Hone Harawira will front the nation today to apologise for comments he made about white people.

It will be the first time the Te Tai Tokerau MP has publicly spoken about an email, criticised as racist, that he sent to a party supporter who had asked him who paid for a trip the MP and his wife made to Paris.

No other Maori Party MPs are expected to be present at Waipapa Marae in Auckland. However, Mr Harawira may be supported by high-ranking party leaders.

Flaxroots members are frustrated with the emerging gulf between his politics and party direction.

The MP has serious issues with the party’s support for ACC legislation, and the Emissions Trading Scheme. He has also struggled with failure to get any movement on Maori seats on the Auckland Super Council and how the party fits with National.

Beethoven, Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic is one of the most perfect combinations ever to have emerged from the classical music world. When the Ninth Symphony is performed at a New Year’s Eve concert, it becomes an even more spectacular event. Karajan’s rousing interpretation of Beethoven’s most admired symphony has long acquired legendary status. Now Euroarts is releasing it in a recording made in Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on New Year’s Eve 1977 in celebration of the conductor’s 100th birthday this year.

Born in Salzburg on 5 April 1908, Herbert von Karajan was one of the most widely respected performing musicians appearing in the past century. He influenced fellow musicians and public taste for generations through his live appearances and recordings, especially in the role of Principal Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, which he led for more than 30 years, moulding the orchestra into an ensemble of peerless power, tonal beauty and stylistic flexibility.

The Ninth is an affirmation of optimism and beauty, written when Beethoven was almost completely deaf and the final movement is considered by many to be the composer’s crowning glory. It had been Beethoven’s lifelong dream to set Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to music, for the poem expressed the fulfilment of Beethoven’s most passionate desire: peace and brotherhood in the world. Giving eloquent voice to this plea are the world-renowned soloists Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Agnes Baltsa, René Kollo and José van Dam. This concert recording on DVD has all the elements that audiences came to expect from Karajan — strong, elegant conducting and a truly moving musical event.

Twenty years ago today an architectural monument to human enslavement melted before the eyes of the world: The Wall, the horrific complex of barbed wire, mine fields, police dogs, killing zones, and constant military guards was torn down by East Germans who finally saw a chance for liberty.

There was always something surreal about the Wall. Germany, after the Second World War, had been bisected into two more or less equal parts. In the east was the Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany), former German territories awarded to Poland in Pomerania, Silesia, and the southern half of East Prussia, and in the west was the Federal Republic of Germany, a free democracy cobbled together from the American, British, and French sectors of conquered Germany.

Long before the Wall was built, millions of Germans had left the eastern half of Germany for the west. The Red Army raped almost every female who came into its clutches (a long ignored atrocity, which still is as unimportant to feminists as the hellish life of women under Islam.) Entire factories were moved from Germany to Russia. Totalitarian governments were set up in Eastern Europe, and it did not matter if the peoples had been the victims of Nazism, like Poles and Czechs, or Nazis allies, like Hungary and Rumania.

MANILA, Philippines — Suspected al-Qaida-linked militants in the southern Philippines beheaded a schoolteacher after kidnapping him last month, officials said Monday.

The severed head of Gabriel Canizares, 36, was left in a bag at a gas station on Jolo Island, three weeks after suspected Abu Sayyaf militants stopped a passenger minibus and dragged him away in front of his colleagues, said regional military commander Maj. Gen. Benjamin Dolorfino.

The militants, notorious for bombings, ransom kidnappings and beheadings, were reportedly demanding a ransom of 2 million pesos ($42,000) for his release.

The Abu Sayyaf, which is suspected of receiving funds from al-Qaida, is believed to have about 400 fighters on Jolo and nearby Basilan Island. The group has been sheltering militants from the larger Southeast Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, the military says.

Labour’s “open door” immigration policy knowingly risked allowing dangerous people to settle in Britain unchecked, according to documents seen by The Sunday Times.

The Whitehall correspondence, which was illegally withheld by the Home Office for four years, shows how ministers were told by the country’s most senior immigration official that his staff were to be “encouraged to take risks” when granting visas, work permits and extended residency to hundreds of thousands of new migrants.

