Two a penny

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LATEST:
Andre Agassi’s upcoming autobiography contains an admission that he used crystal meth in 1997, the year he dropped to No. 141 in the rankings.

In a story posted on People magazine’s Web site Tuesday, Agassi says: “I can’t speak to addiction, but a lot of people would say that if you’re using anything as an escape, you have a problem. A writer from SI first revealed the crystal meth reference on a Twitter posting Tuesday.”

Excerpts from the book are being printed this week by People and Sports Illustrated.

In the posting on People’s Web site, Agassi says he “was worried for a moment, but not for long,” about how fans would react if they found out he used drugs.

“The tweet from SI that posted earlier today which tipped to one of the revelations in the book – Agassi’s use of crystal meth in 1997 – was accurate,” Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Tuesday.

“I wore my heart on my sleeve and my emotions were always written on my face.

Among the most successful – and, without a doubt, one of the most popular – tennis players in history, Agassi won eight Grand Slam singles titles before retiring in 2006. I was actually excited about telling the world the whole story,” Agassi says.

Agassi’s first major championship came at Wimbledon in 1992, and he won a gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He drew attention not just for his play, but also for his outfits, his hairstyles and his relationships with women.

He resuscitated his career in 1998, making the biggest one-year jump into the top 10 in the history of the ATP rankings. . The next season, he won the French Open to complete a career Grand Slam, then added a second career US Open title en route to finishing 1999 at No. The next season, he won the French Open to complete a career Grand Slam, then added a second career US Open title en route to finishing 1999 at No.

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Knopf is publishing the book November 9

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Mangere residents are raising doubts about whether police have the right man in custody following a string of sex attacks in the South Auckland suburb in the last two months.

A teenage boy is due to appear in court today after being arrested in connection with a sex attack on a woman in South Auckland yesterday.

The 14-year-old is due to appear in Manukau Youth Court earlier today facing one count of indecent assault against a 29-year-old woman.The woman was knocked to the ground and sexually assaulted before her screams attracted the attention of residents.

In the incident yesterday, the woman was attacked in an alleyway running behind Nga Iwi Primary School as she on her way to pick up a child from school. .

Police have been investigating a string of four sex attacks on females since early last month, the youngest victim being an eight-year-old girl who was raped in an alleyway last week.

However, the description of the arrested man did not match that given by victims of a string of recent sex attacks, Mangere Maori Wardens chairman Thomas Henry told Radio New Zealand.Police have not yet said whether the man taken into custody was arrested in connection with four sex attacks in the alleyway since September 8, or whether charges have been laid.The assault yesterday may have been a copycat attack, Mr Henry said, although he did not understand why anyone would commit such an act.The daylight assaults have been described as “brazen” by police.Police were following up a strong lead from a resident who said they knew who the attacker was and further details would be released earlier today. She punched him and he fled.In an attack last Thursday, a man grabbed a 28-year-old woman pushing her son in a pram in the alleyway.The man was described as Polynesian, aged between 18 and 20, and 165cm tall.The man was described as Polynesian, aged between 18 and 20, and 165cm tall.The man was described as Polynesian and wore a black baseball cap, a white hooded sweatshirt with a black or dark collar.On Monday last week, an eight-year-old girl was raped by a Maori or Polynesian man while walking home from school with her six-year-old sister, who screamed for help. He grabbed her from behind and she was indecently assaulted.On September 8, a 12-year-old girl was attacked by a man in the alleyway.

.Police had received recent reports of an unidentified male approaching young females and asking to touch them in a sexual way

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The New Zealand dollar climbed above US75c for the first time in 15 months, rocketing up more than 1c to close to US75.50c in the two hours to 5am.

By 8am the kiwi was buying US75.37c at 5pm yesterday.37c from US74. .

The NZ dollar also reached a 15-month high of 0.5043 euro from 0.

Against the Japanese currency the kiwi peaked at a one-year high 68.4997 at 5pm.35 yen by the local open from 67.48 yen, easing to 68.

The ANZ bank said risk appetites appeared unquenched as markets expected interest rates in the United States to remain lower into 2010.54 yesterday evening.

After taking a breather at the end of last week, US equities pushed higher to start the week, with analysts’ expectations of earnings continuing to be exceeded, giving investors confidence to push equities higher.

