US authorities have received more than 3,000 reports of unruly airplane passengers this year, with most infractions about face masks, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said.

There are up to 2,300 reports of passengers who refused to comply with the federal requirement to wear face masks on planes.

The mandate also includes public transport such as buses.

READ MORE: Qantas engineers using brooms to ward snakes off plane

The statistics come after an unruly passenger, an off-duty Delta Air Lines flight attendant, used the plane's intercom and assaulted two other flight attendants.

The pilot was forced to issue an urgent request for "all able-bodied men to (come to) the front of the plane for an emergency".

The off-duty flight attendant — allegedly wearing a helmet and elbow pads — was subdued.

The sharp surge in misbehaviour prompted FAA Administrator Steve Dickson to launch a zero-tolerance policy against unruly passengers in January.

Since then, officials have been tracking the number of reported instances of misbehaving passengers, which they haven't done before.

Mr Dickson told CNN in an interview last month he is "concerned" about the increase in unruly passengers and the safety risk the problem poses to flights.

"The aviation system that we have in the United States is the safest form of travel in human history," he said.

"That's what this zero-tolerance policy is all about – to make sure that we get this situation under control."

– WITH CNN

The German paedophile sensationally declared a prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann case has broken his silence in a letter and sketch from prison, declaring the investigation an "unbelievable scandal".

It is the first time Christian Brueckner has spoken publicly about allegations levelled against him by German police, including so-called "concrete evidence" that Madeleine is dead.

German prosecutors have said Brueckner, who is currently jailed for another crime, is a suspect in Madeleine's unusual disappearance 14 years ago – but that they do not have enough evidence to charge him in court.

READ MORE: Maddie prime suspect just a 'scapegoat', former lead Portuguese detective claims

LISTEN: True crime podcast investigates what happened to Madeleine McCann

In a letter dated May 8, written from his prison cell and published by German tabloid Bild, the 44-year-old Brueckner slammed suggestions he abducted or harmed Madeleine.

"Charging someone with a crime is one thing," he wrote.

"It is something completely different, namely an unbelievable scandal, when a public prosecutor starts a public prejudicial campaign before proceedings are even opened," he continued.

"Freedom of expression is not a basic right so that everyone can say and write what they want. Freedom of expression does not protect the majority," Brueckner wrote from his prison in Oldenburg, near Bremen.

"It protects the minority. It does not protect the most logical, most convincing or most popular views, but rather the outsider position.

"I call on the Brunswick public prosecutors (Hans Christian) Wolters and (Ute) Lindemann to resign from their offices."

READ MORE: Three questions could help answer what happened to Maddie

In June last year prosecutor Mr Wolters stunned the world when he presented Brueckner as a new prime suspect in the case.

Mr Wolters has repeatedly claimed he has evidence Madeleine is dead but he has never revealed what that evidence is, or how it might be linked to Brueckner.

Brueckner appeared to take aim at Mr Wolters over this fact in his letter.

"You have proved worldwide, through arbitrary convictions in the past and through scandalous prejudicial campaigns in the present, that you are unsuitable for the office of an 'advocate for the honest and German people who trust in justice,' and that you bring shame to the German legal system."

Mr Wolters has admitted he has no forensic evidence which would link Brueckner to Madeleine's disappearance.

Brueckner also drew a cartoon in his letter which showed two prosecutors ordering a dinner of "filet forensics" in a restaurant.

In speech bubbles, a male character in the coloured drawing says: "I'll take the filet forensics."

His dinner companion, a woman, replies: "Yummy, me too."

Madeleine went missing in 2007 while on holiday in Portugal with her family.

She was aged three at the time of her disappearance.

Brueckner had lived in Portugal's Algarve region from 1995 to 2007, and also resided in a house in Praia da Luz, the resort town from where Madeleine vanished.

He is currently appealing a conviction for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American woman, for which he was sentenced to seven years in jail.

