Family News Home

A Christchurch family are devastated their 20-year-old cat was handed to the SPCA and killed before they had a chance to save it.
The Clarke family of Halswell had Krumpet for 20 years.
Last Tuesday, father Gwyn Clarke was shocked to come home from work and find a note in his letterbox saying their female ginger cat [...]

Her label, Spanx, is one of those brand names that seems to have incrementally seeped into the English language, aided partly by some impressive endorsements. Quite a number of Hollywood bums, and post-baby tummies, and cellulite thighs, have been Spanxed. The weird thing is that the celebrities don’t appear to mind talking about these control-top [...]

Rural schools are a bit like rural post offices. Everybody loves them, especially in BBC costume dramas, but few use them. Most of us now live in city, town and suburb. Even in France, where the countryside lobby is more powerful than in Britain, villages steadily lose their local services as populations dwindle and car [...]

Consider the evidence: namely, that the famous women we see in the gossip mags are gloriously, recognisably human. In chav-mag land, beauty comes and goes with smoke and mirrors - it’s all a construct and, as such, liable to fall apart at any time, which means that the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady (or Jade [...]

I wonder if Bo was on to something. I’ve spent days watching innumerable DVDs of actors in preparation for the first casting meeting of a forthcoming film. The phenomenon is hard to miss once you become aware of it; by this, I mean the near omnipresence in the film and TV world of the ‘husky [...]

Concern over possible links emerged when it was claimed that seven young people who hanged themselves could have known one another and noted each other’s death on the internet social networking site Bebo.Police have consistently said there is no evidence all seven knew each other, or that their contact in the virtual world somehow led [...]

Captain Marc Elliot was under orders not to touch his own set of controls unless I either passed out or was in danger of smashing into the earth. We’d taken off from Manhattan 10 minutes earlier, after a long evening that had spiralled way out of control. The night had started out innocently - dinner [...]

No Country For Old Men (15)
(Ethan %26 Joel Coen, 2007, US) Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem. 122 mins.The Coens return to the sober tone of Blood Simple for this brooding neo-western, and the result is their best movie in ages. It’s a familiar set up, following a bag of cash from a Tex-Mex [...]

Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) — James Uffindell, wearing a pinstriped
suit and walkie-talkie headset, races along the corridors of an
18th-century manor outside Oxford, England, as he presides over
an October weekend retreat for 175 ambitious teenagers.
[...]