Some films seem to will themselves into existence.
After reading a translated copy of Argentinian author Ariana Harwicz’s novel Matate, Amor (Die My Love) for his book club, Martin Scorsese was flabbergasted by its forthright depiction of a strong-willed woman on the edge.
He passed Harwicz’s book to Jennifer Lawrence’s production company, Excellent Cadaver. Equally enthralled, Lawrence sent it to You Were Never Really Here filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, asking her to adapt it.
This video is hosted on Youtube.
Ramsay wasn’t automatically convinced, she reveals, speaking hoarsely from the London Film Festival through a cold.
“I didn’t get back to Jennifer right away because I had to see how I could find my way into the book,” Ramsay says. “It’s quite a challenging piece.”
Ramsay relocated the action to a sweltering hot summer in the middle-of-nowhere Montana, with Harwicz’s blessing.
“I was really moved by meeting Ariana,” she says. “It’s a bit of a different animal, but the spirit of the book is still there, and she saw that.”
Filmmaker Lynne Ramsay shows the shades of grey surrounding postpartum depression and the way couples navigate a new baby.
Supplied / Kimberley French
Lawrence plays Grace, an aspiring writer hoping to pen the next Great American Novel, convinced to move from New York City by her partner, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), who has inherited a rundown house from his uncle.
Careening around that crumbling edifice in the heated throes of passion, Grace falls pregnant. After the birth, Jackson is frequently absent.
Ramsay has felt frustrated by reductive reviews pinning her increasingly extreme behaviour purely on postpartum depression.
“I want people to go into this film with no expectations because it’s not black and white,” she says.
Shades of grey
There’s a sense that Grace always felt throttled by the world and its suffocating views on a woman’s place. Ramsay’s films Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin both painted incredibly complex portraits of women in shades of grey.
“Kevin is worried about the relationship between the mother and child, whereas Die My Love is more about the relationship between Jackson and Grace,” Ramsay says.
Lynne Ramsay wanted to capture the broad spectrum of womanhood in Die My Love.
Supplied / Kimberley French
Lawrence was willing to go anywhere with Ramsay.
“It’s a love story with madness involved that’s also about someone being isolated and their marriage starting to disintegrate,” Ramsay says.
“But mainly it’s about this completely unapologetic character that felt quite bold, very feral, very animalistic.
“You love her or hate her, but you know she’s got some kind of honesty.”
Set fire to the rain
Lawrence’s performance is astonishingly raw.
“Jennifer trusted me a lot because we did some pretty wild stuff,” Ramsay says.
“She was pregnant while we were shooting it, which made it so much more powerful, and she embraced it in a way that could have been terrifying for some people.”
Ramsay said Lawrence, pictured here with Nick Nolte, put a lot of trust in her to film while pregnant.
Supplied / Kimberley French
Lawrence also shares remarkable moments with Carrie star Sissy Spacek, as her stepmother, Pam, and tender ones with Nick Nolte as Jackson’s ailing dad, Harry.
Working with them was a dream come true for Ramsay.
“Sissy’s an idol of mine, one of cinema’s greats,” Ramsay says.
“So is Nick Nolte, who has one of those faces. [Cinematographer] Seamus McGarvey and I were like, ‘Oh my God, this guy is mesmeric.'”
For Ramsay, Pam is the glue that holds the film together.
“Pam sees Grace a bit more clearly than everyone else,” Ramsay notes. “Grace is a punk rocker. She’s setting the world on fire.”
Knives Out star LaKeith Stanfield also plays a small but fascinating role as biker jacket-wearing Karl. Erotically charged sequences in which he circles Grace under an eerily blue moon feel dream-like.
“He’s part fantasy for her, even though he’s a real guy, and that was in the novel,” Ramsay says.
“She’s got these sexual desires that aren’t being fulfilled.”
No love lost
A discombobulating shift from reality to dreamscapes is also a feature of one of Ramsay’s favourite filmmakers, Ingmar Bergman.
“I’ve always been so fascinated by characters and getting into their psyche,” she says.
“Bergman is really close to his characters.”
Lynne Ramsay says Sissy Spacek, who also starred in the 1970s horror film Carrie, is an idol of hers.
Supplied / Kimberley French
Ramsay’s mum, who died recently, raised her on the likes of Mildred Pierce, Imitation of Life and All About Eve. The latter’s dark humour is present in Die My Love.
“Right from the beginning, through any discussions on the script [with co-writers Enda Walsh and Alice Birch], it had to have this absurdity,” Ramsay says.
“A kind of gallows humour that Glaswegians tend to have, and Jennifer Lawrence has great comic timing.”
From the screenplay, sound and cinematography to working with costume designer Catherine George and production designer Tim Grimes, Ramsay was across every inch.
