As Parliament braces for another protest the legacy of the last has begun to sprout, with a slightly more green-fingered political message. Protesters were seen during the 23-day occupation planting a range of produce, but as the…

The man who died after being hit by a car on SH14 at Tangiteroria yesterday has now been named.He was Derek Morgan, aged 60, from Dargaville. It appeared he was crossing the road when he was struck by a car travelling east towards…

Test your brains with the Herald’s afternoon quiz. Be sure to check back on nzherald.co.nz for the morning quiz tomorrow. To challenge yourself with more quizzes, CLICK HERE.

More than 200 flights in and out of Wellington have been cancelled since Tuesday due to a lingering fog. More than 60 flights were cancelled today alone. The fog finally burnt off this afternoon and planes were able to take off…

Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson has paid tribute to his uncle the late Moana Jackson, just days after the Labour Minister’s mum Dame June Jackson died.Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has also addressed the highly-respected…

Police are no longer seeking to seize a matte black Mercedes Benz G-Wagon vehicle thought to be linked to the largest ever methamphetamine bust at New Zealand’s border. Earlier in the week, police appealed to public to help them…

Police have released a picture of a man they want to speak to in connection with a shooting at a suburban Auckland carpark earlier this month that left seven people injured. They are seeking the public’s help to identify him as…

The head of a British spy agency visiting Australia has said some Russian soldiers in Ukraine have refused to carry out orders and Vladimir Putin has seriously misjudged the conflict.

Speaking at the Australian National University in Canberra, Sir Jeremy Fleming, director of GCHQ, the UK's intelligence listening centre, said: "It increasingly looks like Putin has massively misjudged the situation.

"It's clear he misjudged the resistance of the Ukrainian people".

READ MORE: Trump's brazen Putin request

Sir Jeremy said Mr Putin had overestimated the abilities of the Russian military to secure a rapid victory.

"We've seen Russian soldiers – short of weapons and morale – refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft," he said.

Ukrainian military sources claimed early on in the war, which began on February 24, that a Russian ship in the Black Sea destroyed an aircraft in "friendly fire", though it was not confirmed by Russia.

It was unclear whether this was one of the incidents highlighted by Sir Jeremy.

Sir Jeremy also said Mr Putin was also hampered by the reluctance of senior Kremlin advisers to tell him the truth about Russia's staggering military campaign.

"Even though we believe Putin's advisers are afraid to tell him the truth, what's going on and the extent of these misjudgments must be crystal clear to the regime," he said.

Sir Jeremy said British intelligence experts have seen "sustained intent from Russia to disrupt Ukrainian government and military systems" and has seen indicators suggesting Russia's cyber actors are looking for targets in countries that oppose the Kremlin's actions.

READ MORE: Dangerous weather system tracks south as frustrations grow in northern NSW

He said it is "clear" that Russia is using mercenaries and foreign fighters to support its forces — including the Wagner group.

"The group works as a shadow branch of the Russian military, providing implausible deniability for riskier operations," Sir Jeremy said, adding that Wagner is now prepared to send large number of personnel into Ukraine to fight on the Russian side.

"They are looking at relocating forces from other conflicts and recruiting new fighters to bolster numbers," he said.

"These soldiers are likely to be used as cannon fodder to try to limit Russian military losses."

READ MORE: Tears, stories and laughs flow for Shane Warne as Australia says farewell

On the position of China in the Ukraine conflict, Sir Jeremy said there are risks for Russia and China associated with the two countries aligning too closely.

"Russia understands that long term, China will become increasingly strong militarily and economically. Some of their interests conflict; Russia could be squeezed out of the equation," he said.

– Reported with CNN

Wriggling in a clear plastic box the six tiny, striped eastern brown snakes were eager to return to the wild.

New South Wales snake catcher Sean Cade, Owner of Australian Snake Catchers, filmed the moment the reptiles returned to their natural habit yesterday.

Mr Cade became an unwitting surrogate mother to the second most deadly snake in Australia after "twenty-three perfect eggs" were laid in his bag at the beginning of the year.

And with snake season coming to an end an influx of young reptiles, from browns to red-bellied black snakes, are now coming forward.

READ MORE: Trump's brazen Putin request

Mr Cade said yesterday's release was a very careful one, as baby eastern browns are as deadly as their adult counterparts.

An untreated eastern brown snake bite can kill in under half an hour.

"Venom is venom — no matter if the snake is 20 centimetres or six foot," he told 9News.

