Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Two decades ago Richard Stiles escaped an avalanche in New Zealand, but friend Steve Robinson wasn’t so lucky. Now the mountain has given up some of its secrets
When mountaineer Chris Hill found a backpack with an old camera in it on the Hooker Glacier – an 11km chunk of ice on New Zealand’s South Island – he was intrigued and decided to get the film inside developed.
Hooker is at the base of Aoraki (Mount Cook), in a national park of icy peaks where hundreds of climbers have died, dozens of them never to be found.
Since 1975, Māori have been able to reclaim land through a tribunal – but its reach is limited and now they are exploring other options
Two years ago, a small pocket of land three kilometres from Auckland’s international airport became the most prominent site of a struggle by Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous people, to reclaim land confiscated by the crown more than 150 years ago.
Ihumātao contains evidence of New Zealand’s first commercial gardens, where thousands of hectares were planted with kumara, a tropical sweet potato which thrived in the warm and nutritious soil. The adjacent stonefields, today a category one Unesco heritage site, are rich with ancient nurseries and storage pits. When William Hobson, then-governor of New Zealand, founded Auckland in 1840, the produce of Ihumātao sustained the growing population.
New Zealand's social development minister Carmel Sepuloni said she would ‘never buy the odd shaped carrot pack again’ after ‘almost wrestling’ with son over vegetable
Director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said virus’ reproduction rate remained under one, meaning cases would continue to drop
New cases of Covid-19 have continued to drop in New Zealand, in a promising early indication that the country’s strict lockdown is working and its latest outbreak may be coming under control.
The country announced 49 new cases on Tuesday – dropping for the second day in a row, down from 53 cases on Monday and 83 on Sunday. It is the lowest number of new cases reported in the country in six days.
Carmel Sepuloni said she would ‘never buy the odd shaped carrot pack again’ after ‘almost wrestling’ with son over vegetable
A New Zealand cabinet minister has become the latest public figure to be embarrassed by an unfortunate incident involving a video call after her live TV interview was interrupted by her son, who entered the room excitedly brandishing a phallic carrot.
Carmel Sepuloni, the minister for social development, was doing a live Zoom interview with Radio Samoa when her grinning son burst through the door behind her, holding an oddly shaped carrot he’d apparently found among the groceries.
Floods came after unexpectedly heavy rains, with as much as 90mm per hour hitting the city through the night
Aucklanders have been forced to evacuate their homes in the middle of the night due to flash flooding, after New Zealand’s largest city was hit by unexpectedly heavy rainfall.
Evacuations were carried out in the suburbs of west Auckland and nearby townships, such as Kumeu and Piha, with firefighters having to use jet skis to reach motorists trapped in their cars, according to the New Zealand Herald.
With a 50% chance of inheriting a fatal disease, is it better to know your future or live in the moment?
Lillian Hanly has a 50/50 chance of inheriting Huntington’s, a neurodegenerative disease. With a number of her family testing positive for the gene, and her mother already affected by it, she must come to a decision: Get tested now or continue to live on, in the unknown.
Fifty Percent is part of the Loading Docs 2021 collection. The films can be viewed online via www.loadingdocs.net
A coin toss could give me two completely different lives. But once I know the result there’s no going back
I’ve spent most of my life knowing I may have inherited a faulty gene that would cause Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative disease that can be fatal. My grandad had the disease, my mum has it, and I am yet to take the test to find out if I have it too. It’s a 50/50 chance of inheritance. Right now, I am happily ignorant of whether I carry the mutation or not. A coin toss could give me two completely different lives. Once I know the results, there’s no going back. So far, everyone who has been tested in my family has tested positive. It seems the odds are against me. I’m 27 years old, and I’m starting to think seriously about my future, whether that is moving overseas or contemplating having children. Whatever big decisions I am facing now, I can’t help but wonder, could this disease overshadow them? I explore this tension in a newly released short documentary, Fifty Percent.
With a nationwide lockdown and some of the world’s strictest restrictions, Jacinda Ardern is counting on her people’s goodwill again
In locked-down New Zealand, life orbits around the 1pm briefing. As the home-bound nation digests its lunch, the director general of health, Ashley Bloomfield – frequently alongside prime minister Jacinda Ardern – takes the stage behind a socially distanced podium and updates the country.
In the midst of a Covid outbreak, those briefings occur almost every weekday. They are so clockwork-regular, so predictable in their essential structure, that certain sentences became memes: “Kia ora koutou katoa. There are X cases of Covid-19 in the community,” each begins. After the last outbreak, media outlet The Spinoff spliced together Bloomfield saying it 44 times.
Public indifference to abuse of the Pasifika community is especially concerning – we all need to show compassion in this crisis
The past week in lockdown has been tumultuous for many in my community. I was on my way to pick up my daughter from school when media outlets began reporting that New Zealand was headed for a possible level 4 lockdown, suggesting the Delta variant had breached our borders and there was a probable case in the community. By the time I arrived at the school, notifications were filling my messenger feed with supermarkets packed to the brim as the rush for toilet paper began. New Zealand went into full lockdown that night in its fight against Covid-19.
