Sideswipe

Miscalculation: The numbers on a Waikato information board at River Haven, Huntly, seem dodgy for Federated Farmers say they represent half of New Zealand's farmers - around 100,000.

Opinion

Mission Improbable: A reader of David Farrar's blog (www.kiwiblog.co.nz) has a stunning theory on how National's emails got into the wrong hands. "Planning for a contingency like this has been under way for a good while," says the Bats In Space blogger. "Helen Clark sent Parekura Horomia over to England last year - a matter of public record. What was NOT known at that time is that he was being covertly trained by sections of M16 in data retrieval. Last year, around November, the black-lycra-clad MP silently abseiled down the side of the Beehive, diamond-cutting through a glazing panel and nimbly vaulting into the building. After security was subdued with chloroform, Horomia put his new-found technical prowess to work, quickly downloading Brash's hard-drive on to a device given to him by Clark expressly for the purpose. Pocketing a half-eaten Moro bar on the way out, he exited just as covertly, and that is how Labour came into possession of the said emails, and why Horomia often looks so smug in the house."

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Gawker.com reports production on an episode of CSI: New York stopped yesterday when a building engineer discovered a mummy near where the crew were shooting. The CSI set was on the seventh floor of a downtown Los Angeles building; the body was found on the fifth floor after the engineer checked on an incommunicado tenant.

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The boss of New York based dance music producer Steve Francis will pay US$15,000 ($22,945) for a curry. The Indie Spice restaurant in Belfast told the Times they'd had an order to supply a dinner party in New York. The food will be blast-chilled before leaving and packed in dry ice so that it only needs to be heated up on arrival across the Atlantic. Half of the food will arrive from the restaurant's Dublin branch by private jet, where the rest of the order will be picked up and flown to London. From London, the food, which will be accompanied by one of the owners of the restaurant, will board a Virgin Atlantic flight to New York. It will be met there by a limousine that will take them to a private party in Manhattan, where they will heat it up.

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Rodney Hide's dancing shoes are for sale on Trade Me, with all proceeds going to the Have A Heart appeal. Both shoes are signed by Rodney on the sole and have eight bidders, with the top one at $120. As part of the appeal, there will be a race between Hide, in his Smartcar, and Heart of the City CEO Alex Swney, on his Vespa, tomorrow at the night trots, Alexandra Park.

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Harry Potter author JK Rowling has told how she was almost stranded in New York after refusing to part with the manuscript for the final book on a flight home. Baggage restrictions were imposed after an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic flights between US and Britain was uncovered. She wrote on her website: "The heightened security restrictions on the airlines made the journey back from New York interesting, as I refused to be parted from the manuscript of book seven. A large part of it is handwritten and there was no copy of anything I had done while in the US. They let me take it on thankfully, bound up in elastic bands. I don't know what I would have done if they hadn't - sailed home probably." Rowling also revealed she has yet to choose a name for the book. "I was quite happy with one of them until the other one struck me while I was taking a shower in New York," she wrote.