After taking a breather at the end of last week, US equities pushed higher to start the week, with analysts’ expectations of earnings continuing to be exceeded, giving investors confidence to push equities higher.

The NZ dollar managed to outperform the aussie, largely due to a function of less liquidity on the NZ dollar side, ANZ said.

The correlation with equities looked to be back, as gains in the Dow Jones industrial average translated into gains in the antipodean currencies.”

That was especially so as the Reserve Bank of Australia had already started hiking interest rates and there was increasing talk that the next move would be 50 basis points.

“This continues to be a source of much frustration as the NZD side should be underperforming based on relative fundamentals.22c by 8am from A80.

The kiwi was up to A81.34 from 66.96c at 5pm, while the trade weighted index lifted to 67.

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One of the worst economic years in the New Zealand Government’s history will be confirmed tomorrow when the final government accounts for the June year are released.

At the beginning of the financial year Treasury was still predicting an operating surplus of $2.This was already down from the $7.56 billion for the fiscal year.In hindsight the signs of rot were starting to show last July with Treasury predicting that cash surpluses would be a thing of the past in the years ahead due to a slowing economy and cuts to income tax.39 billion predicted last December.Finance Minister Bill English said the Crown accounts would tell a story of deficits and losses on investments, “a picture we’re familiar with”.After that the world was hit first by a credit crisis which brought on a global recession, which came on top of the domestic recession already under way. .This would include a $10 billion to $12 billion reversal in the operating surplus to around a deficit of around $9 billion.While the Government’s main investment vehicles – the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, ACC and the Government Superannuation Fund – have all recorded improving fortunes recently, this is not expected to make much difference to the final books for 2008/2009 tomorrow.

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LATEST:
Michael Laws has slammed claims he bullied several school children who wrote letters to him about the spelling of Wanganui on his radio show this morning.

The radio station Laws works for, Radio Live, ran an item about the bullying allegations during their 9am news bulletin, just minutes before Laws was to begin his regular talk back show.”

Laws addressed the allegations on his programme and spoke of his surprise at opening The this morning to “find myself in the midst of yet another controversy”.

Veteran news reader Hilary Barry dissolved into giggles when she read the story, concluding “Michael Laws hung up on Radio Live when we contacted him this morning.

Mr Laws replied to letters from Otaki school children by telling them “there are so many deficiencies of both fact and logic in your letters that I barely know where to start”.

A group of primary school children who wrote to Laws about the “h” debate were upset that they received a letter back suggesting their teacher be sacked and that they control their anger.

The seven children wrote in separate letters how they were annoyed that Mr Laws would not change the city’s name.

Ngarui Waahitia-Manukau, 12, and her year 7 and 8 classmates at Otaki School’s kura kaupapa unit wrote letters in Maori to Mr Laws at the beginning of August, saying they thought the spelling of Wanganui should have an “h”.”

He added: “Perhaps sacking your teacher for allowing such misapprehension to flourish?”

In handwriting at the bottom of his letter, Mr Laws wrote: “PS Controlling your anger might be a start!”

On his show this morning, Laws said he had looked up the meaning of bullying in the dictionary this morning, he said, and did not believe the letters he had written made him a bully.

A fierce opponent of any name change, Mr Laws replied to the children that he would take their views seriously “when your class starts addressing the real issues affecting Maoridom particularly the appalling rate of child abuse and child murder within Maori society, then I will take the rest of your views seriously.”

“I think it’s wrong for kids to be angry about something inanimate, don’t you?”

“They were demanding letters by 11 and 12-year-old and all stated their personal anger.

Laws said he had been “shocked” by the tone of the letters he received, which he says were “demanding” and “angry” from children who “live nowhere near Wanganui.”

“Needless to day I wrote back to them and said this is a bit off and isn’t there other things you should get angry about…”

The pupils were upset by the reply and family members questioned yesterday whether the response was acceptable. .

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LATEST:
Former New Zealand Olympic rower Rob Hamill has confronted his brother’s killer at the trial of former Khmer Rouge official Duch in Phnom Penh.

An emotional Hamill testified before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh about the “incredible” impact the horrific death of his brother Kerry, 27, had on his family here – a “massive and unquantifiable impact”.

Hamill, former Olympic and long-distance rower, said he had waited a long time to confront his brother’s killer and to tell the story about the impact on his parents and siblings.

