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10 Jul 2025

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Labour hits back at Seymour's claim NZ is still 'digesting' Covid-19 pandemic 'hangover'
Acting finance spokesperson Megan Woods said she did not hear the acting prime minister acknowledging Covid's impact on the economy while in opposition.

Flood-hit Tasman farm 'more like a riverbed than a farm'
Work to bolster flood resilience along the Motueka River came too late for one flood-hit Tasman farmer who lost dozens of hectares of farmland to the stopbank-bursting river.

Ngamatapouri locals cut off by flooded Waitotara Valley Road remain unfazed
Only Ngamatapouri residents with four-wheel-drive vehicles can access the road in, and sometimes not even then.

I put up these holiday lights last year—and they’re not coming down
Holiday lights are no longer just for the winter season; these days, you can decorate your home with full-color lighting and celebrate every occasion all year long. What’s even better, with permanent installations like the Enbrighten Eternity Lights, you need only clamber up a ladder once. Lots of companies offer permanent holiday lights these days, and I’ve evaluated many of them, but Enbrighten’s product remains my favorite. For starters, they’re the easiest to install, needing just one screw per light. And that screw gets hidden when you pop each LED puck into its socket. And during Prime Day, you can grab a 100-foot string for 24% off MSRP or $189. Amazon is also offering slightly smaller discounts on the 50-foot string (19% off, or $130) and the 150-foot string (16% off, or $294). Enbrighten uses RGBWIC LEDs, meaning each puck on the cable has red, green, blue, and white diodes capable of glowing in 16 million colors, plus white light that you can tune to specific color temperatures, ranging from a warm 2200 Kelvin to a daylight equivalent 6500K. Enbrighten Eternity permanent holiday lights wash your home’s walls with color.Michael Brown/Foundry Enbrighten’s app has lots of preset lighting scenes, including Christmas, Fall, Halloween, July 4th, Mardi Gras, Rainbow, Spring, St. Patrick Day, and Valentine’s Day. These are all fully customizable and you can create your own with self-explanatory visual effects settings such as Solid, Twinkle, Strobe, Pulse, Wave Chase, Chase, Wave, Fade, Lightning, Flame, and Stacking. I had a lot of fun with the Lightning effect during Halloween, which randomly flashes one or a few of the pucks a blueish-white to resemble a lightning strike. You can (of course) also create schedules to turn the lights on and off. Enbrighten Eternity Lights connect to your 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network, and they can be controlled with Amazon Alexa or Google Home voice commands, but they are not HomeKit or Matter compatible. Don’t let these excellent Prime Day deals on Enbrighten Eternity Lights pass you by. You’ll celebrate your savings every night. PCWorld’s editors have found lots of other great tech deals, too, so be sure to check those out as well. Get 100-foot Enbrighten Eternity Lights for 24% offbuy now at amazon This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lighting.

Woman found dead in home four hours after calling 111
A woman struggling to breathe called for an ambulance, but died before one arrived hours later.

Queensland Maroons stun NSW Blues to claim State of Origin series
Once again, the series came down to a decider in Game 3 in Sydney.

Watch: Kiwi scores in Lions’ win over Brumbies
James Lowe scored one of his team’s tries in Australia’s capital.

What makes a bull worth $161,000? He's 'beautifully put together'
The bidder who smashed a national price record at the recent Angus bull sales says his purchase is "beautifully put together".

Perplexity debuts Comet, a free AI browser (that currently costs $200)
On Wednesday, Perplexity.ai debuted Comet, its first entry into the browser market that does away with Google and Microsoft’s Bing in favor of its own search engine. Comet will be available for both Windows and macOS platforms, the company said. Perplexity has locked Comet behind a, um, perplexing pricing model. Although Comet is technically free, Perplexity has made it accessible for now via a waitlist. If you’d like to download it, you can wait for your turn to arrive or subscribe to Perplexity Max, the company’s $200/mo plan that includes access to its latest AI models. What sets Perplexity apart is that the browser doesn’t use a traditional third-party search engine. Instead, it relies upon Perplexity’s AI engine to provide AI summaries of the answers. It also can perform tasks that other AI engines can do, such as summarizing web pages. The Browser Company of New York has also launched an AI browser called Dia. Our colleagues at TechCrunch took Comet for a spin, and found the browser useful, though it couldn’t handle complex tasks. One disconcerting aspect: if you want Comet to be able to help organize your own life, you’ll need to give it access to your private information, such as your calendar and email. Comet also employs agentic AI, which sends off various AI couriers to perform tasks independently, then waits for your approval. The problem? In this case, it didn’t work. When TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff asked Comet to seek out and book a parking space for an upcoming trip, things went south. “Turns out, Comet Assistant hallucinated and entered completely wrong dates, later telling me that the dates I wanted were booked, but still wanted to have me complete the check-out anyways,” Zeff said. “I had to tell the AI agent that the dates were non-negotiable, and asked it to find another location. It ran into the same problem again.” Perplexity, indeed.