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 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 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 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 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 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 More"There was no long-term plan. It was, we need labour - let's ship them in from the islands, let's bring them down from the rural areas, build these houses, stick them in there and get them working."
Read MoreAs a lightweight in a sport of giants, it was Strack’s technical proficiency that saw her excel. She was an enthusiastic student of the sport, and prided herself in her mastery of rowing’s biomechanics.
“I knew how to get a boat moving really fast,” she says.
That was until she forgot. Or at least, her body forgot.
Read MoreIn one Press letter to the editor from 2011, M & S Jones of Halswell lament the influence of the "quake families" after the February 2011 earthquake: "[We] can't continue to sit silently in case the public come to feel that their comments and feelings represent all those who have suffered bereavement." In blue pen in the margin: "I know how you feel!!"
Read MoreWhile 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.
Read More"It's a completely ridiculous process," he says about tenure review.
"First of all, the land should be retained as public land, but if there's going to be huge profits made it should come back to the state, the people who own this land.
"This has happened behind closed doors, as far as I can see. They're not looking at the interests of the public or the wider country at large."
Read MoreWeatherly's sudden arrival on the women's downhill scene in January came as a surprise to some in mountain biking - until the end of last year she'd been known as Anton and raced men.
She'd quietly let a few of the other women know she was making the switch and they seemed supportive. But when she won an event in Rotorua by more than 30 seconds, it set off a firestorm of online discussion and calls for her to be excluded.
Read MoreOnce stacked on the footpath, the worldly possessions of a dozen people didn’t look like much, and it didn’t take long for the pot-bellied driver with a bluetooth earpiece to load the luggage compartment of the chartered bus. Hibbah was feeling happy, if a little overwhelmed. The sign on the rear of the bus said: “We hope you will love New Zealand as much as we do”.
Read MoreThe television news once called her the ‘rock n’ roll granny’. On her watch, The Kings Arms became a hub of the metal, punk, indie and reggae scenes. The irony was Maureen, who was 86 when she died last year, was a classically-trained singer who would often leave after the bands’ soundchecks to go to an orchestral concert. But music proved to be a way to keep alive an old-fashioned pub whose core clientele were literally dying off.
Read MoreThe crux of the inquiry arrived when two key witnesses, Reay and Harding, gave evidence. Reay was pensive, deliberate on the stand, allowing long pauses to fill the hall while he formulated his answers...He proffered five alternative collapse scenarios, which, under questioning from Mills, he was forced to concede were “just a series of possibilities that occurred to you”.
“Am I right that they all have in common the fact that none of them attribute any responsibility to you or your firm for the collapse of the building?” Mills asked.
“I have not considered that,” Reay said.
Read More"I thought by the time it gets to me, I'll be too old to really care. But in the last three years it's just happened so fast," says Gavin Sykes, who lives in Granity.
"People used to use our backyard to have 60th birthdays and all sorts of things. This was beautiful, this backyard. We had plants, nice grass... It was a beautiful area and the sea's just f...ed it.
"Right now, it could be all over for us in a year."
Read MoreIt is nearly 25 years since her daughter disappeared. Saturday, October 17, 1992 is a day she relives “year in and year out, over and over”.
“I hate airing my dirty laundry. There are so many people out there who judge me for the things that I have done … but honesty is the best policy,” she says with a gravelly voice.
Read MoreMost of the victims were Māori or Pasifika and from the margins of society - the homeless, mentally ill and unemployed - and there seems to have been a muted response to the crisis from Government and the public.
"I wonder if we had 20 kids from wealthy families dying in a very short amount of time what the response would be," says Ross Bell, executive director of the Drug Foundation.
Read MoreThe next morning, Moss held a razor to his wife’s face, twice, asking, "Shall I shave you?"
Mary shrugged him off. "Don’t be silly," she said.
Her nonchalance masked a colossal unease.
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