Hey, I’m sorry about that outburst I had last week. It’s okay if you don’t care about the news and only care about yourself. There’s plenty of things going on out there in the world – some good, some not so good – but that shouldn’t matter to you, right? It’s all about you, baby. You vs. the world. Fuck everyone else, right? Don’t forget to charge your crystals this week, too.
A rare leaked document from the US Supreme Court revealed their desire to overturn women’s rights to safe abortions in America. 1973’s Roe v. Wades’ ruling protected women’s rights to choose under US law, but a draft document leaked by Politico last week saw the courts claiming that the original decision wasn’t constitutional, and ‘must be overruled.’ Despite their desire to control what women do with their bodies, research shows that outlawing abortions doesn’t reduce the amount of abortions sought – in fact, it actually increases pregnancy-related deaths by up to 21%, as women seek out unsafe abortions elsewhere. Protests have been happening across the US over the last week, as women in the Land Of The Free grapple with the new reality of having less rights than a gun. Abortion remains legal in Aotearoa, and women’s rights were protected further after a new law passed in March to prevent sick, sad freaks from protesting directly outside abortion clinics.
Scallops are off the menu in the Coromandel, as the tipa population falls to critical levels. The total population of scallops in the Hauraki Gulf has dropped by 93% over the last decade, with a 2020 Auckland Council report lamenting ‘mass mortality’ events among the shellfish caused by ‘adverse environmental conditions’ and ‘toxic algae blooms’. Local iwi have placed a rāhui on collecting shellfish to allow for numbers to recover, and several fisheries across Te Ika-a-Māui have followed suit. While everyone agrees that the decline in tipa numbers is due to human activity, the fisheries industry believe climate change is to blame, while others suspect ‘dredging’ (fisheries ‘obliterating the sea floor’ by dragging a giant claw across it) might have something to do with it. ‘This is the beginning of the end for dredging in the gulf,’ Auckland Councillor Pippa Coom told NZ Herald. ‘[We] will continue to advocate for a completely dredge-free future.’
Landlords still be landlording as TradeMe continues to pull illegal lodging listings from their website. A property in Auckland suburb Ellerslie was advertised at $550 a week, but didn’t include any cooking facilities, which are required by law under the Residential Tenancies Act 1986. When questioned by Stuff, the landlord claimed he wasn’t aware that property managers had to meet legal requirements for cooking facilities, and that tenants could just use an ‘air fryer’ or something – likely indicating he hadn’t read the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 at all. The listing was only removed after a screenshot went viral on social media, aided by Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick tagging TradeMe’s official Twitter account. Things continue to be grim for renters in this country, but hey, look on the bright side – if you’re getting sick of Uni, you could always become a landlord. You don’t have to have any qualifications, you aren’t required to pay any attention to the law, and you get to bottom feed off your tenant’s wages as you sit at home and do nothing. Score!
A CEO of an Aotearoa chemical manufacturing company has been heavily criticised after making sexist and racist comments about a prominent New Zealand businesswoman. In an interview with National Business Review (paywalled), DGL Group founder Simon Henry inexplicably took aim at My Food Bag co-founder Nadia Lim, calling her ‘Eurasian fluff’ and making incredibly inappropriate comments about a photo of her as it appeared in their prospectus. Following Simon’s comments, Stuff reports that DGL Group’s value dropped $304 million in less than a week, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern even weighed in on the situation, telling New Zealand Herald ‘I imagine [his comments] would be insulting to all women.’ On recently launched online radio station The Platform, Sean Plunket made the charitable claim that Simon Henry was merely trying to make a comment about ‘star power or celebrity endorsement’ in business, but even he agreed that you’d have to be ‘seriously odd’ to see the image in question as sexual. I can only imagine that Simon Henry lashed out at Nadia out of jealousy, as no one would ever accuse him of using his physical appearance to sell anything (aside from birth control).
