World News

Photo: RMS Advisory / Supplied Tasmania's largest farm is back on the market and it's expected to fetch offers of more than A$100 million ($NZ110m). Rushy Lagoon is a sprawling 22,000-hectare property on the state's north-eastern tip. The late Allan Pye purchased the farm in 1996, snapping it up for $8 million at auction. Pye was one of New Zealand's richest farmers, making his fortune in potatoes. He passed away earlier this year and the sale is part of his estate. Peter Ryan from RMS Advisory is one of the agents handling the listing and said inquiries for the farm had been rolling in. "Rushy Lagoon is an iconic property, not just in Tasmanian terms, but in Australian terms," he said. "Just about everybody who is anybody in agriculture has heard about the fabled Rushy Lagoon. "We had a...

File picture. Photo: AFP Australian Dr Saul Newman from Oxford Institute of Population Ageing has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for his work debunking the idea that people in Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia in Italy and Greece live longer lives than average. These long-lived people we've been taking "lifestyle tips from" are "mostly corpses," Newman told RNZ's Afternoons. "I found out that at least 72 percent of the people in Greece over the age of 100, thousands of people, they're all dead. "These numbers come from the people handing out the pensions, and they've been handing out the pensions for 100-year-olds despite the fact that these people are dead. "It's extraordinary to have a ton of science based off this, because, like, what are you going to conclude? Essentially it's nonsense." Ok...

Russian President Vladimir Putin won a record post-Soviet landslide in a March election. (File photo) Photo: ALEXANDER KAZAKOV / AFP "God save the Tsar!" has been one of the first public birthday wishes for President Vladimir Putin. Putin, who turned 72 on Monday, has been Russia's paramount leader for nearly quarter of a century. The greeting came from ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin on his Telegram messaging channel minutes after midnight. Dugin, 62, has long advocated the unification of Russian-speaking and other territories in a vast new Russian empire, which he wants to include Ukraine, where Russia has been waging a war. Dugin's daughter was killed in a suspected car bomb in 2022. Putin, who ordered his troops to invade Ukraine in 2022, won a record post-Soviet...

By Nandita Bose Kamala Harris says the Arkansas governor's views on family are outdated. Photo: AFP / SAUL LOEB US Vice President Kamala Harris has rejected Republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders' suggestion that the Democratic presidential candidate is not humble because she does not have biological children. Harris said the Arkansas governor's views on family were outdated and discussed her own "modern family," which includes her husband, Doug Emhoff, and his two children from his first marriage, Cole and Ella. During a town hall meeting Sanders moderated for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Michigan in September, she said her kids keep her "humble," while Harris "doesn't have anything keeping her humble." Harris responded to Sanders' comments on the popular Call Her D...

The HMNZS Manawanui, aground in Samoa. Photo: Profile Boats / supplied Residents on the south coast of Upolu in Samoa fear potential oil or chemical spillage from HMNZS Manawanui could be disastarous for the local environment and businesses. Local authorities are conducting environmental assessments after the $100 million specialist survey ship hit a reef on Saturday night and sank Sunday morning. Manager at Coconuts Beach Club at Maninoa, Brian Rose, says they are concerned about the potential impacts of the disaster on their lagoon, which has a sizeable turtle population - a major tourist attraction. "So far it looks like the impact directly on our shores has been minimal, but we know that with tides and currents things change and so we're going to keep an eye out to make sure if ther...

By Daniel Trotta and Bo Erickson, Reuters Pinellas County residents fill sandbags at John Chestnut Park in Palm Harbor, Florida. Photo: AFP / Bryan R. Smith Florida is preparing for the state's largest evacuation since 2017 as Tropical Storm Milton intensified in the Gulf of Mexico on its path toward Florida's western coast, coming on the heels of the devastating Hurricane Helene. Milton was expected to reach hurricane strength by the time of its projected landfall on Wednesday morning (local time), most likely hitting near the heavily populated Tampa Bay area, the US National Hurricane Center said. It had the potential to affect areas already wrecked by Helene, which made landfall further north on 26 September. Tropical storm-force winds could hit Florida's Gulf Coast by Tuesday nig...

A woman reacts while visiting a memorial for the victims killed at or kidnapped from the Supernova music festival during the October 7 attacks by Palestinian militants, at the festival site near Kibbutz Reim in southern Israel, on the eve of the attacks' first anniversary on 6 October, 2024. Photo: MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP By Rami Amichay and Ari Rabinovitch, Reuters One commemoration of the 7 October assault on southern Israel will be a live, public ceremony to be held at a large venue in Tel Aviv. The other will be a pre-recorded televised tribute that leaves little to chance. The first is organised by bereaved families who lost loved ones. It plans to dive deep into the failures as well as the heroism on display that day. The other is set up by the government, which says its recorded cer...

A plume of smoke rises in the sky of Gaza City during an Israeli airstrike on 9 October 2023. Photo: AFP Today marks one year since Hamas militants crossed into Israel and launched a large-scale terror attack, killing more than 1000 people and kidnapping more than 200 others. Days later, Israel announced it was at war, and began a brutal, long-term retaliation on the militant group in Gaza. Tens of thousands of people have died in Israeli strikes in Gaza in the past year. More than 1000 people have also died in Lebanon in recent weeks, as Israel pivots its attacks towards Hamas ally Hezbollah. Some of the Israeli hostages taken in the initial Hamas attack are still believed to be held in Gaza. Millions of people have been displaced and face severe shortages of water, food, medical care ...

Palestinians help a man injured in an Israeli strike that targeted a mosque-turned-shelter in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, during the night of 6 October 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. Photo: BASHAR TALEB / AFP At least 24 people were killed and 93 others wounded when Israeli airstrikes targeted a mosque and a school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip early on Sunday morning local time, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said. The strikes on the mosque and the school, near the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, came as the war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas in the enclave approaches its first anniversary. In its own statement, the Israeli military said it conducted...

Dionne Warwick is coming to New Zealand in January 2025. Photo: Supplied / Frontier Touring At the end of the 1980s and in the latter years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, then-US President Ronald Reagan still struggled to say the word AIDS, let alone acknowledge the seriousness of the disease. But then he had a curveball question at an event. It didn't come from a reporter - it came from American singer and actress Dionne Warwick, one of the first in the music industry to advocate for those with HIV AIDS. Warwick's question at an event - "And what am I working on, President Reagan, that makes you so proud of me?"- cornered Reagan into one of his first public utterances of the term "AIDS". "If his eyes could kill me I wouldn't be talking to you today, " Warwick told RNZ's Jim Mora on Sunday M...