Category: Public Media

Source: Radio New Zealand

A homicide investigation is underway after the death of a woman in Canterbury.

Detective Senior Sergeant Karen Simmons said the woman was found dead at a property in Burnham in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

“Emergency services were called to a Burnham School Road address about 3.05am after a report of disorder.

“After arriving at the property, police located the body of a woman.”

Simmons said one person has been arrested and is helping police with its inquiries.

“Cordons are in place and a scene examination has commenced at the property.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

The slash debate heats up – again – in Gisborne as forestry operators urge the government to remove their legal accountability for the devastating discharge.

When the rain stops in Tairāwhiti, the damage doesn’t.

Because when the rain hits hard, it floods wood. Lots of it.

On beaches, whole trees lie tangled like matchsticks.

Rivers choke with debris; bridges are smashed; roads are closed; and communities are left staring at a costly and heartbreaking mess.

The debris has a name, slash. It is the branches, logs and waste left behind after commercial forestry harvesting.

And now, it’s been revealed the industry at the centre of it is asking the government to remove legal accountability when slash escapes.

Under current law, forestry companies can be held responsible if slash causes environmental harm or property damage.

And in recent years, slash in the area has caused widespread destruction of billions of dollars of public and private infrastructure.

So, three years after the devastation left by cyclones Hale and Gabrielle, The Detail speaks to Dr Mark Bloomberg, an adjunct senior fellow at the School of Forestry at Canterbury University, about forestry, slash and who should be accountable.

“The [forestry] companies came in and let’s say, I don’t like to use the word good faith, but in good faith, they went in, and where they hadn’t complied, they took their licks and set about to try and be compliant with the consents they were operating under and contributing to clean up,” Bloomberg said.

“But then the bills kept coming, and the council came back and said, ‘yeah, well, apart from any liability in terms of complying with consents, there’s a broader liability under the RMA [Resource Management Act] because you guys did the logging, you are it’.

“I think that issue has got to be resolved.

“In the short term, we have a problem arising from harvesting practices over the last decade.

“But in the medium term, we have got to solve the problem by stopping the discharges.”

He said slash had long been a feature of forestry landscapes, but in steep, erosion-prone regions like Gisborne, it had become a recurring hazard.

Heavy rain mobilises the debris, sending it downstream with devastating force. Cyclone Gabrielle made the consequences impossible to ignore.

“This is probably where I am a little bit tough on the forestry industry,” Bloomberg said.

“I think these large, clear fells – they should have seen it coming. It was pretty foreseeable, actually, that large volumes of sediment and the accompanying slash would be triggered in the next storm.”

He recommended replacing large-scale clear-felling with “smaller coupes” (a coupe refers to an area of felled trees, resulting from a forestry harvesting operation).

“It’s the scale of the clear-felling that caused a lot of the damage in terms of slash and sediment. We have got to get those coupes down to small sizes. This is, in fact, what happens overseas. If you look at difficult erodible land being harvested in Europe, they’ll be down to coupe sizes, sometimes one to two hectares.

“It’s recognised that big commercial clear felling, on this kind of land, is just not a goer. If you want one take-home message, then these big clear fells have to stop, and they have got to stop pronto.”

In recent years, slash has blocked access to beaches, affected business and tourism, destroyed infrastructure and threatened safety. In some cases, debris contributed to loss of life.

And it has returned in recent days, albeit on a much smaller scale, following heavy rain in Tairāwhiti and surrounding areas.

“Unless we grasp the nettle and sort this one out, any of the outcomes [environmentally and economically] will not be good. I’d be pretty confident there.”

At its heart, the slash debate is not about whether storms will come – they will.

But whether, next time, the responsibility is owned or quietly slips away.

Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Geotechnical engineers told Tauranga City Council two decades ago that buildings should not be allowed in the “runout” zones of potential landslides unless they have specially constructed protection like a retaining wall.

The runout zone is the area at the base of a slope that might be inundated in a slip.

A motorcamp and hot pools were struck by a landslide at the base of Mauao last week, killing several people.

It is not clear how engineer runout calculations might apply to the area.

The advice in 2005 has been superseded in part by new science that has led to the adoption of smaller runout zone sizes in the Mt Maunganui and Papamoa neighbourhoods, but the thrust was obvious – to steer clear.

“Only in rare circumstances would it be prudent to violate” the zone criteria, wrote two geotechnical engineers in the study into 300-plus landslides across Tauranga triggered by a big storm.

“Because of this we believe that the following changes to the criteria would be appropriate: 1. Buildings are not to be located within the [zone]. Only if special measures are taken, such as construction of properly engineered structures (ie retaining walls, piled foundations and deflection bunds) can these criteria be exceeded.”

