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Shark attacks and seriously injures British tourist in the Caribbean as friends “fight off” the predator
A shark attacked a British tourist on Friday in the southeastern Caribbean, prompting the government of Trinidad & Tobago to close seven beaches and a marine park. The man was hospitalized in an intensive care unit following the attack, officials said.
The closure included beaches along the northwestern coast of the island of Tobago. The attack occurred at Turtle Beach along Great Courland Bay.
The BBC identified the victim as Peter Smith, 64, who was on the Caribbean island with wife Jo and friends when he was attacked. His wife said he suffered damage to his left arm and leg, puncture wounds to the abdomen and injuries to his right hand.
This weekend, she said her husband “is aware of what is happening and is able to communicate a little, although he is still under strong medication,” according to the BBC.
Officials said the incident involved a bull shark estimated to be eight to 10 fet long, the BBC reported.
The government said in a statement that shark sightings were reported in the Grafton area and the Buccoo Reef Marine Park. Officials said the closures will allow the Coast Guard and Department of Fisheries to investigate the incident and “neutralize the shark threat, if possible.”
Eyewitness Orion Jakerov, a water sports manager at the nearby Starfish resort, said other people in the water were “physically trying to fight off the shark.”
“I don’t think they saw it. They were about waist height in the water so they weren’t out of their depth,” he told the local broadcaster TTT Live. “I think their backs were turned and they were just kind of lounging around. Nobody saw the shark coming.”
Shark attacks are rare. Last year, there were 69 unprovoked attacks and 22 provoked bites worldwide, along with 14 fatalities, according to the Florida-based International Shark Attack File.
The incident in Tobago comes after attacks on American tourists in recent months in the Caribbean. In January, a young boy from Maryland was seriously injured when he was bitten by a shark at a resort in the Bahamas.
In December, a Boston woman was killed in a shark attack in the Bahamas. Lauren Erickson Van Wart, 44, was paddleboarding with a family member when she was attacked. She was declared dead at the scene by emergency responders.
Last May, an American woman visiting Turks and Caicos was hospitalized in serious condition after being attacked by a shark while snorkeling. The 22-year-old woman from Connecticut, who was was reportedly on vacation celebrating her graduation from Yale, lost her foot in the attack.
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Britain’s Conservative Party on Saturday elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader as it tries to rebound from a crushing election defeat that ended 14 years in power.
The first Black woman to lead a major British political party, Badenoch (pronounced BADE-enock) defeated rival lawmaker Robert Jenrick in a vote of almost 100,000 members of the right-of-center Conservatives.
She got 53,806 votes in the online and postal ballot of party members, to Jenrick’s 41,388.
Badenoch replaces former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who in July led the Conservatives to their worst election result since 1832. The Conservatives lost more than 200 seats, taking their tally down to 121.
The new leader’s daunting task is to try to restore the party’s reputation after years of division, scandal and economic tumult, hammer Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s policies on key issues including the economy and immigration, and return the Conservatives to power at the next election, due by 2029.
Alberto Pezzali / AP
“The task that stands before us is tough but simple,” Badenoch said in a victory speech to a roomful of Conservative lawmakers, staff and journalists in London. She said the party’s job was to hold the Labour government to account, and to craft pledges and a plan for government.
Addressing the party’s election drubbing, she said “we have to be honest — honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip.”
“The time has come to tell the truth, to stand up for our principles, to plan for our future, to reset our politics and our thinking, and to give our party, and our country, the new start that they deserve,” Badenoch said.
A business secretary in Sunak’s government, Badenoch was born in London to Nigerian parents and spent much of her childhood in the West African country.
The 44-year-old former software engineer depicts herself as a disruptor, arguing for a low-tax, free-market economy and pledging to “rewire, reboot and reprogram” the British state.
A critic of multiculturalism and self-proclaimed enemy of wokeness, Badenoch has criticized gender-neutral bathrooms and government plans to reduce U.K. carbon emissions. During the leadership campaign she drew criticism for saying that “not all cultures are equally valid,” and for suggesting that maternity pay was excessive.
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the Conservative Party was likely to “swing towards the right both in terms of its economic policies and its social policies” under Badenoch.
He predicted Badenoch would pursue “what you might call the boats, boilers and bathrooms strategy …. focusing very much on the trans issue, the immigration issue and skepticism about progress towards net zero.”
Alberto Pezzali / AP
While the Conservative Party is unrepresentative of the country as a whole — its 132,000 members are largely affluent, older white men – its upper echelons have become markedly more diverse.
Badenoch is the Tories’ third female leader, after Margaret Thatcher and Liz Truss, both of whom became prime minister. She’s the second Conservative leader from a non-white background, after Sunak, and the first with African roots. The center-left Labour Party, in contrast, has only ever been led by white men.
In a leadership contest that lasted more than three months, Conservative lawmakers reduced the field from six candidates in a series of votes before putting the final two to the wider party membership.
Both finalists came from the right of the party, and argued they can win voters back from Reform U.K., the hard-right, anti-immigrant party led by populist politician Nigel Farage that has eaten away at Conservative support.
But the party also lost many voters to the winning party, Labour, and to the centrist Liberal Democrats, and some Conservatives worry that tacking right will lead the party away from public opinion.
Starmer’s government has had a rocky first few months in office, beset by negative headlines, fiscal gloom and a plummeting approval rating.
But Bale said that the historical record suggests the odds are against Badenoch leading the Conservatives back to power in 2029.
“It’s quite unusual for someone to take over when a party gets very badly beaten and manage to lead it to election victory,” he said. “However, Keir Starmer did exactly that after 2019. So records are there to be broken.”