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RNZ News
10-07-2025
- RNZ News
Body found in search for missing diver in Auckland
Whatipū Beach. Photo: Fairfax Media A body has been found in the search for a diver who was reported missing at a remote West Auckland beach. Police were first called to Whatipū Beach about 5.20am on Thursday. Search crews have now located a body near Paratutae Island, just off the beach. There hasn't been a formal identification yet but police believe it is the missing diver. Their family has been advised and is being given support. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
New York Post
27-06-2025
- Business
- New York Post
Former hippy commune that inspired Steve Jobs to name Apple is on sale for $5 million
This for-sale farm was the apple of Steve Jobs' eye. The 388-acre property recently listed for $5 million and boasts an apple orchard that inspired a young Jobs. The folkloric listing in McMinnville, Oregon, spans five parcels of land, encompassing a main house, outbuildings and farmland. A countercultural community called the property home in the 1970s, and Jobs' association with the group proved highly formative for the recent college dropout, The Oregonian reported. The commune, called All One Farm, was managed by future mining billionaire Robert Friedland. 12 Steve Jobs, pictured in 1980. Tony Korody 12 The Canadian mining financier Robert Friedland once led a countercultural commune at the for-sale farm. Fairfax Media via Getty Images 12 An aerial view of the main house, the large barn and various outbuildings. Vick Staudt 12 Jobs received inspiration from a stroll in the apple orchard, which the property's current owner has begun to revive. Drew Staudt Jobs would go on to credit his experiences within the community as teaching him about charismatic leadership, psychedelics and Zen Buddhism. Most importantly, the farm inspired his company's name. The late tech founder told his biographer Walter Isaacson that a stroll in the farm's large apple orchard inspired the name. 'I was on one of my fruitarian diets. I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating,' Jobs told Isaacson. 'Apple took the edge off the word 'computer.' Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.' 12 A gathering at All One Farm, posted by 12 Robert Friedland, pictured in an archival photo by managed the commune. 12 A photo of farm members posted by identified as 'Bob, Elizabeth, Steven, Greg, Uma, Abha.' Jobs' high school girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, also lived on the farm and in 1978 gave birth there to Jobs' first daughter, Lisa Nicole Brennan-Jobs. The $5 million property offers buyers a 5,200-square-foot main house with large decks, a three-bedroom guesthouse and several outbuildings. The seller is Damon Gustafson, a real estate developer and investor. Gustafson remodeled the main house and the property's outbuildings, as well as restored the apple orchard. The rehab took several years, according to listing agent Drew Staudt at Windermere Realty Group. The land was in 'complete and utter disrepair' when Gustafson purchased it, Staudt told The Post. Gustafson's projects included rehabbing and repainting a small red barn where, according to Staudt, historical accounts place Jobs as having slept and hung out during his days on the farm. 12 The recently renovated main house. Drew Staudt 12 The main house's sprawling patio. Drew Staudt 12 The home boasts craftsmen finishings. Drew Staudt 12 An Apple logo on an outbuilding nods to Steve Jobs' time spent there as a young man. Drew Staudt 12 The interior of the outbuilding where Jobs reportedly slept and produced work for Atari. Drew Staudt A larger barn — where All One Farm devotees once meditated and a 'om' symbol remains chalked into the beams — now hosts a ballroom dance floor and amenities for catering parties. Staudt said the future of the farm is up to the next owner, with options ranging from reinvigorating the apple orchard to hosting corporate retreats. How do you like them apples?
RNZ News
14-06-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
More managed decline? Or settling on a sustainable structure?
