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This year's NRL grand final will feature the Sydney Roosters and the Newcastle Knights. And the story of the Knights is a fairytale in the making. The team finished last in the competition last year. Now they're just one win away from a premiership. As a result, the city of Newcastle is going absolutely ballistic.

After a 31-year career as the ABC's finance guru, Alan Kohler announced this week that he's leaving the organisation. He joins Saturday Extra to talk about the latest interest rate hike, the housing market, and how he became one of this country's great economic communicators.

Few writers in the world have written with more clarity or authority on the intersection of the modern-day media and modern-day politics than Gabriel Sherman.  Gabriel Sherman is a special correspondent with Vanity Fair, author of the book Bonfire of the Murdochs, and the screenwriter of the movie, The Apprentice, which tells the story of Donald Trump's rise to fame as a property developer in New York City.

The first round of voting in Brazil's presidential and parliamentary election starts on Sunday. The main contest is between the 80-year-old incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his rival Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former leader Jair Bolsonaro.

This week, a flydubai plane headed to Tel Aviv in Israel came frighteningly close to crashing after the pilot was stabbed by his co-pilot. We assess the latest information around the alleged terror attack and the geopolitical implications for the region.

It's AFL grand final day, so we talk to Melbourne's Lord Mayor Nick Reece for this month's instalment of The Last Thing. He shares some of the last great things he's read, watched and visited.

While we're all choosing our favourite books as part of Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books, which ones have had a big impact on Australian society and could be considered the most important and impactful? We thought we would ask two very bookish historians.

The Longest Nights is a popular Korean children's book that is being adapted for the stage by The Sydney Opera House and Seoul musical company Ipkoason.  The two-year long creative collaboration brings pansori, a traditional storytelling technique featuring drums and voice, to Aussie kids.

Comedian, TV host and author Shaun Micallef has combined his trademark humour with historical research to write the story of Matthew Flinders. Matthew Flinders was a British navigator who led the first circumnavigation of the Australian continent and helped popularise the name "Australia."

This week, 130 heads of government are in New York for the UN General Assembly. And for the first time ever, artificial intelligence has been centre stage.  But it's the undiplomatic rhetoric which has made headlines with Donald Trump using his speech to threaten to annihilate Iran.  That followed a strong rebuke from Iran's president, marking the first time the leader of a country at war with America has delivered a speech on US soil.

Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Washington has ended after three days of talks, a state dinner and an extravagant welcome ceremony.  In a social media post, President Trump said that the leaders plan to meet twice more before the year’s end. What were the key takeaways from the summit?

Australia's Indigenous Desert Alliance has been named a finalist in The Earthshot Prize for their work protecting desert habitat across 270 million hectares. The alliance of 70 Indigenous ranger groups has one of the world's leading cultural burning programs and supports threatened species including the Great Desert skink, bilby and night parrot. The Earthshot Prize was founded by Prince William in 2020 to recognise initiatives that find solutions to the planet's greatest environmental challenges. Guest: Samantha Murray, CEO Indigenous Desert Alliance.

Next week, world leaders will meet at UN Headquarters in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Leaders like Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Anthony Albanese are set to speak, against a backdrop of an increasingly sidelined and underfunded UN. Topics are likely to range from AI to climate change to conflict in the Middle East to preparing for the next pandemic.

Paul Keating's ambition was to liberate Australia from our remaining attachments to Britain, achieve reconciliation, and reorient the nation in the Asian region. After unprecedented access to the former prime minister's papers, and a series of interviews, James Curran explores Keating's long-term vision for Australia.

The former prime minister Kevin Rudd has warned that there is an urgent need for intergovernmental regulation of AI. Ahead of next week's meeting in Washington between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, what could a set of guardrails look like, and how would both the US and China be involved?