James Muir, a 33-year-old heroin user, begging in Glasgow, Scotland. Photo / Mary Turner, The New York Times
James Muir, a 33-year-old heroin user, begging in Glasgow, Scotland. Photo / Mary Turner, The New York Times
Welcome to the weekend. It's been a big week of news in New Zealand with the abortion law reform dominating the headlines.
Internationally the focus has been largely on the United States following two mass shootings within 24 hours of each other.
With rain set to blanket much of the country this weekend it's the perfect time to get comfortable on the couch and catch up on some of the best journalism from our premium international syndicators.
As Scotland's Trainspotting generation ages, the dead pile up
Tony Nugent was clean for almost seven years before he relapsed. He found that heroin, cruel to the young, is even less forgiving with age.
Nugent had been using the drug on and off since he was 19, but overdosed the first time he shot up again. He has overdosed three more times since last year.
Last year there were 1,187 drug-related deaths in Scotland, a record, and a staggering increase of 27 per cent from the year before. Older, long-term opioid users account for much of the problem. Things are expected to only get worse.
Tony Nugent, rear, and a friend, James Muir, shooting up in a stairwell popular with addicts in Glasgow. Photo / Mary Turner, The New York Times
How the jet stream is changing your weather
The powerful and influential Northern Atlantic current is shifting course — with implications for crops and sea levels.
At the summit of the Greenland ice cap the temperature rarely rises above zero degrees centigrade — the elevation is 3200m and the ice below is more than a mile thick.
But last Friday, reports Leslie Hook of the Financial Times, a small weather station laden with sensors captured something highly unusual: the temperature crept past zero and up to 3.6C — the highest since records began three decades ago. As temperatures rose across the massive ice sheet, which blankets an area five times the size of Germany, around 60 per cent of the surface started to melt, one of the largest ever recorded.
An iceberg floats in Disko Bay behind houses during unseasonably warm weather this July. Photo / Getty Images
'It feels like being hunted': Latinos across US in fear after massacre
After 22 people were shot to death at a Walmart in El Paso last weekend, a Florida retiree found herself imagining how her grandchildren could be killed. A daughter of Ecuadorean immigrants cried alone in her car. A Texas lawyer bought a gun to defend his family.
Latinos in interviews this week said they felt deeply shaken at the idea that radicalised white nationalism seemed to have placed them — at least for one bloody weekend — in its crosshairs.
For a number of Latinos across the United States, the shooting attack in El Paso felt like a turning point, calling into question everything they thought they knew about their place in American society, the New York Times reports.
At a memorial for the victims of the shooting in El Paso, Texas. Photo / Calla Kessler, The New York Times
Why polyamory works for them
The tradition of having a single sexual partner is among the only things liberals and conservatives rarely disagree about. Scientists have yet to conclude why prairie voles, much less people, prefer to bond in long-term pairs.
Most weekends in New York however, a smattering of events cater to the non-monogamous. There are lecture series, workshops and discussion groups. There are cocktail hours and meet-and-greets. And there are, of course, parties.
Jade Marks, left, with their primary partner, Tourmaline, at the apartment the two share in Brooklyn. Photo / Yael Malka, The New York Times
Megaphone for shooters: 8chan creator says 'shut the site down'
Fredrick Brennan was getting ready for church at his home in the Philippines when the news of a mass shooting in El Paso arrived. His response was immediate and instinctive.
"Whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I say, 'All right, we have to research if there's an 8chan connection,' " he said.
Brennan started the online message board 8chan in 2013, as a spinoff of 4chan, the better-known message board. Now, 8chan is known as something else: a megaphone for mass shooters, and a recruiting platform for violent white nationalists. And Brennan, who stopped working with the site's current owner last year, is calling for it to be taken offline before it leads to further violence.
Fredrick Brennan started the online message board 8chan in 2013. Photo / Todd Heisler, The New York Times
Russians feel the pain of Vladimir Putin's regime
As pro-democracy protests hit central Moscow this summer violent clashes erupted on the city's streets. Armour-clad, helmeted riot police were seen pinning down unarmed protesters on stone pavements as their colleagues beat their knees with batons.
Not since 2012, when thousands of Muscovites took to the streets to protest against Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency, has Russia's capital seen such a brutal crackdown on demonstrations as that witnessed during the past fortnight. Police trucks packed with young Russians and rows of baton-wielding troops have shown the brute force available to Putin and his willingness to use it.
Researchers say people who swear at work can seem more honest, credible and persuasive. Photo / 123RF
Bloody marys and bold type: How a small-town paper said goodbye
Whenever she thought her small staff would be facing a particularly stressful deadline day, Rebecca Colden, the publisher of the weekly Warroad Pioneer, declared a Bloody Mary Monday.
This was definitely one of those Mondays — indeed, the last of them. The Pioneer, the newspaper that had served this tiny town just below the Canadian border for 121 years, was one issue away from certain death.
Colden trudged into the newsroom on a cold May morning with vodka, olives and tomato mix. A mock-up of the front page greeted her on the newsroom printer, screaming out a bold, striking headline: FINAL EDITION.
Some have felt the lure of politics and social activism, running for Congress or advocating for the environment, while others have gravitated to the stage or Hollywood.
A sprawling group with many in their 20s and 30s, the younger generation of Kennedys took a tragic turn in the national spotlight last week. One of its members, 22-year-old Saoirse Kennedy Hill, suffered an apparent drug overdose Thursday at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and died.
Saoirse Kennedy Hill placing a flower on President John F. Kennedy's grave in 2000. Saoirse Kennedy Hill died last week at 22 after an apparent overdose. Photo / AP
When rape onscreen is directed by a woman
"Whore!"
The word came sailing out of a man's mouth after a screening of Jennifer Kent's latest movie, The Nightingale, at the Venice Film Festival last year. At first Kent thought the livid viewer must be joking. But the man wasn't joking.
In June, the film made headlines again, after a few dozen people walked out of showings at the Sydney Film Festival.
Before she was a butcher, Kavanaugh was a strict vegetarian. She stopped eating meat for more than a decade, she said, out of a deep love for animal life and respect for the environment.
She became a butcher for exactly the same reasons.
Kate Kavanaugh holding well-marbled rib steaks, a signature of her shop, which specialises in 100 per cent grass-fed and finished beef. Photo / Ryan Dearth for The New York Times
