Sue Ahearn

New Zealand is trying its hardest to go broke - Alex Worker. farmersweekly.co.nz/opinion/new-ze…

@ZealandEarly Griffins Marshmallow Puffs on sale in Melbourne at Cheaper By Miles.

Didnt know NZ biscuits (Griffins) were available in the Reject Shop, Australia.

Myth: "I only wear vegan fabrics. Better for the animals, better for the planet." Let's check in on Doris's annual contribution. Once a year, in late spring, Doris is sheared. The procedure takes approximately three minutes. Doris does not enjoy it. Doris does not, by any visible measure, suffer from it. Doris is, immediately afterwards, a noticeably more comfortable animal in the British summer. The fleece weighs approximately 3 kilograms. It is sold to the British Wool Marketing Board for, depending on the year, between £0.40 and £2.50 per kilogram. The shearing costs more than the wool fetches. Brian is shearing Doris at a loss. The wool is then: - Naturally flame-retardant - Naturally antibacterial - Moisture-wicking - Biodegradable - Renewable, annually - Carbon-storing while in use The replacement, in performance fabrics: - Polyester - Polyamide - Acrylic - Polypropylene - All petroleum-derived - All shedding microplastics on every wash - All requiring fossil fuel inputs to produce - All non-biodegradable, with a typical landfill lifespan of 200-500 years A single wash of a polyester fleece can release up to 700,000 microplastic fibres into the water system. These fibres are now in: every tested water source on earth, every tested human placenta, every tested rainfall sample, the deep ocean, the Arctic ice, and the lungs of marine mammals. A single wash of a wool jumper releases: nothing. The wool, when eventually disposed of, returns to soil within a few years. The fabric being marketed as the "ethical" alternative to wool is plastic. The plastic is "ethical" because nobody has been asked to slaughter the polymer. The polymer also has not been asked. Doris, by being a sheep on a fell, is producing the most thoroughly sustainable performance fabric humans have ever made. Brian is selling it at a loss. The fashion industry, meanwhile, is selling petroleum at a profit and calling it ethical. Reject plastic. Wear wool. Doris is, this morning, growing next year's batch.

Multi-million dollar estate advertises for mysterious ‘end of the world’ library job stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360971…

Video appears to show the immediate aftermath of the shooting outside the ballroom where the White House Correspondents Dinner was taking place.

Chaos at the White House Correspondents Dinner

Wolf Blitzer said he was one flight above the ballroom and “a few feet away” from the shooter. Cops threw him down for his safety and hustled him into the men’s room with others. He’s okay.

More Wolf Blitzer: Says shooter was “shooting randomly.” Says he heard maybe a half dozen shots. Extremely loud, “very frightening.” Cop jumped on him to protect him.

Credit to @BrianStelter for taking out his cellphone and streaming for @CNN, discussing with @KaitlanCollins and @MajorCBS earlier and now @MKRaju, admitting at 849pm Eastern that the #WHCD shooting has a lot of people shook up

A lot of shaken up people here at the #WHCD - this woman at the table next to me was so scared. I grabbed her hand and told her everything was going to be okay. Amid all this, law enforcement drew firearms. POTUS rushed out. Someone tackled. Confusion if there was a gunshot (not confirmed) or just a loud noise. I personally did NOT hear a gunshot.

Agents with the U.S. Secret Service, guns drawn, tell reporters and other bystanders to get back, following reports of shots fired inside the hotel where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was taking place in Washington, attended by President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump.

Jacqueline Smith, the ombudsman of the Stars and Stripes newspaper, tells OutFront she was fired after she warned Hegseth was trying to control coverage.

Stars and Stripes Ombudsman: The Pentagon is trying to silence me and to destroy editorial independence of the publication. The job was created by Congress. The paper's independence is enshrined in law. Read more: stripes.com/opinion/2026-0…

According to Reporters Without Borders, Israel accounted for almost half of the world's journalist deaths this year. It says Israel has now been the deadliest country for journalists for three consecutive years.

"I stand by every single word of this report...I have been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information." Sarah Fitzpatrick on Kash Patel: theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/…

@ThinkNGuess Scales for weighing wool bales - all farmers used to have them in the wool shed.

I bet you cannot identify what it..can you?

When Peter Thiel helped kill Gawker, he said he wasn't going after journalism in general. Now, he's backing a company that aims to do just that. I wrote about his new plan to route around the 1st amendment with the help of ex-spies and an AI "tribunal" codastory.com/polarization/c…

The BBC has found a pattern of spikes in trades on financial markets ahead of public announcements by President Trump, including during the Iran war. 🎧 #GlobalNewsPod bbc.in/4vVxjYm

$580,000,000 in oil futures moved 16 minutes before Trump announced a pause in Iran strikes. Not after. Before. The BBC just documented five separate instances of massive, suspiciously timed trades preceding Trump’s biggest market-moving announcements — oil futures, the tariff pause, Maduro’s capture, Iran ceasefire bets. The platforms where anonymous accounts cashed in? Polymarket and Kalshi. Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket’s advisory board and is a strategic advisor to Kalshi. There’s even a law against this. The STOCK Act (2012) explicitly covers executive branch officials. Zero prosecutions in 14 years. Oh, and the DOJ unit created after Watergate to prosecute exactly this kind of corruption? Trump cut it from 36 lawyers to 2 and stripped its authority to file new cases.

News organisations need to be unflinching in their use of strong language to describe Trump. Too often we have normalised the abnormal. Mea culpa. I did it myself at the BBC and often came up against institutional timidity. My weekend read. open.substack.com/pub/historynev…