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A now-defunct US government program developed a proposal to tunnel through the Moon using nuclear weapons in a search for "lightweight metals", new documents reveal.

The papers were obtained from the Department of Defence's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) by VICE, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The secretive program ran from 2007 to 2012 and spent millions on researching experimental technologies such as invisibility cloaks, traversable wormholes, warp drives, and anti-gravity devices.

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Buried among 1600 pages of reports, proposals, contracts and meeting notes was a explosive plan to mine the moon.

In the report on "negative mass propulsion," authors suggested extremely lightweight metals may be found inside the heart of the celestial body.

They claimed these may be "100,000 times lighter than steel, but still (have) the strength of steel".

To reach the centre, the authors proposed blasting a tunnel through the lunar crust and mantle using thermonuclear explosives.

The existence of the AATIP was first revealed by the New York Times in 2017 upon director Luis Elizondo's resignation.

Later that year the former Pentagon official went public about reports of UFOs.

While AATIP's moon proposal was not greenlit, space agency NASA is moving forward with plans to mine the space rock.

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It's believed "the Moon holds hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resources".

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced on Twitter in 2020 the agency "is buying lunar soil from a commercial provider".

"It's time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources," he wrote.

He expanded on this in a blog post, explaining all commercial proposals and operations will comply with the Outer Space Treaty created in 1967.

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"We are putting our policies into practice to fuel a new era of exploration and discovery that will benefit all of humanity," Mr Bridenstine said.

The tweet marked one giant leap for the space agency's Artemis missions, which plans to return humans to the Moon by by 2025.

With Artemis, NASA will land the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon, and seek to set up a permanent base there.

This is the first time humankind will return to the Moon since the Apollo missions.

Billionaire hedge fund investor Bill Ackman has told shareholders he has chosen to sell his fund's investment in Netflix despite losing almost $600 million in three months.

Netflix's stock has plummeted in recent days after an earnings report revealed 200,000 subscribers had left the streaming giant, marking the first-time subscriber numbers fell in more than a decade.

Mr Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management became one of Netflix's largest shareholders in late January this year. Based off market disclosure at the time – and Netflix's current stock price – it is estimated that Pershing Square lost around $US430 million ($596 million) on the deal.

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In a letter to shareholders, Mr Ackman said while the hedge fund has "a high regard" for Netflix's management they can no longer confidently predict the company will experience long-term growth.

"Yesterday, in response to continued disappointing customer subscriber growth, Netflix announced that it would modify its subscription-only model to be more aggressive in going after non-paying customers, and to incorporate advertising, an approach that management estimates would take 'one to two years' to implement," Mr Ackman said.

"While we believe these business model changes are sensible, it is extremely difficult to predict their impact on the company's long-term subscriber growth, future revenues, operating margins, and capital intensity."

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https://twitter.com/billackman/status/1486460691519361024

Mr Ackman said the fund "would not be surprised" to see Netflix become more successful, but had learnt with other investments that acting quickly was key.

"One of our learnings from past mistakes is to act promptly when we discover new information about an investment that is inconsistent with our original thesis. That is why we did so here," he wrote.

"While Netflix's business is fundamentally simple to understand, in light of recent events, we have lost confidence in our ability to predict the company's future prospects with a sufficient degree of certainty.

"Based on management's track record, we would not be surprised to see Netflix continue to be a highly successful company and an excellent investment from its current market value."

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Last week Netflix's stock dropped 30 per cent when the market opened on Wednesday, instantly wiping more than $60.54 billion off the value of the company.

Netflix said it shed 200,000 subscribers in the first three months of the year, when it had been expecting to add 2.5 million.

The streaming giant, whose stock had already dropped more than 40 per cent this year-to-date, blamed the attrition on increased competition for viewers and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Netflix said its decision to pull out of Russia cost the company 700,000 subscribers.

Nine, the publisher of this website, also owns streaming service Stan.

A Ukrainian man has told how his wife, three-month old baby and  mother-in-law were all killed in a Russian missile strike.

Yuriy Glodan had just stepped out of his Odesa apartment to get something from the shops when the devastating explosion ripped through his family's home, the BBC reports.

Mr Glodan raced back to his apartment where he found the body of his wife, Valeria, and her mother.

The body of his baby daughter, Kira, was discovered later.

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The instant deaths of three generations in one strike has outraged Ukraine, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy mentioning Kira in an emotional nightly address.

"How did she threaten Russia? It seems that killing children is just a new national idea of the Russian Federation," Mr Zelenskyy said.

Heartbroken, Mr Glodan returned to his unit on Sunday to gather what was left of his family's belongings.

"If I leave things in the flat, it will become garbage and people will throw it away," he told the BBC. "I want to keep it for my memories."

Mr Glodan said his wife was the love of his life.

"She could find joy in everything. Odesa was her favourite city. She worked in PR and she could communicate with a lot of people, understand them. I admired what a good writer she was," he said.

"She was a great mother, friend, with all the best qualities. It will be impossible for me to find somebody else like Valeria. She was perfect. Such a person could be given to you only once in a life and it's a gift from God."

Mr Glodan said he was struggling to accept his new reality after being so happy after the birth of his daughter.

"It's very hard for me to realise now that my daughter and wife are no longer here. 

"All my world was destroyed yesterday by a Russian missile."

Mr Glodan said he wanted to spread the message across the world about what Russia was doing.

"What is happening is a grief for my family, for our city, for Ukraine, it's a grief for the whole civilisation. I hope our story helps to stop this war."

Motorists travelling home from long weekends in and out of Northland and Auckland are being told to expect heavy traffic this afternoon. The NZ Transport Agency, Waka Kotahi, said people returning from Northland should expect heavy…