Foreign

Australian Influencer Allegedly Poisons Baby to Elicit Donation

By Web News 281

An Australian influencer has been charged with poisoning her baby girl to elicit donations and boost online followers.

The Queensland woman claimed she was chronicling her child’s battle with a terminal illness on social media, but detectives allege she was drugging the one-year-old and then filming her in “immense distress and pain”.

Doctors had raised the alarm in October when the baby was admitted to hospital suffering a serious medical episode.

After months of investigation, the 34-year-old woman was charged with torture, administering poison, making child exploitation material and fraud.

“[There are] no words for how repulsive offences of this nature are,” Queensland Police Det Insp Paul Dalton told reporters on Thursday.

Between August and October, detectives say that the woman – from the Sunshine Coast region – gave the child several prescription and pharmacy medicines, without approval.

She went to great lengths to obtain the unauthorised medications and cover up her behaviour, they alleged, including using leftover medicine for a different person in their house.

Police began investigating on 15 October, when the baby was brought into hospital experiencing “severe emotional and physical distress and harm”. Tests for unauthorised medicines returned a positive result later in January, they said.

The woman raised A$60,000 (£30,500; $37,300) through GoFundMe donations – which the site is attempting to repay, Det Insp Dalton said.

Police had investigated other people over the alleged abuse, but there was no evidence to charge anyone else, he added.

The woman is due to face Brisbane Magistrates Court on Friday.

BBC/Simeon Ugbodovon

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Foreign

Entire Town Evacuated as Flash Floods Pummel Queensland

By Web News 409

*Airport submerged and crocodiles are seen after record rain

Flash floods in north Queensland have led to an entire town being evacuated and people trapped on a hospital roof.

Thousands have been evacuated but others remain stranded, in what authorities expect to be the Australian region’s worst-ever flood.

Extreme weather driven by a tropical cyclone has dumped a year’s worth of rain on some areas.

Images show planes submerged at Cairns airport, a crocodile seen in the middle of a town, and people fleeing in boats.

So far no deaths or missing people have been reported.

Intense rainfall is expected to continue for another 24 hours.

Hundreds of people have been rescued – with many homes inundated, power and roads cut off and safe drinking water dwindling.

The city of Cairns has received more than 2m of rainfall since the weather event began.

Queensland Premier Steven Miles told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the natural disaster was “about the worst I can remember”.

“I have been talking to Cairns locals on the ground… and they say they have never seen anything like it,” he said.

“For someone from far north Queensland to say that, that is really saying something.”

Entire town to be evacuated

He said the immediate concern was getting those trapped in rising waters to safety, like those in the remote town of Wujal Wujal, about 175km (110 miles) north of Cairns.

Nine people – including a sick child – spent the night on the roof of the hospital after emergency crews were unable to reach them.

The group on Monday were relocated to another spot, but Mr Miles said the entire town would now need to be evacuated.

He later said a planned evacuation on Monday had to be called off due to bad weather, and that another attempt would be made on Tuesday morning local time, ABC reports.

Mr Miles had earlier voiced “concerns about drinking water, about sewerage, power and telecommunications, the roads – many of the roads are blocked and we can’t get aerial support in.”

Forecasters said the torrential rain would continue for most of Monday and coincide with a high tide, intensifying the impact on low-lying communities.

While the rain is expected to begin easing on Tuesday, rivers are yet to peak and will remain swollen for days.

Several rivers are expected to break records set during a mammoth flood event in 1977. The Daintree River, for example, has already exceeded the previous record by 2m, after receiving 820mm of rain in 24 hours.

State officials estimate the toll of the disaster will top A$1bn (£529m; $670m).

Eastern Australia has been hit by frequent flooding in recent years and the country is now enduring an El Nino weather event, which is typically associated with extreme events such as wildfires and cyclones.

Australia has been plagued by a series of disasters in recent years – severe drought and historic bushfires, successive years of record-breaking floods, and six mass bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef.

A future full of worsening disasters is likely unless urgent action is taken to halt climate change, the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warns.

BBC/Simeon Ugbodovon

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Foreign

Australian Man Killed by Pet Kangaroo

By Web News 577

An Australian man has died after being attacked by a kangaroo he had been keeping as a pet, police say.

A relative found the 77-year-old man with serious injuries on Monday at his home in Redmond, about 400km (250 miles) south of Perth.

When paramedics arrived at the rural property, the kangaroo prevented them from treating the man.

Police were forced to shoot the marsupial dead. The man died at the scene.

A police spokesperson told media they believed the man had been attacked by the kangaroo – a wild animal – earlier in the day.

Australia is home to about 50 million kangaroos, which can weigh up to 90kg and grow to 2m tall.

But fatal attacks are rare – this is the first one reported in Australia since 1936.

Kangaroos have “a lot of weapons” such as sharp teeth, claws and powerful legs, kangaroo behaviour expert Graeme Coulson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Certainly if they’re cornered or in some sort of distress, that can be quite dangerous,” Associate Professor Coulson said.

“The problem with kangaroos and people is we’re both upright animals, we stand on our two feet, and an upright stance like that is a challenge to the male kangaroo.”

In July, a kangaroo left a 67-year-old woman with cuts and a broken leg after it attacked her on a walk in Queensland.

And a three-year-old girl suffered serious head injuries in an attack in New South Wales in March.

Urban development across Australia is increasingly encroaching on wild kangaroo habitats.

BBC/Simeon Ugbodovon

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Foreign

Three killed on remote Australian property

By Web News 5535

A manhunt is underway in northern Australia after three people were killed and another critically injured in a shooting on a remote property.

The shooting happened on Thursday morning local time on a cattle farm at Bogie in Queensland, authorities said.

Queensland Police have locked down an area surrounding the property as they search for the “killer or killers”.

The critically injured person – a man – had travelled “many, many kilometres” to raise the alarm, officers said.

The man suffered a gunshot wound to his abdomen and was flown to a hospital in the city of Mackay to undergo emergency surgery.

Superintendent of police, Tom Armitt told the media that the police are at very early stages of this investigation.

 “We do not know who is responsible,” he said.

Armitt explained that the victims have not been identified but are believed to be relatives of the injured man.

“Originally when the male person spoke to us, he was obviously in a distressed state,” he said.

Australia has some of the toughest gun laws in the world, introduced after a lone gunman murdered 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996.

Since then, there have been only three mass shootings – defined in Australia as those resulting in at least four deaths, excluding the perpetrator.

Supt Armitt described Thursday’s shooting as an “extremely rare event”.

BBC/ Oluwayemisi Owonikoko

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