Investigate, October 2007 by Investigate Magazine

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October 2007:

Terror Cell • Big Cat • Ron Holland • Organ Donation

Issue 81

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Volume 7, Issue 81, October 2007

FEATURES THE JIHADI CHEFS

Two members of a banned terrorist organisation slipped into New Zealand by lying to Immigration about their backgrounds. One has been deported but the other is still here, with an extended work permit. IAN WISHART has the exclusive story on who he is, and his links to one of Islam’s leading terrorist groups

THE MEGA-YACHT MAESTRO

TO GIVE, OR NOT TO GIVE

28 32

Ron Holland is one of New Zealand’s top ex-pat yacht designers, but as SELWYN PARKER discovers, his latest project is not only one of the world’s biggest sailing yachts, it is also the world’s greenest

Australia and New Zealand’s organ donation programmes are both suffering, for different reasons, with a big impact on potential transplant recipients. MELODY TOWNS reports

THE BEASTS OF BENMORE

Forget the Beast of Bodmin Moor in Britain: North Otago and Canterbury/Westland are increasingly looking likely as the homes of breeding populations of American mountain lions and possibly Asian or African black leopards. A new documentary has discovered hard evidence in the form of claw marks, pawprints, mauled sheep carcasses and dung positively identified as “big cat” in origin. IAN LUCAS backgrounds the history of big cat sightings, while filmmaker MARK ORTON discloses what he found while making The Prints Of Darkness

Cover: File image of Islamic jihadist taken by Investigate’s Shayne Kavanagh in 2001

EDITORIAL AND OPINION Volume 7, issue 81, ISSN 1175-1290

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL Big sister is watching

t’s nice to know that while Islamic jihadists are roaming New Zealand after entering on false documents, they nevertheless get work permits and other government assistance, while the cretins at the Refugee Status Appeals Authority think they can judge whether someone is truly a convert to Christianity or not. I doubt that anyone at the RSAA – even the liberal ministers of the cloth they sometimes ring in – would know a Christian convert if they fell over one. In fact, I strongly suspect they’d reach for a necklace of garlic and a silver bullet if they thought a genuine Christian was coming anywhere near them. Our modern bureaucratic infrastructure, after nine years of Labour’s social engineering, often reminds me more of those old Hammer Horror “They won’t be chasing the rapidly vampire classics, where the growing numbers of terrorist- bloodsucking leaches on the public purse swarm trained immigrants, but instead around wherever there is they’ll be surveilling ordinary fresh meat and a chance lunch; but shine a bit of families, assigning a government of sunlight on them and they social engineering spy to every shrink back and shriek, barsingle family in the country” ing their fangs in anger as they retreat, scattering like the bats they are. I’m talking of course about the plight of former Muslim Ali Panah, the Iranian who converted to Christianity after leaving Iran and now faces a potential death sentence, if forced to return. The NZ Government, as part of its reasoning for declining his appeal, doesn’t want to open the “floodgates” for Muslims looking to convert to Christianity. Interestingly, however, the government and the RSAA had no qualms at all about granting asylum to a gay Iranian party boy, who also faced a potential death sentence on his return. Maybe the experiences of one Labour MP who had an affair with a gay Iranian played a part in the Government’s decision. Who knows? But according to a report in Britain’s Independent newspaper a couple of years ago, there’s a crying need for “gay friendly countries” to open their doors to gay asylum-seekers. Christians, on the other hand, can be fed to the lions. According to news reports, persecution, torture and execution of Christians has increased in Iran under the

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

leadership of President I’masmadasajackrabbit, the fundamentalist Muslim who believes he has been chosen by Allah to usher in Armageddon in the next couple of years. “The recent wave of persecution traces back to the kidnapping and stabbing of an Iranian convert to Christianity named Ghorban Tori on Nov. 22. The murdered 50-yearold Tori was a leader of an independent house church of Christian converts in Gonbad-e-Kavus, a town east of the Caspian Sea along the Turkmenistan border. His dead body was found outside of his home in northeastern Iran a few hours after his kidnapping and the police took away Bibles and other banned Christian books from his house, Compass Direct reported. “Tori was reportedly the fifth Protestant pastor in Iran killed by unidentified killers in the past 11 years. Three of the five were former Muslims." We live in a strange world of ‘tolerance’ indeed when NZ, by its own admission, sends out signals that it is prepared to act as a haven for gay Muslims worldwide, and where Islamic terror suspects are welcomed but where accepting Muslim converts to Christianity would be seen as “sending the wrong signals”. Then, to top it all off, the supreme commander in Labour’s belfry of bats, Children’s Commissioner Cindy Kiro (affectionately known as ‘Top Bat’ in the social engineering circles, proudly announces that she’ll pour millions into a nanny-state surveillance scheme. They won’t be chasing the rapidly growing numbers of terrorist-trained immigrants, but instead they’ll be surveilling ordinary families, assigning a government social engineering spy to every single family in the country. Kiro is cloaking her Big Sister scheme in child abuse statistics to make it politically acceptable, but as National’s John Key has pointed out – Labour should be looking to its own core voters to target first if it really wants to combat child abuse. Finally, some important news. If you read Investigate and not receiving our monthly email edition, The Briefing, you need to be, as there are some major developments ahead. It’s free, so to get on the subscriber list simply visit our website, www.investigatemagazine.com and click on the link, ‘The Briefing’.

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INVESTIGATE

I am writing to you regarding your latest edition of Investigate, and what I consider to be one [of] the worst pieces if [of] journalism I have ever seen. I can not believe the utter rubbish your magazine has published and how you have brought the name of your magazine and that of Air New Zealand into complete disrepute. How can this story be considered break [ing] news? Slow news day for Investigate was it? From the information I have been able to find on the internet and the Air New Zealand website, it is clear that the three charters that Air New Zealand operated were a commercial decision, which has nothing to do with Investigate or the general public. This was a business decision that does not affect New Zealand or its citizens. The New Zealand government was completely aware of the tender for the charters to Kuwait and Japan, however due [to] the constant political bungling of the New Zealand government, one department did not communication [communicate] to another that Air New Zealand had tendered and been successful in obtain [ing] excellent business revenue for them. Well done Rob Fyfe. May I remind Investigate magazine that only 5 or 6 years ago, our national carrier was in very poor financial health and the New Zealand government were forced to buy out the once privatized airline. Now that Air New Zealand are making good financial decisions, and chasing business all around the world, to put to use their aircraft, a publication such as yours has tarnished this image and canned what was an excellent decision. September 2007: Air New Zealand • Aspartame • Birdlife In Danger • Paul Henry Issue 80

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

So [To?] say that I am furious with Investigate is an understatement. I will not continue to purchase your publication in the future as I feel your article was pathetic and has caused a complete up roar [uproar] in Parliament which will waste more taxpayers’ money as each politicians [politician] argues with another for the next few months. I am fully aware that one less reader will not affect Investigate in any shape or form, however I hope that fellow readers and bloggers also give Investigate the boot as I have done so. Glenn Potter, Auckland EDITOR RESPONDS:

Dear Glenn, we’re sorry our story annoyed you. As we explained in our editorial we actually support Air New Zealand’s commercial decision in this regard, but stories have to be judged on their news merit. Had the Herald, or TV3, or the Dominion Post been first to discover this info, they too would have run it. The fact that the flights were mentioned in tiny circulation industry newsletters is not significant, and reminds me of a scene in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the local council claimed that a public notice affixed to the wall of a basement storage room in the council building, behind a door carrying the warning sign, ‘Beware of the Leopard’, also amounted to widespread publication. Significantly, Investigate, like the rest of the mainstream media and public in NZ, was unaware of the flights. In our case, we received a tip off from staff and also a close friend of a crew member, after the first flight. There was no indication at that stage of a second or third flight, and because we were in the middle of our Dunedin Police investigation at that stage the information was held by us until we began

TO DISCOVER...

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preparing the magazine during July (co-incidentally the time the info started appearing in industry newsletters that no one else reads). Air New Zealand, incidentally, did not mention the fact that it had publicized the flights in those newsletters, when we asked the airline for comment on them. Air New Zealand also stated this to Investigate: “No authorisation was sought or required from either MFAT or Civil Aviation.” That statement appears to be in conflict with its later statements to the media that it sought advice from MFAT. There’s an old adage in business and politics: ‘Regardless of legal niceties, never do anything that you would not be comfortable with on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper’. As a media organization, we cannot please everybody all the time. But at least we do our job without fear or favour.

DIAL 1080

While no great lover of DOC, in fact I find them a typical Government Department who want to extend their empire at all costs. However the article on 1080 by Melody Towns that appeared in your last issue cannot go unchallenged. Over thirty years ago I was a deer culler for the New Zealand Forest Service. I would have shot many, many thousands of deer, pig and goat. I was in areas where there was no forest canopy, this was in the real backblocks of New Zealand bush. Areas where I never heard a bird by day but possums all night. It was nothing to set out a line of traps and cyanide and get 100 possums each night for a week. Places so steep goats fell out of their boots and so high that if you fell down a mountain you would starve to death before you hit the bottom. I have recently returned to several overdue hunting trips to these areas. The bird life is everywhere, the forest has a canopy and is regenerated and still regenerating. All these areas were the subject of 1080 drops after I left. As one who has been on the ground doing the hard yards I can only say that 1080 has created a new forest life not destroyed it. There were even more native trout in the streams. I am still a keen hunter but realistic enough to know that this anti 1080 debate is driven more by hunters who lose the chance to bag a trophy, yes I know there are secondary effects that kill deer and other creatures, and the loony left greens who hate anything unnatural being introduced into the environment, forgetting the fact that the basis of 1080 is a naturally produced substance as is the killing power of cyanide. For Melody Towns to state in her article, “that even in the roughest terrain ground-based possum control is possible for a $20-per hectare differential in cost”, is breathtaking in its stupidity. I will challenge Ms Towns to put on a pack loaded with just the right amount of kit to survive in the New Zealand bush, plus traps, cyanide tubes and rifle and ammo and go into areas where I have been and bait, poison and shoot then see how effective her methods are. Oh do not forget if you sprain your ankle, break your leg, or in any way injure yourself you are 2 or 3 days walk from anywhere. A helicopter would be hard pressed to find you. From above they can only see the possum free canopy. Chris Steele, Wellington

A LAND OF HOBBITS

Our country’s drive to set an example of conserving natural resources is, in true New Zealand fashion, going beyond the limits of absurdity. Horizon Regional Council is proposing to limit

10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

the supply of fresh water to the inhabitants of the Tararua towns of Woodville, Eketahuna and Dannevirke to something like seventy five gallons a day. For well over a century this God-given resource has been freely and abundantly available. Now the residents (a diminishing number) will be taught a lesson and punished for their past profligacy. They will have to mend their ways, use ‘grey water’ for gardening, restrict themselves in such matters as bathing, ‘loo flushing, laundry, car washing, even the dog will learn what life is like in places like Somalia. Still as good citizens I guess we should be prepared to make this sacrifice, (or suffer this lunacy) in the supposed belief that in some unfathomable way it will somehow alleviate the water shortages in Africa, Australia and maybe Arizona. Truly those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. A.H. Wall, Masterton

TAITO ARTICLE

I invite your magazine to print a retraction of the statement made by Taito Phillip Field in reference to myself on page 30. The statement made by Mr Field and published by Investigate magazine is false. I, Olinda Woodroffe did not “use carpenters and materials that were there for building cyclone relief shelters in Samoa, on a property, on her own, on the basis that it was to build accommodation for the builders.” Investigate should investigate the accuracy of statements it publishes, rather than publishing inaccurate self serving statements of Mr Field. 1. Mr Field has defamed me in the past. However there was no need to pursue action against him because the truth had come out through the public inquiry that Doug Graham, MP for Remuera at the time, called, when I approached him. 2. The public inquiry found that all the Cyclone Val committee members including the Maori Queen made decisions that were carried out by the builders in Samoa. The inquiry was by an independent accountant, called by the Government of New Zealand and was paid for from Public funds. 3. The inquiry established that Mrs Woodroffe told the truth. The rest of the committee hired lawyers at the expense of the Cyclone Val funds, to cover up, the questions raised by Mrs Woodroffe. Mrs Woodroffe met her own legal expenses. 4. What that independent public inquiry report said was anything that was done on Mrs Woodroffe’s land by any builder was with tacit approval of the whole committee of Cyclone Val. The committee was headed by the Maori Queen. Mrs Woodroffe had no power to unilaterally direct the builders. On the subject of inaccurate reporting by Investigate in regards Mr Siriwan. I was approached by Mr Siriwan the Thai tiler to act for him while I was at the Woodroofe Law Partnership office in Samoa. There was no good reason for Woodroffe Law Partnership not to act for Mr Siriwan. It would have been dishonest of me, to refuse to act for Mr Siriwan simply because Mr Field is Samoan. Mr Siriwan, his wife and 5 year old son, Henry, were thrown out on to the street in Samoa, during pouring rain at night, when Mr Field found out that Mr Siriwan had gone to a lawyer to help him. As Mr Siriwan had no money, no family in Samoa to turn to, and nothing but his phone, wet clothes and with a wet child and wife beside him. Mr Siriwan rang Auckland and asked Natalie Johnson, a Thai citizen, for help. Mr Field did not care about

Henry, a 5 year old child, when Henry and his parents were shown the street in the dark and heavy rain. Through telephone calls from New Zealand to family members of Mrs Woodroffe, the distraught and wet family were picked up from the street of Apia and given shelter until they left for Thailand. In my opinion what Field did to the 5 year old child and his parents casts doubt on the Fields portrayal of himself as a loving Christian man. I look forward to a retraction by Investigate magazine. Olinda Woodroffe, Barrister EDITOR RESPONDS:

It was an interview, not a report. Field made the point there was a controversy, and you also concede as much. We trust our readers, having now had the chance to read your perspective, will take it into consideration. My name is Christina. You probably don’t remember, but a few weeks ago you spoke at a Rotary meeting in Auckland. You gave me a free copy of Eve’s Bite book, (being the only student present) and I have since finished reading it. Thank you for giving it to me, I’m so glad I got the chance to read it. It has fully altered my perspective on the issues you mentioned. For the hell of it, I asked a couple classmates whether they thought gay couples should be allowed to adopt children – a unanimous yes, (“Why should they not be allowed to raise children? After all they can’t help their orientation, they’re born like that”), and I asked about the condom thing, most typical answer – “Long as you use a condom, it’s all good. They protect against S.T.I’s and stuff.” Average 16 year olds are more concerned with how to get their hands on alcohol, boyfriends/girlfriends, and not getting caught with passengers on a restricted licence, than politics, ethics ...basically the stuff you highlight in your book. I am making most of my friends read it, and for the ones who lack the patience or literary skills, I’m telling the general gist. Thanks again for the book. Yay for abstinence. Only wish I’d read it earlier on in the year, then I could have done my informative English speech on it. We’ll incite a revolt and demand proper sexual education when we march on parliament. (just kidding) I hope I’m not the only 16 year old who’s read this book, we all deserve to know the truth about the world we are going to inherit from you adults in a decade from now. Christina PS hope that made sense! It’s 12:53am, and I’m rambling a bit. Couldn’t put the book down. :)

THE FOURTH ANGEL

I read with interest your article ‘The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun...”. While I do not dispute your major thesis that the climates of planets, including Earth, may change from natural causes, and that the sun may heat up or cool down, which would have effects on Earth and elsewhere, I found the detail of your evidence less than convincing. I would like your responses to the following.

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You state that the south polar caps on Mars had been diminishing for three summers in a row. If the size of the caps varied randomly, three such summers are as likely as throwing three ‘heads’ with a coin; a chance of one in eight, not enough to establish a statistically significant trend. You report increases in the brightness of Venus and Saturn, the former by 2,500% and the latter by 1,000%. As a mathematician I dislike using percentages for such large changes, preferring to describe them as factors of 26 and 11 respectively. In the absence of further detail I initially assumed, as I think most of your readers would, that you referred to visual brightness. Closer reading showed that for Venus you are referring to some kind of radio emission, though you do not say what. For Saturn, no such clue is given. The brightness of stars and planets is measured by magnitudes, a difference of five magnitudes corresponding to a factor of 100 in brightness. On this logarithmic scale a factor of 11 corresponds to two and a half magnitudes. I saw Saturn only a few nights ago. It was not brighter than the figures in my 1950 star atlas led me to expect. Further, since the planets and moon shine by reflected sunlight, they, and the sun, should all get brighter by the same factor. This does not seem to have happened. You report that “Neptune’s moon, Triton, has leapt in temperature equivalent to a 10 degree rise on Earth.” This means nothing to me as I do not know what you mean by “equivalent” in this context. Any such definition would need to be backed up by an appropriate theory. You also say that, “A growing number of scientists are convinced that the sun is heating up. They point out that there has been more sunspot activity in the past 60 years than in the previous 1,000 years.” I hope your sources were more careful than this in their statements. In the first place, it is ambiguous. One meaning could be that there have been more sunspots in total in the last 60 years than in the previous 1,000. I would need to see data to accept this. It is more likely to mean that the average rate (sunspots/year) over the last sixty years is higher than over the previous thousand. But even this statement needs to be treated with caution: sunspots were not discovered until 1610, less than 400 years ago, and no sunspots were recorded between 1650 and 1715. Increased sunspot activity may represent increased electromagnetic activity; it does not directly represent increased temperature since sunspots are dark because they are cooler than the surrounding sun. My final comment is on an absence. One crucial piece of evidence is missing, the most convincing of all. Surely the incoming solar radiation is measured regularly, and has been for over a hundred years. Yet you make no mention of any increase in its value. Is because there has been none? David Robinson Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury EDITOR RESPONDS:

Without rebuilding all the searches I did in writing the piece in the first place, it is impossible to answer some of the points. Suffice to say I was drawing from material on the websites of magazines like New Scientist, Science, Nature, Space.com and some in the general media where these issues were being pulled together. Like you, I sometimes

raise my eyebrows at historic claims, but the people making them had letters after their names so I deferred to them. In just re-Googling the phrase “sun heating up”, I note an astrophysicist at UCLA explaining that the Sun is unexpectedly about 1.5 Kelvin higher than normal for this period of the solar cycle, and yes, it is affecting other planets. He also suggests that sunspots create heat, which may clarify your query above. “During the 17th to mid-18th centuries, astronomers noticed a complete absence of sunspots and geological records show that the Earth’s temperature dropped by 1 to 2 degrees during that time. This may not seem like much, but it was enough to freeze the Thames river and shorten Europe’s growing season, causing famine in many countries…”

LAV3 STRYKERS

I have read with great interest your articles on the NZLAV and the US Stryker (Investigate, May 2007 ) and while you are to be commended for discussing the issue I feel you have been somewhat myopic in thinking about New Zealand's defence arrangements and overlooked some things in the process. When looking at the issue of what equipment to buy, the trap many fall into appears to be in planning to fight yesterday’s wars. This thinking seems to underpin both the article on the NZLAV and the Stryker. When looking at NZ's requirements we have to stop and think, what are the likely threats our military will face?

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I think it reasonable to assume it is highly unlikely we will deploy against an industrialised and well-organised opponent in conventional battle. More likely, but still a remote possibility, is we will face troops from a developing country, poorly equipped and trained and lacking motivation. Far more likely is we will face highly motivated informal forces fighting unconventional warfare. Another consideration is technology and New Zealand's geographic location. Taking these factors into account, the NZLAV is adequate. It can be transported to a trouble spot in the Pacific aboard the HMNZS Canterbury multi-role vessel and affords protection and firepower. The issue of C-130 transportability is something of a red herring. More likely is the need to move an Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) around slung under a helicopter (see below). Your articles make the mistake of comparing this type of IFV with full armour, such as Main Battle Tanks (MBT) and heavier IFV's such as the Warrior. The NZLAV represents mechanised infantry, not armour. The protection is from stray rounds, shrapnel from exploding shells nearby, and falling items, which actually comprise the majority of casualties in battle. Where the NZLAV starts to lack is when in urban built up and wet areas. This, your articles touched on but needed to be examined in more depth. A tracked vehicle can turn on itself, and so in a case of ambush, can handle things much better. By comparison the NZLAV has a wide turning circle and can get easily trapped in streets full of rubble. The other thing missed is the NZLAV is not amphibious, which makes it much less useful. When deploying in the Pacific, the landing barges with the multi-role vessel will have to be used at all times, whereas a fully amphibious IFV would enable beach landings and island to island hopping without the multi-role vessel as intermediary. On the debate about whether wheeled or tracked, please bear in mind, that despite what people say, tracks require ongoing maintenance and the expense of repairing running gear and final drives is much heavier. With a fleet of tracked vehicles, a larger maintenance and support establishment needs to be kept in tow. So what is there apart from the NZLAV? If looking around, not much. The Warrior is very heavy, expensive, and not amphibious. We seem to be ideologically opposed to looking at Russia, but they have vehicles that would suit our requirements, for instance, the BMD-4 which is an amphibious turreted tracked IFV with a road speed of 70 kmh and 10 kmh in the water. Brief specification, it carries slightly fewer crew but more weapons, is lighter and can be air dropped or carried under a helicopter. The Russians have an eight wheeled amphibious turreted vehicle which is heavier than the NZLAV. But wait, I haven't talked about technology. This is where our government and ministry have really fallen down. The pace of change means that our adequate NZLAV's and grossly expensive frigates are simply large missile magnets (along with the new multi-role vessel)!! These assets need to be protected and currently we have no means to achieve that. All we have is an anti-

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armour weapon which is unlikely to be used as we'll probably not be attacked by other armour, and close-in and low-flying defense systems. Problem is most airborne threats are likely to be fast high flying fire and forget systems, or drones, well out of reach. In our current set-up, if we were to deploy to a trouble spot, the multi-role vessel is a sitting duck, as the frigates can only protect themselves and no-one else unless they park themselves in the way of a missile, while the NZLAV's once ashore can be picked off by stroppy natives equipped with budget RPG's. What is the solution? We need to adjust to the new landscape. We need multi mission maritime aircraft like to new P-8 or the 737AEW&C being bought by Australia, working in with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones). The Orions have served well, but they date from an age when the USSR had a fleet of submarines prowling the oceans. They are designed to fight that war. What we now need is command and control able to identify insurgents heading off in their Toyota Hilux armed with RPG's, and the ability to drop a laser guided bomb down their snouts before they even get into contact with the NZLAV's. Drones can hover over a target or search area for much longer as they have no crew to tire. We also need air strike capability, with the range and speed of the likes of the Sukhoi's being purchased by Malaysia, to counter any airborne threat to our surface assets. We also need to realise that drones now make our airspace less secure as we are within range of the northern hemisphere, so we need to be able to reach their altitude fast to counter any such threat. In this model, New Zealand would employ surface vessels that were multi-role, like the HMNZS Canterbury but with more self protection and a decent gun, with helicopters able to carry out anti-submarine and other tasks, amphibious mechanised infantry, covered up top at all times by manned air strike and surveillance systems, working with drones. Phew, and that's just the start... Ken Horlor, Christchurch

GUNSHY

As always your article was excellent and balanced. Please keep up the investigative journalism, your magazine is a beacon of hope for all of us who despair about the "journalists" working for the major media who seem to limit their investigative research to downloading the latest news release from whatever Govt Dept they are "reporting" on, I seriously cannot understand why anyone bothers to read them nowadays one gets more in depth investigation in Woman's Day than on TV1. Jeremy Eggleton, via email

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SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE Spears me!

ou only have to watch the tragic life trajectory of Britney Spears and her hollow-eyed Hollywood gal pals to understand the damage done by the premature sexualisation of girls and the extreme commodification of female bodies. Spears is the ultimate incarnation of our girl-poisoning culture – as both victim and role model. From cute performing Mousketeer to a grim, self-loathing, substance-abusing, pole-dancing parody, her psychological unravelling has played out on the public stage. Bouncing between failed relationships, weight ballooning up and down, the mother of two exists to party joylessly with fellow tragics Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, casually flashing their shaven “The defenders of what Germaine crotches for the paparazzi Greer calls this “sinister muck” to immortalise. Even Australia’s own claim to be empowering girls to Nikki Webster, who express their sexuality. But all they starred as a bubbly 13-yearat the 2000 Sydney are doing is teaching them how to old Olympics, before a TV become sex objects. It’s not self- audience of billions, has expression but self-oppression” aspired to reinvent herself as pop trash ever since. She is often quoted as being unhappy at her inability to shrug off the sweet-girl-next-door image. Her latest attempt at street cred was to pose in a silk bodice and hot pants on the cover of men’s magazine FHM, a fast-track way to jettison any remaining shreds of dignity. While it may be too late to turn back the tide for the Britney generation, the growing fears of parents and experts about the psychological damage being done to girls by a hypersexualised culture has coalesced into a formidable grassroots opposition against what the Australia Institute last year referred to as corporate pedophilia. Even author Steve Biddulph, of Raising Boys fame, has climbed on the girl bandwagon. And Julie Gale, a Melbourne mother of two girls aged 9 and 11, who founded lobby group Kids Free 2B Kids, has become the pin-up mum of the revolution, inundated with support from parents angry at the curtailing of childhood. The latest salvo comes from Melinda Tankard Reist, mother of three daughters, author and founder of the feminist think tank Women’s Forum Australia. In a

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book, Faking It: The Female Image In Young Women’s Magazines to be published this month, Reist and public health expert Selena Ewing parody the glossy women’s magazines they say are the toxic drivers of modern girldom. The book features such tongue-in-cheek cover lines as “Hate your body – we show you how”, “The stick insect diet” and “Of course you’re not hot”. The messages in magazines from Dolly to Cosmopolitan is that “women have never-ending sexual appetites – to be satisfied they must be continually available to men for sex”. Teen magazines are similarly focused on “how girls can make themselves desirable to get a boyfriend”. Over time, the effect of reading such magazines, say Reist and Ewing, is that women come to see themselves and other women merely as objects to be evaluated. “Women who objectify themselves are likely to subject their bodies to constant surveillance . . . more likely to feel disgusted, ashamed or anxious about their own bodies and have lower self-esteem”. They say: “Some researchers think that self-objectification even contributes to the risk of self-harm.” The book cites research comparing Playboy with Cosmopolitan and concludes the magazines share the same message: “That women exist as decorative bodies to look good and sexually satisfy men”. At the same time that Cosmopolitan encourages women to be independent and reject traditional roles it is telling women they need to find and service men. Then there are the new wave of magazines aimed at 5- to 12-year-old-girls, Barbie, Total Girl and Disney Girl, with their focus on celebrities, “crushes” and being “hot”. “Little girls are shown how to look and behave like pop stars.” The magazines compound other influences – from bras for eight-year-olds, underpants with dollar signs and the words “totally worth it” across the crotch, to such toys as a “Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit” marketed to six-yearolds complete with sexy garter. In the Corporate Paedophilia report, a content analysis of Total Girl found 50 per cent of the pages were sexualising; for Barbie magazine the figure was 74 per cent. The defenders of what Germaine Greer calls this “sinister muck” claim to be empowering girls to express their sexuality. But all they are doing is teaching them how to become sex objects. It’s not self-expression but self-oppression.

