A taxi driver ran over and killed a crocodile in the central business district of an Australian town, police said yesterday.
When the driver reported the accident, "police thought he may have been a bit strange or under the influence of liquor or something but it was all above board," said Inspector Ray Pringle.
The taxi collided with the one-metre croc while driving in Mount Isa in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Inspector Pringle said.
"Sure enough when they went down, there was this freshwater croc," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "It was quite severely injured and they looked at opportunities to save its life but the injuries were so bad it passed away." (AFP)
Who's who?
The Irish police have solved the mystery of a Polish recidivist who clocked up 50 traffic offences on different addresses and who was never caught, after one officer noticed his name meant driving licence in Polish.
An internal police memo cited by Irish papers yesterday said officers taking details of Polish traffic offenders had been mistakenly using "Prawo Jazdy", printed in the top right corner of the driving licence, as the holder's name.
"Prawo Jazdy is actually Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence," the police memo dated June 2007 said. "It is quite embarrassing to see the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities."
About 200,000 Polish people flocked to Ireland during the boom years of its "Celtic Tiger" economy but a poll in November indicated a third of them planned to leave due to recession. (Reuters)
Sharks feel credit crunch
Even the sharks are feeling the impact of the global economic slowdown.
Shark attacks on humans dropped worldwide last year to their lowest level in five years, apparently because the recession has curtailed seaside vacations, University of Florida researchers who compile the annual tally said yesterday.
They confirmed 59 shark attacks on humans in 2008, down from 71 the previous year and the fewest since 2003.
"I can't help but think that contributing to that reduction may have been the reticence of some people to take holidays and go to the beach for economic reasons," said George Burgess, who directs the International Shark Attack File at the university.
"We noticed similar declines during the recession that followed the events of 2001, despite the fact that human populations continued to rise," he said in a reference to the Sept. 11 attacks.
In recent years, attacks on vacationing tourists have been recorded off beaches in remote parts of the globe, such as Cocos Island in the Indian Ocean, where none was reported in the past, he said. Four of last year's attacks were fatal - two in Mexico, one in Australia and one in the United States. (Reuters)
Octuplets' grandma faces foreclosure
The grandmother of California's newborn octuplets faces the threat of foreclosure on the house she has shared with her daughter and six of her grandchildren, property records have revealed.
According to a mortgage default notice filed last week with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's Office, Angela Suleman is more than $23,000 behind in payments on her house in the Los Angeles suburb of Whittier, an agency spokesman said.
The default notice was first made public when a copy of the document, giving Mrs Suleman three months to settle her debt in order to avoid foreclosure, was posted on the celebrity news website TMZ.com.
Her daughter, Nadya, 33, jobless and receiving food stamps, drew international headlines and a torrent of public ridicule after giving birth on January 26 to octuplets conceived through in vitro fertilisation.
That criticism intensified when it was revealed she already had six children, aged two to seven, that she was collecting disability checks for three of them, and that they all were living with the grandmother. (Reuters)
Military horse stuns Parisians
A French military horse threw off its rider near President Nicolas Sarkozy's Elysee palace and stunned locals and tourists as it galloped along the banks of the Seine and through the streets of Paris.
The 15-year-old chestnut horse named Garibaldi reached the eastern Bastille area on Wednesday, about four kilometres away, before it was brought under control by police officers, police said.
The horse is part of France's Republican Guard, the ceremonial unit of the Gendarmerie, whose duties include guarding public buildings in Paris such as the Elysee and the national assembly.
Garibaldi, who apparently was spooked by something, suffered only a few scratches during its flight, and its rider was unharmed, police said. (AFP)
China sends yaks, camels to N. Korea
China may not publicly disclose much of its aid or exports to poverty-struck, nuclear-armed North Korea, but state media yesterday let in a crack of light on the issue by announcing the export of yaks and camels.
The official Xinhua news agency said a zoo in the northern Chinese city of Dalian had exported two yaks and four camels to reclusive North Korea. "This is the first time wild animals have been exported to North Korea from either Dalian or Liaoning," the brief report said, referring to the province in which Dalian is located. It gave no details of their ultimate destination in North Korea, nor why the country may have wanted the animals.
Relations between China and neighbouring North Korea, once described as being as close as "lips and teeth", have soured in recent years, especially since Pyongyang began a controversial nuclear programme. But Beijing still provides some energy and food aid, fearing that if North Korea collapses it could destabilise large parts of northeastern China. (Reuters)