A weekly wrap-up of news, issues and current affairs from the Pacific. The programme is broadcast nationwide every Saturday evening on Radio New Zealand National and is produced by the newsroom of Radio New Zealand International. The following rundown is supplied from the broadcaster’s news system:
1. The first refugee determinations for Australia's asylum seekers being held on Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island have been handed down this week.
2. Samoa's Ministry of Health says four children have died and 19 have been left seriously ill this year due to malnutrition following diarrhoeal illnesses.
3. Our correspondent in Solomon Islands [i.e. Dorothy Wickham] says while there is praise for police after last weekend's riots, the incidents raise questions about the numbers of disaffected, often unemployed youth in the capital Honiara.
4. A nickel expert says questions need to be asked about Vale's risk management procedures, workers' behaviour and the design of its processing plant in New Caledonia to find out why spills keep happening there.
5. NGOs [i.e. non-governmental organizations] in Fiji say their calls to remove an Electoral Decree provision which restricts what work they can do have so far been ignored.
6. A Nauru MP [i.e. Roland Kun], one of three suspended by the island's Government, has been settling his family in New Zealand after his wife's Nauru visa was withdrawn.
7. A man-made climate resilient harbour, believed to be the world's first, has been constructed at Mangaia Island in the Cook Islands.
8. Tonga rugby coach Mana Otai says the global reaction to 18-year-old sensation Taniela Tupou came as no surprise to him, with foreign scouts already on the lookout for the next schoolboy star.