Lindsay Lohan , having a wardrobe ‘moment’

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 17

LAURA’S WORLD

LAURA WILSON When the fat lady sings…

ifferences in political approaches to New Zealand’s obesity epidemic remind us that whilst our major parties claim to occupy Centrist ground, tigers don’t change their stripes and they are as polarised as they’ve ever been. Apparently, around 10 percent of us are obese. Carrying around extra weight is in league with smoking and heavy drinking in terms of future health complications. This represents big bucks for our overstrained health department. Labour and National’s strategies for halting this epidemic hail from their extreme Left and Right roots. Question is, who’s right? Boiled down, one approach is about group responsibility and the other, personal “National firmly believes that responsibility. Labour tends look at an obese indihelping the obese sort out their to vidual as a product of their problems by making others environment. Many other responsible cultivates a climate of individuals and organisations share strands of culendlessly expensive intervention pability attached to an and helplessness” overweight person’s condition. Businesses that have instigated unhealthy eating and profited greatly from it theoretically should take part in shouldering the human costs. National is of the opinion that an obese individual is exercising their right and their freedom to eat what they choose, as part of living the life they choose. In the same vein, companies have a right to produce foodstuffs as high in calorie and low in value as they choose, making huge profits along the way. Spending millions on advertising to hook children into eating nutrition-free products is simply an aspect of personal freedom. In Labour’s game, we all play a part in the wellbeing of our neighbour. In National’s game, our neighbour’s quality of life is up to them. You can see how one approach creates a welfare state, and the other hard-nosed capitalism. Both perspectives are backed by impressive arguments. National is convinced that a fulfilled life results from allowing the basic human drive to succeed as unfettered a path as possible, in its innately selfish rise to the top. Experiencing personal success and fulfilment naturally causes individuals to want to give back, to include others in their successes. National’s policy is to re-route taxpayers’

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money from funding government initiatives into funding business enterprise, believing that whilst this will make the short-term more painful, in the long term increased prosperity will make for better conditions overall. Labour essentially wants the same goal, but goes about it in the reverse order. For them, taxpayer money is better spent equalising social extremes, bringing about a level playing field on which the weak or underprivileged are given a leg-up, and the well-endowed are reined in by enforced contribution to their struggling neighbour. Labour’s idea of being Centrist is to promote business-friendly policies within a social-justice framework. National softens it’s pro-business stance by giving it a humanitarian edge. But Centre ground remains frosty territory. The area where Left and Right are supposed to meet is in fact their battleground where each rips off the other’s disguise. On an issue such as obesity the lines were clearly drawn this month by Labour’s Pete Hodgson and National’s Jonathon Coleman confirming Centre Ground remains a No-Man’s-Land. Labour is already marching on businesses that profit from obesity, whilst National is defending them from legislation that intends to make them alone responsible for the negative effects of their products. National firmly believes that helping the obese sort out their problems by making others responsible cultivates a climate of endlessly expensive intervention and helplessness. Money better spent on assisting anyone with gumption to get ahead in life. Help those who help themselves, instead of helping those who can’t or won’t make the effort. There is of course one fine example of this school of thought let loose over many decades; America. Hard to argue against the most prosperous country in the world. Unless you go there. A drive through America’s unpublicised territory is an experience in the cost of the path of the Right. To this Kiwi’s astonished eyes, half of America appeared to be trailer-parks, as if the razzle-dazzle of Manhattan was fuelled by a million sordid shanty-towns. In contrast, the path of the Left shows up more in some Scandinavian countries with their earnest attempts at redistributing wealth into a no-gaps safety net. A highlevel of government intervention and no shanty-towns in sight, but would you want to live there, paying over 50 percent of your wage in tax? New Zealand is its own micro-climate of Left meets

Right ethics as our spirit is distinct from the Nordic and the American way. We are a place of high individualism mixed with a strong sense of brotherhood, which makes for fairly explosive politics as we veer between ideals of self and community. Whilst my own roots dig into the Left and I find it creepy that National’s idea of wellbeing includes pillorying schoolkids

with softdrinks and meat pies at tuckshops and on TV all in the name of ‘personal responsibility’, I find myself glad of the debate. Through this fishtailing our spirit finds its way forward between our dual ideals. No amount of wannabe Americans within National’s ranks makes me fear anything can repress our most basic Kiwi ideal of all for one and one for all.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 19

STRAIGHT TALK

MARK STEYN The President’s Vietnam lessons

eorge W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq a couple of weeks ago, and in the middle of it he did something long overdue: He attempted to appropriate the left’s most treasured all-purpose historical analogy. Indeed, Vietnam is so ubiquitous in the fulminations of politicians, academics and pundits we could really use anti-trust legislation to protect us from shopworn historical precedents. But, in the absence thereof, the president has determined that we might at least learn the real “lessons of Vietnam.” “Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. “Many “In Grenada, Maurice Bishop argued that if we pulled out toppled the prime minister, Sir Eric there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese Gairy: It was the first ever coup people. ... A columnist for in the British West Indies, and in a the New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just faintly surreal touch led to Queen as Cambodia and Vietnam Elizabeth presiding over a People’s were falling to the commu‘It’s difficult to imagRevolutionary Government” nists: ine,’ he said, ‘how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.’ A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: ‘Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life.’ The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.” I don’t know about “the world,” but apparently a big chunk of America still believes in these “misimpressions.” As the New York Times put it, “In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.” Well, it had a “few negative repercussions” for America’s allies in South Vietnam, who were promptly overrun by the north. And it had a “negative repercussion” for the former Cambodian prime minister, Sirik Matak, to whom the U.S. ambassador sportingly offered asylum. “I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion,” he told him. “I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people who has chosen liberty. ... I have committed this mistake of believing in

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you, the Americans.” So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with the best part of two million other people. If it’s hard for individual names to linger in the New York Times’ “historical memory,” you’d think the general mound of corpses would resonate. But perhaps these distant people of exotic hue are not what the panjandrums of the New York Times regard as real “allies.” In the wake of Vietnam, the Communists gobbled up chunks of real estate all over the map, and ever closer to America’s back yard. In Grenada, Maurice Bishop toppled the prime minister, Sir Eric Gairy: It was the first ever coup in the British West Indies, and in a faintly surreal touch led to Queen Elizabeth presiding over a People’s Revolutionary Government. There were Cuban “advisors” all over the island, just as there were Cuban troops all over Africa. Because what was lost in Vietnam was not just a war but American credibility. Do the British qualify as real “allies” to the Times? The Argentine seizure of the Falkland Islands occurred because Gen. Galtieri had figured if the Commies were getting away with all this land-grabbing, why shouldn’t he get a piece of the action? After all, if the supposed Yank superpower had no stomach to resist routine provocations from its sworn enemy, the toothless British lion certainly wouldn’t muster the will for some no-account islands in the South Atlantic. “The west” as a whole was infected by America’s loss of credibility. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, Galtieri lost his gamble, but it must have looked a surer thing in the spring of 1982, in the wake of Vietnam, and Soviet expansionism, and the humiliation of Jimmy Carter’s botched rescue mission in Iran – the helicopters in the desert and the ayatollahs poking and prodding the corpses of American servicemen on TV. American victory in the Cold War looks inevitable in hindsight. It didn’t seem that way in the ‘70s. And, as Iran reminds us, the enduring legacy of the retreat from Vietnam was the emboldening of other enemies. The forces loosed in the Middle East bedevil to this day, in Iran, and in Lebanon, which Syria invaded shortly after the fall of Saigon and after its dictator had sneeringly told Henry Kissinger, “You’ve betrayed Vietnam. Someday you’re going to sell out Taiwan. And we’re going to be

around when you get tired of Israel.” President Assad understood something that too many Americans didn’t. Then as now, the anti-war debate is conducted as if it’s only about the place you’re fighting in: Vietnam is a quagmire, Iraq is a quagmire, so get out of the quagmire. Wrong. The “Vietnam war” was about Vietnam if you had the misfortune to live in Saigon. But if you lived in Damascus or Moscow or Havana, the Vietnam war was about America: American credibility, American purpose, American will. For our enemies today, it still is. Osama bin Laden made a bet – that, pace the T-shirt slogan, “These Colors Do Run”: They ran from Vietnam, and they ran from the helicopters in the desert, and from Lebanon and Somalia – and they will run from Iraq and Afghanistan, because that is the nature of a soft plump ersatz-superpower that coils up in the fetal position if you prick its toe. Even Republicans like Sen. John Warner seem peculiarly anxious to confirm the bin Laden characterization. Depending on which Americans you ask, “Vietnam” can mean entirely different things. To the New York Times and the people it goes to dinner parties with, it had “few negative repercussions.” And it’s hardly surprising its journalists should think like that when its publisher, Pinch Sulzberger, in a commencement address last year that’s almost a parody of parochial boomer narcissism, was still bragging and preening about his generation’s role in ending the war three decades later. Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (which is appar-

ently some sort of elite institution for which people pay many thousands of dollars to receive instruction from authoritative scholars such as Professor Nye), told NPR last month: “After we got out of Vietnam, the people who took over were the North Vietnamese. And that was a government which preserved order.” If by “preserved order” you mean “drove a vast human tide to take to the oceans on small rickety rafts and flee for their lives.” But, if you’re not a self-absorbed poseur like Sulzberger, “Vietnam” is not a “tragedy” but a betrayal. The final image of the drama – the U.S. helicopters lifting off from the embassy roof with desperate locals clinging to the undercarriage – is an image not just of defeat but of the shabby sell-outs necessary to accomplish it. At least in Indochina, those who got it so horribly wrong – the Kerrys and Fondas and all the rest – could claim they had no idea of what would follow. To do it all over again in the full knowledge of what followed would turn an aberration into a pattern of behavior. And as the Sirik Mataks of Baghdad face the choice between staying and dying or exile and embittered evenings in the new Iraqi émigré restaurants of London and Los Angeles, who will be America’s allies in the years ahead? Professor Bernard Lewis’ dictum would be self-evident: “America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” Mark Steyn is a syndicated columnist and the author of the New York Times best-seller America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It. © Mark Steyn, 2007

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EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER Apologies accepted

ohn Key went down half a notch in my estimation last month. He apologised to the Jews. Quite frankly, I’ve had enough of people apologising to the Jews. Why is this, you may ask? Is Prosser some sort of anti-Semite, along with his other right-wing attitudes? Not so. In fact, this writer, just like Mr Key, happens to be part Jewish. My father’s mother was from a family of Spanish Jews who fled to Holland at the time of the Inquisition, migrating from there to Britain during the 18th century. That makes me somewhere between a quarter and one sixteenth Yid, depending on whose assessment you choose to believe, and more than entitled to an opinion, I would venture. If it doesn’t, I shall have some very hard questions for certain others, later on. “People who never did anything Mr Key was apparently forced to apologise to the wrong, apologising to people who Jewish community after never suffered any ill, for things MP Maurice Williamson which happened decades or commented “If some people can’t lose weight no matter generations or centuries or even what, how come there were millennia ago, is just silly” no fat people in the Nazi concentration camps?” Perhaps the next Prime Minister felt compelled to express his displeasure at the statements made by his Transport spokesman because of his own lineage; perhaps because of a desire to be seen as politically correct. Either way, it is an Apology Too Far. The war is over. We won. Nazi Germany was defeated and destroyed, her leaders dying either by their own hands, or at the end of the hangman’s rope. And Israel today is a proud strong nation, a nuclear power with friends in high places. It is time to let it go. By continually apologising for the wrongs of the past we remain trapped within it, a past not of our making, and one which denies us the opportunity to build the future we desire. I am well aware of the atrocities of the Holocaust. I have been to Dacchau, I have seen the gas chambers and the ovens, I have met with several of my great-uncles who were active in the resistance in Denmark, smuggling Danish Jews to safety in neutral Sweden. They were great men; sadly, now, all but departed, along with most of their rescued compatriots, and indeed, almost all of those who persecuted them. An era is coming to an end.

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We must never forget the past, nor the wisdom of its lessons; but there comes a time when we must forgive the descendents of those who did wrong, accept the realities of the present, and move on. Only through failing to prevent a repeat of those evil times will we dishonour the memory of those who suffered through them – not by learning to live without suspicion of those who were not responsible. Just this week as I write, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre has awarded New Zealand – along with Australia, Austria, Scotland and Estonia – with a ‘D’ grade for “lack of effort” in hunting down any old Nazis who might still be hiding in our midst. Yeah, well, big deal. Personally I think that says more about the Wiesenthal Centre than it does about us. Did we get an ‘A’ for effort for sending a generation of our finest to fight them in the first place, I wonder? Myriad other groupings and peoples were persecuted and slaughtered at the hands – or the behest – of the Third Reich. Gypsies, homosexuals, intellectuals, communists, Catholics, the handicapped and the mentally ill, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and trade unionists, not to mention millions of ordinary Poles, Russians, and countless others. No-one demands continuous apology on their behalf, nor offers it at the drop of a hat; and nor should they, for what good would it do? That aside, I don’t criticise the singling out of one particular race, religion, or people for special sympathy or remembrance; rather, it is the over-reaching and absurd concept of ongoing apologism in itself, which gets up this writer’s nose. I mean who is apologising to whom, and why, and what do they expect or suppose will be achieved by it? I confess I don’t really know what it means for me to be “part Jewish”. Is it a religious thing, or an ethnic thing? I don’t do religion, so that can’t be me, and as for ethnicity, well, I’m from good mongrel stock anyway, so what’s one more flavour? Did my grandmother’s family stop being Spanish when they escaped the Papacy, and when did they become Dutch? How long had they been English before being subsumed by the Welsh? What was my great uncle James Rueben Goulden, when he died at Arnhem? Jewish, or something else? I mean he was as much a Williams as he was a Goulden, and as much an Evans and a Davies as either of the aforementioned. Frankly, I’d always thought he was British. He was, after all, an officer in the British Army, and wearing a British

Army uniform, and I couldn’t care less what his religion was, assuming he had one. I’ve never asked. And should someone apologise to me for his death? Should I expend my life in a festering rage, trying to track down a descendent of some hapless enlisted German soldier, so that he or she can apologise to me for something which happened decades before either of us was born? And for which of his or her GroBvater’s sins should they be apologising – doing his job? Being a good shot (or even a lucky one)? Losing the War? This is playground stuff. “He started it!” “No, she started it!”… and the blood feuds and the ethnic distrust and the utu which follows such thinking down through the ages and the generations and the centuries, is every bit as childish and just as ridiculous. We are individuals, born with a clean slate and blessed with the ability for free thought. That we should choose to exercise this free thought by filling the minds of innocent children with hatred of peoples never met, and grievance of wrongs never suffered, is insane. In the United States, the Reverend Jesse Jackson wants “white America” to apologise to Black America (can we still call them that? Or are they African America?), for the wrongs visited upon their ancestors who came to the new continent as slaves. Reality check, Reverend – your name is Jackson. Which bit of you is going to apologise to which other bit? It’s the apologising which keeps us stuck in the past – all of us, the apologists and the apologees both. The apologists are trapped by guilt, and the apologees are trapped by self-pity, and the whole horrible sorry mess is perpetuated by political correctness. Can’t we all just bloody well get over it and move on? People who never did anything wrong, apologising to people who never suffered any ill, for things which happened decades or generations or centuries or even millennia ago, is just silly. I mean England invaded and annexed Wales in 1076…or was it 1078? I forget – understandably, perhaps, because I wasn’t born until almost nine centuries later, and on the other side of the world. Should I still be demanding an apology from the English? And the English – should they be seeking apologies from the Normans? Naturally, I’ve had enough of Pakeha apologising to Maori, as well. So have a good many Maori. It is mostly only the professional grievance industry who keep this bitterness alive in New Zealand, because they’d be out of a job if we all decided to just shake hands, have a beer, and get on with life – much like the way things were, in fact, before we had a Race Relations Commissioner. Hmm. The sooner the whole Waitangi business can be put to bed, the better. Yes, bad things happened 150 years ago, to Maori who have been dead for 100 years, and visited upon them by white people who have also been dead for 100 years. Whose fault is it? Ours? It certainly isn’t mine – I’m the first generation of my family to be born in New Zealand, and my mother’s family, who were the first of my lot to arrive, didn’t get here till more than a century after the Treaty was signed. Do I get lumped in with what is supposed to be General Pakeha Guilt, just because I’m a white boy? What kind of racist garbage is that? And who am I supposed to be compensating? My mate who happens to have a parcel of land on Stewart Island, courtesy of his great-grandmother, but is paler than me? How far must we dilute the bloodline before the right to feel aggrieved is relinquished? What kind of loser actually wants to feel aggrieved anyway? Or

perhaps it doesn’t work like that; some will try to tell us that it’s all down to affiliation, not blood. Well, that brings me back to just how Jewish this writer might be; a sixteenth if you figure it on blood alone (I haven’t worked out precisely how Spanish or Dutch I might be just yet, or who might need to apologise to me for that), but as much as a quarter if you take it on affiliation. Either way, it’s silly. People who never lost anything, demanding compensation from people who never took it, makes about as much sense as the rest of the grievance and apology industry – ie, not much at all. Ironically, the comment from Maurice Williamson which kicked the whole thing off, highlights yet another form of apologism. No, there weren’t any fat people in the concentration camps – yet still, we apologise today for those who claim that they just “can’t” lose weight, despite the fact that they lack nothing but willpower and discipline. As Billy Connolly said; “You want to lose weight? Eat less, move more. Simple.” Quitting smoking many years ago, I complained to a mate that the process was too hard. “I can’t,” I said. His face darkened. “Wimp,” he replied. That one-word slap in the face was more effective than any amount of hypnosis or nicotine gum, and I haven’t lit up in sixteen years. Enough of the apologies for all those who choose to be offended; the fat people, the smokers, the weak-willed, the historically aggrieved, and on behalf of the Jewish quarter, or this writer’s Jewish quarter at least, for the Second World War as well. Your apologies have long since been accepted. Can we all just climb over it and get on with life now, please?

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LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER Voice of the Sheeple

an anyone ever remember a time when a New Zealand Government became so unpopular in such short order? It seems like only yesterday that Helen Clark and her fellow travellers purchased the Government, with our money, at the last election…Almost immediately, legislation that in more considered times would have shocked, if not outraged, the population at large was wafted quickly through Parliament so that almost without realising it, we became but simple spectators as our entire social, economic and moral values systems were upended as this extraordinary woman bent us all to her will. It was thought by many that Sir Robert Muldoon’s political tenure had brought with it an example of the democratic process being “Helen Clark, by any measure, is a effectively trampled all over politician who could well have given by a driven political personyet alongside the fair Machiavelli a run for his money” ality, Helen it appears that he, in fact, was but a mere amateur. Sir Robert’s eventual fall from grace came about simply because he largely achieved his political aims by personally terrorising the members of his caucus into total acquiescence, to the point in fact, where he essentially ended up running just about everything single handed. A brutally honest man he simply “did it his way” and if people didn’t like it, then they were perfectly entitled to go and get stuffed! Eventually, of course, the pressure told, leading to that famous television news clip that had Sir Robert, as pissed as a parrot, calling for a snap election at precisely the worst possible political moment, at which point along came the remarkable Roger Douglas, who, with David Lange as his front man, finally achieved the opportunity to re-build the New Zealand economy into a model that more or less still continues to serve us all pretty well. Looking back over these times, it really was quite remarkable that Muldoon displayed all the classic signs of being a rampant Socialist, what with price and wage freezes and the like, whilst Douglas undoubtedly would have made a brilliant National Party Finance Minister with his advanced theories of de-regulation and the flogging off of Government controlled assets that had been running at colossal losses for decades. Then along came the essentially unimaginative, almost caretaker-like government of the Bolger/Shipley years, where to all intents

24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

and purposes stagnation of thought and action became the order of the day. The advent and eventual application of MMP over this time allowed for extraordinarily inept and totally unsuitable people becoming available as future voting fodder and therefore, inevitably, to acts of common political bribery as National and Labour in competition with each other to achieve power at any price, proceeded to sell their souls to these weird folk for political support. Which brings us of course to the current Government, who, by planning to create an enormous number of joke Ministerial portfolios, had a large number of posts available with which to bribe the required number of third party ‘wannabees’ and therefore, very craftily they managed to achieve the power that they sought. Helen Clark, by any measure, is a politician who could well have given Machiavelli a run for his money. From day one in power, this very clever woman has shamelessly stacked her front benches and therefore Caucus with people of a sufficiently low IQ that with little difficulty she has been able to intellectually dominate and control them. Indeed, one would have some difficulty in assembling such a hapless collection of incompetent Ministers if one were to search under every bridge in the land. Having seamlessly gathered up all the reins of power under her direct and unchallenged control, Ms Clark then set about unleashing a personal agenda, to be apportioned amongst the aforementioned and demonstrably thick Caucus members, who then, naturally got to carry the can if some of Helen’s wilder ideas seemed likely to bring about civil unrest or perhaps an actual revolution. This way, “Dear Leader” maintained her overall image, (as originally created by the heavily re-touched and highly fanciful election posters), with any public criticism of her performance as leader being borne by her legion of sacrificial, ministerial goats. Combine all of this with having only a passing acquaintanceship with the truth when it comes to covering the Dear Leader backside, eventually and inevitably the voting public do tend to notice the ever increasing size of the Prime Ministerial nose as the fibs continue to flow and the word EX looms large before the current title doesn’t it? It is at this point of course that those that drugged with the power thing, become desperate to hold onto it at any cost…The cost quite naturally being borne in its entirety by the very people over whom they wish to maintain power. Dr Michael Cullen most certainly should be

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hailed by all of those inclined towards the Labour Party political machine, having managed to gather up by the most avaricious tax regime known to the civilised world, a war chest of the public’s money, so vast, that Dear Leader now enjoys more than enough money to bribe every voter in the land. And make no mistake about it, the signs are already there, what with legislation being put in place that only the Government will be able to spend tens of millions of dollars on what can only be described as electioneering, whilst free speech on the part of most of her opposition will be capped by an election material spend of only up to around sixty thousand dollars. Mind you I suppose we should be grateful the good lady hasn’t followed more closely the methods employed by other neo Marxist leaders and simply had her opposition done away with altogether. I’ve just spend a week in Queensland, where regardless of where you go Kiwis are just everywhere – apparently to around a half million now in number. Apart from the sunshine why are they there? Real easy, money and lifestyle. $300,000 – $400,000 gets you a four bedroom brick and tile, well constructed home, even maybe with a pool thrown in. You’ll be paid an average of 30% more money each week and for forty hours no less. Your taxes are lower, power bills are around $200 bucks every THREE months, petrol is cheaper, rates are generally a lot less, local government appears to not be run by congenital idiots – so roads and general infrastructure are as they should be, and for what it’s worth all of this is being achieved without Queensland having any State debt. No this isn’t an advertisement for Kiwis to consider crossing the ditch, simply a comparison to show what New Zealand could be like had we the good sense to employ at Central and Local Government level at least a few people with an ounce of talent, and ability to plan for the future rather than just for the next election. We all wonder, particularly in Auckland, why the whole Kiwi lifestyle is changing so rapidly. Well, when our talented youngsters are departing for OZ in their hundreds each and every month, when an otherwise very noticeable population drop is concealed by indiscriminate immigration. Add to this our retired folk being driven out of the city by uncontrolled rates hikes, that simply have come about because Local Government has employed thousands of hugely overpaid bureaucrats, has spent untold millions on “consultants” and have indulged themselves with every kind of expensive and usually quite unnecessary civic “improvement” probably dreamt up most likely prior to another session in re-hab. House prices also going through the roof here, so our youngsters can’t afford a roof over their heads. The ARC, also run by dick heads and party hacks of the first order, as policy, just won’t allow building on the thousands of hectares of available land we have, therefore creating a shortage that like any other shortage is bound to bang up the prices. From the Clark Government to Local Bodies we are being led into, rather than out of the economic and social desert, and worse still there appears to be no discernible movement from amongst the “Sheeple” to even begin to reverse this plainly destructive process. We have elections coming up ladies and gentlemen, is it too much to ask those of you who have some regard for this neat little country of ours, to vote, and clean out in total, the utter morons who are currently doing their best to wreck it. Ask yourselves a simple question before you vote, “would I employ this candidate”, if not, for heavens sake don’t vote for them, we now need talented and clever people running our affairs... Urgently!

TOUGH QUESTIONS

Kim Vo

Faith healing: Believers vs. skeptics

n steeply pitched chapels, plain hotels and living rooms, the sick are calling on God to heal their pain. And in many cases, they say, God is answering. Marianela Fajardo says her daughter, stricken with cystic fibrosis, is breathing easier. And Clifford Vaughn swears he’s cured of incurable AIDS. In an era when people invest billions of dollars searching for the next medical breakthrough, more people are turning to faith. While people have always prayed for good health, experts say the number who believe in divine healing is increasing, partly due to the influence of charismatic churches, one of the fastest-growing segments of Christianity. This comes despite a major study published last year that found some people who were prayed for didn’t recover any better “Some believe faith and prayer are than those who weren’t. wants to heal you, enough. Others say God created he“God really wants to heal doctors so they should take you. But first you have to advantage of modern medicine” believe,” Pastor Ken Ruiz thundered this summer at a healing crusade in California, where people had come seeking help for ulcers, depression and paralysis. “It’s like the diagnosis is: You’re a sinner,” Ruiz preached. “And the prescription is Jesus Christ.” Intriguingly, 29 percent of Americans say they have actually witnessed “divine healing,” says a 2006 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. It’s a leap from another poll that found only 10 percent of Americans believed in divine healing three decades ago. The current belief in divine healing shoots up to 62 percent among Pentecostals and 46 percent among charismatic Christians, whose traditions include laying hands and speaking in tongues, according to Pew. “You’ll definitely see a growth in divine healing, even as technological and medical development continues,” says Candy Gunther Brown, a religion professor. Many people opt for both medicine and prayer, she says. People seek healing in many ways, and for many reasons. Some believe faith and prayer are enough. Others say God created doctors so they should take advantage of modern medicine. And some turn to God after everything else has failed. Marianela Fajardo relies on a combination of faith and medicine for her 6-year-old daughter, Maria. She recently

26, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

brought the girl to a San Jose home, where David Lindberg has transformed his living room to a healing room complete with a cross and “beautiful, gentle, godly music.” There, Lindberg and his wife, who feel called by God, pray over their guests. It is one of 620 healing rooms that have opened worldwide since 1999, according to the International Association of Healing Rooms, which offers a two-day training session for the healers. “Before the healing room, she had heavy breathing and was always coughing,” says Fajardo, a loan agent in San Jose. “Now she can swim and play without even gasping for air, even while playing really hard.” Fajardo plans to bring the child back for more prayers. “I know for myself she’s healed. And for me, it’s a reminder that God is awesome.” Others aren’t so sure. As editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, Dr. Wallace Sampson has examined several claims of supernatural healing. He doesn’t care if people credit doctors or God as long as they don’t abandon medicine. Faith can indeed comfort the sick, Sampson added. However, Sampson, a retired oncologist, worries societies could stop supporting costly medical research if people believe faith did most of the work. “There is a tendency for some in faith healing to dismiss or demean science. That’s a problem for science,” he says. “Good public policy will not progress on faith.” Fajardo and Lindberg discount scientific reviews of divine healing, including a major 2006 study involving 1,800 patients undergoing bypass surgery. It found that intercessory prayer – that is, praying for others – did not help people recover any better; people who knew they were being prayed for actually suffered more complications. Jeffery Dusek, who co-wrote the study, considered it one of the most rigorous studies on intercessory prayer. On the other hand, the study did not measure healing via direct prayer and the laying on of hands, which is the way the Apostles were instructed in the Bible. Pastor Grace Caruth is accustomed to the skepticism. She is a certified medical assistant. On Sundays, she dons a blue robe and leads services in a California hotel room. Members of the Bible’s Way Apostolic Church claim God has fixed their livers, their thyroids, their addictions. They also see doctors, have had transplants and take medication. The battle lines between the skeptics and the faithful may be drawn, but those who have seen, believe.

