The cop is in a huff when he pulls over the carload of tourists. He stands in the cold dusk air on the main road into Arequipa scanning the registration and insurance documents. Fernando, riding co-pilot and the only local in the car, answers the questions for the non-Spanish speaking driver. They assume he’ll just nod and wave them on, as other police officers have done so far – the car’s papers are in perfect order. Instead he asks gruffly for the Circulation Card, something they neither have, nor need. The games begin.
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The Auckland City Council wants to clean homeless people out of the city centre.

How could this be done… Perhaps they might provide a new homeless shelter in the city where rough sleepers can crash, get some soup, medical attention, assistance with getting back on their feet and integrated into society.

Maybe that’s a bit too much of a budget-stretcher. Maybe the council could just provide a place to sleep, and skip all the social service trimmings.

But no, even that would be too much, it seems. Read the rest of this entry »

Team New Zealand flittered $130 million on its failure in Valencia last year, and more than a quarter of that came from the Government.

In John Key-ese, that’s equal to about 3,217,350 blocks of cheese the government could have given to hard-working families. Instead they preferred to blow the $33.75 million on a rich white man’s sport.
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Journalists may be low in public esteem, but I reckon if those surveys asked respondents to rank student reporters, we’d fare even worse.

The general aura of suspicion that often greets journalists is frequently augmented by fear (of being wildly misquoted, I suppose) when our subject hears they’re talking to a student journalist.

Either that, or we’re patronised: patted on the head and asked, “is that all you’ve got?” with a smirk when we get to the end of our questions.
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While New Zealand sleeps, most of the world is busy getting on with life.
Yet, it seems the New Zealand Herald’s foreign editor goes to bed at the same time as the rest of us.
How else could you explain the lack of acknowledgement in today’s world section that Russia had called a halt to the conflict with Georgia?
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There was the woman who wet her pants at work after chomping through three packs of chewing gum a day. And then there was the man who went blind after regularly drinking seven bottles of fizzy a day.

But altogether the most disturbing aspect of What’s Really in Our Food (TV3, Tuesday night) was the attitude of the Food Safety Authority.
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On her weekend visit, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice indicated that the US is open to “warming” relations with New Zealand. This wee country has been left out of all the fun and games (the US won’t do military training exercises with Kiwis, despite the fact the two countries’ troops are active in Afghanistan, for example) because of a ban on nuclear ships entering its waters.

Media talk has edged around a free trade agreement. It’s a long way off, but it’s not a bad goal – depending on how far backwards New Zealand would have to bend to sign it. At the moment, a small-scale dairy exporter who wants to try its luck in the US market has to give a fifth of its takings to the US government in import tariffs. Cutting that back would be a good thing.
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Paris
Montparnasse Cemetery
Montparnasse Photo Gallery: Click to see more photosGrandeur

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The New Zealand government’s makeover of the 1987 immigration act is still in the pipeline.
The select committee considering the immigration bill was due to report back on Monday, but recently they’ve pushed their deadline out until July 21.
It’s a huge topic to be looking at, so it’s not surprising they want a bit more time. But I’d like to see new legislation go through before the election – I wouldn’t like to run the risk of New Zealand First having any more say in the matter than they already do.
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If factories can pick up and move overseas when they want, then why can’t workers? That’s what the US Socialist Worker Party’s candidate for the Presidency, Roger Calero, reckons.

I interviewed Calero a few weeks ago and, on the whole, our perspectives on world affairs were so far apart that I sometimes wondered if we were both talking about the same global system.

But I agreed with what he had to say about immigration.
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