1Government plans to sell the Shipping Corporation appear to be in jeopardy tonight with union claims that the corporation is on the verge of bankruptcy. Deck officers aboard two vessels are on strike until a redundancy agreement is reached.

2Prime Minister David Lange is refusing to respond in kind to sacked Cabinet Minister Richard Prebble's jibes regarding his leadership style.

3Air New Zealand announced a record profit today, an encouraging boost for the Government's plans to sell the airline.

4United States President Elect George Bush has started making appointees to his inner circle and announcing his intentions for the Presidency. Today he named James Baker as Secretary of State. Analysts are dissecting the 1988 United States Presidential campaign, describing it as a negative and frequently dirty campaign. Was this a contributing factor to the low voter turnout?

5More than 30 coal wagons derailed spectacularly from a freight train near Arthur's Pass last night.

6An Auckland jury has found a man who threw his two young children from the Auckland Harbour Bridge to their deaths not guilty because he was insane at the time. Philip Colin Money threw his daughter Vanessa aged 5, and son Haydon aged 3, off the harbour bridge in 1984. He jumped too but survived.

7A letter written 200 years ago by Captain James Cook has triggered a court case and a family dispute in Gisborne. The owners of the letter have sent it to England for sale, and are now facing prosecution for exporting antiquities.

8The Tainui Trust Board has clarified its stance over land claims affecting the Universities of Auckland and Waikato. It wishes to have an endowed Maori University College established on each campus as compensation for the land.

9The Government has issued the packaging industry with an ultimatum - manufacturers have been told to deal with the increasing problem of plastic, glass and tin waste, or face having regulations imposed on them by the Government.

10Hundreds of people attended the funeral of a father and his two sons, who died in a tramping tragedy in the Tararua Ranges over the weekend.

11One of the South African Siamese (conjoined) twins joined at the head who were successfully separated six months ago, has been released from hospital. Her sister remains in hospital until her strength improves.

12A pilot and nine American tourists were injured when their twin engine plane crash landed in Fiji.

13The world has marked the fiftieth anniversary of the night the Holocaust began. Known as Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) because of the broken glass left in the streets, rampaging Nazi stormtroopers destroyed than a thousand synagogues, ransacked of tens of thousands of Jewish shops and homes, and rounded up more than 30,000 Jewish men and took them to concentration camps.