Air New Zealand has cancelled some of its international flights due to ongoing issues with its Rolls-Royce engines; and a second family has filed court papers challenging the rules around caring for severely disabled children.
1.Hawke’s Bay police are investigating a number of gang related incidents in Napier yesterday and are calling for witnesses to come forward. A scene examination is underway in the central city, where a shot was fired last night at City Medical on Wellesley Street.
2.A second family has filed court papers challenging the rules around caring for severely disabled children. RNZ last month reported the case of a disability advocate who has the Employment Court to decide whether people with intellectual disabilities have the mental capacity to be employers.
3.Air New Zealand has cancelled some of its international flights due to ongoing issues with its Rolls-Royce engines. The national carrier says maintenance requirements has forced it to cancel some 82 flights, affecting 14,000 customers travelling between 10 December and 5 January.
4.Tens of thousands of McDonald’s workers are set to be reimbursed due to a major holiday pay botch up that short changed workers in many industries throughout the country. The fast food giant was one of hundreds of companies caught up by payroll systems, incorrectly calculating holiday pay.
5.More than 50 final year medical students of the University of Otago will be prevented from graduating because of an overseas placement rort. The University began looking into its medical students after discovering at least 15 had used their overseas placements to go on holiday and then lied about it.
6.The child of the former Dunedin doctor accused of the murder of 16-year-old Amber-Rose Rush has been told he hugged her mother and accused the woman’s partner of the killing. Venod Skantha denies killing Rush in February last year. Detective Constable Amy Stewart has told the High Court in Dunedin this morning that she was present at a meeting two days after Rush’s death.
7.Firefighters are still checking for hot spots in an Auckland storage complex that went up in flames early this morning. Crews were called to the East Tamaki building early and managed to contain the fire to one block containing about 20 units.
8.A Hong Kong police officer has been struck in the leg with an arrow as clashes continue between anti-government protesters and security forces. Protesters have been throwing bricks and slinging petrol bombs at police on the Polytech University campus in some of the fiercest battles in nearly six-months of demonstrations.
9.Prince Andrew’s personal adviser has reportedly resigned after the Prince’s decision to speak to the BBC about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
10.Police investigating a woman’s death in Invercargill have found items of interest in a Southland Park. A woman’s body was found at at North Road motel in the Invercargill suburb of Waikiwi on Sunday morning.
11.Women on the boards of the top 100 NZX companies has passed a quarter for the first time, a survey out this morning shows.It showed women now hold 25.9 percent of the board roles, compared with 24.1 last year and 22.1 in 2017.
12.A landlord who prefers to keep a property empty says rather than rent it out says it is not worth his while having to deal with tenants. The man who does not want to be named said that after renting a property out for 14 years he became disillusioned with being a landlord.
13.Anselm Williams, the lawyer for a self professed white supremacist Philip Arps who was convicted of sharing the Christchurch mosque shooting video says his client should not be behind bars. Arps was jailed for 21 months in June for distributing the video and is appealing against his sentence for a second time. .
14.the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall have completed their first two official engagements on their tour of New Zealand. The tour started with a wreath laying ceremony at the Mt Roskill war memorial.
15.Actress and writer Nancy Brunning, who played roles ranging from Nurse Jaki in Shortland Street to matriarch Ramona Mahana in the film Mahana, has died at the age of 48.Her death on Saturday came the day before she was named as this year’s winner of the Bruce Mason Award for playwriting, by Playmarket.
