Police Chase Koala Through Sydney Train Station

FILED - 19 July 2023, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Stuttgart: A koala climbs a tree in its new enclosure at Wilhelma in Stuttgart. Photo: Bernd Weißbrod/dpa
FILED - 19 July 2023, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Stuttgart: A koala climbs a tree in its new enclosure at Wilhelma in Stuttgart. Photo: Bernd Weißbrod/dpa
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Police Chase Koala Through Sydney Train Station

FILED - 19 July 2023, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Stuttgart: A koala climbs a tree in its new enclosure at Wilhelma in Stuttgart. Photo: Bernd Weißbrod/dpa
FILED - 19 July 2023, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Stuttgart: A koala climbs a tree in its new enclosure at Wilhelma in Stuttgart. Photo: Bernd Weißbrod/dpa

A wayward koala led police on a low-speed, early morning chase through a Sydney train station, video released on Tuesday showed, surprising commuters in the city.
Video provided by Transport for New South Wales showed the koala ambling through Casula station on Friday, around 34 km (21 miles) south-west of the city's central business district.
The video showed the koala checking out an elevator before opting to descend a stairway.
Trains in the area were ordered to slow as the koala - a normally reclusive species and one of Australia's best-loved animals - came dangerously close to the platform edge.
The marsupial eventually hopped the station fence after police officers were dispatched to chase it away from the tracks.
"All passengers, great and small, are reminded to stay behind the yellow line," Transport for New South Wales said in a statement.
Koala are listed as vulnerable to extinction in the state.



China Says its Astronauts Complete Record-breaking Spacewalk

File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS
File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS
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China Says its Astronauts Complete Record-breaking Spacewalk

File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS
File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS

Two Chinese astronauts this week completed a world-record spacewalk of more than nine hours, according to a statement from China's Manned Space Agency, marking another milestone for Beijing's rapidly expanding space program.

The spacewalk, carried out by Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong outside the Tiangong space station in low-Earth orbit on Tuesday, was at least four minutes longer than the last record set by NASA astronauts James Voss and Susan Helms in 2001, according to Reuters.

The two astronauts of China's Shenzhou-19 mission donned their Feitian spacesuits to carry out an array of tasks on the station's exterior, including the installation of space-debris protection devices, China's space agency said.

"They successfully completed all the planned tasks and felt very excited about it," Wu Hao, a staffer from the China Astronaut Research and Training Center, told China Central Television, a state broadcaster.

The former Soviet Union in 1965 became the first nation to carry out a spacewalk. Since then, Russia and the United States have conducted hundreds of such missions, primarily outside the International Space Station for tasks ranging from solar panel installations to materials research.

The first spacewalk by a Chinese astronaut occurred in 2008.

China's spacewalking milestone this week comes amid a flurry of other recent cosmic achievements that have boosted Beijing's competitive footing with the United States.

China landed its first rover on Mars in 2021 and earlier this year became the first country to retrieve rock samples from the moon's treacherous far side in its Chang'e-6 mission.

Beijing is targeting 2030 to land its first astronauts on the moon to become the second country after the US to put humans there. Beijing has courted roughly a dozen countries for its International Lunar Research Station program, an effort to build a moon base on the moon's south pole.

That program rivals NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return US astronauts to the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission of 1972.