Wellington  - A Royal New Zealand Air Force plane has begun a search for 29 missing Taiwanese fishermen after their burned out boat was found floating in the South Pacific, a Defence Force statement said on Thursday.

The Orion maritime surveillance aircraft will spend the next three days searching nearly 39,000 square kilometres of ocean for the men believed to have abandoned their vessel on three life rafts, a spokesman said.

Wellington  - The New Zealan

Wellington - Fiji embarrassed visiting New Zealand with a 2-0 win in Oceania's final World Cup qualifier on Wednesday night.

It was the New Zealanders' first defeat after five wins in the Oceania Nations Cup had already qualified them for the Confederations Cup in South Africa in June 2009 and a World Cup playoff against an Asian team later next year.

Both goals in Lautoka, Fiji, came in the second half after New Zealand goalkeeper Glen Moss was sent off in the 59th minute for questioning a decision of referee Lencie Fred, reducing the visitors to 10 men.

Wellington  - The state-owned Air New Zealand announced Wednesday that it was cutting 200 jobs in a new cost-saving drive as passenger numbers fall in the current international financial crisis.

Chief executive Rob Fyfe said that 100 long-haul cabin crew staff would be made redundant and up to 68 in technical, planning and management with smaller cuts in other areas.

Fyfe said the airline had reduced capacity to match customer demand over the past few months and had worked hard on initiatives to minimise redundancies.

Wellington  - New Zealand's new government was sworn in Wednesday, officially clearing the way for Prime Minister John Key to attend this week's Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit meeting in Peru.

Key, whose conservative National Party has formed a centre-right administration after signing power-sharing agreements with three other parties in Parliament, will leave Thursday for Lima.

Wellington  - German tourist Julia Jahn, 20, kept telling herself she was too young to die as she struggled for five hours to keep her head above water after her kayak became trapped on a New Zealand river, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

"I was thinking I want to survive. I'm still young. I don't want to die, so I had such a big will to live," Jahn, from Bavaria, told the Dominion Post as she talked about Friday's ill-fated kayak trip in the wilderness of the North Island's Whanganui River.