14: One by one the letters arrived in New Zealand informing Gertrude Browne of the saddest news.

Tens of thousands of members of Iraqi religious minority groups driven from their homes for fear of the jihadist group Islamic State are dying of thirst and heat on a desert mountainside.

The first full day of peace reveals the massive reconstruction task ahead.

On the morning of July 15, Moscow was as hot as an oven.

12: Of all the soldiers who served and died in World War I, few could match the gifts of Hugh Montagu Butterworth in their descriptions of the conflict.

100 years on from the beginning of the first World War, the Torpedo Bay Naval Museum in Auckland has chosen a theatrical way of commemorating the fallen. Geoff Allen's 'Sister Anzac' tells the herstory of the hospital ship 'Maheno' and the nurses who served aboard.

Google is facing criticism for continuing to allow Android mobile users to download a game called "Bomb Gaza".

Memories of his service along the Gaza border two years ago have been streaming through the mind of Shai Davidovich this week.

Over the next four years we will learn much about World War I and the suffering that went with it.

11:They served in horrific conditions, and many of those that survived years of war were rewarded with a bullet.

Prime Minister John Key is rejecting claims the Government is too soft on Israel and should expel the Israeli Ambassador.

One hundred gun shots echoed over Wellington today, marking the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI.

10: Harriet Sutton had five sons go to war. Francis and Benjamin never came home. Buried in foreign fields, the grieving mother worried their short lives would be forgotten.

The neglected burial site of Sapper Robert Hislop, mourned a century ago as NZ's first casualty of World War I, is expected to become an official war grave.

One hundred years ago on Tuesday, a tense crowd of 12,000 gathered at Parliament to hear confirmation of what they already knew - the young nation of New Zealand was going to war.

The family of a young soldier who was given a military farewell as New Zealand's first casualty of World War I wants his neglected burial site honoured as an official war grave.

9: They were the first New Zealanders on the Western Front, arriving in France in the cold spring of 1916.

Wearing a bright hijab, black blazer and long denim skirt, Mariam Abultewi sat in a taxi she had just ordered using Wasselni, a taxi-ordering and carpooling app she launched in Gaza four months ago.

Even while "the monstrous anger of the guns" was hauling millions to their death, the blame game was already well under way.

Israel is approaching a fateful decision on what to do when it completes the stated initial goal of its ground offensive: locating and destroying Hamas cross-border tunnels.

6: James Thomson Steven was a tall farmer from Totara Valley at Pleasant Pt in South Canterbury when war broke out.