His manner is strange from the get-go. He doesn’t look me in the eye; he looks at his desk or off to the side of me as if I’m not really there.
And somehow, within two minutes of my arrival in this small, brown office in a provincial family medical centre, after briefly inquiring about my family medical history and without asking me why I want an abortion, he tells me I don’t meet the criteria. He won’t certify the abortion, because “this is not, and should not be, an abortion on demand society”.
Read MoreIf you want to see two people at their absolute best, says A'Court, ask them how they met.
A'Court, 56, is in the kitchen with the spotted ceramic chook on the windowsill and she's making coffee. She throws sugar in the plunger. "Do you take sugar?" No. "Oh," she pauses. She and Jeremy Elwood both take sugar.
Read MoreThe Hinemoa's men hauled 10 large, wooden crates from the steamship, dragged them through the shallows and onto the sand. There were six females and four males, all less than a year old, about a metre and a half in height at the shoulder. The animals stepped carefully into the dim light.
Read MoreTHE SUN SETS over the Clutha Valley, staining the snow on the Pisa Range strawberry-pink. Outside a fruit-packing shed on the outskirts of Cromwell, melancholy music rises through the chill autumn air. A group of men strum guitars and ukuleles over the thud of the bush bass—a large wooden box with a pole and a string that is plucked. Their harmonised voices form sweet, ephemeral chords full of longing. These are songs of a tropical home, the kind sung by those in exile.
Read MoreThere became something of a campaign in Kiwi boxing for Rohit Singh to fight someone real, someone he hadn’t handpicked, to see what would happen.
Craig Thomson made a series of offers of ranked Kiwi fighters. All, he says, were declined: “He wouldn’t fight anyone remotely close to having a pulse,” Thomson says.
Read MoreIn one lengthy email to CYF in September 2013, a notification from the relative compared the unsafe home environment to one of New Zealand's worst cases of child abuse.
"The ineffective parenting or caregiving, the immaturity of the caregivers, drugs, alcohol and violence, turning a blind eye and creating a culture of silence . . . I am afraid these children will become another victim of our inability to act," she wrote.
"If they are not the next Nia Glassie, then they will be."
Read More“I suffer as much as anyone does from ISIS because my family live in Iraq. They absolutely hate ISIS because they’ve made our lives a living hell.”
Hela hears her parents crying on the phone talking to relatives overseas, but she feels people don’t see Muslims as victims.
“Sometimes it feels like we’re Muslim before we’re human. We’re Muslim before we’re anything else.”
Read More"'Don't feel alarmed,' says gun shop owner and shooting enthusiast David Tipple as he fiddles with a German World War II pistol. 'A gun is harmless so long as you're not trying to hurt somebody with it.'"
Read MoreWe don't ask why they're here. Instead, we help them through the first recipe. For many of these guys, basic skills like properly measuring a cup of flour have to be taught – but they're happy to learn.
And we talk about what we do in the community, and that their baking is going to women's refuges.
One baker, Kahu*, nervously asks if the women know who it's coming from – they do.
Read More"Our views aren't publicly acceptable quite yet," one anonymous alt-right member said. "The media often paints us as evil, or vile or sick. We [could] lose our jobs, our families. Corporations don't apologise for racists ... not that we are racist."
Read MoreJanet Wilmshurst’s focus is ten centimetres from her face. Crouching in the dirt in a Swanndri and gumboots, her spiky grey hair almost brushing the cave roof, she peers into a sieve with her headtorch, hoping to find the partially digested remains of a laughing owl’s lunch.
She shakes the sieve over and over, sifting through the tiny particles with practised fingers. Then—“Ooh!” She picks something minuscule out of the rubble, and passes it to Jamie Wood.
“Wing bone,” he says. “Clearly been chewed by an owl.”
Read MoreHe’s 34 now. And some days his pain is only at a two. Some days he can easily pick up his little boys. If he went back into manual work again he would end up in a wheelchair. He’s on a strict health plan that includes diet and exercise designed to try to simply maintain where he is. He won’t get better. There is no cure for this.
Read MoreIt's 5.30pm. She is 16 and doesn't know what she's having for tea.
She won't tell me her name.
Short, with curly black hair and worn shoes, she's defiant.
"You don't look like a journalist," she says. "But you don't look like the po po either."
Why is she there?
Read More"No." As death notices go, my sister's call on a winter's day two years ago was a bit on the succinct side but it conveyed the essential information. Well, I thought, that's how it goes. It hadn't exactly come as a big surprise. We'd been expecting it for a while. And so I got on with my day – work, feeding the cats, reading YOU WON'T BELIEVE lists online – in a glum mood, nothing more. The next day I fell to pieces.
Read MoreHad the operation happened within 14 days - as it was meant to - Peter could have expected to return to work within two days.
Because it didn’t, Peter is missing half his face, sleeps in a van, cannot work, and lives off $400 a week. He was given a 10 per cent chance of surviving five years. That five years just expired; he’s now on borrowed time.
Read MoreDown the bank. Past the cycle path and the boundary fence and on to the Mt Roskill extension of the Western Ring Route. According to Go Media Billboards, 60,000 eyes pass this spot every day. If they looked up, just before the $1.2m Ernie Pinches pedestrian bridge, they might see a palm tree. A thick trunk, a spiky head, that started its life in a tyre.
This is a story about a tree. A family tree.
Read MoreIn the pantheon of jobs I’ve endured in the pursuit of less unhappiness, reporting on All Blacks weddings for a newspaper was vastly more soul-destroying than screwing in the same screw 1000 times a day on a computer assembly line. It left me feeling considerably less clean than my days as a cable layer – a job that involved actually being covered in dog manure most days.
I hated it with every fibre of my being.
Read MoreMore than two years later, she struggles to name the date of her exit.
“It was on leap year day, in—what’s the second month, sorry?”
That’s February. Where she grew up, the months and days of the week have only numbers, not names. She never knew her siblings’ birthdays—no one gets to stand out and be celebrated. ”No one should be made special.”
Read MoreBy the end of my decade and a half long bender, the shakes were bad enough I couldn't get the first couple of drinks from glass to mouth without spilling it everywhere. The trick was to make a quick diversion home en route from work to pub, improvise a sling from a bath-towel or t-shirt to hold one arm steadily in place, and wrestle to my lips a sufficient quantity to quell the shakes: precisely two cans of beer.
Read MoreAn artificial intelligence system that can work hand in hand with medical doctors, listening to and interpreting their notes? It sounded good, very good – almost too good to be true.
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