Saturday Morning for Saturday 10 April 2021

 

8:10 Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, dies aged 99

Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh has died at nearly 100 years of age.  So if you think he'd been around forever, he pretty much had! 

Victoria Arbiter who happens to be the daughter of long time royal reporter Dickie Arbiter, is herself a royal commentator based in the United States. 

The Prince, she says, had been ailing for a while now so his death comes as no great surprise.

8:20 Aye Min Thant: Myanmar in Crisis

On the 1st of February Myanmar's military carried out a coup, seizing control of the country, undoing a democratic election in which Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party won by a landslide.

In the weeks since, the Burmese people, including healthcare workers and civil servants have expressed their discontent through peaceful protest and mass civil disobedience.

Million of workers have gone on strike with the hope of putting financial pressure on the military rulers.

As of the end of March, at least 520 civilians, including children, have been killed by military or police forces and at least 3,070 people detained.

Aye Min Thant is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has covered business, politics, and conflict in Myanmar, Thailand, and the United States.

They most recently worked at Phandeeyar, a Yangon-based NGO, leading a team promoting social cohesion in Myanmar through digital and media literacy education.

 

8:53 Chris Smith: Covid science update

Cambridge University consultant clinical virologist Dr Chris Smith discusses further news on the suspected link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots; new variants; and Russia’s COVID-19 defence may depend on a mystery vaccine from a former bioweapons lab – but does it work?

9:05 Lisa Genova: The science of memory, and the art of forgetting

Neuroscientist Lisa Genova explores how memories are made and retrieved  in her new book Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting.

She looks at whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day).

Lisa Genova says memory is profoundly impacted by meaning, emotion, sleep, stress, and context: we remember what is meaningful and what we paid attention to – but our memories are faulty and we still don't remember most of our lives.

9:35 Darren Byler: Big Brother vs China's Uighur

Constant surveillance, cultural suppression and 're-education' are a day-to-day reality for the approximately 12 million Muslim minority Uighur people who live in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of northwest China.

Activists and UN rights experts accuse China of using torture, forced labour and sterilisations. China denies rights abuses in Xinjiang and says its camps provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism.  

Technology has become a cornerstone of the government's control methods. Uighur are required by the police to carry their smartphones and IDs listing their ethnicity and are tracked by face surveillance checkpoints located at jurisdictional boundaries, entrances to religious spaces and transportation hubs. 

University of Colorado anthropologist Darren Byler has been researching and writing about Uighur dispossession and also edits the website: The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia

10:05 John Baker: The search for Stalin's wine cellar

The hunt for a wine collection believed to have been hidden in a remote Georgian winery during the Second World War is at the centre of a new book, Stalin's Wine Cellar.

First owned by Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, and later by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the collection is estimated to be worth millions of dollars.

Sydney based John Baker was a hotelier and rock 'n' roll promoter in the 1980s era of Midnight Oil, INXS and Cold Chisel before becoming a wine merchant and importer. He is the co-author of Stalin's Wine Cellar.

10:30 Georgia Rippin: The world of online sex work

Georgia Rippin (Tainui, Ngāti Mahuta) is a New Zealand writer and television producer based in New York where she works on programmes for Netflix and Showtime.

Her early productions, including Dislawderly and The Do Not Enter Diaries were broadcast as web series.

Georgia is now making Girls Girls Girls, a documentary about women working in the online sex industry.

11:00 Poet Johanna Emeney: exploring the felt realm

Poet Johanna Emeney says that Felt, her new collection of poems, explores teaching, animals and how emotions and “the things that have hit me hard over the past decade” are felt in the body. Johanna Emeney teaches creative writing at Massey University and co-facilitates the Michael King Young Writers Programme.

11:40 John Cockrem: Little penguins with big problems

"He kororā, he tohu oranga:  the little penguin is the sign of life".

This whakataukī, that the success of kororā populations indicates the health of the coastal marine environment, underpins John Cockrem's work.

The professor of comparative endocrinology in the School of Veterinary Science at Massey University monitors nestbox colony study sites at Napier Port, Port Tarakohe in Golden Bay and Mana Island off the Porirua coast.

The studies of breeding success and foraging of kororā provide insight into what is happening out at sea.

He's witnessing first hand the threats that dog predation, plastic pollution and climate change related food shortages are having on Kororā.

 

Books mentioned in this show:

Remember: The science of memory and the art of forgetting
By Lisa Genova
ISBN: 9781761101205
Published by Simon & Schuster Australia

Stalin's Wine Cellar
By John Baker & Nick Place
Viking Australia
ISBN: 9781760893132

Felt
By Johanna Emeney
ISBN: 978-0-9951407-1-4
Published by Massey University Press

Music played in this show

SONG: Cloudbusting
ARTIST: Kate Malco