In 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."
How NZ's growing alt-right movement plans to influence the election →
"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 MoreBig Red →
He began wearing the jacket everywhere. He wore it when he walked across the overhead bridge to the polytechnic where he was doing his songwriting degree. It billowed out behind him like an extra body. He wore it into the CD store where the girl he liked worked. When he came home to Te Kūiti on some weekends, I was briefly enveloped in the jacket, and again before he left. ‘Take it easy, Eyelash,’ he said.
Read MoreLife hackers →
Gene editing has the potential to improve lab research, create new crop varieties, eradicate pests, wipe out pathogens, manage threatened species, and bring extinct ones back from the dead.
That’s the idea, anyway. The reality is we haven’t done much of this yet—and we’re still in the middle of asking ourselves if we should. New Zealand could be at the forefront of gene editing, or take a principled stance against it.
Scott Dixon's journey from his Nissan Sentra to motorsport legend →
While Dixon now holds a near-historic driver's resume, has a wife, two kids and a true athlete's build, you don't have to squint that hard to see that kid with a pillow strapped to his backside driving a Nissan Sentra in Pukekohe all those years ago. The grin is still as boyish as it was back when he was driving karts and saloon cars.
On the raceway, you know where those 20-odd years have gone though. Ice pumps through Dixon's veins. His mind becomes a complete, constantly moving rational calculus of fuel spent and optimal speeds. On track, the Kiwi picks up exactly what he needs – and disregards the rest.
One night in Auckland →
Outside the casino, the moneyed and the desperate smoked in the light of the Sky Tower; across the street the secondary industry of the pawnshop had shuttered for the evening. A young Asian man spat heavily into an outdoor ashtray, the Pakeha woman next to him, with a lifetime smoker’s deep wrinkles, looked up from her phone in disgust. An American man in an Aertex shirt described his new cross-trainers to a female companion: “You’re a woman, you wouldn’t understand.”
Read MoreHow the discussion around suicide ignores crucial voices →
Sophie keeps her condition a secret because to other people she appears “normal” and the stigma, despite years of campaigns urging New Zealanders to be more open-minded, is too strong.
“People like me who have long-term mental health concerns don’t want to be a drain on society. I have a great job, good relationships, and am generally doing well — but I know how precarious my situation is. I’m one brain chemical misfire from losing everything I’ve worked for.
“We get shunted aside because we can’t be trotted out as problems that are easily fixed.”
A tale of two currents →
For kayakers like Venable, it is the diminishment of wilderness that is the main reason for opposing Westpower’s plans for hydro on the Waitaha—not merely the loss of a kayaking opportunity. Although most of the river would be unaffected by the scheme, the loss of the final reach would mar the experience of the whole—like tearing the last chapter out of a thriller.
Read MoreDo our relationship property sharing laws need a radical shake-up? →
“Artist Bill* owned a house, whose walls were hung with a lifetime worth of art – both his own and gifts from other artists. When Emma* moved in, she brought a bike and cash.
When they split…Emma claimed the $350,000 art collection in the house was joint property, despite pre-dating her. Bill argued the collection was of such sentimental value it was a taonga and should be exempt, but the judge found the artworks had been used as "household ornaments" and were therefore family chattels.
“The judge said equal sharing would be "repugnant to justice".
Read MoreShield of dreams →
But beyond the assemblies and solemn undertakings, kids seethed and tensions grew. On social media, bravado and bullshit flew. It had become more than a game. As one Wellington College pupil wrote, “This means war.”
War began punctually at 9.30am with the under-14 boys 3000m.
Hello darkness: Peter Wells on finding himself in the cancer ward →
It’s Douglas’s birthday. I have a small present to give him then some other presents on the following day when, for practical reasons we decide to hold a small birthday. Again for practical reasons – I can no longer really manage a cooked meal – we will have Indian takeaways and some Moet. This is not how we expected it to be. But this is how it has turned out.
Read MoreThe New Zealand Project offers a bold, urgent, idealistic vision. I found it deeply depressing →
Most of these conversations are issues on which the progressive left has convinced itself, but no one else. What Harris is really calling for here is for academics and left-wing intellectuals to transform politics by talking about things that they’ve already been talking about, for years and sometimes decades, with little effect, and for everyone else to just embrace all of those values and agree with them about everything. It’s an argument against the broken status quo that perfectly replicates it.
