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A 'Beautiful Tonga Clean Up' campaign held earlier this year, has today presented new lawnmowers to eight villages who did the best clean up work in Tongatapu.

The COVID19 pandemic has upended economies the world over, while there is financial pain there is also an opportunity for the reorganisation of national and global economics. Fiji's economic fault lines have been exposed under the pressures of COVID-19, exposing the gaps through which people and communities are falling. As governments continue to act to support economies undone by the pandemic it's important to see that any community relief that is being offered also has an eye to the future. By Maureen Penjueli.

Louena, a Tongan mother of two who lives in Japan, is desperate to be reunited with her babies, daughter Kathleen (5) and infant son, who are now in Tonga without her. The sudden border closure caught the family by surprise and has separated them for over three months.

Three men were arrested with illicit drugs at Patangata and Pili in a Tonga Police operation on June 16-17.

CoViD-19’s effects on health, jobs and economies are simply an acute version of what climate change is predicted to bring – and in places already has. Unless we aspire to a better normal with recovery, we are treating the symptom, not the disease. We must build back better than before. For example, it may be tempting to scale up funds for infrastructure like roads, but that funding can go to improved and greener public transport systems to service more people. More public transit capacity will reduce the load on roads and reduce air pollution and emissions. Investment in IT can decentralize business operations, reducing time lost and carbon produced in commutes and travel. By Armida Alisjahbana and Inger Andersen.

The 50 passengers to board the first repatriation flight from Auckland to Tonga will probably be selected next week, confirmed MEIDECC CEO, Paula Ma’u today, 17 June. “If that goes well, it depends on health and their analysis on whether we will increase the number and even the flights.” Otherwise at that rate, with about 7,000 Tongans overseas who want to return to Tonga, it might take years to repatriate everyone and quarantine will be costly. By Eleanor Gee.

Governments cannot openly admit that the "controlled easing” of COVID-19 lockdowns in fact means controlled progress toward so-called herd immunity to the virus. Because there is currently no COVID-19 vaccine, governments have had to find other ways to prevent “excess deaths.” Most have opted for lockdowns, which remove entire populations from the path of the virus and thus deprive it of hosts. But this strategy has a terrible weakness: governments cannot keep their populations locked down until a vaccine arrives. Apart from anything else, the economic cost would be unthinkable. So, they have to ease the lockdown gradually. By Robert Skidelsky

Air New Zealand will resume passenger flights between Auckland and Shanghai next week, with passengers subject to government border controls in each direction.

Tonga’s Ministry of Tourism has confirmed today that government is planning for the first repatriation flight of 50 Tongans “after next week as a start” and that the first passengers will arrive “in three weeks from last Friday, if everything is going as planned”.