Wellington  - New Zealand's government welfare agency has confirmed it examines internet social network sites like Facebook to catch benefit fraudsters, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

Young mother Lauren Kaney, 22, of Mount Maunganui, was convicted in court last week of getting three times the weekly benefit she was entitled to, after claiming she lived on her own with her 2-year-old- son.

In fact, her Bebo and Facebook pages revealed she was living with the boy's father, the Herald on Sunday reported.

Wellington - People switched off their lights in 44 cities and towns throughout New Zealand at 8:30 pm (0830 GMT) Saturday to kick off the worldwide 2008 Earth Hour event designed to draw attention to global warming.

If hopes of the organizers, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), are realized, by the time the hour from 8:30 to 9:30 pm local time has passed around the globe, 1 billion people in more than 1,000 cities would have spent 60 minutes in darkness to show their concern about the excessive use of energy and its impact on the environment.

Wellington  - An illegal Indian immigrant in New Zealand for the last 23 years has been reunited with his wife and son after finally getting permission to stay, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

"I thought I would be going to my grave without ever seeing them again," Abdul Jalil Patel, 58, told the New Zealand Herald as his wife Amina, 55, and son Salman, 24, flew into Auckland airport on Friday.

Wellington  - More than 100 pilot whales died in a mass stranding on an isolated beach in the Chatham Islands, a New Zealand-owned group in the Pacific Ocean, about 700 kilometres south-east of the capital Wellington, reports said Friday.

The Department of Conservation was notified of the mass stranding at Mairangi on Thursday night, but the tide had gone out by the time staff reached the site, Radio New Zealand reported.

Eight surviving whales were so badly injured that they had to be put down, the report said.

Wellington - New Zealand's deepening recession was confirmed Friday when official figures were released showing the economy had contracted for the fourth consecutive quarter last year.

Gross domestic product (GDP) was down 0.9 per cent in the December quarter, Statistics New Zealand said, with a 3.8 per cent slump in manufacturing the main contributor.

The one bright feature of the report was a 4-per-cent rise in agricultural output in the last quarter, driven by increased production of dairy products, which account for about

Wellington  - Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, 59, the new chief of the United Nations Development Programme is a no-nonsense, political junkie with a lifelong commitment to helping the poor and underprivileged.

Once labelled a radical feminist, she overcame what she dubbed "incredibly sexist" male attitudes in the New Zealand Parliament, where she has served for more than 27 years, to win promotion by "the skills and devotion of a workaholic," as she put it.