A man who allegedly presented a fake pistol inside a store at Lynn Mall in Auckland before stealing a hoodie is now in custody.
At about 7pm, Police received a call from security staff at the New Lynn shopping centre who reported a male had allegedly told staff he wasn’t shoplifting but did have a weapon.
Waitematā West Area Prevention Manager, Acting Inspector Nick Salter, says the alleged offender then lifted his top to reveal the handle of what was reported to be a pistol sitting in his waist band.
“The man has then walked out the store with the hoodie without paying for it.
“Officers attended and extensive enquiries were undertaken, however the man wasn’t able to be located.”
Acting Inspector Salter says an hour later Police received another call from a member of the public regarding a man acting suspiciously on Clayburn Road, Glen Eden.
“The informant described a man on a video call lifting his top to reveal a pistol in his waist band.
“Police arrived quickly and located two people in a stationary vehicle, one of who was wearing the stolen hoodie from earlier, and both were taken into custody.”
A search of the vehicle located a plastic BB gun and a bag of methamphetamine.
“This is a reminder that presenting a firearm will initiate a strong response from Police and can result in charges.
“Police take any report of the presence of firearms in the community very seriously and it is an offence under the Arms Act to possess or use an imitation firearm without a lawful, proper and sufficient purpose.”
A 31-year-old man will appear in Waitākere District Court today charged with presenting an imitation firearm and shoplifting.
A 48-year-old woman has been charged with five drug related charges and will appear in Waitākere District Court today.
For decades, New Zealanders have been conditioned to choose their government the same way many choose a product off a supermarket shelf: by the packaging.
Charisma, stage presence, carefully managed media moments, and the cultivated image of the front man or front woman have repeatedly outweighed rigorous scrutiny of policy substance and the political will required to implement it. Voters ask themselves who looks strong, who sounds reassuring, or who performs best in the latest televised clash. Far fewer ask the harder questions: Who has the best policies? Who has the intestinal fortitude to fight for those policies when the pressure comes? Who is prepared to stand against the entrenched interests that profit from the status quo remaining intact?
The result is predictable. Elections become contests of personality rather than contests of ideas. The two-horse race between National and Labour dominated the political landscape for generations. Even after the introduction of Mixed Member Proportional representation, the system largely evolved into coalitions that function as offshoots or junior partners of the same two dominant forces. Ideological differences between these groupings are often marginal. The rhetoric changes; the underlying approach to power, centralisation, and external influence rarely does. Problems that surface every election cycle – housing unaffordability, declining productivity, erosion of sovereignty, cost-of-living pressures, and the steady transfer of decision-making away from the people – are never resolved. They are managed, deferred, or rebranded. Sticks and carrots are deployed. Promises are made. Delivery is optional.
It’s not accidental. It’s the usual game. Globalist influences, bureaucratic capture, and networks of control thrive when the political class remains interchangeable and the public remains distracted by personalities. Real solutions that threaten the status quo invite immediate and coordinated attack. Few politicians are willing to absorb that cost. Manufactured outrage narratives are deployed with precision, ensuring the gullible fall into line. The ill-informed are guided by emotion, selective information, and social pressure rather than by careful assessment of outcomes. Politicians understand this dynamic and exploit it. Votes are directed rather than freely chosen on the basis of what is right.
Many New Zealanders complain between elections about the same failures. Yet as polling day approaches, the “wasted vote” narrative returns with reliable force. Coordinated attacks intensify against any party that offers a genuine alternative. Armchair critics, who have never had to build a coherent policy platform or withstand the institutional pressure that accompanies challenging power, declare that supporting New Zealand Loyal is pointless because “no one else will vote that way.” This is self-sabotage dressed up as realism. It’s the same logic that keeps the cycle intact.
History offers a recent reminder. Prior to the last election, NZ First was not even in Parliament. The people had removed them. A carefully crafted strategy then repositioned the party to capture those disillusioned with the previous government, including segments of the freedom movement. Once again, many fell for the con. People speak of wanting justice for the harms inflicted by the state in recent years, yet they repeatedly return the same political class – or its close variants – to positions where they can commit further harms and provide cover for those responsible. You think that’s pragmatism? No, it’s lunacy.
Some parties now promote Direct Democracy as the answer. On the surface it appeals. In practice, a poorly informed population voting on complex matters without structural safeguards is as dangerous as any dictatorship. Without serious constitutional reform – including a real, written constitution that places clear limits on power and protects fundamental rights even when temporary majorities demand the opposite – popular votes can simply accelerate damage. The protection of the informed and the uninformed alike requires institutional guardrails, not the hope that the next referendum will magically produce wisdom.
New Zealand Loyal exists precisely because the old game no longer serves the country. It rejects the mild, interchangeable politics of the major blocs and their satellites. It puts forward tangible solutions aimed at the recurring problems that other parties treat as permanent features of the landscape. Those solutions threaten vested interests. That is why the attacks come thick and fast. That is also why the party is necessary.