"It's the volume that causes issues with humans.

"In general, adults can regulate their venom and deliver a dry bite as a warning, but a baby, because they're more frightened, they can deliver several drops.

"Luckily, I don't get bitten."

READ MORE: Dangerous weather system tracks south as frustrations grow in northern NSW

Mr Cade said as he released his young wards he struggled to spot them due to the black stripes across their back.

"Eastern brown snakes, when they're born, they traditionally have black banding every centimetre to help with camouflaging," he said, explaining residents often misidentify young eastern brown snakes.

"We get a lot of calls for tiger snakes that turn out to be young eastern brown snakes.

"Tigers are generally found in cooler climates.

"But it's great to know that camouflaging works."

READ MORE: Tears, stories and laughs flow for Shane Warne

Mr Cade said watching them set off into the bush was one of the best moments of his job after the long process of incubating them and watching them hatch in February.

"The best part of my job is releasing stuff back to their natural environment, it's not catching them," he said.

"Because all of these snakes are losing their habits, displaced and injured, if I can put six more back into the environment they play an important part in the ecosystem."

Mr Cade held onto the eggs as wet weather battered the east coast for months on end.

He waited for the baby snakes to do their first shedding before releasing them.

"I know they've eaten, I know they shed the skin — it's an indicator they've grown," he said.

"They're quite vulnerable in the first one or two weeks.

"It gives them the best chance of survival."

Astronomers have discovered the farthest star yet, a super-hot, super-bright giant that formed nearly 13 billion years ago at the dawn of the cosmos.

But this luminous blue star is long gone, so massive that it almost certainly exploded into bits just a few million years after emerging.

Its swift demise makes it all the more incredible that an international team spotted it with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

It takes eons for light emitted from distant stars to reach us.

READ MORE: Ice volcanoes on Pluto could contain life, study suggests

“We’re seeing the star as it was about 12.8 billion years ago, which puts it about 900 million years after the Big Bang,” said astronomer Brian Welch, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the study appearing in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

“We definitely just got lucky.”

He nicknamed it Earendel, an Old English name which means morning star or rising light — “a fitting name for a star that we have observed in a time often referred to as Cosmic Dawn”.

The previous record-holder, Icarus, also a blue supergiant star spotted by Hubble, formed 9.4 billion years ago. That’s more than four billion years after the Big Bang.

In both instances, astronomers used a technique known as gravitational lensing to magnify the minuscule starlight. Gravity from clusters of galaxies closer to us — in the foreground — serve as a lens to magnify smaller objects in the background. If not for that, Icarus and Earendel would not have been discernible given their vast distances.

While Hubble has spied galaxies as far away as 300 million to 400 million years of the universe-forming Big Bang, their individual stars are impossible to pick out.

“Usually they’re all smooshed together … But here, nature has given us this one star — highly, highly magnified, magnified by factors of thousands — so that we can study it,” said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who took part in the study.

“It’s such a gift really from the universe.”

Vinicius Placco of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRlab in Tucson, Arizona, described the findings as “amazing work.” He was not involved in the study.

READ MORE: Ancient pool may have been way to navigate the stars

Placco said based on the Hubble data, Earendel may well have been among the first generation of stars born after the Big Bang.

Future observations by the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope should provide more details, he said, and “provide us with another piece of this cosmic puzzle that is the evolution of our universe”.

Current data indicate Earendel was more than 50 times the size of our sun and an estimated one million times brighter, outsizing Icarus.

Earendel’s small, yet-to-mature home galaxy looked nothing like the pretty spiral galaxies photographed elsewhere by Hubble, according to Welch, but rather “kind of an awkward-looking, clumpy object.”

Unlike Earendel, he said, this galaxy probably has survived, although in a different form after merging with other galaxies.

“It's like a little snapshot in amber of the past,” Rigby said.

Earendel may have been the prominent star in a two-star, or binary, system, or even a triple- or quadruple-star system, Welch said. There’s a slight chance it could be a black hole, although the observations gathered in 2016 and 2019 suggest otherwise, he noted.

Regardless of its company, the star lasted barely a few million years before exploding as a supernova that went unobserved as most do, Welch said. The most distant supernova seen by astronomers to date goes back 12 billion years.

The Webb telescope — 100 times more powerful than Hubble — should help clarify how massive and hot the star really is, and reveal more about its parent galaxy.

By studying stars, Rigby said: “We are literally understanding where we came from because we’re made up of some of that stardust.”