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Jihad in the

Kitchen Migrant chefs exposed as members of terrorist group

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In an Auckland restaurant today, a young Muslim man works as a chef, and may be on the verge of getting permanent residency. But this man is not just anybody. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s undergone terrorist training with a major Islamic terror group, and arrived in New Zealand on false documents. The authorities know this. So why is he still here? IAN WISHART has the exclusive investigation INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 29

embers of one of the world’s largest Islamic terrorist groups have successfully infiltrated New Zealand and been instructed to set up support networks here, despite being banned under New Zealand’s Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. Even more embarrassing for the Government, Investigate has obtained documents and statements from within the NZ Islamic community that show a man given military training at a terrorist base on the Afghan border continues to work here on an official work permit, despite evidence that he provided false information on his immigration application five years ago – and despite the New Zealand Government being alerted three years ago. The terrorist organization is called Lashkar e Taiba (pronounced “Lashkari Tiber”), which means “Army of the Righteous” in the Urdu language of Pakistan. Its members, believed to number well into the thousands, are trained in a hundred madrassas, or hardline Islamic religious schools, scattered throughout Pakistan and the Afghan border regions, and collectively they make it one of the largest terror organizations affiliated to Osama bin Laden’s al Qa’ida network. The documents obtained by Investigate show a Lashkar e Taiba (LeT) group in Pakistan urging followers to set up support networks in New Zealand, even though the organization is banned worldwide and as part of this country’s anti-terrorism laws. Across the Tasman, Australian authorities arrested and prosecuted a 22 year old Muslim medical student who had attended an LeT terror training camp in Pakistan, but here in New Zealand one of the group’s members who attended the same camp has instead been given an extension to his work permit. In a moment we’ll tell you more about who the man is, where he works and what the evidence is. But first, some background To understand the significance of this story, and the ramifications for NZ security that these men have been able to enter the country legally, albeit using false documents, you first need to know a little bit of history about the LeT. The group has been caught donkey-deep in some of the terrorist plots uncovered in Australia in recent years, as journalist Kaushik Kapisthalam noted on Australia’s Crikey.com.au news-site. “When it comes to the common terrorist thread between Willie Brigitte, Izhar-ul-Haque, David Hicks and Faheem Lodhi, Australians constantly hear the name “Lashkar-e-Taiba” (LeT) bandied about. Given the preponderance of LeT connections to terror plans within Australia therefore, it is critical that Australians understand the origins and activities of Lashkar-eTaiba. To begin with, one must be disabused of the notion that the LeT is a “Kashmiri” group. It is not. “The LeT was founded in Pakistan and is made up of mostly Pakistani Punjabis with a smattering of Afghans, Arabs, Bangladeshis, South East Asians and the occasional Western or Indian Muslim recruit. To understand the LeT, it is critical to appreciate its position in the Pakistani as well as the global jihadist movement. “The LeT led Ahle-Hadith movement has traditionally stayed apolitical and instead focused on its main goal – the dream of

30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

establishing an Islamic Caliphate that stretches from Indonesia to Morocco, including Northern Australia by means of a violent jihad. “Due to its eschewing of political confrontation with the Pakistani army and thanks to the strength of its ties to Saudi Arabia the LeT steadily grew in to one of the largest and most capable jihadist groups in Pakistan, despite the relatively small size of the Ahle Hadith followers in that nation. Even though the LeT elects not to take part in politics, it does have an unarmed wing, the Markaz Da’wa wal-Irshad (MDI) or “Centre

A madrassa student poses for Investigate with his AK-47, October 2001, Pakistan. PHOTO: Shayne Kavanagh

for Religious Learning and Social Welfare”. At the inspiration and by some accounts seed money from Osama bin Laden, Pakistani Salafists Zafar Iqbal and Hafiz Mohammad Saeed of the University of Engineering and Technology of Lahore, founded the MDI in 1987. One of the other founding fathers of the MDI was Palestinian promoter and scholar of jihad Abdullah Azzam of the Muslim Brotherhood. Azzam was also one of the inspirations behind the creation of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Many consider Azzam the “Godfather” of the modern jihadist movements. Azzam was in fact the reli-

gious and political mentor of Osama Bin Laden and the inspiration behind the “Arab-Afghan” phenomenon of international, particularly Arab volunteers hijacking local conflicts involving Muslims in the name of Islam and turning them into a part of a global jihad. To this day, Lashkar uses Azzam’s speeches and publications to train and motivate its cadres. Also noteworthy is the fact that the Lashkar-e-Taiba, before it renamed itself “Jamaat-ud-Dawa”(JuD) in 2002, linked on its website to the Hamas official website and the then English mouthpiece of al Qaeda, Azzam.com. Before Israeli forces killed him, Hamas INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 31

An armourer associated with an Islamic jihadi group prepares assault weapons in Pakistan’s North West Frontier province. PHOTO: Shayne Kavanagh

leader Sheikh Yassin routinely addressed LeT rallies in Pakistan through phone. It is to be noted that Hafiz Mohammad Saeed became the supreme leader or the “Emir” of the LeT following Azzam’s death. “The 190 acres large headquarters of the MDI/LeT is located in the town of Muridke, about 45 kilometres from Lahore. Its vast campus contains a huge mosque for the construction of which Osama bin Laden had reportedly contributed 10 million Pakistani Rupees, along with a garment factory, an iron foundry; a wood works factory, a swimming pool and three residential colonies for the volunteers. During the days of the US-Saudi funded jihad in Afghanistan to drive out the Soviets, the MDI was allowed its LeT volunteers to fight along with the Afghan Mujahideen. The Muridke campus also served as a base camp for Arab fighters to rest and recuperate and even train for jihad. “Reports say that Bin Laden also paid for the construction of a lavish and secure guesthouse in the LeT’s Muridke campus. Other than staying in the guesthouse occasionally, Bin Laden also used to chair LeT’s annual conclaves. After he became a global fugitive in the early to mid 1990s, Bin Laden preferred not to stay in the Muridke guesthouse due to security concerns. While Osama bin Laden stopped attending LeT’s annual moots, he has addressed them over the phone until a few years ago from his hideout in the Sudan and, since after 1996 from Afghanistan. Addressing the November 1997 LeT annual meeting on the phone from Kandahar, bin Laden reportedly said: “Those who oppose jihad are not true Muslims.” The LeT like other Pakistani jihadist groups also benefited greatly from 32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

Al Qaeda training at its camps in Afghanistan. In those camps, LeT fighters gained access to suicide bombing techniques, learned how to build large truck bombs that could destroy reinforced concrete structures, how to conduct surveillance on targets without being noticed, how to plan for spectacular operations covertly etc. “To finance its day-to-day activities, the LeT leverages its contacts in Saudi Arabia as well as launches donation campaigns with overseas Pakistanis, especially middle class and wealthy Punjabis in Britain, Australia and the Middle East. According to Jane’s Terrorism & Insurgency Centre, Osama bin Laden has also financed LeT activities until recently. The LeT, under its new name JuD, uses its outreach networks including schools, social service groups and religious publications to attract and brainwash recruits for jihad in Kashmir and other places. “While LeT apologists try to use its connection to Kashmir to palm it off as a “Kashmiri freedom fighter” group, the reality is that it has always used brutal terrorist tactics in Kashmir and elsewhere in India. LeT members have perpetrated and even claimed responsibility for scores of attacks on Hindu pilgrims, temples and innocent farmers. In fact, the LeT boldly claimed responsibility for a May 2002 attack on the wives and children of Indian troops at a time of war-like situation between India and Pakistan. European Union External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten noted at that time that he was repulsed by the sheer savagery of the attack where sleeping infants were machinegunned to death at close range. Despite this, the LeT openly praised the attack and glorified it on its website.”

TOP LEFT: Muhammad Anwar’s father, also Jameel ur Rehman’s uncle, Nazir Ahmad, who urged the men to help establish Lashkar e Taiba in New Zealand. TOP RIGHT: Muhammad Anwar’s two children left behind in Pakistan. He told Javed Chaudhry’s sons he was looking forward to his oldest son joining LeT when he was old enough. BOTTOM LEFT: The wife Anwar denied having on his immigration forms. BOTTOM RIGHT:Muhammad Anwar’s 2004 application for an extended work permit. Note the marital status box toward the bottom of the page

So that, then, is just one brief article on LeT. There are thousands more on the internet, including reports that some of the July 7 bombers in London may have trained at LeT camps. How could an organization so prominent on the War on Terror hit-list manage to slip past New Zealand intelligence and immigration agencies (again)? Our story begins in 2001, when a Waikato businessman traveled to Pakistan seeking staff for his restaurant. The man, a moderate Muslim and prominent community leader named Javed Chaudhry, wanted an unmarried chef. The man who responded was Muhammad Anwar, a cook from Pakistan who needed an employer to sponsor his immigration to New Zealand. While the businessman sorted out the paperwork, Anwar arranged for a ‘friend’, Jameel ur Rehman, to be hired as a cook as well. Rehman, in fact, was Anwar’s cousin. Both men arrived in New Zealand in early 2002 to start work at the restaurant, and initially they lived with the businessman and his family.

But it was only a matter of time before the first hint of trouble, says Chaudhry. “Anwar came to me one day, and said he had been having sleepless nights because he needed to tell me something. He said, ‘I did not tell you the truth back in Pakistan. I have a wife and two children. I am sorry’. “I was very shaken, because I had had to turn away many good chefs who applied for the jobs for the very same reason. I didn’t want a married person because the job in New Zealand was for years, and I did not believe it was ethical to separate a man from his wife and children for several years. “So I told Anwar he had broken my trust and would have to work hard to regain it.” Despite coming clean to his boss about the lie, Muhammad Anwar did not come clean to the New Zealand immigration authorities, and in a 2004 document applying for a work permit extension he again ticked the “never married” box. It was during this time that the restaurant owner became INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 33

Madrassa students in Pakistan’s North West Frontier province. PHOTO: Shayne Kavanagh

more suspicious, after stumbling across a letter addressed to both Anwar and Jameel ur Rehman. The letter, now in the hands of both Investigate magazine and the Security Intelligence Service, disclosed that Anwar and Rehman’s relatives were all involved with an Islamic terror organization called Lashkar e Taiba, and the tone of the letter suggested both of Chaudhry’s houseguests were likewise, active members of the banned organization. This is what we now know in hindsight – at the time the name of the terror organization meant little to the businessman; it was the paramilitary hardline Islamist references he was picking up on. Initially, it was not enough to tip his hand in favour of calling NZ authorities, but it was enough for him to start keeping his ears and eyes open. While Anwar was applying for an extension to his work permit in 2004, the businessman made a visit to Pakistan, armed with a video recorder. He managed to track down Anwar’s wife and children, along with other details linking him back to the terror organization. On his return to New Zealand he faced the issue of whether to keep Anwar on, but in July contacted the NZ Immigration Service (NZIS) and alerted them to the false information in the work permit application, and the terror links. Chaudhry asked NZIS whether they could cut the 12 month extension to just five months which – when backdated to the 17 March 2004 permit expiry – meant that Chaudhry 34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

could effectively give Anwar four week’s notice for a departure on 16 August. Three days later, NZIS spoke to Chaudhry by phone, advising him to immediately “withdraw the offer of employment”. This, explained NZIS, would have the effect of cancelling the work permit forthwith, allowing Anwar to be deported. So the next night he told Anwar to leave. Naturally, Anwar wasn’t happy. “Mr Anwar, after losing his job, has become more violent and troublesome towards us,” complained Chaudhry in a further letter to NZIS. “He is pressuring us not only by himself, but also through his friends. On Monday 26 July 2004 at about 10pm his friend Mr Awaiz rang me and told me that he is coming to see me at the restaurant and that I should wait for him there. “There, he demanded for Mr Anwar’s passport and claimed [that] Mr Anwar has told him that he does not fear immigration for the possibility of being deported, but rather ‘he promises to bring harm to you, your family and your company through any possible means’.” The passport, incidentally, had been sent to Immigration back in March as part of the work-permit extension process. Chaudhry didn’t have it. A couple of days later, the restaurant was broken into and money taken from the till, and the following day an egg was

thrown at the front window while a female staff member was setting tables. The police were called in regard to both incidents, but naturally had no hard proof of Anwar’s involvement. Anwar meanwhile had fled his flat, and was staying with another Pakistani immigrant. According to Chaudhry, Anwar was being hidden by local Pakistanis, many of whom hailed from the same lawless North West Province of Pakistan as Anwar and Rehman. Within weeks, Anwar was in Auckland, working in the restaurant of another Pakistani businessman. Chaudhry found out via his own contacts in the community and secretly videotaped Anwar there, sending a copy to Immigration. He also passed on the text of a conversation with Shahid Azad, the President of the Pakistan Association of New Zealand (PANZ). According to the documents sent to Immigration in September 2004, Azad admitted harbouring Anwar and arranging work for him at the Salateen restaurant in Hunter’s Corner, Auckland, despite the fact that Anwar was wanted by the authorities.

ou would think that Immigration, knowing where Anwar was working, would move swiftly to deport him. But no, the wheels of the deportation appeal process turn slowly. Another letter sent in May 2005 records “that Mr Muhammad Anwar is still working at the Salateen…he keeps changing his appearance. Currently he is clean shaved and having moustache,” wrote Chaudhry. It took nearly a year, along with a series of cat and mouse police raids on houses in Auckland suspected of harbouring Anwar, before he was finally deported. One of those houses allegedly belonged to the then-head of the Pakistan Association of New Zealand, Shahid Azad. One of the association executive told Chaudhry that members of the Pakistan Association held an emergency meeting to decide whether the Pakistani community should co-operate with the police investigation into Anwar. “As if they had a choice,” mutters Javed Chaudhry to Investigate. “I told my colleagues that this was a matter of national security and that we owed allegiance to our new country, New Zealand. Instead, some other people in the Pakistani community here took a different view and began slandering my name.” Rather than see Anwar as a threat to New Zealand security because of his extremist Islamic views and membership of a terror organization, local Pakistanis commenced a whispering campaign against the businessman, accusing him of being a bad employer and slave-labourer. Whilst it was true he had failed to pay the correct holiday wages, that didn’t make him Genghis Khan. And even if he were New Zealand’s worst employer, it would not change the fact that two men were in the country with proven connections to terrorism, and who had lied on the official NZ immigration forms in order to get in. Nor did it change the reality that at least one of the men nursed ambitions of bringing the rest of his family, including extremist Islamic preachers and fellow members of LeT, out to New Zealand if he could gain residency. That man, Jameel ur Rehman, remains in New Zealand today and still has a work permit. So what do we know of Rehman?

A letter from Jameel ur Rehman’s cousin, discussing the family’s attendance at the Lashkar e Taiba “annual gathering”. The portion highlighted inside the oval are the Urdu words for Lashkar e Taiba

A letter from Anwar’s sister (and Rehman’s cousin) Nasreen to the men in 2002 told how the family had again attended the “itjema”, or annual gathering of Lashkar e Taiba, a gathering that called in members from overseas as well. Nasreen wondered whether any NZ supporters of LeT had traveled back for the meetings. According to translations supplied to the Police, Nasreen mentioned the names of several of the family members attending, including Rehman’s mother Zubaida. By way of independent corroboration, the website globalterroralert.com describes LeT’s “Annual Mujahideen Conference in Pakistan. The conference was held, according to the militant group, ‘to acquaint our brothers and sisters of the current situation [state] of Jihad’.” In a second letter, a relative named Saeed Ahmad asks whether there is any representative of LeT in New Zealand, then notes that Anwar’s father (also Rehman’s uncle) wants both young men to establish “Lashkar e Taiba in New Zealand”, by “making introductions” and extending “invitations” for local Muslims to join the group. The Waikato restaurateur, already suspicious, was shocked to discover Rehman and Anwar had been discussing the need for young Muslims to complete military “jihad” with the businessman’s teenaged sons, regaling them with stories of “training camps” in remote regions. “He told me,” one of the teenagers swore on oath in a High INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 35

A sworn statement about Rehman’s training at an LeT terror camp Court statutory declaration about Rehman, “that while studying at a madrassa, he received three months’ training in a training camp in Shinkiari, and said that he fully supported what the terrorist organization and Osama bin Laden are doing. “As he described the training to me, he mentioned that he learned to use firearms and had to survive in the forest for 1 week alone, and using the training that he had been taught…” Another son, in his statutory declaration for the authorities, wrote: “He has mentioned that his family are great supporters of this organization and that many of his brothers have attained training there, with one of his brothers reaching the commando stage. He mentioned that the training included the use of firearms and explosives.” Now, here’s an interesting piece of corroboration. Note that comment above that Rehman trained at an LeT terrorist camp in Shinkiari, in the infamous North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. That statutory declaration was sworn in 2005. Here’s a news report from the Times of India published on May 14 this year, 2007: “Over 50 terrorist camps active in Pak: LeT chief NEW DELHI: When pushed against the wall by a battery of reporters in Islamabad on Sunday, Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Sayeed blurted out the truth about the existence of terrorist infrastructure on Pakistani soil and his resolve to carry on jihad to its logical conclusion – a fact which contradicts the stand taken by the Musharraf regime and something former PoK [Pakistani Kashmir province] president Abdul Qayyum had vehemently denied during his recent visit to India. 36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

“Lashkar’s admission supports claims made by India that terrorist camps are still operational in Pakistan. Sources said over 50 camps are active in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and in parts of Northern Areas – at least half of which are new camps set up in the past six months with fresh recruits. “According to intelligence received here and based on questioning of some captured militants, India has prepared a dossier of camps operational in different parts of Pakistan. The intelligence assessment says that while 10-12 new camps have been set up in different parts of Pakistan, including areas around Rawalpindi and Lahore, almost a similar number of old camps are already in existence. “Cadres associated with LeT and Hizbul Mujahideen outnumber all other outfits, about a dozen of whom operate out of PoK and Pakistan. Among the prominent outfits having substantial presence include Tehrik-ul Jihad Islami, Tehrik-e-Jehad Islami, HUJI, Al Badar and Al Jihad, besides LeT and HuM. “Sources said most of the camps have mixed cadre strength where militants associated with different outfits are trained together. “Some of these camps are situated in Shinkiari and Jungle Mungle in Manshera and Attarshisha area of NWFP; Talegam in Rawalpindi and Raiwind in Lahore.” Investigate found some more corroboration – from statements taken from LeT’s own website back in 2000. “Lashkar e Taiba correspondent Abdullah Muntazir said jihad has been raised not only in Jammun and Kashmir but also in the whole world…In our Jihad Camp we impart training for three weeks in which newcomers are introduced to the Kalashnikov up to the Missile. “Following this, there comes the Special Tour comprising of three months in which they are trained for Guerilla war and mine blast, fighting and firing the missiles and rockets. “He said after this practice some of the boys are selected for specialization in making remote control bombs and missiles.” This is the camp Jameel ur Rehman boasted of taking part in, and which his family indicated on video that he had been on. Investigate magazine rang the NZ Immigration Service to enquire about Jameel ur Rehman, the LeT terror-trainee. NZIS confirmed Rehman was still living in New Zealand, and still has a valid work permit. The question that has to be asked, given the documents obtained by Investigate, and given the way far less sinister Iranian Christians are being booted out of NZ, is “Why?” Letters sent to Rehman in New Zealand from friends in Pakistan reveal a number of his associates, including “mujahedin” Hafiz Sahib and Ali Watto, were in jail at the time of writing. Watto, when he got out, himself wrote a letter to Rehman where he posed the question, “Whose gunman will I be? If anyone, friend, comes without praying then on gunpoint I will get them to pray”. So that’s how Rehman’s friends talk. Other friends of Rehman have been killed. An entry in his diary, obtained by Investigate, reads: “35 kilometres away from Bahawalnagar, a village east of Haripur; by word of mouth from Imran: Deceased, Mr Yaser, Mr Tahir, Mr Aslam, Mr Mahmood and Mr Asad (Sunday 25.7.2004). Both alive friends Mr Imran and Mr Shahid.”

Satiana madrassa, affiliated to the terror group Lashkar e Taiba, where Jameel ur Rehman trained in Faisalabad, Pakistan

The diary entry did not record any detail of how the five men died or why two survived. Nor does the diary entry record whether the “Mr Aslam” killed is Rehman’s cousin Mr Aslam, who’d written a letter in 2002 saying, “If, after death, Allah asked me ‘did you do Jihad?’, then what will I reply to my Allah?” A second letter from Aslam had recorded his attendance at the mujahedin’s “itjema”, or annual gathering that year.

rom the documentation supplied, it appears Jameel ur Rehman and Muhammad Anwar were sending funds earned in New Zealand back to the madrassa in Satiana, Pakistan, affiliated to the Lashkar e Taiba. A letter from Rehman’s brother, Atiq ur Rehman, asks him to do his “level best” to get the money through, and pages from Rehman’s diary have bank account numbers alongside the names of key contacts back in Pakistan. This, too, would be a breach of New Zealand’s Terrorism Suppression Act. Section 8 of the Act provides a 14 year jail term for anyone who directly or indirectly collects funds for the benefit of an organization or entity that they know has carried out or participated in a terrorist act. Section 13 of the Act provides a 14 year jail term for anyone who participates in such a group or organization. No one in New Zealand has ever been charged under the Act, leading the communist party front organization RAM – standing candidates in this year’s local body elections and a big supporter of radical Islam – to misleadingly claim that NZ is

terrorist-free. But from the evidence gathered by Investigate, it seems authorities may simply have chosen not to lay charges rather than attract public attention to the security breaches. In one letter from Rehman back to his brother, he talks about the possibility of bringing Atiq – who’d recently trained as a madrassa teacher – over to New Zealand to teach Salafi Islamic doctrine. “There [are not many] mosques here in New Zealand…don’t worry at all, leave it to me, whenever I find an opportunity I will let you know.” Investigate has tracked down the madrassa Rehman and Anwar trained at. Its website records that it is a Salafi institute (a hardline Islamic sect), whose “ultimate goal of struggle to spread Islamic Knowledge is: • To prepare people with Islamic Knowledge, who then without any personal motive, spread teachings of Deen-E-Islam according to Quraan and Sunnah. • To help bring Islamic values and teachings into practice. • Rectify Aqeedah of People by educating them with right Islamic Aqeedah. • To fight against Bi’dah [moderate interpretations of Islam] by educating people.” The website notes that “This institute is trying its best to spread Islamic teachings in the world”, and also records that one of its original teachers was a “Qaree Matee ur Rehman”, back in the late 1970s. The website also records one of its current leaders is Bashir INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 37

TOP LEFT: Jameel ur Rehman’s brother, Latif, showing off the Lashkar e Taiba framed posters on the walls of Jameel’s home in Pakistan. According to the family Latif has risen to the rank of “commander” in the local LeT group. TOP RIGHT: One of the LeT posters on the wall, featuring Kalashnikov rifles set against the LeT flag. BELLOW RIGHT: Another LeT poster, featuring the American flag burning and Capitol Hill under attack. The LeT flag also features again. BOTTOM, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: A third LeT poster, again featuring rifles being fired. Some of the same Lashkar e Taiba propaganda posters featuring in an anti-terrorism profile by NBC TV correspondent Evan Kohlmann.

Ahmad. In one of the letters to Jameel ur Rehman and Muhammad Anwar, Bashir Ahmad urges them to spread the Salafi doctrine in New Zealand, by “giving invitations to others”. Video footage supplied to both Investigate and security services of Jameel ur Rehman’s house, back in Pakistan, features his brother proudly showing the Lashkar e Taiba propaganda posters displayed on their lounge wall – images of Kalashnikov rifles, rocket launchers, burning American flags and slogans like “This is how to treat infidels”. 38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

During the same trip that he obtained the video footage, Javed Chaudhry checked up on the credentials Rehman had supplied for his work experience. Already well aware that Rehman had been training at terror camps and in a hardline madrassa, Chaudhry wondered where he’d found the time to clock up five years working in the kitchen of the Hotel Adil, the source of the signed work reference Rehman had presented to him in order to get the job. That reference, signed by the hotel’s manager, is on hotel letterhead and reads:

“This is to certify that Mr Jameel ur Rehman s/o Muhammad Ismaeel holding Passport No J947676 has been working in our Hotel as cook for Pakistani Tandoori dishes/bread making with effect from 1995 to 2000. During this period his work and conduct has been excellent. He is young, hardworking and conscientious worker. I wish him every success in his future life.” It is signed by M. Zahoor ul Haq, Proprietor, Hotel Adil International, Rawalpindi. Naturally, Rehman’s employer allowed his curiousity to get the better of him, and went to see Zahoor ul Haq. “He said he had never heard of Jameel, and said the signature on the reference wasn’t his,” says Chaudhry. In other words, the reference was a fake. But Jameel had not just used it to get the job, he’d used it also to gain entry to New Zealand on the immigration papers. So what was Rehman doing while he was supposedly working at the Hotel Adil? In video footage provided to the NZ immigration and security services, one of Rehman’s relatives, and a teacher at the Satiana madrassa tells Chaudhry the full story. “Did he live in Rawalpindi city for five years?” asked Chaudhry. The relative lets out a hearty laugh on camera. “He did not live in Rawalpindi for five years, but for five years he would have lived in Saudi Arabia. After coming back from Saudi Arabia he spent some time at home and then came here [Satiana madrassa] with Atiq [his brother]. “He had lived in Saudi Arabia and had earned money in Saudi by himself…Later on I came to know that he had been selected as cook by you and when Jameel realized that it is a cook visa then he started learning cooking in a restaurant in Burewala city for about six months or a year, but I think even less than a year. However, he started learning cooking after he was selected by you for the position of cook.” In the video, the relative, a man Rehman referred to as ‘uncle’ but who was actually only related by marriage, was disparaging about the family. “They are troublesome people. They are all trouble creator rather than problem solver.” Chaudhry contacted another uncle, a blood relative this time, who also confirmed on video that Jameel ur Rehman had never worked in Rawalpindi as a hotel cook. Yet that’s the document, now established as fraudulent, used to obtain a New Zealand work permit. “I’m sure he is interested in getting permanent residence in New Zealand,” says Chaudhry to Investigate, and the word in the community is that he is close to getting it approved.” After talking to others, and piecing together some of the timeframes in Rehman’s letters and diary entries, Chaudhry told the NZIS that rather than working at the Hotel Adil between 1995 and 2000, the real sequence of events was this: 1995-1996: Rehman studied at the Madrassa Jamia Usman Bin Affan, in Bahawalpur, Pakistan. 1996-1998: Rehman was living and working in Saudi Arabia, including performing the Hajj pilgrimage in 1997. 1999-2001: Rehman returned to Pakistan to study at the madrassa Satiana in Faisalabad. With all this evidence then, you’d have to again ask the question, “why is Rehman still here?” The answer appears to lie in political correctness – the Muslim extremist has played the ‘victim’ card.

The work reference that Jameel ur Rehman used in support of his NZ immigration application. The document is a forgery, according to information supplied to NZ security agencies.