The old runout zones in Tauranga were calculated as ‘4H:1V’ – four times the vertical height of the slope (V), extending horizontally from the base (H). The new zone in 2025 was suggested as half that – 2H:1V.

The study on this for the city council last year by engineering consultants WSP covered all the Pacific seaside neighbourhoods except Mauao itself. RNZ has asked the council why Mauao was not mapped, and also for comment on runout zones.

‘Directed away from areas with an unacceptable risk’

Auckland Council has been sharing its country-leading work on landslides with Tauranga and the Bay of Plenty region. Tauranga was “unique” in how prone it was to rain-induced slips, WSP said in 2025.

Mayor Mahé Drysdale told Morning Report they were setting up an independent review into the “facts and events leading up to the landslide”.

Auckland Council said because of that review it was inappropriate for it to answer queries about landslide risk on Mt Maunganui.

But it laid out its own advances on landslide mapping that it said meant the information people could get about landslides on Land Information Memorandums, or LIMs, was more reliable, and its controls over what got built and where were better.

“Before our 2025 mapping, we didn’t have good regional maps showing landslide susceptibility because we didn’t have the data available to create them,” chief engineer Ross Roberts said in a statement.

“This meant that it was more difficult to identify where activities were taking place in areas potentially susceptible to landslides.”

It was also difficult and complex to apply controls to existing activities.

Since last year it could statistically model the landslide susceptibility, which was feeding into plans and LIMs.

“This means it can be used by people when choosing where to buy or rent a house, and by infrastructure and asset owners… Together, these mean that future development can be directed away from areas with an unacceptable risk, and existing assets can be assessed and their use modified if appropriate,” Roberts said.

Checks on individual sites were still sometimes needed, such as when protective structures had been built, earthworks had changed the land profile or underlying characteristics were unusual.

‘Avoid building in run-out areas’

Martin Brook, professor of applied geology at University of Auckland, said understanding landslide runout on Mauao was important because the maunga had a history of slips.

“Understanding and modelling the runout of landslides and where the detached material is going to run out and end up and possibly inundate is really important,” he said.

“You should avoid building in run-out areas. That’s sensible, and people would follow that advice in most parts of the Western world.”

But the light-detection (LIDAR) tech used to detect historical landslides was not so useful for runout and he was not aware of much research on it.

“Most of New Zealand is under-researched from a sort of a geological standpoint.”

The country had woken up recently to tsunami risk and signs and advice had sprung up, but had only begun waking up to the risk of landslides since 2023 though they were the country’s most deadly natural hazard, he added.

‘Reliant on outside advice’

Northland geotechnical engineer David Buxton said councils nationwide had really struggled since the 1990s – when they began shedding expertise – to get their own technical advice to back their decisions on the likes of runout zones.

“They’re reliant on outside advice to give these things, but then they’re reliant on in-house people without that depth of technical knowledge to make that decision-making, and I think it would be really good if councils were able to invest in that in-house technical ability.”

Buxton himself, as a consultant, benefited from the current set-up, he said – however it was not just expensive, but led to patchy follow-through sometimes.

Auckland Council had invested in-house and that was paying off in its response to floods, Buxton said.

The WPS study for Tauranga last year had some gaps – for instance, it did not look at the likely size or volume of likely slips.

“The factors that determine the volume and runout characteristics of the landslide, and the consequent impacts on infrastructure in proximity to the slope, could be considered when looking at specific slopes as part of site-specific studies,” said the short study, that sits alongside two longer engineering reports into landslides in the city and region.

“This should be carried out as part of considering the risk posed to infrastructure or property at particular sites.”

The landslip map showed small zones of “failure” and runout at several streets, the largest of which were around Hopukiore Reserve.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

A survey from the Classifications Office shows two thirds of New Zealanders have seen extreme and potentially illegal content online.

The report Online Exposure: Experiences of Extreme or Illegal Content in Aotearoa was based on a survey of 1000 New Zealanders aged 18 and over.

The Classifications Office said it was believed to be the first of its kind to ask adults directly about their experiences with extreme or illegal content online.

It also found 49 percent of the population believed encountering extreme content online was unavoidable and 78 percent thought the likelihood of seeing it was increasing over time.

Chief censor Caroline Flora told RNZ it was essential people online understood the law.

“A big part of releasing this research is to communicate with the public – thank you we recognise your experience and we all have a part to play.

“Reporting this content is really important and understanding your rights and responsibilities when it comes to content is really important as well.”

Flora said it was necessary to note people were not incriminating themselves to have extreme content if they were obtaining it to provide to authorities.

“What I would say is if you come across something online to report it to the platform and to online safety organisations and law enforcement.”

She said it was important people did not create objectionable content – particularly given new technologies such as AI generated content.

“If you create objectionable content, it will still be objectionable even if it is synthetic or fake and the penalties for creating content are very severe.”