“We were looking at colour palettes for different moods,” she says. “I picked out the powder-blue dress Grace wears to her wedding, with its slightly 50s feel. At the beginning, she’s bright and hopeful, then she starts dressing like everyone else.”
But you won’t forget her.
Die My Love‘s closing credits are accompanied by a Joy Division cover sung by Ramsay herself.
She also worked closely on the score composed by Raife Burchell and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds guitarist, George Vjestica.
“It summed up the movie, but it was never my intention that it was going to be in the film,” Ramsay reveals.
“It was just a temp track we did for Cannes because we didn’t have anything else. I love writing songs and jamming, but I don’t want to sing.”
International distributors insisted it stay in.
“I guess it works,” she says.
Die My Love hits New Zealand cinemas on 27 November.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
A British pub in Greater Manchester has become the scene of what the landlord jokingly called “the crime of the century” — a whodunnit involving pints, songs, and a sneaky group.
The Barking Dog pub transforms into a trivia battleground every week, regularly drawing 70 to 80 people to claim the coveted prize — a £30 (NZ$70) bar tab.
Everything ran as usual until a new team showed up about a year and a half ago — a group of middle-aged women who seemed, at first, simply brilliant, says quiz master Bobby Bruen.
According to travel writer Peter Janssen it must be built before 1967, have been continuously serving beer and have some architectural integrity.
Food
They answered obscure questions, nailed every round, and became unbeatable to the point it drove others away, he says.
“We started getting a bit fishy because we had complaints about them cheating, but we never saw anything,” Bruen told RNZ’s Morning Report.
The doubts grew during the music round, where contestants have to identify 10 song titles and artists, based on the intros, and find the secret connection between them — maybe all songs that hit number two on the UK charts, or tracks that share a producer.
Bruen came up with a tactic to throw curveball questions that no one would get, “especially not a team like that”.
“From ’80s hip hop to ’50s rock to 2010s pop music, they’d get everything … even with the producer’s titles which aren’t even mentioned on Spotify – I didn’t have no clue of the connection – that’s when I thought ‘right, you really are cheating now’.”
To level the playing field, the pub banned phones about six weeks ago, which mellowed suspicions. Yet somehow, the same team kept winning. So the staff decided to investigate.
One staff member began peering over their shoulders, sure they were cheating, but couldn’t figure out how. Another slipped outside to spy through the window — and caught the team whispering into their smartwatches and using an app to guess the songs, he says.
“They just stayed silent, they didn’t even deny it. They just sat in silence and turned away.”
The team has been banned from the quiz but remain anonymous, “for our sake and their sake”, he says.
But news of the scandal spread fast after the pub’s landlord, Mark Rackham, shared the story on Facebook.
He told the BBC the anonymity sparked a “massive whodunnit”.
“Everyone’s desperate to know who’s done it. I was at a council meeting the next day and people were coming over and asking me about the quiz,” he said, labelling it as “the crime of the century”.
Despite the drama, Bruen says there’s no need to change the rules.
“Because of how much media frenzy that this story has got that no one would dare to cheat in this pub again, because you’ll end up in the news in New Zealand.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Envision a time when hundreds of spacecraft are exploring the solar system and beyond. That’s the future that NASA’s ESCAPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, mission will help unleash: one where small, low-cost spacecraft enable researchers to learn rapidly, iterate, and advance technology and science.
The ESCAPADE mission launched on Nov. 13, 2025 on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, sending two small orbiters to Mars to study its atmosphere. As aerospace engineers, we’re excited about this mission because not only will it do great science while advancing the deep space capabilities of small spacecraft, but it also will travel to the red planet on an innovative new trajectory.
The ESCAPADE mission is actually two spacecraft instead of one. Two identical spacecraft will take simultaneous measurements, resulting in better science. These spacecraft are smaller than those used in the past, each about the size of a copy machine, partly enabled by an ongoing miniaturization trend in the space industry. Doing more with less is very important for space exploration, because it typically takes most of the mass of a spacecraft simply to transport it where you want it to go.
Having two spacecraft also acts as an insurance policy in case one of them doesn’t work as planned. Even if one completely fails, researchers can still do science with a single working spacecraft. This redundancy enables each spacecraft to be built more affordably than in the past, because the copies allow for more acceptance of risk.
Studying Mars’ history
Long before the ESCAPADE twin spacecraft Blue and Gold were ready to go to space – billions of years ago, to be more precise – Mars had a much thicker atmosphere than it does now. This atmosphere would have enabled liquids to flow on its surface, creating the channels and gullies that scientists can still observe today.
But where did the bulk of this atmosphere go? Its loss turned Mars into the cold and dry world it is today, with a surface air pressure less than 1% of Earth’s.
Mars also once had a magnetic field, like Earth’s, that helped to shield its atmosphere. That atmosphere and magnetic field would have been critical to any life that might have existed on early Mars.