The Waikato restaurant owner, Javed Chaudhry, admits becoming increasingly concerned about the backgrounds of his two staff during late 2002 and 2003, yet he did not approach the authorities until July 2004. During this time, his relationships with the two migrants deteriorated. The men were themselves suspicious of Chaudhry and whether he would dob them in. They knew he had read their mail and diaries. Anwar decided to shift into the garage, out of the main house, and Rehman soon followed. Despite the fact that the shift was their own choice, as even the Employment Relations Authority later noted in a decision on the case, that didn’t stop the migrants spinning a tale of “slavery” to anyone who would listen. “I did not know anybody because I was not allowed to talk [to] anyone,” Jameel ur Rehman later testified at a Pakistan Association meeting. “I was not allowed to go outside of my garage where I live three and half years as prisoner with my master’s car. Only the man I know, that was my Master.” That’s what Rehman told the Pakistani community in New Zealand, but it conflicts with evidence he later provided to the Employment Relations hearing. He included a statement from Hamilton woman Judith Griffiths who said she’d known Rehman and Anwar since August 2002, when they’d met via an Indian student who was boarding with her. While Rehman was telling people he was a prisoner, didn’t know anyone and was not able to talk to anyone, Griffiths told the hearing something different: INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 39

the family moved to larger accommodation, Mr ur Rehman shared a room with Mr Chaudhry’s son…Mr Anwar left the family-provided accommodation for a short while and then returned. Initially Mr Anwar was sleeping in the lounge room, but then moved into the garage. “I am satisfied that Mr ur Rehman, on his own initiative, moved into the internal garage with Mr Anwar for a period of time. During that time Mr Rehman had access to the shower [etc]…”

A Jameel ur Rehman

“My house had a back door and yard completely hidden from the street. Jameel and Anwar would race down the side of my house to this sanctuary and knock on the kitchen door…Over time, [they made] repeated visits (sometimes at 5am)…From my home they rang home and spoke freely for the first time without Javed listening to every word.” Griffiths, incidentally, could not speak Urdu. There was no danger that she would understand anything the men were discussing on the phone, if it indeed was sensitive. And now another claim that Rehman made to the Pakistan Association meeting: “We were two peoples in garage. I sleep on one side of Master car and [Anwar] sleep on other side of car. There were no toilet facilities in garage and some time we have to do our ‘morning’ in shaper [sic] bags and dispose it in restaurant’s toilets where I worked three and a half years…” Significantly, the Employment Relations adjudicator did not believe Rehman’s story in this regard. “Having reviewed all the evidence,” wrote Vicki Campbell in her judgment, “I am satisfied that the accommodation provided for Mr ur Rehman and Mr Anwar was not as it was described by the applicant and his witnesses. At the investigation meeting, Ms Griffiths accepted that she was relying on what she had been told by Mr ur Rehman about his living conditions and that she had never checked it out [our emphasis]. “It was common ground that initially Mr ur Rehman and Mr Anwar shared a sleepout and that they had access to the main house to use the bathroom and ablution facilities. After 40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

nother inconvenient truth that suggests Jameel ur Rehman was lying is that in November 2003 he and Anwar were left in charge of the restaurant and the house while Javed Chaudhry and his family traveled back to Pakistan for a family wedding – they did not return until February 2004. “This is hardly the action of someone keeping ‘slaves’,” exclaims Chaudhry. The ERA threw out the wilder claims, but did ping Chaudhry for failing to include the Holidays Act in his pay calculations. Nonetheless, the ERA did make a number of wildly politically correct findings of its own. It suggested the “search of Mr ur Rehman’s personal belongings in his flat and the reading of personal mail and diaries” amounted to a “breach” of the Employment Relations Act. Never mind the fact that the correspondence disclosed affiliation to a major international terrorist organization. Even alleged supporters of Islamic terror groups have rights under the Employment Relations Act that trump national security concerns, according to the ERA. For the record, the Court of Appeal and the Privy Council have long-established rulings that “there is no confidence in iniquity”, meaning that anything containing evidence of illegality or a security threat automatically loses any privacy protections. Chaudhry was acting within the law in keeping an eye on the correspondence, despite what employment law might say. Chaudhry was also criticized by the Employment Authority for notifying New Zealand Immigration Service of the terror allegations. This, too, said adjudicator Vicki Campbell, was a breach of Rehman’s rights as an employee. Chaudhry, for his part, admits to being torn as a businessman between the need to keep his restaurant running (and sacking his two chefs was not going to be helpful) and the need to advise the government of the security risks. This was one of the reasons it took some time to come forward. And even after he blew the whistle on Muhammad Anwar, he did not approach police about Rehman until 12 months later – again, coinciding with the renewal point of his work permit. In the Employment Relations Authority hearing, Chaudhry’s critics argued the decision to dob in the men had more to do with a revenge strike over Anwar and Rehman’s political lobbying within the Pakistani community against Chaudhry – and the employment allegations – than national security. Chaudhry, on the other hand, says it was simply the result of the working relationship deteriorating, and the reality that the men could apply to work for another employer who did not know their backgrounds. It would be fair to say Chaudhry was, however, surprised at the level of political lobbying the men managed to do. They quickly

found heavyweight support within the Pakistan Association of New Zealand – some of whose members originate from the same areas and with similar views to Anwar and Rehman. Chaudhry is incensed that Rehman was wheeled into a PANZ AGM to spin what the employment adjudicator later ruled was a false story about his treatment at the hands of Chaudhry, without PANZ giving Chaudhry a hearing on the matter. Chaudhry points to his own background as an Executive Member, Vice President and Treasurer in the Executive Committee of the Manawatu Muslim Association, Palmerston North, between 1995 and 2001. At the end of 2001 he and his family moved to Hamilton, where they’ve been involved in community initiatives through the city council and the Pakistan Kiwi Friendship Association of New Zealand, which Chaudhry founded three years ago. “Like any other normal Muslim,” he says, “I am also against extremism and terrorism and very much concerned about the security and prosperity of my country of origin, Pakistan, and country of adoption, New Zealand.” The bottom line, he argues, is that Anwar and Rehman have clear uncontested links to Lashkar e Taiba, and hardline Islamic fundamentalist madrassas, coupled with their entry to New Zealand on false documents.

ontrast the liberties extended to Jameel ur Rehman, with the case of Iranian Christian convert and hunger striker Ali Panah – now facing deportation because the Government doesn’t believe his conversion to Christianity is genuine. As more than one critic of the government’s position has pointed out, what would Labour MPs know about Christianity? Regardless, here’s how Victoria University’s Salient newspaper described the arrest of Ali Panah once his refugee appeal was lost: “[Panah’s former boss Bruce] Keane says Panah moved from Iran to South Korea more than five years ago. While working and living there, Panah converted to Christianity from Islam. “What he did is he sent his mother a tape of his baptism and it got intercepted [by Iranian authorities], so in his absence he was sentenced to death.” Panah has never returned to Iran to appeal the charges. “Keane recalls the day Panah was arrested by immigration authorities. He said that while the two were working at a client’s property, he received a call from the Immigration Department asking if Keane was with Panah. “I said, ‘yeah, he’s with me’, and they said, ‘keep him there, we’re coming to interview him’.” Keane told Panah that they needed to wait for the authorities to arrive, and hour and a half later, two police officers and one Immigration officer arrived with a police wagon. “The next thing was that his hands were up his back and he was handcuffed. People were looking from the house [the two were working at] amazed at what was going on.” Completely taken by surprise, Panah was given his rights and placed inside the police wagon, which took him to an Auckland police station. “Keane says he is appalled at how the authorities dealt with the situation. “It was just the way it was done. They didn’t have to do that on private property and it was at the back of the house with people looking.” Keane says he later returned to his client’s home where the arrest took place to explain what had

Note the black and white striped flags, similar to the variant used by Lashkar e Taiba. PHOTO: Shayne Kavanagh

happened. “They were pretty horrified that that was what all it was about,” he says. “Keane also exclusively told Salient of Panah’s first few days under police custody. On the day of his arrest, Keane says Panah had been working inside a sewer. He says he told the authorities at the time that Panah, who was saturated in waste, was a health hazard to himself and others and therefore needed a shower and a change of clothes, “but they didn’t want to know”, he says. “The next day, I went up to the police station and took him a pair of clothes and toiletries, and they refused to accept anything.” “Keane says three days later when Panah appeared in court, the police still hadn’t offered him a shower and a change of clothes. “And in court I had to stand up and say this man would be a health hazard to everybody…” Keane says at this point, the judge present ordered the police to allow Panah a shower and a clean set of clothes. “It’s important to mention that Keane is not the typical person you would expect to find supporting an asylum seeker. But Keane says Panah isn’t a typical asylum seeker. “It’s crazy, our law,” says Keane. “If you have a look around, most of the immigration people who come to this country are on the dole or in Housing New Zealand homes and they’re getting carried by the workforce. But you get a guy who can do it and is capable of doing everything and we refuse him.” Another Iranian convert to Christianity, a mother of two, has just been jailed in Auckland this month for two years for an irregularity on her immigration papers. She had failed to mention that she also had Turkish citizenship. For lying, she has been imprisoned and separated from her two children. She lost her appeal for home detention. Jameel ur Rehman, on the other hand, appears to have been given every assistance by the New Zealand government, despite being associated with a banned terrorist organization. It is also ironic that the treatment meted out to Christian convert Ali Panah by an NZ government agency – being made to spend three days in sewage-encrusted clothing with no shower or change of clothes – is far worse than anything Rehman or Anwar suffered in New Zealand – or even allegedly suffered – at the hands of whistleblower Javed Chaudhry. INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 41

42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

High winds The story of a Kiwi mega-yacht designer

Forget the America’s Cup. In yachting’s leisure stratosphere, Kiwi designer Ron Holland is on a reach for the ultimate. SELWYN PARKER catches up with the man behind one of the world’s most ambitious new vessels

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 43

on Holland is working on a big boat in his design office in the seaside village of Kinsale, Ireland. No, make that a very big boat. Better still, a very big sailing boat. Surrounded by scores of photos, drawings, paintings and models of the yachts that have come off his drawing board over the last 35 years, he’s looking intently at a set of drawings spread over his desk. To the average landlubber, they are incomprehensible, covered with so many lines they look as though a battalion of spiders has performed a set of highly disciplined manoeuvres all over them after first stepping in a pot of ink. But to Holland, the lines tell him just about all he needs to know. Although the yacht is still imprisoned on the design board, he’s already got a pretty good idea of how neatly she will spin in a tack, how cleanly her bow will cleave through the waves of an Atlantic gale, how smoothly she will run downwind – and of course how elegant she will look tied up at a marina at Antibes. When she’s launched, this boat will probably make even more headlines than some of the other yachts that have come off the New Zealander’s drawing board. She’s already got a name, Ethereal. Now taking shape at the famed Royal Huisman yard at Vollenhove in the Netherlands, Ethereal is a 190-foot mega yacht for American software scientist and billionaire Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the brains behind Java software. The first sailboat of any kind that Joy has ever owned, she will be the “greenest” yacht ever launched. Despite having every kind of technology available to him and being one of the first naval architects to use Cadcam as a design tool, Holland has always looked beyond the lines on paper, even if that paper is the special, non-stretch Mylar that is the material of choice for yacht designers these days. “You have to trust your eye”, he says. “The client wanted a boat like Juliet [an earlier, much-feted, 143-foot Holland design] only a lot bigger and better, and this will be it.” Given his reputation, he ought to know. “Ron Holland was the pioneer of modern superyachts”, says Hank Halsted, a yacht broker and former professional skipper from Newport, Rhode Island. “He was the guy who early on understood how to make these huge ships handle like real sailboats.” This is quite some praise but it’s pretty much par for the course. Holland has come a long way since an adventurous boyhood on Auckland’s North Shore. Probably the most famous alumnus of the Torbay Yacht Club in the days when it was not much more than a shed perched on the edge of the creek, he used to worry the committee by going sailing in all weathers, sometimes in a gale. Although his late parents, Phil and Gwen, hardly knew the sharp end from the blunt one, they were of a dying breed that believed that children should learn from experience. Thus Ron and younger brother Phil grew up in a Huckleberry Finn kind of existence, sailing up and down the North Shore while still in short pants. This laissez-faire parentage seems to have worked well enough. Holland, now 60, is one of an exclusive breed of naval architects capable of drawing up the lines, rig, keel and other 44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

immensely detailed specifications of the new wave of superyachts and their immediate descendants, the even larger megayachts that girdle the globe with the aid of professional crews. (Ethereal’s crew will be a couple short of a whole soccer team). You don’t have to be a billionaire to own one of these bespoke vessels but it certainly helps. Last year Rupert Murdoch took delivery of Rosehearty, a Holland-designed 184-foot ketch from Italy’s Perini Navi yard. Danish coffee-machine entrepreneurs Kim and Nina Vibe-Petersen also set sail in another PeriniHolland collaboration, the 176.5 feet Parsifal III. And probably a dozen other Holland-designed yachts are in the hands, albeit anonymously, of seriously wealthy people who love the feel of the wind in their hair. For definition purposes a superyacht is 100 feet or more, although a 100-footer would be a baby in the superyacht fleet these days. A megayacht is roughly defined as 160 feet or longer, costs at least NZ$45m to put in the water – and that’s before running expenses. Thus even billionaires like to defray the bills by chartering the boats out to friends with equally deep pockets. For example, around $450,000 will secure a week’s full hire of the gargantuan 247-foot Mirabella V, another Holland design for former Avis chairman and chief executive Joe Vittoria. The biggest single-masted yacht ever, Mirabella, with interior design work by Viscount Linley, was launched from the VT yard at Portsmouth in late 2003. I was aboard Mirabella when she was on the hard at Portsmouth during a refit -- she’d hit a rock at high speed and bent the keelbox and related equipment – and all I can say is that she’s probably worth $500,000 if you’ve got that sort of money. And there are plenty who do. Vittoria, a charming, sailing-mad, Italian-American who wears his wealth lightly,

assured me over dinner that there are quite enough billionaires in the world to keep Mirabella busy. According to reliable estimates, there are in fact about 700 billionaires worldwide. If they don’t spend their money on racehorses or expensive cars, it’s probably boats. In some cases of course, it’s all three. Meantime it says something about the growth of new wealth that the inner circle of megayacht designers, which includes Germán Frers in Buenos Aires, the venerable New York firm of Sparkman and Stephens, American Ted Hood and Briton Ed Dubois, is booked solid. Astonishingly in view of their price, super and megayacht commissions are rising by around 10-15 per cent a year as a whole wave of newly rich join the already rich who are getting richer, and also seek the good life afloat. Indeed, Auckland’s Alloy Yachts has two Ed Dubois-designed megayachts under construction right now – Mondango and Red Dragon, both 170-footers. Indeed Holland has brought several clients to New Zealand over the last decade. But it’s the same story in Italy, France and Britain, in fact wherever superyachts are built. “We’re at full capacity”, reports the Pendennis yard in Falmouth, one of three in the UK able to undertake projects of this size. As for 123 year-old, family-owned Royal Huisman, one of the world’s gold-standard

yards that started out in 1884 building little, arm-powered fishing boats, it has been expanding capacity flat-out since the nineties for both superyachts and giant-sized motor yachts. And if that’s not a comment on the world’s growing affluence, it’s hard to know what is. Paradoxically, Holland cut his sailing teeth on little boats. He started out in the P-class, the one-kid dinghy created by civil engineer Harry Highet that has been the cradle of just about every Kiwi yachtie of note for the last half century or more. Holland gradually moved up the scale into the John Spencerdesigned Flying Ant and Cherub before jumping board the Mullet class whose members used to throw terror into anchorages up and down the east coast. Holland first came to attention as a designer through another relatively little boat, a 24-foot quarter-tonner named Eygthene. (The name was supposed to sound like a Kiwi saying “eighteen” to an American.) The year was 1973 and Holland was living in the United States after abandoning a boat-building apprenticeship on the North Shore to sail the world. Nothing if not brave for a largely self-taught designer whose only formal instruction was at night school in the old Seddon Tech, Eygthene incorporated quite a few revolutionary ideas such as

“Ethereal is a 190-foot mega yacht for American software scientist and billionaire Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the brains behind Java software. The first sailboat of any kind that Joy has ever owned, she will be the “greenest” yacht ever launched”

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would have taken a rugby team to do it), masts would have collapsed under the enormous loads created by a decent breeze, sheets would have parted, sails ripped, and the hull disintegrated.

a flared freeboard that made the boat more easily driven. He and a few mates threw her together after work on a spare lot in a yard in California. To their amazement they won the United States champs and then, having shipped the boat to England, proceeded to win the world champs. The superyachts and megayachts followed a further 20 years of design experience. First were the Admiral’s Cup boats including one of the best known, the Morning Cloud of the late British prime minister Ted Heath. Next up the ladder were the 80-foot maxis such as the famous Kialoa for Los Angeles property developer Jim Kilroy. However the quantum leap came in 1985 with the 103-foot Whirlwind XII, the first yacht to crack the 100-foot barrier. Although many a waterfront sage predicted her rig would collapse, the hull would buckle under the enormous loads and the keel would fall off, Whirlwind has proved an astonishingly durable sailboat. Thereafter followed 120-footers, 140-footers like the beautiful, ketch-rigged Juliet which was launched in 1993, then 160-footers and, ultimately, Mirabella V whose mast and sail have just been certified by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s biggest. Until relatively recently, such dimensions on a sailing yacht were unthinkable. Even if the crew could have got the sails up (and it 46, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

ut it was Whirlwind XII that turned the tide for Holland as well as for superyachts in general. One of the reasons the project appealed to Holland, who already had a reputation for pushing the envelope, was that the owner, a flat-pack furniture magnate, wanted a yacht capable of fast cruising speeds. “There’s no reason why any sailing boat should be slow, especially when the owners are busy people”, Holland likes to argue. It’s fair testimony to the integrity of the original concept that Whirlwind has in the last 20 years completed three circumnavigations of the globe and is still being sailed hard in the hands of a North American owner, albeit with regular refits. The entire yachting industry rose to the technological challenge she posed in materials, winches, spars and electronics. It was hydraulic power that did the heavy lifting, shooting sails up the mast at the touch of a button and rolling them away after a day afloat, winching up the anchor, even hoisting the rubber dinghy back aboard. It wasn’t just Holland of course who turned the corner – others had begun to see the possibilities of using more advanced technology – but it was certainly Whirlwind that provided the impetus and inspiration. Almost overnight, sailboats started getting bigger and bigger. Today the world’s biggest sailing yacht, the 290-foot Athena owned by internet billionaire Jim Clark, is in direct line of descent. Along the way, yacht interiors came in for the Down Under treatment. Holland also collaborated with the late Jon Bannenberg, the Australian-born interior designer who added his iconoclastic bit to the technological revolution in yachting. “He wasn’t bound by tradition”, approves Holland. “He started making the interiors look like New York apartments instead of gentleman’s clubs.” Andrew Winch, who worked with Bannenberg and now runs his own firm, remembers doing out one Holland boat, the superyacht Cyclos III, in high-gloss white lacquer, stainless steel and black leather. “There wasn’t any wood in it all”, he approves. “You don’t want a boat to look like home. You want an escapist environment.” All this helped change women’s attitudes. Unless they were raised to the sport, many of them had thought of big and powerful sailing boats as wet, miserable and intimidating. Boys’ toys, in short. But here was the poetry of sail plus interiors straight out of Vogue. Rapid advances in communications technology from the late nineties became the icing on the superyacht cake. Once sailingmad owners realized they could be wired to the office or the stock markets while at anchor off Tonga just as easily as if they were, say, in a five-star hotel in London, Tokyo or Paris, and in as much luxury, there wasn’t any reason not to jump aboard and get away from it all. “Most superyacht owners are very connected to their boats, much more so than powerboat owners,” says Holland. “A lot of them have been sailing for years.” Rupert Murdoch would agree. He learned sailing from his father, Sir Keith, who had completed the Sydney-Hobart deep-water classic and Mirabella’s Joe Vittoria has raced boats since boyhood. Bill Joy does not have a salty background but after a few

cruises aboard Juliet, owned by an industrialist friend, he became passionate about the glories of sail. Now a partner in the planet-friendly venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, he intends Ethereal to be a model of ecological rectitude, a boat that leaves little more than its wake behind in the world’s oceans. Thus he pushed the Royal Huisman yard and his own team to come up with breakthrough energy-saving and other on-board systems. Indeed he taught Holland a new word – biomimetic, meaning copying from nature. He invited Holland along to think-tanks, known as charettes in IT-speak, to listen to Joy’s boffin friends think up ways of rendering Ethereal as environmentally-friendly as possible by, well, copying from nature. “It was a fascinating experience. Almost everything was up for grabs”, recalls Holland. He does however note with some satisfaction that the scientists pretty much ended up leaving him to get on with what he is best at. Namely, designing all the stuff that belongs in the water. Being scientists, that was not however the way they started out. They did their best to prove him wrong. “Ron drew it, and we tried longer and shorter and other things,” remembers Joy. “In the end we came back to what he had done in the beginning. In other words his intuitive feel for what was going to work turned out to be correct. We did a lot of simulations and tank-testing to go in a big circle.” Joy has certainly got the sailing religion. There won’t be osten-

tatious displays of wealth aboard Ethereal – no Impressionists (“the point of the ship isn’t to show off paintings”, interior designer Pieter Beeldsnijder was informed), no ornate furniture, no television, indeed no unnecessary worldly intrusions. Joy wants nothing that might disturb “the rocking quiet of a late night, reading yourself to sleep….interrupted only by the creaking of the ship and the noise from the sea,” as he romantically puts it. Ethereal is clearly intended to make big into beautiful, at least in sailing. Not that Holland is totally averse to diesel-powered vessels. He’s just returned to his design loft in Kinsale from sea trials for Marco Polo, a 148-foot, long-range, trans-ocean powerboat that was built in China as the first of a series. He’s demonstrably proud of Marco Polo, seeing it as just another way of going afloat. With his boats taking shape just about everywhere, Holland spends so much time away from base he makes Helen Clark look like a stay-at-home. He has little time now for racing but there’s one annual regatta he hates to miss. It’s held off the Isle of Wight in the first week of June and it’s a re-run of the world quarter-ton championships he won with his home-built boat all those years ago. If they can, the original crew turn up to exercise their rusting skills and Holland’s eyes light up at the memory of it. “I wouldn’t miss it,” says the megayacht designer. “We like to get wet.” So, pretty much still the boy from Torbay. selwyn@investigatemagazine.tv

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Toor Give Not to Give… Should it really be a question?

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What if you were told your child needed a new liver or their life would end? Or what if the lung transplant you desperately needed just wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there and your family had to watch you slowly die, all the while knowing it was avoidable? These are just two stories of many real people whose lives are in the hands of our organ donation systems, or lack of them. MELODY TOWNS reports INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 49

oday in Australia, a man sits in his home, struggling for each breath he takes. With every wheeze his condition worsens and although he continues to take the hundred or more medications laid out for him on the kitchen bench every morning, he can’t hide his ailing condition from the people that he wants to protect most. As his every breath continues to worsen, his family look on horrified – only too aware of the fact that with the right lung transplant, this husband, father and grandfather would not only live but would share in the life that they have built together for a whole lot longer. The condition is rare, but Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, a rare respiratory illness that destroys the lungs within three or four years, is curable, for a time, with the right lung transplant. Now, time is everything when you are fighting for your life, but for Rudie Sypkes, time is running out. Now, the fact that Rudie is a pinnacle of success in the Australian business world means little when it comes to saving his own life, but a large donation by his family to the Australian Royal Hobart Research Foundation in aid of medical research is one way that he hopes to see change come about in the lives of those who outlive him. “It’s too late for me, but if it can help others that’s what its all about”. What this sad story makes us ask, is why are lives like this being lost in a country that supports organ donation? Australia has the organ register that New Zealand doesn’t; yet with a lack of publicity, support and a well-run campaign the public are still under the misconception that if they tick the box on their licences then they are organ donors. Yet as we will soon explain that is not the case; the fact that only 200 people in Australia donated organs last year highlights the assumption that the system is not working. “More donors would change figures dramatically for people who die needing a transplant,” says Rudie. “In other countries the problem is virtually obsolete with people readily donating their organs, but here in Australia confusion and ignorance is confounding the problem”. It is however, a far better situation than the one that many New Zealanders in need of organs may find themselves in. With only 25 organs donated last year, our need for any type of change is crucial in meeting the basic right to human life. Andy Tookey knows only too well the fight that is on his hands to save the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of New Zealanders when it comes to organ donation. Andy’s involvement began when his daughter Katie was diagnosed with a rare liver condition at birth and told she would need a liver transplant or she would die. Describing the situation the family found themselves in, Andy describes his daughter’s dire need of a new liver on his organ donation campaign website, givelife.org.nz “Katie was born on the 12th September 2001. Apart from having jaundice, which can be normal for newborns, she was what appeared to be a normal baby. Her jaundice didn’t clear up after about ten days, but we were told, ‘not to worry, as some babies can be jaundiced for up to three months.’

