
'Secrets of the Penguins' premiered on eve of Earth Day
22 Apr 2025 18:41
LONDON (Reuters) Years of filming, often in extreme conditions, have provided new insights into the extraordinary challenges endured by penguins for a documentary series were premiered on Monday, the eve of Earth Day.
"Secrets of the Penguins" is voiced by US actor Blake Lively and hosted by National Geographic explorer Bertie Gregory, who hopes to engage the widest possible audience with the natural world.
He said filming that included 274 days on the Ekström Ice Shelf in Antarctica, home to around 20,000 emperor penguins, as well as in locations from Cape Town in South Africa to the Galapagos Islands, led to discovering "new penguin secrets"."I have filmed penguins a lot before," he added. "I thought I knew penguins. I was so wrong."The three-part series, to be screened on Disney+ on Monday, and on Nat Geo Wild on Tuesday, in all took more than two years to film.
The highlights include penguin chicks jumping off a 15-metre ice cliff to dive into the sea for the first time in their young lives.
"As soon as the first one went ... they all started to jump. It was an amazing moment to witness," Gregory said, adding the exploit had never been broadcast before.
"They're the only animal in the world to raise their young during the Antarctic winter. It is the coldest, darkest, windiest place on Earth," he said further.
"We should want to look after penguins, not just because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside, but because we need healthy, wild places for so many things," he declared.The 31-year-old explorer has two Daytime Emmy Awards for the series "Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory" and a BAFTA Television Craft Award for shooting British naturalist David Attenborough's "Seven Worlds, One Planet".He does not see himself taking on the mantle of the 98-year-old Attenborough, who is still at work. "He's one of a kind," Gregory said. "There is no replacement."
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Frederick Forsyth, 'Day of the Jackal' author, dies at 86
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But Forsyth's hurricane-paced thriller complete with journalistic-style detail and brutal sub-plots of lust, betrayal and murder was an instant hit. The once poor journalist became a wealthy writer of fiction. "I never intended to be a writer at all," Forsyth later wrote in his memoir, The Outsider - My Life in Intrigue. "After all, writers are odd creatures, and if they try to make a living at it, even more so." So influential was the novel that Venezuelan militant revolutionary Illich Ramirez Sanchez, was dubbed 'Carlos the Jackal'. Forsyth presented himself as a cross between Ernest Hemingway and John le Carre - both action man and Cold War spy - but delighted in turning around the insult that he was a literary lightweight. "I am lightweight but popular. My books sell," he once said. His books, fantastical plots that almost rejoiced in the cynicism of an underworld of spies, criminals, hackers and killers, sold more than 75 million copies. 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"He looked down at her, and for the first time she noticed that the grey flecks in his eyes had spread and clouded over the whole expression, which had become dead and lifeless like a machine staring down at her." After finally finding a publisher for The Day of the Jackal, he was offered a three-novel contract by Harold Harris of Hutchinson. Next came The Odessa File in 1972, the story of a young German freelance journalist who tries to track down SS man Eduard Roschmann, or The Butcher of Riga. After that, The Dogs of War in 1974 is about a group of white mercenaries hired by a British mining magnate to kill the mad dictator of an African republic - based on Equatorial Guinea's Francisco Macias Nguema - and replace him with a puppet. The New York Times said at the time that the novel was "pitched at the level of a suburban Saturday night movie audience" and that it was "informed with a kind of post‐imperial condescension toward the black man". Divorced from Carole Cunningham in 1988, he married Sandy Molloy in 1994. But he lost a fortune in an investment scam and had to write more novels to support himself. He had two sons - Stuart and Shane - with his first wife. His later novels variously cast hackers, Russians, Al Qaeda militants and cocaine smugglers against the forces of good - broadly Britain and the West. But the novels never quite reached the level of the Jackal. A supporter of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, Forsyth scolded Britain's elites for what he cast as their treachery and naivety. In columns for The Daily Express, he gave a host of withering assessments of the modern world from an intellectual right-wing perspective. The world, he said, worried too much about "the oriental pandemic" (known to most as COVID-19), Donald Trump was "deranged", Vladimir Putin "a tyrant" and "liberal luvvies of the West" were wrong on most things. He was, to the end, a reporter who wrote novels. "In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached," he wrote. "It is our job to hold power to account."


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