A tourist has had a lucky escape after being trapped on a remote Australian island for two weeks by a monster 6m crocodile, reports said yesterday.
The New Zealander, identified only as Ryan, was dropped with his kayak on Governor Island off Western Australia’s far north by boat and had been intending to paddle the 4km to the mainland.
He told his rescuer, Kalumburu resident Don Macleod, that every time he tried to kayak away from the island, the giant reptile stalked him. So he stayed on dry land, despite diminishing food and water supplies, for fear of being eaten.
“He said he was there for a fortnight and he came to the conclusion very quickly that he couldn’t get off there without attracting this crocodile that lives in that area and probably was watching him all the time,” Macleod told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “So he was reduced then to trying to conserve his water and signal [for help].”
Macleod said he was familiar with the crocodile that roamed the island, which has no fresh water source.
“That crocodile, I’ve seen him several times actually going by quite fast,” he said. “One day, he just happened to surface alongside me as I was going past and my boat’s 20 foot [6m] long, so he was well up towards the 20-foot mark.”
Macleod said he only went to investigate on Saturday after spotting a light on Governor Island and came across the distressed man.
“I went across and Ryan came out looking a bit distraught,” he told the broadcaster. “He came down the beach, he had no hat on and no shirt on. He was relieved and shocked, and thankful someone had come along because he was running out of options pretty quickly. He is a very, very lucky man. He was desperate for water when I trotted up. We gave him a cold beer, which was probably the wrong thing, and then he went to sleep about three-quarters of the way home.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS