Australia’s weather forecaster yesterday predicted heavy rain for large swaths of country’s flood-hit south and east, as a flood crisis continues in the two most populous states.
The week-long emergency in New South Wales and Victoria comes as Australia endures a third straight La Nina weather event, bringing heavy rains.
Flooding has killed five people, prompted thousands of requests for assistance and led to hundreds of people being rescued from rising waters.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology yesterday issued a severe weather warning for a 320km stretch of the north coast of New South Wales, including Lismore, the region’s center.
Lismore was among the localities worst hit by devastating floods that hit Australia’s east in March, killing at least 13 and forcing tens of thousands to be evacuated.
The forecaster predicted rainfall for the region, which also includes Byron Bay, to total as much as 300mm within 24 hours.
Photo: Reuters
“Locally intense rainfall which may lead to dangerous and life-threatening flash flooding is also possible during this period,” the agency said on its Web site.
There were 122 flood warnings in place for New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state. Inundations were forecast to be worst in the northeast near Moree and on the southern border near the town of Moama, about 780km from Sydney.
Footage supplied by emergency services showed large parts of Moree, a town of about 7,500 people, submerged and people being dragged to safety from flooded rivers in other parts of the state.
Across the border, Victoria had 67 flood warnings, with parts of Kerang and nearby Echuca — a town of 15,000 on the Murray River — urged to evacuate.
The river, Australia’s longest, had risen to about 94.80m above sea level yesterday, similar to devastating 1993 flood levels, and was expected to reach a peak of about 95m later in the day.
About 750 people have been rescued across the state in the past 10 days, the Victoria State Emergency Service said.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Saturday said 150 Australian Defence Force personnel were assisting in New South Wales and 350 troops in Victoria.
Last weekend, Albanese was joined by Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews when he toured flood-hit parts of the state after suburbs near the central business district of the state capital, Melbourne, were flooded.
Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Friday said that the widespread floods would dent Australia’s economic growth and increase inflation.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might