At about 10pm Monday night Police were notified by the Otago Rescue Helicopter that they had been struck by a high-powered laser.
Due to quick thinking and expert piloting skills the helicopter was able to locate the offender’s whereabouts. The helicopter hovered over north Oamaru to pinpoint the address where the laser came from.
They followed the offender as he entered his car and drove from his home address onto Thames Highway heading north out of town.
The suspect went into a covered petrol station in an attempt to hide from the helicopter following him. The helicopter crew guided police on the ground to the vehicle and officers were able to stop the vehicle and arrest the occupant who admitted to shining the laser at the aircraft.
The laser was recovered from the front seat of the vehicle.
Sergeant Tony Woodbridge from Oamaru Police says, “The laser was shined at the helicopter for a total of four minutes, which is incredibly irresponsible and dangerous.
Pointing a laser at any aircraft can affect a pilot’s ability to safely control the plane or helicopter and can cause loss of vision. Even from several metres or even kilometres, this can cause serious harm.
Emergency services and our community rely on that chopper service and putting the chopper pilot at risk puts people’s lives at risk.”
A 39-year-old local man was charged with Endangering Transport and was bailed to appear in the Oamaru District Court on 27 November.
A major undersea data cable connecting Finland and Germany, the C-Lion1, has been severed, with Finnish authorities reporting that all fiber connections along the 1,200-kilometre Baltic Sea route are cut.
Discovered during a routine check by Finnish data provider Cinia, the break is under investigation, with no immediate explanation for the disruption.
Officials have noted that such incidents rarely occur in these waters without external impact, although natural and human activities, such as shipping or fishing, are common causes of undersea cable damage.
The disruption follows heightened scrutiny of undersea infrastructure after incidents like the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and a gas pipeline break between Finland and Estonia last month.
While no direct evidence links this event to malicious activity, the cable’s proximity to critical infrastructure, such as the Nord Stream pipelines, raises concerns. For now, Finland’s internet traffic is rerouting through alternative pathways, as authorities work to determine the cause and repair the damage.
Public submissions are now open for the Treaty Principles Bill, offering New Zealanders the opportunity to voice their views on a fundamental aspect of the nation’s future, ACT Leader David Seymour announced today.
“For nearly 50 years, unelected judges have interpreted what the Treaty of Waitangi’s ‘principles’ mean. That changes now,” Seymour said. “This is a chance for Kiwis to decide whether we are a ‘partnership’ between two groups with differing rights or a modern multi-ethnic democracy united by shared rights and responsibilities.”
Seymour said public engagement was important for shaping the Bill, particularly following today’s Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which saw thousands marching to Parliament. “I hope those marching today will read the Bill and contribute meaningfully through the select committee process. I also encourage those who were unable to attend to make their voices heard through submissions,” he said.
Submissions to the Justice select committee close on January 7.
Police comment as Hikoi wraps up
Meanwhile, police commended the smooth running of the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which drew approximately 42,000 participants to Wellington’s Parliamentary precinct. Superintendent Corrie Parnell noted the cooperative and positive conduct of those involved.
“Today’s hīkoi was carried out safely and respectfully, moving through the city without major incidents,” Parnell said.
While ambulances attended to 20 medical incidents and one individual was arrested for disorderly behaviour and indecent assault, no significant issues were reported. Police also highlighted the risks of driver fatigue as participants began their journeys home and advised motorists to remain patient amid increased traffic.
The Hīkoi’s final event will be held at Waitangi Park at 7pm.
Campaigner Liz Gunn was convicted of assaulting an Auckland Airport security worker in February 2023.
Gunn’s application for a discharge without conviction was heard today in the Manukau District Court.
Judge Janey Forrest ruled the conviction was proportionate to the offending.
While the judge acknowledged the assault was minor, she ruled the circumstances warranted the entering of a conviction. An application for costs by the prosecution was declined.
A key section of State Highway 1 between Tūrangi and Waiouru on the Desert Road will close from January 6 to the end of February for major repairs, NZTA has announced.
The summer shutdown is necessary due to the warmer temperatures required for effective bonding of materials.
Repairs will include rebuilding 16 kilometres of road and replacing the Mangatoetoenui Bridge deck, aiming to eliminate the risk of potholes for years.
Motorists will face detours around Tongariro National Park via SH47, SH4, and SH49, adding approximately 40 minutes to travel times.
The closure is part of “an accelerated” 16-month maintenance project, which NZTA describes as one of New Zealand’s “largest and most ambitious” roading upgrades.