Read MoreShortland Street: The short life and tragic death of Neville Goodwin →
Neville doesn't have a name yet. He barely exists. He's just a difficult patient who'll have his morphine nicked by Deb, then die at her hands. (As Fleming says, "Everyone loves a killer nurse.")
What if, says medical adviser Caroline Restall, "the patient's so irascible that he scratches Mo, and Deb fixes Mo up?" (This is cunning, as it simultaneously serves the Deb-Mo storyline.)
Fleming: "Yeah, that's sweet."
Trainee storyliner Lily Daubney: "Can he have Alzheimers as well?"
Fleming: "I don't think we need that."
A Dunedin Study discovery saved an American killer from the death penalty →
Waldroup’s lawyers argued that the sluggish version of the gene had combined with his history of suffering child abuse to explosive effect. The gene wasn’t the only factor the jury considered, but it clearly persuaded some of them he wasn’t equipped to weigh up a premeditated murder.
As one juror later said to National Public Radio: “Something in [Waldroup] doesn’t tick right … A bad gene is a bad gene.”
Money markets and global leaders (except Trump) front up to climate change →
When it came to climate change and the potential global supply of fossil fuels, “nobody had done the maths”, Campanale tells the Listener. But the new research on the total carbon budget made it possible to run the calculations. With financial backing from philanthropists, Carbon Tracker was able to hire the analytical brainpower needed to go through the published reserves of the world’s biggest publicly listed oil, coal and gas companies and figure out how much of those reserves could be burnt while remaining within the global carbon budget.
The conclusion was stunning: the world’s fossil-fuel companies owned reserves which, if burnt, would dump 2795 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, but the carbon budget showed there was room for only a further 565 gigatonnes.
Read MoreWhat really goes on in Auckland's clubs →
Charisma, spunk, being willing to say what you think: these are the qualities Barton identifies as the common traits of Auckland's leading party people and they are qualities he embodied that night. But then again, sometime either a bit before or a bit after the booth-dancing and the bottle-swigging, through sad eyes that were increasingly squinty, he looked at me seriously and said, "This is my job."
Read MoreThe fire inside: eating at Auckland’s most remarkable restaurant →
From day to day and week to week things change: the quality of the flour, the weather, and sometimes it doesn’t rise, or doesn’t rise to Ed’s satisfaction. “A bad bread day is the worst ever. When I pull out pancakes from the oven, those are the days I hate my life.”
Laura said, “If we’re not entirely happy we say, ‘Here, just have it.’ The customers say, ‘Oh no, we don’t mind paying, we can’t tell the difference!’ But we can.”
Read MoreMaking a Truce With the Voices in Your Head →
Sarah has a decade learning to live with her voices, and a gift for metaphor and comic timing.
At one point, she tells the group, she called the marae, to tell them what was happening. '“And they said ‘you’ve got a gift!’ and I was like, ‘ok, well can I return it?’"
The hunting of the Snipe →
Snipe are not one of the stars of New Zealand’s pantheon of threatened birds. Small, speckled brown, with a long probing beak like a kiwi, they look like a wading bird that’s gone bush. Their eyes seem set too far back in their heads, giving them a dopey expression. Perfect rat-bait, they’ve long been gone from the mainland, and most New Zealanders have never seen one.
But the story of snipe is one of tragedy and mystery, miraculous resurrection and myth. Almost flightless by day, the snipe’s terrifying alter-ego, the hākawai, haunts the night sky. Catching them involves prancing through the scrub with a butterfly net.
Read MoreThe life that Nicky built: Who is the real Nicky Hager? →
Some years when he's working on a book, he says, his income is more or less zero.
Looked at throughnink the prism of the harsh and uncertain economic realities of a solo father, Hager's whole project could be viewed as an ongoing series of leaps of faith, in which every time he has started a book, he's been at risk of being ended, economically speaking.
"I see it differently," he says. "I think, 'I've only got one life.' I mean, you know: Who wants to be old and regret what they did with their life?"
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