Features

White power movement delivers warning

For evil to prosper all you need is a good dose of sunshine.

So it was on a bright Christchurch day last weekend when men adorned in black T-shirts, camouflage pants and with their heads shaved took to the streets.

Alongside them were women pushing baby strollers, and displaying signs that declared, among other things, that it was all right to be white.

For evil to prosper all you need is a good dose of sunshine.

So it was on a bright Christchurch day last weekend when men adorned in black T-shirts, camouflage pants and with their heads shaved took to the streets.

Alongside them were women pushing baby strollers, and displaying signs that declared, among other things, that it was all right to be white. (read more)

Overstayers fear for their Kiwi kids

Off the main road, past the tank that proudly stands guard outside Jalandhar’s military headquarters, past its railway station and the place where the trains go to die, lies a loose collection of feebly strung blue tarpaulins, woollen blankets and a faint blur of coloured dots.

Stop and look closer on Rama Mandi road, in India’s northwest Punjab, and the coloured dots become children. (read more)

Rough ride for Rena salvors

Standing in the Rena’s engine room, weeks after the container ship struck the Bay of Plenty’s Astrolabe reef, Kenny Crawford’s mind was altered.

He had sailed for years on ships much like it, and recognised the layout. But here the spanners on the walls were leaning, like the ladders, the entire ship on a 22 degree angle. (read more)

Lost biologist drawn to New Zealand

The scene seemed familiar to Mihai Muncus-Nagy as he flew into Auckland airport last year. He felt at home as he saw green trees, rounded hills and feeding cattle beneath him. Though he knew little about reincarnation, the 33-year-old Romanian biologist was confident that if he had lived before, it would have been here. (read more)

When cricket is more than just a game in India

So this lesson begins with a cleft of Kashmir willow, a tree once grown on the plains of a piece of disputed territory in Central Asia, but now, in the heart of India’s Punjab region, it is shaped into a high-sided polygon, thin white twine wrapped around its cane handle and it is in the hands of Propsh Om Parkash. ”Think of India as a bat,” Parkash says. “It has a top, the handle, a splice, a middle and a toe.” (read more)

Your Weekend

Crowned prosecutor (Qantas Award finalist 2010)

Simon Moore has a full gallery on this June day as he walks calmly across Auckland High Court’s courtroom 15. The jury watches closely as he addresses them before the judge, defence, media and public gallery. The New Zealand coat of arms is set securely within a wooden shield over looking the jerking, hulking figure of Antonie Ronnie Dixon. (read more)

What good are the arts? – Denis Dutton vs John Carey

Like all good English boys, Oxford professor John Carey was brought up to believe that the arts made you a better person – that there was some higher moral authority in being able to quote Shakespeare or comment on the musical phrasing of Beethoven’s later symphonies. Art was, for lack of a more specific term, good. But as the Sunday Times’ chief book reviewer, Carey has read many accounts of famous artists, musicians and writers. And the more he reads, the less good they all seem. (read more)

Campus chameleon

Rod Carr never seemed like the thing he ended up becoming. He never seemed like an economist when he went to help govern the Reserve Bank. He never seemed like a businessman when he headed up Jade Software Coporation. Right now, standing in the lobby of the company he still runs, Carr does not sem like the Vice Chancellor of the University of Canterbury. But in four months time he will be. (read more)

Learning to hear

On his final day in a world without hearing Guy Anderson ate a Japanese curry in a small restaurant on Hereford Street. The next day, at 8am, doctors at St George’s hospital shaved a part of his head, drilled into his skull, inserted a filament into the ear and embedded a small electronic implant. (read more)

Looking for Leo (nominted for Canon Media Awards junior feature writer of the year portfolio)

It’s out there somewhere – a black Nokia mobile phone with the battery run flat and hundreds of messages left unanswered. The message is casual – the voice of a young man with seemingly nothing in particular on his mind. ”Hi, I’m not here at the moment, please leave a message.” One hundred and forty-one days have passed since a live voice replied at the other end. Seven helicopter searches. Dozens of emails. Thousands of kilometres driven, from Nelson to Invercargill. Hundreds of kilometres trekked, from the tip of Golden Bay to the edges of the Marlborough Sounds. But the numbers aren’t important any more. After five months, no-one knows even where to begin. (read more)

Hitting the right notes (nominted for Canon Media Awards junior feature writer of the year portfolio)