German police have previously investigated Brueckner in the 2015 disappearance of a German girl, Inga Gehricke, who vanished in the woods while on a family picnic.

He was not charged with any crimes relating to Inga, but police did prosecute him over the child abuse material found inside his camper van.

Natasha Beth Darcy began hounding grazier Mathew Dunbar to change his will just months after meeting him on a dating website at the end of 2014.

"Don't forget you need to change your will", and "can you promise to do one thing for me this week? Call solicitor for appointment to sort out your will", the 46-year-old texted Mr Dunbar.

Less than six months after they'd met he had left her his multi-million-dollar sheep farm Pandora in the small and misty town of Walcha near Tamworth on the state's northern tablelands.

By this stage, Darcy was back in jail for breaching her parole – having served time for sedating her estranged husband Colin Crossman and burning down their family home while he slept in 2009.

While Darcy was in custody, Mr Dunbar helped to care for her three children until she returned to Walcha in 2016.

It was well known the 42-year-old farmer was desperate to find love and a family and Mr Dunbar was over the moon when he thought he had found a family he could care for.

But eight months after Darcy got out of jail, Mr Dunbar was dead.

Today a NSW Supreme Court jury found Darcy guilty of murdering Mr Dunbar by sedating him with a cocktail of drugs blended in a NutriBullet before she gassed him with helium on his property in the early hours of August 2, 2017.

Coincidentally, Darcy's estranged husband Mr Crossman was the first paramedic on the scene after Mr Dunbar was murdered.

"The accused had a significant motive: she had no income … she insisted she be made the beneficiary; she stood to gain substantially by his death: she had motive," Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield told the seven men and five women of the jury in the final moments of his closing address.

"He may have desperately wanted love and a family, but what did he get? A cold and calculating person who was determined to kill him and inherit his wealth."

Darcy knew of Mr Dunbar's history of depression and that he had once threatened to take his own life in June 2017.

"This was known to the accused and she exploited this and killed him in the manner she did to make it look like a suicide," Mr Hatfield said.

During the two months the prosecution argued Darcy had meticulously planned Mr Dunbar's murder, Googling hundreds of way to kill him from February 2017.

Darcy had even done "two dry runs" before the eventual murder by injecting his calf with ram sedatives and giving him an overdose of her son's medication.

Psychiatrist Clive Stanton told the jury Darcy had even goaded Mr Dunbar to kill himself, asking if the "rafters in the shed were high enough to hang himself on" and that she had "emotionally manipulated" and "gaslighted" him which had caused him depression.

Google searches

Between February and August 2017, Darcy Googled hundreds of different ways to murder Mr Dunbar.

On the night of his murder, possibly after she had killed him, she used his phone to search "Does helium show up in an autopsy?"

Some of the searches include:

• 11 toxic wild plants that look like food
• How to commit murder
• 99 undetectable poisons
• Plastic bag suffocation
• How long after suicide is there a crime scene?
• Can police see deleted text messages

Securing ram sedatives (acepromazine)

Darcy tried to source ram sedatives from three different vets before finally obtaining 100 millilitres of acepromazine from Creeklands Veterinary Surgery at Armidale on June 28, 2017.

She used a false name and address to purchase enough acepromazine to sedate 25 to 40 horses and Googled "acepromazine human overdose" and "what would acepromazine do to a human?"

Ordering helium

Darcy ignored two calls from Mr Dunbar as she researched helium online on the family's Mac computer two days before his death.

One minute later she rang a Supagas store at Tamworth on the afternoon of July 31, 2017 and ordered a 3.5 cubic metre tank of helium, telling an employee a "Mr Dunbar" would pick it up the following day.

The employee remembered "clear recollection of the request being specially for high purity helium and it being a female caller".

Darcy later suggested to police Mr Dunbar may have ordered it telling them, "Mathew had a very feminine-sounding voice".

The Supagas employee told the court: "No, I am 100 per cent certain I spoke to a woman."

Seroquel and Paliperidone purchase

Darcy had purchased $100 worth of antipsychotic drugs – Paliperidone and Seroquel – from a former friend after telling them Mr Dunbar was her gay business partner who only had six months to live due to a brain injury.

Darcy said she needed the drugs to help Mr Dunbar sleep and that he had not been given strong medication because this would cause his tumour to grow.

$20,000 offer to make a false statement

While on remand for murder Darcy wrote to an old high school friend, offering her $20,000 to make a false statement about how Mr Dunbar had planned to kill himself.

"I'm going to make you a proposition and see if you can be the one to help me," Darcy wrote to her friend in January 2020.

Darcy then outlines her plan, inspired by the 1990s sitcom Frasier, where one of the characters struggles with the "moral dilemma" of whether to lie for a friend in a court case.

"I was watching an episode of Frasier when Niles needed him to lie in court and say he didn't know that Niles was in love with Daphne," Ms Darcy wrote.

"It got me thinking if only I could ask somebody to say that Mathew told them he was planning his suicide maybe a few or several days before he passed."

The Supreme Court heard her high school friend, contacted the Director of Public Prosecutions after hearing about the trial through the media, and came forward with the letters Ms Darcy had written.

Post murder searches

Darcy looked up and Googled the four types of drugs found in Mr Dunbar's system following his murder but before she had been informed of the toxicology results.

Following her arrest, she also asked two undercover officers – posing as prisoners – if they had heard police mention the drug "acepromazine" before she had been told it was present in Mr Dunbar's system.

In the days after Mr Dunbar's murder Darcy searched:

• What can the police get iPhone
• Can police access deleted web history
• Can police retrieve deleted text Facebook messages
• How long to test for poisons (sic)
• Wife killed husband

Investigating police deemed Mr Dunbar's death as suspicious almost immediately after he was found, given Darcy's history and having previously sedated her estranged husband Colin Crossman and hit him over the head with a hammer after applying for life insurance in 2009.

Readers seeking support can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or beyond blue on 1300 22 4636.

Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467.

MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78.

*National Domestic Violence Service: 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732). If you are in immediate danger call triple zero (000).

Australians are facing a "ticking economic time bomb" due to soaring house prices and the anticipation that interest rates will rise within the next few years.

A new report by the University of New South Wales has noted that in the past 30 years, Australia's household debt has more than doubled.

In 1990 the national household debt sat at 70 per cent of Australia's Gross Domestic Product (or GDP). In 2020 that figure rocketed up to 185 per cent of GDP.

READ MORE: Desperate Aussie families struggling to break into the property market

The report, titled Housing: Taming the Elephant in the Economy, called on the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and a Royal Commission to ensure younger Australians aren't burdened with the cost of housing.

"Australia's approach to housing policy has fuelled income and wealth inequality and created significant economic instability. This is a huge drag on productivity and warps Australia's capital investment patterns," said the report's lead author, Professor Duncan Maclennan.

"The recent explosion in house prices brings a fresh and troubling dynamic. Rampant price growth has returned to the larger cities and is now spreading to regional Australia.

"This is in part due to the pandemic-fuelled work-from-home revolution but is also because so many younger Australians can no longer afford the life they want as homeowners in the larger cities."

READ MORE: Clifftop Sydney mansion set to smash price records

In the 12 months to April 2021, Australia's house prices rose by 10 per cent and are forecast to increase between 10 per cent and 14 per cent over the coming year.

When valued as a whole, it is estimated Australia's current housing stock is worth $8.1 trillion.

Professor Maclennan said market regulators are largely ignoring the real-world impacts exploding property prices is having on the day-to-day movements of Australians.

"Policy makers must pay greater attention to the economic fallout created by housing market distortions. The Commonwealth Government's policy actions are boosting inflationary pressures and the RBA has effectively washed its hands of responsibility for house prices, arguing higher prices are good for the economy," Professor Maclennan said.

"But when people are paying more and more for rent and to service their mortgages, they have less and less to spend on other goods and services.

