Canada asks world to stop sending mail

OTTAWA: Canada’s postal service has issued a plea for the rest of the world to stop sending in mail as its striking workers rejected the latest contract offer.

Canada Post, facing a huge delivery backlog as the labor unrest looked set to enter a fifth week, recently sweetened its offer to staff in a last-ditch effort to bring the rotating strikes to an end.

This followed a warning from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that his government was prepared to step in to settle the labor dispute ahead of the upcoming holiday season.

His government has faced pressure from online retailers including eBay to legislate an end to the strike before the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events, which start on November 23.

But a spokeswoman for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers told AFP the offer, due to expire on Saturday, was “unsatisfactory” and the union “will not be presenting it to members.”

Canada Post, meanwhile, said a backlog of deliveries that coincided with the start of the strike on October 22 has now extended to mail entering the country.

“As a result, we have been forced to advise international posts, including the United States Postal Service, that we are unable to accept incoming items until further notice,” it said in an email.

The two sides have been in contract negotiations for nearly one year, with no success.

The rotating strikes have so far impacted more than 200 communities, including major cities Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver.

In Toronto alone, a record 260 trailers of parcels and packets were waiting to be unloaded, while in Vancouver more than 100 trailers were parked outside its plant.

Canada Post delivers two-thirds of the nation’s online shopping and the last six weeks of the year are its busiest due to the holiday rush.

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Rare Sumatran tiger rescued from beneath shop in Indonesia

BURUNG ISLAND, Indonesia: A rare Sumatran tiger that was trapped beneath the floor of a shop for three days has been rescued, an Indonesian official said Saturday.

The three-year old male was freed from the 75 centimetre (30 inch) crawl space on Burung Island in Riau province, the local conservation agency said.

“After the tiger was successfully put to sleep we opened up part of the shop’s foundation to do the evacuation,” Suharyono, head of the Riau conservation agency, told AFP.

The 80-kilo (180-pound) animal was treated by veterinarians for minor wounds on its legs and cracked canines, officials said.

The big cat became stuck between two buildings in the densely populated market area on Wednesday before freeing himself and then becoming trapped again beneath the building.

Video footage showed the tiger lying on its belly between two concrete foundations, unable to move.

The tiger has been transported to a rehabilitation centre.

Sumatran tigers are considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

There are fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild and environmental activists say they are increasingly coming into conflict with people as their natural habitat is rapidly deforested.

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Australian dies of cardiac arrest after ‘stingray attack’

SYDNEY: A swimmer died after a rare suspected stingray attack off an Australian beach while another two people were mauled in separate shark encounters this weekend.

The 42-year-old’s death came more than a decade after world-renowned “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin was killed when a stingray barb punctured his chest while he was filming on the famed Great Barrier Reef.

The man was in waters off Lauderdale Beach some 23 kilometres (14 miles) from Hobart in the southern island state of Tasmania Saturday when he “sustained a puncture wound to his lower abdomen… possibly inflicted by a marine animal”, police said.

He was brought onto the beach by friends but suffered a heart attack and was unable to be resuscitated, police added.

“It’s consistent with (a stingray injury) but further investigation and examination of the deceased may be able to give a bit more of a concrete fact on that,” Tasmania Police Senior Constable Brett Bowering told the Sunday Tasmanian.

“It’s a pretty traumatic incident to see.”

Commonly found in tropical waters, stingrays rarely attack humans but their barbs, at the end of their tails, are coated in toxic venom which they use to defend themselves when threatened.

– Two attacks –

In the first shark attack of the weekend, a man taking part in a surf lesson off the east coast suffered serious cuts after an encounter on Saturday.

The 24-year-old was wading waist-deep in waters off Seven Mile Beach some 130 kilometres (81 miles) south of Sydney when he “felt a forceful lashing motion against his legs”, New South Wales Ambulance said.

He had “significant cuts and haemorrhage as well as several puncture wounds to his wetsuit and right leg… and cuts to his hand”, NSW Ambulance duty operations manager Inspector Jordan Emery told reporters Saturday.

The beach was closed and authorities sought to identify the shark species involved.

That attack was followed by another on Sunday off the north coast, when a teenage boy was bitten on his arm and leg while spearfishing, police said.

The 17-year-old was spearfishing from a vessel off the coast of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory when he sustained “significant injuries” to his arm, St John Ambulance told national broadcaster ABC.

“Obviously there’s quite a large amount of bleeding that’s occurred,” St John Ambulance’s Craig Garraway said.

He said shark encounters in the NT were unusual, adding: “I’ve been around a long time and I’ll be honest, I can’t remember a shark attack.”

The two attacks are the sixth and seventh off Australian beaches in two months, amid public debate about how to reduce the risk of encounters between sharks and the growing number of people using the ocean for leisure.

Australia has one of the world’s highest incidences of shark attacks, but fatalities remain rare.

There have been 13 “unprovoked” shark attacks off the vast continent’s coast this year, including one death after a swimmer was mauled by a shark in the Whitsunday Islands in early November, according to data from Sydney’s Taronga Zoo.

There were 15 attacks — one fatal — last year, and 17 encounters and two deaths in 2016, the data showed.

New South Wales hosted an international conference with marine experts in 2015 after a sharp increase in attacks across Australia that year to 22, including the death of a Japanese surfer after his legs were torn off by a shark.

The state, Australia’s most populous, has trialled non-lethal measures such as aerial drones to track shark movements and “smart” drum lines that alert authorities to their presence.

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