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“It wasn’t until she went for her six-week checkup at the doctor’s that he thought she should have a blood test to see why the jaundice hadn’t cleared up. The normal ‘bilirubin level’ (amount of bile) in a healthy person is anywhere between 1 and 20. “We had a call the next day to go straight to Starship Hospital, as Katie’s bilirubin level was 270 plus!” “After days of tests, it was confirmed that Katie had Biliary Atresia. We had no idea what Biliary Atresia was, initially it was explained that it was a blocked tube and that she would need an operation to ‘bypass’ the blockage. Though this is devastating enough to hear we thought it would be a routine operation. “At 11am one Friday morning we overheard a nurse talking to the doctor on the phone confirming Katie would need this operation on the Monday. As we were to be allowed home for the weekend (we were fed up with sleeping on the hospital floor) we accepted that we would have to bring Katie back on the Monday for surgery. As Katie didn’t ‘seem’ ill we were keen to leave the hospital for a weekend at home. “The nurses said we had to wait to see the doctor, which we couldn’t understand why we would have to wait another three hours for him to tell us to come back on Monday. “We sat in the waiting room for the three hours before the Consultant Paediatric Surgeon (Mr. Vipul Upadhyay) explained the depth of the problem. When “liver transplant” was mentioned, we went into shock. “We went home for the weekend not knowing if Katie could survive this, how successful a transplant is or anything. It was the longest weekend of our lives. “On the Monday, we returned to Starship. Katie had a fourhour operation, which involves cutting out a piece of intestine and attaching to the liver to drain it directly to the bowel. This is not a cure, it buys a bit of time, without this operation (Kasai) life expectancy is around eight months. “Researching liver transplants, our hopes went up when we found out that they can be up to 97% successful. Our hopes went down again when we found that New Zealand is the worst in the civilised world for the number of organ donors we have! “I went back to the research to find out why we had low rates, and found a system badly neglected by the government. This is where GiveLife.org comes in...” Little Katie is now five, but her father’s search to get her on a waiting list has not only been to save the life of his child but has also made him take a long hard look at New Zealand’s current organ donation system and propelled him to fight for change in the hope of saving the many, many lives of those that are continuing to be lost. “Not knowing anything about organ donation or transplants I did some research and discovered a liver transplant had a 97% success rate, of course my hopes went down when I discovered that we were the lowest in the western world for the number of donors we have; at that stage there were 40 donors a year (last year it went down to just 25! Which makes us the worst in the western world – between Iceland and Mexico that is). “I went to the donor service and said “what can I do to help raise the donor numbers?” says Andy. “They basically told me to bugger off and mind my own business.” Far from ‘bugger off’, this was just the beginning for Andy who has since founded the website givelife.org.nz, made two

“Australia has the organ register that New Zealand doesn’t; yet with a lack of publicity, support and a well-run campaign the public are still under the misconception that if they tick the box on their licences then they are organ donors” documentaries regarding his organ donation campaign, appeared on numerous talkback television shows and even gained the support of Hollywood heavyweights. “With my constant lobbying I was making friends with a few big name people who were supporting my campaign including director Peter Jackson. I was on the talk shows, Holmes and Campbell Live and two documentaries have been made on the work that I’m doing. Another family supporting me (and have made a generous donation) is the family of Hollywood actor Robert Redford. His son needed a liver transplant also, yet there has been no mention of this in the NZ or Australia media”. Andy poses the question to every person regarding organ donation, challenging us to think about why each of us should consider giving life. On his website, Andy states his plea, “There are currently around 400 people in New Zealand waiting for

a transplant. Some will die due to the lack of available organs. They need not die. You can help. We are not a charity asking for money. Whether you’re rich or poor, all we are asking you is to consider giving ‘The Gift of Life’ “. Andy believes there is a combination of reasons as to why New Zealand’s donor rates are at such a record low. He states that although some reasons are legal the majority are because of lack of education and public ignorance of the real organ donation situation. A large amount of blame is sheeted home to the New Zealand government: “The government has neglected the area of organ donation in all ways, from funding for the transplant co-ordination centre to training of doctors, from nil advertising to the public of the need for organs to non-education of the process becoming a donor involves”. Andy has continued to petition the government and INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 51

has just issued an amendment bill with the help of National MP Dr. Jackie Blue. They are anxiously awaiting its results. “As the donor rates are at an all time low there is a need for change,” acknowledges Jackie Blue. “There needs to be a provision made for an organ donor register and after many public submissions we have put forward an amendment for change. However a donor register will only ever be as good as the world behind it that makes it work, with doctors buying into it and a strong social marketing campaign”. Andy initially submitted a petition to parliament that, he says, “caused a bit of a stir”, primarily because he says that it revealed to the public a lot of information that they didn’t know. “For instance, ‘donor’ on your licence means nothing, it is not checked in the event of your death. Having a living will etc is also not legally binding, it only takes one family member (including distant relatives) to say ‘no’ and you won’t become a donor. If you have no family, or your family is not contactable (maybe you live in NZ but your family is from the UK) and you have donor on your licence you will still not be a donor, because there is no family to ask... even though you have given your permission already. “I also pointed out that there was not one single piece of promotion or advertising about organ donation. Even the organ donor service was not listed in any NZ phone book. I pointed out that a computer search revealed that the British Secret

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Service, the CIA and even the Russian KGB were listed with phone numbers but the NZ organ donor service was not...” The common misconception that you are a donor if you tick the box on your licence is just one of the problems confounding the lack of organ donors. With a success rate that can be up to 97% and donors accepted up until the age of 85, there is no reason why people should be dying due to lack of organs. Andy points out that one donor can save the lives of up to 10 people but once you become a donor you consent to give all your organs, it’s an all or nothing scenario. However all organ donors may not be suitable as donors only come from intensive care, however the more donors the greater chance of organ compatibility. Cindy is waiting for a liver. She writes of her situation on the Give Life website, “I am a non-practicing registered nurse as I write this. I learned while working on a surgical floor at a small community hospital that I have hepatitis C. By the time I was diagnosed, the disease had progressed so much that within a year of finding out I have Hep C, I was placed on a waiting list for a liver transplant. Professionally speaking, I understood what was happening to me, but I felt like I had no one who could understand what I was feeling. “As I write this, I have been on a waiting list for a liver transplant for 20 months with a probable additional one to two years of waiting (unless I get sicker faster than that). I had seen “The Kindness of Strangers” produced by the James Redford Institute and posted to the website. I was contacted by one of the families featured in the documentary, Pete and Laurel Wiley. It has been my blessing to have met Pete; his daughter, Laurel and I e-mail several times a week. It has helped to know someone who has been through the waiting period and who is now five years post-transplant and living a full, productive life. “If I could say one thing to people, I would stress that they make their wishes to be an organ donor known to their families before that situation arises. I think most families would honor their loved one’s wishes and it would be easier to do so if they know in advance”. Currently in New Zealand, the only way to inform everyone of your wish to be an organ donor is to register on your driving licence. Presently 42% of drivers are listed as donor on their licence (1.1 million people) yet a recent New Zealand death audit showed that only 38 people out of a possible 104 were donors in 1999-2000. As people like Cindy wait, Give Life urges that changes need to be made and the crucial one is that public awareness is raised. Andy states, “The most important part of being a donor is to discuss your wishes with members of your family, so that they are aware of your commitment. You’ve made the commitment, now have the conversation!” Until then all we have is hope for people in need of organ donations and their families. The words of Sherry, the mother of a heart recipient, provide hope to a situation that desperately needs to be given life. Sherry writes, “My daughter Joi (age 10) has received organ donations for three open-heart surgeries. She was born with a congenital heart defect that was diagnosed at age 3 months. I am forever grateful...tell everyone...Give Life.” melody@investigatemagazine.tv

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The Beasts of BENMORE 54, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

Experts are getting closer to confirming the existence of possibly two varieties of exotic big cats living wild in New Zealand – American mountain lions and African or Asian black leopards. Researcher IAN LUCAS and documentary-maker MARK ORTON provide two perspectives of the hunt for evidence, including the latest sightings

t was the morning of Monday the 18th of July, 1977 when Christchurch police received a startled call from concerned citizen. Mrs F Clark, a resident of Kaiapoi, rang to report she had seen a “tiger” outside the gate of her suburban home. The call was taken seriously as it was initially thought a big cat could have escaped from Orana Park Zoo. A thorough search of the area was fruitless, neither sight nor sign of any big feline eventuating. Poor Mrs Clark became the target of malicious calls, jokes were made about her, she was called a liar and worse. Redemption was forthcoming however when large pug marks and droppings were found at an isolated part of nearby Pines Beach later in the week, followed by a sighting of the elusive creature by a local farmer on the Friday afternoon. It is unclear if Mrs Clark actually saw stripes on the cat or just used the term ‘tiger’ just to signify a very large member of the cat family. The mystery feline wasn’t to be seen again however and after a week of regular reporting, the Christchurch Press soon dropped the story-line. With what we know today however, this story would appear to be the first well-documented account of a so called ‘mystery big cat’ sighting in New Zealand. A popular misconception is that sightings of the mysterious cats began in the mid 1990s, however research has shown this to be incorrect. Another fact, as was the case in the story just related, is that not all sightings are of black, panther type animals. Brown or tan-coloured cats resembling cougar/puma are also described. Back in 2000 when I began researching the big cats I was fortunate to receive details of such a sighting from a gentleman who, in 1962, had been working on an orchard in the Cromwell Gorge area of Central Otago. After work one summer’s evening he faced his fears by gamely crossing the Clutha River on a rickety old flying fox. Successfully, but not without difficulty, he reached the far side and headed off towards an old miner’s cottage at the foot of a barren hillside. As he approached he became aware of a very large fawn coloured ‘puma’ just a few metres from the building. It quickly scarpered off up the slope, disappearing among rocks and wild rose bushes that grew higher up. A Dunedin resident wrote me detailing an incident of around 1973, when she was out rabbit shooting with a friend in the back hills of Bendigo, Central Otago. The young lady states she remained as lookout, perched atop a large rock while her colleague worked the valley below. Suddenly something large and black shot out of bushes below her. It ran low and fast, had a noticeably long tail and was large enough to send the young lady running nervously to join her friend. In 1989, two young men were driving late at night near Waitahura when they saw the distinct shape of a very large cat silhouetted in the car headlights. Around that time a gentleman travelling during day time on the road between Middlemarch and Hyde saw a large animal cross the highway further ahead. He described it as being the size of a sheepdog but with a cat’s outline and gait. Although he stopped by the pile of wood cuttings the mystery animal had disappeared into, he was wary about approaching for a closer inspection! During the 90’s and up until the present time such sightings have become more regular, especially in the Central Otago, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 55

Canterbury regions. Several of these encounters were reported in November 2006 issue of Investigate by Ian Wishart in his article “Close Encounters Of The Furred Kind”. The Australian connection was also discussed at length however this is truly a global enigma. Sightings of similar animals have been well documented throughout the UK for decades. Older readers will recall references to the Beast of Bodmin, the Surrey Puma, the Exmoor and Basingstoke Beasts. To this day sightings are routinely being reported in Ireland and Wales in particular. In Britain in the past 20 years, at least five mountain lions (cougars) have been either captured or shot, even close to London, and in 1988 a leopard was discovered roaming the countryside, before it too was shot. Although less common, large cats have also been seen in mainland Europe, sightings ranging from Sweden to France. Earlier this year French authorities mounted a search for a tiger after credible positive sightings. Tigers, of course, used to roam throughout Europe but are now thought to be confined to Siberia. Even the island of Hawaii is not exempt. A rash of sightings in 2003 led to the visit of an employee of the Arizona Fish and Game department in an effort to capture the elusive black beast. Needless to say he was not successful. You may ask how so large an animal can survive hidden in our society today, being seen only on rare occasions. Members of the cat family can be extremely furtive, their camouflaged colouring enabling them to literally disappear into their surroundings. Lying flat to the ground completely still, you could walk within a metre of such an animal and be unaware of its presence. Proof of this was the discovery of a new breed of wild cat in Scotland. During the late ‘80’s three or four such unknown cats were shot and in 1988 one was caught in a fox trap by a gamekeeper. Dubbed the Kellas cat, they have since been bred successfully in captivity, however they remain ferocious and extremely wary of humans. They have short jet black coats, slim bodies, long legs and muscular hind quarters. The upper jaw juts out beyond the lower and has protruding canines that are long and sharp. The Ashburton Guardian has reported on several sightings down South. One worth mentioning was that of Jessica Sculley who in September 2006 witnessed a rare, two cat sighting. A resident of Wakanui, Jessica was delivering her two young sons to school when she noticed two very large black cats in a sheep paddock. The sheep bunched up and bolted, the sudden movement causing the cats to take off, disappearing in to a line of roadside trees. They were described as being not as large as Labradors but at least as tall as a foxy. Their gait however was described as a powerful trot rather than a lope and they had the telltale long, thick tail of other mystery black cats. Were these merely two exceedingly large feral cats? Another Guardian article reports that in October the previous year, Mt Somer resident Mrs Andrea Thompson watched a large black cat dragging a lamb for about 20 metres, all the while being pursued by the ewe which was bleating and headbutting the would be sheepnapper! It only released its victim when Mrs Thompson yelled and screamed at it, leaping over a one metre high fence to escape. One of the rarer, cougar type sightings was reported to have occurred in Queenstown during September 2004. Grant Carter, 56, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

an Australian tourist was out on the balcony of his room at the Heritage hotel late one evening. His attention was drawn to something apparently tan-coloured walking up the scrub covered slope next to the hotel. Focussing on it, he noted it was the size of a Labrador but with the movement of a cat. Thankfully it took no notice of a passing pedestrian and disappeared in to the night. It appears little known that there have also been a handful of big cat sightings north of Cook Straight. In October 1980 police received several reports of a large, marmalade, lion-sized animal in scrub covered farmland near Newlands, Wellington. One of the observers later retracted his statement and declared it to be just a large cat although it was invariably described by others as the size of an alsation dog. Later, in December of 1994, Tawa resident Ross Pedlar found it difficult to believe his eyes when looking out his kitchen window early one morning. There, sitting in the branches of a nearby tree was an extremely large fawn coloured cat which he thought to be a puma! It remained there as he hurriedly phoned the police but it eventually wandered off in to nearby bush. Ross described the animal as standing as tall as a person’s shoulders. The surrounding area was searched without success by police and armed offenders. This incident was reported nationally on radio news bulletins as well as being reported in the Wellington Evening Post.

Some time around the early 1970â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s two friends went to a Hawke Bay firing range for a little target practice. Imagine their surprise when, after firing the first volley, an extremely large cat-like animal scarpered up the steep bank at the rear of the target area, disappearing in to trees on the ridge. Another couple believe they may have seen the same creature outside their residence one evening shortly after and on another occasion crossing the highway. Other as yet unconfirmed sightings have been reported in Northland and the lower Coromandel areas. More information, much of it previously unreported, has recently been forthcoming following the Dunedin, June premier of a half hour documentary Prints Of Darkness. This

edited version of many hours of interviewing big cat witnesses, was produced by Dunedin film maker Mark Orton and his able assistant Pip Walls. Initially a skeptic, Mark is now caught up in the excitement of the hunt for the mystery big cats although he is convinced that many of the sightings can be attributed to a breeding colony of oversized feral cats. He concedes however that there still remain a number of sightings that do not seem to fit this category. Due to public demand, another public screening of the documentary was made to a receptive audience in Ashburton in July. Mark is presently seeking funding to enable the creation of a much longer movie in which he will be able to present all the new information. Ian Lucas

FURTHER INFORMATION You can obtain a DVD copy of Prints Of Darkness for just $18.00 Check out Markâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website (www.printsofdarkness.co.nz) for a preview and contact details. Inevitably there will be more sightings of these elusive creatures and, now that video and digital cameras are common accessories, it is hoped that more and better quality footage will eventually be forthcoming to help better identify the animals and convince the remaining sceptics of the validity of this enigma. This writer hopes that such a feline is not shot although this would be understandable if it was worrying stock. Meanwhile, the mystery remains unsolved. You can contact the writer at bigcatsnz@gmail.com. Both myself and Investigate magazine welcome any new information.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 57

Prints of Darkness: The Aftermath

hen reflecting on how the film Prints of Darkness evolved I will have to be honest and say that it very nearly didn’t happen in its present form. As a student searching for a documentary topic for my Post Graduate course in Natural History Filmmaking; I figured that a story detailing the eco-damage of New Zealand’s feral cats might be a little interesting, but it would need a hook. Already fascinated with strange cat sightings in The United Kingdom and Australia, I turned to our own beast of the backcountry as a possible accessory to the story. The trouble was, nobody wanted to hear about nasty little feral cats, the question I was constantly asked was “What do you think the black cat is”? I was a little sceptical, well actually a lot sceptical, but I didn’t want to be remembered as the Buzz Aldrin of Dunedin. In other words, this was a prime opportunity to make the first documentary on this intriguing phenomenon. Furthermore, I still couldn’t shake the grainy image of a large black cat slinking through Al Kircher’s 2006 photos taken near Winterslow Station, home to some of the most credible sightings to date. Linking up with Pip Walls as my film-partner in crime, we set about researching the story from where all good projects start, Google. It quickly transpired that not only was the available information sketchy at best, in many cases it simply didn’t fit the story that we had imagined. There was nothing else for it; we would have to immerse ourselves in the cat epicentre over the summer of 2006/7. Taking a trip down inland scenic route 72, our base became the appropriately named Panther’s Rock Tavern in Mayfield. Our first major research pit-stop was always going to be Al Kircher’s place in Methven. In our minds, his photos are the best evidence yet that something sinister was stalking the back country. With his best Khaki’s on and the notoriously generous Mid-Canterbury hospitality that we came to rely on, Al entertained our hair-brained film idea; even the part about filming him next to the spot where the photo was taken. Little did we know what rugged country it was and that the last time Al had been out there was in a helicopter. After four hours of Matagauri spikes, river crossings, bush crashing and shingle slides we made it to the spot and were not disappointed. From our calculations with a tape measure and a series of photos, we were able to bring some scale to the images and clarify for ourselves that the feline object in Al’s photograph was significantly larger than any cat that should, by rights, be living wild in New Zealand. Not only did this convince us that we might be onto something, but shortly afterwards the Christchurch Press and the Ashburton Guardian ran pieces about our research and our inbox ran hot. With some maps, pins and old fashioned research tools we refined our area of interest, ‘or the crime scene’ as we referred to it and drew up a list of questions to answer. From the exhaustive phone conversations conducted over two weeks in November 2006 a definite pattern and similarity between sightings started to emerge. 58, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

The most interesting points were: 1. Almost unanimously black in colour (but not always) 2. Almost always occurred in winter and just after a fresh snowfall. 3. The ‘Cat’ had a very long bushy ‘tubular’ tail 4. The cat moved with a long loping stride and very fast 5. Sightings were clustered over a 30 year period with records of sightings back as far as the 1920s. Now, while there were many other details of significance that would crop up again we focused on these points and started to re-visit our catalogue of sightings with greater rigour and tighter criteria. After this process we still had 16 very credible sightings (some supported with secondary evidence) that stretched from the 1970s to August 2006. This was quite interesting as many officials that we interviewed on this subject insisted it was a recent phenomenon that only came to light in the mid-1990s. Totally obsessed with the task at hand we ploughed through everything we could lay our hands on and some very interesting material surfaced. Way too much for the 24 minute film that we had to deliver. However, that did not stop us filming enough to elaborate on the subject if there is enough interest to warrant a longer version of the film at some stage. After spending a lot of time talking with witnesses on the phone and then putting them in front of the camera we decided that, yes, there definitely are big cats living in the New Zealand backcountry. While it would be much more convenient to have just ‘one’ phantom cat, we had to conclude that this was simply not possible because of three major points. 1. The life span of a big cat in the wild is 15-20 years at best 2. The distance travelled for hunting or mating is huge (150200 kilometres in a week) but we were dealing with an even bigger area than that. 3. The cats being reported were not all the same colour. However, the fact still remained that credible people had seen something extraordinary. What was it and would the various theories, speculations and urban myths stand up to some serious interrogation? We set about finding answers to questions that were constantly asked but never investigated. 1. We tested the escaped circus legend and found an intriguing story related to an escaped cat in the mid-80s. (never substantiated) 2. What about border control and possible illegal importations? Once again, no one is going to own up to an illegal importation though we do have on record a wildlife expert speculating on very relaxed importation conditions up to 15 years ago. Furthermore, MAF failed to provide us with a record that they supposedly keep of circus/zoo/game park animals entering or leaving N.Z. 3. We contacted workers at two defunct privately owned game parks in the South Island to get an idea of what cats they had. There were leopards, lions, jaguars and even a bobcat but no ‘black’ pumas or jaguars, the two cats that are commonly associated with the name ‘Black Panther’ 4. Genetics experts were interviewed to test the theory that the cat might be a feral cat with a form of gigantism. 5. We spent time with DOC trapping feral cats to see if there was any co-relation with their work and the sightings we were testing. 6. We analysed records from the turn of the century where

“Totally obsessed with the task at hand we ploughed through everything we could lay our hands on and some very interesting material surfaced. Way too much for the 24 minute film that we had to deliver” farmers and miners were known to import certain cats from the U.K. to help contain the rodent and emerging rabbit problem. We discovered information suggesting that bobcats and lynx were imported and that the feral cats sighted in the wild were getting so large that dogs were not game to approach them. 7. Was there enough food to sustain a big cat? Was there any evidence of fresh kills or loss of stock? The answer was yes to both questions, we managed to obtain some quite gruesome photos of mauled sheep and had noticed big numbers of rabbits/hares and birds in the areas where cat sightings had occurred. With all this information we were dangerous, but as they say in film-making parlance, you have to ‘kill your darlings’. Certain sequences and scenes would have to remain as digital files. With limited time available to flesh out any of these issues, we concentrated on a film that would educate the lay

person about the circumstances and let the viewer meet some of the ordinary people with extraordinary tales to tell. With that decision made, we could introduce the viewer to a couple of pieces of secondary evidence that we had beaten the sensationalist media to. While interviewing Sarah and Blair Gallagher at their property in Mt Somers (the site of truck driver Chad Stewart’s very credible 2003 sighting) we discovered that Sarah had kept a sample of black hair attached to the fence that the cat had leapt over. Her efforts to discover what animal the hair had come from fell on deaf ears at MAF so we took the task on. Similarly, just over the ridge in nearby Staveley, Hamish Bruce was in the process of building his new house when he noticed some very large freshly made paw prints with no discernable claw marks. We were keen to learn more and sent the photos overseas to two big cat experts who were guiding us. Their comments were very interesting. INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 59

Furthermore, while we were filming in Mayfield at the home of Andrea Thompson who had seen a cat attacking a lamb, we were contacted by a hunter who had seen a very large cat that had, in his own words, “put the wind up him and his hunting companions”. Seeing as he was only a short trip along the inland scenic route we made a date to meet at a local pub and have a yarn. What transpired was most interesting. Not only was the conviction in their story captivating, but their associate Ben Bell mentioned that he could remember talk in the area that there was a plan to release cougars into the Canterbury foothills to control Deer. With our bullshit detectors now fully honed, we quickly dispatched it to the boundary. However, when reviewing the tape back in Dunedin, I decided to look through the Canterbury newspaper archives out of curiosity, and to my great surprise I discovered that Ben’s memory had in fact been spot on. While we are undoubtedly happy that the story we ended up telling has attracted a lot of positive media attention and has recently been nominated for an award at the Documentary New Zealand Film Festival, we have uncovered additional information that we are sure the public would find fascinating.

Postscript: While we were in the final throws of editing, something happened that we simply couldn’t ignore. Through our new found celebrity, a Central Otago landowner found my contact details on the Internet and phoned me up to report a sighting that was possibly one of the best in terms of detail, and it gets better. Close-by, he discovered bird and sheep carcasses, claw makes on trees and posts and fresh scat. As he was new to this (I mean, who do you call when you think you have just seen a Puma?), 60, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007

he asked my advice. I put him in contact with MAF and sent images of the scat, claw marks and other detail overseas. The initial response from the local authorities was less than helpful, until they received the scat. My contact in the United Kingdom confirmed that the scat and claw marks were consistent with a big cat. Furthermore, when the scat was finally analysed in New Zealand it was confirmed as cat scat and a professional hunter was dispatched to the property to see if he could gather some ‘conclusive’ evidence. Adding fuel to the speculation, the same landowner (who wishes to remain anonymous) and his wife spotted what appeared to be the same cat again. While nothing has been shot yet, the landowner has invested in surveillance equipment to see if he can do what has yet to be done in New Zealand, capture moving images of the mysterious cat. And still, the phone calls kept coming with further information to follow up. It would be fair to say that at this point we are worn out with the constant questions and analysis of our film topic. But, the lid simply would not fit back on the can of worms. Out of the blue a handwritten manuscript of a book detailing one man’s life tracking cats in the Waimakiriri Gorge turned up. Complete with photos and map/grid references, the detail is so astonishing that it has caused us to re-evaluate the history of Mystery Cat sightings in New Zealand. Furthermore, with flagging spirits now revived; we have the impetus to complete the process by pitching a longer version of the story to broadcasters and funding bodies. Watch this space. Mark Orton www.printsofdarkness.co.nz www.humanriff.blogspot.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 61

thinkLIFE money

Obtaining ‘free money’

Peter Hensley works through a KiwiSaver issue

eorge thumped the table and shouted “The devil is in the detail Jim, how is it that these buggers can take something which is so brilliantly simple and make it so damn complex.” Jim and his long time bowling buddy George were both attempting to sign up to KiwiSaver. It did not take them long to work out that for them it was a nobrainer. They were both aged 63 and had retired a short time ago. They had done their homework and read all the material available. They could both join up with a registered scheme provider and if they contributed $20 per week, they would qualify for the free money on offer from the Government. For Jim, adding the required amount to the scheme was not going to be a problem, it was going to be a bit tougher for George, but the thought of doubling his money for the next five years courtesy of Mr Cullen was something he was not going to ignore. Now Jim’s investment adviser wrote

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a book earlier in the year praising the author(s) of the KiwiSaver Act. In the book he described the scheme as “brilliantly simple”. And it was. The rules had been kept to a minimum and they were clear and concise. The scheme was aimed at the average New Zealand taxpayer and provided them with a low cost savings vehicle, something this country had never seen before. The obvious drawback was that the scheme was going to be voluntary. Mr Cullen knew this would be a problem, so he devised a series of incentives to make the scheme more attractive to the masses. Over the centuries history has shown that one of the biggest motivators for individuals has been greed. And so in the May 07 budget he announced that he would effectively pay people to sign up, if they put $20 into the scheme, he would match it. He was both careful and cunning in how he described the process, instead of free money, he called it a tax credit.

History has also shown that when free money is on offer, people will attempt to devise methods in order to qualify for the money without playing by the rules. The first and obvious attempt is for an individual to sign up with a scheme provider directly and not through their employer, their strategy being that they will contribute enough cash directly with the scheme provider in order to maximise the free money and not have to contribute through their wages. This strategy has an element of intelligence to it. The rules clearly state that should a tax payer sign up either through an employer or directly with a scheme provider they have to contribute either 4 or 8% of their wages for a minimum of 12 months before they can apply for a contributions holiday. If they thought that they could get away by just adding $1,040 directly to a scheme and not have to contribute through their wages, they are sadly mistaken. Basing the system on an individual’s IRD number

means that they will be caught and their wages deducted for at least 12 months. Following the first anniversary of their joining they will be allowed to apply for a contributions holiday from their wages. Once this has been approved, they could then contribute $1,040 to their account on an annual basis and still qualify for the free tax credit account top up from the Government. The only thing on George’s mind was how to make sure he qualified for the maximum tax credit. The May 07 budget papers intended that a scheme member would be entitled to a matching Member Tax Credit (MTC) of up to $20 per week. It has been left to the boys and girls from the IRD to place some qualifying parameters around the scheme. For practical purposes, they have had to identify a date to base their calculations on. The MTC year has been decreed to run from 1st July to 30th June. Now George indicated to Jim that this could have a significant and negative impact on both himself and also low wage earning people in their first year of belonging to the scheme. Jim was a bit confused as to how this could impact on George as George

was not earning wages. Instead of thumping the table George pulled out a pencil and paper. Because George was not contributing through wages, the system did not allow him to start contributions until 1st October 07. If he contributed $20 a week, his total contributions would be $780 by 1st July 08. He would be $260 short of the $1,040 and accordingly miss out on $260 of the available free money from the Government. Jim said that he could get around this by tipping in an extra $260 in late June 08. George thought that would be OK, however this would only work if George had joined the scheme in July 07. The new rules clearly state that in the first year, the MTC allowance is pro-rated over how many months you have been a scheme member. Jim then realised that it was important to make sure scheme members join up as soon as possible to ensure maximum MTC’s. Even though Jim could see that the $260 was important to George, Jim thought that George was missing the point. KiwiSaver was not designed to appeal to people’s greed, it was designed for the benefit of

the Hoi Polloi, the masses of working taxpayers in New Zealand. The scheme was still brilliantly simple and Jim went on to explain to George that his investment adviser thought that it would become compulsory way before most people think. His adviser said that he thought it would be Mr Cullen’s legacy to the people of New Zealand. Most of the bugs in the KiwiSaver system would have been identified and sorted prior to the 2008 budget. If not enough people have signed up Mr Cullen would be in a position to say that more people need to join the scheme and accordingly he could make it compulsory for all. On the other hand if the statistics indicate that the scheme has been popular, he would be in a position to say that because most people are now in the scheme, the rest should be made to join and he will make it compulsory. Not withstanding, the concept and underlying fundamentals of KiwiSaver are sound and because it has been designed for the greater good of all, it deserves to stand the test of time. It should prove to be an excellent legacy for Mr Cullen to leave to the people of New Zealand.

thinkLIFE education

When will they ever learn?