Research done by the Classifications Office last year found that young people had similar experiences to the findings in the latest survey, Flora said.

“The findings make it clear that exposure to extreme or illegal content can happen to anyone, but it is significantly more common amongst younger people.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Follow Our Changing World on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Our brains never touch the outside world.

We experience a perception of the world that the brain builds based on all the sensory inputs it receives, as well as existing knowledge.

This is how our sensory systems, like vision, work. We see things because light reflects off a surface and then bounces off the back of our eyeballs, but from there the brain does a lot of work to create an image and fill in the blanks.

These interactions of physical inputs, sensory systems and our brains allow us to develop our sense of self, and how we fit in the world. And this is why neuroscientist Professor Vincent Reid is totally fascinated about where and when this all begins.

Studying sight in the womb

Vincent, now head of the School of Psychological and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato, spent 25 years of his research career investigating how infants learn, including how infants perceive the world through sight. But he realised that he, and others in the field, were working off assumptions.

There was this idea that newborn abilities and preferences in the realm of vision were rapidly acquired directly after birth. But, Vincent thought, could it be possible that these visual abilities and preferences already existed in the womb?

“And so that’s when I started looking at the human foetus and realised that we really didn’t know very much at all about what was going on in the third trimester of pregnancy,” Vincent said.

“Specifically when you had sensory systems that are operational. But at the same time, we didn’t even understand the environment in which they were processing information.”

In 2017 Vincent, then based at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, did a world-first experiment to investigate whether foetuses would respond to certain light stimuli. He did this using lasers and ultrasound.

On ultrasound images a third trimester foetus’ eye in the womb appears as a large, round, dark circle. As the eye moves, light reflects off the lens – a bright disc on this dark ball. By tracking this movement, researchers can determine the direction in which a foetus in the womb is looking.

By shining a red laser with three dots against the womb, Vincent and his team were able to show that the foetuses displayed a preference for a “top-heavy” T shape, compared to the inverse.

At the time other researchers in the field challenged these results. But in 2025 a group in Italy saw the same response in their study.

It is an intriguing finding because newborn infants show a strong preference for looking at faces, thought to be one of these rapidly learned abilities post-birth.

However, if the preference for a “face-like” T shape already exists in the womb, this disrupts this idea of how the visual system develops.

Since those early findings, further work by Vincent’s group at the University of Waikato indicates that these third trimester foetuses also show an effect called “anticipation” where they react to a sound cue and look towards a light source before it switches on.

Part of the challenge in the field was that it remained unclear how much light actually gets into the womb, so Vincent set out to address this question by recruiting some mathematical colleagues.

A red moonlit night

Associate Professor Jacob Heerikhuisen’s research involves mathematical modelling of all sorts of different things. But modelling how light particles, called photons, would bounce, scatter and move through clothing and tissue to get into the womb was a new one for him and Dr Zac Isaac, who was doing his PhD research with Jacob at the time.

With Vincent’s help, the team fossicked around in various biology textbooks to find the light properties related to all the different layers – skin, fat, muscle, the wall of the uterus and the amniotic fluid.

Then they built a model to account for all these layers, set realistic parametres for each of them and investigated how much light would get through.

“The level of light is comparable to a night sky with a full moon,” Jacob said.

“So certainly when I go outside now, every time there’s a moon, I’m like, oh, yeah, this is like the amount of light that gets through to a foetus. It’s significant.”

Their model also revealed that the wavelength of light more likely to get through was in the red spectrum. Blue and green light did not appear to penetrate far enough.

The work has excited Vincent because of what it means for the environment within the womb that the visual system is already developing in.

According to this modelling the light that is getting through is enough for the foetus to have a visual experience, Vincent said, and he would like to know how that is shaping vision, even before birth.

From a psychology point of view, it was fascinating to think about, but the results have a practical application too, Vincent said, particularly in neonatal care units where pre-term babies are likely experiencing an environment very different to what they should be.

“This work can actually inform what those units should look like, what they should do… which then, in theory, would lead to downstream health benefits for those children.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Fundraising pages set up for some of the Mount Maunganui landslide victims’ families have raised thousands of dollars, with donors paying heartfelt tribute to those trapped by last week’s massive slip.

Six people were caught when a landslide came down at the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park, smashing into campervans, tents, vehicles and an ablution block at about 9.30am on Thursday, 22 January.

The victims have been named as Lisa Anne Maclennan, 50, Måns Loke Bernhardsson, 20, Jacqualine Suzanne Wheeler, 71, Susan Doreen Knowles, 71, Sharon Maccanico, 15, and Max Furse-Kee, 15.

A Givealittle page set up by Maclennan’s sister had raised almost $13,000 (12,876) within 13 hours for the Morrinsville teacher’s family.

