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  - A Pakistani immigrant told New Zealand officials he had not paid nearly 200,000 New Zealand dollars (about 134,000 US dollars) in income tax because "where I come from we didn't have to pay tax," a newspaper reported on Thursday.

Farrukh Hashmi, 42, pleaded guilty in the Napier District Court Wednesday to 37 charges of failing to pay tax on earnings from his grocery store between 2002 and 2007, the Dominion Post reported.

Wellington  - Nippy, who was believed to live longer than any other gibbon in captivity, has been put down aged about 60 at Wellington Zoo after his health rapidly deteriorated, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

"The decision to euthanise him was not made lightly, but we firmly believe it was in his best interest," zoo manager Mauritz Basson told the Dominion Post. "His mind remained agile but it seemed that his body had just given up."

Nippy, believed to have been born in Borneo, had lived at the zoo since arriving as a one-year-old in December, 1949.

Wellington  - New Zealand is poised to recover from recession as the economy has hit the bottom of a downturn cycle, the country's leading independent economic think tank said on Tuesday.

Increases in energy and food prices appeared to be past their peak, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research said, and it noted that interest rates had started to ease, albeit slowly.

Analysts believe the central bank will cut its benchmark interest rate again in a scheduled review of monetary policy on September 11, after reducing it to 8 per cent on July 24.

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.

Wellington  - New Zealand's suspended foreign minister Winston Peters was scheduled to meet fraud investigators on Saturday in a bid to clear his name after allegations that donations to his political party did not reach their intended destination.

Peters, 63, agreed to stand down from his post on Friday after calling the allegations "vile, malevolent, evil and wrong."