Allison Rudd

An Invercargill City Council hearings panel has called for more information before making a decision on whether two hospital buildings from the 1930s should be demolished.

Experience versus new blood - that is the choice facing Invercargill voters this year.

Auckland to Bluff Ocean Race organiser Murray Francis says it was ''personally crushing'' to have to postpone next year's inaugural race.

He has been thinking about the idea for more than a decade, but this is the year Tuturau, Southland sheep farmer Johnny Perkins is finally realising his dream to do something for breast cancer research.

Invercargill city councillors adopted an ambitious and expensive CBD revitalisation master plan this week, but not without impassioned views from both sides of the debate and members of the public.

Invercargill's most recognisable building is under threat of demolition.

There was more to Ernest Godward than a hairpin. But that was pretty interesting too, Allison Rudd reports.

By November, Southern Discoveries' $4 million high-speed catamaran Spirit of Queenstown will be cruising the relatively calm waters of Lake Wakatipu.

The signing of an electricity deal with Meridian Energy and a one-off injection of $30 million from the Government guarantee the future of the Tiwai Point aluminum smelter for at least two and a-half years and hopefully beyond, the chairman of the company which operates the plant says.

The new general manager of the troubled Tiwai Point aluminium smelter admits returning the plant to financial viability will be a challenge.

In the next 12 months, Gerry Forde hopes to help rural Southland communities raise at least $500,000 for worthy local projects, and that is on top of the $120,000 he has help raise in the past 12 months.

For the past eight years, twins Karisa and Kaley Webster (14) have shared a passion for gymnastics.

The owner of the Queenstown firm which built the Southern Region Registered Master Builders 2013 House of the Year says even though he thought the house was ''fantastic'', he was not sure how it would be viewed by the judges.

A middle-aged man was shaken but unhurt when the ute he was driving was struck by a train on the southern outskirts of Invercargill yesterday.

Oysters will not be in season when Invercargill holds its first wild food festival in February, but organisers are hoping for other ''strange and wonderful'' locally sourced delicacies.