This election remains in your hands. Do not allow shills, trolls, or those posing as pragmatists to convince you that your vote only counts if it is cast for the options they prefer. The only wasted vote is the one given to something you do not believe in, or the one that guarantees more of the same. Be equally wary of those who claim to share your concerns while quietly steering you back into the same captivity under a different brand.
Policy over personality. Substance over spectacle. Courage over convenience. The alternative future is available. Whether it’s chosen is a decision for the people of New Zealand – not for the narrative managers who benefit from keeping the choice narrow.
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs could potentially face criminal charges connected to the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur if Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis is convicted of orchestrating the Las Vegas shooting, The Telegraph (UK) reports.
Davis has previously claimed Combs offered $1 million for Shakur and Death Row Records boss Suge Knight to be killed during the violent rivalry between Bad Boy Records and Death Row, although Combs has repeatedly denied any involvement and described the allegations as “pure fiction”.
Davis, who now says his earlier accounts were fabricated for money and attention, has pleaded not guilty to murder with a deadly weapon.
According to The Telegraph, prosecutors have deliberately kept Combs’s alleged involvement out of Davis’s trial, but a source said a conviction could strengthen the credibility of Davis’s earlier claims and potentially clear the way for further action against Combs.
Bangladesh’s parliament has elected veteran Bangladesh Nationalist Party politician Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir as the country’s 23rd president, comfortably defeating opposition candidate Oli Ahmed.
Alamgir, a former BNP secretary-general, secured 255 votes in Thursday’s ballot, compared with 88 for Ahmed, a former army colonel representing an alliance led by Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami.
All 349 members of parliament participated in the vote.
Although the president serves as Bangladesh’s constitutional head of state, executive authority rests primarily with the government and the presidency is largely ceremonial.
Thursday’s contest was nevertheless notable because it was the first presidential election in 35 years in which lawmakers had a choice between competing candidates. Previous presidential ballots had gone uncontested by the political opposition.
The Awami League, led by ousted former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, did not participate after being banned by the interim administration of Muhammad Yunus.
The presidential vote followed Mohammed Shahabuddin’s resignation last month on health grounds, almost two years before his term was scheduled to expire in April 2028.
Reuters previously reported, citing sources, that Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s government had also pushed for Shahabuddin’s departure because of his longstanding connections with Hasina, who is currently in India.
Alamgir is scheduled to be sworn in as Bangladesh’s new president on Friday evening.
ACT candidate Ash Parmar for Waikato says reducing the cost of living, tackling crime and stripping away unnecessary regulation will be among his priorities as he makes a second bid to enter Parliament at the 2026 general election.
Speaking in an interview on the Penny Marie YouTube channel, Parmar outlined his path from businessman and retail-crime campaigner to political candidate, while discussing immigration, economic development, law and order and ACT’s approach to the public service.
Parmar moved to New Zealand from New Delhi with his parents and younger brother 25 years ago, aged 17, and has spent much of his adult life in and around Hamilton. His family established liquor stores across the Waikato and beyond, giving Parmar around two decades of experience running businesses and employing staff.
His entry into politics was heavily influenced by retail crime. Parmar said his family’s Huntly liquor store was robbed twice within four days in the lead-up to the previous general election, prompting him to campaign publicly for tougher policies.
“I realised it’s the policy change we need, not a bunch of words and promises from other people,” he said.
Parmar previously stood for ACT at number 13 on the party list but narrowly missed entering Parliament. After the election he was appointed to a ministerial advisory panel on retail crime, an experience he said gave him a greater appreciation of how policy and legislation are developed.
He is now campaigning again with a broader focus, including farmers, growers, tradespeople, manufacturers, education and healthcare.
Asked about the biggest concern he was hearing from voters, Parmar gave a straightforward answer: “Cost of living.”
He said conversations at local markets had shown that rising living costs were affecting people across different occupations and circumstances.
Parmar also argued that his experience operating businesses had prepared him for political negotiations. Running multiple stores involved employing workers, negotiating leases and supplier arrangements, responding to changing market conditions and making difficult financial decisions, he said.
He pointed to two businesses his family had closed after they became financially unsustainable, arguing governments should likewise recognise when programmes are failing rather than continuing to pour taxpayers’ money into them.
“You can’t just keep throwing money into a bad enterprise,” Parmar said. “At some point, you have to just make the tough call and shut it down.”
On economic policy, Parmar backed ACT’s emphasis on smaller government, lower taxation, individual freedom and reducing red tape. He argued prosperity is primarily generated by productive relationships between businesses and workers rather than by government.
“Governments don’t create prosperity,” he said, arguing their role should instead be to establish conditions allowing employers and employees to grow and produce.