"The responsibilities of the RBA need to be expanded to include maintaining a more stable, rational housing market."

READ MORE: Aussie house prices 'at risk' from China shift on iron ore

Currently, Australia's interest rates sit at the historic low of 0.1 per cent. In February 2020 – just prior to the true impact of the virus being known – Australia's official cash rate was sitting at 0.75 per cent.

Professor Maclennan said while housing supply is "sluggish", the states need to do more to help younger Australians enter the market without taking on outrageous debt.

"Short political time horizons and cross-border and cross-sector blame games will not help younger and poorer Australians," Professor Maclennan said.

"The scale and complexity of the problem demands that a Royal Commission be established to investigate how to defuse the time bomb and create a more effective and equitable market for all Australians."

READ MORE: Aussie property valuers predict more price hikes

Housing economist Saul Eslake said soaring house prices is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to the developments of COVID but the result of how Australia's property market is structured.

"Media coverage is rightly sounding alarm at recently booming house prices that are locking more young people out of the market. But this is far from a short term or cyclical issue. It's a structural problem that's been building for decades," Mr Eslake said.

"And it's one that won't be solved by policy initiatives that just tinker round the edges.

"It's been more than amply demonstrated that what governments need to do is step back from policies which serve mainly, or only, to inflate the demand for housing, and step up to pursue policies which expand the supply of it."

One moment, your car is safely parked only a few metres from your building.

Then, in less than a minute, your car has disappeared completely.

That was the experience of an Indian doctor, who filmed as a sinkhole opened up underneath his Hyundai.

READ MORE: Enormous 60-metre sinkhole threatens to swallow house

Kiran Doshi filmed as the concrete underneath his car crumbled and the car disappeared face-down into a deep hole.

In a matter of seconds, the car is completely submerged.

The sinkhole opened up on Sunday morning at the beginning of an intense monsoon season in Mumbai.

A heavy rainfall belt has been battering the enormous city for days, causing major flooding.

That particular section of the parking area was an old well which had been partly covered by a concrete slab.

"Half of the well was covered with the concrete portion, while a part of it was kept open," Dr Doshi said.

"Everyone parks cars there, and this is the first time that a portion of it caved in."

READ MORE: Sinkhole causes traffic chaos for Gold Coast Christmas shoppers

Over the years, the concrete had weakened before finally collapsing on Sunday.

About 9pm that night the car was retrieved using a crane.

Nobody was hurt.

Emergency crews are currently working to extinguish a boat fire in waters off Sydney's Northern Beaches.

Crews were called to the fire roughly 100m offshore at Morning Bay in Pittwater around 8am.

Fire and rescue teams arrived to find the vessel well alight with large plumes of smoke pouring from the inside.

LIVE UPDATES: Biloela Tamil family to be reunited in Australia

Fire and rescue teams have since towed the vessel to shallow water.

No one is on board the vessel and no injuries have been reported.

A crew, along with a crew from the Rural Fire Service (RFS), is responding from Church Point.

The cruiser is moored to another boat and booms will be placed around the vessels.

The boat is expected to burn out.

Residents have been ordered to evacuate their homes after a massive chemical fire broke out at a plant in the US state of Illinois.

The city fire department ordered a mandatory evacuation for all Rockton residents and businesses within a 1.6-kilometre radius of the Chemtool Inc. plant, police said in a message on Twitter.

Rockton Fire Chief Kirk Wilson said the city hopes to avoid "an environmental nightmare" that could occur if any of Chemtool's oil-based lubricants ran off into the nearby Rock River, about 300 metres west.

READ MORE: Myanmar puts Suu Kyi on trial on charges critics call bogus

Speaking at a news conference, Mr Wilson said the department's water-based firefighting suppression has stopped inside the building, and they're now letting the product "burn off".

"One of their main concerns is product spilling into the Rock River," he said.

Another concern is the large plume of smoke moving south and southeast from the explosion site.

Mr Wilson said the city's hazmat team has performed air quality analysis and determined there's no compromise of air quality at ground level at this time.

Evacuations remain in place for a one-mile (1.6km) radius from the explosion site as a "precautionary measure," he said.

About 150 homes are in the evacuation zone.

The burn-off at the plant is expected to take several days.

https://twitter.com/PapaTomTweets/status/1404465444350791685?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1404465444350791685%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2021%2F06%2F14%2Fus%2Fillinois-industrial-fire%2Findex.html

Between 40 to 45 agencies and 150 to 175 fire personnel are currently on the scene.

The cause of the "catastrophic incident" has not been determined, Mr Wilson said.

CNN affiliate WREX reported that city Mr Wilson said the 70 employees at the factory were able to get out safely.

When fire crews arrived, the flames were through the roof, and clouds of smoke filled the sky.

CNN affiliate WIFR said one firefighter was injured.

No other details were immediately available.

Explosion sounded like 'a decent-sized firework'

Residents of Rockton, located about 24 kilometres north of Rockford near the state line with Wisconsin, reported hearing a series of explosions.

"My family and I live in the evacuation zone," Thomas Rollette told CNN.

"We heard the explosions this morning and decided to check outside maybe five minutes afterwards when our dogs wouldn't calm down.

"By that point the smoke was already filling the sky."

https://twitter.com/MaggiePolsean/status/1404454852961374212

He said the first explosion sounded "like somebody lit off a decent-sized firework".

"It wasn't until more and louder explosions came that I even thought something was going on," he said.

"Seeing the wall of smoke outside just confirmed it for me, and pretty soon after they were telling the nearby residents to evacuate."

Company thanks first responders

According to the company's website, "Chemtool Incorporated offers a wide variety of lubricating greases to meet your needs".

The Lubrizol Corporation, which owns the facility, released a statement saying all employees were safe and accounted for."

At about 7am local time (10pm Monday AEST), local emergency personnel responded to a fire at the Lubrizol Corporation's Chemtool Facility in Rockton, Illinois.

"We have confirmed all on-site are safe and accounted for," the statement said.

"Our concern right now is for the safety of all our employees and the surrounding community.

"As a precaution, authorities have evacuated residents in a one-mile radius of the site.

"We do not yet know what caused this incident, but we will be working with local authorities and with our own risk management team to determine what happened and identify any corrective actions.

"We will share more details as they are known. We are grateful to our employees, first responders, and safety forces responding to this incident."

Salvation Army staff and volunteers set up a mobile unit to provide food to first responders, the Salvation Army of Winnebago County said, according to WIFR.

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NATO leaders on Monday declared that China poses a constant security challenge and is working to undermine global order, and they said they're worried about how fast the Chinese are developing nuclear missiles.

In a summit statement, the leaders said that China's goals and "assertive behaviour present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to alliance security."

While the 30 heads of state and government avoided calling China a rival, they expressed concern about what they said were its "coercive policies," the opaque ways it is modernising its armed forces and its use of disinformation.

READ MORE: How worried should China be about the West's G7 rebuke?

They called on Beijing to uphold its international commitments and to act responsibly in the international system.

The statement comes as President Joe Biden has stepped up his effort to rally allies to speak in a more unified voice about China's human rights record, its trade practices and its military's increasingly assertive behaviour that has unnerved US allies in the Pacific.

Biden, who arrived at the summit after three days of consulting with Group of Seven allies in England, pushed for the G7 communique there that called out what it said were forced labor practices and other human rights violations impacting Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province. The president said he was satisfied with the communique, although differences remain among the allies about how forcefully to criticise Beijing.

The new Brussels communique states plainly that the NATO nations "will engage China with a view to defending the security interests of the alliance."

READ MORE: Chinese cartoon mocking G7 leaders goes viral online

The Chinese Embassy to the United Kingdom on Monday issued a statement saying the G7 communique "deliberately slandered China and arbitrarily interfered in China's internal affairs," and exposed the "sinister intentions of a few countries, such as the United States." There was no immediate reaction from the Chinese government to the new NATO statement.

