Almost 1 million families will be eligible for low- and no-interest loans under a new Government-backed scheme aimed at saving low-income families from "loan sharks".

Peter Calder writes: Waikowhai Primary School in Mt Roskill is one of 15 schools where the seven-week course called Kiwi Kids has been run over the past eight years.

Epsom election candidates faced off at a public debate last night, with one promising to name a convicted sex offender with name suppression under parliamentary privilege.

When policymakers in the modern world worry about the cost to future taxpayers of ageing populations, pensions are only part of it - healthcare also contributes to the bill.

Mountaineer Graeme Dingle's youth charity is branching out from its original outdoors focus to try to connect school-leavers with employers and jobs.

A further 3500 young people on welfare could have their spending tightly controlled by an adult supervisor if National is re-elected.

For the first time, US public schools are projected this northern autumn to have more minority students than non-Hispanic whites.

I tuned into an annoying discussion on the radio this week. It was a bunch of baby boomers claiming young people who haven't seen war have no right to complain.

Let's not get sidetracked over whether or not Housing New Zealand's dog ban failed.

Pinepine Savage holds proof in her own life that it is possible to turn around a town that everyone had written off.

An Auckland Congolese family whose children are sponsored by NZ donors have been overwhelmed by readers' generosity since their story featured in the Herald.

Even while "the monstrous anger of the guns" was hauling millions to their death, the blame game was already well under way.

Wheelchair users who can't get into a new bank branch in downtown Auckland say its inaccessible design makes New Zealand look like a "Third World" country.

If he knows what's good for him, the modern gentleman will prefer brains, not blondes, according to a study of marriage.

Picture your son or daughter watching an event at the Commonwealth Games, then turning to you and saying: "I want to do that."

When you are feeling in the depths of despair it does not help at all to be told to count your blessings, writes Deborah Hill Cone.

Kiwi donors are sponsoring three African children - in Mt Roskill. The trio came here as refugees in '08 need the sponsorship because the family can't make ends meet.

New Zealand has retained its rank as one of the world's most developed countries.

Life-long street activist Sue Bradford has turned to the academic world in a bid to overcome the "mindless activism" of much of New Zealand's protest movement.

Is poverty for life? A Treasury report suggests not, writes Brian Fallow. Only 24 per cent of those at the bottom decile in 2002 were there seven years later.

In his Dialogue piece last week Professor Warren Brookbanks questioned whether a specific new offence relating to strangulation would deter domestic violence.

The Government is falling short of key targets it set itself for reducing child abuse and rheumatic fever.

Georgia Hageman was in bed at 4.30am when her waters broke and less than four hours later the 15-year-old Aucklander was holding her baby son.

Today, Pita Sharples will carry out the first reading of the new Maori Language Bill 2014 in Parliament.

The former director of Sir Owen Glenn's family violence inquiry has produced her own solution without waiting for the inquiry to finish its work.

Children's "vulnerability" is more like a revolving door than a fixed state, a new report has found.

The curriculum in New Zealand schools is "compulsory" and nobody minds - until it is suggested that all New Zealand children should be given a grounding in te reo Maori.

He went inside the minds of our most dangerous prisoners, told us how to bring up our kids, and now Nigel Latta turns moral guardian in search of answers to society’s biggest problems.

'Let's go and have a look around," is how my Dad announces a trip to a town whose main draws are a supermarket and an obese pigeon.

The Labour leader apologised for being a man and the lid came off a sizeable can of worms, writes Patricia Greig.