Results for Pacific Islands

The Tonga Legislative Assembly resumed its 2024-2025 session this morning, but before they got down to parliamentary business, exhausted members talked about the strong 7.0 M earthquake that shook Tonga at 1:18am and kept them awake during the night. In an emergency operation, Police had helped to move people away from coastlines in Tongatapu, Vava’u and Ha’apai.

Forty years ago, in 1985, the people of Rongelap Atoll in the central Pacific were forced to evacuate their radioactive home after enduring years of health impacts from the US nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands. Yesterday, the community came together in Mejatto to light candles, to sing and remember the terrors of the nuclear testing in the Pacific and their displacement from their home.

A donation of disability equipment, including wheelchairs, was presented by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to the Vaiola Hospital in Tongatapu yesterday, 26 March 2025. The equipment will help to replace the wheelchairs that have gone missing from the wards at the Hospital, where they are needed for disabled patients. It is the fourth such donation the church has made to the hospital.

Australia and Tonga have agreed to an AUD85 million (TOP125 million) budget support program over the next four years to support a stronger economy and national budget. “This is the largest investment in our partnership’s history,” stated a joint announcement yesterday, on the margins of the Special Forum Economic Ministers Meeting (FEMM) in Nuku'alofa.

Around 26 New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) medics have improved their skills for responding to the range of injuries that might be expected from a destructive weather event striking in the Pacific. The exercise was recently held in Santoft Forest near Whanganui, in New Zealand.

The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Economic Ministers and officials are meeting in Nuku'alofa today, for a Special Forum Economic Ministers Meeting (FEMM). Among other things, they will discuss the establishment of the Pacific Resilience Facility, the first Pacific-led, member-owned and managed and people-centred climate and disaster resilience financing facility, which will be headquartered in Tonga.

It is essential for the Government to secure its own financial resources in order to strengthen long-term development capacity, Japan's Ambassador to Tonga, HE Inagaki Hisao, told the National Development Summit on Friday. Panelists from the diplomatic corps of New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and China in Tonga talked about Collaboration and Partnership, duringt the final session of the summit on 21 March, at the Fa’onelua Convention Center in Nuku'alofa.

Finau Pomale (48) is serving a 12-month sentence for cultivating 79 cannabis plants, weighing 33.07 grams, at a bush allotment in Fatai.

Tonga urgently needs an illicit drugs rehabilitation centre due to the rising number of drug users, said Head Psychiatrist Dr. Mapa Puloka and counsellor Mele Prescott at the National Development Summit session on “Security and Illicit Drugs” at Fa'onelua Convention Centre. "Previous governments have been asked for this," said Dr. Puloka.