ESCAPADE will measure remnants of this magnetic field that have been preserved by ancient rock and study the flow and energy of Mars’ atmosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind, the stream of particles that the sun emits along with light. These measurements will help to reveal where the atmosphere went and how quickly Mars is still losing it today.
Weathering space on a budget
Space is not a friendly place. Most of it is a vacuum – that is, mostly empty, without the gas molecules that create pressure and allow you to breathe or transfer heat. These molecules keep things from getting too hot or too cold. In space, with no pressure, a spacecraft can easily get too hot or too cold, depending on whether it is in sunlight or in shadow.
In addition, the Sun and other, farther astronomical objects emit radiation that living things do not experience on Earth. Earth’s magnetic field protects you from the worst of this radiation. So when humans or our robotic representatives leave the Earth, our spacecraft must survive in this extreme environment not present on Earth.
ESCAPADE will overcome these challenges with a shoestring budget totaling US$80 million. That is a lot of money, but for a mission to another planet it is inexpensive. It has kept costs low by leveraging commercial technologies for deep space exploration, which is now possible because of prior investments in fundamental research.
For example, the GRAIL mission, launched in 2011, previously used two spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, to map the Moon’s gravity fields. ESCAPADE takes this concept to another world, Mars, and costs a fraction as much as GRAIL.
Led by Rob Lillis of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, this collaboration between spacecraft builders Rocket Lab, trajectory specialists Advanced Space LLC and launch provider Blue Origin – all commercial partners funded by NASA – aims to show that deep space exploration is now faster, more agile and more affordable than ever before.
NASA’s ESCAPADE represents a partnership between a university, commercial companies and the government.
How will ESCAPADE get to Mars?
ESCAPADE will also use a new trajectory to get to Mars. Imagine being an archer in the Olympics. To hit a bull’s-eye, you have to shoot an arrow through a 15-inch – 40-centimeter – circle from a distance of 300 feet, or 90 meters. Now imagine the bull’s-eye represents Mars. To hit it from Earth, you would have to shoot an arrow through the same 15-inch bull’s-eye at a distance of over 13 miles, or 22 kilometers. You would also have to shoot the arrow in a curved path so that it goes around the Sun.
Not only that, but Mars won’t be at the bull’s-eye at the time you shoot the arrow. You must shoot for the spot that Mars will be in 10 months from now. This is the problem that the ESCAPADE mission designers faced. What is amazing is that the physical laws and forces of nature are so predictable that this was not even the hardest problem to solve for the ESCAPADE mission.
It takes energy to get from one place to another. To go from Earth to Mars, a spacecraft has to carry the energy it needs, in the form of rocket fuel, much like gasoline in a car. As a result, a high percentage of the total launch mass has to be fuel for the trip.
When going to Mars orbit from Earth orbit, as much as 80% to 85% of the spacecraft mass has to be propellant, which means not much mass is dedicated to the part of the spacecraft that does all the experiments. This issue makes it important to pack as much capability into the rest of the spacecraft as possible. For ESCAPADE, the propellant is only about 65% of the spacecraft’s mass.
ESCAPADE’s route is particularly fuel-efficient. First, Blue and Gold will go to the L2 Lagrange point, one of five places where gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth cancel out. Then, after about a year, during which they will collect data monitoring the Sun, they will fly by the Earth, using its gravitational field to get a boost. This way, they will arrive at Mars in about 10 more months.
This new approach has another advantage beyond needing to carry less fuel: Trips from Earth to Mars are typically favorable to save fuel about every 26 months due to the two planets’ relative positions. However, this new trajectory makes the departure time more flexible. Future cargo and human missions could use a similar trajectory to have more frequent and less time-constrained trips to Mars.
ESCAPADE is a testament to a new era in spaceflight. For a new generation of scientists and engineers, ESCAPADE is not just a mission – it is a blueprint for a new collaborative era of exploration and discovery.
This article was updated on Nov. 13, 2025 to reflect the ESCAPADE launch’s date and success.
Glenn Lightsey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Nine in 10 Americans gather around a table to share food on Thanksgiving. At this polarizing moment, anything that promises to bring Americans together warrants our attention.
But as a historian of religion, I feel obliged to recount how popular interpretations of Thanksgiving also have pulled us apart.
Communal rituals of giving thanks have a longer history in North America, and it was only around the turn of the 20th century that most people in the U.S. came to associate Thanksgiving with Plymouth “Pilgrims” and generic “Indians” sharing a historic meal.
The emphasis on the Pilgrims’ 1620 landing and 1621 feast erased a great deal of religious history and narrowed conceptions of who belongs in America – at times excluding groups such as Native Americans, Catholics and Jews.
Farming faiths and harvest festivals
The usual Thanksgiving depiction overlooks Indigenous rituals that give thanks, including harvest festivals.
