Wellington

Former All Blacks coach John Hart said on Tuesday he has no doubt that giant former All Blacks wing Jonah Lomu can return from a kidney transplant to play at the highest level again. Lomu said on Monday in London he will return to 15-a-side rugby for the first time in three years at Twickenham on June 4.

Opener Nathan Astle’s century provided the backbone in New Zealand’s innings of 256-9 against a World XI in Wellington on Monday in a one-day charity match to raise money for tsunami victims. Astle started aggressively but settled into the anchor role, batting through 44,3 overs of the innings.

Excited archaeologists are sifting through the contents of 150-year-old New Zealand toilets to get a better understanding of the everyday lives of early settlers. Although there is plenty of oral and written history, there are gaps that can only be answered by lifting the lid on the sanitary habits of pioneering families, they say.

Mount Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary says he has met the ghost of eminent British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who died during an expedition to Antarctica in 1916. In a video promoting conservation work on Shackleton’s hut in Antarctica, New Zealand’s greatest explorer describes how he saw the apparition when he first visited the hut at Ross Island.

A pair of burglars learned that crime does not pay when Mohammed, a New Zealand shopkeeper, smashed up their car as they raided his mini-supermarket in the middle of the night, a newspaper reported on Wednesday. He saw the pair stealing cigarettes, sunglasses and telephone cards on a monitor in his West Auckland flat.

”Dear Santa, I want a man for Christmas.” Such requests mark a new trend on New Zealand Telecom’s Santaline, traditionally dominated by children seeking bicycles, dolls and toys. ”Listen Santa, I want a new man this Xmas. I broke the last one,” said one e-mail.

No carols about the holly and the ivy will be sung in New Zealand this Christmas if the Conservation Department, the official guardian of the countryside, has its way. Sarah Boyle, a so-called department ”weedbuster” on the east coast of the North Island, said those traditional festive items threaten the environment.

New Zealand’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs has issued a warning about what it calls the latest ”Nigerian letter scam” — an e-mail offering millions of dollars linked to the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, it was reported on Monday.
The e-mail claims to be from his widow, Suha Arafat.

New Zealanders are rushing to try to stop smoking ahead of a new law that will make it illegal to light up in bars, cafés, restaurants and workplaces, which comes into effect on Friday, a newspaper reported on Monday. Up to 700 people a week are telephoning the state-sponsored Quitline.

Text messaging may have some advantages, but a New Zealand drug dealer has found it can be very bad for business when you don’t know where the recipient is. When Anthony Crown sent an SMS with a methamphetamine offer, he didn’t know his client was sitting in a Wellington police station — having just been arrested for burglary.

British pop star Elton John held back on Tuesday from apologising for his recent foul-mouthed attack on Madonna, whom he accused of miming during live performances, saying she is an ”artist of the video age”. ”I do regret hurting her feelings because she’s a major artist,” John told Television New Zealand.

New Zealand beer consumption averages 80 litres per head a year, but community leaders in the North Island town of Masterton object to brewing experiments in a school science class, according to a newspaper report on Friday. Masterton deputy mayor Rod McKenzie said he was surprised that pupils were allowed to brew beer.

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark has rejected an informal apology by Israel for the disruption in diplomatic relations caused by the actions of two alleged Israeli spies. Clark said she has no doubt the two men jailed in Auckland on Thursday for conspiring to illegally obtain New Zealand passports are Israeli spies.

New Zealand has suspended its diplomatic ties with Israel following the jailing of two suspected Israeli spies in Auckland on Thursday. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said on Thursday that a strong suspicion exists that the men were acting on behalf of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad.

Tropical Cyclone Ivy cut a swathe through the centre of the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu on Thursday, tearing down homes, ripping out trees and cutting communications with winds of up to 190kph. Two Taiwanese fishing boats in the harbor of the capital, Port Vila, were driven ashore by pounding seas.

Why would two highly respected men — one a professor of medicine, the other a government inspector — travel halfway round the world to dig up plants in a foreign country and risk spending three years in jail? The answer is that they were in the grip of ”orchidelirium”, an obsession with orchids.

New Zealand’s leading current affairs broadcaster, Paul Holmes, has apologised for calling United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan a ”cheeky darkie” on his morning radio show. Holmes said he ”surrendered to baseness” when he said that the world was not going to be told how to live by a Ghanaian.