is still being directly felt and lived by many

thousands of people around the world.

This is the story of Thalidomide.

Once marketed in the late 1950s as a sort of wonder drug to deal with insomnia and anxiety, it was

also said to cure mourning sickness in pregnant women.

The tragic consequences, though, were that thousands of babies were born with serious

often fatal physical defects. It became a global health scandal, but it wasn't

until May 1968 that employees of the German Pharmaceutical Company, Grunntal, went on trial over the production

of the drug Thalidomide.

...