Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

QUICK HITS
12:15 Nile: battle for control
12:25 Sourcemap.org
12:40 Digital classrooms
12:45 China: Rent-a-white-guy
13:10 Food: eating mouldy bread?
13:20 Global loo roll
13:30 Sugar: a history
13:50 Mekong River 3: Golden Triangle

THE SMALL PRINT
To kick off we're heading up the Nile where the 9 countries bordering the river are finding it hard to agree on who can do what with the water that flows along the world's longest river.

At 12:25pmsourcemap.org it's a web site with maps that show exactly where things come from. Not just apples or shoes either...no, here you can see where all the components in a lap top originate, how far they've travelled, and how much carbon's been used in the whole process.

Then at 12:40pm, and sticking with technology, we speak to David Glover, the CEO of Learning Media. He's just back from a gathering of the world's largest educational publishers. So are they facing the same challenges as the entertainment industry and how will the good old school textbook survive in the digital age?

Then before the news, Mitch Moxley recently got paid US$1,000 a week for being a suit-wearing foreigner in China, no other qualifications required. All he had to do was act like the quality control manager of a Chinese factory.

After the news, at about 1:10pm more food questions and answers and most of us have found a bit of mould on a slice of bread. But is it safe to eat it or should you throw it in the bin?

At about 1:20pmtoilet paper and with the average American wiping their way through about 23 kilos of it a year, and demand rising fast across Asia and Africa, it's seriously big business. Whether you like embossed, 3-ply or recycled, supplying loo paper to a toilet near you is posing all sorts of environmental issues.

At 1:35pm from sweets to pudding, ice cream to chocolate, life just wouldn't be the same without sugar. But sugar's history not always been that sweet- in the early days it was produced by slave labour and now it's implicated in the so-called obesity epidemic. We're speaking to writer Elizabeth Abbott about her book Sugar: A Bittersweet History (Overlook Press).

Then before we go, part three of our series travelling down the Mekong River from China to Vietnam. This week, we enter the notorious drug producing region, the Golden Triangle, on the Laos/Thailand border. With most of the world's heroin getting produced in Afghanistan it's getting re-branded as a tourist destination.

WE'RE PLAYING THESE TRACKS TOO....

Track: Home Brand
Artist: C90
Album: Nature's Worst (compilation)
Label: Nature's Worst Records
Broadcast at: 12:30

Track: Answer to Yourself
Artist: The Soft Pack
Album: Rough Trade Shops: Counter Culture 09
Label: ROUGH TRADE
Catalog#: 730133
Broadcast at: 13:10

Track: Don't...tell me what to do
Artist: Robyn
Album: Body Talk, Part 1
Label: Modular
Catalog#: 740979
Broadcast at: 13:45

AND OUR THEME IS:
Track: The Green Termite
Artist: Jefferson Belt
Album: Table Manners
Label: Round Trip Mars
Catalogue #: RTM 2009