Greg Hywood, chief executive of Fairfax Media and some of the company's top newspapers. CeBIT Australia (CC BY-SA 4.0) CeBIT Australia Photo: CeBIT Australia When Stuff announced it was merging its digital wing with Trade Me last week, things had gone full circle. New Zealand's biggest publisher of news had bought the online marketplace itself in 2006 for more than $700m. Back then it was called Fairfax Media NZ, a subsidiary of the giant Australian news publisher which parted with $1.2 billion to buy the The Press, Dominion Post and Sunday Star Times and others. By 2012, TradeMe was sold off in bits to ease debts and falling revenue. And six years later, Greg Hywood negotiated a merger of Fairfax Media and TV broadcaster Nine Network. It created an Australasian news titan but extinguished the Fairfax name. The email Fairfax staff received as the merger news broke. Photo: screenshot "The best outcome for our journalism, for our employees, our business and of course our shareholders," Greg Hywood said at the time. But the New Zealand publishing - now branded as Stuff - wasn't on the radar at the time. The 95-page merger document only mentioned Fairfax's New Zealand holdings once. And there was no sign of Stuff on a chart showing the logos of the new big beast called Nine Entertainment. Less than two years later, Nine Entertainment sold its apparently unwanted New Zealand branch for just $1 to its chief editor Sinead Boucher. Five years after that, sole owner Boucher is now selling half of Stuff's digital business back to Trade Me. In the same week her former boss in Australia, Greg Hywood, stepped down from his role as chairman of Free TV, the umbrella group for Free to Air TV broadcasting in Australia. Sydney-based Hywood became the ultimate boss of Stuff and its papers here when he rejoined Fairfax Media as CEO in 2010. "Editorially and in the day to day business sense, the organisation did what it needed to do - and frankly it was doing really quite well," Hywood told Mediawatch. "The New Zealand assets were important assets and we kept a close eye on them. They were managed very well. "I was surprised that it was given back for a dollar because I always thought. . the New Zealand business was probably in better shape than the regional business here, which was sold for A$120m by Nine. "Good luck to Sinead and the team with what they've subsequently done." But if Hywood and Boucher had had their way in 2016, the deal could never have happened. Both backed Fairfax Media NZ merging with its big New Zealand rival APN, the publishers of the New Zealand Herald (these days called NZME). They said it was essential for their survival. The plan was knocked back by the Commerce Commission who reckoned it would be too much of a monopoly here. And it would have created one single publisher of news instead of the two we have now - Stuff and NZME - with district editorial approaches offering readers choice. "In retrospect I'm still supportive of it. Ninety percent of the growth in advertising in both New Zealand and Australia goes to Google and Facebook - and traditional media are fighting over the other 10 percent," Hywood said. Fairfax and APN / NZME pursued the process in court for three fruitless years. "You really needed scale to be able to compete and it was a question about diversity or scale. While they have both survived, would they have been able to invest in journalism in the merged entities (more) than what's currently the case? Hywood said. "I can't answer that, but it was a very legitimate exercise to deal with the structural change going on in the industry and making sure that the journalism would survive." "By the time I got back to Fairfax in 2010 as CEO, the consequence of investing so heavily in newspapers had put the company in the position where we had to sell TradeMe to reduce the level of debt. The print revenue was dropping at 10 percent a year, which was $100 million a year," Hywood said. Former All Black captain Divid Kirk was the CEO who bought Trade Me for Fairfax in 2006. "That was a very good decision by David - to digitise the revenue streams of the business," Hywood said. Ads for jobs, homes and cars were the so-called 'rivers of gold' - practically a licence for newspapers to print money - as well as news - in the days before the Internet. Hywood said back in the 1970s Fairfax had its own garage and a staff of mechanics just to service the executives' cars. "Things were great, and were certainly fun... if you were fortunate enough to be a journalist in those days. But there's no point being what I might call an Anzac of the 70s." "As the years went by and we hit the Internet period, the role of the journalist was less certain. But the fundamental role of a journalist has always been the same - having a good crack at making sure you get to the kernel of the truth." Many still know Hywood in Australia as 'the man who swung the axe.' Nineteen hundred people got made redundant at Fairfax in basically