The church was divided over the use of millions of dollars in donations.

At its peak, about 20,000 Auckland homes were without electricity.

One desperate owner stood by himself in the dark trying to stop a creek from flooding.

A Whakatāne dairy farm owner has been fined $48, 750 for effluent discharge.

He thought it was a small puddle. Then his engine died.

A boy living with autism has been reunited with his family after he went missing in the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria.

Parsa, aged 6 is non-verbal. He was at a family Easter gathering at the play space on Olinda Monbulk Road when he wandered off at 4pm.

Friends and family searched frantically for him however, he could not be found, so they reported him as missing to Victoria Police.

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A large-scale search operation was launched immediately to locate him.

The search had been called off the day when a local 18-year-old boy heard about the missing child.

He decided to hop onto his mountain bike and help look for the 6-year-old.

The teenager was riding along a trail when he came across Parsa at 8.15pm.

Victoria Police said the boy "looked sleep deprived" but was in otherwise good health.

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"Searches for lost children with autism can be particularly challenging as often they are unable to communicate with searchers," Knox Acting Senior Sergeant Mel Gostimir said.

"After speaking with Parsa's family, our members found out that his favourite song was Hickory Dickory Dock and a song about learning the alphabet so they began playing that on their phones and through the PA systems on their police cars.

"We are so grateful for the support from the local volunteer services and community members who attended to assist in the search."

He has since been reunited with his family.

Police are trying to piece together the final moments of a Queensland woman before her body was found in a river.

Crystal Beale was found in the Brisbane River by a member of the public at 5.40am on February 22.

Police have established a timeline in the few hours leading up to her suspected murder.

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At 8.30pm on February 21, Beale left a family dinner in Sunnybank in a car with her son and former partner to an address in Annerley.

Beale and her partner then continued travelling to Ryan Street in West End.

Her former partner was the last person to see her alive when she exited the car at 9.30pm on Ryan Street.

The next day her body was found in the Brisbane River.

One of her shoes was found in bushes on Ryan Street, with several other personal items found at Orleigh Park, near the river.

Homicide investigators do not know how she ended up there, 1km away from her last known location.

Detectives have combed through 1000 hours of CCTV with no luck.

"The piece of the puzzle we are trying to understand is how Crystal got from Ryan Street into the Brisbane River," Detective Acting Inspector Rod Watts said.

"This incident happened on Friday evening in West End. It is 1km from her last confirmed sighting to where we located her personal belongings at Orleigh Park.

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"If Crystal had taken this route on foot, part of her journey should have been captured on CCTV, but we are yet to receive any eyewitness accounts or CCTV footage to confirm this.

"From everything that we have been told, Crystal was a loving mother of two, she was well known in the Sunshine Coast community and there is no reason why this has happened to her.

"We know people, who are not suspects, were in this area that evening, and we continue to ask them to come forward.

"Even if the information you have seems small, it may be the crucial piece of the puzzle we need to solve what happened to Crystal that night."

Anyone with any information is urged to come forward.

The White House has launched a new website championing the theory that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was a human-made pathogen that leaked from an infectious disease laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The page revives a long debate about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic that has seen investigations by federal agencies, global health organisations and congressional committees.

In January, the CIA issued a report concluding that a lab leak was likely, but with "low confidence" in that judgement, paralleling similar conclusions from the Energy and State departments.

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The CIA had previously said it did not have enough information to make a determination about where the virus originated.

The World Health Organisation has said it remains open to all hypotheses, including that the virus spread from animals to people in a Wuhan market.

Yet the Trump administration's new website takes the lab leak theory even further than most of those reports, stating that the virus "possesses a biological characteristic that is "not found in nature" and "if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have "already surfaced. But it hasn't."

The federal website Covid.gov, which previously linked to information about vaccines, testing and treatment, now redirects to the White House's lab leak website.

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While US intelligence agencies have remained open to the possibility the virus was naturally transmitted during lab research, they nearly all previously agreed it was not genetically engineered. Many scientists believe, based on analyses of the virus and early cases, that the virus occurred naturally in animals and spread to humans in an outbreak at the Wuhan market. They've also said that the origin of the virus may never be proved.

