Rotorua builder Steve Tane turned 64 this year and has been counting down to 65 for months. He has been working in construction since his late teens. His knees are worn. His lower back flares up regularly. The physical toll of four decades in the trade is visible in the way he moves at the end of a … Read more
When Hamilton retiree Colin Marsh checked his bank account in late January, the deposit sitting there was larger than he had been expecting. He had turned 65 the previous month and submitted his NZ Super application twelve weeks in advance, just as Work and Income recommends. The first full fortnightly payment had arrived. Just over a … Read more
When Napier resident Ana Ferreira moved to New Zealand in her mid-40s, she made her retirement plans around one assumption. The residency requirement for NZ Super was ten years, and she would comfortably meet it long before she turned 65. Now, with a 2026 policy debate proposing to double that requirement to twenty years, the … Read more
Auckland warehouse manager Tom Sinclair noticed something on his March payslip that he had not been expecting. His KiwiSaver deduction was slightly higher than usual, even though April had not arrived yet. His employer had updated the payroll system early. The new default contribution rate was already running. “It is only about twelve dollars a … Read more
When Palmerston North resident Sandra Tait turned 64 earlier this year, she had one thing completely settled in her mind. NZ Super would begin at 65. It always had. It would for her. Then she started seeing headlines about a 2026 government policy review, and the certainty she had built her plans around started feeling … Read more
Nobody on the beach quite understands why the light suddenly looks wrong. The sun is still there, high above the water. But the colours have flattened. The shadows have lost their edges. A group of children stops what they are doing and stares at the horizon without being able to explain why. Someone turns the … Read more
James opened his budgeting app for the first time in January with genuine optimism. The colourful pie chart looked almost reassuring. Rent, groceries, transport, savings. All in neat, familiar slices. This was the year he was going to get ahead. Then he tapped on “Other.” Buried in that grey, anonymous segment: a pet insurance policy … Read more
The bones had been sitting in museum storage boxes for decades. Excavated from the Goyet cave complex in Belgium since the 19th century, they were catalogued, studied, and largely set aside as part of the broad and messy record of Ice Age life. Then a multidisciplinary research team re-examined 101 human bone fragments from one … Read more
The first thing you notice is the silence. Not ordinary afternoon quiet, but something heavier. A shared pause, as if the entire town has stopped mid-sentence. Dogs go still. Birds that were loud moments ago vanish from the sky. On the horizon, the daylight looks wrong, like someone found a dimmer switch for the world … Read more
It took only seconds. A burst of pressurised gas, a flash at ground level, and then a thick rolling cloud of dark smoke swallowing the base of the launch stand. SpaceX’s first Starship V3 booster, known as B18, was destroyed during what should have been a routine cryogenic pressure test at the company’s Starbase facility … Read more