Dave

New baby formula standards were designed to prioritise infant nutrition and take the pressure off parents. But for formula companies, profits were at stake. And that's when the lobbying kicked in.

Concerns about misleading marketing claims on the tins was one of the reasons public health experts from New Zealand and Australia spent the past decade writing a set of regulations that would prioritise infant nutrition above all other interests.

Over 11 years, officials commissioned 36 public reports, five consumer studies and 40 stakeholder workshops, and wrote draft after draft. The regulations were all but signed and due to be implemented this year.

But in August, the government opted out of the trans-Tasman proposal last-minute, citing costs to exporters. While Australia will implement the new standards in 2030, New Zealand now intends to develop its own.

This RNZ investigation uses background interviews with industry insiders, officials and experts as well as documents obtained under the Official Information Act to show how the formula industry lobbied the government to put private profit before public health, and won.

King was born Deaf and uses New Zealand Sign Language full-time, leading the primary school class using every tool in his kit that is not the spoken word.

“I can read your lips and when the children are talking to me I can read their lips, but I don’t speak myself, I don’t use my voice,” King explains through an interpreter.

To begin, King led the class from the front while an interpreter would stand at the back of the room speaking the words (the interpreter would also be around for staff meetings, parent/teacher interviews and seminars).

Gradually, King would ask the interpreter to “turn their voice off” in class – and over time, with plenty of preparation, planning and perseverance, their time in the classroom was wound back, until they did not need to be there at all.

“When I sign it has to go to the interpreter who then talks and it's quite a bit of time, whereas if we can sign together I can talk to you directly and so we can have that interaction and that builds a better relationship instead of having to go through another person,” King said.

“So last year … when the interpreter left, all of them [the students] were so happy to have the interpreters gone … and I actually took a picture and I will never forget that moment.

“I was so shocked … they were just … invested in having me as a teacher.”

Lemmy.nz is submitting Mau Moko by Alien Weaponry.

We voted in this post.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bean

Last weeks thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

Beneficiaries sanctioned with money management cards will often be unable to pay rent, government data shows, putting them at risk of homelessness.

The sanction for non-complying Jobseekers would lock half their benefit into payment cards that cannot be spent on rent - but official statistics from MSD show the average beneficiary is already spending more than 53 percent of their income on housing costs.

MSD confirmed to RNZ the cards - being introduced from 26 May - would see beneficiaries' Jobseeker payments split, with half going onto a payment card unable to be used on rent.

"The Money Management card will be able to be used at grocery, transport, healthcare (including prescriptions) and education suppliers ... [it] cannot be used on other expenses such as rent or utilities," general manager income Shannon Soughtton said.

International media and scientific organisations are lapping up footage of a real life 'Sharktopus' filmed in the Hauraki Gulf.

Marine biologist Professor Rochelle Constantine said the encounter in December 2023 was a tale to top them all.

I submitted a post here asking for ideas for a song to submit to Lemmyvision 2025.

This is the post where we vote on which song to submit!

There's more info on Lemmyvision here.

Here is the list of songs nominated:

• Mau Moko - by Alien Weaponry
• Toito Te Tiriti - by Grove Roots
• Totara - by Aro
• Bush Bash - by Revulva
• Natives of Aotearoa - by Shane Walker

Please head to the following link to vote: https://survey.lemmy.nz/index.php/757833?lang=en

A Dunedin local who has been giving free skateboarding lessons to the city's new migrants is hoping to encourage even more people into the sport by opening up to the wider community.

"We started teaching new migrants - a friend of ours who is part of our group now had a contact in the Red Cross and said it would be great to see if any of them were interested in learning how to skate. And sure enough, a couple came along for a lesson, and then next week more came along, and it started growing that way."

He said they had given lessons to dozens of people, with the Saturday morning lessons selling out for every session so far.

Apologies for the bit of downtime. I've just updated Lemmy.nz to 0.19.10 as well as aligning our nginx config with the latest config from the Lemmy repository. We had been running an original one from when the instance started, with some custom changes. Now we should benefit from changes over the last couple of years.

Details of the latest release are here: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-03-19_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.10_and_Developer_AMA

Some highlights:

• Youtube thumbnails should be fixed
• DMs are now removed when banning user with content removal (i.e. deletes scammer "Nicole the Fediverse chick" DMs)
• Resolving some language setting issues

I was hoping to solve a video streaming issue but the update to the nginx config doesn't seem to have helped so I need to play with it some more. So there may be more brief outages tonight but I will try things in my test instance first.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions for cabbage recipes from the other week. Some great stuff, but now I'm sick of cabbage.

Does anyone have some great recipes that taste good and are loaded with vegetables?

Preferably ones where cabbage isn't the main ingredient.