Not the Barry Hadfield Reserve although not far away from it — in the Southwards Museum grounds.

This is a screen shot from the TPU’s fuel supply monitor website as at this morning. Their press release about the refusal of MBIE to confirm which tanker ships and where the ships supposedly are that are additional to the totals the TPU can identify can be read here

from Reuters

• Supplies to be halted from 1 May
• Updated export schedules sent to Kazakhstan and Germany
• Move comes amid strained Russia–Germany relations over Ukraine
• Kremlin says it needs to ​check this information.

MOSCOW, April 21 (Reuters) – Russia is set to stop oil exports from ‌Kazakhstan to Germany via the Druzhba pipeline starting from May 1, three industry sources said on Tuesday.

The sources, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said that an adjusted oil exporting schedule has been sent to Kazakhstan ​and Germany.

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A halt to Kazakh flows would add more uncertainty to Germany’s fuel supply as ​the Iran war disrupts energy shipments from the Middle East only a few ⁠years after Berlin’s decades-long energy ties with Russia were upended by the war in Ukraine.

Kazakhstan’s oil ​exports to Germany via Russia’s Druzhba pipeline totalled 2.146 million metric tons, or around 43,000 barrels per ​day, in 2025, an increase of 44% from 2024, and 730,000 tons in the first quarter of 2026.

A complete halt would remove about 17% of the up to 12 million metric tons of oil a year processed by Germany’s ​PCK refinery — one of the country’s largest — in the northeastern town of Schwedt, fuel from which ​powers 9 out of 10 cars in the Berlin and Brandenburg region.

Russia’s energy ministry did not immediately reply to ‌a ⁠request for comment. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he was not aware of a move to stop the oil exports.

Continue reading

by Roger Childs

“White Poppies For Peace” from the Peace Movement have been for years actively promoting peace education, and challenging young people to think. –Shirley Murray.

Lest we forget them all

Another Anzac Day occurs on Saturday.  There will be the traditional dawn parades and later gatherings around the war memorials of the nation: the veterans and descendants of those who served their country will march and attend; wreaths will be laid; flags will be lowered and raised, speeches will be delivered, and the Last Post and Reveille will be played.

We will also hear the traditional reminders: Lest we forget and We will remember them.

The media will play their part too, with television presenters and news readers wearing red poppies and the channels and papers recalling battles glorious and deeds victorious. 

It is right and proper that our small country, which has given so many lives per head of population over the last 126 years, should pause and remember the contributions, heroism, sacrifices New Zealanders have made in time of war. 

Many Kiwis at this time will buy a red poppy to keep faith with the fallen and the veterans.

The horrendous toll of wars

However, the reality of war is that most casualties have been civilians, caught up in conflicts where they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tragically, tens of millions of innocent people over the centuries have been slaughtered, injured, raped and displaced because of military campaigns aimed at achieving often short term, political goals. 

In New Zealand, we recall the effects of war on families on the home front who lost husbands, fathers, sons and brothers in campaigns on the other side of the world.  It is hard for us to identify with the plight of families overseas who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves living on, or close to, battlefields, however. 

We can’t imagine what it would be like to have to leave our homes in Elizabeth Street, Tutere Street, Wellington Road and the Esplanade, put our belongings on a cart and head north, south, east or west, possibly never to return.  

 The white and purple poppies

All we are saying is give peace a chance. –John Lennon 

The late John Murray often reminded those who would listen, of the wide ranging casualties of war and the importance of the white poppy as a symbol of peace. 

His advocacy raised the ire of some folk in RSAs who misunderstood the message. Speakers at Anzac Day services often talk about servicemen and women giving their lives that we might live in peace. That’s what the white poppy is all about.

A few weeks ago, Elliot wrote after a Hobson’s Pledge supporter received a response from Minister Paul Goldsmith saying he did not “intend to release the report” on the Treaty clauses. This review is part of the National-NZ First coalition agreement, and sought to identify legislation with Treaty clauses that were unclear, ambiguous, or even unnecessary. We quickly set up a website to enable you to email the Minister demanding to know what is going on.