Little Kirimaraea was not supposed to hum. She couldn’t. The five-year-old is one in 150,000. Emma Breaker had never even heard of Cornelia Delong Syndrome when, after six months of tests, doctors finally discovered the reason why her daughter had lost half her body weight by the time she was just six weeks old. Kirimaraea was just the 10th baby in New Zealand to be born with the genetic disorder, which causes wide-ranging and severe developmental abnormalities. She doesn’t speak. She smiles, and grins and pokes her tongue out. She nestles into the refuge of her mother’s shoulder when she gets nervous. There is scarcely a peep out of her. But each day last week, after Kirimaraea came home from Victory Primary School, Ms Breaker heard something different: high-pitched wordless tones. They had rhythm and tune. It was a melody. (read more)

The men’s room (nominted for Canon Media Awards junior feature writer of the year portfolio)

It is a difficult place to blend in. Sneakers too white, jeans too blue, skin not lived in. Before taking even one step across the thick white stone threshold that separates the shelter from the Vanguard St pavement, it’s obvious that the reporter is not one of them. (read more)

One step at a time

About five years ago, when 13-year-old Hemanshu Patel lost the last of his dwindling sight, he curled up in a small ball, afraid of the world. He stayed that way for seven weeks and would not move. But yesterday Hemanshu, who suffers from a rare genetic disorder, went for a walk in the Queen’s Gardens. Barefoot and with cane in hand, he slowly made his way out the doors of Maitai School on to the cold tarmac and crossed Tasman St. (read more)

On the road to independence

Sharon Schipper cannot speak, but she has a voice. It is sharp, funny and inquisitive. Sharon’s voice is her best buddy, her “BB”. It is the name she gave her pink DX5 computer that she uses to communicate with the world around her. At 7.50am, the 15-year-old is at the door of her Nelson home waiting to be taken to Garin College, in Richmond, for school. Sharon has made the trip almost every weekday for the past three years. Her mother, Amanda Schipper, puts her lunch in a backpack, pulls Sharon’s gloves over her hands and puts a black woollen hat on her head. It is a cold morning. Mrs Schipper often wakes up to seven times a night to make sure Sharon is OK. One morning, Mrs Schipper was so tired that she couldn’t stop to chat with Sharon before she headed off. ”I’m sorry Sharon I can’t talk today,” she said, hooking her backpack on the side of her daughter’s electric chair. Sharon grinned and began to press buttons on the computer in front of her. The letters came up on the screen. After a few moments BB spoke: “Go back to bed,” Sharon told her mother. Mrs Schipper had to laugh. But yesterday, Sharon simply moved the joystick on her chair, rolled down the wooden ramp that leads up to her house and was lifted up into an awaiting taxi van. After being strapped in, Sharon was on her way. ”Be good at school,” Mrs Schipper called out. (read more)

Judge jails errant teen in “saddest case” (nominated for Canon Media Awards junior reporter of the year portofolio)

He spent the first two years of his life tied to a potty in a Russian orphanage. He plays the clarinet, reads a book a day and was a ballet dancer. He moved to New Zealand for a better life with a new mother and a sister. But 17-year-old Andrej Michael Schwaab could not escape his past. (read more)

Collision course with killing (nominated for Canon Media Awards junior reporter of the year portofolio)

Shannon Brent Flewellen was a boat painter, turned white supremacist, turned murderer. He had been through youth court from a young age, spent most of his adult life in prison and never showed any responsibility or remorse for his offending. Now 30 years old, Flewellen will spend at least another 16 years behind bars after being sentenced yesterday to life imprisonment for the murder of South Korean tourist Jae Hyeon Kim on the West Coast in 2003. ”He was always on a collision course,” said Nelson Bays area commander Detective Inspector John Winter, who headed the investigation.

Land of the dinosaurs (Qantas Award winning entry 2010)

I have been told to walk first. I’m entering some of the oldest remaining bush on Stephens Island, the most remote Department of Conservation outpost in the Marlborough Sounds. I have been told to walk first because that way, I will see one of New Zealand’s very own living fossils, the tuatara. Stephens Island, or Takapourewa, is home to 90 per cent of the world’s tuatara population and it is here they have lived unchanged for millions of years. So, if I want to see one, it is best they are not disturbed. Walk quietly. (read more)

“Is it a pineapple?”

“Is it a pineapple?” askes seven-year-old Rose Moana Rapata looking at my piece of cardboard. To be honest, I am not sure. It is oval with spiky hair and a quality that screams “a five-year-old made me,” but a five-year-old didn’t.  I did. “Sure, it’s a pineapple,” I say. (read more)