The Wampanoag, who shared food with the Pilgrims in 1621, continue to celebrate the cranberry harvest, and similar feasts were held long before Columbus sailed and Pilgrims landed.
Cahokians and their neighbors came in late summer or early autumn to give deities thanks, smoke ritual tobacco and eat special food – not corn, their dietary staple, but symbolically significant animals such as white swans and white-tailed deer. So, those Cahokians attended a thanks-giving feast five centuries before the Pilgrims’ harvest-time meal.
‘Days of Thanksgiving’
The usual depiction also de-emphasizes the tradition of officials announcing special “Days of Thanksgiving,” a practice familiar to the Pilgrims and their descendants.
The Pilgrims, who settled in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, were separatist Puritans who had denounced the Catholic elements that remained in the Protestant Church of England. They first sought to form their own “purified” church and community in Holland. After about 12 years, many of them moved again, crossing the Atlantic in 1620. The Pilgrims’ colony southeast of Boston was gradually absorbed into Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630 by a larger group of Puritans who did not split from England’s official church.
As historians have noted, Puritan ministers in Massachusetts’ state-sanctioned Congregational Church didn’t just speak on Sundays. Now and then they also gave special thanksgiving sermons, which expressed gratitude for what the community considered divine interventions, from military victory to epidemic relief.
The practice continued and spread. During the American Revolution, for instance, the Continental Congress declared a Day of Thanksgiving to commemorate the victory at Saratoga in 1777. President James Madison announced Days of Thanksgiving during the War of 1812. Leaders of the United States and the Confederate states did the same during the Civil War.
This tradition influenced Americans such as Sarah Hale, who called for a national Thanksgiving holiday. A magazine editor and poet best known for “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” she successfully pitched the idea to Abraham Lincoln in 1863.
Harvest feast of 1621
Many Americans’ view of “The First Thanksgiving” resembles the scene depicted in a Jean Ferris painting by that name. Finished around 1915, it is similar to another popular image painted around the same time, Jennie Augusta Brownscombe’s “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth.”
Both images distort the historical context and misrepresent Indigenous attendees from the nearby Wampanoag Confederacy. The Native leaders wear headdresses from Plains tribes, and there are too few Indigenous attendees.
Only one eyewitness account survives: a 1621 letter from the Pilgrim Edward Winslow. He reported that the Wampanoag’s leader, Massasoit, brought 90 men. That means, some historians suggest, the shared meal was as much a diplomatic event marking an alliance as an agricultural feast celebrating a harvest.
Ferris’ painting also implies that the English provided the food. Plymouth residents brought “fowl,” as Winslow recalled – probably wild turkey – but the Wampanoag added five killed deer. Even the harvest of “Indian corn” depended on Native aid. Tisquantum or Squanto, the lone survivor of the village that the Pilgrims called Plymouth, had offered lifesaving advice about planting as well as diplomacy.
The image’s cheerful scene also obscures how death had destabilized the area. The Pilgrims lost almost half their group to famine or exposure that first winter. After earlier European contact, however, even larger numbers of the Wampanoag had died in a regional epidemic that raged between 1616-1619. That’s why the Pilgrims found Squanto’s village abandoned, and why both communities were open to the alliance he brokered.
Pilgrims’ primacy
The Pilgrims were latecomers to the Thanksgiving table. Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation, published in Harper’s Monthly, mentioned “the blessing of fruitful fields,” but not the Pilgrims. Nor were Pilgrims depicted in the magazine’s illustrated follow-up. The page showed town and country, as well as emancipated slaves, celebrating the feast day by praying at “the Union altar.” For years before and after the proclamation, in fact, many Southerners resisted Thanksgiving, which they saw as a Northern, abolitionist holiday.
This ‘Thanksgiving Day’ illustration, made by cartoonist Thomas Nast, commemorated its first celebration as a U.S. holiday. Syracuse University Art Museum
The Pilgrims’ absence makes sense, since they were not the first Europeans to land on North America’s eastern coast – or to give thanks there. Spanish Catholics had founded St. Augustine in 1565. According to an eyewitness account, the Spanish leader asked a priest to celebrate Mass on Sept. 8, 1565, which Native Americans attended, and “ordered that the Indians be fed.”
Two decades later, an English group had tried and failed to establish a colony on Roanoke Island, North Carolina – including a Jewish engineer. The English had more success when they settled Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. A commander leading a new group to Virginia was instructed to mark “a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God” in 1619, two years before the Plymouth meal.
In 1769, Plymouth residents promoted their town by organizing a “Forefathers’ Day.” In 1820 the Protestant politician Daniel Webster gave a speech commemorating the bicentennial of the landing at Plymouth Rock and praising the Pilgrims’ arrival as “the first footsteps of civilized man” in the wilderness. Then in an 1841 volume, “Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers,” a Boston minister reprinted the 1621 eyewitness account and described the shared harvest meal as “the first Thanksgiving.”
