The Wire with Sara

Last week an unusual gathering of scientists and hackers met at the University of Pennsylvania. This was not the first time such a group had met and they were tasked with retrieving and preserving climate data from government web pages before the Donald Trump administration tore it all down. Their predictive action was not in vain, either, after the inauguration the new Whitehouse.gov website reflects notable absences. Dr. Bethany Wiggin is director of the program in Environmental Humanities at the university and has been heavily involved in this activism meets data recovery. bFM Reporter Mackenzie Smith spoke to her and began by asking what led to this action.

Prime Minister Bill English has suggested that the TPPA should go ahead without the US.  bFM reporter Momoko spoke with Professor Jane Kelsey who thinks that this would impact negatively on New Zealand as a whole, and Business NZ Chief Executive Kirk Hope, who thinks moving forward with the TPPA Deal is New Zealand’s most viable option to prevent isolation from the world’s trading markets.

A long serving former Labour MP with a short stint as Leader of the Opposition, David Shearer is now in a different form of politics: solving the South Sudanese crisis. Mack Smith filed this report. 

There’s concern at the amount of untreated sewage being washed into Auckland’s harbours. A Herald investigation revealed one million cubic litres of human and animal effluent is flowing into the ocean every year - the equivalent of 400 olympic swimming pools. It’s happening every time more than five millimetres of rain falls in the city, due to our stormwater drains being combined with our sewage drains. While the infrastructure was a great advancement when it replaced open air sewers in the early 1900’s… today it doesn’t quite stack up.Ten of Auckland’s beaches are now so polluted people are unable to swim. 95bFM producer Hannah Ross spoke to Auckland Mayor Phil Goff about the issue, while producer John-Michael Swannix spoke to, Gemma Tolich Allen, a wastewater biologist and scientific advisor for the Manukau Harbour Restoration Society, who has worked in this area for thirty years, and Dr Lokesh Padhye who is a wastewater engineer at the University of Auckland.