Samoa and Niue are setting dates to open their borders for the first time since March 2020, as studies are assessing the impacts of COVID on the region's health systems.

Night owl Carol Dix loves driving 1800 kilometres a week delivering The Waikato Times. It's a seven day a week job, and Carol says she can't remember the last time she had more than four days off in a row. The paper is currently celebrating 150 years in print. Carol talks to Kathryn about the nocturnal nature of the job and what she encounters on the roads.

Growing numbers of young New Zealanders are heading overseas as the borders open. But will a pandemic OE be slightly different?

Film and TV correspondent James Croot joins Kathryn to talk about the Yellowstone prequel 1883 (Amazon), a new series starring Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston called The Essex Serpent (Apple+), a new comedy in cinemas called Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and a series coming to TVNZ called The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe.

Neuroscience educator Deb Rewiri says it has never been so important to get on board with traditional Māori parenting practices. Help is at hand to take whanau back to when a village raised the children. Deb tells Kathryn about a whanau support initiative called Tākai which embraces mātauranga Māori and indigenous parenting approaches.

Cyber-security expert Tony Grasso joins Kathryn to talk about the new spear-phishing email doing the rounds from Chinese state-sponsored hacking group Override Panda. He'll also look at how Russian hacking group, Cozy Bear, has been targeting diplomats around the globe and how the CIA is using a variety of social media platforms to give instruction on how Russians can send information to them via a secure browser over the Dark Web.

Joanna Ludbrook of the Chicken and Frog Bookstore in Featherston reviews The Lighthouse Princess by Susan Wardell, illustrated by Rose Northey, published by Penguin Puffin.

Three years ago Hong Kong was rocked by protests that shook it to its very core. It began with concerns about an extradition treaty with China; was fuelled by the disappearance of five booksellers and ended with a crackdown on freedom of expression. It also made Louisa Lim realise it was time to go back to the place she was raised and unearth key stories about the identity of Hong Kong. Louisa is an award-winning journalist who reported from China for a decade and now teaches journalism at the University of Melbourne. Her new book about the history, people and culture of her childhood home is called 'Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong'.

UK correspondent Matthew Parris joins Kathryn to talk about rising inflation and a Cabinet Minister's suggestion that struggling families should buy budget brands, which has not gone down well. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer says the police have not been in touch about his office beer with staff under lockdown, local elections could be a real indicator of Boris Johnson's popularity and the long-awaited Elizabeth Line is nearly open in London.

Technology behind breeding low-methane emitting sheep has the potential to be applied to cattle, with huge potential for reducing New Zealand's greenhouse gasses. Scientists at AgResearch have found that lower methane emissions are a heritable trait in sheep. Emissions are measured using portable accumulation chambers, with the lowest emitting sheep producing close to 13 per cent less methane than the highest emitters, per kilogram of feed eaten. It's now hoped that this will be transferable to cattle, with a single chamber being used to test this. Thirty-five percent of New Zealand's greenhouse gases come from grazing livestock; with sheep accounting for one third of that, and cattle 70 percent. If New Zealand's entire flock were to become low methane emitting, it's estimated the country could reduce methane emissions by one percent per year. Kathryn speaks with Dr Suzanne Rowe is a geneticist and senior scientist at AgResearch.