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MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Authorities killed on Monday a large crocodile thought responsible for Australia's second fatal attack in a month. The latest victim was a 40-year-old man from New South Wales state who had been fishing on Saturday while on vacation with his wife and children, traveling through Queensland state with a trailer, according to police. Government conservation officer Daniel Guymer said the man fell into the Annan River south of Cooktown. His body has not been recovered. Cooktown resident Bart Harrison said the steep bank...
VIJFHUIZEN, Netherlands (AP) — Grieving families recited the names and ages Wednesday of all 298 passengers and crew killed when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine 10 years ago, as they marked the anniversary of the tragedy at a solemn ceremony near Amsterdam. The relatives, some weeping or choking back tears, named brothers, sisters, parents, grandchildren, grandparents nieces and nephews in a litany of lost lives that lasted 30 minutes. "It's a black day," said Evert van Zijtveld, who lost his daughter and son, F...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet and raised a celebratory clenched fist as his supporters cheered on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga. Assange told Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a phone call from the capital Canberra's airport tarmac that Australian government intervention in the U.S. prosecution had saved his life, A...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The host of a weekend family lunch at her Australian country home was charged with murdering three guests with poisonous mushrooms and attempting to murder a fourth who was left fighting for life, police said on Thursday. Police arrested Erin Patterson, 49, earlier Thursday at her home in Leongatha in Victoria state where her former husband's parents Gail and Don Patterson, both aged 70, Gail Patterson's sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, and her husband Ian Wilkinson, 68, were invited for lunch on July 29. All four g...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Violence receded Friday in the capital of the Solomon Islands, but the government showed no signs of addressing the underlying grievances that sparked two days of riots, including concerns about the country's increasing links with China. Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare sought to deflect attention from domestic issues by blaming outside interference for stirring up the protesters, with a thinly veiled reference to Taiwan and the United States. External pressures were a "very big ... influence. I d...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — An Australian farmer couldn't go to his aunt's funeral because of pandemic restrictions so he paid his respects with a novel alternative: dozens of sheep arranged in the shape of a love heart. Drone-shot video of pregnant ewes munching barley in a paddock while unwittingly expressing Ben Jackson's affection for his beloved Auntie Deb was viewed by mourners at her funeral in the city of Brisbane in Queensland state this week. Jackson was locked down at the time across a state border at his farm in Guyra in New South W...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Helaina Alati was browsing the spice aisle of an Australian supermarket when she came face-to-face with a huge snake. The head of the 3-meter-long (10-foot-long) non-venomous diamond python emerged through a space in a shelf above the spice jars in the Sydney store. "I was in the spice aisle just looking for something to put on my chicken that night so I didn't initially see it because it was curled up way back behind the little jars of spices," Alati said Wednesday. "I kind of turned to my right and it poked its head...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — A ransomware attack on the world's largest meat processing company is disrupting production around the world just weeks after a similar incident shut down a U.S. oil pipeline. JBS SA of Brazil notified the U.S. of a ransom demand from a criminal organization likely based in Russia, White House principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed Tuesday. She said the White House and the Department of Agriculture have been in touch with the company several times this week. JBS has extensive facilities in t...
BOGAN GATE, Australia (AP) — At night, the floors of sheds vanish beneath carpets of scampering mice. Ceilings come alive with the sounds of scratching. One family blamed mice chewing electrical wires for their house burning down. Vast tracts of land in Australia's New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as "absolutely unprecedented." Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork. "We're at a critical point now where if we don't sign...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Alex White thought he was watching a huge worm writhing in plastic-wrapped lettuce he'd just brought home from a Sydney supermarket — until a snake tongue flicked. "I kind of completely freaked out when I saw this little tongue come out of its mouth and start flicking around and realized it was a snake because worms don't have tongues," White said on Thursday. "I definitely kind of panicked a bit," he added. It was a venomous pale-headed snake that authorities say made an 870-kilometer (540-mile) journey to Syd...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — A pigeon that Australia declared a biosecurity risk has received a reprieve after a U.S. bird organization declared its identifying leg band was fake. The band suggested the bird found in a Melbourne backyard on Dec. 26 was a racing pigeon that had left the U.S. state of Oregon, 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) away, two months earlier. On that basis, Australian authorities on Thursday said they considered the bird a disease risk and planned to kill it. But Deone Roberts, sport development manager for the O...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Two fishermen have rescued a naked fugitive who they found sitting on a tree branch in Australian crocodile habitat. Cam Faust said Wednesday he and fellow recreational fisher Kev Joiner heard Luke Voskresensky, 40, yell for help on Sunday as they set crab traps from their dinghy in mangroves on the outskirts of the northern city of Darwin. Faust said Voskresensky -- who was covered in mud, cuts and insect bites -- had explained that he had been lost for four days, survived by eating snails and had used his clothes "...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The Great Barrier Reef is facing a critical period of heat stress over the coming weeks following the most widespread coral bleaching the natural wonder has ever endured, scientists said Friday. David Wachenfeld, chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the government agency that manages the coral expanse off northeast Australia, said ocean temperatures over the next month will be crucial to how the reef recovers from heat-induced bleaching. "The forecasts ... indicate that we can expect o...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Specialist firefighters have saved the world's last remaining wild stand of a prehistoric tree from wildfires that razed forests west of Sydney, officials said Thursday. Firefighters winched from helicopters to reach the cluster of fewer than 200 Wollemi Pines in a remote gorge in the Blue Mountains a week before a massive wildlife bore down, National Parks and Wildlife Service Director David Crust said. The firefighters set up an irrigation system to keep the so-called dinosaur trees moist and pumped water daily f...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Thousands of protesters gathered Friday at rallies around Australia as a day of worldwide demonstrations calling for action to guard against climate change began ahead a U.N. summit in New York. Some of the first rallies in what is being billed as a "global climate strike" kicked off in Australia's largest city, Sydney, and the national capital, Canberra. Australian demonstrators called for their nation, which is the world's largest exporter of coal and liquid natural gas, to take more drastic action to reduce g...
