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.”
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS