to move up and down
Teen survives in Australian bush for nine weeks emerging half blind, covered in leeches and 84lbs lighter
An 18-year-old man has astonished emergency personnel by surviving for almost nine weeks in dense Australian bush during a record-breaking heatwave.
Matthew Allen, who has been missing from his home since November 27, was found covered in leeches, bites from mosquitoes and gangrene was affecting his feet and legs. Police said he had lost almost 84lbs (38kgs) — about half his body weight.
“He was in such a poor state,” Acting Det.-Insp. Glyn Baker told the Sydney Morning Herald. “He was completely exhausted, completely dehydrated, suffered significant weight loss, somewhere up to 50%. He was suffering from partial blindness and he had leeches all over him.”
Apparently this was the work of a rogue librarian, and not their official policy on Lance Armstrong. But it’s still funny.
“All non-fiction Lance Armstrong titles, including Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion, The Lance Armstrong Performance Program and Lance Armstrong: World’s Greatest Champion, will soon be moved to the fiction section,” a sign, sporting a smiley face, tells library patrons.
Armstrong’s books have also taken a beating from reviewers on sites such as online bookseller Amazon.com — the once-faithful readers now skeptical of every word in the cyclist’s autobiography Its Not About The Bike. (Photo via Reddit user Evadregand)
Amateur prospector finds massive, $260,000 gold nugget buried under bush
When an amateur prospector with a metal detector found something under a bush in Ballarat, Australia, he thought it was part of a car hood. Then he saw “a glint of gold.”
When he started scraping away dirt, “the gold kept expanding and expanding,” a friend of the unidentified man told the BBC. When he finished, he’d revealed the full scale of his find: a 22-cm-long hunk of gold weighing 5.5 kg.
It’s now up for sale for $260,000. (YouTube)
A snake on a plane: Python clings to wing during flight to Papua New Guinea from Australia
This snake on a plane had a turbulent flight. Stunned Qantas Airways passengers watched out their windows as a large python clung to a plane’s wing during a two-hour flight from Australia’s northeastern city of Cairns to Papua New Guinea.
The 3-meter python fought to stay on the wing, pulling itself forward only to be pushed back by the frigid wind. (AFP / Robert Weber)
Terrified family clings to dock for hours as wildfire rip through town and destroys their home
As a wildfire destroyed their Tasmanian home, Tim and Tammy Holmes gathered their five grandchildren and headed for the only place they thought would be safe: the area beneath a wooden jetty, where the frightened family stayed for over two hours.
The family clung to the jetty and to each other as the fire tore through the town of Dunalley, about 56 km east of the state capital of Hobart, Australia, until they found a small boat and made their way out of the fire zone. (Tim Holmes, Holmes Family/Associated Press)
Threat level raised to ‘catastrophic’ as wildfires scorch 124,000 acres in Australia
Firefighters battled scores of wildfires Tuesday in southeastern Australia as authorities evacuated national parks and warned that hot, dry and windy conditions were combining to raise the threat to its highest alert level. Temperatures soared to 45 degrees Celsius in some areas.
No deaths have been reported, although officials in Tasmania were still trying to find about 100 people who have been missing since last week when a fire tore through the small town of Dunalley, east of the state capital of Hobart, destroying around 90 homes. On Tuesday, police found no bodies during preliminary checks of the ruined houses. (AP Photos)
‘It could have been fatal’: Young Australian boy’s egg collection hatches into deadly snakes
A 3-year-old Australian boy was lucky to escape uninjured after a collection of eggs he found in his yard hatched into a slithering tangle of deadly snakes.
Reptile specialist Trish Prendergast said Friday that young wildlife enthusiast Kyle Cummings could have been killed if he had handled the eastern brown snakes — the world’s most venomous species on land after Australia’s inland taipan.