Minister Goldsmith was sitting on a completed review of Treaty clauses, refusing to release it, knowing full well he and Cabinet colleagues had discussed and decided the matter and – by all appearances – hoping the issue would simply fade away. But we were not going to leave the matter lie.

Thankfully, our supporters did not leave it be either. They spoke up and applied the pressure necessary to force action.  

So I want to personally congratulate you all. Thousands of Hobson’s Pledge supporters flooded the Minister’s inbox, demanded accountability, and now, the Government has been forced to break their silence and signal action on the “Treaty Clauses” unnecessarily embedded in so much of our legislation.

But now is not the time to let up.

While it is encouraging to see that the review has been completed and that decisions are now being made, we know very little about what the decisions are and how they will be enacted. We don’t know which legislation is to be amended, and we haven’t seen the report.

It is essential that this process is transparent.

The Minister and the Government have a mandate to do this work. We want to be able to wholeheartedly support it, but we cannot do so with so little information.

We want to provide confidence to the Government and get the silent majority to speak up because there will be criticism from the mainstream media. But they do not speak for all New Zealanders. Many of us support the objective of removing vague and open-ended Treaty clauses and replacing them with clear, specific law. This is the right direction.

So join me in telling Minister Goldsmith that we are tentatively supporting him, but need to know more!

There has also been a new risk introduced, which we have questions about. A new potential source of confusion.

We are seeing reports that the Government is proposing to acknowledge both “the Treaty of Waitangi” and “Te Tiriti o Waitangi” in new legislative frameworks.

We must ask the Government: Why?

By explicitly separating the two, the Government risks reinforcing the radical activist narrative that there are two markedly different documents with conflicting meanings. This is a recipe for further legal chaos.

This separation supports the idea of dual sovereignty and invites activist judges to pick and choose their interpretations to suit a political agenda. It creates more confusion, not less.

If the goal is clarity and equality, why are they entertaining a “two-document” approach that only deepens the divide?

[SEND A MESSAGE TO THE MINISTER ASKING FOR CLARITY]

We cannot let up now. The Minister needs to know that while we welcome action, we will not accept half-measures or new “hooks” for co-governance.

Minister Goldsmith needs to see that there is overwhelming public support for repealing these clauses entirely and replacing them with clear, universal language. No more double-speak.

We need to tell him:

1. Finish the job. Remove the vague principles that create two classes of citizenship.
2. One Document, One Law. Stop the move to distinguish between “The Treaty” and “Te Tiriti” in a way that suggests different sets of rights for different people.
3. No more delays. We are watching, and we expect the promises made in the coalition agreements to be kept in full.

We have the momentum. Let’s make sure the Minister hears us loud and clear.

[SEND A MESSAGE TO THE MINISTER HERE]

Don Brash 
Trustee of Hobson’s Pledge

And for Hippy Chippy.

The are 5 places called Elk in the USA (and one in Poland).

by Karl du Fresne

It’s verging on dishonesty for RNZ to describe political commentator Janet Wilson as a former National Party press secretary, as it did [Tuesday] in an item about the unrest in the National caucus, as if her former status endows her opinion with special force or credibility.

For the record, Wilson described National as a “slow-slip political earthquake” and “a miasma of nothingness”. These were damning words. The unmistakeable implication was that if Wilson is dissing Christopher Luxon then the party must be in a truly dire predicament – because after all, isn’t she supposed to be on National’s side?

Wilson is often critical of National and appeals to the media for exactly that reason. The subliminal message is that the party has been abandoned even by its own supporters.

Stuff plays the same game, routinely introducing Wilson’s political columns by mentioning she has worked for National. It’s a useful, if slightly deceitful, way of trying to prove to readers that Stuff is politically even-handed, contrary to what its critics keep saying. (Stuff does the same with another political columnist, Ben Thomas, who was Chris Finlayson’s press secretary so long ago that it’s scarcely relevant.)

But the fact Wilson once worked for National tells you nothing about her political sympathies. She was just one of the many hired guns – sorry, I mean communications advisers – who ply their trade around the Beltway. She provided media training to John Key and was later employed on a relatively brief fixed-term contract as press secretary to the National leader (two, in fact – the hapless Todd Muller and then Judith Collins) during a chaotic period in 2020 when the party was in abject disarray.

