Some Brisbane residents have taken to the flooded streets in canoes.
The Australian state of Queensland is facing a reconstruction task of “post-war proportions”, as floods left swathes of it under water.
State Premier Anna Bligh said the state was reeling from the worst natural disaster in its history.
Powerful flood waters have surged through the state capital, Brisbane, leaving thousands of homes submerged.
The floods peaked at a lower level than expected but 30 suburbs are under water.
Huge amounts of debris – cars, boats and jetties – have been floating downstream, some smashing into bridges.
One man died when he was sucked into a storm drain and two more deaths elsewhere were reported by Australian broadcaster ABC, bringing the toll from this week’s flooding to 15, with dozens more missing.
At the scene
Things are still very bad here – there is widespread devastation. Some 25,000 homes are either partially or totally flooded, but the key thing is the river levels didn’t peak at the high point feared.
The big commercial area will win a reprieve but more than 30 suburbs have been hit and people will be under water for days to come. There will have to be a huge recovery operation throughout the state, so this crisis is far from over.
The floods have devastated much of the agriculture sector and the mining sector. I was speaking to the state treasurer on Wednesday and he said the cost would have a “b” after it – for billions – rather than an “m”.
The Brisbane River was expected to continue to fall to around 3.2m by early on Friday.
It peaked at 4.46m (14.6ft) just before 0530 (1930 GMT Wednesday), short of the 5.4m (17.7ft) in the 1974 floods.
West of Brisbane, the small town of Goondiwindi is on high alert, with fears the flooding Macintyre River could swamp the town.
Police are continuing to search areas of the Lockyer Valley for those missing after a torrent of water swept through the area on Monday.
“Queensland is reeling this morning from the worst natural disaster in our history and possibly in the history of our nation,” Ms Bligh told reporters.
“We’ve seen three-quarters of our state having experienced the devastation of raging flood waters and we now face a reconstruction task of post-war proportions.”
In Brisbane, the worst-hit suburbs included Brisbane City, St Lucia, West End, Rocklea and Graceville.
“There will be some people that will go into their homes that will find them to be never habitable again,” Ms Bligh said.
Brisbane Mayor Campbell Newman said 11,900 homes and 2,500 businesses had been completely flooded, with 14,700 houses and 2,500 businesses partially submerged.
Milton resident Brenton Ward reached his home in the suburbs by rowing boat.
“We have water to the waist in the living room. We have to check the amount of damage – probably (the) electricity has to be all rebuilt,” he said.
Many supermarkets in the city have been stripped of supplies, while a number of rubbish collections and bus services have halted. More than 100,000 properties had their power cut.
Where waters had receded in the city centre, sticky mud remained. Officials said the clean-up could take months.
Brisbane airport survived the swell and remains open, with almost all flights unaffected. However, passengers are advised to check before travel. Public transport to the airport is severely limited.
Extra police have been brought in to patrol the city.
The man who died was a 24-year-old who had gone to check on his father’s property and was sucked into a storm drain.
The bodies of two victims of floods earlier this week were also found, one in the Lockyer Valley and the other in Dalby, ABC said.
Send your pictures and videos to [email protected] or text them to 61124 (UK) or +44 7725 100 100 (International). If you have a large file you can upload here.
Read the terms and conditions
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The bank said emerging markets would contribute more to global growth, but expressed concern on food prices
The global economy will slow this year, with developing countries such as India and China providing a greater share of growth, the World Bank has predicted.
The bank estimates that global GDP growth will be 3.3% this year against 3.9% in 2010, with emerging markets growing by 6%.
But these rates would not be enough to reduce unemployment in the hardest-hit economies, it said.
The bank warned that “serious tensions and pitfalls” persist.
These included the eurozone debt crisis and the risk of large amounts of capital flowing from low-interest developed economies to higher-interest emerging markets, which could affect currencies.
It also said it was “very concerned about rising food prices”.
The bank forecasts growth this year in China of 8.7% and in India of 8.5%. This compares with a forecast of 2.4% for rich countries collectively.
“If the financial crisis was a kind of stress test for developing economies, then they passed with flying colours,” the bank said.
It is these economies that will drive global growth in 2011, it said, despite continuing issues in developed economies.
These include high household debt, unemployment, weak banking sectors and high government debt levels, particularly in Europe.
“Strong developing-country domestic demand growth is leading the world economy, yet persistent financial sector problems in some high-income countries are a still a threat to growth that require urgent policy actions,” said Justin Yifu, the bank’s chief economist.
The bank also expressed concern about rising commodity and energy prices.
“If international prices continue to rise, affordability issues and poverty impacts could intensify,” it warned.
“We are very concerned about the rise in food prices. We can see some similarities with the situation in 2008, just before the financial crisis,” said Hans Timmer, the bank’s director of development prospects.
In 2008, sharp rises in food costs led to riots in a number of countries.
