Just to highlight how utterly ridiculous policing in the USA looks to those of us on the outside.

This guy was waving a gun around. This is how police can deal with it. He even shot at the attending officers. He's still alive.

Context: police in NZ do not carry sidearms. They do have guns secured in the boot (trunk) of their cars. There are also special units equipped for dealing with armed offenders.

A short opinion piece on how neoliberalism has affected the NZ economy in the late 20th C.

This is the damning fact:

Epidemiologist Michael Baker told Stuff it was difficult to properly monitor influenza and other winter illnesses, because high-quality surveillance programmes were discontinued, including the Ministry of Health not renewing its contract for the FluTracking tool for cost-saving reasons.

The battle that New Zealand education forgot.

Typical bullshit from Peters, trying to manufacture anti-Māori conflict.

Acknowledging both the Māori and European discoverers of New Zealand is good. Both discoveries are, themselves for their peoples, true.

IMHO the interesting fact is that not all iwi have whakapapa that asserts Kupe as the navigator who discovered Aotearoa. Some iwi have whakapapa that asserts that it was Maui*.

This isn't a problem. Both Kupe and Maui could have independently done so. The same way that one might argue that Cook and Tasman both discovered this land mass for Britain/Europe.

* if you're interested: Maui fishing up the north island is an allegory to seeing the island rise up over the horizon as if being lifted out of the water. Maui was a navigator/wayfinder of repute, as was Kupe.

Not quite totality.

My daughter's school.

I'd hazard a guess that getting the Birkenhead or Takapuna fire station's teams on site in less than 17 minutes would be challenging anyway, let alone the Silverdale team on site that quickly.

But, fuck you Simeon Brown:

At the time, Pakuranga MP Simeon Brown said he was "angry" on behalf of those impacted by the fire due to it happening during the strike.

Firefighters, nurses, teachers: give them whatever the hell they ask for. None of them do those jobs for the money you facist nationalist pigs.

Oof.

After a four-year wait, the abundant fruiting of the rimu tree could inspire the world’s heaviest parrots to boost their population

There's something I'm missing in this one.

Stumbled across this archive.

It has some of the multi-part comics aggregated for easier reading.