Rising immigration
Between 1880 and 1920, the Pilgrims emerged as the central characters in national narratives about both Thanksgiving Day and America’s origin. It was no coincidence that these years were the peak of immigration to the U.S., and many Americans saw the new immigrants as inferior to those who had landed at Plymouth Rock.
Irish Catholics already had a presence in Boston when the “Pilgrim Fathers” volume appeared in 1841, and more came after the Irish potato famine later that decade. Boston’s foreign-born population increased further as poverty and politics pushed Italian Catholics and Russian Jews to seek a better life in America.
The same was happening in many northern cities, and some Protestants were alarmed. In an 1885 bestseller called “Our Country,” a Congregational Church minister warned that “the glory is departing from many a New England village, because men, alien in blood, in religion, and in civilization, are taking possession of homes in which were once reared the descendants of the Pilgrims.”
During the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing and harvest meal, celebrated in 1920 and 1921, the federal government issued commemorative stampsand coins. Officials staged pageants, and politicians gave speeches. About 30,000 people gathered in Plymouth, for instance, to hear President Warren Harding and Vice President Calvin Coolidge praise the “Pilgrim Spirit.”
Soon nativist worries about the newcomers, especially Catholics and Jews, led Coolidge to sign the Immigration Act of 1924, which would largely close America’s borders for four decades.
Americans kept telling the Pilgrim story after U.S. immigration policy became more welcoming in 1965, and many will tell it again next year as we celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. Understood in its full context, it’s a story worth telling. But we might use caution since, as history reminds us, stories about the country’s spiritual past can either bring us together or pull us apart.
Thomas Tweed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sam Fankhauser, Professor of Climate Economics and Policy, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford
World leaders gather for the UN climate summit (Cop30) in Belém, Brazil, amid concerns about the slow progress in cutting global carbon emissions. Ten years into the historic Paris climate agreement, we are off track to meet its core objective, to keep global warming well below 2°C, relative to pre-industrial levels.
Yet there are glimmers of hope, and none more important than the astounding progress on renewable energy. Renewables are now so cheap that the clean energy transition is no longer an economic burden, it is a momentous opportunity.
Climate change campaigners tend to see renewables as an environmental imperative, an effective way of cutting emissions. They are that, of course. But they are also a powerful engine of investment, jobs and growth. They are reshaping the global economy. In my team’s new report, we lay out the evidence.
The first economic dividend of renewables is inclusion. Access to affordable energy remains a critical sustainable development goal, which shapes everything from education to health to women’s empowerment. Distributed renewables – from solar home systems to mini-grids – are our best chance yet of bringing affordable energy to all.
Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, renewable energy entrepreneurs are doing what national grids have struggled to do: reaching remote villages and replacing polluting diesel generators with clean, reliable power.
Because of its modularity, renewable electricity can be built out fast, expanded flexibly and maintained locally. Renewable energy firms are combining these technical advantages with new business models that make renewables more accessible (for example, through pay-as-you-go models) and keep benefits in the local community (for example, by offering energy services like cold storage, phone charging and water pumping, as well as electricity).
Investment, jobs and growth
If inclusion is the first dividend, investment is the second. Every dollar invested in renewables delivers more economic bang than a dollar spent on fossil fuels. The International Monetary Fund estimates that clean energy investments generate about 1.5 times their cost in economic activity, while fossil fuels yield less than one-for-one. Renewables do not just pay back; they pay forward through spending on supply chains and local wages.
The numbers are staggering. Between 2017 and 2022, climate finance flows into the 100 largest developing countries (excluding China) boosted their GDP by a combined US$1.2 trillion (£0.9 trillion) – the equivalent of 2-5% of GDP for most nations. In Brazil, the host of Cop30, renewable investments raised GDP by US$128 billion over those six years, according to our report.
A report found that, in South Africa, clean energy jobs pay 16% more on average than all other advertised roles. bsd studio/Shutterstock
Climate finance flows are still insufficient. To increase them, we need more concessional funding, more risk guarantees and more partnerships between governments, investors and local communities.
In the Dominican Republic, a blend of policy reform, clear incentives and blended finance has helped the country mobilise over US$6.5 billion in clean energy investment and double its renewables capacity in just three years.
The energy transition is often painted as a jobs killer, but the evidence says otherwise. Intergovernmental organisations project that there will be 43 million clean energy jobs by 2050, far outstripping those lost in fossil fuels.
For our report, we took a closer look at the jobs market in South Africa. For 12 months we collected data from job adverts and found a striking fact: clean energy jobs pay 16% more on average than all other advertised roles. For the most part the higher wages reflect the fact that clean energy jobs are high-skilled jobs, which require experience, training and problem-solving skills.