a single day in 2012. "That is what we had to do. You don't feel great making decisions like that, but it's a bit like a surgeon with a dying patient on the operating table." "The direction the company meant the banks would have been knocking on the door and sold it off and broken it up. It was not going to survive in that form. You've got to do some radical things to save the patient's life." The closure of printing plants followed - and outsourcing of production to New Zealand. That prompted strikes and newspaper workers there holding signs like 'Not happy Bro' 'BAAAA-d move' against a backdrop of sheep. "We offshored the sub-editing process and focused on the local reporting because we had to have the journalism. That was our responsibility." The New Zealand Herald reports the news that its rival has gone into business with Trade Me. Photo: New Zealand Herald Fairfax in Australia established the property news and information platform Domain, recently the subject of a bid of NZ$3b from a US real estate firm. But the market leader across the ditch - - is currently valued around $30b. Is Stuff's partnership with TradeMe a smart move to secure its news and journalism? "I'm not close enough to the Stuff and TradeMe merger... but from a distance it looks like a pretty good idea. Well done to Sinead and the team," Hywood said. "The whole point of the Fairfax and Nine merger was really to get a media company of scale with a property marketing platform to enable it to compete. Domain is a distant number two, but... with the correct investment and the decisions, the ability to take on was always there. That hasn't occurred but the property marketing market is extremely lucrative." Companies like Fairfax Media and Stuff have been in the business of managing decline for the last 20 years. Have they now found a sustainable but smaller-scale model based on lucrative digital property platforms? "I don't think it will ever calm down. It's a bit like a raging river where you've got to hop from island to island. You can't just rely on content and advertising," Hywood said. "Also, government has always been slow to adapt to what's going on. And it's got to really deeply think about what the right regulatory environment is... to get New Zealand stories in New Zealand, Australian stories in Australia and the news and information that is required." "The private sector's got to get on its bike and build the businesses. And the government has to provide a fair, and sustainable regulatory environment so that everyone can get on with it." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
9 News
10-06-2025
- 9 News
Police shoot woman they say was armed with knife in Townsville
Queensland police officers have shot a female in the abdomen in Townsville. Authorities were called to a West End hotel on Ingham Road just before 5.30pm, after reports a woman armed with a knife was making threats. Police said she came at officers, which is when she was shot. READ MORE: Eight people and suspected gunman reported dead in Austrian school shooting Queensland Police officers have shot a female in the abdomen in Townsville this evening. (Glenn Hunt/Fairfax Media) Officers provided first aid and the woman was taken to hospital for treatment. Police have cordoned off the crime scene as investigations into the incident continue.
New Statesman
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Sharing a bed with Edmund White
Photo by Peter Kevin Solness / Fairfax Media via Getty Images For a time, Edmund White and I slept in a bed reputed to have belonged to Walt Whitman. We were both living in New York and teaching at Princeton. When we had to stay the night, we were hosted by a friend who lived on the edge of the campus. In his guest room was a dark wood bed purchased in the 1950s from an antique dealer who produced the story of its connection to the 19th-century American poet. Whatever the truth, on our separate nights, Edmund and I both slept in 'Whitman's bed', smoothing the unchanged sheets in the mornings to maintain the fiction that it had not been slept in by anyone else. Eventually, Edmund wrote a poem about it, describing himself, an aged gay novelist, chastely reading Chekhov's stories, and a British PhD student who was the object of his erotic fantasy, both sharing the great gay poet's bed. 