Results for Pacific Islands

New research into the effect of drinking kava on driving has revealed it has a significant impact on temporal order judgement - or how well the brain is able to keep track of the order of events. Dr Apo Aporosa says the research findings will assist with kava drink-driving cases in court, but there is more work to be done.

In New Zealand, the University of Waikato, in support of increased Covid-19 vaccination rates among Māori and Pacific communities, will host a vaccination clinic and drive on September 16 to mark Kīngitanga day. There is concern that vaccination rates among the Māori and Pacific communities are lower when compared to the New Zealand national average, while some studies also suggest that Pacific people are three times more likely to need hospitalisation when infected with the virus than non-Pacific people.

Seasonal workers from Tonga, Samoa, and Vanuatu will be able to travel to New Zealand quarantine-free starting in October, announced New Zealand’s COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins and Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor yesterday, September 14. The arrangement will help New Zealand’s horticulture industry for the upcoming picking season.

Heads of Customs in the Pacific, including Tonga, have agreed that they need to work together with national security to ensure the region is more secure from transnational crimes. Despite border closures because of COVID-19, they say threats in the Pacific remain high from illegal activities, which are often facilitated by trusted insiders.

Tonga’s Director of Meteorology, ‘Ofa Fa’anunu has been re-elected for another four-years as President of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Region V, at their virtual session held from September 1-3. "Our challenges are quite unique in the sense that we are in charge of monitoring the atmosphere and the ocean in a very large area of mostly ocean," he said.

More than 20 Tongan nationals stranded in Fiji since March after Tonga closed its borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, claim they have been neglected by their government. The Fiji Times reported a claim by the Tongans that their government had turned a blind eye to their pleas to return home after it allowed 14 Chinese into the Kingdom from Vanuatu late last month.

Tonga's Palace Office and the Waterhouse family in Sydney, in separate statements, have today denied amazing allegations made about the late King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV and Tonga, published in Australian media over the weekend.

There has been a drop in the number of new COVID-19 cases reported daily in Fiji recently, but the Ministry of Health and Medical Services attributed this to a change in testing policy in the Suva-Nausori area.

Fiji has recorded 603 new COVID-19 cases over 24-hours ending at 8:00am on August 9. There were 18-new deaths due to the virus between August 4-9.