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — An Australian court by a 2-1 majority ruling Wednesday upheld convictions against Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Catholic to be found guilty of children sex abuse. The Victoria state Court of Appeal rejected Cardinal George Pell's appeal of the unanimous verdicts a jury issued in December finding Pope Francis' former finance minister guilty of molesting two 13-year-old choirboys in Melbourne's St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1996 and 1997. At the time, Pell had just become archbishop of Australia's second largest c...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — An Australian crocodile farmer who found an orthopedic plate inside a croc's stomach said Thursday that he had been told the surgical device was from a person's body and had been contacted by relatives of missing people anxious for clues. Koorana Crocodile Farm owner John Lever found the plate inside a 4.7-meter (15-foot-5-inch) croc called M.J. during an autopsy in June at his business near Rockhampton in Queensland state. He initially wasn't sure if the unusual find had been part of an animal or human. But he s...
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The most senior Catholic to be convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. Victoria state County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd on Wednesday ordered Cardinal George Pell to serve a minimum of 3 years and 8 months before he is eligible for parole. Each of the five convictions against Pell carried a maximum possible sentence of 10 years each. "In my view, your conduct was permeated by stagg...
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The most senior Catholic cleric ever convicted of child sex abuse could face his first night in custody after a sentencing hearing Wednesday that will decide his punishment for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral two decades ago. A Victoria state County Court jury unanimously convicted Cardinal George Pell in December of abusing the two 13-year-olds in a rear room of St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1996 weeks after becoming archbishop of Australia's second-largest city. But unusually, Pell wasn't taken i...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The Australian government said on Thursday a Chinese-Australian writer had been detained in China in what a friend suspects is part of a backlash against Canada's arrest of a top Chinese telecommunications executive. Novelist and influential online commentator Yang Hengjun was a Chinese diplomat before he became an Australian citizen. Friends say the 53-year-old had been living in New York as a visiting scholar at Columbia University and had returned to China last week with his wife, Yuan Rui Juan, and 14-year-old s...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia's critical infrastructure including electricity grids, water supplies and hospitals could not have been adequately safeguarded if Chinese-owned telecommunications giants Huawei and ZTE Corp. were allowed to help roll out the nation's 5G network, a spy chief said. Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Signals Directorate, said his cyber experts had backed the government's decision in August to bar the two Chinese companies that he described as "high-risk vendors." It was the first time the s...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — They both wanted children. They knew it was time. Meghan had ended her acting career and moved to Britain to be a full-time royal. Prince Harry had stepped down from the military and wanted to settle down. Their marriage was a five-star glamour blowout: the spectacular Windsor Castle setting, the horse-drawn carriage on a warm spring day, the vintage Jaguar with the top down, the Hollywood A-listers mixing with real-life royalty. And now comes the very welcome word that Harry and Meghan, the duchess of Sussex, are e...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — An Australian archbishop on Tuesday became the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in the world convicted of covering up child sex abuse in a test case that holds to account church hierarchy that kept silent in the face of an international pedophile crisis. Magistrate Robert Stone handed down the verdict against Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson in Newcastle Local Court, north of Sydney, following a magistrate-only trial. Wilson, 67, had pleaded not guilty to concealing a serious crime committed by another person ...
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — A family of seven including four children was found dead with gunshot wounds Friday at a rural property in southwest Australia in what could be the country's worst mass shooting in 22 years, police and news media said. The children died with their mother and grandparents. The three generations had moved in 2015 to Osmington, a village of fewer than 700 people near the tourist town of Margaret River, to grow fruit, media reported. Police would not comment on the possibility of murder-suicide, but said they are not l...
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australian Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Vatican official to be charged in the Catholic Church sex abuse crisis, arrived Wednesday for an appearance in a Melbourne court where he will eventually stand trial on sexual abuse charges spanning decades. Magistrate Belinda Wallington on Tuesday ordered Australia's highest-ranking Catholic to appear at Victoria state County Court after ruling that prosecutors' case was strong enough to warrant a trial by jury. Pell is expected to face a brief preliminary hearing i...
