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The South Island will stay in lockdown for four more days before everyone below the Auckland boundary will move to alert level 3. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made the announcement at 3pm on Friday after Cabinet met earlier in…

The NSW Government has announced a staggered return to school for all students from late October.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said today the goal will be for every school staff member to receive COVID-19 vaccination by November 8, with a special day for staff to be vaccinated on September 6.

"We are asking for everybody who works on a school campus to be vaccinated by November 8," Ms Berejiklian said. 

"A large proportion of teachers are already vaccinated but we are calling out for anybody, to any teacher, who is not vaccinated to get vaccinated." 

LIVE: NSW records 882 cases, two deaths

Later date for HSC exams

HSC exams will be pushed back to November 9, with a revised timetable and guidelines for COVID-safe exams to be released by the NSW Education Standards Authority in early September.

The government says the delay of the HSC exams will not disadvantage NSW students when applying to university.

READ MORE: Lockdown extended for regional NSW

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the university sector had been consulted.

"We expect that means the results will come out in mid-January, but the university sector has been consulted, and are able to accommodate those changes," Ms Mitchell said. 

"And that means any Year 12 student who wants to go to university will be able to be offered a place, in line with previous years." 

READ MORE: More freedoms for fully vaccinated in NSW – What you need to know

Ms Mitchell said existing measures were in place to deal with "illness and misadventure" in the event an HSC student was unable to attend an exam. 

"Any particular student on the day of their exams who cannot attend because they are unwell, if they are impacted by being a COVID close contact, there are already procedures in place to help those people in terms of the assessment," she said. 

"We did that last year and we do it when there are bushfires or natural events and there are good mechanisms in place." 

Staggered return, restrictions remain at school

Children in any area of NSW which comes out of lockdown before October 25 will be automatically allowed to return to school.

The NSW Department of Education says its plan aims to bring students back in a COVID-safe way while stay at home orders are still in place.

Students will return to face-to-face learning in the following order:

• From 25 October – Kindergarten and Year 1
• From 1 November – Year 2, 6 and 11
• From 8 November – Year 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10

Year 12 students are already able to return in a limited way and this will continue for the remainder of Term 3.

From October 25, Year 12 will have full-time access to school campuses and their teachers.

If stay-at-home orders are lifted in a local government area or region before October 25, all students living or learning in that area will return to face-to-face learning.

If COVID-19 cases in LGAs increase significantly, learning from home will resume for that LGA until case numbers drop.

READ MORE: The key COVID-19 symptoms to watch out for – and when to call an ambulance

Ms Mitchell said students will return to school on level three restrictions.

This will involve minimal mixing and no extra adults on campus; no assemblies and large gatherings; and mask-wearing will be compulsory for all staff and all high school students. 

Primary school students are also advised to wear masks. 

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Western Australia's Premier has labelled a suggestion to move its non-stop Perth to London flights to Darwin as "outrageous".

Qantas says it is considering relocating the flights once international borders reopen due to WA's hardline border policy.

But Mark McGowan has criticised the potential change, arguing a terminal at Perth Airport had been upgraded to secure the flights at a cost of $15 million.

READ MORE: Qantas plans restarting international flights despite $1.7 billion loss

Qantas expects its direct flights from Australia to the UK to be in high demand once international travel is allowed.

The flight time from Perth to London, or Darwin to London, is comparable and that route is now being looked at.

"The airline is investigating using Darwin as a transit point, which has been Qantas' main entry for repatriation flights, as an alternative – or in addition – to its existing Perth hub given conservative border policies in Western Australia," Qantas said in a statement.

READ MORE: 'An odd thing to say': WA Premier hits back at PM's Croods comparison

But Mr McGowan said his state was being "punished" for its tough stance in keeping COVID-19 out.

"All of the income we produce … the revenue we produce for the Commonwealth government is keeping Australia alive, we shouldn't be punished for that," Mr McGowan said yesterday.

READ MORE: Qantas offers free points, flight vouchers, for fully vaccinated Australians

"All I'd say to Qantas … as a state, we funded the Perth-London flights.

"We put in place $15 million worth of improvement at the terminal. [Qantas] need to show some understanding and perhaps some gratitude to what the state government has done."

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce says the carrier was ready to launch international flights once vaccination rates in Australia reach 80 per cent, due to happen in December.

Since coalescing in eastern Afghanistan six years ago, an Islamic State affiliate there has grown into one of the most dangerous terror threats globally.

