Australia news LIVE: Ley mulls Coalition front bench overhaul; Bradfield in the balance as amid informal vote surge; 3500 make insurance claims after wild weather
Latest posts
7.03am
Some NSW schools reopen after floods as cleanup continues
By Christopher Harris
NSW is cleaning up after major flooding which inundated about 10,000 homes last week. About 3500 have made claims across the mid north coast and the upper Hunter region, The Insurance Council of Australia says.
About 32,000 people in 14 towns across the upper Hunter and mid north coast were isolated yesterday.
Insurance Council of Australia chief executive Andrew Hall said as people returned to their properties, insurance claims were climbing at 1000 a day.
'This is our fourth flood for 2025... they're underscoring each and every month, we have 220,000 homes which have been built in high-risk flood zones,' he told the ABC's Radio National program.
The frequency of floods across the East Coast coupled with the steep increase in building costs of about 40 per cent in recent years, was driving up insurance costs, he said.
'They're becoming a real challenge to provide affordable insurance to,' CEO said.
He said Australia needed to have a flood defence plan which could help local governments deliver timely flood studies and reduce the devastation communities face.
The Department of Education says 60 schools will remain closed while 120 will reopen this morning.
6.58am
Russia and Ukraine swap hundreds of prisoners
By Christopher Harris
Russia and Ukraine swapped hundreds more prisoners on Sunday, the third and last part of a major exchange that reflected a rare moment of cooperation in otherwise failed efforts to reach a ceasefire in the more than three years of war.
Hours earlier, the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and other regions came under a massive Russian drone-and-missile attack that killed at least 12 people and injured dozens. Ukrainian officials described it as the largest aerial assault since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Russia's Defense Ministry said each side exchanged 303 soldiers, following the release of 307 combatants and civilians each on Saturday, and 390 on Friday — the biggest total swap of the war.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed Sunday's exchange, saying on X that '303 Ukrainian defenders are home.' He noted that the troops returning to Ukraine were members of the 'Armed Forces, the National Guard, the State Border Guard Service, and the State Special Transport Service.'
Nataliya Borovyk, the sister of released Ukrainian soldier Ihor Ulesov, was overwhelmed when she learned of her brother's return.
'My uncle had to calm me down and put me in a taxi so I could get here,' she told The Associated Press. 'A moment like that stays with you forever.'
Borovyk said the family had been waiting anxiously for news, and that she had hoped her brother might be released in the first part of the exchange on Friday.
'We were worried about all the guys. He wasn't there on Friday, but I was here — I at least greeted them, I stood there until the very end and waited, (hoping) maybe he would appear after all.'
In talks held in Istanbul earlier this month — the first time the two sides met face to face for peace talks — Kyiv and Moscow agreed to swap 1000 prisoners of war and civilian detainees each. The exchange has been the only tangible outcome from the talks.
AP.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News AU
3 hours ago
- Sky News AU
Tulsi Gabbard explains why Russia must have thought Hillary Clinton win was ‘inevitable'
The Russians privately felt it was 'inevitable' that Hillary Clinton would triumph in the 2016 election, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said on Miranda Devine's 'Pod Force One' podcast. Despite widespread narratives that Russia was in President Trump's corner, Moscow's objective was to sow chaos in the American political process and brace itself for a Clinton presidency, Gabbard claimed, citing the trove of intelligence documents her team has released. 'It surprised me that all of these documents still existed, quite frankly,' Gabbard said in an episode set for release Wednesday. 'As we've learned in later documents that we've reviewed throughout that campaign, Russia believed that Hillary Clinton would win the election. 'They felt it was inevitable.' Last month, Gabbard's team began disclosing a trove of documents that gave a behind-the-scenes look at the intelligence community's machinations during the 2016 election cycle regarding the probe of Russian interference. This included a House Intelligence Committee report from 2020 that claimed the Russians may have had intelligence that Clinton was 'placed on a daily regimen of 'heavy tranquilizers' and while afraid of losing.' That was supposedly due to her alleged 'psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.' Gabbard pondered why that supposed Russian intelligence wasn't leaked to the public if Moscow's chief objective was to prop up Trump and undermine Clinton. 'If Russia aspired to help Trump get elected, which is what the manufactured January 2017 intelligence community assessment says with high confidence, according to Brennan and Clapper, then Putin would have released the most damaging information and emails to help President Trump,' she said. 'It was intentionally withheld and not released because they assumed that Hillary Clinton would win thatelection, and their plan,' Gabbard added, citing the 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, '[was to] wait until maybe days or weeks before her inauguration to release these documents.' The Russians were widely alleged by US officials to have hacked Democratic National Committee emails during he 2016 campaign. The 2020 House Intelligence Committee report had concluded that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's 'principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process' and that he didn't necessarily prioritize propping up one candidate over the other. 'The American people, I think, have been, and our republic, has been most harmed by this,' Gabbard said of the Russia collusion narrative. 