Australia news live updates: Qld and NSW flood death toll rises; WA Covid cases expected to surge; Japanese encephalitis cases suspected








There is something happening on the ground in the outer suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. It may just be a ripple, or it could be a roar – another crack in Australia’s political landscape arising from the pandemic.

The full impact won’t be known until election night, but the number of people finding resonance with the “freedom” message of Clive Palmer’s United Australia party cannot be ignored.

The United Australia party has attracted some controversial figures and candidates, including at least two who have espoused views in support of Vladimir Putin. But disaffected voters right across the country, particularly from the migrant communities of western Sydney and western Melbourne that were hard hit by lockdowns, are also signing up to join the Palmer movement.















Four days ago Tasmanians Rachel Lehmann Ware and her husband, Duncan, received the call.

They had spent the past few nights in the basement of the school they worked in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital at the heart of the Russian invasion.

The couple and another teacher had 30 minutes to get to the other side of the city. It was their only hope to get out.

Lehmann Ware said:


I don’t know what the CEO did to get them, but he got us seats on the train and it’s almost impossible. We had 30 minutes to get there. We got there with literally 30 seconds to go. The driver, he was screeching down the streets of Kyiv.

The couple is now safely in Chernivtsi, a city in western Ukraine that is acting as a short-term haven for people trying to cross the border to Romania or Moldova.

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Tasmania records one new Covid death, 16 people in hospital








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It was dry and sunny in Melbourne 10 days ago when Kimberley Reid was looking at images being spat out by a weather forecasting model – all isobars, arrows and splodges of orange.

The phenomenon forming in the atmosphere off Queensland’s coast – about 1,500km (930 miles) north-east of Reid’s computer screen – was nothing remarkable yet, but the channels of moisture she saw in the pictures are the subject of her PhD.

“Atmospheric rivers are quite easy to see,” she says. “I thought it didn’t look that strong. I was holding back from tweeting. I didn’t think it was going to get that big.”

Reid says atmospheric rivers are long, narrow regions between one and three kilometres up “characterised by really strong water flow. It is like a running river in the sky.”

A few days later, the river got stuck over an area of the Pacific Ocean a few hundred kilometres north of Brisbane.

Rain became torrential – like a tsunami from the sky. Politicians called it a “rain bomb”.

Reid has calculated how much water was in the river as it was flowing over Greater Brisbane.

The city itself got almost 80% of its annual rainfall in only six days up to 28 February, when the system started to move south. Brisbane had only ever recorded eight days of more than 200mm before the 2022 floods. But it saw three in a row.

Reid says over the course of the two heaviest days of rain, 26 and 27 February, enough water flowed in the atmospheric river above the city to fill Sydney harbour – that holds about 500bn litres – almost 16 times.

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