Sunday Morning

FBoy Island controversy; TVNZ's boss on the concerns about the public media merger aired on Parliamentary hearings; can epic-scale social media platforms be hacked down to size?

Rosa and Margo Flanagan (Two Raw Sisters) are passionate about the power of nutrition. The Christchurch cooking duo tell Anna Thomas how their individual health journeys have influenced their fresh approach to food.

Senior Stuff journalist Andrea Vance has been following the local elections with a particular focus on those candidates who've been sharing false information and baseless conspiracy theories - and looking into how things have gone for them at the ballot box.

Anna Thomas talks to new Mayor of Wellington and Rotorua, but it's too close to call in Gore...

More young people are living at home with their parents. The Australian Institute of Family Studies has reported that nearly half a million Australians between the ages of 25 and 34 are at home, or back at home with Mum and Dad. That's a 17% jump in five years. Dr Kate Prickett is a family sociologist and demographer from Victoria University's Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families.

A lot has happened in the fortnight since we last talked to Jack Watling about the war in Ukraine. Annexation referendums have taken place in Russian-occupied areas and their results have been rejected globally. Russian reservists have been called up and Putin has again hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons. The attack on the Nord stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea is said to have been the biggest single methane release ever recorded. Award winning analyst, Dr Jack Watling is our regular commentator on the military aspects of this war. Jack's the senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the world's oldest and the UK's leading defence and security think tank.

As many of us start to tentatively look beyond a world constrained by covid, new research findings on the after-effects of the virus shed some light on what "post-pandemic" may mean for some. New Zealander Dr Andrew Read is the director of its Institutes of Life Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. He works at the forefront of international research on Covid and specialises in the ways infectious diseases work, with expertise too in how well vaccines cope with them.

We know about the nature versus nurture debate, the combination of genes and environment that affect our chances of success and happiness in life. What also seems important is a random kind of luck, and not just the sort of luck that wins Lotto. Benjamin de Bivort is a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. His research has made him think another kind of random luck is at play in our lives.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) the world's leading economies are sliding into recession as the Ukraine war sparks energy and inflation crises and cuts growth. There's a variety of opinion about what this means for Aotearoa New Zealand and the severity of what's in store. New Zealander Jeffrey Halley is a former Senior Market Analyst for the OANDA corporation. His analysis has been regularly sought by Bloomberg, the BBC, Reuters, CNBC and the New York Times.

The American Geophysical Union has conducted the first-ever "global inventory of lake colour". Past studies have looked at the health of up to 200 bodies of freshwater at a time, this research looked from space at the hues of 85,360 lakes and reservoirs worldwide over 7 years, using 5.14 million satellite pictures. Dr Catherine O'Reilly is a Professor of Geology at Illinois State University and one of the two lead authors of the study.