Queensland will still make vaccinated people arriving into the state from overseas quarantine for 14 days when it reopens on Monday.

Authorities have confirmed the 14-day isolation rule will remain – however people will be able to quarantine at home if they meet strict rules rather than in hotels, which costs more than $3000.

The 14 days is in comparison to three days of home isolation for people landing in Sydney and Melbourne – a rule only imposed in the wake of the new Omicron strain.

Previously no isolation was required in NSW or Victoria, provided arrivals tested negative after 24 hours.

LIVE UPDATES: Early booster shots under close watch, PM says

Queensland's quarantine rule applies to arrivals from all places except for New Zealand, which has no quarantine imposed.

Like the rest of the nation, anybody who has been in South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Malawi in the last 14 days must do hotel quarantine.

However, the strict rules, which also apply to people coming from interstate, mean people must either stay in a house or an apartment with no shared access such as foyers or lifts.

They can get a taxi from the airport but it must be on Queensland health's approved list.

They must also live no more than a two-hour drive from the airport, plus take another COVID-19 test on arrival.

People coming from overseas via another state need to have done 14 days quarantine there, either in a hotel or at home.

Neither NSW nor Victoria demands arrivals live in a house or apartment with no shared areas.

READ MORE: UK tightens COVID-19 rules amid Omicron surge

Queensland's flight caps, which, along with the rest of the nation, have limited Australians and their families being able to fly in, leaving thousands stranded over the past 18 months, will be removed from Monday, Queensland Health confirmed.

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However, to meet the criteria to escape hotel quarantine, people must have been vaccinated with a TGA-approved vaccine, which is causing issues for Aussies who have been unable to get one overseas.

A Queensland Health spokeswoman confirmed the rules.

"From Monday, if you're are coming from overseas you can home quarantine if you meet the conditions," she told 9News.

READ MORE: DFAT moves back to 'pre-COVID settings' for overseas Australians

Anybody flying into Australia must test negative three days or less before getting on a plane.

Currently, only Australians and their families can enter the country, after a plan to allow more people including skilled workers and students in was pushed back until later this month.

At the end of last month there were still 7500 Aussies who had told authorities they were trying to get home from overseas, a number which has dropped from over 40,000 before borders opened in NSW and Victoria on November 1.

All other states and territories still have flight caps and hotel quarantine.

Queensland Health says quarantine rules for international arrivals will be removed when the state hits 90 per cent vaccination, expected next month.

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Talented photographers have captured the true beauty of Africa with hopes their images will encourage people to take a more active role in conservation.

Australia's property market has surged through a record-breaking 12 months as prices rose at the fastest year-on-year rate in history.

Domain's End of Year Wrap for 2021 has revealed that in 2021, Aussie house prices rose an eye-watering 21.9 per cent, the fastest annual rate of growth on record.

More than 446,000 houses were sold in 2021 and more than 144,000 units were sold, both remaining on the market for the shortest time in more than half a decade.

READ MORE: UK tightens COVID-19 rules amid Omicron surge

Domain's Chief of Research and Economics Dr Nicola Powell said 2021 will be remembered as the year that radically defined the way Australians use – and prioritise – what they want in their properties.

"The challenge of grappling with a global pandemic shifted buyer priorities, placing a greater emphasis on the space in which we reside, this spurred purchases and brought forward decisions," Dr Powell said.

"Ultra-low home loan rates, government stimulus, rebounding economic conditions, returning expats and improved household savings became the perfect combination of factors for extraordinary price growth and activity in 2021."

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The highlight numbers of 2021 are nothing short of staggering.

The most expensive sale of the year was the penthouse of 163 Castlereagh Street in Sydney, which sold for an eye-watering $60 million.

Three of Australia's capital cities in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra now boast a median house price of over $1 million, and the median capital city price nationwide is also closing in on seven figures.

According to Domain, there is hope for buyers desperate to enter the market: thanks to booming conditions, many homeowners erring about selling their home are being enticed by record prices.