Despite years of military targeting by the US-led coalition, the group known as Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, has survived to pursue new attacks as the United States and other NATO partners withdraw from Afghanistan, and as the Taliban return to power.

President Joe Biden cited the threat of Islamic State attacks in sticking with a Tuesday deadline for pulling US forces out of Afghanistan.

And ahead of deadly suicide bombings at the Kabul airport Thursday, there were urgent Western warnings of a potential attack by the group, under cover of the throngs that have gathered at the Kabul airport seeking evacuation.

READ MORE: Multiple explosions in Kabul kill 'a number' of US troops

US officials said the killings are believed to have been carried out by the Islamic State group.

The group has built a record of highly lethal attacks in the face of its own heavy losses.

A look at a deadly group influencing the course of the Kabul airlifts and US actions:

What is Islamic State Khorasan?

The Islamic State's Central Asia affiliate sprang up in the months after the group's core fighters swept across Syria and Iraq, carving out a self-styled caliphate, or Islamic empire, in the summer of 2014. In Syria and Iraq, it took local and international forces five years of subsequent fighting to roll back the caliphate.

The Afghanistan affiliate takes its name from the Khorasan Province, a region that covered much of Afghanistan, Iran and central Asia in the Middle Ages.

The group is also known as ISK, or ISIS K.

Who are the Islamic state Khorasan's fighters?

The group started as several hundred Pakistani Taliban fighters, who took refuge across the border in Afghanistan after military operations drove them out of their home country.

Other, like-minded extremists joined them there, including disgruntled Afghan Taliban fighters unhappy with what they — unlike the West — saw as the Taliban's overly moderate and peaceful ways.

As the Taliban pursued peace talks with the United States in recent years, discontented Taliban increasingly moved to the more extremist Islamic State, swelling its numbers.

Most were frustrated that the Taliban was pursuing negotiations with the US at a time when they thought the movement was on the march to a military win.

The group also has attracted a significant cadre from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, from a neighbouring country; fighters from Iran's only Sunni Muslim majority province; and members of the Turkistan Islamic Party comprising Uighurs from China's northeast.

Many were attracted to the Islamic State's violent and extreme ideology, including promises of a caliphate to unite the Islamic world, a goal never espoused by the Taliban.

What makes them a leading threat?

While the Taliban have confined their struggle to Afghanistan, the Islamic State group in Afghanistan and Pakistan has embraced the Islamic State's call for a worldwide jihad against non-Muslims.

The Centre for International and Strategic Studies counts dozens of attacks that Islamic State fighters have launched against civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including minority Shiite Muslims, as well as hundreds of clashes with Afghan, Pakistani and US-led coalition forces since January 2017.

Though the group has yet to conduct attacks against the US homeland, the US government believes it represents a chronic threat to US and allied interests in South and Central Asia.

What is their role with the Taliban?

They are enemies. While intelligence officials believe al-Qaida fighters are integrated among the Taliban, the Taliban, by contrast, have waged major, coordinated offensives against the Islamic State group in Afghanistan.

Taliban insurgents at times joined with both the US and US-backed Afghan government forces to rout the Islamic State from parts of Afghanistan's northeast.

A US Defence Department official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was working covertly, said previously that the Trump administration had sought its 2020 withdrawal deal with the Taliban partly in hopes of joining forces with them against the Islamic State affiliate.

The administration saw that group as the real threat to the American homeland.

What is the risk now?

Even when the United States had combat troops, aircraft and armed drones stationed on the ground in Afghanistan to monitor and strike the Islamic State, Islamic State militants were able to keep up attacks despite suffering thousands of casualties, Amira Jadoon and Andrew Mines note in a report for West Point's Combating Terrorism Centre.

The withdrawal is depriving the United States of its on-the-ground strike capacity in Afghanistan, and threatens to weaken its ability to track the Islamic State and its attack planning as well.

Biden officials say the Islamic State group is only one of many terror threats it is dealing with globally.

They insist they can manage it with so-called over-the-horizon military and intelligence assets, based in Gulf states, on aircraft carriers, or other more distant sites.

One of the United States' greatest fears about pulling out its combat forces after two decades is that Afghanistan under Taliban rule again becomes a magnet and base for extremists plotting attacks on the West.

That threat, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN last weekend, was something "we're focused on, with every tool in our arsenal."