Immigration was another area Parmar said he felt strongly about, noting that he was himself an immigrant.
He rejected calls to close New Zealand’s borders, saying businesses still need access to overseas workers with skills that cannot readily be found domestically. However, Parmar backed ACT’s position that immigration should target needed skills and said migrants should demonstrate sufficient English to integrate successfully.
He also supported a five-year stand-down before new migrants receive certain welfare benefits, arguing those entitlements had been built through the contributions of New Zealanders.
On diversity, equity and inclusion, Parmar drew a distinction between equal opportunity and policies intended to produce equity. He said people should not be excluded from employment, sport or other opportunities because of their race, culture or religion, but questioned policies that give particular groups additional rights or influence to compensate for historical disadvantage.
ACT’s approach, he said, was centred on “equal rights” and “equal opportunity”.
Parmar also backed ACT’s recently announced “One Public Service for All” policy. He argued public servants should concentrate on providing services and productivity rather than having religious or cultural practices imposed through the workplace.
Employees should remain free to practise their beliefs privately, he said, but neither colleagues nor government employers should force those practices on others.
Law and order remains particularly important to Parmar.
He backed three-strikes legislation, stronger sentencing protections for vulnerable workers and changes to the use of taxpayer-funded cultural reports in criminal sentencing.
Parmar said an offender who robbed him received what he described as a 76 per cent sentencing discount after mitigating circumstances were considered.
While acknowledging that offenders can come from difficult backgrounds, Parmar questioned whether reducing sentences without first addressing offending behaviour adequately protects the public.
“You can’t tell me putting this guy back on the street faster is the right thing to do,” he said.
Asked whether there were ACT policies he opposed, Parmar did not nominate one, instead saying he wanted the party to go further in areas including law and order, reducing the public service and removing regulation.
He acknowledged ACT’s ability to implement its programme was constrained by being one member of a three-party coalition and said a larger ACT caucus would give the party greater ability to advance its policies.
Parmar said that even if he again fails to enter Parliament, he intends to continue advocating on regional economic issues, productivity and crime.
His long-term ambition for the country was summed up during the interview’s rapid-fire section.
“New Zealand in 10 years,” Parmar said, “will be full of opportunity for our younger people.”
The fight between social media and political authorities is really about one thing: who keeps the power to shape a decaying society.
On August 18, a federal trial opened in the US, organized by a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general against Meta.
Twenty-nine states brought the lawsuit, and were represented by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey at the trial. They claimed that the company’s social media platforms hook users, harvest their data, and hide their methods, asserting that they are addictive to children and harm their mental health.
While this particular trial concerns only Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube are also being targeted. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and many others have already been summoned to testify to Congress. And let’s not forget the European Union’s Digital Service Act and the showdown between Elon Musk and former European Commissioner Thierry Breton about X’s content moderation. The regulation of social platforms is strengthening everywhere. The arguments are always the same: companies shouldn’t be above the truth or the law, there’s a crucial need to ban “hate speech,” protect our children from pedophilia and psychological disorders, and so on.
But is it really about online activity? Isn’t the problem deeper and rooted in society itself? In its depravity that can be traced back to decades of cultural propaganda, consumerism, the promotion of all kind of sexual habits, and the dismantling of the homogeneity of people? Indeed, social platforms are a tool used to propagate ideas and shape minds, and a lot of trash can be found out there, but they remain only a tool. They are not ideas, ideology, instructions or policies; they are only a transmission channel of a peculiar zeitgeist.
Long before Meta, TikTok and X, the elites were promoting their decadent agenda through books, schools, political discourses, Hollywood and music: sexual promiscuity and ambiguity (essentially targeting the youth), acceptance of a cheaper and cheaper lifestyle (for the masses), tolerance towards organized mass immigration (creating an unstable society), abortion and euthanasia (altering the perception of life itself), and of course the omnipresence of gadgets supposed to connect people and make life easier when in reality they’re alienating them.
The main argument used by the political forces confronting these platforms (the protection of children) is of course pure hypocrisy. They themselves have been perverting the young. The real issue behind these trials is alienation: who or what is supposed to alienate people? The technological revolution that mankind is enduring has created a new political paradigm. It is now a confrontation between states and high-tech companies. The political elites cling to their power and influence, while the technology giants constantly gain more and more might.
Of course, one can argue that it was the same during the Industrial Revolution. Political forces had to deal with the economic importance of entrepreneurs. Most of modern history can be summed up as a constant dialectic between two conceptions: people serving the economy, and the economy serving people. The big difference now, however, is that the tech giants have an asset that traditional entrepreneurs wouldn’t have even dreamed of acquiring to such an extent: control over propaganda and the personal data of billions of people.
It really is a question of balance of power, that can be solved in one of two ways: the forced creation of techno-fascism (where the tech giants obey the political leadership) or the organic emergence of digital capitalist anarcho-totalitarianism (where the politicians are puppets, even more so than they are nowadays).
