SYDNEY: Australia ramped up its military response to deadly flooding in the country’s northeast Tuesday, as troops prepared for a massive clean-up following storms which killed four and swamped thousands of homes.
Heavy rain and flooding triggered by ex-tropical cyclone Oswald have inundated the states of Queensland and New South Wales, with the most recent fatality a three-year-old boy killed by a falling tree.
In Queensland two men are still missing days after they failed to turn up for work, the Australian Associated Press reported. The car of one of them was found fully submerged in a flooded creek west of the state capital Brisbane.
Tens of thousands have been left isolated or displaced by the torrents, but after rivers peaked in most areas late Tuesday waters began to drop gradually and troops started to prepare for a mammoth recovery effort.
“We’re planning to have some troops on the ground hopefully within the next 24 hours. It looks like waters will recede and we’ll be able to gain access,” Brig. Greg Bilton told reporters.
The sugar-farming town of Bundaberg was devastated as the swollen Burnett River peaked at a record 9.6 meters (32 feet), with officials saying some 2,000 homes and 300 businesses had been flooded.
Queensland Police Minister Jack Dempsey said about 7,500 residents had been displaced by the floodwaters, with 1,000 people plucked from the roofs of their homes in daring evening rescues after the river broke its banks late on Monday.
“We did have a situation of fast-rising floodwaters and people being very rapidly isolated on ever-diminishing islands of ground,” Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard said four military helicopters, 100 troops and three transport aircraft had been deployed to the emergency, with the evacuation of 131 patients from Bundaberg’s hospital to Brisbane a priority.
Some of the most dramatic footage from the floods in Queensland showed a toddler being winched to safety in a bag from the back of a truck.
Robin Collie, 22, who is four months pregnant, said Tuesday she felt “sick” as her sobbing 14-month-old son Luke was lifted from her arms by a helicopter rescue team.
She had been driving to the town of Biloela in northeastern Queensland when her utility truck hit a submerged tree and stalled in rising floodwaters.
Luke was too small to fit into the rescue harness and had to be zipped into a waterproof equipment bag.
“The worst part was seeing him go up in the bag,” she told Seven News.
“(I felt) sick, it’s your baby, it’s your life. Putting him in a bag and zipping it up, God, above water that could carry him away.”
There was limited flooding in Brisbane itself, but the deluge damaged water treatment plants. Newman warned that some of the city’s reservoirs could dry up overnight unless people restrict their use to drinking, cooking and washing.
Insurers had already received some 6,100 claims from Queensland worth Aus$72 million ($75 million), according to the Insurance Council of Australia.
Wild storms hit neighboring New South Wales overnight, with floodwaters isolating 41,000 people and prompting authorities to order 2,100 people to evacuate from the town of Grafton.
NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell said the worst appeared to be over Tuesday evening, though towns downstream would face significant inundation in coming days.
“Now we are in recovery mode,” said Murray Kear, commissioner of the NSW State Emergency Service.
Military called in as deadly floods batter Australia
Military called in as deadly floods batter Australia
German court rules spy service may not label AfD ‘extremist’ for now
- The court found that there were indeed efforts to undermine Germany’s free democratic order from within the AfD
- Alice Weidel, the party’s co-leader, hailed the ruling as “a major victory not only for the AfD but also for democracy”
BERLIN: A German court ruled on Thursday that the domestic intelligence agency cannot label the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” group, at least for now.
The AfD had challenged the designation, which would empower the spy agency to use broader surveillance powers to monitor it and would embolden political opponents seeking a ban of the anti-immigration party.
The Cologne administrative court’s decision puts the designation on hold pending the final outcome of a legal battle between the AfD and Germany’s intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).
The court found that there were indeed efforts to undermine Germany’s free democratic order from within the AfD, highlighting its demands to ban Muslim minarets, public calls to prayer and headscarves in public institutions.
But it ruled that the party as a whole was not “shaped by these efforts” such that “an anti-constitutional tendency can be established” to characterise the party in its entirety as extremist.
Alice Weidel, the party’s co-leader, hailed the ruling as “a major victory not only for the AfD but also for democracy and the rule of law” in a post on X.
The decision had also “thrown a spanner in the works” for the “fanatics” seeking to outlaw the AfD, she added.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, a conservative, noted that the court decision still found reason to suspect the AfD of working “against the free democratic order” and “pursuing anti-constitutional aims.”
The party will continue to be monitored as a “suspected” extremist group, he added.
- Politically isolated -
The AfD was founded in 2013 primarily as a euroskeptic party, but has since become more hard-line nationalist, putting an anti-immigrant stance at the heart of its appeals to voters.
The party surged to become the largest opposition force in last year’s nationwide election, winning nearly 21 percent of the vote.
The AfD is particularly strong in the formerly communist East Germany, holding commanding leads in the polls ahead of several key state-level elections there later this year.
But it remains frozen out of power across the country, as all other political parties have maintained a “firewall” against it and refused to consider cooperating.
Many in mainstream German politics see the AfD’s far-right positions and rhetoric as taboo, a view informed in part by Germany’s dark Nazi history.
The intelligence agency moved to officially classify the national AfD party as a “confirmed extremist” organization on May 2 of last year, a step up from its previous designation as a “suspected” case.
The party filed a lawsuit against the move and the BfV agreed to suspend the classification until a court ruling on the matter is issued.
Several regional AfD party organizations have already been designated as “confirmed extremist” groups.
- Calls to ban -
Thursday’s decision by the Cologne court, which can still be appealed, keeps it on hold until a verdict is reached in the AfD’s broader challenge to the classification.
Some of the AfD’s political foes have advocated banning the party — a process for which there are high legal hurdles in Germany.
It would require, for example, evidence that a party is actively trying to abolish the democratic order and has the means to do so.
Dobrindt and a number of other conservatives have criticized such a move, arguing instead that the AfD must be defeated at the ballot box.
On Thursday, Dobrindt said the court decision only underscored how high the legal hurdles for action against a political party is.
“I have repeatedly said if we want the AfD to go away it should be by governing competently and not by banning them,” Dobrindt said.
