A new perspective on obesity

There’s a degree of incongruity in the fact that the two major problems facing this country are child poverty and obesity. Dr Jonathan Boston, professor of public policy at Victoria University, ruffled more than a few feathers last week when he said that there are children living in New Zealand in circumstances not much different from those living in the slums of India. “They are in houses that don’t have heating, in caravans that don’t...

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What's in a name?

Back in 1986 I spent six weeks in Brazil leading a Rotary Group Study Exchange team. We were billeted by locals in the Amazon area adjacent to the vast rain forest. Before we left on our intrepid journey we were given some instruction in the language - Portuguese - by the honorary consul and we were emphatically told that the embroidered pockets on our team blazers must have Brazil spelt correctly, which as far as the Brazilians are concerned...

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We sow, we reap and we agonise

"Teenage murderers on the rampage,” screamed the headline. Well it didn’t actually; I just made that up, but it is the sort of banner we might well have got used to over the last few months as more and more young people are severely sentenced for hideous homicides they have committed. As I looked at the photos of the four people convicted for the senseless slaughter of the Featherston supermarket worker, I couldn’t help but think that...

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Reflecting on the longest day

Seventy years ago, on June the 6th 1944, the tide of the Second World War was about to turn. The allied invasion known as D-day started on the beaches of France and advanced all the way to Berlin where the Germans surrendered eleven months later. The war in Europe was over. It was a clever and well planned campaign, but its success or otherwise was never a foregone conclusion. The Germans were aware that it was to happen, but wrongly...

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