Interestingly enough, her LinkedIn profile doesn’t mention that time. Perhaps she was burned by the experience and doesn’t want to remind anyone of it. Certainly she saw the Nats at their worst, which may explain why she so often seems hostile to the party and happy to undermine its leader.

This is not to say Wilson doesn’t have a valid perspective, but when all is said and done she’s just one opinionated commentator among many (in fact rather too many, you might say, considering the 28 comment pieces about Luxon’s leadership that political scientist Bryce Edwards included in his daily roundup this morning).

Moreover, like most commentators she’s fallible, as she proved when she rather rashly wrote National off after the 2020 election. Readers may recall the party made an emphatic comeback three years later. But Wilson remains a favoured commentator largely because her past association with National is seen as giving her opinions a special patina of authority.

The question is, would RNZ have been remotely interested in her view on National’s leadership imbroglio if she had said Luxon was secure and deserved to lead the party into this year’s election? Somehow I don’t think so.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I am not and never have been a supporter of National or Luxon and believe the party probably deserves whatever happens to it. I just wish the media weren’t so damned predictable in the unsubtle way they push opinions that suit them.)

Orginal piece

Another unfortunate side-effect of the war, is that condoms will now cost at least 30% more as they are a petroleum product.

The largest prophylactic manufacturer in the world, which produces in excess of 5 billion of them a year and supplies well known brands such as Trojan and Durex, has announced the price increase and also stated that demand for condoms has increased by about 30% also, since the war began.

Will people heed the advice when told to “go [Stuff] themselves”?

by Caitlin Johnstone

Former senior Biden advisor Amos Hochstein said during an interview on Sunday that the Biden administration had been preparing to bomb Iran if they had won re-election in 2024.

Hochstein was asked by Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, “In July 2024 Secretary Blinken claimed Iran was one or two weeks away from having enough fissile material breakout capacity to eventually make a weapon if Iran had decided to do so. There were indirect negotiations that the Biden administration did, but it went nowhere. So when President Trump argues that he did what no other president would, is it just simply that the bill was coming due and it fell on his watch?”

“I do think there’s a certain element to that, and that’s why I was supportive of President Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term,” Hochstein replied. “We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably, we may have to be there in the same place. And we did, we did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.”

Hochstein, for the record, is an Israel-born IDF veteran who reportedly played a major role in the Biden administration encouraging Israel’s horrific bombardment of Lebanon in September 2024. And his narrative that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities “may have had to happen” under a theoretical second Biden term is false.

In March of last year, US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khomeini [sic] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” contradicting both the claims of President Trump and of Antony Blinken the year before.

But even if you accept that Iran was a nuclear risk, there was nothing stopping the Biden administration from simply restarting the nuclear deal that the Obama administration secured with Tehran in 2015. The JCPOA was working fine while it was in place; anyone who says otherwise is a lying warmonger. Trump and his handlers torched the JCPOA in 2018 because it was the primary obstacle preventing them from getting to war with Iran, and the Biden administration refused to reverse this move because they wanted war too.

The Democrats were beating the drums of war for Iran well ahead of the 2024 election. Here’s an excerpt from the official 2024 Democratic Party platform explicitly attacking Trump for not going to war with Iran in his first term:

“All of this stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency. In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.”

Kamala Harris, who controversially replaced the dementia-addled Biden as the Democratic candidate late in the race, labeled Iran the number one enemy of the United States. In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America’s enemies and announced that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”

I’ve seen a lot of people trying to argue that Trump’s depravity in Iran proves everyone should support Democrats, but it’s clear the Democratic Party is just the more polite-looking face [really? —Eds] on the same evil power structure.

he war with Iran was always planned. Analysts like Brian Berletic and Richard Medhurst have been laying out solid arguments that this American war is more about attacking the economic and energy interests of Russia and China in a last-ditch effort to retain planetary hegemony than it is about assisting Israel. This places the United States on a dangerous trajectory toward increasingly hostile escalations between nuclear-armed powers

This cartoon from 2024 was spot on, and Blinken-Biden were being encouraged by the Leftist New York Times to do this.