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"Sellers are now being enticed by record prices while tighter lending and affordability constraints have put a slight sting in buyer demand," the report reads.

"That means the year is closing in a different position to the start, with new listings coming to market quicker than they are being sold.

"While it remains a sellers' market, slowly the market is starting to tip in buyers' favour."

Looking ahead, 2022 is tipped to remain positive for homeowners while not replicating the near-insatiable growth of 2021.

"Buying opportunities are looking brighter for 2022. With new listings to remain strong, particularly over late summer and early Autumn," Domain notes.

"This will continue to bring the total homes for sale into a 'normal realm'.

"This additional choice, as well as tighter lending reducing buyers' leverage and wages growth not keeping pace with 2021 price growth, prices won't rise at the same sweltering pace as in 2021."

Domain is owned by Nine, the publisher of this website.

It's been two years since Natalia Sawran-Smith saw her family back in England – and there is no end in sight to the separation.

Ms Sawran-Smith, who has lived in Sydney for six years, had been desperately hoping this Christmas would be the one where she was reunited with family and friends.

"I usually go home every single Christmas, it's the one time of year that we all get together," she said.

"I really thought there was a glimmer of hope that I would be able to go this year."

READ MORE: UK tightens COVID-19 rules amid Omicron surge

Ms Sawran-Smith is one of hundreds of thousands of people living in Australia who still need an exemption to leave and re-enter the country.

From December 15, travel restrictions are set to ease for many temporary visa holders – including those on working holiday, skilled and student visas.

'All I want to do is go home and give my family a hug, it's not a lot to ask'

The change had been set to take place on December 1, but was delayed by two weeks because of uncertainty over the Omicron variant.

However, not all types of visas have been included in the changes.

Bridging visa holders, of which there are 360,000 in Australia, will still be required to get a travel exemption before returning from overseas.

The rules even apply to bridging visa B holders, who – outside of the pandemic – are normally allowed to travel.

So far, more than 10,000 people have signed an online petition calling on the Department of Home Affairs to allow bridging visa holders to travel overseas without an exemption.

"We pay our taxes, we provide essential skills, received double vaccinations and contribute to the economy," the petition, started by bridging visa holder Jo Davis, states.

"It's discriminatory to stop us from visiting our friends and families while others can."

Ms Sawran-Smith has lived in Australia on various types of visas over the years, including a working holiday visa and sponsorship visa. She is currently on a bridging visa B after applying to become a permanent resident in March.

"Due to the lockdowns my medical examination was cancelled and everything has been delayed," she said.

"The processing visa times for my kind of visa is 16-20 months."

Ms Sawran-Smith said it had been mentally tough to be separated from her family during the pandemic but she had persevered, thinking an end would soon be in sight.

"I have given blood, sweat and tears. There were wage cuts because of COVID, half of my work team got laid off," she said.

"During that time, I have lost people back home.

"I've had a family member die, my friend (died by suicide) and I have not been able to be there for any of it. We have had to do funerals over Zoom.

"All I want to do is go home and give my family a hug, it's not a lot to ask."

Ms Sawran-Smith said a lot of the frustration she and others felt stemmed from a lack of explanation from the government about why her visa class had been excluded.

"We don't know why have we been overlooked. It seems a simple clerical error, it's so ridiculous," she said.

'The government has made us feel like second class citizens'

Hannah Thomas, who is also from the UK, is working in Sydney on a temporary skills shortage visa, which allows for overseas travel from mid-December.

However, that visa will expire on December 22 as she moves on to a bridging visa to await permanent residency.

In April, Ms Thomas' father died suddenly and she was unable to go home for the funeral.

"A month later, my grandma passed away," she said.

"Again, I sat down in front of my laptop to watch her funeral. No goodbyes or support from my family, no closure or ability to grieve properly.

"The government has made us feel like second class citizens throughout the entire pandemic.

"It's this treatment that makes many of us question if we can continue to live in the country we love and have worked so hard to build a life in when we are still denied the simple right to visit their loved ones after two years. 

