AUSTRALIA
Man survives croc ordeal
A man has been rescued after a three-day ordeal trapped in a remote flooded fishing hut where he was stalked by 4m crocodiles, a report said yesterday. Terry Donovan, 65, was at the Staaten River Fishing and Wilderness Lodge in crocodile-infested northern Queensland when he became isolated this week, the Cairns Post said. He told the newspaper he saw huge saltwater crocs lurking in the water and was afraid that if the water rose much higher one of them might swim in and attack him. “The first one I saw was sitting out the back on the veranda in about a foot [30cm] of water, maybe a bit more,” he said. “I thought to myself: ‘Well, there’s a warning, there’s a crocodile there. Where there’s one, there’s probably two or three or more.’” The report said Donovan positioned himself in the highest place he could find, taking refuge on a billiard table which he packed with supplies. He was eventually spotted by a passing helicopter which had gone to check on him after he failed to answer his satellite phone. Officials then alerted local fishermen, who rescued him.
AUSTRALIA
Suspected hooker set on fire
A woman, reported to be a prostitute, was being treated in hospital for severe burns yesterday after a man set her on fire on an inner-city Sydney street, police said. “Police believe a man approached her and set her alight,” News South Wales State police said of the incident on Thursday evening in the city’s Chippendale area. “The woman was taken inside a nearby business and assisted by an employee who extinguished the flames.” ABC radio said she was a prostitute, and her colleagues at a nearby brothel heard her screaming and rushed out to douse the flames. Inspector Sam Crisafulli told the broadcaster the woman, 33, was in hospital in a critical, but stable condition with severe burns. “She is unfortunately not in a condition where she can tell us exactly what happened at this point in time,” he said. “Hopefully later on she’ll recover, but we don’t know whether she knew her attacker, whether it was random or what the motive is.”
CHINA
Alarm system installed
Beijing has installed a silent alarm system inside every house in a border town as part of a crackdown on fugitives from North Korea, a report said yesterday. The system is designed to let residents secretly send a signal to police if North Koreans come to their homes asking for help, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said. It can transmit dialogue between the owner of a house and visitors, and the authorities plan to expand it to other border areas, the agency said. “If you push the red button on the wall, a signal goes directly to a police station,” Yonhap quoted one man as saying. The man said he saw the device during a recent trip to see a relative in the Yanbian border area in Jilin Province.
SLOVAKIA
Men try to hijack tram
Two passengers on an early-morning tram in Bratislava threatened the driver with a gun on Thursday in a bid to change its destination. “Two men armed with a gun threatened the driver, claiming they did not like the tram’s direction,” Bratislava Transport Authority spokeswoman Agata Stanekova said. The driver called police, but the would-be hijackers got off the tram and escaped before they arrived, Stanekova said. Nobody was injured during the incident, she added. Bratislava’s public transport system — especially trams — underwent major itinerary changes as of Monday, requiring passengers to get used to new routes and schedules.
DENMARK
Lottery billions an error
Three hundred Danes believed a dream lifestyle of champagne and caviar awaited them this week after they were announced billionaire lottery winners — until they discovered it was a mistake. All 300 had received an email from the head of the state-run lottery company Danske Spil congratulating them on the astronomical sums they had won, Danske Spil spokesman Thomas Roersig said. “Three hundred of our lottery players who won the lottery, the Keno, received a message saying they had won a sum in the billions. And they never won that amount ... We are of course very sorry. We have now written to them to inform them of the sum that they really won,” Roersig said.
RUSSIA
Killer escapes by helicopter
A convicted killer broke out of a high-security prison with the help of a hijacked helicopter on Thursday, only to be caught hours later and 100km away headed toward Moscow in a taxi. Alexei Shestakov, 34, who was serving a 24-year sentence for murder, escaped by climbing a rope lowered by helicopter into the prison yard on Thursday morning in the Vologda region north of Moscow, local investigator Natalia Letenkova said. Prison guards shot at the fugitive as he was lifted skyward but missed their mark, she said. “The helicopter was hijacked along with the crew. With a gun to their heads the crew was forced to change course,” she said. The convict, who had served half his prison sentence, was caught hours later on the road to Moscow. Police were searching for his accomplices, who rented the helicopter and then forced the crew to take part in the prison break.
UNITED KINGDOM
Boy, 12, convicted of rioting
A boy who was aged 11 when he took part in last year’s London riots, becoming the youngest person to be prosecuted over the disorder, was given six months’ detention by a court on Thursday, police said. The youth, who is now aged 12, pleaded guilty to violent disorder after admitting that he kicked in a shop window causing £6,000 (US$9,500) damage during the mass looting in August last year, a Scotland Yard statement said. Security camera footage showed him encouraging others to join in the attempt to break into the florist in Romford, east London. He was later identified from CCTV images and arrested in February.
BRAZIL
Uniform stops truancy
Grade-school students are using uniforms embedded with a computer chip to let their parents know if they are in school or cutting classes. The education secretary of the northeastern city of Vitoria da Conquista says 20,000 students in 25 of the city’s 213 public schools started using T-shirts with the chips this week. Coriolano Moraes says that by the end of next year all 43,000 public school students in the city will be using the T-shirts. He said parents are told when their children enter school through a text message and are alerted if they do not show up within 20 minutes after classes begin.
BOLIVIA
Doctors remove huge tumor
Doctors said on Thursday they had successfully removed a 15kg tumor from a woman in her 35th week of pregnancy who had since given birth to a healthy girl. “We took out a tumor of 15kg and there were multiple cysts inside. The lady was a 25-year-old woman who was 35 weeks pregnant and this was her first pregnancy,” medical team leader Ariel Tapia said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema