Author: Press Room

The board chair of the Suter Art Gallery in Nelson has warned of “dark clouds on the horizon” as costs continue to rise.Nelson City Council provides an inflation-linked annual grant to the Suter, but it isn’t proving enough to meet ballooning bills.“Things like insurance, electricity, our audit fees went up substantially … at $40,000, it’s a lot of money for a small organisation like ours,” Board chair Steve Green told Nelson City Council on Thursday when he presented the gallery’s half-year report.To limit the rising costs, the Suter has reduced its staffing to “skeletal” levels, and had stopped funding depreciation…

The outgoing Parole Board chair says shorter prison sentences don’t work because it exposes offenders to “a university of crime” without sufficient rehabilitation. Sir Ron Young is retiring after nearly seven years in the role. He told Q+A for people who had prison sentences shorter than two to three years, the reoffending rate is about 40%. For people who had spent more than eight years in prison, that dropped to about 10% after rehabilitation and reintegration programmes, he said. “What it suggests to me that for those under two years, whom we [the Parole Board] don’t see at all, is…

A police complaint has been filed after MP Shane Jones was verbally abused and his wife allegedly assaulted during a “confrontation” at Auckland Airport yesterday.Speaking to 1News, a spokesperson for Jones said a man not known to the pair verbally abused the New Zealand First MP and grabbed the shoulder of his wife, Dot.A complaint had been filed with police over the alleged assault, they added. The incident occurred yesterday morning.Dot Jones was “doing okay” but was fearful that similar incidents could happen to the spouses of other MPs, according to the spokesperson.Shane Jones is a Cabinet minister, holding the…

ADVERTISEMENTThe death toll from a Russian missile strike on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih has risen to 18, including nine children, according to regional officials.Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – who comes from Kryvyi Rih – says the youngest to lose their life in Friday’s attack was just three-years-old.At least 72 others were injured, with the youngest being a three-month-old baby, in what authorities say was a ballistic missile attack. About half of them remain in the hospital receiving treatment, with 17 of them still in critical condition, according to regional Governor Serhii Lysak.“There can never be forgiveness for…

One person has been critically injured after a glider crashed in Hastings this afternoon.Emergency services were alerted to the crash on Valentine Rd at around 12.15pm.”One person is believed to have critical injuries,” police said.St John said it sent one rapid response unit to the scene.The Civil Aviation Authority had been notified of the incident involving a glider, it said in a statement.”We are working alongside emergency services and have investigators travelling to the scene. In the coming days our focus will be on understanding what happened and why.”

Labour’s foreign affairs spokesperson David Parker has taken aim at social media companies, saying what they allow on their platforms is “ruining civilisation” and “ruining our democracies.”The comments were made in an interview on Q+A about the current waves of global instability rocking the globe. Parker admitted those were strong words, “but I believe it to be true.”“Youth suicide, mental health problems with young people, people getting ripped off all of their savings from scams, and those companies are doing nothing to prevent it – in fact they’re selling services to the people doing it,” he said. The opposition spokesperson…

United States customs agents have started collecting President Donald Trump’s unilateral 10% tariff on all imports from many countries, with higher levies on goods from 57 larger trading partners to start next week. The initial 10% “baseline” tariff paid by US importers took effect at US seaports, airports and customs warehouses at 12.01am on Saturday (US Eastern Time), ushering in Trump’s full rejection of the post-World War 2 system of mutually agreed tariff rates. “This is the single biggest trade action of our lifetime,” said Kelly Ann Shaw, a trade lawyer at Hogan Lovells and former White House trade adviser during Trump’s…

Car crashes and Covid marked the end of an era and the start of another for the owners of an Invercargill supermarket. After more than 55 years under the ownership of the Bakker family, new owners took over Plaza SuperValue on Monday. Jigs and Shelly Buha came from Bulls, where they owned a supermarket for eight years and learned the importance of running a community business. But three weeks before takeover, the couple spent their first two weeks in Southland Hospital after a car accident in Bluff. ‘‘It’s always good to explore around before you start a new journey. ‘‘But…

Auckland councillors are not comfortable the congestion charging scheme for motorists laid out in a bill will be good for the region.The council’s transport committee has agreed to make a submission pushing for changes, to a parliamentary select committee.”The bill itself will create risks for Auckland and the council if implemented in its current form,” council officers told the transport committee.Its chairperson Andy Baker said the bill needed to change to give Auckland more say.”There’s very little ability for us … to be able to have sufficient input into what scheme, that it’s really Wellington telling Auckland what is good…

ADVERTISEMENTIn the midst of its coalition negotiations, the CDU/CSU has lost six percentage points. The head of the Institute for New Social Answers (INSA) Hermann Binkert calls this a “loss of support that has never been seen before in the period between the Bundestag elections and the formation of a government”.According to the Sunday poll conducted by the Insa opinion research institute for the Bild newspaper, 24 per cent of voters surveyed would vote for the CDU/CSU and 24 per cent for the AfD. For the AfD, this represents an increase of one percentage point compared to the last poll,…