It is unfortunate that the Herald appears to have a bee in it’s bonnet about Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church. I say unfortunate, because the Herald does not appear to have the tools, understanding or, indeed, the inclination to approach the topic of donations to a church, or to the pecunious “Bishop” in question, [...]

Pink Floyd have won their long-standing lawsuit against EMI, part of which was a complaint that they had an agreement with EMI not to sell incomplete albums. This has been pitched as a triumph for artistic integrity and has lead to some postulate that Pink Floyd may withdraw their songs from iTunes or insist that [...]

Well, there seems to be no doubt what the (supposedly unbiased) Herald’s official position is on the proposed “three strikes” law. The headline
‘Unjust’ bill means 11,000 per cent rise in prison time
is not exactly studiedly neutral. And making out that Kim Workman comes from “an independent organisation on crime” is simply a bad old-fashioned lie. [...]

I have just returned home after watching this – by far the most enjoyable version of the Alice in Wonderland story I have seen. Except that all the reviews of the movie I have read so far do not appear to have noticed that this is not a re-interpretation of the two books by Lewis [...]

Is it my imagination, or have the latest run of left wing protests been both shrill and rather hypocritical? Today Mike Lee and Andrew Williams are bleating about the horrors of the Auckland Supercity. The Herald dutifully repeats their complaints without once pointing out that both complainers are destined to be out of work when [...]

An article on Stuff asks the question “Are blogs for old people?” The article then goes on to say:
The study, released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that 14 per cent of internet youths in the US, ages 12 to 17, now say they blog, compared with just over a quarter [...]

Last year the report in the Herald on the Parachute Music Festival was a one paragraph filler on how hot it was. This year Parachute made it to page two – because it rained. Honestly, you would think that journalists could find something more exciting to write about than the weather!
They could, for instance, have [...]

Most tax-funded subsidies produce weird incentives that cause overuse and/or overproduction of a product or service. Witness that enormous blow-out in physiotherapy costs as soon as the subsidy effectively made visits free. But there are occasional government subsidies that are economically worthwhile. The tax subsidy that encourages overseas movie producers to film here and, especially [...]

The Herald on Sunday contains articles on two extremely misfortunate deaths. The first is Lam Xuan Hu, a 24-year-old Vietnamese student who died when a wheel from a truck, traveling in the opposite direction on the freeway in Auckland, came adrift and crashed through a bus. This unfortunate young man, a recent arrival to New [...]

Now here’s an interesting headline…
Ex-UN weapons inspector faces child sex charges
PHILADELPHIA – A longtime UN weapons inspector who blamed a 2001 sex-sting arrest on his criticism of the Iraq war has again been charged in an online child-sex case, and this time he was caught on camera.
Scott Ritter, 48, of Delmar, New York, engaged in a [...]