The high skills requirements are a challenge as well as a boon. Taking full advantage of the clean jobs revolution will require proactive skills development, both in the classroom and on the job. But for the young labour forces of many developing countries, the message is clear: renewables are not just a climate strategy, they are a job opportunity.
Perhaps the most underappreciated economic benefit of renewables concerns productivity. Cheap, efficient energy is the lifeblood of industrial growth. Renewable energy is now much cheaper than fossil fuels, particularly when factoring in what is lost when turning energy (say, car fuel) into usable services (propulsion).
We calculated that with a rapid conversion to renewables, energy-sector productivity could double by 2050, compared to both current levels and a fossil fuel future. Since energy is such a ubiquitous input to all other economic activities, this has significant economy-wide benefits. For some developing countries, the GDP boost could be as high as 9-12% – simply from having more efficient energy services.
These productivity gains are not evenly distributed. For once it could be developing countries that benefit most. Industrialised countries grew rich on the back of cheap and abundant energy. In a low-carbon economy, it will be sun-rich developing countries that have the cheapest, most abundant sources of energy. This critical shift in comparative advantage could finally help to narrow the global prosperity gap.
At Cop30, leaders are debating climate targets, finance mechanisms and transition timelines. But they should also recognise this deeper reality: renewables are not a drag on growth but its new engine. In a world anxious about growth and prosperity, the clean energy transition is an economic strategy as much as an environmental one.
The challenge, as our report reminds us, is to share these gains equitably. Without fair benefit-sharing the transition risks repeating the inequities of the fossil fuel era. But get it right, and renewables can power not just cleaner economies, but fairer ones.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
When Shay Mitchell’s daughter said she wanted to do “what mummy does”, it sparked the idea behind Rini — a Korean-inspired skincare line for young children.
Co-founded by Mitchell, a well-known Canadian actor, and fellow entrepreneur Esther Song, the brand was announced on Instagram last week to Mitchell’s 35 million followers.
“This has been three years in the making, inspired by my girls, their curiosity, and all the little moments that made me realise how early it starts,” Mitchell wrote.
Rini founders Esther Song and Shay Mitchell with their kids.
Rini
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
The pocket watch is estimated to sell for between £800,000 – £1 million (NZD$2.3m).Photo: Henry Aldridge & Son
An “iconic” pocket watch recovered from the body of a first class passenger who died during the Titanic’s sinking is estimated to grab up to $2.3 million at auction.
According to UK auction house Henry Aldridge & Son, the watch is “quite simply one of the most important and iconic Titanic items ever to be offered for sale”.
It is estimated to sell for between £800,000 – £1 million (NZD$2.3m).
The 18 carat Jules Jurgensen pocket watch belonged to Isidor Straus and is listed as part of his belongings in the official body recovery list.
According to Discover Titanic, Isidor and his wife Ida were one of few first class couples who died in the sinking.
Isidor was offered a seat on a lifeboard due to his age but refused, saying he would not go before other men. Ida refused to leave her husband, saying “I will not be separated from my husband; as we have lived, so will we die together”.
The watch is engraved with the initials of IS and the date of 6 February 1888.Photo: Henry Aldridge & Son
Discover Titanic said the couple were last seen sitting on deck chairs next to each other before the ship went down.
According to the description of the watch on the auction house’s website, the watch is engraved with the initials of IS and the date of 6 February 1888.
“This date marked his 43rd birthday. 1888 was also an important year in his life as in 1888, he and his brother Nathan became full partners of the iconic Macy’s Department store in New York.”
The auction house said the watch “quite simply represents one of the finest and rarest objects from the Titanic story in existence”.
“A piece which was a treasured personal possession from one of the most respected and high profile men from the Titanic story.
“At the turn of the 20th century, a pocket watch was one of the closest things to the heart of a gentleman of the era, and this watch embodies this as a gift from one half of the most famous couple on the Titanic to the other.”
The auction takes place on 22 November.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
A leaked memo has led to resignations at the top levels of the BBC, and shaken confidence in media. Photo: Henry Nicholls/ AFPPhoto: HENRY NICHOLLS
From editing error to boardroom exit, how the BBC’s reputation took a blow and what this means for global journalism
Since its inception, the BBC has stood as one of the world’s most trusted news institutions, standing for journalistic integrity, accuracy, and balance.
But this week, that trust has taken a severe blow after a damaging editing scandal, involving President Donald Trump, which has ignited a firestorm of outrage, accusations of political bias, and an existential crisis for the public broadcaster.
The BBC’s top leader and head of its news division have both now resigned, the BBC has issued a rare public apology, and Trump himself threatened a US$1 billion (NZ$1.7 billion) lawsuit, accusing the organisation of defamation.
The controversy centres on a Panorama documentary in which a crucial section of Trump’s speech was misleadingly edited, altering its tone and meaning.
“When media organisations breach the trust they have with their audience, they are in big trouble,” long-time journalism educator Jim Tully tells The Detail.
