K Road comes to Wellington

Along with Queen St and Ponsonby Rd, Karangahape Rd is one of the few stretches of Auckland that non-Aucklanders have explored or heard of. Most people know it today for its bustling shops, cafes, clubs and decades-long reputation as a red-light district and magnet for drag queens and the gay community

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Top Gear’s new season opener features NZ

Top Gear’s adventures in New Zealand feature when the popular car show returns to British screens on Sunday (local time) for its 20th series. “The motoring magazine returns with the action kicking off in New Zealand, as Jeremy Clarkson and James May race a car against a boat in a nail-biting battle up the beautiful coastline to the very tip of the North Island,” BBC promotional material says

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Judge’s facts become work of blockbusting fiction

A district court judge who lectures on international art crime has found his work in the most unexpected place – the pages of Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster. Hamilton-based Judge Arthur Tompkins, who each New Zealand winter teaches a course on art crime during war in a small town north of Rome, was stunned to find The Da Vinci Code author had lifted a passage of his writing for use in his latest New York Times bestseller, Inferno.

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Girls Gone Wild’s Francis guilty of assault

Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis has been found guilty of misdemeanor counts of assault and false imprisonment stemming from a dispute with three women after a night out at a Hollywood club in 2011. Los Angeles City Attorney Carmen Trutanich said in a statement that after a two-week trial, a jury convicted the 40-year-old Francis of three counts of false imprisonment, one count of assault causing great bodily injury and one count of dissuading a witness.

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The Wedding Day Massacre: An Ominous Afghan Tragedy

It was past midnight when the insurgents crossed into Afghanistan’s Dur Baba district on the border with Pakistan and began their descent. In the valley below, relatives of the district governor, Hamisha Gul, a tall, handsome man in his late 40s, had gathered at his compound to celebrate the impending marriage of his cousin Nawshir.

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