I’m on holiday at the moment, but I could not sit comfortably without saying anything about the latest violence that has erupted against Gaza. Israel is now in it’s third day of air-strikes in the densely populated Gaza strip. The first nine hours of the strike saw 100 tons of bombs dropped and the death toll at the time of typing stands in excess of probably 250 Palestinians and the number of wounded is somewhere [...]

Boxing Day has come to be known as a shopping holiday here in Aotearoa/New Zealand (I’m not familiar with what other countries do on December 26th so can’t comment on that). It’s a day when there are bargains galore and stores flick off all the stock they couldn’t move before Christmas so that they can make way for new stock in the New Year.

Originally written for Filmguide. Taxi to the Dark Side chronicles the story of a young man from Afghanistan called Dilawar, a taxi driver who was taken into custody and detained in 2002. He died in the American prison in Bagram only months later. Dilawar was innocent and had no part in the incident that he was supposed to have been an accomplice in.

Kiwi photographer Susanna Burton tells about heartbreak and hope among a group of rubbish collectors in Bali and how a group of New Zealand business women are giving them the chance of a better future. I am jolted from sleep at an hour that seems far too early for any sane westerner. Staring double-visioned at the clock, I make out it is 4am, time to get up. I drag myself from bed and fumble about [...]

Allow me to make a confession – I have come to the realisation that I am an obsessive consumer. The sad thing is that in my world consuming is so normal, encouraged and needed for the survival of the economy in which I exist that I, like many other such addicts, have been mostly blind to my addictive compulsion. It’s placated so often without question that I’ve never been subject to the withdrawals and tendencies [...]

by Richard Aleman. After more than a century, attempts to apply Capitalism and Socialism have met with the same disastrous outcome. A select group possesses everything while the majority is either bound to stale and declining wages, or worse, they slide from poverty to destitution. One model achieves this by appealing to individualism, while the other to collectivism. Yet for all their superficial differences, Capitalism and Socialism have much in common. Both bar the laborer, [...]

Eat Less We all know it and we’ve all participated in it. We know it as simply having a good feed. It could also be known as Christmas gluttony. Christmas is a time for many of us to enjoy good food with family and friends we love. Food can be a good means of enhancing a social occasion and there is no shortage of social occassions at Christmas time.

Someone told me yesterday that it’s Christmas soon and we should celebrate. He asked me if Santa was bringing me anything for Christmas. He told me that where he comes from Christmas is a time where everybody buys presents and gives it to their family and friends.

According to the New Zealand Herald today, Citizen’s and Ratepayers councillors on Auckland City Council formed the majority in a vote recently to move forward in developing a bylaw to force the homeless away from inner city streets. The development of the bylaw comes with a $50,000 spend, a contrast to the hault on spending in many other areas that has been put forward by the Mayor and his council. Interestingly Mayor John Banks has [...]

THIS World AIDS Day (December 1), TEAR Fund has joined the Alive Campaign, a global initiative to urge the New Zealand Government and those that signed the Millennium Development goals, to put more resources into making antiretroviral (ARV) drugs more available in developing nations.