“It’s crucial our readers, listeners, viewers trust us, and anything we do to undermine that trust is potentially quite harmful to the reputation of the organisation.”
He says the BBC “sees itself as the bastion of impartial and accurate reporting, they have staked their reputation on that since the 1930s. Most people would see the BBC as a trustworthy media organisation”.
But he believes the editing scandal, which follows a string of other controversies, will make it hard for the broadcaster to rebuild and regain public trust.
“I think the resignations of people at that level should send a message to the public that they take matters seriously, and people have obviously fallen on the sword because of the significant damage that is emerging.
“[But] I think it will be much more of a challenge [to rebuild] this time. And it’s going to have a potentially significant effect on the extent to which people think ‘oh yeah, it’s from the BBC, therefore it’s correct and I can rely on it and I can believe in it’.
“Once that goes, it’s very difficult to reclaim.”
For many, the story cuts deeper than just one mistake. It feeds into a growing trust unease about whether any media organisation remains truly impartial in an age of polarisation, algorithms, and instant outrage.
“There are always surveys, annually coming out, in which we don’t figure much ahead of used car salesmen and the like,” Tully says. “It’s become fashionable to clobber the media.”
He says the ethical guidelines for journalists are “pretty clear and widely accepted”.
“You may edit in a way for clarity and conciseness because journalists are not required to report everything that somebody says, otherwise, we would be merely stenographers.
“So, we exercise judgement as to what is interesting and relevant, and that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
“The issue arises, of course, when in making those edits, you create a situation where the intended message of the interviewee has been disrupted, and you have misrepresented through selected editing what they were saying.”
The BBC has promised a full internal review, tighter editorial checks, and renewed transparency.
Freelance UK correspondent Sean Hogan is in London and tells The Detail that since the scandal emerged, more than 500 complaints have been sent to the broadcaster about the programme.
“I think the general public sentiment is an increased level of scepticism,” he says.
“People are calling it a storm, a crisis, a disaster. It’s quite extraordinary…. some are saying it’s the biggest scandal the BBC has faced in decades.
“Public trust has been continuously eroded, and they’ve got to change the narrative somehow.”
He says the scandal is front page lead news and is showing no signs of going away.
“UK media love to hold a microscope very closely to the BBC. It’s never far from the headlines, so it wasn’t a surprise to see this story splashed all over our screens and front pages, since it broke, and it really hasn’t relented.
“I’ll give you a few of the headlines there’s ‘BBC meltdown’, ‘BBC humiliation’, and ‘The BBC in crisis’. And that’s just a few of them.
“Now, to be fair to the BBC, their own website and channel haven’t shied away from the story and have covered the story extensively.”
The scandal is becoming more than a BBC story.
Jim Tully says there are lessons the entire industry – that in an era where truth is fragile and trust is currency, even the most respected newsrooms are one mistake away from crisis.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Domestic dogs are among the most diverse mammals on the planet. From the tiny chihuahua to the towering great dane, the flat-faced pug to the long-muzzled borzoi, the sheer range of canine shapes and sizes is staggering.
We often attribute this diversity to a relatively recent phenomenon: the Victorian kennel clubs that first emerged around 200 years ago. These clubs are usually credited with formalising the selective breeding that created the hundreds of modern breeds we recognise today.
But our new research, published in Science, shows that this is only the latest chapter in a much older story. Dogs were already remarkably diverse in their skull size and shape more than 10,000 years ago, long before kennel clubs and pedigrees.
This discovery challenges the idea that directed breeding alone created the physical variety we see in dogs today. Instead, our research found that early dogs had already evolved an extraordinary range of forms soon after domestication – a diversity that has been continually shaped by thousands of years of shared history with humans.
Looking for the first dogs
For decades, archaeologists and geneticists have been trying to answer a deceptively simple question: when did wolves become dogs?
The history of human interaction with wolves is a long one, stretching into the last ice age, perhaps even as far back as 30,000 years ago. But the exact timing of dog domestication is uncertain. What makes dogs particularly special is that they were the first species humans domesticated – well before any plant or livestock. Yet despite decades of research, the first dogs continue to elude us.
Part of the challenge is the similarity between wolves and dogs. Even today, some modern dog breeds closely resemble wolves. This makes tracking their domestication in the archaeological record particularly difficult. By using a technique called geometric morphometrics – a way to map and measure shape variation in three dimensions – we could track subtle changes in shape over time from 3D models of the archaeological skulls.
We analysed 643 skulls of ancient and modern dogs and wolves, spanning 50,000 years from sites mainly across the northern hemisphere to track the emergence and diversification of domestic dogs across time and space.
What we found was striking: the earliest skulls with clearly domestic skull shapes in our dataset date to around 11,000 years ago, from the Mesolithic site of Veretye in Russia.
