Warm and Toasty: The story of Solid Energy’s sleepless nights. Hannah Newport shares her thoughts on Happy Valley in the South Island. “Ok, so we all like a nice toasty fire in the winter - “put your feet up dear, there’s a good lass”. But that’s no reason to go around killing native animals, now… is it?”

Just Focus member Geoff Cooper shares his thoughts and experiences from his visit to Haiti. “It was a full on trip to a country that few of my family wanted me to visit! The first question that I was asked on my arrival back in NZ was “were you surprised at the level of poverty?”

The world, since September 11 is a different place. The media permanently talks about the latest ‘terrorist threat’ and we have a whole new vocabulary: ‘war on terrorism’ and WMD. There is a lot of fear, and in this state of fear we are quietly allowing our freedoms to slip away.

On Monday March 20 at noon, in the heart of Auckland’s Central Business District, one thousand high school students who had walked out of school that morning rallied to demand an end to youth rates. The students were demonstrating the power of collective direct action

Clearly, Rupert Murdoch is a very gifted entrepreneur, from one local newspaper to a $30b (US) media empire. While at first this may not seem connected to poverty, it gains a certain logic when you link it up with the fact that newspapers, TV and other media sources are where most people find out about world events.