A tenant responsible for extensive damage to a rental property, totaling more than $40,000, has been ordered to pay $4085 to the landlord by the Tenancy Tribunal.
The property, newly renovated before the tenancy, suffered intentional and careless damage, including broken windows, large holes in walls, and damaged fixtures.
The tribunal determined the tenant was liable for multiple insurance excesses, totaling $750 per incident for 11 separate instances of damage.
Despite the extensive costs, the landlord could only claim the excess amounts under tenancy rules, which cap tenant liability for careless damage to the lower of four weeks’ rent or the insurance excess.
The case highlights challenges with insurance coverage for landlords, particularly how insurers define damage events.
While the tenant’s liability was mitigated by insurance, the case highlights the financial strain and legal complexities landlords face when repairing damage exceeding tenant liability limits.
Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Rodrigo Bentancur has been banned for seven domestic matches, fined £100,000, and ordered to attend an education programme after being found guilty by the FA of using a racial slur about teammate Son Heung-min of South Korea during a TV appearance in Uruguay in June.
Despite denying the charge, an independent regulatory commission upheld it. Bentancur, who has featured 15 times for Spurs this season, will miss key Premier League clashes and the League Cup quarter-final but remains eligible for Europa League games.
Many believe Albert Luthuli was silenced because he was using a global platform to highlight the horrors of Apartheid.
Chief Albert Luthuli, renowned anti-Apartheid activist and Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died in 1967 after being struck by a train. His death was ruled accidental, but in May this year, 57 years later, South Africa’s national prosecuting authority reopened the inquest, saying there are suspicions regarding the circumstances of his death.
South Africa under colonial rule
The country had been under colonial rule for almost 250 years by the time Luthuli was born in 1898, and regardless of whether it was the Netherlands (1652-1795 and 1803-1806) or Great Britain (1795-1803 and 1806-1961), the majority of Luthuli’s countrymen were treated as second class citizens for decades.
Successive colonists were attracted by the lure of the mineral revolution that was taking place in the country. The greed of this desire to possess the country’s mineral wealth would see them enact various phases of dispossession and the exclusion of black people from power in the quest for wealth.
The first signs of the considerable mineral wealth emerged in 1867 when South Africa’s diamond mining industry was established, with diamonds being discovered near Kimberley in what is today known as the Northern Cape. The Kimberley diamond fields, and later discoveries in Gauteng, the Free State, and along the Atlantic coast, emerged as major sources of gem-quality diamonds, securing South Africa’s position as the world’s leading producer by the mid-20th century.
Later, the discovery of the Witwatersrand goldfields in 1886 was a turning point in South Africa’s history. The demand for franchise rights for English-speaking immigrants working on the new goldfields was the pretext Britain used to go to war with the Transvaal and Orange Free State in 1899.
White government
South Africa became a Union with its own white government in 1910, but the country was still regarded as a colony of Britain until 1961. Driven by Western exploitation and the desire for its considerable mineral wealth, it appeared that little attention was being paid to the yoke of oppression that was being placed on the citizens of the country.
Luthuli was still a teenager when in 1913, the Land Act was introduced to prevent black people, except those living in the Cape Province (now the Western Cape), from buying land outside reserves.
When the National Party (NP) took power in 1948, marking the beginning of white Afrikaner rule under the scrutiny of Britain, these laws designed to exclude black people from the economy started to take sinister shape as they covered the entire country.
The policy of Apartheid was adopted by the NP as soon as they assumed power, and this was followed two years later by the Group Areas Act, which was passed to segregate blacks and whites and saw the Communist Party banned.
By 1960, the oppression of the Apartheid government had gained steam, culminating in the deaths of 70 black demonstrators killed at Sharpeville. The news of this atrocity reached the world and triggered international outrage. The African National Congress (ANC), Africa’s oldest liberation organization formed in 1912, was banned soon thereafter.
Teacher and chief
Albert Luthuli was born into a religious family, and his childhood was like many of his peers, with a notable exception – he desired to be educated despite the colonial restrictions on access to learning and he started to become consciously aware of his religion. He completed a teaching course in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal and was later confirmed in the Methodist Church and became a lay preacher.
In 1920, he received a government bursary to attend a higher teachers’ training course at Adams College, and subsequently joined the college as a teacher, where he saw firsthand the struggles of the working class. In 1935, Luthuli was called upon to become chief in his ancestral village of Groutville in KwaZulu-Natal. For 17 years, he immersed himself in the local problems of his people, adjudicating and mediating local quarrels and organizing African cane growers to guard their own interests.
Through minor clashes with white authority, Luthuli had his first direct experience with African political predicaments. Travel outside South Africa also widened his perspective during this period.
Conflict with the authorities
It was at this stage that Luthuli’s political involvement started to accelerate as he became more involved with the ANC and he became the provincial chairperson of the party in 1951. At 54, he was a late bloomer in politics.
His public support for the 1952 Defiance Campaign, which saw thousands of people peacefully refuse to obey Apartheid laws of segregation and subjugation, brought him into direct conflict with the South African government, and after refusing to resign from the ANC, he was dismissed from his post as chief in November 1952.
At the annual ANC conference in December 1952, Luthuli was elected president-general by a large majority and he was subsequently banned by the Apartheid government from publicly addressing supporters.
In 1960, Luthuli was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but the South African authorities said he was banned and refused to allow him to travel to Oslo, Sweden to accept the award. It was only the following year, with cajoling from the Peace Prize committee, that the Apartheid authorities finally relented and allowed him and his wife, Nokukhanya, to travel to receive it.
Nobel Peace Prize
Luthuli was acutely aware of the global platform his speech would give him and the millions of South Africans who had to endure countless horrors and deprivations at the hands of the Apartheid government, the very reason that the government had obstinately refused him permission to travel before finally relenting.
“As you may have heard, when the South African Minister of Interior announced that subject to a number of rather unusual conditions, I would be permitted to come to Oslo for this occasion, conditions, Mr. President, made me literally to continue (to be) a bad man in the free Europe. He expressed the view that I did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for 1960.”
Unbowed and defiant, Luthuli used the opportunity to share with a global audience the reality of the situation in a country, where censorship hid the atrocities that were being committed away from the global eye.
“I recognize, however, that in my country, South Africa, the spirit of peace is subject to some of the severest tensions known to men. Yes, it is idle to speak of our country as being in peace, because there can be no peace in any part of the world where there are people oppressed. For that reason, South Africa has been, and continues to be, the focus of world attention. I therefore regard this award as a recognition of the sacrifice made by many of all races, particularly the African people, who have endured and suffered so much for so long.”
Support from Martin Luther King Jr.
With his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Luthuli achieved what he had set out to do – bring worldwide attention to the plight of the majority of the people in South Africa.
On October 22, 1962, University of Glasgow students elected Luthuli as lord rector in recognition of his “dignity and restraint,” and his adherence to non-violence saw him supported by civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., who commended Luthuli’s reputation and spoke of his admiration for Luthuli’s “dedication to the cause of freedom and dignity.”
In September 1962, King and Luthuli issued the Appeal For Action Against Apartheid organized by the American Committee on Africa, which boosted solidarity between the anti-Apartheid and civil rights movements and urged Americans to protest Apartheid through non-violent measures such as boycotts.
The Apartheid government responded to Luthuli’s increasingly global prominence by tightening the noose on his freedoms, and in 1964, imposed a banning order that was so severe that he could not even travel to the nearest town a few kilometers away from his house. John Vorster, then-minister of justice, said Luthuli’s activism advanced communism, and he cautioned him against publishing any statements, making contact with banned individuals, or addressing gatherings.
Quest for justice
Luthuli, by then a renowned anti-Apartheid activist, died on July 21, 1967. The official report stated that he was hit by a train near Gledthrow station, Groutville, KwaZulu-Natal, but his family and activists have long cast doubts on the white-minority government’s version of his death.
Its inquest found that the Nobel laureate had died in an accident after being hit by a train as he was walking by a railway line near his home in the KwaZulu-Natal province. But campaigners suspected that the regime killed him and covered it up by claiming he died of a fractured skull after being struck by a train.
In September 1967, an inquest held by the Apartheid regime at a magistrates’ court found the evidence “did not disclose any criminal culpability on the part of the South African Railways and anyone else.”
In May this year, the country’s justice minister at the time, Ronald Lamola, announced that a new inquest will be held into the mysterious death of Luthuli. In a statement, Lamola said a new inquest would “open very real wounds,” but “the interest of justice can never be bound by time.” Lamola said he acted on the recommendation of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which cited a mathematical and scientific report as saying that it was highly unlikely that Luthuli was struck by a train and died because of this.
While details of the new inquest have yet to be made public, it is understood that experts undertook an historic forensic investigation and reconstructed the crime scene, finding that there were significant suspicions around how reports of his cause of death had been captured.
Luthuli’s death – at the height of his international acclaim – did not lead to the dismantling of the Apartheid system that he had fought hard to remove. Instead, the system profited and persevered for another 23 years before his beloved ANC was unbanned in 1990 and Nelson Mandela, who would later become the country’s first democratically elected president, was released from prison.
Luthuli’s family has maintained since his death that the international renown he used as a platform to speak out against the ravages of oppression was the reason behind his death. Luthuli was bringing international attention to the cause of freedom in South Africa and stood in the way of those opposed to democracy and black majority rule. Therefore, was he stopped?
By Kubendran Chetty, a South African-based international affairs commentator.
The country’s interim leader has touted the constitutional referendum as a “historic” step toward restoring democracy.
Gabonese voters have overwhelmingly approved a new constitution that will pave the way for returning the Central African nation to civilian rule, more than a year after soldiers toppled longtime leader Ali Bongo.
The government says 91.80% of the voters said “YES” to endorse the proposed constitution, which reportedly introduces a two-term limit on the presidency in a country that had been ruled by the same family for nearly six decades.
While the current constitution allows for unlimited five-year terms, the proposed one introduces a seven-year term that can only be renewed once and, according to the Associated Press, prohibits family members from succeeding a president. Reuters also said it abolishes the position of prime minister and recognizes French as Gabon’s working language. More than 8% of Gabonese voted “No” in the referendum held on Saturday.
Gabonese Interior Minister Hermann Immongault announced the provisional results on Sunday in a statement read on state television, saying turnout was around 53.5%. The Constitutional Court will announce the final outcome, the minister added.
A group of Gabonese soldiers overthrew Ali Bongo shortly after he had been declared the winner of the disputed presidential election in the former French colony in August of last year. The coup leaders placed Bongo under house arrest in the capital, Libreville, on charges of corruption and irresponsible governance. The ousted leader had been in power for 14 years after succeeding his father, Omar Bongo Ondimba, who ruled for more than four decades before his death in 2009.
General Brice Oligui Nguema, who led the military coup and is currently Gabon’s transitional leader, has pledged to oversee “free, fair, and credible” elections in August 2025 to hand over power to civilians.
On Monday, General Nguema hailed the landslide approval of the constitution as a “victory for democracy” in the oil-rich African state and a “historic step toward the restoration of its institutions.”
Although the interim leader, a cousin of the ousted president, has not announced his intention to run for office, Reuters claims that the new draft law does not bar him from doing so, contradicting previous reports that transitional government members were ineligible to contest.
A study examining sudden deaths following COVID-19 vaccination has been published after facing nearly two years of “unprecedented” censorship.
The study, initially submitted to The Lancet and another journal but pulled from publication at the last moment, has now been peer-reviewed and made public.
The study analyses 325 autopsies of individuals who “died suddenly” shortly after receiving COVID-19 ‘vaccines’, making it the largest series of autopsy reports on this topic to date.
According to the paper, the mean time from vaccination to death was 14.3 days, with findings suggesting that 73.9% of the deaths were directly caused or significantly contributed to by the COVID-19 mRNA gene therapy (marketed to the public as a COVID ‘vaccine’), based on independent adjudication.
The authors, led by Dr. Peter McCullough and co-authored by others including Nic Hulscher, claim the study provides evidence linking COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to sudden deaths, especially within the first two weeks post-vaccination. The authors argue that this time frame is significant, as deaths occurring early after vaccination have been labelled by Big Pharma-funded medical authorities as occurring in “unvaccinated” individuals in official data.
“Unprecedented censorship”
The path to publication was fraught with obstacles. The authors allege that their work faced “unprecedented censorship” from prominent medical journals, including The Lancet and another Elsevier publication, both of which reportedly withdrew the paper at the final stages of publication. “This has never been seen in scientific publishing before,” said one of the authors, reflecting on the process.
Implications of the findings
The study’s findings, which assert a causal link between mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and sudden deaths, have reignited debates over vaccine safety. Proponents of the study claim it fills a critical gap in understanding the short- and long-term effects of the COVID jab, particularly among individuals who experienced adverse outcomes.
Dr. McCullough, a vocal critic of mRNA vaccines, expressed gratitude for the persistence and hard work of the team involved. “This is a monumental achievement in the face of historically unprecedented scientific censorship,” he stated on social media, adding that the paper “proves why deaths were hidden” in the early stages of vaccine rollout.
BREAKING NEWS: Most CENSORED paper on EARTH – The Lancet-Censored “SUDDEN DEATH” COVID-19 Vaccine Autopsy Paper has been peer reviewed an published!!
It has been two years now, with unprecedented censorship from Lancet and another Elsevier Journal which pulled this paper at the… pic.twitter.com/ELI5HEtXln
