Backbencher

After reading through the North and South magazines (Mar-Apr2005) and also doing a bit of research on-line , I found this New Zealand based magazine to be similar to that of Reader's Digest but just New Zealand news. It deals with entertaining its audience, which is primarily middle age and older readers, by offering a wide range of reading material from recipies and traveling tips to current issue stories, politcs, or whatever else is going on in New Zealand. I found two stories while skimming through articles, one that I enjoyed and one that I thought that would be beneficial to the class.

The article that I enjoyed was Man Down. It is set in the Kaweka foothills seventy miles from Napier on the Nicholas remote farmstead. In August of 2004, the 71 year old Jack Nicholas was gunned down by a unknown shooter while walking out of his rural home. The police went through this mysterious case inside and out but never found the murderer. No real suspects have been discovered, mostly due to the fact that Jack was so well liked by everyone that knew him, and he had no known enemies that anyone knew of.

The article that I thought would be beneficial to the class was Shake Rattle and Roll. This relatively new formation of rocks that we call New Zealand has 305 active hidden faults hidden underneath the young rock surface. This large number of faults is the major cause of 15,000 earthquakes a year in New Zealand, 150 of which can be felt by people. Every year the NZ Earthquake Commission deals with thousands of claims and shelling out millions of dollars in insurance money due to earthquakes. The EQC is also in the study of predicting when the next big quake will hit a major NZ city, as in Napier in 1931.