“She lost her life trying to save everyone else,” the page said.

“We cannot put a value on the loss of a loved one but any donations will make a difference and help this whanau through this extremely difficult time.”

Many donors commented on Maclennan’s work with Morrinsville Intermediate School students over the years, while others paid tribute to the final acts of a “courageous, selfless woman”.

A separate page has also been set up “In Loving Memory” of Furse-Kee, with $35,435 donated to the teenager’s family in less than 15 hours.

Page creator and family friend Samuel Holliday wrote that he’d had the privilege “of seeing Max grow into the beautiful, much-loved child he is”, and said the family was “facing an unimaginable loss”.

“There are no words that can truly ease the pain of losing a child. Max was deeply loved, and his loss has left a hole in the hearts of his family, friends, and everyone who knew him.”

The funds raised would be used to help with immediate and ongoing costs, time away from work, and whatever support the family needed, the page said.

On Monday evening, about 100 people gathered at Auckland Domain to remember another Pakuranga College student and landslide victim, Sharon Maccanico.

Meanwhile, work has resumed to recover the six missing people, with tens of thousands of cubic metres of dirt to comb through.

Tauranga City Council is heading an independent review into the events leading up to the landslide and WorkSafe has announced it will look into the organisations involved in the holiday park.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Some of New Zealand’s least generous savings accounts are paying as little as 0.05 percent in interest.

A survey of bank rates showed the main banks have a number of products that offer very little return.

ASB’s Savings On Call account offers 0.1 percent.

ANZ has a Select account that pays 0.05 percent on balances over $5000 – there is a monthly account fee of $6 but that is waived if the monthly balance remains over $5000.

Westpac’s Simple Saver pays 0.05 percent – customers are sent “nudge” emails if they have higher balances to remind them of other options.

Co-Operative’s Smile On Call account pays 0.1 percent to balances over $4000.

Reserve Bank data shows the average rate across the market for unconditional savings accounts is just over 1 percent.

New Zealanders have almost $120 billion in savings accounts, a total that has increased over the past year.

Squirrel chief executive David Cunningham has previously said that people leaving money in low-paying accounts provide a lucrative income stream for the banks.

Banking expert at Massey University Claire Matthews said she had money in a Westpac Simple Saver account.

“I’ve just realised at the weekend how low the interest rate is. It changed substantially over 2025 as the OCR was cut and interest rates fell. I’m going to fix that shortly.”

Financial Markets Authority research showed across all age groups, people said that the highest interest rate was the most important factor in choosing a savings account.

But for those aged 65 to 74, the stability of the rate and how easy it was to access savings were equally important.

The FMA said the self-reported importance of finding a high interest rate peaked in midlife and declined thereafter as people began to attach more importance to other factors.

Lower-income earners also placed more importance on the ability to access savings than the rate they were getting.

The self-reported importance of a high interest rate increased with income, to a point, while the importance of access declined with income.

But Matthews said there could be a few reasons why people did not look for a better deal.

“Speaking personally, it is inertia – as far as I’m aware you can’t now open a Simple Saver with Westpac, so I don’t believe anyone would be actively choosing it. It’s possibly the same with similar accounts at other banks.

“So I think for most people it is likely to be historic, and they either haven’t looked at what interest rate they are receiving and the options available or they just haven’t worked up the energy to make a change.”

Infometrics chief executive Brad Olsen said people might like the security of knowing they could access their money easily.

“People are clearly sometimes willing to compromise returns for access.

“There’s a wider conversation – people often talk about the lazy tax and how there’s all these people who pay the lazy tax because they don’t move their bank account, they don’t move their power bill or don’t move their internet or whatever. In dollar terms I completely understand it, but as someone who’s also tried to adjust some of these settings myself – it can sometimes take so much time.”

He said it could sometimes take a lot of effort to make a change.

Olsen said he kept some money in an account he was aware paid little interest.

“It’s a pretty small amount and so it is one of those things that it’s pretty minimal given I keep that as a bit of as emergency fund if I have to up and do something right now it’s always available.

“But if you’ve got half your savings or something in it and you’re hoarding that to buy a house or whatever and it’s not getting any interest, what’s the point there?”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Crews working on the Mount Maunganui recovery mission are hoping for sunshine on Tuesday, labelling moisture “the enemy”.

Work has resumed to recover six people presumed dead after a landslide at a Mount Maunganui campground last Thursday.

While the ground is slowly stablising, any rain risks further slips.

An independent review, announced by Tauranga City Council, will look at events leading up to the landslide. Meanwhile, WorkSafe says it will looking into the organisations that had a duty of care for everyone at the Mt Maunganui holiday park.

Follow the latest in RNZ’s live blog at the top of this page.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand