Wellington  - A war dance made famous by New Zealand's national rugby team the All Blacks was officially designated the intellectual property of a Maori tribe in a compensation agreement signed in Wellington on Wednesday.

The All Blacks always perform the haka called Ka Mate, with ferocious threatening actions and protruding tongues, as a challenge in front of their opponents before the start of games.

Wellington  - New Zealand state-owned power generator Meridian Energy on Tuesday announced a joint venture with Mitsubishi Motors to conduct trials of a new generation of electric cars.

The first venture of its kind, they are combining to test two prototypes of the Mitsubishi iMiEV, a four-door hatchback with a maximum speed of 130 kilometres an hour and a driving range of up to 160 kilometres, with fuel costs claimed to be one-third the price of petrol.

Wellington  - The search for a Dutch tourist and the pilot of a microlight aircraft that crashed on a sightseeing flight over New Zealand's Abel Tasman National Park resumed on Tuesday.

A wing of the plane was spotted from the air on Monday afternoon after it failed to return to Motueka on schedule, but a search of dense bush in the 22,530 hectare park found no trace of the couple.

The area where the plane is believed to have crashed is extremely rugged with deep gorges, a spokesman for the search operation told Radio New Zealand.

Wellington  - New Zealand Prime Minister John Key bowed Monday to calls to examine procedures of the country's top security agency after it was revealed that it had spied on opposition Green Party legislator Keith Locke.

Locke, a well-known left-winger whose parents were openly members of the Communist Party, said his Security Intelligence Service (SIS) personal file showed that spies had watched him from the age of 11 and continued to do so after he was elected as a member of parliament in 1999.

Wellington  - A man attacked while swimming off a New Zealand beach was injured by a stingray, not a shark, as police and paramedics first thought, according to news reports on Sunday.

Police cleared beaches on the South Island's Tasman Bay on Saturday, after Mike French, 46, a builder, staggered from waist-deep water at Kina Beach with two deep, tearing lacerations in his back.

He did not see what attacked him but paramedics told police the wounds looked like a shark bite and bathers were told to keep out of the water.

Wellington  - New Zealand peacefully celebrated 169 years of partnership between its indigenous Maori people and white settlers from Britain Friday with Prime Minister John Key shrugging off a physical attack on him by two Maori dissidents the previous day as an isolated incident.