Shawn McAvinue

Pebbles and Jaffas rattling in boxes are now nothing more than a memory. And the machine that once filled the cardboard packets has been consigned to the scrapyard.

The final movie screening at Dunedin's Hoyts cinema tonight is the same movie that screened when the cinema opened 20 years ago.

Proud parents queued in the cold yesterday for ''hot commodity'' tickets to see their children perform in Dunedin.

A Dunedin pupil's science exhibit testing a Leonardo da Vinci theory about trees branched out to beat 321 other budding Otago scientists.

The community will be able to share their ideas on the St Clair sea wall with Dunedin City Council consultants in the next $130,000 stage of the project, infrastructure and networks general manager Tony Avery says.

An Auckland family - two adults and four children - had to wade back in a rising tide while returning from a walk to Taieri Island last night.

Dunedin was the final South Island stop for a First Union national tour to discuss poverty, the living wage and employment law change.

Warrington mountaineer Paul Hersey has attended the funerals of many of his mountaineering mates but he will continue to climb.

The Tindall Foundation has granted $22,500 to help Otago families and communities.

Responsive landlords of cosy Dunedin flats were celebrated and an indifferent property manager of a rat-infested student abode was denounced at the Best and Worst Landlord Awards yesterday.

A Brighton dairy owner has returned the 2degrees sim card stock to signal her disappointment at the way the telecommunications company has treated the seaside community.

A satay restaurant empire was built from a small stall that opened in the Octagon 25 years ago.

Six-year-old Phoebe Miles had a perfectly sweet day in Dunedin yesterday.

A "bedraggled'' aviary at Otago SPCA in Dunedin will be replaced with a new purpose-built facility after a $5000 donation from Delta yesterday.

Friendly fire was exchanged in Dunedin last night at the Hiroshima Day debate, which discussed whether New Zealand was safer being nuclear-free and out of the Anzus Treaty.

A stolen laptop and backup computer hard-drive belonging to a Dunedin writer has been recovered and two ''scumbags'' charged but the life story of the Dunedin woman with a degenerative disease was deleted - but could still be recovered.