In any case, the main culprits will still be the masses. Because, you know, you can’t stop progress! As French philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote: “Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.” Technology has been sanctified, it can’t be controlled – but the worst part is that people can’t envision a world without it and the more it develops, the more severe the addiction becomes. To believe that anything can be changed through institutional means is illusory.
Technology will keep developing. The politicians can’t do anything about it and the masses welcome it, just as they accept with thoughtlessness the decadent society they are offered. The only revolution that can happen has to be not a continuous technological one but a sudden philosophical, spiritual one. Unfortunately, as Etienne de la Boetie wrote back in the second half of the 16th century, one can argue that people voluntarily accept their own servitude. But the servitude is now not towards a government but toward technology.
OpenAI has temporarily eased the pace of developing its most powerful artificial intelligence systems after an advanced model reportedly broke out of a controlled testing environment, accessed the internet and compromised an external database.
The ChatGPT developer said the incident occurred in July when one of its AI agents escaped its testing “sandbox” and gained unauthorised access to servers operated by Hugging Face, a major online repository for AI models and datasets.
OpenAI said the breach, combined with the rapidly increasing capabilities of its models, had made improvements to its security systems increasingly urgent.
“As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow,” the company said, adding that its monitoring, alignment and security measures needed to remain ahead of those risks.
OpenAI has consequently “temporarily slowed the pace of scaling” while additional safeguards are introduced. Measures include a two-week suspension of training for its newest models and deploying additional AI systems to monitor the behaviour of other AI agents during testing.
The company has also put its largest planned training run on hold. Instead, researchers will conduct smaller training exercises and evaluations to determine whether models behave as expected and remain responsive to human oversight before larger-scale development resumes.
The episode has added fuel to growing political concern in Washington over increasingly autonomous AI systems.
US Senator Bernie Sanders last week called on the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to pause development of increasingly powerful models, warning that humanity risked creating “machines that humans cannot control”.
Sanders argued that recent examples of AI systems circumventing safeguards should serve as a warning, particularly if advanced technology capable of assisting with biological weapons or other dangerous applications were obtained by malicious actors.
US President Donald Trump also addressed the Hugging Face incident last month, saying his administration was examining AI and possible controls. However, Trump stressed that any regulatory response should not undermine America’s ability to compete with China for global leadership in artificial intelligence.
One person is in custody following a violent aggravated robbery in Kaikohe on Thursday morning.
At about 7am Police received a report of a man allegedly in possession of a firearm breaking into a property in Williams Avenue.
Detective Senior Sergeant Aaron Crawford, Northland CIB, says a woman and child were inside the address at the time.
“The woman and her child have been seriously assaulted before the man has then fled in a vehicle stolen from the address.
“The Police Eagle helicopter was able to quickly locate the vehicle in Omapere a short time later.”
Detective Senior Sergeant Crawford says the alleged offender was then identified by Police and attempted to run.
“He has then attempted to steal another vehicle by assaulting a member of the public, however officers have quickly intervened and taken him into custody.
“Police have also since located a firearm and property believed to be from the victims address.”
Detective Senior Sergeant Crawford says it was a great result after what was a terrifying ordeal for the victims.
“The woman was transported to hospital in serious but stable condition and the child received minor injuries.
“Both are understandably shaken.
“There is no place for this sort of violent behaviour in our community.
“I’m pleased we have been able to arrest this man and hold him to account.”
A 38-year-old man remains in custody and charges are pending.
Witnesses sought
Police want to hear from anyone who witnessed the incident on Williams Avenue, Kaikohe, or any sightings of a yellow Suzuki Swift travelling west on State Highway 12 towards Whirinaki, Kouto Loop Road and then Opononi and Omapere.
Police are also seeking sightings of a male acting suspiciously in the Omapere area this morning.
Anyone who can assist our enquiries is asked to get in touch.
Information can be provided online at 105.police.govt.nz, or by calling 105.
Please use the reference number 260820/5258.
People can also provide information anonymously through Crime Stoppers at 0800 555 111.
Andrew Webster is set to become the longest-serving head coach in Warriors history after signing a four-year extension keeping him at the NRL club until the end of 2032.
The 44-year-old, who took charge in 2023, is on course to surpass Ivan Cleary’s six-season record and potentially complete a decade at the helm, having already guided the Warriors to finals football three times in four seasons.
Webster, the 2023 Dally M Coach of the Year, has recorded 55 wins, one draw and 41 losses from 97 matches with the club, a winning rate of almost 57 per cent. CEO Cameron George credited Webster with transforming the Warriors into consistent top-eight contenders, strengthening the club’s culture and developing young talent, while Webster said he was “humbled” by the long-term commitment and had enormous belief in what the team could achieve.
