5 live News Specials

5 Live's Laura Whitmore meets Melinda Gates - one of the world’s most powerful women. She’s a former general manager at Microsoft, co chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropist who has helped award grants worth more than 50 billion US dollars to organisations and individuals in 139 countries. We invited an audience of women along to speak to her - all with their own inspirational stories. They spoke about careers, equality, family, society, charity work and much more.

In the autumn of 1962, US president John F Kennedy laid out his ambition for the USA to put the first man on the moon. At the time, it seems, Kennedy already had in mind one particular individual who he wanted to be involved in what he described as "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked". His administration had handpicked a young aeronautical engineer and test pilot from the US Air Force named Ed Dwight Jr to become the first African-American astronaut. Dotun Adebayo speaks to Dwight about his thoughts at the time, space exploration and why after Kennedy’s assassination, Dwight was unable to fulfil the president's ambition.

Andy Woodward was a promising young footballer at Crewe Alexandra when he was groomed and sexually abused from the age of 10 to 16 by the club's youth coach Barry Bennell. In 2016 Andy Woodward decided to go public with his story and in February last year Bennell was jailed for 31 years - but the effect on Andy's life and his family has been profound. He tells his story to 5 Live's Nihal Arthanayake.

To mark D-Day, BBC Radio 5 Live honours some of Britain’s Homefront heroes – the people who made the invasion possible without being on the front line. Chris Warburton has been finding out about the young Bletchley Park code-breaker Mavis Batey, the weather forecaster Group Captain James Stagg and the extraordinary Spanish double agent known to his handlers as Garbo. The podcast is introduced by 5 Live Breakfast's Rachel Burden and Nicky Campbell.

Nihal Arthanayake gets rare behind the scenes access to one of the most secretive establishments in the UK - the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory - which many of us know as Porton Down. It was here that the nerve agent that poisoned Russians Sergei and Yulia Skripal last year was identified as Novichok. He looks at the extraordinary range of things that happen at the DSTL - everything from police work to the armed forces, and new ways to prevent diseases that kill millions of people around the world.