Biden arrived at his first NATO summit as president as leading members declared it a pivotal moment for an alliance beleaguered during the presidency of Donald Trump, who questioned the relevance of the multilateral organisation.

Shortly after arriving at the alliance's headquarters for the first NATO summit of his presidency, Biden sat down with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and underscored the U.S. commitment to Article 5 of the alliance charter, which spells out that an attack on one member is an attack on all and is to be met with a collective response.

READ MORE: US assessing reported leak at nuclear power facility in China

"Article 5 we take as a sacred obligation," Biden said. "I want NATO to know America is there."

It was a sharp shift in tone from the past four years, when Trump called the alliance "obsolete" and complained that it allowed for "global freeloading" countries to spend less on military defence at the expense of the US.

Looking forward, Stoltenberg noted myriad challenges still facing the alliance.

"We are meeting at the pivotal time for our alliance, the time of growing geopolitical competition, regional instability, terrorism, cyber attacks and climate change," Stoltenberg said at the start of a joint session of the NATO leaders. "No nation and no continent can deal with these challenges alone. But Europe and North America are not alone."

Biden, who came to Brussels following three days of consultations with Group of Seven leaders in England, was greeted by fellow leaders with warmth and even a bit of relief.

Belgium Prime Minister Alexander de Croo said Biden's presence "emphasises the renewal of the transatlantic partnership." De Croo said NATO allies were looking to get beyond four stormy years under the Trump administration and infighting among member countries.

READ MORE: G7 leaders back Australia on facing down China trade threats

"I think now we are ready to turn the page," de Croo said.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi made a not-so-subtle dig at Trump, while welcoming Biden.

"This summit is a continuation of yesterday's G7 and is part of the process of reaffirming, of rebuilding the fundamental alliances of the United States that had been weakened by the previous administration," he said. "Think that President Biden's first visit is to Europe and try to remember where President Trump's first visit was?"

Trump's first overseas visit as president was to Saudi Arabia.

Trump routinely berated other NATO countries for not spending enough on defence and even threatened to pull the US out of the world's biggest security organisation and even questioned the mutual defence provision of the NATO charter, a central tenet of the alliance.

When alliance members last met for a summit in England in December 2019, Trump grabbed headlines by calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "two-faced" and French President Emmanuel Macron "nasty."

Trump lashed out after Trudeau was caught on a hot mic gossiping with other leaders about Trump turning photo opportunities into long news conferences. Ahead of the summit, Macron had declared NATO "brain dead" because of a void in US leadership under Trump.

The White House said the communique to be signed by alliance members at the end of the NATO summit is expected to include language about updating Article 5 to include major cyber attacks — a matter of growing concern amid a series of hacks targeting the US government and businesses around the globe by Russia-based hackers.

The update will spell out that if an alliance member needs technical or intelligence support in response to a cyber attack, it would be able to invoke the mutual defence provision to receive assistance, according to White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

The president started his day meeting with leaders of the Baltic states on NATO's eastern flank as well as separate meetings with leaders of Poland and Romania to discuss the threat posed by Russia and the recent air piracy in Belarus, according to the White House.

Biden's itinerary in Europe has been shaped so that he would first gather with G7 leaders and then with NATO allies in Brussels before his much-anticipated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on Wednesday. And with both summits, Biden aimed to consult European allies on efforts to counter provocative actions by China and Russia.

Biden will meet later on Monday with Turkey's president, Erdogan, on the summit sidelines.

Biden has known Erdogan for years but their relationship has frequently been contentious. Biden, during his campaign, drew ire from Turkish officials after he described Erdogan as an "autocrat." In April, Biden infuriated Ankara by declaring that the Ottoman-era mass killing and deportations of Armenians was "genocide" — a term that US presidents have avoided using.