 9news.com.au has contacted the Department of Home Affairs for comment.

Contact reporter Emily McPherson at em********@******om.au

We're about to get a new perspective on some of the most extreme objects in the universe. Tomorrow NASA will launch its Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer mission, or IXPE, to measure X-rays released by black holes and neutron stars.

The satellite is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Live coverage of the launch will be available on NASA TV and the agency's website.

The spacecraft, which is the collaborative effort of NASA and the Italian Space Agency, carries three telescopes. While IXPE isn't as big as NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory, it is the first space observatory of its kind. The satellite will be able to see an often overlooked aspect of cosmic ray sources called polarisation.

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Advances in X-ray astronomy

"The launch of IXPE marks a bold and unique step forward for X-ray astronomy," said Martin Weisskopf, IXPE's principal investigator, in a statement. "IXPE will tell us more about the precise nature of cosmic X-ray sources than we can learn by studying their brightness and colour spectrum alone."

X-rays are a highly energetic wavelength of light that are born from extremes. In space, this includes powerful magnetic fields, collisions between objects, explosions, scorching temperatures and rapid rotations. This light is practically encoded with the signature of what created it, but Earth's atmosphere prevents X-rays from reaching the ground. This is why scientists rely on X-ray telescopes in space.

Polarised light also bears the unique stamp of its source and what it passed through on the way. While waves of light can vibrate in any direction, polarised light only vibrates in one direction.

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Understanding extreme cosmic objects

Using IXPE to study the polarization of cosmic X-rays could help scientists better understand the remnants of exploded stars, like black holes and neutron stars, their environments and how they produce X-rays. This perspective on extreme cosmic objects could also reveal the answers to larger fundamental questions about physics.

"IXPE will help us test and refine our theories of how the universe works," Weisskopf said. "There may be even more exciting answers ahead than the ones we've hypothesized. Better yet, we may find whole lists of new questions to ask!"

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The satellite's eyes on the universe include sensitive polarization detectors, which were made in Italy. The telescopes will observe the X-rays and feed them into the detectors, which can capture images of the X-rays and measure their polarization.

"This is going to be groundbreaking in terms of X-ray data acquisition," Weisskopf said. "We'll be analyzing the results for decades to come."

Indonesians are used to dealing with natural disasters. Their country sits on the Ring of Fire, a band around the Pacific Ocean that sets off frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity. But Mount Semeru's eruption on the island of Java Saturday was different.

Days of heavy rain had gradually eroded Semeru's lava dome, a mound of hardened lava that acts like a volcano's plug, which partially collapsed.

It was this "dome avalanche" that Indonesian volcanologists believe triggered the eruption, according to the country's geological chief, Eko Budi Lelono, from the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.

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"Based on photos and data, we can compare the size of the dome before and after the December 4 eruption. We can see a big mass of the dome's volume was lost after a heavy spell of rain that day," he said.

A lava dome can be unstable and collapse for several reasons, but there is growing understanding that heavy rain can be one of them.

The role of rain in this case has raised questions around whether climate change could bring more frequent eruptions of this kind.

That's a concern, because eruptions caused by lava-dome collapse tend to be stronger and more destructive than other types, scientists told CNN.

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Saturday's blowout created what's known as pyroclastic flow, which are fast-moving clouds of lava, gas and ash.

The temperature of these clouds are typically between 800 to 1,000 degrees Celsius, Eko said.

It can move fast — sometimes around 10 kilometres an hour, but up to 100 km/h — and can be impossible to run from.

More than 30 people were killed in the weekend eruption and searchers are looking for dozens more people missing. Thousands of buildings were damaged, many buried under heavy piles of ash that shrouded homes in entire villages.

The force of this eruption was bigger than usual. Semeru shot ash some 15 kilometres up into the air, when it's typically just hundreds of meters, and the pyroclastic clouds reached more than 12 kilometres on land, much further than the usual five kilometres, Mr Eko said.

