News brief

New Zealand legislators suspended lawmakers who performed a Māori haka. The lawmakers from Te Pāti Māori, the Māori Party, performed the haka, a chanting dance of challenge, in November to oppose a widely unpopular bill, now defeated, that they said would reverse Indigenous rights. One lawmaker received a seven-day ban and the leaders of the Māori Party were barred for 21 days. Three days had been the longest ban for a lawmaker from New Zealand’s Parliament before. The protest provoked months of fraught debate among lawmakers about the place of Māori culture in Parliament.