An alleged bikie has been extradited to Western Australia, after Queensland detectives caught the accused money launderer on a Gold Coast highway this week.

Johnson Rowe, 28, has been charged with money laundering and conspiring to sell 50kg of dangerous drugs, including 30kg of methamphetamine, 10kg of cocaine and 10kg of heroin.

Mr Rowe's arrest on Tuesday came after the seizure of a record $6 million in drug money during a raid on a Perth home, with a total of $32 million seized during the 2020 operation.

READ MORE: Suspect in 'carefully planned' Brooklyn subway attack jailed without bail

"At the time of the alleged conspiracy detectives seized millions of dollars in cash and several kilograms of illicit drugs," a statement from WA Police said.

The cash seizure is one of the largest in Australian history and the Australian Federal Police, as well as state officers from four states, have been searching for the perpetrators for over a year.

Police said Mr Rowe is alleged to be a major player in an international drug trafficking syndicate.

"This person has never, while committing these offences, never actually stepped foot in Western Australia and he operated from the east coast, predominantly Queensland," Detective Superintendent John Hutchison from WA Police said.

"We're getting better every day at utilising data and technical capability to apprehend these type of people and this is just a good example of that."

A number of men have already been charged in relation to the 2020 drug bust.

The warrant for Mr Rowe's arrest was issued December last year.

He will appear in Perth Magistrates Court tomorrow.

One person has died and another is critically injured after a car crash near Queenstown, while a third person was also seriously hurt in the region when a vehicle was crushed by a truck.Police said the car crash involved two cars…

New South Wales has detected a case of the XE COVID-19 variant, Australia's first known case, while Victoria has also identified a new sub-variant locally for the first time.

NSW Health authorities reported that the case of XE was detected in a recently returned overseas traveller last week.

It was confirmed in the weekly COVID-19 surveillance report NSW Health releases.

READ MORE: Slight drop in COVID-19 case numbers for NSW

"This is the first XE sequence to be identified in NSW and was identified in a recently returned traveller," NSW Health said in the report.

"Another recombinant BA.1/BA.2 sequence has previously been identified but it was not of the XE lineage."

XE is a mixture of the two Omicron variant sub-types BA.1 and BA.2.

The BA.2 variant has also been known as a "stealth" variant.

READ MORE: How the youth vote could impact this election

There is little data yet on the transmissibility or severity of the new sub-variant.

Victorian health authorities have also confirmed the detection of a new Omicron sub-variant in wastewater.

The sub-variant, which is believed to be either BA.4 or BA.5, has been confirmed from samples taken from the Tullamarine catchment.

"The sub-variant has been recently detected in a small number of cases in South Africa, Botswana, Belgium, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Germany," Victoria Health said.

"There are currently no known significant epidemiological differences observed between the new strain and the BA.2 strain."

The World Health Organisation did note last month that XE may be 10 per cent more transmissible than the currently dominant BA.2 Omicron sub-variant.

The Omicron BA.2 sub-variant has been the dominant infection in NSW for several weeks.

READ MORE: Everything to know about XE variant of COVID-19 virus

NSW Health prioritises the genomic sequencing of people hospitalised and admitted to ICU with COVID-19.

"Therefore the proportion of VOCs (variants of concern) is not necessarily reflective of their distribution in the community," NSW Health said in the report.

An animal rights organisation says Sir Mark Todd’s hitting a horse with a tree branch nine times amounts to cruelty, and a four-month ban is a slap on the wrist.The British Horseracing Authority gave the equestrian a four-month…

The FBI has blamed hackers associated with the North Korean government for stealing more than $810 million in cryptocurrency last month from a video gaming company, the latest in a string of audacious cyber heists tied to Pyongyang.

"Through our investigation we were able to confirm Lazarus Group and APT38, cyber actors associated with the DPRK, are responsible for the theft of US$620 million in Ethereum reported on March 29th," the FBI said in a statement.

"DPRK" is an abbreviation for North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and Ethereum is a technology platform associated with a type of cryptocurrency.

READ MORE: Suspect in 'carefully planned' Brooklyn subway attack jailed without bail

The FBI was referring to the recent hack of a computer network used by Axie Infinity, a video game that allows players to earn cryptocurrency.

Sky Mavis, the company that created Axie Infinity, announced on March 29 that unidentified hackers had stolen the equivalent of roughly $810 million — valued at the time of the hack's discovery, on March 23 from a "bridge," or network that allows users to send cryptocurrency from one blockchain to another.

The US Treasury Department on Thursday sanctioned Lazarus Group, a wide swath of hackers believed to work on behalf of the North Korean government.

Treasury sanctioned the specific "wallet", or cryptocurrency address, that was used to cash out on the Axie Infinity hack.

Cyberattacks have been an important source of revenue for the North Korean regime for years as its leader, Kim Jong Un, has continued to pursue nuclear weapons, according to a United Nations panel and outside cybersecurity experts.

READ MORE: How the youth vote could shape this election

North Korea last month fired what is believed to be its first intercontinental ballistic missile in more than four years.

Lazarus Group has stolen an estimated $2.4 billion worth of cryptocurrency in recent years, according to Chainalysis, a firm that tracks digital currency transactions.

