Board was found covered in barnacles and mussels in Raglan, nearly 18 months after it was lost during a boat trip near Tasmania

A surfboard lost off Australia’s coast nearly 18 months ago has washed up on one of New Zealand’s most famed surf beaches, thousands of kilometres from where it was last seen.

New Zealand-based French surfer Alvaro Bon was kite surfing in Raglan on the North Island’s west coast on 15 October, when his kite caught in the water and he began drifting out to sea.

Teachers, nurses and public service staff among those walking off job and also pressing for more government investment in health and education

An estimated 100,000 nurses, teachers and public sector staff walked off the job in New Zealand on Thursday to call on the government to better fund and resource public services, in one of the country’s largest ever strikes.

The so-called “mega strike” brought together workers from multiple sectors, including more than 60,000 school teachers, 40,000 nurses and salaried medical specialists and 15,000 public service staff.

Photographers capture extremely unusual phenomenon – also known as red sprites – against backdrop of the Milky Way

A trio of photographers in New Zealand have captured images of “red sprites”, or red lightning, one of the rarest light phenomena in the world, in which luminous crimson flashes appear in the sky.

New Zealand photographer Tom Rae and Spanish photographers Dan Zafra and José Cantabrana set out to shoot the Milky Way over the Ōmārama Clay cliffs in the South Island on 11 October, when they chanced upon the extraordinary event.

There was a different side to the chaos of the Amazon outage that affected crucial services around the world, such as no exams, light switches not working, and less work to do

Workers were sent home, exams were delayed, coffee machines had to be turned on manually and language app users feared their hard-won progress was lost as a result of the global outage of Amazon Web Services on Monday, as some made light of their briefly tech-free existence.

A glitch in the AWS cloud computing service brought down apps and websites for millions of users around the world affecting more than 2,000 companies, including Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and language app Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations.

New research examines how traditional artists worked as revitalisation efforts see tā moko – Māori tattooing – become more visible in New Zealand

In New Zealand’s national museum, master Māori tattoo artists painstakingly apply ink to the faces of eight men and women as a large crowd watches on.

Thin lines spiral over the men’s cheeks, dipping towards the jaw and up over the forehead, while lines curl around the women’s chins – each mark telling the story of its wearer’s identity, lineage and experience. Surrounding them are their families, who sing and grip their hands as they lay still under the needle and weight of the sacred – and usually private – ceremony.

Tributes flow from across political spectrum for man known for high ideals but also remembered for controversially slashing welfare and health spending

Former New Zealand prime minister Jim Bolger, whose political legacy was defined by his deep commitment to reconciliation with Māori as well as his brutal cuts to welfare and deregulation of the labour market, has died aged 90.

Bolger died peacefully surrounded by his wife, Joan, nine children and 18 grandchildren, his family said in a statement on Wednesday. Bolger suffered kidney failure last year and had been undergoing dialysis.