The Radio National Hour

A week on from the deadly floods in Nepal and Tibet the search continues for more than four thousand missing people including 38 Australians. The focus has shifted to retrieving and identifying the hundreds of bodies and body parts that have been washed downstream, but hope remains with officials today saying  there’s a good chance that 46 people could be alive, in a chamber in an underground hydro-electric plant. ABC correspondent Natalie Whiting has been visiting the devastated district of Chitwan. 
Settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank reach unprecedented levels, and hundreds of former Israeli security chiefs have written to the US president Donald Trump pleading with him to intervene. Former brigadier general Ephraim Sneh describes the violence as 'ethnic cleansing'.
Science communicator Vanessa Fuchs just LOVES plants, her latest book What the Flora? is an epic tale of evolution and the ingenuity of plants, and a timely reminder that our survival is deeply intertwined with theirs.

Last week's disaster in the Himalayas did not respect borders, but information flows at a trickle between Nepal and China controlled Tibet and, critics like Dibyesh Anand, a professor of international relations at Westminster University, say has exposed a deeper problem when disaster strikes.
More than seventy thousand hopeful African migrants swam to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in late July, spurred on by false rumours online of a new open door policy. Now Spain’s Prime Minister is accusing Israel and Russia of using the event for payback and to sow division in Europe. 
A major retrospective of Australia's most renowned artists, modernist Margaret Preston goes on show at the National Gallery of Victoria this Friday. Born in Adelaide in 1875, Margaret Preston helped to forge a uniquely Australian modernist style - with bold and distinctly coloured renderings of local landscapes, native flora and fauna. The exhibition's curator Beckett Rozentals lifts the veil on this collection.s.

It’s D-Day for the collapsed New South Wales developer Bathla, which needs $20 million in cash to get to the end of the week, if not, the major property developer will be liquidated and with it, the dreams of hundreds of buyers who paid deposits for new apartments. AFR associate editor Primrose Riordan says the next few days will be critical.   
The 2026 northern summer has driven home the reality of climate change in terrifying and deadly fashion; from the blistering heatwaves that gripped Great Britain like a vice for days on end, to the infernos that engulfed Europe’s holiday coasts and now of course, the catastrophic flash flooding in Nepal, which according to  scientists was triggered by a glacial melt and subsequent collapse. Paul Behrens British Academy Global Professor at the University of Oxford says it's not the new normal but the new abnormal. 
When the titans of Silicon Valley first spouted their ‘move fast and break things’ mantra they were hailed as heroes but little did we know it was democracy itself that they wanted to smash and replace with their own network states, their own laws and in their own image. That's the thesis of a new book called The Nerd Reich by journalist Gil Duran.

The number of missing people in Nepal has risen sharply to more than 4,000, with least 900 confirmed dead. We speak to John Torpey who's leading the emergency response for World Central Kitchen. 
Computers powered by human brain organoids, grown from skin, blood or hair. That's the vision of a Dr Brett Kagan, chief scientist and CEO at Cortical Labs a Melbourne based company which claims to have developed the world’s first biological data centre, replacing silicon chips with human tissue.  
And Sanjeev Gupta was dubbed 'The Saviour of Steel' when he swooped into the South Australian town of Whyalla in 2017, offering a billion dollar lifeline and a grand vision for the future of green-steel. But as former ABC presenter Paul Barry details in his new book, The Big Steal, that appears to have been a mirage.

The Chair of Universities Australia, Professor Carolyn Evans has spoken out this week about her concerns over creeping government regulation and how populist backlash over issues like migration is already harming higher education. 
For this week's edition of 'The Diplomats' Tracey spoke to one of the world's foremost most experienced and respected hostage negotiators, Suzanne Williams.
For six decades Ghanaian cameraman Chris Hesse toiled in obscurity amassing a visual record of Africa’s painful journey to independence. The precious reels have been used in a new documentary Eyes Of Ghana, debuting at the Africa Film Festival Australia. Tracey spoke to the films producer, Anita Ofanu.