Features

With the best will in the world, there really are only 21 blokes who deserve to be All Blacks this year, writes Hamish Bidwell.

“In Syria, my music gave me... light in the end of the darkness and stop the war in my mind. War about ‘how I should carry water? How I should find food? How I can be free? ... It makes me busy with something positive. Audio

The tobacco giant tried to gain access to an Auckland poverty group as well as a South Auckland DHB in a bid to get its new tobacco products marketed to poor people, writes Guyon Espiner.

After 15 live concerts recorded in 10 days in sunny Nelson we reach the Grand Finale of the 2019 Adam Chamber Music Festival.

Analysis - As the curtains draw to a close for this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, how has this year's crop of Kiwi comics fared in the Scottish capital, Harry Lock asks.

This first of four panel discussions to mark the Tuia 250 commemorations of first contact between European and Māori. Alex Perrottet talks with Dr Wayne Ngata and Mai Chen about race, colonisation, and identity. Audio

Analysis - All sports have their highs and lows and for two riders from Wellington, the unforgiving Isle of Man TT circuit showed on Sunday that in motorsport, the opposite of triumph is tragedy in the truest sense, writes Hugh Barlow.

Martin Rummel, head of the School of Music at the University of Auckland, has resigned.

Nauru is moving ahead with its plans to rehabilitate land that was wrecked by years of phosphate mining.

The World Health Organisation says 2019 has been worse than usual for dengue fever in the Pacific.

A State of Emergency put in place by the Vanuatu government to contain and eradicate the invasive coconut rhinoceros beetle has been extended for another 60 days.

A study is being launched in French Polynesia on the consumption and impact of methamphetamine.

The grammar of being an MP is harder than you might think. MPs in Parliament choose their words with care, and not only because they can't call each other liars or cheats. And it just got more complicated. Audio

Conservation efforts in the Cook Islands over the last 30 years have brought one of the nation's most iconic birds - the kakerori - back from the brink of extinction. Audio

The Detail - Global angst about the burning of the Amazon may finally have sparked a reaction from the government that’s accused of fanning the flames. Audio

Ayham al-Ahmad became famous after playing his piano in the rubble of Syria's Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus. Audio

Mediawatch - The worst of Alan Jones’s violent verbiage about Jacinda Ardern hit headlines this week. Will the outcry run the belligerent Australian broadcaster’s career off the rails? Audio

Songs of lost love, frustration, ignorance and oxygen particles are among some excellent new songs for you to try out this week. Video, Audio

Catherine van der Meulen grew up in fashion; her father founded Supre in Australia. Now based in Seddon, Marlborough she says the fast fashion industry has no place in the 21^st Century. Audio

A West Papuan journalist and editor has complained to the United Nations about internet being cut in Papua by Indonesia's government.

A large raft of pumice is floating in the Pacific after an underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga earlier this month.

Taiwan's Foreign Minister, Joseph Wu, has hit out Chinese investment in the Pacific, describing it as a "trap". Audio

Ebeye Island in the Marshall Islands is facing an extended period of power outages after one of two rental generator units powering the island went down last week, leaving the power utility company without adequate generating capacity.

More needs to be done to help veterans of the Bougainville civil war, the Papua New Guinea head of NGO Conciliation Resources, Amie Kirkham, says. Audio