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.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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