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Michael Field, Pacific journalist
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Fiji's military regime has used warlike-talk to condemn New Zealand and Australia in a continuing stand-off over sanctions on the South Pacific coup prone nation.
Coverage of the Air New Zealand A320 crash from Perpignan, France. An Air New Zealand Airbus A320 plunged into the Mediterranean Sea on November 27, 2008, killing all seven people aboard.
Privy Council rejects Bain bid London's Privy Council has rejected a legal bid to halt a further murder trial of David Bain over the 1994 killings of his family but his lawyers were jubilant over what they saw as a key concession by New Zealand's judicial system.
Kiwi film hits London to rave reviews Everywhere you look in London today - tube stations, bus stops and airports - there are posters for a New Zealand movie almost unheard of in its homeland.
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New book:The Digitized Imagination
Bebo-ing the South Seas: from Tin Cans to the Internet in the Pacific On a good day Tokelau can command a resident population of around 1100. One of the world's last colonies, the New Zealand territory has no port or airport, much less a capital city. It takes two days from Samoa to even reach its three atolls which themselves are a day's sailing apart. It was the last territory to be hooked up to the telephone. "I think improved communications provides more accountability too from the public services point of view," Tokelau official Tino Vitale said. "With telephones we will probably feel less isolated than at the moment." If isolation and smallness verging on the microscopic has for over a century represented a severe handicap, the digital world has suddenly changed them.
London's Privy Council - reporting inside It's certainly colonial and empire, but to sit in the Privy Council’s small, wooden walled and green-leather-furniture chamber in London’s Downing Street is to be a privileged witness at civilisation’s on-going and defining debate.
It was a long bus trip back from a weekend camp for the two rugby teams aboard: one white, the other African-American. They stopped at a convenience store and one of the black kids looked at the newspaper rack to see a report on the murder of his best friend. A fat white biker came through the door. |
Fair go cobber, is this the best you can do? Australia – the movie – is a long, tedious shocker and an embarrassment to a film industry with an otherwise outstanding record.
Fiji is now the complete banana republic. These are the people who made it; Voreqe Bainimarama, Anthony Gates, John Byrne, Davendra Pathik, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum and the assorted peon who submitted extravagant invoices in a mosquito like fashion as they feed on the body corpus that is Fiji today.
What is more astonishing is that both newspapers lost their publishers in military deportations, but, in the new, tame age, now accept their versions of what happened from the Fiji Government. Not only are they completely gutless, they have lost the ability to read themselves! It is easy to lose sight of simple truths amidst all the self promotion and back slapping going on among the South Pacific leaders who bravely faced Voreqe Bainimarama’s empty chair and told him things they would not have had he been there. |
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