Well, of course they won’t, if the education politburo has anything to do with it, argues Amy Brooke

n email from a friend who has just judged the senior and junior speech contests of supposedly one of New Zealand’s top colleges contains his understandably depressed reaction that our New Zealand young, “are appallingly inarticulate. It really needs to be addressed in the curriculum, I feel.” Most of the speakers “just recited essays, either mumbling incoherently, or prattling unintelligibly”. What surprises me is that so many wellplaced parents haven’t caught on to the name of the game, as far as the state education bureaucracy is concerned, in that they think the poor language skills of our young “should be addressed in the curriculum” as if, once the state bureaucracy takes this on board, it will react enthusi-

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astically. Sorry everybody, we certainly agree. Whoops, we made a big mistake deliberately removing the teaching of competence in written and oral language use from the school curriculum. Right – we’ll pop it back in again. Then young New Zealanders will have a chance to learn how to use language well, and to speak clearly to accepted speech standards, instead of just “commyewnicayting”. Never-never-land is still a long way off, until more parents express their outrage to teachers and schools – as well as to the Ministry of Education, instead of keeping their heads down either through inertia, or because they don’t want teachers to take it out on their children – as those of us who’ve experienced ignorant and malicious teachers along the way can

substantiate. However, with most staff well-meaning, if themselves grossly undereducated, pressure on the schools is useful to that valuable minority of teachers fighting a lonely rearguard action not only against the ministry and NZQA apparatchiks, but very often against the hostility of their own colleagues and principals. Let’s take it as read that we all know who’s to blame. So why aren’t we doing something effective about it? The key word is effective, given that the ongoing scandal of a subliterate, or barely literate New Zealand population has long been common knowledge. Visiting young German, Danish, and French hitchhikers, for example, have a command of correct English that puts most state school leavers to shame. A returning

Croatian found his New Zealand-schooled son so far behind there in educational achievements for his age-group that he has returned temporarily to give him a chance to “graduate” in New Zealand, where he received most of his schooling. A Scottish couple, however, have done the opposite – reluctantly, for their children’s sake, reversed an earlier decision to remain in this country, dismayed at what passes for our education system. We can ignore periodic education establishment claims about how well our youngsters are doing. These are simply not true – except perhaps in comparison with other English-speaking countries where the constant to-ing and fro-ing of fellowtravellers from the Left, sharing the same

ideological views about using the schools as a tool for social and political control, has provided useful interactions for conferences, published studies, and influenced the Wellington establishment. When 90s references to how well young New Zealanders had long performed in areas of literacy competence kept invoking the 1971 IEA survey as a shining example of how well we were doing, this was so demonstrably incorrect that I went back to check for myself. What the survey actually said, in essence, was that our young were competent enough in what we’d call informal English – for example, when writing home to ask a parent for pocket money – or in a similar casual use of language. However, in formal written and analytical skills our youngsters performed badly, their results ranging from about 49% to 51%, as I recall. This is exactly the sort of result we could expect from children so poorly taught the complex use of language (with the deliberate withholding of the teaching of grammar and syntax) that they were unable to actually think with any degree of complexity. It’s hard to refute George Orwell’s summary that “slovenly language leads to slovenly thinking”. And even the most fanatical apologists for the social crime of depriving our young of a quality education can’t claim that most New Zealanders’ use of language is anything but over-casual, or subliterate -– even discounting the ubiquitous use of the f-word as a substitute for most adjectives and verbs. What of another boasted-about finding, that of the 2000-2001 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) purporting to show New Zealand teenagers’ literacy skills are among the best? It did nothing of the sort. For example, let’s examine the jargon. “The PISA focus was on whether young adults have the ability to use their knowledge and skills to meet real life challenges, rather than whether they have mastered a specific school curriculum. This vision ties in with the goals and objectives of the New Zealand school curriculum, which is concerned with the development of skills and what students can do with what they learn, rather than just content knowledge.” (Italics mine) There we have it. Ignoring the poor grammatical construction of the last sentence, let’s re-read this and absorb what the writer is actually saying. First, we should forget actually learning. Forget mastering the curriculum. Note the denigration of

just content knowledge… But without content knowledge – there is no learning. The current dumbed-down emphasis on mere “skills” to replace the knowledge that students haven’t acquired, so that they can access it in short doses, on the run, as it were, is to the fore here. Is it birdseed between these theorists’ ears, or a more pernicious ideology? Let’s opt for both. It’s the latter if we’re dealing with those whose neo-Marxist policies of envy and anger at some children’s economic and social advantages has long had them striving to remove genuine standards of accountability, instead of teaching all children – irrespective of background – rigorously and well, to help lessen that gap of initial advantage. It’s birdseed territory among the hordes of not very bright, decent, well-meaning and useful employees brainwashed and undertaught during their own recent schooling, whom the real culprits hire to uncritically endorse their rubbishy theories. The much–vaunted PISA study had nothing to do with genuine literacy. It was all about “reading literacy”. That is, a large part consisted of recognising icons, or pictures – or filling in short word answers. Far from testing pupils’ ability to demonstrate being able to use basic grammatical constructions, the PISA test resembled the kind of construct one might erect if one wanted to disguise how far national standards in language use have slipped. For slipped they have – something which doesn’t particularly bother university-located linguists whose adherence to discredited deconstructionist theories leads to assertions such as that an individual’s use of language is “valid”, however substandard it is. The same off-the-wall academic theories yield an Oxford professor of English arguing that studying Barbara Cartland’s novels is as worthwhile as studying Shakespeare. In the thin air of leftwing, post-modernist academics, there are no standards. The real problem with education in this country can’t be stated often enough. The education bureaucracy uses “useful fools’’ to propagate theories designed for social engineering – not for academic excellence. With a state-supported, near monopoly of education, what genuine improvement can take place? www.amybrooke.co.nz www.summersounds.co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/user/brookeonline/

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 65

thinkLIFE science

The edge of evolution

The Intelligent Design debate gets interesting with the release of a new book from biochemist Michael Behe, writes Cameron Wybrow in a review of the new tome

n 1996, scientist Michael Behe launched a frontal attack upon Darwinian evolution with the publication of Darwin’s Black Box. Behe, a mild-mannered molecular biologist at Lehigh University, argued politely but vigorously that the standard Darwinian explanation (random mutations plus natural selection) simply couldn’t explain the evolution of a number of significant structures and processes observed in living things. Intricate processes like human blood clotting, and intricate structures like the bacterial flagellum (which is built uncannily like an outboard motor) were “irreducibly complex” arrangements that couldn’t have arisen by a series of chance steps. They therefore must have been designed, by an intelligence of some kind. Behe’s book soon became the flagship of the movement known as intelligent design (ID). Behe’s presentation and subsequent defense of ID (including his testimony at the Dover trial in 2005) outraged much of the biological community. He was denounced by the self-styled defenders of science – biologists like Ken Miller and Jerry Coyne, and non-scientists like Michael Ruse and Barbara Forrest. They accused Behe (along with his allies in the ID movement) of recycling disproved arguments, of insolently refusing to genuflect before the Darwinian consensus, of misunderstanding the nature of scientific theory, and of trying to slip God (disguised as “the intelligent designer”) into public-school science classrooms. Intelligent design, if not nipped in the bud, would turn science classes into seminaries, set back modern medicine by denying the evolution of antibiotic resistance, and destroy confidence in science in general, relegating America to a backward technological status. There was some reasonable criticism. Behe said that the bacterial flagellum could have been created only by multiple coordinated genetic changes, and that such coordination

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was beyond the power of random mutation. Miller argued that, given enough time, random mutations could accumulate, producing a flagellum by stages. Behe’s purely qualitative argument couldn’t disprove this possibility; without hard numbers, how did he know what random mutation could or couldn’t accomplish? Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, provides some hard numbers, coupled with an ingenious argument. The key to determining the exact powers of Darwinian evolution, says Behe, lies with fast-reproducing microbes. Some, such as malaria, HIV, and E. coli, reproduce so quickly that within a few decades, or at most a few millennia, they generate as many mutations as a larger, slower-breeding animal would in millions of years. By observing how far these creatures have evolved in recent times, we can estimate the creative limits of random mutation. In the case of malaria, the creative limits appear quite low. Over the last few thousand years, several thousand billion billion malarial cells have been unable to develop an evolutionary response to the sickle-cell mutation, which protects its human bearers from malaria. On the other hand, malaria has proved able to develop Darwinian resistance to the antibiotic chloroquine. This resistance is based upon two simultaneous mutations affecting a malarial protein. Yet this rare double mutation has occurred fewer than 10 times since chloroquine was introduced 50 years ago, during which time a hundred billion bil-

lion malarial cells have been born. If this indicates the typical rate of occurrence of double mutations, then the Darwinian transformation of our pre-chimp ancestor into homo sapiens, which would have required at least some double mutations, would have taken at least a thousand trillion years, a time span greater than the age of the universe. Drawing upon parallel mutation studies of HIV and E. coli for confirmation, Behe concludes that random mutations cannot explain the origin of most of the complex structures in living things. He concedes that Darwinian processes can make new species, but argues that they are incompetent to generate new kingdoms, phyla, or classes. The creative limit, the “edge of evolution,” lies somewhere between the level of species and the level of class. Darwinian processes can account for the difference between a dog and a wolf, maybe even a dog and a bear, but not the difference between a lizard and a bird. Something other than random mutation must have produced such differences; for Behe, the “something” is intelligent design. The response to Behe has been predictable. The editors of the major print media have assigned known enemies of ID to trash the book – Richard Dawkins for the New York Times; Coyne for the New Republic; Miller for Nature; Ruse for Toronto’s Globe & Mail. A large part of each review is ad hominem, concerned with Behe’s alleged religious agenda, his minority status among biologists, and other irrelevant matters. In Dawkins’ review, the science is barely touched, and it’s not clear from Ruse’s review that he has even opened the cover of the book. Behe deserves better. The Edge of Evolution makes a serious, quantitative argument about the limits of Darwinian evolution. Evolutionary biology cannot honestly ignore it. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism by Michael J. Behe; Free Press

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 67

thinkLIFE technology

Dialing in on teen drivers’ distractions Ted Gregory profiles new US research to find out what teen drivers are really like

n what may be the most intimate video diary of young drivers, researchers at a Virginia traffic institute placed cameras in 100 sedans and sport-utility vehicles to track them as they logged almost two million miles navigating the roads around Washington, D.C. And what they found in the nearly 43,000 hours of digital video is more than a little unsettling. Teen drivers are on the verge of “an impairment epidemic,” says Thomas Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which monitored 241 drivers ages 18 to 73 in its “100Car Study.” About 40 of those drivers were teens, and their impairment is emerging from the increasing number of distractions in automobiles and trucks, and from drowsy driving, Dingus and project manager Sheila “Charlie” Klauer says. “It’s to be expected. First of all, I don’t think their judgment is anywhere near as good as they think and I think they are prone to use the cell phones and (to) text message their friends (more) than older drivers.” Teens embrace technology and that technology – from cell phones to digital music players to illuminated dashboard maps that

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talk to drivers – is becoming increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous in automobiles and trucks. That is a frightening mix when considering that research shows teens are particularly vulnerable to distraction and tend to think of themselves as both invincible and proficient multi-taskers. “What we’ve seen and continue to see is that teen drivers engage in a lot of different types of tasks while driving,” Dingus says. “The problem is they’re not very good at judging risk. They tend to use (the devices) in driving situations when they shouldn’t,” he added. Dingus acknowledged that statistics are scarce on the role handheld devices play in car crashes. He is extrapolating his findings to a certain extent. But those interpretations are based on a very compelling collection of video evidence. In 2003 and 2004, each of the 100 vehicles was equipped with five onboard cameras, speed and geographic sensors, and other tracking devices. Anytime drivers braked, swerved, followed too closely or were followed too closely, electronic monitors would “flag” that moment and researchers would review it to determine whether a crash or near-crash occurred.

In one incident, a teenage girl started punching her cell phone while driving, then stopped abruptly as a child in a tricycle crossed a few feet in front of the car. In another, a teenage boy arguing with his girlfriend on a cell phone drove through a tollway oasis lane at 70 km/h and struck a sand barrel, totaling the car. Those events and similar footage were strong enough to prompt Dingus to suggest a nationwide ban on all handheld devices – not just cell phones – for all drivers under 18. Klauer supports the idea. “All of these things need to be banned,” Klauer says. “Teens haven’t fully learned to recognize hazardous driving situations and the only way they’re going to learn it is without wireless devices.” Other experts agree that distraction posed by cell phones, digital music players and other gadgets is a serious problem among teen drivers. Much of it has to do with their inexperience. Drowsiness also is emerging as a significant crash factor for teen drivers. Klauer says data from police departments suggested drowsiness was a factor in about five percent of all crashes. The 100-car study showed, however, that 18- to 20-

year-olds were in five times more crashes and near-crashes involving drowsiness than any other age group, Klauer says. “That was one of the findings of the study that surprised us,” she adds. The observations come at a complex time in the dizzying evolution of automobile technology. The driver’s seat is becoming an increasingly busy place, largely in response to consumer demand and fierce competition among auto companies. Colourful, almost hypnotic navigation screens gleam from the dashboard and seem to speak magically. Icons flash a warning light on the speedometer when tire pressure is low. Parking sensors beep as the vehicle edges close to another car, curb or pole. And then there are the sound systems, an ever-unfolding mix of outlets that accept digital music players and similar gadgetry, all of which require fiddling and looking away from the road. A resourceful, risk-taking driver can plop a portable DVD player on his or her lap and watch a

movie while tooling down the highway. Add a handheld cell phone to the mix and Dingus’ “impairment epidemic” scenario for teens becomes more obvious and more ominous. Many auto manufacturers are addressing the concern by shifting toward voiceactivation devices. Among those features is next-generation technology that will allow drivers to download music and access songs using voice commands. Dingus welcomes the shift. Klauer contends that the voice-activated technology should improve safety, “but the technology is not perfect and it’s got a ways to go before it’s going to reduce drivers’ `eyes-off-road time’ in any significant way,” she says. Klauer and other experts contend that a driver remains distracted despite handsfree technology – that what a driver is thinking about is nearly as important as where he is looking. Eliminating device fiddling – whether those gadgets are on the driver’s lap, in the hands, wedged against the shoulder or in the dashboard

– is insufficient, they say. “I still think people need to be smart about it,” Klauer says. “There are points in time when they’re just going to have to drive and do nothing else.” But Bill Kozyra, president and chief executive officer of Continental Automotive Systems’ North American Division, says new technologies follow rigorous standards set by the Society of Automotive Engineers and the U.S. Department of Transportation. One of those standards requires the blocking of adjustments to dashboard navigation systems when the vehicle is moving, says Kozyra. “You would have more multi-tasking trying to adjust the heater in your car than you would using many of these technologies,” Kozyra says, adding that many of the more refined gadgets include a one-button activation and voice-control thereafter. “When you have one button on your steering wheel,” Kozyra added, “I think you can see the difference there. We design this stuff with safety in mind.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 69

feelLIFE

sport Qiu Jun/ColorChinaPhoto

Kiwis on top of the world

In a mere six days – New Zealand’s produced four world Champions, writes Chris Forster. First shot-putting colossus Valerie Vili heaved her way to glory in Osaka. Then on a glorious Saturday morning in Munich – Mahe Drysdale, Duncan Grant and the coxless four floated to the top of the podium. Not bad for a sparsely populated couple of islands at the bottom of the south-west Pacific.

AHE DRYSDALE is not your typical, ego-driven world champion. Far from it. The 28 year old from Cambridge rowed the perfect race at the famous Oberschleissheim course in Munich to become the first single sculler in history to snare three successive world crowns. It’s the same venue the New Zealand men’s eight nailed an iconic victory way back in 1972, before either of these athletes were even born. Minutes later he’s only too happy too talk to journalists back home about his dominant display.

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“It was one of my best races ever. I went into it with a completely different plan, and it worked beautifully. You can’t really whinge about that”. Drysdale’s precision performance was awe inspiring – and within the hour New Zealand had added two more golds and two thrilling silvers to their impressive medal haul. It’s just the tonic for a sport on the rise since a golden haul in Japan two years ago, when Drysdale started his domination of an event he wants to carry all the way to the Beijing Olympics in 11 months time.

“I still think there’s more to work on next year. I can get better still. I’ve made changes to my technique that have paid off, although initially there were doubters when I only managed third at a World Cup event in Amsterdam. There’s a steely determination behind this New Zealand champion’s unassuming charisma. “I would trade all three of them (World Championships) for an Olympic Gold”. Days earlier the 6 foot 7 athlete overcame an untimely bout of the flu to comfortably win his semi-final and confirm

his favouritism for the medal race. It was a “bit of a concern”. “I’ll stoke up on vitamins and lemon honey drinks and hopefully I’ll be one hundred per cent on Saturday”. “As the marked man I’ve got to be careful of any tactics to put me off my stride. I have to use the tactics to cover them and decide which tactics to use. That’s when I’m at my best. When I’m dictating and controlling what’s going on”. The Halberg Award winner accomplished all of that and more when it came to the crunch, not once but three times in a row. He was a mixture of power and languid style, reeling off long, silky smooth strokes through the flat, cool waters on Munich’s Olympic course. With 500 metres to go he had one of the best sculling fields ever assembled wallowing in his wake. If he can take this form onto next year’s Olympics and match his mentor Rob Waddell’s golden row in Sydney 8 years earlier – Mahe Drysdale will inscribe his name in New Zealand sporting folklore. VALERIE VILI is a world shot putting champion at the age of 22. It’s a power sport traditionally dominated by imposing Eastern European women in their late 20s or early 30s. The young woman formerly known as Adams followed up a World Junior title – and last year’s Commonwealth Games Gold in Melbourne, in the most dramatic of circumstances. With her sixth and final throw she produced a stunning shunt of 20.54 metres to eclipse Belarussia’s Nadezya Ostapchuk, who’d led since the start of the final. Vili set-off in a fist-pumping, celebratory dance – hugging her fellow competitors and waving to her long-serving coach sitting in the stands. But there was an agonising moment to survive before the world title was hers. Ostapchuk stepped up for her last attempt and also heaved over the 20 metre landmark. It was a mere six centimetres shy of Vili’s benchmark – but the golden glory was hers. “Absolutely ecstatic, happy, marvellous, great. You name it, I’m feeling it”. It was a typically succinct and down to earth comment from the South Aucklander, who later dedicated the gold medal to her late father. “It’s all clicked this year. You just have to worry about yourself. I haven’t had a

Sébastien Lapeyrere/MAXPPP

lot of competitions, and everything came together here”. More importantly it’s given our track and field colossus a huge confidence boost for the Olympics, although she’s not about to get too big for her size 12 track shoes. “That’s a tricky one to be honest. It’s a whole new year, a whole new ball game. You don’t know who’s going to emerge or what’s around the corner. I’ve still got my European campaign to get through, then I’ll head home and start planning for Beijing”. Vili’s record breaking catapult was from the heavens – a personal best under pressure – smashed her own New Zealand and Oceania record of 20.20 metres by some 34 centimetres. That’s quite a distance for a 4 kilo sphere of metal.

She’s also an expert at handling conditions we’d probably describe as ‘stinking hot’, after excelling in 35 degree plus temperatures and suffocating humidity in Osaka. “I don’t have a problem with the heat. But yeah you do sweat like a pig. And soon I pulled out the big power shot”. qqq Gold beckons in Beijing. Mahe Drysdale and Valerie Vili will be leading the New Zealand charge, closely followed by the men’s coxless four and the other rowing hotshots. Their deeds have been overshadowed by the All Blacks’ bid to end a 20 year drought as Rugby World Cup champions in France. But these fine unassuming athletes are every bit the typical Kiwi athlete – straightshooting, earthy and bloody talented.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 71

feelLIFE

health

When all your dogs stop barking

Claire Morrow goes in search of answers to dementia

hen I was barely out of adolescence my first full time job was in aged care. It was a strange little job, mostly attempting to keep mountains of paperwork straight in this little aged care facility, but it was small enough that the team of semi-professionals shared and shared alike; I made endless cups of tea for residents and talked and listened and helped out with the business of hands on care when there were staffing issues or when it was simply needed. I attended the aide training courses and learned little that I didn’t already know, but pieced it together in small chunks learned as they came up. I am a minor expert on medicine for common geriatric complaints but would have to phone a friend if you asked me about your headache medicine. And I learnt a great, great deal about dementia. For the first year I worked there I had a horror of dementing illnesses the way other people fear the big C of Cancer. The first two clearly demented patients I met

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were miserable, stereotypical, unreasonable and I was truly horrified by the process. It was some time before I realized that no small number of happy, cheerful or quiet residents were also afflicted with some form or mental decline or another. I have never quite been able to account for the form that dementia takes; the type of dementia makes a difference, but it mingles too with the personality before, with other things. It is not always the blessed blur of age, but it is not always bleak either. As we live longer, of course, we reach the ages where dementia kicks in. Although something like 1% of the population has dementia, the numbers rise sharply with age; 45% of those over 95 will have some dementia. I am planning to be in the 55% of 96 year-olds who are well. There is little chance though, that we will not experience dementia secondhand if not ourselves. Given its prevalence, most of us will see our parents or grandparents, or eventually our friends become “senile”

(the word literally means aged, it has only recently acquired it’s second meaning of demented). But loss of memory, altered thinking is not part of normal aging. It is so common that it appears so, I’ll grant that, but it is pathological none the less. Which is cause, in fact, for hope. There are somewhere between 11 and 20 types of dementia, depending on how you count them, and they are defined syndromes describing pathological changes in the brain. There are the plauques and tangles; the goop of old cells messing up the neural networks in Alzheimer’s, and the many small parts of brain lost to tiny strokes in vascular dementia. There are rare dementias and common ones, dementias where part of the brain is affected, or all of it. But each of these can be described, and the processes understood. And what can be understood can be managed or treated. A recent study found that statin medications, usually used for heart conditions and cholesterol management might arrest

the process of Alzheimer’s, in fact before it becomes full blown, diabetes medicine has shown some promise too. The old half-aspirin a day recommended – with caution – to reduce the risk of stroke, is thought to also reduce the risk of vascular dementia. There is evidence to support the idea that use of the brain, and general healthy living is protective, but of course it is not failsafe. It is not always wise to attempt to arrest dementia, past a certain point, it is best managed as best as possible; with as much love and dignity as possible and left to run it’s course. There are points where the state of mind is relentlessly agitated, where there is suffering, there is no point in prolonging that stage, it might be sedated and endured as best it can be, until the progression of disease bring some new stage. There are many times when a progression of the disease is, in fact, a blessing. But dementia arrested very early might look more like what we – erroneously – consider to be the normal loss of aging. It is little things, at first, more than the normal nameon-the-tip-of-the-tongue moments, misplacing more things that usual, small changes in personality. A thorough medical examination should be able to detect dementia in the earliest stages, and the nature of the beast should be – although this is often neglected – identified. Delirium from medical illness is often mistaken for dementia, and there are some forms of dementia that can be arrested or reversed. The trend is moving – as with everything – towards early identification and treatment. Too often the old and especially the very old are simply managed symptomatically, as if teasing out the causes of loss were not important. If you have access to a specialist geriatrician, they are usually some of the best kinds of doctors – patient and helpful, and – not infrequently – brilliant. Families of a dementing patient need love and support as much, maybe more, than the patient, and what they really need is a break, and sometimes permission to have a break. Funnily enough, the years working in a “home” remitted the horror of dementia, and of “homes”. In addition to the expert nursing help available, the day to day care staff are not always knowledgeable, but then, they don’t need to be. More often than not they are uncommonly kind and have some other genuine traits of personality that have led them to choose this low paid job over other –easier – low paid jobs. Management is usually competent, although often distracted by paperwork, and there should be good access to services and as much diversion and independence as is practicable. Fear not the “home”, and identify dementia early, lest it can be helped. And if it cannot helped it can be lived with. It is sometimes terrible, but not always. There are patients with Alzheimer’s who still have meaningful lives, there are happy people with severe permanent memory loss At the first sign of memory loss, I will be signing myself in. People joke that the aged care facilities of the future will have broadband, will have Nintendo, will have spas. They will too, some do now. But – knowing my luck – research will save me.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 73

feelLIFE

alt.health

Made in plastic

As long as you’re hauling out toys, take away some plastic bottles too, reports Julie Deardorff

s long as you’re on alert for toys that might contain lead or dangerous magnets, consider another safety precaution: Throw out your polycarbonate plastic baby bottles too. Or, at the very least, stop heating them. That’s the latest advice from researchers who have been warning about the ubiquitous chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), an estrogen-like compound used to make everything from shatterproof plastic baby bottles and food-can linings to bike helmets and eyeglass lenses. There’s no doubt BPA is a handy substance. But with regular use, BPA’s chemical bond with polycarbonate breaks down and leaches from baby bottles and other plastic beverage containers. What concerns scientists is that BPA may mimic the natural female sex hormone estradiol. And animal research has linked even lowlevel exposure to everything from female reproductive disorders, early puberty, early-stage breast and prostate cancer, and decreased sperm count to attention and developmental problems. Whether the animal studies translate to humans is a matter of intense debate. But in early August a federal panel of scientists concluded that there is “some concern” that BPA could pose some risk to the brain development of fetuses, infants or children. Meanwhile, an independent group of 38 BPA researchers who were not part of the panel but are considered experts on the chemical issued their own warning in the journal Reproductive Toxicology: Very low levels of exposure to the chemical can potentially pose adverse health effects, especially to a fetus. That was more than I needed to stop drinking water out of Nalgene bottles when I was pregnant and to switch from Avent bottles, which have been shown to

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have high leaching rates, to glass. But still I worried about my 3-year-old, who used Avent bottles for two years (and had a daycare provider who inadvertently melted the tops.) Could I undo any potential harm? Unfortunately, no. You can only “hope that he is not really sensitive to this type of chemical,” said Fred vom Saal, a professor in the division of biological sciences at the University of Missouri at Columbia and an outspoken critic of BPA. “As with everything, there is quite a range of sensitivity between individuals.” If you haven’t already chosen a bottle brand, the good news is that many BPA-free bottles have come on the market. And if you’re already using Avent and your child won’t take a different nipple, there are a few ways to decrease an infant’s exposure to the chemical: • Don’t heat (in the microwave, sterilizer or dishwasher) polycarbonate bottles, said BPA researcher Gail Prins, a professor of physiology in the department of urology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Though leaching occurs with everyday use or after more than 20 washes when the bottles get scratched, it’s much worse when the bottles are heated. To warm the milk, “you could heat the

milk in a small steel pan, allow it to cool to body temperature and then pour it into a plastic baby bottle for actual feeding,” Prins said. • Throw away any bottles that are cracked. • If you can switch brands, remember that only polycarbonate plastics contain BPA. Medela, Born Free and the Adiri Natural Nurser are all made with polypropylene, which does not contain BPA. Medela also uses non-BPA plastic in all its breast-pump collection bottles and tubing. • Check the recycling label; No. 7 bottles are most likely made out of polycarbonate and contain BPA. Bottles with No. 2, No. 4 or No. 5 generally are made of polyethylene or polypropylene and do not have BPA. “If there is a reasonable alternative to limit BPA exposure in those who are most at risk, why not try to avoid it?” asked pediatrician Ari Brown, co-author of Baby 411 (Windsor Peak, $14.95), who now tells parents to stop using polycarbonate baby bottles until more is known. “If you haven’t bought baby bottles yet, choose BPA-free alternatives such as glass bottles, opaque polypropylene bottles or those with drop-in liners. “If you already own BPAcontaining bottles, it’ll cost about $50 to 100 to replace them,” she added. “That’s a small price in the grand scheme of what it costs to have a baby.”

