Saturday Morning for Saturday 1 May 2021

8:10 Shoba Narayan: India in crisis

All across India, a trail of death and misery is devastating the country and pushing the overburdened healthcare system towards collapse.

Oxygen and medicine are in short supply as the nation deals with a reported 18 million Covid-19 cases, and more than 204,000 deaths.

Author and journalist Shoba Narayan joins us from Bengaluru (Bangalore) to discuss the politics behind the crisis.

8:30 Janey Godley: Scotland's feuding nationalists

Comedian Janey Godley won a huge following last year for her irreverent voice-over videos of Scotland's first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, during Sturgeon's coronavirus briefings. In 2016 a photo of her standing outside Donald Trump's Turnberry Golf resort holding a sign stating "Trump is a C***", went viral.

Scots go to the polls for the Scottish Parliament election on May 6 and the stakes are high as the Scottish National Party aims to control the devolved parliament and make another push for independence while former SNP leader Alex Salmond has started his own party, Alba, which will potentially split the nationalist vote.

 

Warning: contains obscenity

 

9:05 Patrick Radden Keefe: the Sackler family's opioid "Empire of Pain"

In the last 20 years, nearly 500,000 Americans have died from an opioid overdose making the drug the leading cause of accidental death in the country.

Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story of how the Sackler family became a decisive force in this national tragedy In his new book Empire of Pain.

The super-rich family is known for its lavish donations to the arts and the sciences, but the source of the family fortune turned out to be the opioid painkiller Oxycontin.

For years, their company Purdue Pharma had been in the news for creating Oxycontin - the powerful painkiller whose introduction in 1996 ushered in a new era of both pain management and opioid addiction.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, as well as The Snakehead, and Chatter. He also created and hosted the popular podcast Wind of Change.

10:05 Nicole Perlroth: the Cyberweapons Arms Race

In her new book, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, Nicole Perlroth, the cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter for the New York Times exposes threats posed by an international market in cyberweapons.
 
For decades the US government has been collecting "zero days", a software bug that allows a hacker to break into and silently spy on a computer or device, paying hackers for their code.

This has fostered a global market in computer hacks that are now being used against the country. A high profile example last year involved a foreign hack of American tech firm Solar Winds, which then spread the virus to its clients, including huge corporations, the Pentagon, and other government agencies.

Nicole Perlroth has covered Russian hacks of nuclear plants, airports, and elections; North Korea's cyberattacks against movie studios, banks and hospitals; Iranian attacks on oil companies, banks and the Trump campaign; and hundreds of Chinese cyberattacks, including a months-long hack of the Times.

Perlroth is a guest lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a graduate of Princeton University and Stanford University.

10:40 Mark Chapman: lockdown in Mongolia

Kiwi Mark Chapman is a teacher at the International School of Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia. He is in his ninth lockdown and separated from his wife and children who are in Aotearoa.

He has weathered a freezing winter with air quality he describes as “apocalyptic” and now he’s feeling the pressure: his job ends in mid-June at which point his visa runs out and he loses his apartment – but there are no flights to be had. Home seems a long way away.

11:05 Lydia Wevers: Shining light on the life of Jane Mander

Jane Mander is best known for her 1920 novel The Story of a New Zealand River, widely thought to be the underlying narrative for Jane Campion's film The Piano.

The daughter of an MP, sawmiller and newspaper owner, she became the editor of the Dargaville Times before working as a journalist in Sydney in 1910 then travelling to New York to study at Columbia.

Mander was a suffragette and a free thinker who wrote against New Zealand's prevailing puritanism and repressive culture.

Literary historian and critic Lydia Wevers is presenting a talk on Jane Mander at Featherston Booktown on 8 May.

11:40 Stephen Curran: Star ovens and mass extinctions

Kiwi-Scottish starman Dr Stephen Curran returns by popular demand to unpack cosmic goings-on.

This week: how all the iron in your blood came from a massive star which lived and died before the Sun even formed, plus he debunks a recent report of a colossal solar flare potentially causing a mass extinction.

Dr Stephen Curran is a senior lecturer in astrophysics at Victoria University

Books mentioned in this show:

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
By Patrick Radden Keefe
ISBN: 9781529062489
Published by Picador

This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
By Nicole Perlroth
ISBN: 9781635576054
Published by Bloomsbury

 

 

 

 

Music played in this show

Song: Step In
Artist:Cedric Burnside
Played at 9:05

Song: Stop this Flame
Artist: Celeste
Played at 11:30