Within a matter of hours, news emerged that a person from the North Shore of Auckland had tested positive followed by people who had attended a large church gathering in south Auckland. Church plays a pivotal role in the Pacific community. It serves as a hub to express our faith, language and culture, where we reconnect with friends and family. It grounds us and allows us to recharge before we head back into a society that is different to what we knew in our home islands dotted around the Pacific.
The nation’s Delta outbreak continues to grow, with Auckland likely to remain in lockdown for at least another fortnight
Jacinda Ardern says she won’t hesitate to impose tougher restrictions to contain New Zealand’s growing Covid-19 outbreak, as the country reported 83 cases on Sunday – a new daily high for this outbreak.
All but one of the new cases were found in Auckland, with the other in Wellington.
The early European explorers understood the power of naming and so do Māori today
New Zealand is, in its own imagination, a progressive utopia. The first country in the world where women won the right to vote, the first country in the world to introduce workplace arbitration, the Anglosphere’s chief critic of nuclear weapons, and the former British colony with “the fairest treaty ever made by Europeans with a native race”.
A satellite tag which unexpectedly kept working for a year has followed one whale’s 15,000km journey across three oceans
A loud bang shatters the winter calm of Port Ross, in New Zealand’s remote Auckland Islands, and the small inflatable boat is rocked by the swirl of a 40-ton whale being swallowed up by the cold, dark water.
When it resurfaces, the team of scientists are happy to see their US$3,200 satellite tag securely fixed to his side. The whale, whom they have nicknamed “Bill”, slips away into the ocean, the tag transmitting his movements. A few days later, researchers watch as he starts heading west towards Australia.
WHO to ship 100m doses of Sinovac and Sinopharm by the end of next month, while the number of coronavirus patients in US hospitals has breached the 100,000 mark again
Two government advisers have told i news that prime minister Boris Johnson has privately accepted that there could be at least 30,000 further Covid-related deaths in the UK over the next year.
Johnson would reportedly “only consider imposing further restrictions if that figure looked like it could rise above 50,000”, with the government adopting a cost-benefit analysis on whether to impose restrictions which takes into account the economic impact and controversially put the level of acceptable cost to save a life at up to £30,000.
The prime minister is minded to implement another lockdown or new restrictions only if the figure of annual deaths looks like it’s going to go above 50,000. That means deaths from Covid of 137 a day, or just under 1,000 a week.
However, it won’t be an immediate reaction. A sustained rate of death of around a 1,000 a week for two or three weeks will, though, lead to discussion on restrictions being reimposed. Unfortunately, prime ministers have to weigh up the cost of saving lives to the impact on the economy. No one wants to talk about that’s how it works.
Decisions about how much to intervene to improve public health are always difficult for governments. Measures such as vaccinating children against meningitis or imposing speed limits on roads reduce death and disease, but also cost money and limit freedoms.
Finding the balance is one of the hardest decisions for governments, but is essentially what we vote politicians to do. In normal times, it is possible to use calculations of, say, cost per life saved, to provide some framework to guide decisions. In the UK, if an intervention costs less than £30,000 per year of life saved, then it is usually accepted in terms of healthcare.
That’s it from me today. Time to hand over to my colleague, Mattha Busby.
Here’s a brief roundup of what’s been happening over the past 24 hours:
Prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced New Zealand was ending further flights into Kabul, due to the continuing threat of terrorist attacks. The announcement followed an attack at the airport on Thursday that killed least 60 Afghans and 13 US soldiers.
New Zealand will remain in a full lockdown until midnight on Tuesday, with regions south of Auckland moving to level 3 after then, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has announced.
The update came after 70 new cases of coronavirus were reported in the community, bringing the total number in New Zealand’s outbreak to 347.
An Instagram account had called on people to get involved in the Queen Street demonstration
A one-person anti-lockdown protest in central Auckland has been shut down, after the police were alerted to discussions of a potential gathering on social media.
New Zealand police said officers were on Queen Street on Friday after hearing a protest was being planned, but only one person arrived with the intention of protesting, Newshub reported.
UK ministers have been accused of doing the “bare minimum” to curb companies charging “misleading” prices for Covid travel tests and instead have been urged to name and shame the firms.
Ahead of a review of the traffic light system of quarantine rules which government sources said was unlikely to result in many major changes, Labour urged the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, to take tougher action against businesses “exploiting” the pandemic by imposing “rip-off” prices.
Newquay is reeling after health officials said that almost 5,000 cases had been linked to the music and surfing festival Boardmasters, which took place in the Cornish town earlier this month, my colleague Steven Morris reports. About three-quarters of them were aged 16-21 and about 800 live in Cornwall. Many of those who attended believe the number of infections is probably much higher.
It prompted tourism bosses to urge people not to visit the region unless they had pre-booked and to test themselves for Covid-19 before, during and after their stay.