By this point, dogs had not only diverged in terms of skull shape from wolves but had begun to diversify among themselves. These early dogs were not all alike, but instead exhibited skulls of different sizes and shapes, probably reflecting the influence of local environments, population histories and human preferences.
In fact, some early dogs exhibit skull forms not found in any modern breeds, hinting at lineages and morphologies that may have since vanished. While we don’t see some of the most extreme forms of skull shape that we see today (such as pugs or bull terriers), the variation we see by the Mesolithic is already half the total amount of variation we see in modern breeds.
Photograph of an archaeological canid skull (top) and a modern dog skull (bottom). C. Ameen, CC BY-SA
This echoes genetic studies that reveal deep splits among early dog populations. By the Neolithic (around 8,000–5,000 years ago), dogs had already formed regionally distinct lineages across Europe, the Near East and Asia. Some of these lineages survive in modern breeds, while others appear to have gone extinct, possibly replaced or diluted through interbreeding and human movements.
Uneven domestication
Our findings complement a growing body of genetic and archaeological evidence suggesting that the domestication of dogs was a protracted and regionally varied process. Ancient DNA research has shown that major dog lineages were already distinct by 11,000 years ago, implying that the domestication process began much earlier.
The exact timing is still debated, with some research pointing to close human-canid relationship from over 30,000 years ago. However, our study found no domesticated dogs among the 17 Late Pleistocene (126,000 to 11,700 years ago) skulls we examined, suggesting it may not reach that far back. Of course, the earliest dogs had to closely resemble wolves, and it’s possible that early dogs retained wolf-like skulls for generations, but for how long remains unknown.
There is still much we don’t know. To deepen our understanding, we need more specimens from the critical window between 25,000 and 11,000 years ago, particularly in underrepresented regions like central and south-west Asia. What this work has revealed, or perhaps reinforced, is the much older story of evolution between humans and dogs that began soon after domestication itself.
Ultimately, dogs are a mirror of human history. Their story is intertwined with ours, shaped by shared migrations, changing environments and evolving societies. As the first domesticated species – and still our most enduring companion – dogs offer a unique window into how humans have shaped the natural world and how the natural world has shaped us in return.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Justin Baldoni has asked a US judge to dismiss a lawsuit against him.Photo: Cindy Ord / Getty Images / AFP
Baldoni says Lively at fault for harm to reputation
Lively alleged hostile environment on film set
Lawyers for Lively not available for comment
Justin Baldoni asked a US judge to dismiss Blake Lively’s lawsuit accusing the actor of sexually harassing and waging a smear campaign against her in connection with their 2024 movie It Ends With Us.
In a Thursday (local time) court filing, lawyers for Baldoni said he resolved Lively’s concerns about sporadic misunderstandings and “awkward comments” on the set of the film, including over her physical appearance, as soon as she raised them.
They also said Baldoni had a right to hire a crisis management firm to defend his reputation after Lively began disparaging him publicly.
“This is a dispute about Hollywood reputations, not genuine legal wrongs,” the lawyers for Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios said in the Manhattan federal court filing.
“No reasonable juror could find that the handful of comments and miscommunications Lively has mustered amounts to sexual harassment,” they added. “That Lively’s reputation may have suffered is a result of her own ill-advised public statements and actions.”
Lawyers for Lively did not immediately respond to requests for comment. She and Baldoni co-starred in It Ends With Us, which Baldoni also directed. Despite mixed reviews it grossed more than $351 million worldwide according to Box Office Mojo.
Judge warned parties to tone it down
The acrimonious dispute burst into public view last December when Lively filed a complaint against Baldoni with the California Civil Rights Department, followed by her lawsuit.
It has at times transfixed Hollywood and even involved superstar singer Taylor Swift, a friend of Lively’s who Baldoni wanted to question under oath.
The acrimony also annoyed US District Judge Lewis Liman, who in August threatened all parties in the case with contempt unless the “intemperate language and personal attacks” stopped. Rhetoric has since been toned down.
In her complaint, Lively accused Baldoni and Wayfarer of pursuing a “carefully crafted, coordinated, and resourced retaliatory scheme to silence her, and others, from speaking out about the hostile environment” they created.
She is seeking unspecified damages for alleged harassment, invasion of privacy and violations of federal and state civil rights laws. A trial is scheduled for March 2026.
In June, Liman dismissed Baldoni’s $400 million defamation lawsuit against Lively, saying Baldoni didn’t show that Lively made defamatory statements outside her California complaint, which was protected by privilege.
The judge also dismissed a claim that Lively, with help from her husband Ryan Reynolds, extorted Baldoni by refusing to promote the film unless she got more creative control.
Baldoni decided in October not to refile. Liman also dismissed Baldoni’s $250 million defamation case against the New York Times, which wrote about the dispute.
– Reuters
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
