Wellington, Jan 2: A piece of pita bread that looks like Jesus Christ is up for sale on an online auction site.

The TradeMe website shows a photo of the pita bread, which broke into pieces after being put in the oven.

One piece, the Kiwi seller said, looked like the face of Jesus Christ.

"I was tempted to eat it but for some reason I didn''t," the NZPA quoted the seller as saying in their auction listing.

Wellington - Two Irishmen and a New Zealander who went for a short walk in the bush in T-shirts and shorts with and a bottle of whiskey were found trapped on a steep cliff after a night in the open following a major land and air search, Radio New Zealand reported on Wednesday.

The search was launched after the trio, all aged 26, failed to return from an evening stroll by a river near Punakaiki, on the South Island's west coast, on Tuesday.

Wellington  - Air New Zealand successfully conducted the world's first commercial aviation test flight powered by fuel from the seeds of the African jatropha plant on Tuesday.

Chief executive Rob Fyfe said after the jumbo jet's two-hour flight from Auckland, "It is Air New Zealand's long-term goal to become the world's most environmentally sustainable airline and we have today made further significant progress towards this."

A biofuel blend of 50-50 jatropha and Jet A1 fuel was used to power one of the airline's Boeing 747-400's Rolls-Royce engines.

Air New Zealand, which described jatropha as a sustainable second-generation biofuel, said that more than a dozen key performance tests were undertaken during the flight.

Wellington  - Five people missing in a boat in bad weather off the New Zealand coast for 24 hours were found alive by a search helicopter on Tuesday, rescue authorities said.

A sea-and-air search for two men and three boys - aged 16, 12 and 11 - in a 5.5-metre fibreglass runabout was launched early Monday afternoon when the skipper sent a text message to his wife saying they were lost and needed help.

Coastguard official Tom Scott said four were airlifted to hospital and the skipper and his boat were being towed to port.

Wellington  - New Zealand's Foreign Minister Murray McCully rejected on Wednesday accusations that the country's top diplomat in Fiji, who has been expelled by the island state's military ruler, had broken the rules of diplomatic behaviour.

Fiji told New Zealand's Acting High Commissioner Caroline McDonald on Tuesday to leave the capital Suva in a week, saying she had ignored the military government, which seized power two years ago, and associated only with opposition politicians.

Wellington  - Moko, a bottlenose dolphin that has frolicked off a New Zealand beach for more than 18 months, has become so tame that she catches fish for swimmers, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

"She has actually been bringing fish to people," Jamie Quirk, a Department of Conservation manager at Wairoa, on the east coast of the North Island, told the Dominion Post.

"Some lucky people have had her bring them seahorses."