SYDNEY: Tens of thousands of homes were without power and hundreds of schools closed on Thursday as a wild storm front lashed Australia's northeast coast.A state of emergency was declared overnight in Queensland state, which was pounded by gale-force winds exceeding 100 kilometers (62 miles) an hour and torrential rains. A 46-year-old was killed when freak winds ripped a sheet of metal from a building on the Gold Coast tourist strip and it smashed through his office window, police said.Up to 75,000 homes and businesses suffered blackouts as gusting winds felled trees and power lines, and the region received one-third of its annual rainfall in a single day, sparking landslides and causing roads to collapse. Enough rain fell over 48 hours in Brisbane, the state's capital, to supply drinking water for more than a year. Massive ocean swells up of up to 15 meters (50 feet) hammered the coastline, with waves at Currmbin so powerful a car was swept from a beach car park into the surf. More than 300 millimeters (12 inches) of rain was likely to fall, with low-lying coastal areas expected to be swamped by tides exceeding the year's highest mark, it said.Floods unleashed by cyclonic rains in February saw much of Queensland declared a disaster area, with more than one million square kilometers (385,000 square miles) deluged and 3,000 homes damaged. Further floods hammered the region last month, washing a number of motorists to their death and claiming the life of a 12-year-old girl who was swimming in a swollen weir.
BEIRUT: Thousands of people converged Saturday on central Beirut to mark the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Lebanese former premier Rafiq Hariri.Waving Lebanese flags and carrying pictures of the slain leader, men, women and children gathered under sunny skies in Martyr's Square where members of the parliamentary majority were to address the crowd. The rally comes as final preparations are underway in The Hague for the launch of the international tribunal set up to bring Hariri's killers to justice. It also comes as the country prepares for legislative elections in June that will pit Western-backed political parties against a Hezbollah-led alliance backed by Syria and Iran.Hariri died in a massive car bombing on February 14, 2005 that also killed 22 others. The assassination was widely blamed on then Lebanese power-broker Syria, which has denied any involvement. The attack on the Beirut seafront was one of the worst acts of political violence to rock Lebanon since t...
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