Police in Australia launched an investigation on Friday after a statue of British naval officer James Cook was found vandalized in Sydney. The hand and nose of the statue of Cook, who charted Sydney’s coast in 1770,

Australia Day is known to some Indigenous Australians as Invasion Day, symbolising a key moment in the destruction of their cultures by European settlers.

SYDNEY >> A statue in Sydney of British explorer James Cook, captain of the first Western ship to reach the east coast of Australia, was sprayed with red paint and damaged two days before Australia’s national day,