"A hack of a cryptocurrency business, unlike a retailer, for example, is essentially bank robbery at the speed of the internet and funds North Korea's destabilising activity and weapons proliferation," said Ari Redbord, head of legal affairs at TRM Labs, a firm that investigates financial crime.

"As long as they are successful and profitable, they will not stop."

While many cybersecurity analysts' attention has been on Russian hacking in light of the war in Ukraine, suspected North Korean hackers have been far from quiet.

Researchers at Google last month disclosed two different alleged North Korean hacking campaigns targeting US media and IT organisations, and cryptocurrency and financial technology sectors.

Google has a policy of notifying users who are targeted by state-sponsored hackers.

Shane Huntley, who leads Google's Threat Analysis Group, said that if a Google user has "any link to being involved in Bitcoin or cryptocurrency" and they get a warning about state-backed hacking from Google, it almost always ends up being North Korean activity.

"It seems to be an ongoing strategy for them to supplement and make money through this activity," Mr Huntley said.

By Stephen Forbes, RNZ A new round of budget cuts are on the cards as Auckland Council grapples with a $900 million fall in revenue because of Covid-19 and a blowout in transport costs.But where the cuts are going to be made,…

Police have arrested a 26-year-old man after discovering more than 3000 bags of synthetic drugs while conducting a search warrant yesterday.The drugs were “packaged and ready for sale” and a Police spokesperson said a further 115…

Samantha Moala recalls she was taking a shower at her home in Tonga when she heard what sounded like a gunshot so powerful it hurt her ears.

As she and her family scrambled to their car to drive inland, ash blackened the sky.

The world's biggest volcanic eruption in 30 years sent a tsunami around the globe, and the first waves washed across the road as Moala drove to safety at the airport with her terrified husband and two sons.

READ MORE: China accuses US of 'weaponising' extended Shanghai lockdown

A volunteer with the Tonga Red Cross, Moala, 39, was soon attending to the cuts other people had suffered as they escaped and giving them psychological support.

She said about 50 of them stayed for two days at the airport until they got the all-clear to go back home.

“People were all shocked,” she said.

“But I got to mingle with them, help them, get them to be confident. It's a small little island, and we got to know each other in two hours.”

Three months after the eruption, Tonga’s rebuilding is slowly progressing, and the impact of the disaster has come into clearer focus.

Last week, the prime minister handed over the keys to the first rebuilt home of the 468 the government plans to reconstruct across three islands as part of its recovery program.

Some 3,000 people whose homes were destroyed or damaged initially sought shelter in community halls or evacuation centres.

Eighty per cent of Tonga's population was impacted in some way.

READ MORE: How the youth vote could shape this election

In the first few weeks after the eruption, Moala helped out by putting up tents and tarpaulins, and then by cooking food for other volunteers.

It took five long weeks for Tonga to restore its internet connection to the rest of the world after the tsunami severed a crucial fibre-optic cable.

That delayed some families from abroad from being able to send financial help to their loved ones.

Three people in Tonga died from the tsunami and a fourth from what authorities described as related trauma.

The sonic boom from the eruption was so loud it could be heard in Alaska and a mushroom plume of ash rocketed a record 58 kilometres into the sky.

The World Bank estimates the total bill for the damage is about $121 million.

In the small island nation of 105,000 people, that’s equivalent to more than 18 per cent of gross domestic product.

The bank noted that many coastal tourism businesses – which bring in vital foreign revenue for Tonga – were particularly hard hit, with tourist cabins and wharves destroyed.

The agriculture industry also suffered, with crops lost and reef fisheries damaged.

READ MORE: Badly damaged Russian warship sinks after Ukraine claims strike

The ANZ bank says Tonga's GDP will likely contract by 7.4 per cent this year after it had been expected to grow by 3.7 per cent before the volcano erupted.

The international community has been helping out, with Tonga able to secure $10 million in funding from the World Bank and $13 million from the Asian Development Bank, as well as aid assistance from many places including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the European Union, the US and China.

But progress has been hampered by the nation's first outbreak of COVID-19, which was likely brought in by foreign military crews who raced to drop off supplies as the ash cleared.

The outbreak prompted a series of lockdowns, and the country remains in a state of emergency.

Moala is among the more than 8,500 Tongans who have caught the coronavirus since it began spreading through the islands.

Eleven people so far have died.

Moala said the outbreak had affected many businesses, including her husband's work as a tattoo artist.

But as the outbreak ebbs and the rebuilding progresses, the islands' familiar rhythms are returning for many people.

Among those who remain most affected are the 62 people who lived on Mango Island and about another 100 on Atata Island who may never be able to return home.

The islands are located very close to the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai volcano, and the villages were completed wiped out.

READ MORE: World's top oil trader will stop buying Russian crude

Residents have now been offered land by Tonga's king to relocate onto one of Tonga's two main islands.

Sione Taumoefolau, the secretary-general of the Tonga Red Cross Society, said there is a lot of work to be done relocating the residents.

It's also been slow-going getting supplies to people on other far-flung islands, he said.

Many of them remain without internet access after a domestic fibre-optic cable was also damaged and will likely not be repaired for months.

“Three months later, people are starting to get back to normal," Taumoefolau said.

“But we can see they still need psychological and social support, those that were really impacted, especially those who have to relocate.”