Covid 19 coronavirus: What you need to know about Wednesday's big news developments

In what is being described as a "miracle", the two trampers missing in the Kahurangi National Park for almost three weeks have been found alive. Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, meanwhile, has broken ranks, saying New Zealand has been in lockdown for "far too long" and needs to be at level 1 now.

Key developments in NZ

• Dion Reynolds and Jessica O'Connor, who went tramping on May 9 but failed to return as expected five days later, have been found alive. They are understood to have run out of food some time ago and suffered minor injuries. Here is how their ordeal unfolded.

• Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is insisting that the country will be at alert level 2 for at least another four weeks, despite the call from her deputy and NZ First leader Winston Peters for a move to alert level 1 - and Auckland Council's plea to reopen New Zealand's borders.

• Ardern did, however, promise that Kiwis won't have to wait "too long" for a transtasman travel bubble after it was revealed that several exemptions to the travel ban have been made - including for "poo pipe" engineers, a chair lift expert and Avatar film crew.

• Earlier, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield announced that there were no new cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand for the fifth consecutive day, with no one in hospital and only 21 active cases.

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The Apple store in Tokyo's Shibuya district. Photo / Getty Images

Business update

• Apple's new iPad Pro is powerful and boasts many impressive features but is it worth $3900? The Herald's tech writer Juha Saarinen gives his verdict.

• Developers will have to hold on until financiers feel more confident again, with funding for new commercial property and subdivision development virtually drying up due to fears over the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Around the world

• A leading Chinese scientist has warned that new coronaviruses are "just the tip of the iceberg", warning we could see future outbreaks on the same scale as the Covid-19 pandemic that has infected more than 5 million people and 345,000 deaths.

• To the US, where Twitter has taken the extraordinary step of flagging President Donald Trump's tweets with a fact-check warning. This comes after POTUS claimed mail-in ballots were "fraudulent" and predicted that "mailboxes will be robbed", among other things. As expected, Trump expressed his dismay at the move - on Twitter.

The last word

• Ardern consulted widely in the lead-up to New Zealand's four-week lockdown but, according to recently released ministerial diaries, one meeting in particular caught the eye, as Jason Walls reports.