The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best stories of 2021 from our premium syndicators, including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Times of London and The New Zealand Listener.
Today we look at Kiwis love of supplements, the family struggle behind a media dynasty, Hollywood's top divorce lawyer, the story behind the Pentagon Papers and the problems caused by the global demand for EVs.
The truth about supplements
New Zealanders increasingly turn to supplements forprotection against everything from colds to Covid. But do our laws deny us access to products that may actually help us?
In the six months to August last year, sales of vitamins in the "cold and flu" category rose 8.9 per cent. Photo / 123RF
Rupert Murdoch at 90: Fox, succession and 'one more big play'
As executive chairman of News Corp and co-chairman of Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch this year became one of a handful of nonagenarians still running a listed US company. And he is still marking achievements: this year he closed a global content deal with Google, one he fought for more than a decade to secure. It is the envy of other news publishers.
Yet in his twilight years, the question of what happens to the Murdoch media dynasty still seems vexed as ever — a ceaseless family struggle. His children are at odds, not least over Fox News. Lachlan Murdoch, his elder son, is heir apparent. But the succession question somehow still remains open. A battle over the family trust, which holds the shares in News Corp and Fox, looms once Rupert Murdoch relinquishes his grip. None of the children have the votes to exert control alone.
Rupert Murdoch. The question of what happens to the Murdoch media dynasty still seems to involve a family struggle. Photo / Getty Images
Kim Kardashian's divorce lawyer on what she's learnt about marriage
In Hollywood's thriving divorce industry, Laura Wasser is the go-to lawyer. Her bread and considerable butter is dealing with the kind of high-profile, high-emotion celebrity break-up that most of us would run a mile from.
"You take what happens with these folks with a grain of salt because they're going through what's often the hardest thing that they've ever experienced," she says. "You can't expect great behaviour from them."
Laura Wasser, attorney for Britney Spears, speaks to the media outside a Los Angeles courthouse in 2008 after a child custody hearing during her divorce from Kevin Federline. Photo / AP
'We're going to publish': An oral history of the Pentagon Papers
On October 1, 1969, Daniel Ellsberg walked out of the RAND Corp. offices, where he worked as a Defense Department consultant, into the temperate evening air of Santa Monica, California. In his briefcase was part of a classified government study that chronicled 22 years of failed United States involvement in Vietnam. By then, the war had killed about 45,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. Ellsberg had been posted in Vietnam, and even worked on the study he now carried. Having become convinced that the war was not only unwinnable but also a crime, he was now determined to stop it. Over the course of the next eight months, he spent many nights photocopying the rest of the study in secret.
He quit RAND, moved east for a fellowship at MIT and for the next year tried to persuade members of Congress to help him expose the study — later known as the Pentagon Papers — to the world. It was not working. On the night of March 2, 1971, he was in Washington, D.C., and looked up Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter he had first met in Vietnam. The two started discussing the vast dossier.
The New York Times resumed publication of its series of articles based on the secret Pentagon papers in its July 1, 1971 edition, after it was given the green light by the US Supreme Court. Photo / AP
A power struggle over cobalt rattles the clean energy revolution
The quest for Congo's cobalt, which is vital for electric vehicles and the worldwide push against climate change, is caught in an international cycle of exploitation, greed and gamesmanship.
Kisanfu is a new cobalt and copper mine being built by a Chinese conglomerate in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo / Ashley Gilbertson, The New York Times
