Wellington - New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters' political future was on the line Tuesday after an expatriate billionaire donor to his political party gave damning testimony to Parliament's powerful privileges committee.

Owen Glenn, who lives in Monaco, flew home to tell the committee that Peters personally asked him for money to help pay legal fees after the 2005 general election and he donated 100,000 New Zealand dollars (66,000 US dollars).

Wellington - New Zealand and Malaysia are to resume negotiations on a free trade pact, which were suspended in deadlock two and a half years ago, Prime Minister Helen Clark said Monday.

She told a press conference that her cabinet approved the resumption of talks after a boom in trade between the countries.

The latest New Zealand figures showed that Malaysia was New Zealand's ninth-biggest market in the 12 months through July with exports increasing by 50 per cent on the previous year to 876 million New Zealand dollars (596 million US dollars).

New Zealand's imports from Malaysia doubled in the previous 12 months to 1.83 billion New Zealand dollars.

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Wellington - A New Zealand town council wants to dig up the grave of a dog that was sentenced to be destroyed for killing a protected fur seal to prove it is dead, a newspaper reported on Friday.

Peter Ray, 44, told the Greymouth District Court that his Alaskan Malamute called Hercules, which killed the seal after getting away from him on a beach walk, had subsequently died of a kidney infection and been buried in his garden.

Wellington - An earthquake registering 5.8 on the Richter scale hit New Zealand on Monday, seismologists at GNS Science, the official monitoring agency, reported.

The quake, centred near Turangi in the central North Island, was felt 260 kilometres to the south in the capital, Wellington, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.

The quake's epicentre was 80 kilometres below the surface, 50 kilometres deeper than the country's last big quake of magnitude 5.9 which was centred near Hastings, on the east coast of the island, on August 25.