Owners of a $NZ33.5 million ($31 million) lucky Lotto ticket sold in New Zealand hid it in a sock drawer while they processed the life-changing win.

The Christchurch couple, who wished to remain anonymous, sat on their winning ticket for more than a week before coming forward to claim their prize, a Lotto NZ spokesperson said.

The "occasional Lotto players" bought a Powerball Dip the week before the multi-million-dollar draw from Merivale Mall's Fresh Choice Lotto outlet.

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The woman said she had been busy doing chores on the Wednesday and hadn't checked the ticket until later in the night.

"I had been busy doing a few things, and then I thought I may as well check my ticket before I went to bed. I looked the numbers up online and started checking each line of the ticket," she said.

"The winning line was right at the bottom, and the numbers just sort of jumped out at me – all of them.

"I couldn't breathe at first – I was almost hyperventilating."

Unable to believe they might have won big, she woke up her husband to check the numbers because they were "dancing on the paper," she said.

Her husband confirmed it was "very real".

"It was hard to get back to sleep after that."

In no rush to claim their life-changing millions, she said the ticket was kept hidden in a sock drawer, but it was a "nerve-racking" week as she worried about burning the house down with the ticket inside.

"I kept thinking, 'Goodness, I better make sure the iron is turned off' every time I went out."

The couple took their time to claim their prize because, she said, "we wanted to keep things normal while we thought about our next steps".

"I'd keep things cool during the day but then come home and cry – tears of happiness, of course, but it was also a lot to take in."

The multi-million-dollar windfall would help their family "for generations to come," the man said.

"It is also enough for us to help community causes we care about over the long term and make a lasting difference – and that is what we are focused on.

"Winning this is definitely a defining moment of our lives."

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Lotto NZ would help guide new multi-millionaires after the life-changing sum was paid in full to their account, Lotto NZ spokesperson Lucy Fullarton said.

"For big wins like this one in Christchurch, our winners experience team gets in touch as soon as the winner claims their prize, so they have the support and guidance they need.

"We meet with them as soon as possible to talk through what they need to think about – including how to go about finding financial advice and the importance of setting priorities.

"We also put our big winners in touch with a private banker at their bank, who can help them manage the money in the immediate term."

Financial adviser Nick Crawford, author of Sudden Money and How to Handle It, said people who come into a lot of money unexpectedly should in the short term invest in a term deposit while they "catch their breath".

ASB's term investment calculator suggests around $9 million invested for six months could earn an average income of about $29,692 per month with an interest rate of 5.65 per cent.

The draw was the largest Lotto win of the year, eclipsing the $21.8 million won by a ticket bought in Quay Street, Auckland, on January 18.

This article originally appeared on Stuff and is republished here with permission.

A Sydney-based private detective agency was contacted from the US with a unique request.

The caller represented the estate of a dead author – a biographer who left $500,000 behind in publishing royalties when they passed.

The catch? The only person named in their lucrative will was a long-lost distant relative, believed to be living in rural Australia.

With little to go off, the detectives had to draw on their decades of police experience to track down the man on the rural NSW-Victoria border.

Finding their target in the bush "with kangaroos for neighbours," the detectives turned up at his house out of the blue, telling him about his inheritance worth over $500,000.

"He freaked out. He thought he was getting one of those Nigerian prince letters," Danny Mikati, a manager at Precision Integrity Services, told 9news.com.au.

It sounded too good to be true.

"We knew it was going to have to be someone in person, saying 'here's a licence, we're registered in Australia, we're not a scam'."

They told the bewildered man to "look us up, and speak to the US firm that is handling it," Mikati said.

"We showed them all the evidence, and they knew who the person was." 

After convincing their target that they weren't scammers, the private detectives were able to connect him directly to the US group to transfer over the fortune.

It was his lucky day, but just another work day for the detectives at Precision Integrity Services, who told 9news.com.au all about the often murky world of private investigations.

Going private after decades on the force

Before starting the business with his partner Anthony Macklin, Mikati was one of Sydney's most experienced detectives with NSW Police.

He worked counter-terrorism, arson, fraud and money laundering, taking on high-profile cases like the Cronulla riots and the Lindt-Café siege over his 17-year career.

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But the nature of investigations and the challenges of shift work had made life in the force difficult to sustain, he said.

However, walking away from the police didn't mean he had to waste the skills he'd gained there, with the work he's doing in private investigations eerily echoing his former life.

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A man and a 14-year-old boy have been charged by federal police after the teenager was filmed riding a baggage carousel into a restricted area at Canberra Airport.

The pair were stopped by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) yesterday when they went to board their flight home to Queensland.

Canberra Airport Group had contacted police about the teenager allegedly riding the baggage carousel into a secure area on July 2.

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CCTV footage from the airport appears to show two men filming the boy as he climbed onto the carousel and rode it out of view.

Police seized a phone which allegedly contained the footage of the incident when they stopped the 58-year-old man and the teenager yesterday.

Detective Acting Inspector Jon Horrocks has said the AFP has zero tolerance for poor behaviour at airports.

"Airport security is no joke and restrictions exist to ensure the safety and security of the travelling public and workers," he said.

"Canberra Airport Group, the AFP and industry partners take any security breaches at airports seriously and people can be prosecuted if they commit a criminal offence."

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The man and teenager were charged with entering a security restricted area at a designated airport through access control points, contrary to regulation 3.16B of the Aviation Transport Security Regulations 2005.

