Planting time! Organic gardener Kath Irvine returns to share gardening tips and to answer your questions. Irvine counts pumpkins, squashes and beans as easy, beneficent summer crops to plant now.

In 1920 Whanganui residents were rocked by the news that their mayor had shot D'Arcy Cresswell, a young gay poet, who had been blackmailing him. Mackay was sentenced to hard labour and later left New Zealand, only to be shot during street unrest in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

"Mr Organ is a black hole and I've fallen in," quips journalist and filmmaker David Farrier midway through his latest feature documentary, as he plays a bizarre cat and mouse game with the titular and litigious Michael Organ.

Earlier this week the government announced plans to introduce hate speech legislation. Such legislation has not always proven successful, as Danish lawyer Jacob Mchangama shows in his book Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media.

More than 45,000 people, including world leaders and our own climate change minister, are descending on the resort town of Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt for COP27, the annual UN climate conference, which starts on Sunday night. Rhiannon Mackie is one of them. At just 18 the Hutt Valley High School student is a climate champion who has organised protests across New Zealand, and has been running a campaign to get rid of fossil burning boilers from schools. She's concerned that COP is inaccessible to those most at risk from climate change.

Americans go to the polls next week for their midterm elections. At stake is the balance of power within the House of Representatives and the Senate. But more fundamentally - as the first elections since the January 6 2021 Capitol insurrection - these midterms are being seen as a critical test of the democracy and electoral systems in the US.

Listener feedback from listeners to the Saturday Morning show.

Protein scientist and writer Danyl McLauchlan joins Kim to tackle life's big questions, ideas and thinkers. This week - is a computer's neural network conscious?

Sonagachi in Kolkata (Calcutta) is the largest red-light district in Asia, with an estimated 10,000 or more sex workers in residence. It's the setting for Rijula Das' debut novel Small Deaths, a 'modern noir' thriller capturing all shades of a colourful urban area.

What do you do with all those papers and possessions when someone close to you dies? In the case of Gerald O'Brien (1924-2017) - former Labour Party MP for Island Bay and local businessman - nephew and artist Lucien Rizos photographed everything.