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www.mistralsoftware.co.nz INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, October 2007, 75

tasteLIFE

TRAVEL

Desolate beauty

The Sahara’s dunes showcase Morocco, opines Anika Myers Palm

hances are, if you ever find yourself in the middle of the Sahara while on a trip to Morocco, it will feel familiar. You’ll wonder at the silent strangeness of the dunes at Erg Chebbi near Merzouga, but fully expect to see people or things you “know” from books and movies – Paul Atreides and the Fremen, Luke Skywalker or even Lawrence of Arabia – pop up from behind the hills of sand. In the Valley of 1,000 Kasbahs, approaching the desert on an all-day driving trip, my husband and I pass through what seem like hundreds of small towns. I’m casting about for a subject of conversation when I spy something that reminds me of home: construction. When I ask about what seems to be a boom in homebuilding, our driver says that many of the towns’ residents work in Spain

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and France. They send money home for family members and to build palatial houses for their eventual return to Morocco. I also am struck by how the streets in the small towns are filled with men. Women are almost nowhere to be seen, but when they are, they’re mostly covered. I expected that in this mostly Muslim nation, but the reality of the near-absence of half the population from many towns’ streets saddens me. I’ve been told that Morocco has some of the most liberal women’s-rights laws in the Islamic world – and when I was in Fes and Marrakech, large cities, that distinction made sense – but my Western eyes have a hard time adjusting to these towns. I wonder what these women think of their sisters in the big cities, and vice versa. But some things are the same every-

where: When we drive past a school, we see teen boys wearing jeans and slouching under the crushing weight of their bookbags while teen girls walking nearby giggle on cell phones. When we arrive at Merzouga, we are greeted, as we had been everywhere in Morocco, with hot mint tea. We wait awhile before we set out for camp because our guides want to time the trip so that we will see the best of the Sahara at sunset. Merzouga is in southern Morocco, near a disputed border with Algeria. Guidebooks say Morocco’s desert has nothing on Algeria’s, but visitors to Merzouga are uniformly impressed with what they see. Here’s why: It feels like the end of the Earth. At base camp, you’re surrounded by sand as far as the eye can see, with a 400-

“

His family once lived in the desert, but tourism has provided them with the opportunity to live in a town. Still, he says, he prefers to spend his nights in the sands, returning to his apartment home only once every two weeks foot dune as the backdrop. You imagine yourself as Columbus, seeing what feels like uninhabited land for the first time. As we watch our guide, Ibrahim, prepare the camels for our trip, my husband and I pull long-forgotten knowledge from grade school and half-remembered documentaries to get ready for our first upclose experience with these animals: They don’t rear up. We think. They spit. (Our conversation takes place at a comfortable distance.) They run, but usually not with people in tow. I say a silent prayer as Ibrahim instructs my camel to kneel so I can hop onto the folded blankets he has placed on her back. As she rises, I start to wonder if this trip is a good idea for someone who is as much a city girl as I.

The camels mostly ignore their human cargo but snort repeatedly at what I start to imagine is some hilarious camel joke at my expense. About 45 minutes into the ride, we stop to enjoy the sunset. Trying not to groan in pain, we dismount to take pictures as the sun changes the sand from beige to pumpkin to scarlet. We mount our camels again, and after a thigh-chafing hour-and-a-half, we arrive at our camp in the desert. What seem like mountain-size dunes are a backdrop for the camp, which is composed of 10 to 12 tents set off by sparse groupings of date palms. I’m exhausted after our long ride but am strangely hesitant to leave my camel. I’ve grown attached to her during our journey. The guides – Ibrahim is joined by

”

another Berber escort, Moha – immediately usher guests to a meal tent, where we gladly accept more mint tea to ward off the approaching cold. The camp also includes three sleeping tents and a cooking tent. Guests get to know one another while seated on cushions on the sandy floor of the meal tent. These camps have a reputation for being especially popular with Spaniards and Frenchmen who pop over for quick weekends the way Floridians might take trips to Miami or Key West. The guests in our camp for the night include ten men from France who are spending a few days riding motorbikes through the dunes, and four Spaniards: a 60-ish man, his 30-ish son and two of the father’s contemporaries. I understand French well enough to

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IF YOU GO WHEN TO GO Summer is high season. To avoid crowds – and find lower lodging prices – think about traveling in late autumn, winter and early spring. The Dakar Rally, an off-road race to Dakar, Senegal, is scheduled to pass through Morocco in January 2008. MARRAKECH HOTELS La Mamounia: Marrakech’s most opulent hotel is set on former royal grounds and was frequented by Winston Churchill from the 1930s to 1950s; mamounia.com. Hotel Riad Omar: Within easy walking distance of Marrakech’s Djemaa el Fna square and the Koutoubia Mosque, this hotel offers small but comfortable rooms ringing a central courtyard and a hammam (Turkish-style bath); www.riadomar.com.

Rugs in Marrakesh/ Spencer Desmond follow what’s being said but not enough to participate in a complicated discussion about motorcycle maintenance. The Spaniards don’t speak English, but because I speak Spanish, we manage to have a lively conversation. A Mexican art student who says he has been living with the Berbers for a few weeks appears from nowhere when talk turns to a subject in which I have no expertise: the best place in the world to score hashish (the verdict: Chile). Our dinner, a one-dish meal with what I think are chickpeas and goat meat, arrives just as I start to despair of ever feeling warm again. Because my husband and I didn’t think to pack a dessert, our Spanish friends share their dulces with us as dinner winds down. During an after-meal bonfire, Moha shares stories about camel disasters so disturbing that if I had heard these first, I never would have consented to ride one. He follows those stories with tales of games – one sounds like a cousin of Spin the Bottle – that he played with child-

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hood friends on December nights in the desert not unlike this one. His family once lived in the desert, but tourism has provided them with the opportunity to live in a town. Still, he says, he prefers to spend his nights in the sands, returning to his apartment home only once every two weeks. As the night grows colder, and the fire begins to die, the Frenchmen hike to the top of a dune, where they enjoy a few beers by moonlight. We retire to our tent. From the comfort of my bed – a few blankets laid on the sand – I hear the Frenchmen return to camp. I pull the hood of my jacket over my head to protect my ears from the bitter cold. In minutes, one of their number is snoring loudly enough to make his companions laugh. Finally, just before 11, the camp falls silent, with the exception of our French companion’s rhythmic snoring, and the occasional grunts of the nearby camels. I toss and turn, but when I finally drift off, I dream of the hot mint tea that will greet me after the morning’s call to prayer.

FES HOTELS Riad Dar Dmana: This family-run guesthouse with five rooms and three suites is near the center of the city’s medina (old city) section. Traditional Moroccan food is served on a candlelit patio; riaddardmana.net. La Maison Bleue: This nearly 100-yearold Moorish residence in the medina was built by a judge, and his grandchildren have opened its six rooms to guests. A spa offers several treatments, and you can wind down from a day of shopping in the library or on the rooftop terrace; maisonbleue.com. IN THE DESERT Auberge les Dunes d’Or: Start here on your journey to the magnificent dunes of southern Morocco. This facility offers traditional, basic rooms – and an opportunity to take camels out for a night in the desert and a stay in a Berber tent; aubergedunesdor.com. TOUR OPERATORS Experience It! Tours, Morocco: This agency offers several package tours of the Imperial Cities and treks to the Sahara; from US$1,000 per person. Custom tours with a private car and driver can be arranged; experienceittours.com. The Africa Guide: This clearinghouse for agencies that operate tours in Africa also has maps and visa and hotel information; africaguide.com.

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tasteLIFE

FOOD

O solo mio

When it comes to eating, one does not have to be the loneliest number, reports James Morrow

eals for one are traditionally thought of as depressing affairs. Something from a tin, with or without benefit of crockery or even silver; a microwaveable ready-meal; takeaway pizza with the leftovers for breakfast – for too many of us, this is what happens when we are forced by chance or by choice to dine alone. And that is when we eat at all. Sometimes the circumstances behind solo dining are so grim that food doesn’t even the picture, or at least not the one painted by the American songsmith George Jones, often described as “the Rolls Royce of country singers”:

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Last night I broke the seal on a Jim Beam decanter, Looked like Elvis I soaked the label off a Flintstones jellybean jar I cleared us off a place on that one little table That you left us And pulled myself up a big ol’ piece of floor… I pulled the head off Elvis, Filled Fred up to his pelvis, Yabba Dabba Do, the King is gone, And so are you. But it need not be that way. For those of us who still have furniture and food,

dining alone can be a great treat. With no one to satisfy but ourselves, the kitchen becomes a laboratory and playground all in one. Have a partner who can’t abide some delicacy for which you would travel to the ends of the Earth? A night alone is a chance to whip up a batch of your famous foie gras pancakes topped with sea urchin butter and caviar. Curious about some new recipe or technique you are too timid to try out on others? A night exploring the world of molecular gastronomy might be just your ticket. I’m not alone in thinking this is so. Nigella Lawson, who notes in her invaluable How to Eat that “Most people can’t help finding something embarrassingly onanistic about taking pleasure in eating alone”, still maintains that “the sort of food you cook for yourself will be different from the food you might lay on for tablefuls of people: it will be better”. After all, she says, “one of the greatest hindrances to enjoying cooking is that tense-necked desire to impress others”. While I’m not sure I would wholly subscribe to the nearly-religious abnegation of the ego prescribed here by Lawson – it is more accurate to say that the drive for kudos, or recognition, or successfully pleasing others with one’s art is both friend and enemy to creativity – she has a point. Of course, there are also times when one does not want to spend an evening futzing about with foams, or a day sourcing exotic ingredients. There are times when you just want to knock something together quick that tastes good, fills you up, and sends you to bed satisfied. Obvious choices abound, nothing more so than the classic T-bone steak in a hot cast-iron pan. But what about other simple solutions? Instead of take-away sushi, one can almost as easily pick up a piece of fresh salmon and/or tuna, boil up some Japanese rice, and have a feed that would cost three times as much in a restaurant. Instead of classic bachelor pasta (boil spaghetti, top with store-bought sauce straight out of the jar) fettucini alfredo is nothing more than a slosh of cream, a grating of cheese, and a dicing of onion away. My point is this: Eating alone is no cause for despair. Done right, it can be great fun. And no one, except perhaps Elvis, will be around to criticise the cooking.

STEAK TARTARE The old joke has it that the rube enters the fancy restaurant and orders his steak tartare well done. Sadly in the few remaining places that serve this delicacy, in my experience an almost insulting amount of care is taken to make sure that patrons who order the dish know that they are essentially getting a plate of raw mince. In any case, steak tartare is a marvellous meal for one because it is easy enough to assemble, is filling as all get-out, and to be honest, repulses too many potential dining partners for it to be considered a good third date sort of dish. What follows is New York chef Anthony Bourdain’s recipe for this treat. Comments Bourdain, “The key to a successful steak tartare is fresh beef, freshly hand-chopped at the very last

minute … A home meat grinder with a fairly wide mesh blade is nice to have, but you can and should use a very sharp knife and simply chop and chop and chop until fine. The texture will be superior. And do not dare use a food processor on this dish – you’ll utterly destroy it.” You’ll need: 1 egg yolks 1 tbsp Dijon mustard 1 anchovy filets, finely chopped 1 tsp ketchup ½ tsp Worcestershire sauce Tabasco sauce, to taste Freshly ground black pepper 1/8 cup salad (i.e., corn or soy) oil Splash of Cognac ½ small onion, freshly and finely chopped 25g capers, rinsed 25g cornichons, finely chopped

2 sprigs of flat parsley, finely chopped 250g fresh sirloin, finely chopped 4 slices fine quality white bread, toasted, quartered, for toast points To make 1. Place the egg yolks in a large stainless-steel bowl and add the mustard and anchovies. Mix well, then add the ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and pepper and mix well again. Slowly whisk in the oil, then add the Cognac and mix again. Fold in the onion, capers, cornichons, and parsley. 2. Add the chopped meat to the bowl and mix well using a spoon or your hands. Divide the meat evenly among the six chilled dinner plates and, using a ring mold or spatula, form it into disks on the plates. Serve immediately with toasted bread points.

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seeLIFE PAGES

Fast and loose

Michael Morrissey discovers the secrets of Shakespeare, and other stories SOULS OF ANGELS By Thomas Eidson HarperCollins, $36.99

veryone likes a good mystery now and then. Souls of Angels opens with the shock-surprise murder of a prostitute though it’s depicted in a non-violent poetic way – the knife that does the deed is described thus – “something silvery flashed in the dull light like a minnow in a stream”. The scene shifts to a Benedictine nun returning home to save her father from a murder charge. We are in Los Angeles in the mid nineteenth century just as the stirrings of its modernisation begin. The population is just 30,000 – No Hollywood naturally – yet the City of the Angels has an unholy amount of vice – “the Americans ran the liquor and gambling, the Mexicans the bordellos and the Orientals the opium”. Sister Ria, who ran away to be a nun at 17 against her father’s wishes, returns to find her father gone colourfully mad and accused of murder. Don Maximiato Lugo is, or appears to be, very rich (it turns out most of his large holdings have been sold to pay taxes) is indeed mad but in the most marvelously theatrical – one could say quick change artist Hollywood way. Every time he appears he is in a different garb. Thus he may be an Arab-speaking Muslim, an English gentleman, a Catholic priest, a Cavalry officer, a Mexican general. He acts and speaks accordingly but between times he is an inspired if indeco-

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rous artist who paints. Indeed he is a most quixotic fellow – a tilter at windmills – but is he a murderer? His daughter demands to know but with the evasiveness of the deranged, he gives no answer. Meanwhile, he has been condemned to death and the clock has eight days to tick. Whether Don Lugo is a murderer is the tease throughout the book. And despite his daughter’s supposition – one could say faith – that he has been framed or at least condemned too hastily, he often appears as guilty as sin. And no, I’m not telling. But the end seems custom-built for the camera. Though Hollywood was not even a gleam in D.W Griffith’s eye at the time of the book’s setting there is a neo-cinematic influence in the manner of the book’s structure and writing – and no problem with that. This book is an easy and engrossing read with several additional characters of interest – the aging servant Aba, sister Milagros and Raymond Hood, chief of L.A. Police. But Don Lugo remains the most colourful and entrancing – a potential actor’s dream. Expect a film before too long. It’s time Salma Hayek played a nun.

SHAKESPEARE By Bill Bryson Atlas Books, $39.99

an anything be added to the subject of Shakespeare? If you paid a visit to the library of Congress which has

7000 volumes you might think not. This impressive accumulation doesn’t deter the Shakespeare industry in the slightest. Perhaps it is the challenge to add something that keeps the Shakespeare pot bubbling merrily.. And even if some of the “new” material is sneakily a re-tread what better person to do it than the now seemingly ubiquitous Bill Bryson? Both in his writing style and in person, Bryson is so likeable one tries to find a reason to dislike him – in vain. Perhaps it’s the science Bryson picked while writing the hugely popular A Short History of Everything but he sternly (sternly for Bill, that is) tells us that there’s a lot we don’t know about Shakespeare – we do not know how to spell his name; if he ever left England; who his friends were, how he amused himself. His sexuality is a mystery. There is no record of his whereabouts during1585-1592. Bryson wittily compares Shakespeare to an electron – “forever there and not there”. The absence of hard facts hasn’t stood in the way of much speculation which sometimes has acquired the status of fact. As examples, Bryson instances the following: “that Shakespeare was Catholic, or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals”. Other suppositions or conjectures that have no solid foundation propose that Shakespeare was well built, lame or had boils. So what do we know? – that his plays were popular, that he became a comfortably off landowner, that he married, had

children, that his father was in trouble with the law. Apart from his marvellously economic stage craft, his sense of drama, he extended the English vocabulary and many of the phrases that have been permanently absorbed into the language and might alas now be considered cliches, were coined by the Bard eg ‘vanish into thin air’, ‘play fast and loose’, ‘budge an inch’, ‘milk of human kindness’, ‘flesh and blood’, ‘foul play’, ‘bated breath’, ‘foregone conclusion’ – to name but a few. Bryson reminds us that of only 230 plays that still exist from Shakespeare’s time, his 38 make up 15 per cent of the total, a dominance not approached by any other writer of the time. The contemporary admiration of Shakespeare was something that accelerated in the eighteenth century in the face of negative opinion by such luminaries as Pope and Dryden but looks set to continue. What was fresh to me was Bryson’s picture of contemporary English complete to details about the birds the Elizabethans ate (eg crane, bustard, swan, stork); the small size of London; the diseases and executions and high sugar content of many food leading to blackened teeth. Believe it nor not, some people blackened their teeth to demonstrate they were in fashion. The vexed question to some (though not to many) is left to the last chapter – was Shakespeare the author of the plays that we now attribute to the busy and wellknown Stratford theatre owner? Bryson has no doubts and punctures the various candidates – Bacon (initiated by Delia Bacon), Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Sidney or even a syndicate of talents including many already mentioned, plus Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney and others – with wellaimed arrows. Being of a sceptical persuasion myself, I’m not inclined to give credence to conspiracy theories – I don’t believe there are Nazis hiding under Antarctic ice making flying saucers nor that the Pentagon or World Trade Centre was blown up by the American government. However, I do believe – like Bill Bryson, that a “not unhandsome man of about forty “ (though Bryson cautions we can’t be sure about the three portraits we have of Shakespeare) did sit down and write, “To be or not to be” and many other memorable lines besides.

THE SECRETS OF THE CHESS MACHINE By Robert Lohr Fig Tree, $37

am a fan of what used to be called (may still be) Novels of Ideas, eg the works of Aldous Huxley or Thomas Mann. And that, of course, includes science fiction works particularly of the Dystopian variety – depictions of failed utopias. This captivating and gripping novel by first time German novelist Robert Lohr explores one governing idea – is it possible for a clever eighteenth century technician to make a chess playing machine – essentially a machine that can think and outwit human players? Of course it wasn’t – we had to wait till nearly the end of the 20th century and the construction of Deep Blue – a programmed computer which defeated world champion Garry Kasparov – for this secular “miracle” to occur. The original chess-playing machine has a human accomplice – a dwarf (very good at chess) who hides inside and defeats all but a few challengers. In this fictional account – which leans heavily on actual events but also departs from them – Tibor Scardanelli is the dwarf-sized chess prodigy. He’s a likeable very human fellow who engages and delights. The same cannot be said for the Machivellian Von Kempelen who thought up the idea of the machine and other villains. The novel centres around Von Kempelen’s nasty scheme to keep Tibor captive and Tibor’s attempts to escape. It’s an enthralling drama that doesn’t let up. Only in some of the closing climaxes did I feel some tiring of interest at what has become obligatory in contemporary gangster movies (particularly those of Tarentino) – the Mexican standoff with several parties all drawing guns at once. Even though the whole machine is a front and its complex cogs a distraction away from the hidden human agency, there are some descriptions of the Turk’s eyeballs and wires which suggest a metallic humanity – and the machine is appropriately variously referred to as an automaton or an android. It must be remembered that these machines reached a high degree of sophistication – one could write its own name and another could approximate human speech – so why not one that could play chess? For those who are hooked by the novel there is a fascinating footnote that informs

us that though the original chess playing was destroyed in a fire there are several copies in various European museums – with or without hidden dwarf chess geniuses we are not told. Von Kempelen’s speaking machine is in the German Museum in Munich, “although its voice is gradually fading”. I’m glad to hear there are other attractions in Munich beside beer.

THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR By Andrew Keen Nicholas Brealey Publishing, $39.99

he Internet? Impressed or Depressed? According to this passionate if not virulent attack on the latest gadget /wonder of the electronic age, we should all be depressed. That is if we are intelligent high brow culture vultures like presumably Andrew Keen and not brainless mediocre teenagers spending hours with addicted eyeballs gummed to YouTube (for which Google recently forked out $1.5 billion). I have to confess to having a foot in both camps. Several years at university turned me into a highbrow – though secretly (alas a secret no longer now you’ve read this) I do have low brow interests. I have been known to eat a hamburger (though I draw the line at a Big Mac) and read a Jeffrey Archer. I have been known – Shock! Horror! Truth headlines! – to visit some of the websites which Keen feels are threatening Western civilisation. The irony is the myriad images of the Internet are part of the warp and woof of western civilisation albeit a mediocre part. The question is – are they Killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy? Keen is not pulling our legs. He’s concerned, fretting, worried, and (to switch horses in mid stream) I did find myself feeling distinctly queasy as I read his book. Just as when a highbrowish friend of mine who used to read books started telling me about blogs he was reading. Until I read Keen I didn’t know there were such things as splogs (a combination of spam and blogs) and flogs (blogs that claim to be independent but are actually in the pay of a sponsor). It’s worse than I thought. Though again, one could ask, is it any worse than advertising as we know it? Or is it more akin to the sinister Hidden Persuaders (subliminal advertis-

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ing messages) with which Vance Packard scared us silly about some decades ago? I can’t confidently answer these questions but I do have faith that High Culture can survive anything. One of the notions with which Keen brought me out in a cold sweat was Kevin Kelly’s idea of the death of the stand alone text (ie book as we know it) – it would be replaced by a colossal “liquid version”. In this Orwellian vista of the future, all books would be digitally scanned and linked together. On reflection, I don’t find this idea threatening but merely idiotic, useless and impractical. Such a text would be unusable in any meaningful sense – though intellectually, in terms the late William Burroughs would have understood, it would be the ultimate cutup. And who would have time to read it? Another Internet phenomenon that brings Keen out in a rash is Wikipedia which he unfavourably compared to the Encyclopedia Britannica (ironically available on line). His comparison is valid but I think his attack on Wikipedia is exaggerated. I use Wikipedia regularly and have found it highly informative, reasonably scholarly (footnotes abound) and factually accurate (though that might be my ignorance on occasion) as well as being infinitely preferable to other palpably less weighty websites. While it is true, it does have a very light weight side eg biographies of porno stars etc, it is useful especially in mainstream contemporary knowledge. I have the advantage of having a good reference library to counter-check items of information. While like Keen I don’t like to hear that bookshops are going under and the world’s possibly most highly regarded newspaper the New York Times is feeling the bite, I believe high culture will survive. Rome survived the Colosseum, Germany survived the Nazis and universities, books and high culture will survive the Internet. Latin gave way to English and English may one day give way to Chinese but that doesn’t mean ideas and higher thought have evaporated. What I am saying is that over millenia, culture and language itself must change and technology is also powerful in that process of change. After frightening our socks off – in a manner similar to the author of The End of Oil – Keen throws a few consolations at the conclusion of his scenario of cultural doom. In October 2005, a coalition of

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publishers sued Google for its plan to scan and digitalise millions of copyrighted books. In September 2006, Larry Sanger, founder of the amateur-run Wikipedia launched Citizendium and reasserted the place of the expert in compiling website information instead of leaving it to amateurs. Keen also lists Guardian Unlimited, Politico, Joost and Brightcove as beacons of hope – maintainers of traditional high standard of media information. The young and the gullible will always be an easy target for time-wasting unuplifting material. Are things worse than they used to be? And more importantly will they deteriorate even further? Only time will tell and time, as we know, is moving faster than ever before.

ZIGZAG By Nicholas Booth Portrait, $39.99

igZag was the code name for Eddie Chapman, an English safe cracker and suave womaniser turned agent for Germany, then double agent for England. Whenever one speaks of agents, especially agents as colourful and daring as Chapman, comparisons are made with James Bond. One of the primary differences apart from the telescoping of time in films is that Chapman often didn’t know what was going on whereas Bond nearly always does. By that I mean, the good and the bad (and the ugly) are clearly drawn and Bond knows where his information is going, knows what to do. Chapman’s world was rather more murky and uncertain. Just to take a physical angle – parachuting out of a plane at night is not the simple thing it looks on spy thriller movies – and of course Bond usually has some gadgetry that make it even easier. When Chapman parachuted back into England he wound up soaked in his own blood. In Booth’s account, it is noted that the 21 German agents dropped in Britain prior to November 1940 were all captured. So when the German-speaking Chapman, who was captured on Jersey Island, (where he was doing time for safe cracking) put himself forward to the invaders as a possible German agent, he was taken very seriously and was, in fact, recruited. In scenes worthy of John le Carre, he became like a son to the amiable and culture- loving German Baron

Stefan Von Groning, a senior member of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organisation in France. The baron was a lover of art and rare books and no Nazi. The pair, who were both keen drinkers, got on like a house on fire. Such was Chapman’s charms, charisma, and boldness he would get away with behaviours that “would have led others directly to the firing squad” – like shaking his fists at the picture of the Fuhrer, which astonishingly, the Germans found very funny. Apart from his physical attributes, Chapman was polylinguistic, a crack shot and became highly expert at Morse code. Combined with his cool nerves and confident social manner, he was obviously well-suited for the job. Probably his most colourful role was passing off the faked notion that he had bomb-sabotaged a de Havilland plant. Ironically, Von Groning recommended Chapman for an iron cross for his war effort, while from the British government he received nothing. Such are the ironies of war and of a spy’s life – particularly if they are a double agent. For a thriller-type account the book takes its time – from the time he joins the German as a spy till when he leaves for England is spread over 60 pages. When Chapman gave himself up in England he was treated with great suspicion and was duly interrogated at length. Robin Stephens, the officer who interrogated Chapman, was a former Indian policeman who wore a monocle. They hated one another on sight. Stephens who said of Chapman, “he loved himself, loved adventure and love his country, probably in that order,” eventually came to grudgingly respect Chapman’s abilities and icecool nerves. When Chapman published his memoir in 1953 they were heavily censored and the government did not at first admit Chapman was a double agent though the British and foreign presses were fully aware of the fact. Even by 1966 details from his earlier memoir were still cut. By the end of the 70s, the veil of secrecy began to lift and this well-detailed account brings it all out into the open. Footnote: Not quite. In a parallel and rival biography Agent Zigzag by Ben MacIntyre has a fascinating account of how the de Havilland faked explosion was arranged by professional magician Jasper Maskelyne who puzzlingly gets no mention in the Booth account.

SPECIAL OFFER !* PURCHASE TWO COPIES AND SAVE $10 OFF THE TOTAL

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seeLIFE MUSIC

It ain’t garbage

Chris Philpott trawls through the best of Garbage GARBAGE Absolute Garbage: The Best of

KID CONFUCIUS Stripes

VARIOUS ARTISTS All Blacks: The Music

as it really been this long? Has Garbage really been around long enough for a ‘Best of’ record? When I think of the term ‘pop-rock’, Garbage is one of the first bands that generally come to mind – behind the raunchy pop look and punk vocal of singer Shirley Manson, and driven by uberproducer Butch Vig and cohorts Duke Eriksen and Steve Marker, Garbage spent a lot of time at the pop forefront in the mid-late 1990s. Best known for contributions to Bond film The World is Not Enough, Baz Luhrmanns Romeo and Juliet (“#1Crush”) and Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy (“When I Grow Up”), Garbage enjoyed a successful career peaking around 1999 and capped off by 2005’s Bleed Like Me. This collection, Absolute Garbage, contains these tracks and all their earliest hits – “Stupid Girl”, “Only Happy When It Rains” and my personal favourite “Vow” – through to the groups later single releases like “Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)” and “Tell Me Where It Hurts”. With an entire bonus remix CD included in the pack, containing some great tracks in its own right, this is both a must have CD for fans and a great starting point for those new to the group.