The man is due to appear before ACT Magistrates Court in October.

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A Harvard professor believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua New Guinea in 2014.

Avi Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis.

The US Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999 per cent, that the material came from another solar system.

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The government gave Loeb a 10km radius of where it may have landed.

"That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It's a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down," Loeb said.

"We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly."

Their calculations allowed them to chart the potential path of the meteor.

Those calculations happened to carve a path right through the same projected 10km range that came from the US government.

Loeb and his crew took a boat called the Silver Star out to the area.

The ship took numerous passes along and around the meteor's projected path.

Researchers combed the ocean floor by attaching a sled full of magnets to their boat.

"We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," Loeb explained.

"They have colours of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."

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An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84 per cent iron, 8 per cent silicon, 4 per cent magnesium, and 2 per cent titanium, plus trace elements.

They are sub-millimetre in size.

The crew found 50 of them in total.

"It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," Loeb added.

"We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60km per second, faster than 95 per cent of all stars in the vicinity of the sun.

"The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95 per cent of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilisation or some technological gadget."

He likens the situation to any of the Voyager spacecrafts launched by NASA.

"They will exit the solar system in 10,000 years. Just imagine them colliding with another planet far away a billion years from now. They would appear as a meteor of a composition moving faster than usual," Loeb explained.

The research and analysis is just beginning at Harvard.

Loeb is trying to understand if the spherules are artificial or natural.

If they are natural, it will give the researchers insight into what materials may exist outside of our solar system. If it is artificial, the questions really begin.

"It will take us tens of thousands of years to exit our solar system with our current spacecraft to another star. This material spent that time arriving to us, but it's already here," Loeb said.

"We just need to check our backyard to see if we have packages from an interstellar Amazon that takes billions of years for the travel."

He still has more debris to research, and hours of unwatched footage from the camera attached to their sled.

He believes there is a chance the spherules could be small breadcrumbs to a bigger find.

"They also help us pinpoint any big piece of the meteor we could find in a future expedition," Loeb said.

"We hope to find a big piece of this object that survived the impact because then we can tell if it's a rock or technological gadget."

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Two adjacent medical clinics in Melbourne's east were forced to close after building waste containing asbestos was dumped in their driveway.

More than 60 patients had to be turned away yesterday after the doctors arrived to work to find hazardous material in the driveway of the Hughesdale clinics.

CCTV footage then revealed three men with a ute dumped the material about 5pm on Saturday.

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Doctors decided not to see patients, deeming the area too unsafe to attend.

Specialist GP Billy Stoupas told 9News the incident was "a low life act".

"I know tips are expensive but please, don't drop asbestos at a doctor's surgery. Sick people planning to come to the doctor are exposed," he said.

The owners of the clinics paid more than $2500 to have the waste safely disposed of.

They told 9News they did not know why they had been targeted.

Police are investigating and are appealing for anyone who recognises the three men in the footage to come forward.

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A 20-year-old P-plater has been charged after a 68-year-old woman was allegedly hit by a car and thrown into the path of another vehicle which killed her north of Sydney.

Police believe the woman, who witnesses say had just got off a bus, was hit by a car being driven south on Ocean Beach Road at Woy Woy, on New South Wales' Central Coast, about 7.50pm last night.

The first driver allegedly did not stop.

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The force of that impact pushed the woman onto the road, where she was hit by a second car, a Kia Cerato.

The woman was trapped under the second car, and that driver, a man in his 60s, stopped to help.

Neighbours as well as paramedics and police tried to save the woman but she died at the scene.

Her grocery bags were scattered down the road.

The second driver was taken to Gosford Hospital for mandatory testing.

Police trying to find the driver of the first car searched a Central Coast property and seized a Volkswagen, which will undergo forensic examination.

A 20-year-old man at the home was later arrested and charged with fail to stop and assist after vehicle impact causing death.

He was granted conditional bail to appear at Gosford Local Court on Wednesday 19 July 2023.

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A woman walking her dog along a popular track in Sydney's south has been rescued by helicopter after being attacked by two Irish Wolfhounds.

The 34-year-old woman ran into neck-deep mud by the Georges River to try and escape from the animals.

She broke her arm, needs surgery on her hand and had been bitten on the face, neck and legs.

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Police had to use pepper spray to scare off the dogs before the rescue mission could begin in Lugarno in Sydney's south.

Her Jack Russell, which was also mauled, was rushed to a nearby vet.

Two witnesses said they heard the woman's screams and called for help.

They directed emergency services over the phone to the stranded and almost submerged victim.

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"Every time she moved the dogs would come closer, she was trying to push them. We could see them attacking her," Ed said.

Police pepper sprayed the dogs and they finally ran away.

The police helicopter was called in to get the woman out as the tide started to rise.

The victim was told by NSW Fire and Rescue to take off her trousers and shoes to help her wriggle free from the thick mud.

One of the police officers also then also became trapped in the mud for 15 minutes.

Police say the two dogs responsible for the attack were being looked after by a friend of the owners who says they jumped the back fence and then were on the loose.

They're now impounded as police try to find the owner.

"There is liability for the owner of dogs, certainly dogs that go out and attack each other and that will form part of the investigation," Paul Callaghan from NSW Police said.

The woman is recovering in hospital.

Opinion: The party is about climate change, fixing poverty, restoring Māori rights.

The backlog of repairs is expected to take up to a decade to clear.

The trial is expected to run for four months.