Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

There was a wave of pardons issued from The White House this week as the Biden administration made way for the return of Donald Trump. 

Neale Daniher has been named the Australian of the Year for 2025. Neale has been a tireless campaigner for Motor Neurone Disease since his diagnosis in 2013. He has raised more than $100 million dollars for research into a cure. Neale is no longer able to speak, so his daughter Rebecca joins us on Sunday Extra.

GUEST: Rebecca Daniher, daughter of Neale Daniher

Can you guess this week's tweeter?

Jon Owen is a qualified social worker, and Pastor of Wayside Chapel. Over the years, he's opened his home and his dinner table to ex-prisoners, people in recovery, refugees and people seeking asylum.

Every year the scientific journal Nature releases its annual list of ten people who helped shape science. This year the journal has chosen an eclectic group of top minds who have profoundly influenced and reshaped science in 2024 tackling viruses, clocks and the cosmos. Or in Anna Abalkina's case, academic fraud. She’s one of this year's Nature 10 inductees for her work in exposing fraudulent practices in scientific literature.

Mitchel Roth and Mahmut Cengiz document the trends that have emerged through hundreds of years of weaponised post.

When building a home, does size matter? According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the average Australian home is 236 square metres in size, that’s bigger than homes in the United States, the UK, France and Canada. In fact Australia ranks as the country with the largest average house size on earth. Now a new installation at the National Gallery of Victoria called Home Truth is dissecting Australia's obsession with building big. The project, by the Melbourne architecture and design studio Breathe, invites visitors into a space to think about whether quality of life is determined by the size of a housing footprint.

From the highlands of Peru, where the last Inca bridge master fulfils his solemn duty, to movie theatres of Taiwan where a half blind man still hand paints movie posters, meet the people still  carrying out centuries-old traditions.

More than 60 countries worldwide are plagued by landmines, which are costly and time-consuming to clear. New Australian technology could make the process 30% faster. 

The jubilation that came with the unexpected fall of Syria’s Assad regime has been accompanied by great uncertainty for Syrians worldwide. UNHCR reports that more than 14 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes since the civil war began in 2011. Many Syrian refugees and expats are now considering whether to return to their homeland including Sydney based Mohammed Al-Hamwi who plans to return to Syria for the first time in 40 years.