The New Zealander’s wife Rachel and their two-year-old son were in the packed public gallery as Hamill spoke for a full hour.

Hamill’s mother is now dead and his father is in a nursing home.

Duch, 66, has pleaded guilty to murder but the five judges – New Zealander Dame Silvia Cartwright, a French national and three Cambodians – will decide Duch’s innocence or guilt after hearing all the evidence.

Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch as he is known, the man responsible for Kerry Hamill’s death, was in court and listened impassively to Hamill’s testimony as it was translated.

Dame Silvia was in courtto hear Hamill, who was accepted as a civil party.

Crewman Stuart Glass, a Canadian was shot while Hamill and Briton John Dewhirst were interrogated and tortured for two months before being killed in Phnom Penh’s notorious Tuol Sleng Prison run by Duch.

Kerry Hamill was captured by the Khmer Rouge when the yacht on which he and friends were sailing strayed into Cambodian waters in August 1978.

Duch has pleaded the same defence as some of the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials after World War 2, maintaining he was simply carrying out orders and would have been shot had he not done so.

Thousands of Cambodians were killed at the prison.

He noted that Duch used the phrase “smash them”, words meaning prisoners were to be tortured and then killed.

Hamill said Duch had dehumanised himself “the way he did so many people”.

“I’ve wanted to smash Duch,” he said.

“I’ve wanted to smash Duch,” he said.

“We all live and die but the way my brother died it is just so abominable and simply [incomprehensible] and he led that, he created the system that inflicted this terrible, terrible crime on people. I mean what he did, he dehumanised himself… he dehumanised so many thousands of people and the way he did it,” he told told Radio New Zealand.

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Wellington is seeing more people hospitalised with swine flu than Australia’s swine flu capital Victoria, with around 30 people currently admitted to its hospitals.

Victoria, with a population of about five million had 18 patients in hospital last Friday, compared with Wellington’s present number of almost 30 from a population of around 400,000.”It’s obviously been a brutal winter and the numbers here are going up very quickly but that’s probably not surprising,” he said. However, Wellington microbiologist Dr Tim Blackmore said the timing of the spike in infections, with New Zealand successfully containing the virus for almost two months, could be making the figures appear worse than they were. What the long term picture might be we don’t know yet but certainly at the moment there’s a lot of new cases emerging in the community and proportionally we’re seeing quite a few in the hospital.”If it was starting to slow down in Victoria then our numbers of patients on a particular day, compared to Victoria may be out of step.

However, accurate records of confirmed cases are no longer kept and the total number is likely to be much higher.”While instances of swine flu in New Zealand continue to increase, statistics show more that there have been 4,300 cases and nine deaths reported in Australia compared to 825 cases and no deaths here.”

“The hospital services are starting to struggle.Mr Blackmore told AAP that this was the “tip of the iceberg and it’s looking moderately severe to us.”

Sixty-nine people have been hospitalised in the Wellington region. We’ve never seen admission rates like this before and unfortunately it’s only going to get worse.He added that the majority of people were only in hospital for a day or two and asthma was playing a significant role in hospitalisations. Mr Blackmore said they were now only testing those who were believed to be in a more serious position..”There’s a proportion of people who are coming in with primary influenza pneumonia – viral pneumonia – but most have asthma or something like that underneath it . to make doctors more concerned about their health to have them in hospital..While it was difficult to know exactly how many people had been admitted in total, “it’s obviously something that we’re going to look at more carefully.”He said the average age of people being admitted was early-20s and there were “quite a few” children. A woman in her early twenties is still in a critical condition in Hawke’s Bay Hospital though it is not known whether she had any pre-existing medical conditions.”The condition of the 30-year-old woman in intensive care in Wellington Hospital was today down-graded from life-threatening to serious.”Once the virus established in Australia and as a result of the links New Zealand has with Australia .National Influenza Centre head Dr Sue Huang said that New Zealand’s links with Australia, which sent more than one million visitors here last year, had made containing the virus more difficult… it became really difficult to contain.”Meanwhile, swine flu is taking over from seasonal flu as the most commonly diagnosed influenza in the more serious cases this year.Mr Blackmore said of the 294 positive influenza tests carried out in Wellington since June 23, only 25 were seasonal influenza and the rest were the new strain.Since then, the lowest number of swine flu cases diagnosed in Wellington daily was ten and the highest was 37.However, he said the ratio was about even in Auckland, with Christchurch “somewhere in the middle”"The interesting thing about influenza is it does different patterns in different communities. .Mr Blackmore said he believed the number of infections could peak in a “few weeks” before easing, though the level of preparedness on behalf of health authorities meant they were well placed to cope.”I think overall for New Zealand it’s going to go on for a long time,” he warned.Ms Huang said they processed more than 1000 samples from suspected cases last week, which confirmed that swine flu was becoming more prevalent than other influenzas.She said all tests for Tamiflu resistance and virus mutations had so far come back negative.

