Articles from ‘elocal magazine’

A New Zealand-based group has lost a US Embassy grant after refusing to let American officials vet its course on disinformation for alignment with US foreign policy. · Dark Times Academy, which was set to train Pacific Island journalists, declined requests to hand over course materials and a participant list—moves that co-founder Mandy Henk said would have compromised academic independence and breached New Zealand privacy laws. · The US Embassy…

Reza Pahlavi was seven when he grasped something was different about him. · Riding in a horse-drawn carriage through the streets of Tehran after his father’s coronation in 1967, he noticed that the crowds were not only cheering his parents’ carriage, “I realised they were cheering me,” he recalls. “That was the moment it clicked, that I’m special, or important. It triggered something in my head. · “There was the people’s enthusiasm, love and…

News from Ukraine has been terrifying all week. But nothing prepared me for the gut-wrenching horror of reading about the treatment by Russian forces of female Ukrainian prisoners of war. · They told The Telegraph how they were tortured, beaten, starved and humiliated – made to parade naked and freezing while singing the Russian anthem. · Russia’s barbarism in general and in particular where female Ukrainians are concerned is a theme that goes…

New Zealand First’s Shane Jones isn’t backing down from his fight against what he calls “woke Māori” and divisive politics. · In an interview with Moana Maniapoto, Jones argued that Māori should focus on economic advancement rather than identity politics. Dismissing critics who see his policies as anti-Māori, he said, “Woke Māori can throw insults but can’t take their own medicine.” · Taking aim at the Waitangi Tribunal, Jones called for a…

Battle of Langverwacht Hill - 24 February 1902 · The South African War of 1899–1902, often called the Boer War (sometimes the Second Boer War), was the first overseas conflict to involve New Zealand troops. Fought between the British Empire and the South African Republic (Transvaal) and its Orange Free State ally, it was the culmination of long-standing tensions in southern Africa. · Bound to the ‘Mother country’ by the ‘crimson tie’ of empire,…

Snow weighed down the fronds of palm trees in Fort Myers, Florida, while an icy crust formed on the Mississippi River in New Orleans. Nearly three feet of snow buried the nation’s capital, and ice encased steamboats on Lake Michigan. There’s cold—and then there was the Great Arctic Outbreak of February 1899. · The polar vortex delivered an icy slap to every corner of the continental United States, making all other Snowmageddons to follow seem…

Young adults who ate a handful of walnuts with breakfast saw a long-lasting improvement in their reaction times and a boost in memory performance hours later, according to a new study. The findings strengthen the claim that walnuts are a brain-enhancing food. · According to the Doctrine of Signatures, which has been around since pre-scientific times, the physical characteristics – or ‘signature’ – of certain plants were indicative of their…

UK-based Core Power has announced that it plans to mass produce a fleet of floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs) using advanced reactor design and modular shipbuilding to be anchored off the US coast in about 10 years. · Nuclear power is enjoying something of a renaissance with many countries turning to the atom to meet their energy needs. However, the bottleneck for increasing the nuclear sector isn't with manufacturing reactors. It's the…

The last time the free world was in this much danger was during the Cuban missile crisis – and that was for precisely opposite reasons. · In 1962, at the height of the Cold War, there was no ambiguity about who was on what side. The Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship whose leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had threatened to “bury” the West. But the United States held its nerve in the face of what the Kennedy government knew was an epochal…

At 12.51 p.m. on Tuesday 22 February 2011, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake caused severe damage in Christchurch and Lyttelton, killing 185 people and injuring several thousand. · The earthquake’s epicentre was near Lyttelton, just 10 km south-east of Christchurch’s central business district. It occurred nearly six months after the 4 September 2010 earthquake. · The earthquake struck at lunchtime, when many people were on the city streets. More than…