The cover-up of this policy of risk-taking was so concerted that Richard Thomas, the then information commissioner, sent a team of investigators into the Home Office to trawl all the relevant papers. Earlier this year he rebuked the department for breaking the law and ordered it to release the material under the freedom of information (FoI) law.

The documents help to explain the huge rise in the flow of migrants into Britain as the Home Office rushed to clear a backlog of 45,000 cases.

Officials agreed to fast-track 337,000 applications with minimal checks. This led to a rapid rise in immigration. In 1999, 170,000 visas were granted; by 2002, this had risen to 300,000.

The newest installment of the Happiness Index has arrived and residents of the Midwest will be happy to learn that their strangle-hold on the top spots remains intact. There have been some big moves however. Vermont made a big leap, and New Jersey and Lousiana took serious tumbles. There’s also been some movement at the bottom and residents of the Sunshine State may be unhappy to learn that, well, they’re the least happy state in the nation, when it comes to money matters.

Here’s how the index works:

The Happiness Index, which analyzes household income, non-mortgage debt, employment and foreclosures, is a fresh take on the old and tired Misery Index, made popular in the 1970s. The Misery Index takes into account unemployment and inflation rates and seeks to identify the most financially miserable places to live.

For the Blue Dogs, Tuesday was a fire bell in the night.

Virginia Republicans led by Robert McDonnell crushed the most conservative Democrat nominee in decades, rolling up a victory that rivaled Ronald Reagan’s rout of Walter Mondale.

New Jersey GOP nominee Chris Christie, whose campaign had been the despair of its backers, won a 5-point victory over Jon Corzine, despite huge Democratic advantages in money and voter registration, two visits by Barack Obama and the presence on the ballot of a third-party candidate who took votes away from Christie.

Maine has gone Democratic in five straight presidential elections. Yet voters overturned a gay-marriage state law, 53-47, the 31st straight victory for traditionalists. This replicates California’s rejection of gay marriage, 52-48, in a year Obama carried the state by 24 points and 3 million votes.

Democrats see green shoots in the capture of New York’s 23rd congressional district, which has been Republican since Ulysses Grant. Yet, even here, the conservative showing was impressive.

GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava is a fellow traveler of the Albany crowd of Gov. David Paterson. She is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro “card-check”—a euphemism for eliminating the secret ballot for workers deciding on whether they want a union.

Disgusted with a choice between liberals, the Conservative Party put up Douglas Hoffman. While he did not live in the district, his views did reflect the district’s views.

Hoffman was going nowhere, however, until the Tea Party and town-hall activists and Club for Growth sent contributions and troops. Hoffman got ignition when Sarah Palin joined Fred Thompson in endorsing him. He began a rapid ascent from last to first, dumping Dede into third place. When Dede fell to 20 percent, the weekend before the election, she dropped out and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, who won.

Nevertheless, Hoffman had come, in a month, from nowhere to knock a liberal Republican out of the lead and out of the race and out of the party, and closed to within two points of taking the seat.

The good news for the GOP is that, despite the unpopularity of their brand name—Republican identification is down to 20 percent—this is no longer the impediment it was in 2006 or 2008. The 40 percent who call themselves conservative will rally with energy and enthusiasm to Republicans willing to go to their capital, be it Trenton, Richmond or D.C., to battle Big Government.

OAKLAND, Calif. — A former Brazilian police officer suspected of raping six women in Oakland and Emeryville has been charged.

Authorities say 38-year-old Gleiston Porcino De Andrade assaulted the women at gunpoint between April 9 and the end of October, allegedly telling some of them he was a police officer. Authorities say five of the women, who ranged in age from 15 to 25, were prostitutes, and the sixth was a narcotics dealer.

Alameda County prosecutor Norbert Chu said De Andrade was arrested Oct. 26 when an Emeryville police officer spotted him assaulting a woman in a truck linked to the attacks.

De Andrade is facing charges including rape and forced oral copulation.