Daniel Jones investigated the interrogation methods used by the CIA on suspected al-Qaeda operatives. Photo / AP
Welcome to the weekend. After the disappointment of cancelled Rugby World Cup games last weekend, Kiwis eagerly await Saturday night's quarter-final clash against Ireland.
To save you anxiously pacing the room until then, here's a selection of content from our premium international syndicators to keep you occupied.
For years, Daniel J Jones worked in a windowless room in Virginia, poring over documents detailing acts that can only be described as torture.
Over and over again, he read about wall-slams and beatings, people waterboarded until their eyes rolled back and the liquid bubbled from their nose. Some were kept awake for days in bright rooms amid deafening noises, or had power drills placed against temples, or were forcibly rehydrated, rectally, or were nailed into coffin-sized boxes packed with crawling insects and left to scream.
All of this, Jones read, noted, catalogued, weekends and weekdays alike, late into the night. And then, when he'd finally get home at one or two in the morning, he'd crawl into bed next to his sleeping, neglected girlfriend and often unwind by reading Game of Thrones.
Hugo Rifkind of The Times hears his incredible story.
• Also read: My secret life as a CIA agent in the war on terror
At 74, venture capitalist George Sarlo might not have seemed an obvious candidate for an ayahuasca experience. Sarlo, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1956, has had great professional success as the co-founder of Walden Venture Capital. He lives in an upscale San Francisco neighbourhood, in a large house with an unobstructed view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
And yet something was always lacking. Sarlo's father had disappeared from their Budapest home in 1942. He had been drafted in a forced labour battalion, an experience he did not survive. At age 4, George had told himself that it was because he was "a bad boy" that his father had left that day, early in the morning, without saying goodbye. He believes that he never recovered from that early loss.
Casey Schwartz of the New York Times reports.
I turn 50 next week. I feel overwhelmed by luck at having made it, when several peers haven't. But how to make sense of reaching the fifth floor?
Perhaps it's the mix of responsibility and physical decline (coupled with a detachment from one's own alien, ageing body) that makes this a generally unhappy age.
Simon Kuper of the Financial Times contemplates life at 50.
Peter Jackson, the film director behind the Lord of the Rings series, is a towering figure in New Zealand, admired as both a down-to-earth titan of the box office and a one-man income generator for the country's moviemaking and tourism industries.
But Jackson now finds himself at the centre of a debate over how he has exerted that influence. This week, he helped catapult to victory a mayoral candidate who shared his opposition to a proposed development project near his studios, an unheard-of local political intervention in a country where money, fame and power are most often wielded lightly.
It sounded like death made airborne in those brutal days in Raqqa.
Bullets screamed across the ruined streets in swarms thicker than flies on roadkill. Machine guns rattled.
For days in that sweltering October of 2017, Michael Enright crouched in an apartment building turned battle station. Enright was the most unlikely of soldiers, pinned down there alongside his Kurdish and expat militia brothers.
Less than two years earlier, Enright - a Hollywood actor by way of Britain - had been tooling around Los Angeles in an aging black Porsche 911 and hobnobbing with movie stars at awards ceremony after-parties.
In December 2017 Martyn Percy emailed one of the people who set his salary. As dean of the Oxford college of Christ Church, Percy was already among the best paid clerics in the Church of England — earning more than the Archbishop of Canterbury.
But he was unhappy. A priest since his late twenties, the 55-year-old was not rich by the standards of college heads. At Christ Church, with its huge quadrangles and £500m endowment, he was surrounded by wealth. He felt overworked. Perhaps, he told the college's salaries board, he should "adjust [his] availability" — and skip a fundraising tour of the US?
From such exchanges has arisen one of the most embarrassing and expensive debacles in the university's recent history.
It was a brazen campaign to win business in China by charming and enriching the country's political elite.
The bank gave a Chinese president a crystal tiger and a Bang & Olufsen sound system, together worth $28,00. A premier received a $13,800 crystal horse, his Chinese zodiac animal, and his son got $15,800 in golf outings and a trip to Las Vegas. A top state banking official, a son of one of China's founding fathers, accepted a $6,754 bottle of French wine — Château Lafite Rothschild, vintage 1945, the year he was born.
This was all part of Deutsche Bank's strategy to become a major player in China, beginning nearly two decades ago when it had virtually no presence there. And it worked.
The Airlander 10 promises "a flying five-star hotel", with polar bears and whales lingering below.
The round-trip from Svalbard to the North Pole on the world's largest aircraft, a blimp called the Airlander 10, includes cocktails, dinner and breakfast, lunch in the snow, and another dinner and cocktail on board, and takes 38 hours.
The cost? A mere $15,000.
The Financial Times looks at how this might herald a new era for luxury aviation.
He was hectoring and imperious. He was domineering and defiant. And he was audacious and cavalier.
In the nearly three weeks since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened an impeachment inquiry, President Donald Trump has struck a posture of raw aggression. His visceral defences of himself - at the most vulnerable point of his presidency - have shined a spotlight on Trump's state of mind.
Like an aging rock star, the president is now reprising many of the greatest hits from his hellion days. He has bullied and projected - at times levelling against others the very charges he faces - while simultaneously depicting himself as a victim.
• Also read: The Clinton legacy: Impeachment hurts the President
• James Comey would like to help end Trump's presidency
In 2019, we take our entertainment in microdoses. A complete story may be unspooled in a fleeting video snippet, a tweet, a GIF.
The social media app TikTok has built an entire world on that premise, amassing a vast global collection of 15-second clips that are changing the way we sing, dance, pose, joke, dress, collaborate and cook.
It is all too easy to imagine scenarios in which increasingly powerful autonomous computer systems cause terrible real-world damage, either through thoughtless misuse or deliberate abuse.
Suppose, for example, in the not-too-distant future that a care robot is looking after your children. You are running late and ask the robot to prepare a meal. The robot opens the fridge, finds no food, calculates the nutritional value of your cat and serves up a feline fricassee.