You can’t miss the electric billboard on the highway out of Madrid: “110 PEOPLE DIED LAST EASTER”, it says in big yellow letters. The New Zealand Land Transport Safety Authority’s road safety campaigns are pretty hard hitting, on the whole. But the Spanish versions go straight to the point. None of these carefully directed TV ads showing horrific injuries, or catchy slogans about bloody idiots; just the big numbers for all drivers to see as they flee the city before one of the country’s biggest holidays.  Certainly got my attention.

An eager student brought to school the textbook he uses in private classes to show me a section on New Zealand it contains. I was stoked to see some attention being given to our little country, but most of all, I was intrigued to learn about the Maori. The Maori used to hunt a huge, flightless bird called the Mao (which is now extinct), and it’s from this bird that they got their name. The things you learn, eh.
Hey, it would make perfect sense if the Moa was indeed called the Mao, but sadly I think the authors got a little carried away with the wrong end of the taiaha on this one.

If a terrorist tries to kill himself, should you stop him? A mass murderer of the ETA variety came close to comatose recently, after spending months on a hunger strike in protest against his latest conviction. Yesterday the government agreed to let him serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest in order to make him eat. “The difference between us democrats and those terrorists is that we care about life,” says the Minister of Internal Affairs, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba.

This is a complicated case, “a lotta ins, a lotta outs”. But at the crux of it is the use of violence as a negotiating tool, in this case violence against oneself. And it worked. Read the rest of this article »