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Clayton Robert Weatherston set about killing and disfiguring Sophie Elliott “in a calm and collected manner”, the Crown said as it opened the murder case against him in the High Court at Christchurch today.

Crown prosecutor Marie Grills said 33-year-old Weatherston took the knife with him when he visited 22-year-old Miss Elliott’s Dunedin home on January 9, 2008. A pair of scissors was also found bent and bloodstained in the room.

The knife was found broken and covered in blood after the attack in which Miss Elliott was stabbed or cut 216 times.

The defence had signalled that there would be “a partial defence of provocation”, Justice Potter told the jury.

Weatherston, Miss Elliott’s former boyfriend and her lecturer at Otago University, today pleaded not guilty to her murder but said he was guilty of manslaughter when the charge was read to him on the first day of the three-week trial before Justice Judith Potter and a jury.”

Grills detailed clusters of wounds found on Elliott’s body.

Mrs Grills said: “It is the Crown case that the accused, for whatever reason, decided to kill and disfigure Sophie Elliott and he did so in a calm and collected manner, with a significant degree of premeditation. .

Her nose had been cut off in a symmetrical fashion, and chunks of her hair cut off.

The blade of a kitchen knife was found in Elliott’s bedroom, removed from its handle.

“The Crown says it is no coincidence that some of the clusters of wounds relate to areas of physical beauty,” Grills said. The Crown says Weatherston used scissors in his attack.

A bent and blood-stained pair of scissors was also found.

The blade, handle and scissors were among items passed up in evidence as the trial proceeded this morning.

The defence case includes evidence that Elliott attacked Weatherston with a pair of scissors.

Weatherston was in the room and the first police officer to arrive asked him what he had done.

Grills told of police arriving at the house seven minutes after the 111 call by Sophie Elliott’s mother who had tried to force her way into the bedroom during the attack and saw Weatherston stabbing her daughter.”

The officer formally warned him and then asked him why.

Weatherston replied in a calm, normal tone, “I killed her.”

Weatherston was found to have minor cuts on his neck and face.

Weatherston replied: “The emotional pain that she has caused me over the past year.

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A teenage boy has been arrested after a woman in her 70s was sexually assaulted in her Taranaki home early this morning.

The 17-year-old, also a resident of the Taranaki town of Eltham, was arrested by police about 12.15am attack.30 today – about six hours after the 6.

The elderly woman subjected to the assault has been released from hospital and was in the care of family.

He faces three counts of sexual violation, one assault with intent to commit sexual violation, one count of burglary and one of being unlawfully on a property.

“It’s a small community, and we got a list of possible names very early on and went from there. .

The teenager would appear in Hawera District Court this afternoon, or the New Plymouth District Court tomorrow, Ms Perks said.”

Detective Senior Sergeant Keith Borrell extended his thanks to the Eltham community for its quick and helpful response, leading to the early arrest.

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The prison officers union say its members have walked out of meetings today with senior Corrections Department management in protest at proposals to double bunk cells in the country’s four newest prisons.

The officers walked out of meetings at Auckland Women’s Prison and at Spring Hill Prison today, said Corrections Association president Beven Hanlon tonight.”
When the Government was asking for constraint, the prison officers could not understand why senior corrections management needed to employ a private consultant to do their talking for them, he said.
“At a time when public servants are being told there is no money and there will be no pay increases, the prison officers were being told by a highly paid private consultant that their workloads were going to increase, they were going to be placed in higher risk situations and there will be no reward.
The Corrections Department was unable to respond immediately to the union’s claims.
Mr Hanlon said the issue of double bunking of cells that were only designed to hold one prisoner was of grave concern to corrections officers and nursing staff, as the proposal would increase the risks for staff in a job that was already a difficult environment.
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