'My first poem since 1985', he told me untruthfully in an email. Edmund, who died this week at the age of 85, was perhaps America's greatest living gay writer. The author of more than 30 books, including novels, memoirs, and biographies of Proust, Genet, and Rimbaud, he occupied a unique position in American literature. I first met Edmund in Princeton, where he was a professor of creative writing until 2018, at a weekly dinner that he hosted with the owner of 'Whitman's bed' – the philosopher George Pitcher. The evening before Edmund taught his class, he and his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, would travel down to Princeton, stay with George, and take a group of PhD students out to dinner at a local restaurant. The dinners were a finely honed ritual: George, then in his early nineties, would use a flashlight on his key ring to inspect the menu. Someone would order a bottle of white wine. And the PhD students would attempt to keep up with Edmund and Michael's wit. Edmund was a conversationalist of the kind I associate with 18th-century philosophers: intellectually curious but also a master of levity, ranging from minor French literature to celebrity gossip. He once recalled a dinner with Michel Foucault to which he had also invited Susan Sontag. When she went to the bathroom, Foucault hissed at Edmund: 'Why did you invite her? She only ever talks about work!' Edmund's life informed his literature in a special way. In The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (2025), his last published work, he writes: 'I'm at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them – for me it would be thousands of sex partners.' This is another connection with his 19th-century predecessor, as his Princeton colleague Jeff Nunokawa points out: 'Ed believes with a Whitmanesque unabashedness that sex is an instrument of knowledge.' His promiscuity gives his work an epic quality. His oeuvreis, in one sense, a story of America in the second half of the 20th century: its husbands and hustlers observed in their most intimate moments. In The Loves of My Life, he writes: 'I remember a big Southerner who fucked me as I wiggled my butt to show passion, though he kept saying in his baritone drawl, 'Just lay still, little honey.' More wiggling and he'd say, 'C'mon, baby, just lay still for me.' I thought his bad grammar proved he was a lifelong top. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe There is also an unignorable darkness in Edmund's account of desire. As a child, he was sent to a Freudian therapist who pronounced his sexuality pathological. His most well-known book A Boy's Own Story (1982) features a boy who seduces his teacher, only to betray him. To readers who complained that this was unbelievable, Edmund wrote: 'how could the product of an oppressive culture not be deformed?' In time, he outgrew the belief that his desires were curable. He witnessed the Stonewall riots, in the summer of 1969, after a police raid on a popular gay bar. Recalling the laughter, Edmund called it 'the first funny revolution', but emphasised its importance: 'Stonewall inaugurated an epoch when partners of the same sex could claim, maybe for the first time in history, their common humanity.' Like Whitman and the American Civil War, this revolution required its writers, and Edmund would be one of them. After becoming HIV positive in 1984, Edmund was found to be a 'long-term non-progressor', a condition affecting 1 in 500 people infected with HIV. It meant that he would not die from AIDS. Instead, he watched his friends and acquaintances die, and his own writing became a record of the disease and the political intolerance that met it. In Artforum in 1987, he wrote: 'I feel repatriated to my lonely adolescence, the time when I was alone with my writing and I felt weird about being a queer.' Unlike so many gay writers of his generation, Edmund lived long enough to see himself be celebrated as a legend. He spent his summers in Europe and winters in Florida. He was made the director of creative writing at Princeton, until, according to his friend and colleague Joyce Carol Oates, he realised that he would not be able to spend the first week of every January in Key West. At this point, he 'graciously resigned'. Success, inevitably, brought criticism. A review of The Loves of My Life by James Cahill in The Spectator called it 'lurid.' Edmund had cleverly anticipated this, noting in the book's introduction that 'sex writing can seem foolish, especially to the English.' It is his openness to and about sex that will grant Edmund's work its enduring significance, and which makes it feel vital for an era threatened both by a new puritanism and an even more repressive 'anti-wokeness'. His funny, detailed, historiographical writing makes sex appear motivated more by curiosity than appetite. 'I always feel as if I don't really know people unless I've gone to bed with him,' he claimed. I loved visiting Edmund and Michael's apartment in the West Village, the walls stacked to the roof with books. The dinner conversations were full of warmth and wit and smut. I simply expected to see him again. His long life and many books are something to be grateful for and amazed by. My friend Amelia Worsley, who visited him at home a few days before his sudden death, writes: 'I was amazed when Stan, one of Edmund's first loves, stopped by the apartment. We talked about the glamour of New York in the 1960s and the AIDS crisis that followed. 'It's a wonder that I am still alive,' Stan said to Edmund, 'And a wonder you are too.'' [See also: Alan Hollinghurst's English underground] Related
