The Health Minister David Clark is under fire over his delay in appointing a new chair to Hawke’s Bay District Health Board; and the Prime Minister says the official opening of the Suicide Prevention Office is a bittersweet but important moment.
1.There has been a massive power cut today in the Northland region. Power is gradually being restored to 80,000 homes, north of Bream Bay including in Dargaville and Whangarei after a fault happened shortly after 9:30am.
2.Red Cross is warning the measles epidemic in Samoa could get worse and it is encouraging people to be vigilant. The death toll stands at 32 with more than 2,400 cases reported. Most of the victims are children under the age of four.
3.An adviser to the foundation Raf Manji distributing funds to victims of the Christchurch mosque shootings says there are lessons to be learnt from the way the response was handled. The Christchurch Foundation having consulted with the grieving and the injured is about to distribute $9 million donated for the victims.
4.A High Court judge is continuing to sum up the trial of the Dunedin doctor accused of murder. Venod Skantha denies killing 16-year-old Amber-Rose Rush in February last year. The jury of 10 men and two women at the High Court in Dunedin will soon retire to deliberate their verdicts.
5.The Health Minister David Clark is under fire over his delay in appointing a new chair to Hawke’s Bay District Health Board. The DHB holds its first meeting today, nearly seven-weeks since the local elections without a new chair or Government appointees.
6.The Reserve Bank has dashed hopes that it would ease mortgage lending restrictions and instead highlighted risks to the financial system from overseas and low interest rates. The central bank’s latest financial stability report, which looks at the health of the financial system, said risks to the system remained elevated and more needed to be done to strengthen it.
7.The former chief executive of the Hepatitis Foundation John Hornell says his concerns about extravagant spending by board chair Chris Cunningham were brushed aside. A two-year investigation into the charity has revealed the foundation splashed out on lavish dinners, flights and hotels and could not account for thousands of dollars of credit card expenses.
8.An Auckland lawyer swept up in April’s Comanchero gang raids has lost name suppression. Andrew Simpson has admitted money laundering for the motorcycle gang.
9.It could soon get much more expensive to dump rubbish at the tip. The Government has today proposed increasing the landfill levy from the current $10 per tonne to as much as $60 by 2023. The Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage says that adds up to about 30 cents per rubbish bag, she says all the revenue raised will be used to minimize waste.
10. The Prime Minister says the official opening of the Suicide Prevention Office is a bittersweet but important moment. Jacinda Ardern and the Health Minister David Clark opened the new office this morning.
11.Three men falsely convicted of murder in the US state of Maryland have been set free after 36 years in prison.Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins had been sentenced to life in 1984 for killing a 14-year-old boy a year earlier.
12.A Papua New Guinea airline says one of its planes was briefly hijacked on Tuesday.Tropicair said the aircraft was refuelling in West New Britain, when eight armed men forced the pilot to fly them to an unused airstrip.
13. A controversial rodeo has been cancelled this summer due to a lack of funds to run it. The Mid Northern Rodeo held in Maungatapere is off for 2020, but organisers plan to bring it back in 2021.
14.The Netherlands’ leading supermarket chain has abandoned a request for staff to upload semi-naked photographs of themselves to an app so it could work out sizes for a new uniform.Albert Heijn had called on staff at a branch in the eastern city of Nijmegen to upload photos of themselves in their underwear or tight-fitting sports gear.