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Millions of Indonesians live near the foot of volcanoes, where the soil is particularly fertile and good for growing crops. More than 8,000 live within ten kilometres of Semeru.

They sometime get warnings that Semeru — one of Indonesia's most active volcanoes — will erupt as its activity increases, but rain-triggered events like this are harder to predict, Heather Handley, a volcanologist at Monash University in Australia, told CNN.

Continued global warming is projected to bring more extreme rain events to many parts of the world, raising concerns that these larger eruptions could come with little or no notice at all.

Scientists don't know this is necessarily going to happen, but more have been asking that question since 2018, when Hawaii's Kīlauea volcano erupted after days of heavy rainfall.

READ MORE: Could we really have a volcanic eruption in Australia?

"People have been thinking about the relationships between climate and triggers of volcanic eruptions," Ms Handley said.

"There's still a lot to explore that we don't know yet, so but it's good to think about other external driving mechanisms of volcanic eruption that we might otherwise have missed."

Handley explained that there are several ways increased rain and global warming more generally could impact volcanic eruptions.

Memes helped millions of Australians laugh through lockdown in 2021.

About 3.6 million have been tweeted by Aussie accounts this year and Twitter has revealed our favourite: "When you…"

READ MORE: Sport, COVID and crypto dominate Australia's Google Search in 2021

The versatile meme gets an unfair leg up given how many different ways it can be used but it was the country's go-to in August — Australia's biggest meme month on Twitter — which coincided with the start of Melbourne's sixth lockdown and Sydney's continued confinement.

#COVID19 was knocked off by #auspol as the nation's most tweeted hashtag.

Australian of the Year Grace Tame (@TamePunk) who proudly criticised the Prime Minister and backed Brittany Higgins, was the country's third most tweeted about "figure" behind K-Pop groups BTS (@BTS_twt) and Black Pink (@ygofficialblink).

#March4Justice was among Australia's top 10 most-used hashtags.

January may feel like a lifetime ago but the wave of amateur investors who blew up GameStop's stock price hasn't been forgotten.

The movement, which took hold on Reddit, drove sub US$20 ($28) stock as high as US$347 ($484) in a little over two weeks.

A video on the subreddit 'r/wallstreetbets' of a New York billboard displaying that rise was the most upvoted post on the platform in 2021, with the topic claiming the top three spots.

Meanwhile, a lobster diver who "recently survived being inside a whale" beat out Bill Gates and Bethesda's Todd Howard for the most upvoted AMA (Ask Me Anything) as photogenic bees and ducks from the animal kingdom dominated Reddit's top three livestreams.

READ MORE: Cape Cod lobster diver eaten by whale, spat out

Cryptocurrency continues to drive the biggest chunk of Reddit's 366 million posts so far this year; r/dogecoin, r/superstonk, r/cryptocurrency, r/amcstock and r/bitcoin were among the top five most viewed communities.

Gamers united to celebrate EA losing exclusive rights to making Star Wars video games but it was Genshin Impact, League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy XIV that caught the most Reddit attention.

Like on Google Search, the NBA led football, the NFL, wrestling and MMA as the world's most-viewed sport subreddits.

Netflix's Squid Game exploded in September, but the superpower of our Marvel, Star Wars and DC heroes dominated the movie and TV categories. T

he announcement that Dune would be getting a sequel in theatres was the most upvoted post in the r/movies subreddit.

Reddit's overall most viewed topics of 2021 so far:

1. Cryptocurrency
2. Gaming
3. Sports
4. Weddings
5. Health and Fitness
6. Food and Drink
7. Movies and Television

Twitter's most popular hashtags in Australia looked like this:

CCTV of two cars linked to the Sydney CBD murder of Bilal Hamze, and an alleged attempted murder of another man in the city's north, has been released by police.

Just before 10.30pm on Thursday, June 17, emergency services were called to the intersection of Bridge and Pitt Streets in the CBD, after reports a man had been shot by an unknown person in a black Audi.