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hen you think of classic Australian albums, you think of classic rock bands like AC/DC, or crossover hits like Men at Work, or popsters like Kylie Minogue. But what if the latest Australian music sensation was a 9-piece soul act, heavily influenced by the likes of Stevie Wonder and The Roots, and fitting the ‘Fat Freddys Drop’ mold? Proving that – musically speaking – Aussies are a versatile bunch, Kid Confucius have seemingly emerged from nowhere with their latest album Stripes, an album full of soul and hip hop influenced tracks reminiscent of pop-infused soul acts like Wonder and the Neptunes, yet still smacking of wider influences such as Sly and the Family Stone and Marvin Gaye. Bookended by two tracks titled “1977”, and jam-packed with classic tracks like “Let Another Day Go By” and nu-pop styled “Closer”, this is an album that made me stop and take a real serious listen, taking me entirely by surprise in the process. Immensely enjoyable from start to finish, Stripes should be part of the real sound of the upcoming summer. I know I say this a lot, but this is yet another album you should definitely check out if you get the chance.

here are two main points I want to make about this interesting disc. Put together by Loop Recordings, along with the All Blacks Music Committee (consisting of dropped players Piri Weepu and Troy Flavell, and fringe player Neemia Tialata), All Blacks: The Music is a collection of 18 tracks from the current luminaries of Kiwi music, including Brooke Fraser, Hollie Smith, Evermore, Nesian Mystik, The Feelers and Dave Dobbyn. Which brings me to my first point: why do the All Blacks have a music committee made up of players? Which brings me to the next logical question: did this CD have anything to do with Weepu and Flavell dropping out of the squad? The second point I wanted to make is in regard to the content. I have no doubt that this collection will be appealing to many overseas music fans interested in a piece of Kiwiana at the World Cup, however there is a real trend towards poppier tracks – meaning that edgier acts like Elemeno P, Shapeshifter, Shihad and Salmonella Dub are suspiciously missing, since they represent a real strength in the NZ music scene. Regardless of these curious omissions, this is a great collection of Kiwi acts and well worth a listen.

Olympus Tough 770SW • Waterproof to 10m • Snowproof to -10ºC • Shockproof to 1.5m • Crushproof to 100kg For more information please contact: H.E. Perry Ltd. Phone: Christchurch (03) 339 0028 or Auckland (09) 303 1479

seeLIFE MOVIES

God moves in mysterious ways Two new feelgood movies appeal at different levels Evan Almighty Rated: PG for mild rude humor and some peril Starring: Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Lauren Graham, John Goodman, Wanda Sykes Directed by: Tom Shadyac 90 minutes

he benevolent, godly presence of Morgan Freeman comes out as a born-again tree hugger in Evan Almighty. He’s an Almighty on the lookout for a new Noah to build a new ark because of what we’re doing to His Creation. It’s a gentle, warm, “big tent” big-budget comedy with all the rough edges rubbed off. Not an edge to be found. You’d be hard pressed to find something in Evan hat would offend, unless you’re racially, politically, religiously or environmentally narrow-minded. Of course, the best comedies push the envelope, tweak mores and spear sacred cows. Evan does none of these and suffers mightily for it. But there are familyfriendly (and Christian-accented) charms and laughs in this blend of Oh God!, Ace Ventura and Field of Dreams. Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) is a Buffalo TV news anchor who has won a seat in Congress. His party isn’t identified. But he’s a TV personality. He makes a big show out of praying. His first purchase to

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celebrate the career change is a HumVee. His second is a McMansion in a newly clear-cut valley in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. And he has won his seat by promising to “Change the World.” God (Freeman) takes him up on it. Evan may be all set to sell out to the pro-rapacious development committee chair (John Goodman) who wants him on board his “Pave the National Parks” bill. But Mr. “One nation, under Me” has other plans. God starts out subtle, rubbing the General Electric label off Evan’s alarm clock until it reads “Gen 6:14,” as in “Genesis, 6:14.” That’s the chapter and verse of the Bible that has to do with boats and gopher wood. But Evan has to have it spelled out. “I’m God. And I want you, Evan Baxter, to build me an ark.” Evan’s wife (Lauren Graham) and kids are confused when trucks start dumping loads of timber in the vacant lot next door, when Dad’s beard starts growing and he takes a liking to Charlton Heston’s Ten Commandments wardrobe. Think of how Congress and the cynical press (“New York’s Noah,” “Evan Help Us” and “Evan Can Wait” are the headlines) take it. Rather than giving supernatural powers to a jerk and having him reform, a la Bruce Almighty, this Almighty takes a conservative TV anchor and congressman and makes him walk the walk and not just

talk the talk. His faith is put through a Job-like series of tests. That’s actually a clever conceit, as are all the things they borrow from Field of Dreams (Graham has her “Don’t you dare tear down this ballfield, er, ark” moment.). God’s message, about practicing random kindness and preserving Creation, is a sweet one. You don’t have to be a Christian, past or present, to warm up to Evan Almighty, but it helps. God’s zingers about “I haven’t done the pillar of salt thing in a while” and his little intervention with Evan’s wife are as positive an exploration of his “mysterious ways” as the movies have ever had. Credit Freeman for this. The flinty actor is channeling his adorable “Electric Company” past. But Carell, in a variation of his favorite sort of character to play (sweet, clueless, but not utterly stupid), doesn’t do enough to hang a movie on. All the animal and animal-poop gags, the superfluous Wanda Sykes and her oneliners, the little dance Carell’s character does (repeated, by everybody, in the closing credits) and all the expensive effects that show us an ark afloat and thousands of critters teeming aboard simply don’t add up to huge laughs. As summer comedies go, Evan isn’t heaven sent. It’s just standard Hollywood fare, cleaned up for the Christian audience that Universal prays will show up. Reviewed by Roger Moore

Hairspray Rated: PG for language, some suggestive content and momentary teen smoking Starring: Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta, Queen Latifah, Michelle Pfeiffer, Amanda Bynes, Christopher Walken Directed by: Adam Shankman 116 minutes

xploding with energy, laughter, great dancing, knockout music and (mostly) breakneck pacing, Hairspray is the most enjoyable, insightful treatise on race in America since The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That might sound like hyperbole – until you’ve seen it. The movie musical, based on the Broadway hit that was adapted from John Waters’ non-musical 1988 film, will leave audiences stranded between stomachaching laughter and a huge lump in the throat. It’s that good. Set in Baltimore in 1962, Hairspray follows the fortunes of Tracy Turnblad (newcomer Nikki Blonsky, who grabs the film with her first appearance and never lets go). Tracy is a big-haired, big-boned (as they used to politely put it) teen whose dream is to become one of the cool kids dancing every weekday afternoon on “The Corny Collins Show,” an “American Bandstand” clone airing on a local TV station. Tracy’s ambitions aren’t supported by her laundress mother Edna (John Travolta in drag), a plus-sized matron so self-conscious about her weight that she hasn’t left the house in 20 years. Wise to the cruel

ways of the world, Edna doesn’t want her daughter to have to face the rejection certain to come her way. That rejection is embodied by TV station manager Velma Von Tassle (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her daughter Amber (Brittany Snow), both skinny, blonde and contemptuous of anyone who doesn’t meet their white-bread standards of glamour. A one-time beauty queen who slept her way to the title of Miss Baltimore Crabs, Velma rules the Corny Collins Show with a velvet fist. She doesn’t like fat people or overenthusiastic dancing (Tracy represents both) and especially not black people – she’s lobbying to get rid of “Negro Day,” the one time when African-American kids can appear on the show. The screenplay (credited to Leslie Dixon, although much has been lifted directly from the Waters’ film and the stage production) sets numerous roadblocks in Tracy’s path, all of which she blithely obliterates with her enthusiasm, good-heartedness and natural talent. The movie is crawling with juicy characters and performances: Christopher Walken is a hoot as Tracy’s supportive dad, Wilbur, who runs a novelty and joke shop. Zac Efron (High School Musical) is dead-on as the spit-curled Link Larkin, the hottest guy on the show and the boy Tracy loves from afar. Amanda Bynes is all wide-eyed innocence as Tracy’s lollipop-sucking pal Penny ... until she falls for a black kid named Seaweed (Elijah Kelley, who possesses gravity-defying dance moves that must be seen to be believed). Their romance turns

Penny’s religious tract-waving mother (Allison Janney) apoplectic. Queen Latifah is perfectly cast as Motormouth Maybelle, whose shop filled with “race music” records provides a place where black and white kids can mix. Taylor Parks plays Seaweed’s younger sister, Little Inez, who can belt a song like Ma Rainey. James Marsden (late of the X-Men franchise) reveals heretofore hidden singing and dancing talent as the smarmy-butcharismatic Corny Collins. Oh ... and look for John Waters’ appearance in the opening number, “Good Morning, Baltimore.” It’s one of the best cameos in movie history. A big questions going into the film was how Travolta would handle the drag role of Edna. The answer is that he successfully puts his own spin on it. The real star of the show, though, is Blonsky, a singing and dancing dervish bubbling over with life. With a voice that’s equally suited to Broadway ballads and vintage rock and possessing dance moves that are both funny and seductive, Blonsky takes charge of the film like someone who’s been doing this all her life. Hard to believe she had never performed professionally before getting this gig. I can’t call Hairspray perfect. Things bog down a bit at the two-thirds point, especially in a passage when Pfeiffer’s Velma tries to seduce Walken’s Wilbur and Edna is consumed by jealousy and hurt. “Hairspray” is more fun than anything we’ve seen at the multiplex so far this year. And unlike most of this summer’s blockbusters, it’s got something on its mind. Reviewed by Robert W. Butler

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seeLIFE DVDs

Magic needed

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Although funny in many places, Magicians labours in others but is nonetheless entertaining

Man of the Year cracks some laughs, as does Magicians, but both could try harder, argue our review team Man of the Year M, 115 minutes

scar Wilde pointed out to us The Importance of Being Earnest. But he never warned of the deadliness of being too “earnest.” And that’s a warning Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Wag the Dog) and Robin Williams needed to hear before marching off to make Man of the Year. It’s a nearly tone-deaf satire of American politics and the culture of celebrity, a comedy without enough laughs, a satire without enough bite. But it does have a killer premise. It suggests that a Jon Stewart-type might be able to become president of this distracted, shallow land of the TV and home of the naive. You’ve seen that face Robin Williams wears sometimes, the pained, sad-serious “Oscar nomination” face he wears when he’s playing a part that demands few laughs, or talking on a chat show about his personal demons. He wears that pretty much all the way through Man of the Year, even as he is riffing, rapping and rattling off shots at the Republicans, the Democrats and the state of our democracy. Williams is Tom Dobbs, a comic who hosts a popular political comedy TV show with a glib answer to every political question of the day. “If it was unpatriotic to question the government, we’d still be English!” He’s Jon Stewart without the edge or smarts – Jay Leno, in other words.

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Dobbs is convinced, by an Internet “draft Tom” movement, to run for president. He gets on the ballot in a handful of key states. He won’t do TV ads. And for a time, he won’t even do comedy at his campaign appearances. He talks about the issues, the failure of the money-driven two major political parties. And he shoots down the put-downs and distractions of his opposition, mocking flag burning amendments, gay marriage bans and the like. “I’m not just a tree hugger. I’m an air breather.” But thanks to a free-form improvisation at a debate, and the ditzy “this is all a game” attitude of the TV talking heads (Chris Matthews shows up, again and again, no surprise), darned if Tom doesn’t have a shot. Well, thanks as well to something an employee at the company that has the monopoly on touch-screen voting in America figures out. Eleanor (Laura Linney) pays a high price for a glitch she spots in the software, thanks to the weasel corporate attorney (Jeff Goldblum) who calls most of the shots there. We learn this in a long flashback, an interview after the election with Dobbs’ personal manager-turned-campaign manager, played by Christopher Walken. That decision robs the story of its immediacy. Man of the Year never has the heat of a Bulworth, the bitter, funny truths of Network”or the optimism of Dave. For every point the movie scores about a system that rewards those who spend

$200 million to get elected, and the people they’re beholden to, it loses two for boring us as it does. That doesn’t add up to a Person of the Week, much less a Man of the Year. Still, it does have some awesome lines. Reviewed by Roger Moore

MAGICIANS TBC

slightly dark British comedy about a magic act that falls awry when lifelong friends and magicians Harry and Karl (David Mitchell and Robert Webb) come to grief over adultery between Karl and Harry’s wife, who just happens to be the pair’s magician’s assistant. A resulting decapitation of the assistant (accidental of course, during the guillotine trick!) sets up the tension between the two men when they both enter the national magic champs four years later. Can they bury their ghosts, and how will Harry manage when he puts his new assistant under the guillotine? The movie is an extension of Mitchell and Webb’s British TV series, Peep Show, but lacks the edge of the small screen production. Although funny in many places, Magicians labours in others but is nonetheless entertaining. Highlights include a send up of the Paul McKenna/Colin Fry type of act, and bonus features include a behind the scenes look at how many magic tricks are performed.

When news breaks... the world turns to Investigate magazine’s blog, TBR.cc

1.6 million web pages at the height of the English Sailors crisis, and New Zealand’s TBR.cc was the number one ranked site, ahead of Yahoo and America’s Daily Kos

TBR.cc. The Authority. Pass it on...

touchLIFE Epson Stylus CX5500

Epson New Zealand has released its first model in a new range of multifunction printers, the Epson Stylus CX5500, providing versatility and value for money for home and small business users. The Stylus CX5500 features Epson’s improved DURABrite Ultra ink whic produces glossier photos and sharper text printing. DURABrite Ultra ink is resistant to smudging, fading and water and has up to 120 years light fastness. To ensure the home and small business office is productive, the Epson Stylus CX5500 has print speeds of up to 25ppm. True BorderFree printing is available on the Epson Stylus CX5500 in A4, 4x6 and 5x7 inch sizes on a range of Epson’s glossy photo papers. The Epson Stylus CX5500 has a 600x1200dpi scanner with Charge-Coupled Device CCD) technology to achieve accurate colour scanning of photographs and colour documents. With a pixel depth of 48-bit input and 24-bit output, accuracy levels are outstanding. Auto Skew Adjustment software also adds to the ease of use by automatically detecting if a photo or document has not been placed straight and automatically adjusting it. The Epson Stylus CX5500 is capable of PC-free copying, and comes with Epson Creativity Suite which includes utilities to simplify tasks such as web printing. The Epson Stylus CX5500 is RRP $99 including GST. Visit www.epson.co.nz

Building a better mouse trap Gadgets for people on the move

Belkin’s new mouse trap and washable mous

1. Check out this ingenious pouch from Belkin. When zipped up, the Mouse Trap holds your mouse and other small items to accompany your laptop when you travel. When fully unzipped, it serves as a mouse pad. Pretty simple, yet pretty smart. Comes in four colors with weird names: Chocolate/tourmaline, steel/burnt orange, dove/tarragon, dove/peony. 2. Ever wish you could wash the gunk off the bottom of your mouse, or rinse the sweat build-up on the top your mouse under a kitchen faucet? With the Belkin Washable Mouse, you can. The mouse is water resistant and can be hand washed. There’s no mention of whether you can lather it up with soap or toss it into a dishwasher, but we’re guessing that you can’t. The USB mouse has a scroll pad that lets you scroll vertically or horizontally, has a 1200-dpi optical sensor, and works on upholstery and wood. More info at www.belkin.com [Reviewed by computershopper.com]

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Neat Receipts

From receipts and expense reports to business documents and business cards, you can now manage your paperwork with ease. You can keep organized, digital files in a database on your PC. Simply send documents through the scanner and the software will automatically handle the rest, ensuring you have ideal image scans. NeatReceipts will even read and manage information scanned from receipts including vendor purchases, allowing you to keep track of your expenses. The SCANALIZER’s advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software extracts key information from your receipts and business cards and inserts it into corresponding fields on a spreadsheet, filling in the information so you dont have to. Call it life, simplified. Visit www.neatreceipts.com

SanDisk Sansa Connect MP3 Player

The Sansa Connect MP3 player is the first Wi-Fi based MP3 player from Sandisk’s audio line. Created by the leaders in flash memory for wireless entertainment, this flashed-based player keeps you connected to your music, friends and fresh new entertainment streams wherever you are. All from one wireless mobile player, the Sansa Connect plays music, photos and Internet radio. Owners with a Yahoo! ID can listen to LAUNCHcast Internet radio, browse Flickr albums and photos, and see what their friends are listening to. The Sansa Connect provides superior sound playback and supports Microsoft PlaysForSure subscription music. The Sansa Connect provides a microSD card slot for additional capacity for your player. For more details go to www.sandisk.com

RoundTable

Microsoft RoundTable is an advanced conference phone with a built-in 360° camera. Microsoft RoundTable actually follows the conversation, by identifying the active speaker and broadcasting a close-up of his/her face. When the conversation shifts, RoundTable shifts with it, automatically. RoundTable has advanced speech recognition, so it can crosscut between multiple speakers without losing track of the conversation. www.microsoft.com

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realLIFE

LAST WORD

A wing and a prayer

Veteran trans-Pacific aviator Mike Magnell discusses his adventures with Gary Warner

ANTA ANA, California – There was the time west of Hawaii when the cockpit filled with leaking caustic prop-jet fuel, soaking his sneakers so bad that he had to fly several hours in his blistering bare feet. Or when the engine started to cough on his tiny single-engine plane 800 kms from Pago Pago and a watery crash landing was a distinct possibility. Or the afternoon a Soviet helicopter bristling with missiles tailed him across the Bering Sea. Or his favorite tale, about the day he met his future wife on a hardscrabble airstrip outside of Nome, Alaska. Like a lot of pilots on the back side of their 50s, Mike Magnell can spin hours of stories about his long flying career. But unlike rocking-chair flight captains, Magnell has saved the most adventurous chapter for last. After flying parts of three decades for Western and Delta airlines, he now makes a living as one of a handful of pilots-forhire who ferry small planes across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. “Mike is our go-to guy,” says Don Stanton of Select Air Group, “He can fly just about any aircraft and is always ready to go at a moment’s notice. Instead of cruising at 500 miles per hour at 30,000 feet, Magnell now hops around the world, making pit stops in distant spots like Christmas Island, New Caledonia, Senegal and Namibia along the way. It’s a return to his younger days as an

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Alaska bush pilot, flying small planes at low speeds over long distances to unfamiliar airports that are sometimes little more than a strip cut in a forest. “That bush pilot background really shines through,” says Perry Taylor, an Australian ferry service operator who has worked with Magnell. “I am wary of airline pilots, Brylcreem boys, that have not had bush experience. Mike has vast experience.” Magnell, 59, is as lean and lanky as photos from his college days, the only marks of passing time the wrinkles around his

eyes from decades of squinting out of cockpits. He’s a quiet guy unless you get him onto the subject of flying, which sets off tale-filled monologues about Alaska, Siberia or the South Pacific. “I always wanted to fly,” Magnell says. “I can hardly remember a time when I didn’t want to fly.” Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1946, Magnell moved with his family to California when he was five. Growing up in Long Beach and Los Alamitos, he was enthralled by the jet fighters that flew in

and out of what was then called the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station. After graduating from High School, Magnell earned a fistful of pilot’s licenses and certifications. When he graduated from Cal State Long Beach, he wanted to fly off aircraft carriers. “I was accepted by the Navy – I was going to become an officer and gentleman,” Magnell says. “But it was 1970 and Nixon was starting to wind things down in Vietnam. They wanted me to wait 11 months to start training. That’s a long

time for a kid. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to fly.” Magnell instead sent out 500 resumes to airlines, aircraft manufacturers, major corporations – anybody he could think of who could use a pilot. “I was getting nothing,” Magnell says. “Then one day a guy calls from Teller Air Service in a little Eskimo village in Alaska. He’s looking for someone to fly for his air taxi service.” It was fun for the young guy, bumping around the vast interior of Alaska in a Helio Courier, a tiny plane designed for flying in and out of short, tough airstrips. “It was one of the safest airplanes to fly because it flew so slow that you wouldn’t get smashed up if it crashed,” Magnell recalls. Magnell loved the seat-of-your-pants flying. Making friends at dirt airstrips. Fighting the freezing cold or clouds of mosquitoes. One day, Magnell touched down at a small dirt airfield near Nome. While waiting for his passengers, he met a young woman named Iris. “Her dad owned an air taxi service and I flew for the competition,” Magnell says. “I found any reason I could to get over there after that. We were married six months later.” In 1976, Magnell was hired by Western Airlines and after heavy jet training, moved to Orange County. Iris got a job with Air Cal as a ticket agent. The couple built a home in Laguna Hills, giving it the look of an Alaskan lodge. Over the years, they’ve filled it with scrimshaw, Inuit spears, a dog sled, and other far north artifacts. “I knew Iris would be homesick, so I tried to make the place as much like home as possible,” Magnell says. “One of her grandmothers was Eskimo, so a lot of the stuff is from her and her family.” Magnell enjoyed flying for Western, which had a reputation as a fun, freewheeling place to work. Then the airline fell victim to the industry’s merger mania in 1986. “Delta sucked us up, and life got miserable,” Magnell says. “They loved military pilots, and I wasn’t one of that crowd. After that, I couldn’t wait to get out.” When he took a severance package in 1997, the couple lived on his pension and Iris’ salary as a ticket agent at John Wayne Airport for American Airlines, the airline giant that bought up Air Cal in 1986. “I was kind of sick of flying,” Magnell says. “I don’t think I got in a cockpit for a while.”

By chance, Magnell saw an ad for a Helio Courier in Laredo, Texas. It turned out to be the same plane he had used at the start of his career. He bought the plane, refurbished it and flew with Iris on a nostalgic trip to Alaska. It reignited his passion for flying. He began buying and sometimes selling small aircraft as a side business. In March 2002, Magnell saw an advertisement for a 1979 vintage Cessna Turbo 210N once owned by folk singer John Denver. The deal was too good to pass up. The only problem was the plane was in Australia. After exploring a number of options, Magnell realized the cheapest way to get the single-engine propeller plane home was to go down under and fly the 7,500 miles back home himself. “I couldn’t get any insurance,” Magnell says. “If I crashed it, I would have had to eat the entire price, if I survived.” Whatever reservations Iris harbored, she mostly kept them to herself. She knew her husband was a methodical planner and flier. “It’s a lot of water between there and here,” she says. “But Mike said he knew he could do it. And so I knew he could do it.” Magnell picked up the plane in Boort, an outback town about 240 km north of Melbourne. He flew it to Sydney, where he hired legendary ferry pilot Ray Clamback, a veteran of 200 small-plane trips over the Pacific, to install an auxiliary fuel tank. Waiting for the work to be done, Magnell and Clamback did a lot of “hangar flying,” telling tales of epic flights and death-defying mishaps. Clamback told of crashing off Hawaii at night and floating for 10 hours until he was picked up by a Yugoslav freighter. Magnell recounted a flight from his bush pilot days over the Bering Sea when a Soviet helicopter tailed him, ready to shoot if he crossed over the invisible border in the ocean. Magnell skipped across the Pacific, flying from Australia to New Caledonia, then on to Samoa, Christmas Island and Hawaii before finally touching down in Santa Barbara. The last leg is more than 2,300 miles. “That’s the longest distance over water between two points of land that you’ll find,” Magnell says. It was a long, noisy and exhausting marathon. But Magnell was captivated by the deep aqua-blue water, the coral atolls, and especially the friendly locals in places like Christmas Island who helped him hand-

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After flying parts of three decades for Western and Delta airlines, he now makes a living as one of a handful of pilots-for-hire who ferry small planes across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans pump his fuel. It was an adventure that he wanted to repeat. “You feel truly blessed to be a pilot when you are flying like that,” Magnell says. Soon after, Magnell decided to join the small fraternity of long-distance ferry pilots. Since then, he’s flown an American floatplane to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to be used by a resort to pick up clients. A light plane in South Africa went to the Caribbean island of Bonaire with stops in Senegal and Brazil. He’s had recent inquiries from Poland and Japan. In between are shorter shuttles of planes from California to Mexico or Denver to Los Angeles. With global positioning systems, longrange radio and autopilot, flying a small plane across the ocean isn’t exactly like it was in Charles Lindbergh’s day. But it’s still dangerous business. Clamback suffered a serious crash in 2004, landing upside down in a Cessna 182 off Hawaii and enduring several hours bobbing in his lifejacket until rescued by the Coast Guard. “He couldn’t have picked a better place for it to happen,” Magnell says. “The Coast Guard patrols that area and he had one of his pilots, a lady named Lyn Gray, who was able to fly over him for four hours.” Gray, reached by telephone in Australia,

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says it started much worse than it finished. “I never saw Ray after he went in,” she says. “I could see the plane. The Coast Guard found him by the reflection of the aluminum strip on his lifejacket. It was a very happy outcome, but it easily could have gone differently.” What Magnell, Gray and other pilots fear is going down in the trans-Pacific “dead spot.” From five degrees south of the equator off Hawaii to a few hundred miles off the coast of Australia, rescue is anything but certain. “Every one of those countries in that part of the world would try to help you, but the resources just aren’t there,” Gray said. “They might try to divert a ship to you. But you could be in the water for days.” Magnell hasn’t had to ditch, but he’s had his close calls. Like the time far from Pago Pago in American Samoa when the single engine on the Cirrus he was flying started to sputter. “For a couple of hours, I’m thinking, ‘Come on, come on, come on,’” Magnell says. “It wasn’t hard to stay awake.” Another time he was flying a Cessna Caravan turboprop to the Whitsunday Islands in Australia and used a collapsible auxiliary tank to hold the fuel. “It ran on jet fuel, which is different than piston fuel,” Magnell says. “The

extra tank sprung a slow leak and it was sloshing around the floor. It’s really caustic stuff and it got in my sneakers and started to burn my feet. I had to take off my shoes and fly barefoot, never putting my feet on the floor.” Most flights are far more routine. Clients find Magnell, usually by word of mouth or from his Web site. Hiring a ferry pilot is preferred to shipping a small plane by boat because it takes less time and doesn’t involve dismantling the aircraft, which can damage its structural integrity. After he has a client’s plane checked out at Torrance Airport, it’s usually modified with a Turtle-pac, a 238-gallon collapsible auxiliary nylon tank. Magnell will then make short test flights to familiarize himself with the plane and spot any possible problems. Magnell is paid up to US$1,000 per day plus expenses for his longest flights, less for shorter hauls. He’s usually flying no more than five or six days on a delivery, although wait times can extend stays by weeks. “Normally I do an island a day on the trips to Australia,” Magnell says. Although Magnell and Clamback are competitors, they sometimes send each other business when the other is too busy. “Mike’s a great guy,” says Lyn Gray, the pilot who flies for Clamback. “He really prepares. You have to.” With the dollar so weak, most of his business these days is taking planes from the U.S. to foreign buyers. “But it will swing around the other way when the dollar comes back,” Magnell says. Magnell relies on a network of fellow pilots for advice when he’s flying to a new airfield. But he makes a point to build his own friendships wherever he goes. “Make a friend in a lot of places and you have a friend for life,” he says. “Some people think it is just a business and you can treat people poorly as long as you pay them. I make friends. It’s the way I am. But on a practical level, they’re more likely to help you if you have a problem.” Iris has become used to the sudden trips that can take her husband away for days, or like a recent trip to Africa, weeks. “I grew up in a pilot’s family,” she says. “My dad would take off at the beginning of the day. It could be snowing or raining. Sometimes he would have to set down overnight and not be able to let us know. So I’m used to it. Mike’s a good pilot. He’ll come home.”