Editor’s Note: We ask all our visitors to offer prayers for the people of Australia. Please go to Bible Discovered prayer category if needed.

 Australian emergency services were battling floods January 2011 in the rural northeast that have affected up to 200,000 people.”In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions,” Queensland State Treasurer Andrew Fraser told reporters in flood-hit Bundaberg. Residents in the town of Rockhampton were forced to flee the rising waters in darkness Saturday night, while helicopters delivered food and other supplies to towns isolated by the deluge.

The surging tides, which have left entire towns under water and cut off many more over an area the size of France and Germany combined, swept through vast areas on Saturday, threatening to inundate thousands more homes. Emergency workers on Saturday focused on the town of Rockhampton, where the Fitzroy River had broken its banks and was rising dangerously, threatening 2,000-4,000 homes ahead of reaching its expected peak on Wednesday.

Residents left their homes in darkness as the floods approached, with some leaving on boats from areas where water was already rising, AAP reported. “They are actually happening tonight. I hope that not too many people are trying to do this in the dark,” stated Rockhampton Mayor Brad Carter late Saturday. He stated of the encroaching river: “The best way to describe it is as a raging torrent of water. It’s got a tremendous pace.” Carter had earlier warned that the community was likely to be cut off for 10 days, with both roads from the south and its airport blocked.

In other towns residents are preparing to return to homes evacuated during the week. In Bundaberg, in Queensland’s southeast, the clean-up was set to begin in about 300 homes and 120 businesses as flood waters recede, but other towns such as Theodore and Condamine remain empty of residents.

A man went missing late Saturday after his boat was swamped while on a fishing trip near the city of Gladstone, the Australian Associated Press (AAP) reported. And a 41-year-old woman was also missing after the vehicle she was travelling in was swept into a Queensland river, AAP stated.

The floods have hurt the nation’s lucrative mining industry and cut off major highways as the water rushes through sodden inland regions to the sea.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who on Friday toured inundated regions, said the floods had been devastating and would have an economic impact. “We’re still directly battling flood waters — we haven’t seen the peak of the flood yet at centres like Rockhampton — so the people of Queensland in many places are doing it tough today.” Gillard stated the mining sector had been particularly badly hit.”They’ve had to say to the people who buy their minerals that at this time, circumstances are such that they can’t keep supply moving,” she told reporters. “Even those mines that could continue to mine obviously have got difficulties with supply routes because so many roads have been affected,” she said, adding that farmers, small businesses and tourism would also suffer.

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Efforts by terrorists abroad to radicalize and recruit U.S. residents present new security threats, three top Obama administration officials told Congress on Wednesday September 22, 2010.

The threat posed by homegrown extremists shows that the battle against terrorism has become more complex in the past year, underscoring the challenges of pinpointing and blocking terrorist plots, stated Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter stated al-Qaida in Pakistan is at one of its weakest points organizationally. Nonetheless, the terrorist group remains a capable and determined enemy that has proven its resilience over time.
Leiter stated the rising profiles of U.S. citizens like Hammami in overseas terrorist groups provide young extremists with American faces as role models. Leiter states plots by homegrown Sunni extremists were disrupted in New York, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alaska, Texas and Illinois in the past year and point to “a collective subculture and a common cause,” even though the plots were unrelated.

“Groups affiliated with al-Qaida are now actively targeting the United States and looking to use Americans or Westerners who are able to remain undetected by heightened security measures,” FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It appears that “domestic radicalization and homegrown extremism” is becoming more pronounced, Mueller stated.

In his prepared testimony, Mueller stated it is possible that more American extremists are feeling increasingly disenchanted with living in the United States or are angry about U.S. and Western foreign policy, “making their decision to leave for extremist opportunities abroad all the more appealing.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stated al-Qaida has inspired an array of terrorist organizations. “We are all seeing more diverse activity” by a more diverse collection of groups, Napolitano stated. A year ago, the FBI arrested Michael C. Finton in Illinois and Hosam Smadi in Texas in connection with unrelated bomb attempts. The bureau used online undercover agents and confidential human sources who monitored Finton and Smadi until their arrests.

Napolitano stated U.S.-born, Yemen-based Anwar al-Awlaki is an illustration of an English-speaker spreading propaganda over the Internet, an approach she said could be helping to increase the number of homegrown extremists.

Omar Hammami, an Alabama man now known as Abu Mansour al-Amriki, or “the American,” has become one of al-Shabab’s most high-profile members and appeared in a jihadist video in May 2009.

Several U.S. residents from Somali-American communities in Minneapolis were recruited to fight with the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shabab. That prompted the FBI to deploy bureau personnel to cities with high ethnic Somali populations in an outreach initiative to community leaders.

Terrorists “are working increasingly to build alliances or essentially recruit soldiers for their army from within the United States,” said committee chairman Joe Lieberman, an independent. The panel’s ranking Republican, Sen. Susan Collins, stated the shootings at a military base in Texas, and the attempted Dec. 25 Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound airliner show that the terrorist threat “is evolving and ever-changing.”

Tens of thousands of Australians were prepared to flee their homes in the country’s southeast on Monday, September 6, 2010 as worsening floods inundated at least 300 houses. Wild storms lashed Victoria state over the weekend, triggering landslides, knocking out power supplies and forcing hundreds of people out of their houses, with many rivers yet to reach their peak.
At least 53,000 people had been put on evacuation alert across the state since the emergency began, with around 4,000 calls for help from people stranded in their homes or hit by the surging waters. Residents had been forced to flee in 11 towns, including some which were hit by a devastating firestorm last year, and the State Emergency Service [SES] stated more than 100 homes were under direct threat of flooding on Monday.

The amount of snow melt, and extra rain could make things critical. Soldiers joined relief efforts in the worst-hit areas and the SES said emergency crews had come from neighbouring states to boost rescue team numbers. Officials have warned that it could take several days for raging rivers in the state’s northeast to empty, threatening towns further south. As the water travels down into other communities, they are bracing themselves for the impact of that water.

Gale-force winds also lashed the neighbouring states of South Australia and New South Wales over the weekend, felling trees, tearing roofs off homes, and cutting power to tens of thousands of people. Another threat is the crocodile population which is moving inland and through the flooding waters.