The man – who has since been identified as 34-year-old Hamze – was treated at the scene before being taken to St Vincent's Hospital, where he later died.

READ MORE: CCTV footage captures petrol station altercation in Western Australia

A short time later, police found a burnt-out Audi at Fleming Street, Northwood.

Separately, on Saturday, August, 14, police tried to stop a Mercedes on Walker Street, North Sydney.

The driver failed to stop and following a short pursuit, the Mercedes was found abandoned on Miller Street, Cammeray, and seized for forensic examination.

It's alleged the occupants – described as two men in dark-coloured clothing – had earlier approached a nearby Toyota Camry and threatened the 76-year-old male driver with a gun, before fleeing the area in the man's vehicle.

READ MORE: Pfizer says COVID-19 booster offers protection against Omicron

In September, detectives charged two men – aged 31 and 19 – for their alleged roles in that incident. They remain before the courts.

Since that time, an extensive canvass of CCTV has identified that the Mercedes used in the alleged murder attempt was captured travelling with the Audi used in Hamze's murder, in the weeks before his death.

Homicide Squad Commander Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty said investigators believe the same person may be responsible for the cloned number plates which were found to be in use on the Audi and the Mercedes.

"We're appealing to anyone who may have seen these vehicles travelling or being stored together – in any part of Metropolitan Sydney – to come forward and contact police," Superintendent Doherty said.

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"Of note, both vehicles are depicted travelling westbound in the M4 East Tunnel about 15 minutes apart on Thursday, May 27, 2021, and have been identified on traffic cameras across the Sydney metropolitan area after that time."

He said the Audi was also captured on CCTV using the Sydney Harbour Bridge both before and immediately after the Hamze shooting.

"Both the murder of Bilal and the alleged murder attempt at North Sydney have obvious familial and organised crime related links, with this CCTV revealing a further link to the possible acquisition and storage of the vehicles," Superintendent Doherty said.

"We know these stolen luxury cars are kept in garages and unit blocks across Sydney until they are later used to facilitate deadly public place shootings and other violent crimes.

"We're particularly interested in anyone who may have seen these cars travelling around Sydney in May and June this year, or who was perhaps approached through social media or other means to store one of these cars on their property."

The Homicide Squad commander also said police now believe a fleet of cars allegedly being used in these crimes are stashed across the city, with parking spots secured over Facebook marketplace or Gumtree.

"There's people who may have these vehicles stored in their garages or car spaces now and they can come forward," Detective Superintendent Doherty said.

"There's other people that would know and be responsible for directing the sourcing of these vehicles, storing of these vehicles and then directing people to commit both murders and shootings ."

Anybody with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

A woman has died after her car was washed away in a rapidly rising flood in Brisbane's west.

Emergency services were called to Lancing Street, Pullenvale, about 4.40pm on Wednesday when a witness saw a white sedan get washed away.

Queensland Police Inspector Daniel Bragg said it took a swift-water rescue team and other police several hours to find the car in an "extremely challenging operation".

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A 75-year-old Taringa woman was found dead in the car, which a tree had fallen on top of.

"The storm this afternoon did come over very quickly," the regional duty officer said.

"And I'm advised that the floodwaters here rose very very quickly. 

"The reality is here, I suppose, if it's flooded forget it. 

"Can I encourage drivers to stop and not go anywhere near flooded waters."

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Thunderstorms battered Brisbane with heavy rain on Monday, including more than 60mm in an hour at Pullenvale.

Inspector Bragg, describing the incident as "absolutely tragic", said conditions made the search for the woman even more difficult.

"When the police first arrived, the waters were moving very rapidly and they were also rising very rapidly," he said.

"They formed the view that the waters were extremely dangerous and extremely treacherous. 

"So the swift water rescue team were immediately brought in to assist in retrieving that vehicle."

He warned drivers to steer clear of flooded roads.

"When you're driving on the road and you see water across the road, you need to drive with extreme caution," he said.

"If it is flooded, then don't drive through it because things like this can unfold so quickly and before you know it things are out of your control."