Kyle found a clutch of nine eggs a few weeks ago in the grass on his family’s 1.2-hectare property on the outskirts of the city of Townsville in Queensland state, Prendergast said. He had no idea what kind of eggs they were. (Trish Prendergast)
Will the world end in 2012? NASA says no, Australian PM Julia Gillard says yes
The 2012 doomsayers are wrong says NASA, which has dedicated a section of its website to debunking myths about the alleged coming apocalypse. It may have a hard time convincing people, however, as the Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, has recorded a video message expressing with certainly that the world is coming to an end in just a few weeks.
The NASA section spun out of the work of scientist David Morrison, who talked with NPR about the phenomenon last week.
“Many people don’t know what they’re afraid of,” Morrison told NPR’s Neal Conan, “but they have heard this doomsday thing so often that they just come to me with a simple question: Will we have Christmas this year?”
Up in the air
Australia’s James Connor dives during the men’s 10m platform preliminaries at the Fort Lauderdale Aquatic Center on Day 1 of the AT&T USA Diving Grand Prix on Thursday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)
Cool idea for a race: About 3,000 women laced on their sneakers and ran into Australian night, without a man in sight. Actually, men were not allowed to join Nike’s ‘She Runs the Night’ female-only 13 kms running event. Last night’s race in Sydney’s Centennial Park was the first of its kind in Australia.
ANZAC Day commemorated around the world
Australians and New Zealanders commemorated ANZAC Day, honouring members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who fought in the 1915 campaign at Gallipoli, Turkey, during the First World War. In that campaign, 28,000 Australians and 7,500 New Zealanders were killed or wounded in battle. In the decades since the end of the First World War, ANZAC Day commemorates all who served and died in wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations. (Reuters;AFP/Getty Images)
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard dragged from restaurant by police after being surrounded by angry protesters
This is the moment Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was dragged from a Canberra restaurant by her security team after it was surrounded by furious Aboriginal rights protesters.
Ms. Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott were stranded in The Lobby restaurant on Thursday as dozens of demonstrators from a protest against Australia Day, which marks the arrival of British settlers in 1788, converged on the hotel.
Losing a shoe in the rush to safety, Ms. Gillard and Mr. Abbott were dramatically escorted through the crowd by security agents and riot police brandishing shields, and the visibly rattled Ms. Gillard tripped and fell during the rush.
She later made light of the incident, saying she was “made of pretty tough stuff and the police did a great job.” (Photo: Lukas Coch/AFP/Getty Images)
‘It’s pretty well known that crocs don’t like lawn mowers’: Australia crocodile takes down lawnmower
An Australian reptile park worker had a terrifying experience Wednesday when he realised a giant saltwater crocodile had latched onto his lawn mower as he tidied the beast’s enclosure.
The five-metre crocodile known as Elvis didn’t like it when Billy Collett and another man went to cut the grass in his home at the Australian Reptile Park north of Sydney.
“It happened that fast, it was that scary,” Mr. Collett told reporters of the ordeal.
“We’d just started mowing, the croc’s sitting about five foot away from me in the water, then (the) next second he’s attached to the end of the mower, dragging it in, and almost taking me into the drink with him.” (Photo: Australian Reptile Park/Reuters)
Photos of the day
Brendon Todd practices at Bathers Bay during the 2011 ISAF Sailing World Championships, Dec. 15, 2011 in Perth, Australia. (Photo: Mark Dadswell/Getty Images)
Scientists discover the insect-like eyes of freakish prehistoric super-predator
Australian scientists on Thursday hailed the discovery of a pair of insect-like eyes belonging to a freakish prehistoric super-predator which trawled the seas more than 500 million years ago.
Measuring three centimetres (1.2 inches) across and with a whopping 16,000 individual lenses the fossilised eyes, from a huge shellfish-type creature called anomalocaris, were found in rocks on Australia’s Kangaroo Island.
Anomalocaris could grow up to one metre long and were considered the “great white shark” of the Cambrian era, topping the ancient marine food chain, according to lead researcher John Paterson. (Katrina Kenny/University of Adelaide/AFP/Getty Images)
