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4 days ago | 
rnz.co.nz | Alexia Russell
By the time our quarterly figures are out, they're three months old, and recent global instability is making them look very mouldy. While there were shoots of hope when the data was crunched last week - including a slightly better-than-expected lift in Gross Domestic Product - we are about to be hit by what economists like to call 'headwinds' - in this case, war in the Middle East, rising petrol prices, an unstable Kiwi dollar and the effect of America's tariffs.
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1 week ago | 
rnz.co.nz | Alexia Russell
It was supposed to be over by now, a three-day (at the most) blitz by Russia on its many-times smaller neighbour, an ego-boosting win for Vladimir Putin. But the war is now in its fourth year, with Russia occupying just under a fifth of Ukraine, and some out-of-the-box thinking from Ukrainians boosting morale in the beleaguered country.
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1 week ago | 
newsroom.co.nz | Alexia Russell
Paying to bury (or cremate) the person who meant the most in the world to you is going to be fraught with resentment right from the start. “It’s a grudge purchase and also a grief purchase isn’t it … it’s a purchase you don’t want to make,” says Gillian Boyes, the chief executive of the Funeral Directors Association. An average funeral costs around $10,000 but it varies widely.
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1 week ago | 
rnz.co.nz | Alexia Russell
Paying to bury (or cremate) the person who meant the most in the world to you is going to be fraught with resentment right from the start. "It's a grudge purchase and also a grief purchase isn't it ... it's a purchase you don't want to make," says Gillian Boyes, the chief executive of the Funeral Directors Association. An average funeral costs around $10,000, but it varies widely.
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2 weeks ago | 
newsroom.co.nz | Alexia Russell
One of the world’s best universities, a magnet for the globe’s brightest brains, is under attack by the Trump administration. And while Harvard is fighting various funding restrictions and bans on foreign student visas, harsher policies on America’s borders are creating fear from returning students that they could be arrested by immigration officers and jailed or deported.
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2 weeks ago | 
rnz.co.nz | Alexia Russell
Mike Casey is an electricity evangelist, spreading the word from his fossil-fuel-free cherry orchard in Cromwell. He's the CEO of Rewiring Aotearoa, which has just released two reports - the first is a machine count of all the household items people could (and, the organisation says, should) convert to electricity; the second is a policy manifesto which sets out 59 ways to move towards an electrical utopia.
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3 weeks ago | 
newsroom.co.nz | Alexia Russell
Diamonds are having a pearls moment. Once upon a time pearls were the world’s most valuable jewellery item – their extreme rarity making them the way to display wealth to the world. But in the early 1900s Japanese pearl famers worked out how to culture them and for the first time, a string of round pearls became affordable and obtainable. Now, lab-grown diamonds, indistinguishable from mined diamonds, are flooding onto the market, at a tenth of the price of those that came out of the earth.
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1 month ago | 
rnz.co.nz | Alexia Russell
When you vote in this year's local body elections - and you should vote - be wary of the candidate who promises zero rates increases. "Zero rates increases are of course possible," says Lower Hutt Mayor Campbell Barry, "but they do have serious consequences on local services and infrastructure delivery. The low rates approach - and our council suffered from it for a couple of decades - is the reason we're in the infrastructure deficit we have now.
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1 month ago | 
newsroom.co.nz | Alexia Russell
When you vote in this year’s local body elections – and you should vote – be wary of the candidate who promises zero rates increases. “Zero rates increases are of course possible,” says Lower Hutt Mayor Campbell Barry, “but they do have serious consequences on local services and infrastructure delivery. The low-rates approach – and our council suffered from it for a couple of decades – is the reason we’re in the infrastructure deficit we have now.
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1 month ago | 
radionz.co.nz | Alexia Russell
When the prime minister dodged Northland on Waitangi Day, he ended up getting an earful instead in the South Island. It came from Justin Tipa, the chair of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, in a speech at the Ōnuku Marae. "Our rangitiritanga has been ignored for decades, and the state of freshwater in our takiwā (territory) has gotten worse and worse ... and it's not good enough, and we're doing something about it."That something has just come to a conclusion.
