A Rotorua judge says a family of German tourists are lucky to be alive after the car a Chinese tourist was driving crashed into them on State Highway 5.
A South Korean tourist was dressed in dark clothing and was probably distracted by stargazing when he was hit and killed by a car on an unlit rural Queenstown road last year, a coroner has found.
The Government has been accused of failing to do enough to prevent road crashes involving tourists, following the sentencing of a man who killed his mother and seriously injured his sister after he fell asleep at the wheel.
The police officers that apprehended an armed gunman at Waitakere Hospital have been applauded for their "extreme bravery".
The officers were at the hospital dealing with an unrelated matter when the alleged offender turned up at about 3pm this afternoon and fired a shotgun blast at a parked police car.
Fire crews in the South Island have been kept busy overnight, responding to a scrub fire in the hills of West Otago and Roxburgh and a suspicious blaze in Christchurch's Red Zone.
A Christchurch father wrongly accused of being a paedophile died from horrific burn injuries after having petrol poured over him and being set alight by two "vigilantes", a court heard today.