There’s enough doom and gloom around Aotearoa this week, so we won’t spend too much time on the lockdown and virus conversation. We’ll leave the up-to-the-minute updates to the Prime Minister and Director General of Health. While there's a little of that, we're looking at Pi, Banksy, and a few other things that caught our interest.
This week felt a little familiar as we headed back into a nationwide Level 4 lockdown. All the usual outlets are great sources of news, managing as only great newsrooms can to provide LIVE updates even when news is slow. If it's all a bit much then we wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to tune out a little. But there is one site that deserves to be visited. The Spinoff has put all the Locations of Interest (LOIs) on to an interactive map. Very useful as the list continues to grow and expand into different regions. Check it out.
The 1pm press conferences, or today’s 3pm, continue to be New Zealand’s most watched of the week. We will wait to see what this lockdown’s Netflix smash hit is. More as information comes to hand.
The rights and wrongs of the situation in Afghanistan will be discussed in the months and years to come. For the latest developments there's a live blog on the Guardian.
In the Caribbean, the massive earthquake combined with a serious storm has affected 1.2 million people including 540,000 children according to UNICEF.
In better news a supercomputer in Switzerland took 108 days to calculate the famous number to its first 62.8 trillion decimal places. If you're interested Live Science has the full story.
In a delightful short video posted to Instagram, Banksy details his “Great British Spraycation” along the Norfolk and Suffolk coast, leaving his mark firmly behind. Most of his murals are lighthearted depictions, such as a crab safeguarding some empty shells, holding up a sign declaring “luxury rentals only”.
And because we could all do with some cute kittens, this story caught out attention. A German animal shelter is posting profiles of adoptable pets on Tinder. The shelter hopes lonely singles will 'swipe right' on a new pet. Apparently "the response is insane".
