Top Energy has turned down what chief executive Russell Shaw described as "big sums" offered by Chinese interests to extract swamp kauri in the geothermal fields around Ngawha.

Twenty one players represented the Taitokerau rohe at the 54th Sunshine Coast District Winter Bowls Carnival held in Queensland earlier in the month.

Driving around the Mid North I see the price of fuel on most of the service stations. Fuel prices are on my mind as I owned the Rawene Service Station for around 30 years.

Public toilets on Kaitaia's Melba Street have been reopened after a $207,000 revamp which included fitting them with coin-operated hot showers and a unisex lavatory open around the clock.

Kii Small, from Kaitaia, got a standing ovation from other young MPs at the Youth Parliament in Wellington last week.

A man has been arrested and charged with murder following a fatal stabbing in Kaitaia - the third knife attack in the town in a week.

Three people have been injured - one seriously - in a car crash in Northland this afternoon.

Kalani Hansen delivered a textbook display of local knowledge when he took out the Remember the Days surfing contest at Ahipara on Saturday.

I see in Tuesday's Age, July 19, that your cartoonist, Malcolm Evans, is once again on his anti-semitic bike.

The investigation into a stabbing incident in Kaitaia on Tuesday has continued, with police now identifying a person of interest.

Players abusing referees has brought the cancellation of four rugby league games in the Far North this weekend.

Defying the weather, 16 teams, including some representing the Cooper's Beach, Kaitaia Combined, and Church Road clubs turned out to contest the annual Patron's Bowls tournament alongside the members of the host club at the Far North RSA Bowling Club gree

Re Waimatenui-Mataraua Road Bridge N15 - response to letter from Des Mahoney in The Northland Age, July 14.

THE FAR NORTH seems to have reached the stage where discussing the drug problem is pointless.

Lois Wagener has lived on the Aupouri Peninsula long enough to have noticed how Houhora Harbour is changing - and she is deeply concerned that it is in the process of becoming the marine equivalent of a wasteland.

If the theft of a television set from the Shirley Crawford Haven at Kaitaia Hospital ('Mongrel' thief of Haven TV sets new low, July 7) cast Kaitaia in a bad light, last week the community showed its other side.

Substandard housing at Ahipara and a papakainga development at Takou Bay were inspected when the Labour Party housing spokesman, Te Atatu MP Phil Twyford, came to the Far North yesterday.

The countdown has well and truly begun for the three Far North athletes who form part of what will be the largest contingent ever to represent Northland at the Olympics/ Paralympics events.

Two Whangarei women who advertised seafood for sale on closed Facebook pages have each been fined $1000.

The driver of a Liteace van and his five passengers preferred to take to the water at Taipa estuary on Monday night than give themselves up to the police who had pursued them, via a circuitous route, from Kaitaia.

Rose Matthews knows it's a long shot, but she is clinging to "one last pinhead of hope" that someone knows what became of two books that were stolen from her and husband Rex's car outside the Waipapakauri Hotel 46 years ago - and that they will be returne

Mussel Rocks' defeat by Waipap in Far North darts last Wednesday means they will need to dig deep in the remaining three games of the round if they wish to make the top four for the championship knockout.

If they had been hoping for a pleasant week in the great outdoors, the 12 Te Puna Mana Toa (Kaitaia College Services Academy) students who took part in the latest NZ Defence Force course were disabused even before they left the comforts of home.

Hokianga carver and painter Liz McAuliffe is attracting a whole new audience for her work in Denmark.

Moving on Correspondents such as Bruce Moon and Anahera Herbert-Graves insist on pushing their own one-track and selective versions

CAN'T remember who suggested this (a sign of advancing age, perhaps), but the idea that older folk should not be allowed to vote should not be dismissed out of hand.

Internationally renowned skateboarder Dave Crabb was the first person Far North District councillor Sally Macauley turned to when she set about launching a $120,000 revamp of Kaikohe's skate bowl.

Behaviour that a member of the public regarded as suspicious led to the seizure of tens of thousands of dollars worth of cannabis in Kaitaia last week, exposing an attempt to 'export' the drug from the Far North to the Deep South.

Having led a nationwide revival of traditional Maori games, particularly ki-o-rahi, over the past decade, the Kerikeri sporting facilitator described Nga Taonga Takaro II: The Matrix as a 200-page opus of "ancestral awesomeness".

Ivan Batistich, the son of a one-time gum digger, will take his place on the world medical stage in Hong Kong next month.