A piece of fruit prompted the evacuation of an Australian university library last week.
On Friday afternoon, fire and rescue teams in the Australian Capital Territory responded to calls of “a strong smell of gas” inside the University of Canberra library.
The library was evacuated and the territory’s emergency services released a statement saying hazardous materials crews were searching the building and conducting “atmospheric monitoring.”
Photo: AFP
Within an hour, the source of the stench had been discovered.
“Firefighters have completed a search of the building and located the source of the smell,” was the tactful statement from the emergency services department.
“The library is now being reoccupied and the building has been handed back to University of Canberra staff,” it said.
It was left to library staff to reveal the source of the odor: a durian.
Once called the “king of fruits” by 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the durian is adored for its at once sweet and savory flavor and enjoys a cultish popularity in China.
However, its extremely pungent — often reviled — odor means the fruit is often banned from hotels and public transport across Asia.
The rogue durian was left near an air vent on the library’s second level and eventually removed in a sealed bag, a library staff said.
“We are open,” a post on the university library’s Facebook page stated. “The lingering gas-like smell in the building is completely safe — someone left a durian fruit in one of our bins! Very sneaky.”
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
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
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