However, Mr Timmer did say the situation was “slightly different” this time around, not least because grain stocks are much larger.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Inside the charge point factory
The BBC’s Brian Milligan attempts to drive an electric Mini from London to Scotland, using only public charge points.
Just before Christmas, the government proudly announced that 2011 would be remembered as the year the electric car took off.
In an attempt to make that prophecy come true, it announced a subsidy of £5,000 for each electric car sold in the UK.
But what is electric motoring actually like?
Does it bear any resemblance to the smug self-satisfaction of those who glide along in petrol-lubricated luxury, untroubled by the fear that they might not actually reach their destination?
Because despite the hype of the battery revolution, it is still not easy to drive an electric car any further than the supermarket and back.
So, in what is arguably an unfair test of a car designed mostly for short-distance motoring, the BBC decided to try and drive an electric Mini the 484 miles from London to Edinburgh.
It is unfair in one sense, but surely fair in another: if the electric car really has come of age, won’t potential owners want to know that if they wanted to, they could drive it from London to Manchester and back at the weekend, to see uncle and auntie?
It would be easy to charge the car by asking successive pub landlords between Westminster and the Royal Mile if they wouldn’t mind you plugging into their electricity supply while you had a drink.
That is until you mentioned that it might need a ten hour charge and would need to leave a cable dangling out of the window overnight.
No, the only practical way for drivers to charge their cars is by using public charge points, of which there are thought to be as many as 500 in the UK.
No one has actually added them up.
Even OLEV, the government office for low emission vehicles, doesn’t know exactly how many there are.
So are there enough? And are they spaced correctly for me to get to Edinburgh within a working week?
To try and get a better idea of feasibility we went to visit Calvey Taylor-Haw, who runs a business called Elektromotive.
At a factory in Lancing, West Sussex, he manufactures many of the electric charging posts that make up the network.
After looking at the map, he pronounces that the journey as far as Tyneside is perfectly achievable.
But between Northumberland and Edinburgh it will be a significant challenge.
“The gap is 87 miles,” he says, “which is more than the range of your car.”
“Ideally you need another charging post half way between the two. Otherwise you are going to suffer range anxiety.”
From where I’m about to sit, that’s a serious understatement.
You can follow Brian’s journey here on the BBC News technology page – or for more up-to-the-minute updates, he will be tweeting from the #electriccars hashtag on the BBC Business Twitter feed and sharing other material via the BBC Business Facebook page
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Much of Batticaloa is under water
Related stories
More than 30,000 army, navy, police and air force personnel have been deployed across Sri Lanka to provide urgent aid to people hit by heavy flooding.
A government spokesman told the BBC that more than 325,000 people had been displaced by the floods, which have killed at least 21 people.
The priority since the rains abated on Thursday is to deliver emergency food and medical supplies.
In the centre and east farmland has been flooded and rice fields destroyed.
Thousands of people who fled the flooding are now living in camps on higher ground, a spokesman from the disaster management centre told the BBC.
But officials say that in some cases those camps in turn have been flooded – it is estimated that 25 out of 200 have been inundated in the coastal area of Batticaloa.
“More than one million people have been affected by the floods,” UN children’s fund spokesman Mervyn Fletcher told the BBC from Colombo.
“That means they have either been forced from their homes or have seen their property flooded.
“Access to clean water is becoming a major problem and we and other agencies are distributing purification tablets.”
Mr Fletcher said that the floods were especially bad news for people in the east, who in recent years have also endured a civil war and a tsunami.
The floods have left some stretches of railway line under nearly a metre of water.
Officials in Ampara say the rainfall there since Saturday has been the highest ever recorded in such a short time.
Over a million people have seen their homes flooded
“There is a shortage of food for children,” a member of Sri Lanka’s minority Muslim community in Ampara told BBC Tamil on Wednesday.
“In the morning we were forced to divide a single breakfast food parcel into four and give it to our four children.
“We have not got any help from the government. But the local people – especially the rich – have come forward and helped us. We are only getting something to eat because of their generosity.”
A number of big reservoirs have burst their banks, destroying paddy fields in a major rice-growing area.
People in some remote areas on Wednesday told the BBC they had seen no sign of aid agencies or government relief, and that some people in makeshift camps had been missing out on meals.
In other developments:
People in the central districts of Matale and Badulla are being evacuated because of the landslide threat, authorities sayThe price of vegetables has risen sharply because there is no means of transportation to the wholesale marketsThe temperature in Colombo dropped to 18.8C on Wednesday – the lowest recorded for 61 years, the Met Department saidThe Indian government says it will dispatch relief material for the flood-affected people, with the first consignment arriving on Friday
People in Batticaloa district told the BBC Tamil service on Wednesday that they had done their best to stay in their villages, but had been forced to flee in the end.
The air force has helped evacuate people and drop food supplies to some cut-off communities.
The government has made an emergency appeal for ordinary people’s help in sending dry rations, mattresses and bottled water.
Deputy Disaster Management Minister Duleep Wijesekara said on Wednesday that some places, such as Muttur, had been difficult to reach.
“I boarded a high-speed navy boat to get there [to Muttur], but due to the huge waves we had to turn back after sailing for about 15km. After that we had to send food in by air,” he said.
The floods bring a risk of disease, including the mosquito-borne dengue fever, which even in normal times is a severe problem in the country.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Thousands of people listened to President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Arizona
President Barack Obama has honoured the victims of Saturday’s Tucson shooting, urging the US to heal divisions opened by “sharply polarised” political debate.
Blaming opponents for “all that ails the world” was unhelpful, he said.
Six people were killed and 13 injured in the shooting, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
Ms Giffords – who was shot in the head and has had brain surgery – opened her eyes for the first time on Wednesday.
Ms Giffords responded during a visit by Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, as well as congressional colleagues and close friends Kirsten Gillibrand and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
Mr Obama, who visited Ms Giffords earlier in the day, passed on the news to the crowd of more than 14,000 people gathered at the University of Arizona basketball arena in Tucson.
“Gabby opened her eyes. So I can tell you she knows we are here. She knows we love her. And she knows that we are rooting for her through what is undoubtedly going to be a difficult journey,” he said.
Addressing the crowd at the McKale Memorial Center in Tucson, Mr Obama attempted to soothe his grieving audience while at the same time speaking out about the dangers of extreme divisions within American life.
He paid tribute to Ms Giffords as well as to US federal Judge John Roll, who was among those killed.
Suspected gunman Jared Loughner has been charged with several offences and could face the death penalty if guilty.
“There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts,” said Mr Obama.
At the scene
It was a night of prickling emotions in the McKale Memorial Center. Many of the 14,000 within – and those filling the overflow area – had queued for hours.
As they waited inside the centre cheers went up, for the doctors from the University Medical Center, relatives of the injured, state and national representatives. A huge cheer – almost a howl of pleasure and longing – went up for Barack and Michelle Obama as they came in.
The president of the University of Arizona, Robert Shelton, spoke of Tucson as a small college town – “in the truest and best sense of the word, a community” – and it felt like that inside the arena. It felt like a city aching to come together after a grievous blow.
And the president? Grim-faced, he took the platform as the crowd stood and applauded. Repeatedly, he invoked the scriptures. He paid homage to the fallen, to the injured and to the heroes of that sunny Saturday morning.
“There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts,” he said. He was right. But he came close.
Amid the sadness, though, the president said a “national conversation” had already begun, “about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health system”. He described the process as “an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government”.
“But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarised – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”
It was impossible to know “what might have stopped those shots from being fired or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind”, the president said.
Mr Obama then praised the bravery of those who stopped the gunman while he paused to reload.
“Heroism is here all around us, in the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens, just waiting to be summoned – as it was on Saturday morning,” he said.
Speaking before the president, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said: “We will go forward unbending and unbowed.”
“We know that the violence that occurred Saturday does not represent this community, this state or this country,” said Homeland Security Secretary and former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano.
Earlier, Mr Obama spent 10 minutes with Ms Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, before meeting four others injured in the shooting, including two of Ms Giffords’ staff members.
They were shot outside a supermarket as Ms Giffords was on her way to a constituency event.
Suspect: Jared Loughner
Aged 22; lives with parents in TucsonDescribed by former class-mates as “disruptive” drug-user and a lonerReportedly posted series of rambling messages on social networking websitesOnline messages show deep distrust of government and religion, calling US laws “treasonous” and calling for creation of a new currencyWas rejected by the US Army for drug useProfile: Jared Loughner
Before the service the president also held private meetings with the families of those hurt and killed.
As well as Judge Roll, the six who died included a nine-year-old girl and one of Ms Giffords’ aides, who was engaged to be married.
Mr Obama said he hoped the US would “live up” to the expectations of Christina Taylor Green, who was born on 9/11 but died during the shooting.
“I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it,” Mr Obama said of Christina, who had shown an early interest in public service.
Mr Loughner, 22, has been jailed pending trial. The case has been assigned to California federal Judge Larry Burns.
All judges in Arizona have decided not to sit on Mr Loughner’s trial because of the death of Judge Roll, their colleague.
The US House of Representatives on Wednesday took up a resolution honouring Ms Giffords and other victims of the attack, with House Speaker John Boehner fighting back tears as he spoke of his ailing colleague.
Earlier, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin attacked as a “blood libel” suggestions that political rhetoric may have contributed in some way to the fatal shootings in Arizona.
Some commentators have specifically criticised Ms Palin for using an online graphic containing crosshair symbols that marked targeted Democratic districts in the US mid-term elections.
New details also began to emerge on Wednesday about the hours before the shooting took place.
Police have said Mr Loughner was given a verbal warning for running a red light hours before he allegedly opened fire on the crowd outside the supermarket.
Investigators have also said they found a handwritten note among Mr Loughner’s effects where he lived in Tucson bearing the words “Die, bitch”, which they believe was a reference to Ms Giffords.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
