The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best stories of 2021 from our premium syndicators, including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Times of London and The New Zealand Listener.
Today we look at an incredible story of survival, mental health in a pandemic, uncovering a fraud, life as Britney Spears' partner and the European Super League that wasn't.
She fell 3000 metres and walked away
On the morning after Juliane Diller fell to Earth, she awoke in the deep jungle of the Peruvian rainforest dazed with incomprehension. Just before noon on the previous day — Christmas Eve, 1971 — the 17-year-old and her mother had boarded a flight in Lima bound for Pucallpa.
The flight was supposed to last less than an hour. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane flew into a thunderstorm and began to shake.
From a window seat in a back row, she watched a bolt of lightning strike the plane's right wing. She remembers the aircraft nose-diving and her mother saying, evenly, "Now it's all over."
At 17, Diller was the sole survivor of the crash. Fifty years later she still runs Panguana, a research station founded by her parents in Peru.
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• His plane crashed in the Amazon. Then came the hard part
There's a name for the blah you're feeling: It's called languishing
Languishing, the neglected middle child of mental health, is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you're muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.
And it might have been the dominant emotion of 2021.
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• The other side of languishing is flourishing. Here's how to get there
• Sex, sleep and socialising: How to reverse pandemic brain ageing
• 'You've lost your sparkle': What to do when burnout hits
EY and Wirecard: Anatomy of a flawed audit
The FT scrutinised hundreds of pages of internal documents and emails and interviewed more than a dozen people at the heart of the failed audit to try and find an answer. Combined, the documents and first-hand testimony paint a picture of missed opportunities to uncover the fraud earlier, a failure by EY to properly scrutinise the business it was auditing and a reluctance to challenge its client in public even when Wirecard's chief executive made highly misleading statements to investors.
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• Wirecard: a record of deception, disarray and mismanagement
• Wirecard's reluctant whistleblower tells his story: 'They tried to destroy me'
• Wirecard inquiry: Germany's political and financial elite exposed
Why Sam Asghari is more than Mr Britney Spears
Sam Asghari is a nascent actor and erstwhile personal trainer. But this highly polite, handsome and friendly 27-year-old is better known to millions as the fiance of a 39-year-old woman who was, for years, the biggest pop star in the world, control over whose personal life and $85 million estate was, 13 years ago, stripped from her and reassigned to her father (and a court-appointed lawyer to comanage finances) in a controversial and secretive arrangement from which she has been forcefully and publicly trying to extricate herself; a woman who has been, for years, photographed in the regular company of no adult save Asghari.
Now Asghari is working on his own path to fame in a year that has thrust him into the spotlight.
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• The surveillance apparatus that surrounded Britney Spears
• Britney Spears quietly pushed for years to end her conservatorship
European Super League: Inside story of how the outlandish plot unravelled
Earlier this year football fans, politicians and royalty united against the breakaway European Super League. Oliver Shah reveals how the multibillion-pound plan was scuppered — but could still be revived?
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• European Super League: Fans 1, Owners 0: but don't be fooled
• The inside story of the European Super League that wasn't
• How Facebook failed to stem racist abuse of England's football players