US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary appeared to defend the website change during a Fox News interview Friday afternoon.

"I think people want some closure. The entire nightmare of Covid for three-plus years was likely entirely avoidable, had we not [been] messing with Mother Nature in a way that they should not have," Makary said. He added that people also want answers on prolonged school closures and vaccine requirements.

In several ways, the new White House page echoes a final report issued last year by the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, linked on the site. Republican members of the committee concluded last fall that the virus originated in a lab; Democrats issued a separate report that did not draw a definitive conclusion about the virus' origins but also pressed for more transparency.

READ MORE: Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 assassination records released on Trump's order

The new White House site also details perceived failures of the Covid-19 response, including "lockdowns," mask mandates, infectious disease research funding and HHS "obstruction" of those congressional probes.

Some of those officials are named. A section of the page is dedicated to President Joe Biden's pre-emptive pardon of retired National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Multiple Trump administration officials, such as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have railed against the government's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the Biden administration's response in particular. The website could tee up further action from the health agency, as Kennedy has criticised broad coronavirus vaccine requirements and controversial infectious disease studies know as gain-of-function research.

Many congressional Republicans have also called for the administration to reinstitute a ban on this type of research, which can involve making a virus more transmissible or changing other traits to study its spread. A moratorium on gain-of-function studies was lifted during the first Trump administration.

Biden officials last year issued policy guidance that would have put more stringent oversight on gain-of-function research, but not broadly ban those studies. The guidance is set to go into effect this May.

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A man is in a critical condition after he was shot during a hunting trip in the NSW Central Tablelands.

The 70-year-old man was shot on a rural property on Campbells River Road in Black Springs, about 20km south of Oberon.

Paramedics treated the man for a gunshot wound to his right shoulder. He was airlifted to Westmead Hospital in a critical condition.

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Police have been told that the man and his son, aged 47, were securing their guns on the back of a ute when a round discharged from the 47-year-old's gun.

They had been hunting game on the property.

An investigation is underway.

About 10,000 pages of records related to the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were released on Friday, continuing the disclosure of national secrets ordered by US President Donald Trump.

Kennedy was fatally shot on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after giving a speech celebrating his victory in California's Democratic presidential primary.

His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving life in prison.

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The files included pictures of handwritten notes by the gunman.

"RFK must be disposed of like his brother was," was written on the outside of an empty envelope with the return address from the district director of the Internal Revenue Service in Los Angeles.

The National Archives and Records Administration posted 229 files containing the pages to its public website.

Many files related to the assassination had been previously released, but others had not been digitised and sat for decades in federal government storage facilities.

Nearly 60 years after the assassination, "the American people will, for the first time, have the opportunity to review the federal government's investigation thanks to the leadership of President Trump," Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement.

The release of the files shines "a long-overdue light on the truth," Gabbard added.

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The release comes a month after unredacted files related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were disclosed.

Those documents gave curious readers more details about Cold War-era covert US operations in other nations but did not initially lend credence to long-circulating conspiracy theories about who killed JFK.

Trump, a Republican, has championed in the name of transparency the release of documents related to high-profile assassinations and investigations.

But he's also been deeply suspicious for years of the government's intelligence agencies, and his administration's release of once-hidden files opens the door for additional public scrutiny and questioning about the conclusions and operations of institutions such as the CIA and the FBI.

Trump signed an executive order in January calling for the release of governmental documents related to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., who were killed within two months of each other.

Lawyers for Kennedy's killer have said for decades that he is unlikely to reoffend or pose a danger to society, and in 2021, a parole board deemed Sirhan suitable for release. But Gov. Gavin Newson rejected the decision in 2022, keeping him in state prison.

In 2023, a different panel denied him release, saying he still lacks insight into what caused him to shoot Kennedy.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a son of the New York senator who now serves as health and human services secretary, commended Trump and Gabbard for their "courage" and "dogged efforts" to release the files.

"Lifting the veil on the RFK papers is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government," the health secretary said in a statement.

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