'Of course, President Trump went through hell and his family because of this Russia hoax that was manufactured by President Obama and his administration.' Critics such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper accused Gabbard of peddling 'patently false' accusations about their Russiagate activities. Much of what Gabbard has released centered around rebuffing a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which concluded among other things that 'the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.' Brennan, Clapper and others have pointed to a 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, which noted the panel 'heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.' Clapper and Brennan recenty penned an op-ed insisting that the intelligence community report never referenced 'collusion' between Trump and the Russian government, and stood by their claims that the Kremlin prefered him in the 2016 election. Gabbard pointed to how Obama ordered the 2017 ICA of Russian interference in the 2016 election and his administration's machinations detailed in the document dump to accuse the 44th president of subversion. 'What we now know came from President Obama was a covert mission, essentially, to subvert the will of the American people, create this lie that would challenge the legitimacy of President Trump's election and the four years of his administration, resulting and affecting in what was truly a years' long coup,' Gabbard said. Reps from Obama have refuted those characterizations, saying that the 'bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.' 'Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,' Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement last month. Gabbard made referrals to the Justice Department based on her findings, and the DOJ has since formed a 'strike force' to comb through the claims. Originally published as Tulsi Gabbard explains why Russia must have thought Hillary Clinton win was 'inevitable'
Sky News AU
5 hours ago
- Sky News AU
Major Ukrainian drone operation devastates Russian oil refinery
A massive explosion has taken place at a Russian oil refinery in Novokuybyshevsk. The explosion occurred around 1,000 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. The oil facility was targeted in a wave of long-range attacks coordinated by Ukraine's secret services and Armed forces. The Ryazan oil refinery, a fuel and lubricant depot in Voronezh Oblast, and the Primorsko-Akhtarsk military airfield in Krasnodar Krai were all targeted in the strikes. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine posted to Facebook, commenting on the attacks. 'Ukrainian Defence Forces carried out successful strikes on verified targets in Russia that support the ongoing war of aggression against our country. The attack was in response to Russia's recent terrorist shelling of Ukrainian cities, which killed and injured civilians,' said the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine 'The systematic and deliberate targeting of infrastructure that supports the enemy's military will continue until the Russian Federation's armed aggression against Ukraine is fully stopped.' Amid the Ukrainian attack, Russia has bombed a key bridge in Ukraine's southern city of Kherson, killing one.
Sky News AU
7 hours ago
- Sky News AU
Ed Husic: Coalition 'betrays values' by denying Gaza starvation crisis
A Labor MP leading calls in Canberra to recognise a Palestinian state has slammed Sussan Ley for refusing to say civilians are starving in Gaza. Ed Husic was among the 90,000 people who marched through Sydney's CBD and across the Harbour Bridge on Sunday. The son of Bosnian Muslim immigrants, the former minister has been outspoken on the plight of innocent Palestinians in Gaza since losing his cabinet seat in factional infighting earlier this year. Asked about the Opposition Leader's refusal to acknowledge starvation in Gaza, Mr Husic said on Monday any 'pro-family' conservatives who did not recognise the dire situation 'betray' the values they claimed to hold. 'I think conservatives who argue that they are pro family and cannot find a way to reflect on the suffering that has been wrought on innocent Palestinian families really betray whether or not they're fair dinkum on the cause,' he told the ABC. He said he thought 'everyone gets' the horrors Hamas inflicted on Israel in its October 7 attacks in 2023 and those responsible 'need to be held to account'. Mr Husic also said that Israelis taken hostage 'should be released and the people who had mistreated them fundamentally should be held to account as well'. 'But 60,000 innocent Palestinians, half of which have been women and children, that have been killed through the Netanyahu government's actions – they did not deserve that,' he said. 'They deserve to be able to carry on with their lives and do the type of things that they want to do in their lives, like we do in our families. 'So I think the Coalition would do themselves better credit if they recognised the impact on innocent families.' Health officials in Gaza said overnight six more people died from starvation, bringing the total toll to 175. While supplies have started trickling into the war-ravaged Palestian territory in slightly higher amounts, humanitarian groups have said it is nowhere near enough to prevent further deaths from a lack of food. The mild relief has been helped in part by countries air-dropping aid. But the Israeli government continues to keep a chokehold on the aid flow via land crossings. The Albanese government on Sunday announced a $20m support package for Gaza. The funds will go to humanitarian agencies best placed to co-ordinate aid delivery, including the UN's World Food Program and The International Committee of the Red Cross. Liberal senator Dave Sharma, a former ambassador to Israel, on Monday backed the new commitment. Though he said that he was unsure that a lack of money was 'the issue'. 'I don't know if money is so much the issue as the means and mechanisms of delivery and making sure that Hamas is not commandeering the aid and making sure that it's getting to the population in Gaza,' Senator Sharma told Sky News. 'But with that in mind, I don't have a problem with Australia doing a bit to alleviate human suffering in Gaza.' 'Australians, wake up!' All up, more than 100,000 people took part in the protests across Australia at the weekend. That did not go down well in Israel, with the country's foreign minister singling out an image of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran backs Hamas and worked with the Palestinian Islamist group on its October 7 assault. More recently, Israel and Iran traded deadly missiles strikes in a short-lived conflict in June. 'The distorted alliance between the radical Left and fundamentalist Islam is sadly dragging the West toward the sidelines of history,' Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar posted on social media. 'In the picture: Radical protesters at Sydney Harbour Bridge today holding an image of Iran's 'Supreme Leader' – the most dangerous leader of fundamentalist Islam, the world's largest exporter of terror and a mass executioner. 'Australians, wake up!'
