Wellington - One in five New Zealand children live below the poverty line, a children's agency said Thursday.

Half of all children in one-parent families, four out of 10 in the Pacific island population and 27 per cent of indigenous Maori youngsters live in poverty, Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro said.

Her report on a survey with the Barnados child welfare organization put the total number of poor children in the country of nearly 4.3 million at 230,000.

Wellington - Big oil companies were cleared of suspicion of running an illegal anti-competitive cartel in an independent investigation into New Zealand petrol pump prices released Thursday.

The report showed that the New Zealand petrol market was "fundamentally competitive," said Commerce Minister Lianne Dalziel, who commissioned the study after angry motorists' complaints about a 30-per-cent increase in prices within five months.

The price of the most popular 91-octane petrol reached 2.18 New Zealand dollars (about 1.57 US dollars) a litre last month in New Zealand cities, a rise of 60 per cent since January 2007.

Wellington - New Zealand's unemployment rate increased slightly in the June quarter to 3.9 per cent, according to official figures released Thursday.

Wellington - United States crooner Andy Williams' Moon River proved more effective than Mozart's The Magic Flute in getting rowdy merry-makers off the streets in the early hours of the morning in

Wellington - Henry, a tuatara reptile relic of the dinosaur age said to be 111-years-old, is to become a father for the first time, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) usually become sexually mature at the age of about 20, but Henry, who lives at the Southland Museum in Invercargill, was a slow developer and did not discover sex until March when he had a romp with Mildred, who is in her 70s.

As a result, Mildred laid 12 eggs last month and although one has perished, the rest are doing well in a museum incubator and should hatch in about six months, curator Lindsay Hazley told the Southland Times.

Wellington - A coroner's inquest on a skull found on a New Zealand riverbank has highlighted the mystery of a victim who could have been the first European woman in the country when she died more than 350 years ago, news reports said Tuesday.

Pathologists said the skull, found near Featherston in Wairarapa province, belonged to a Caucasian woman in her early 40s and radiocarbon dating indicated she was alive in 1742, give or take 34 years.