Australia’s border police raided a home yesterday in the south of Sydney, discovering what local media described as “nuclear isotopes.”
The home, in the suburb of Arncliffe, was the target of an early morning raid and remains cordoned off with tape warning of a toxic, nuclear or biological hazard inside.
Local commercial broadcaster Channel 10 reported that mercury and uranium isotopes were found inside, while the Daily Telegraph said officers had found nuclear isotopes.
Photo: AFP
The Australian Border Force (ABF) would not confirm media reports about the presence of radioactive material at or near the property.
“The ABF can confirm it is conducting an operation today in Arncliffe, New South Wales, with the support of ... emergency services,” a border force spokesperson said in a statement. “All appropriate safety measures are being implemented.”
“People in the vicinity of the location are urged to follow all directions from emergency services,” the statement said.
Sam Abraham, 19, was trying to get home when he came across the closed road.
“It’s scary finding uranium in your neighbor’s house, you come into the street and there’s police,” he said.
“It’s not something that usually happens in Arncliffe,” Nemr Khamis, 60, said. “In the morning I heard the loud trucks and all that stuff, I looked out of the window and I saw the ambulance and the fire brigade.”
“Then I had to come out and look... And when I came back out, I had a baby with me and the police told me to go back inside,” Khamis said, adding that he called relatives who told him “there’s some uranium in the street just off the unit.”
The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) also refused to confirm the presence of any nuclear material.
“ARPANSA will continue to support relevant state and federal agencies in the ongoing management and resolution of the situation,” a spokesperson said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS