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NSW mayor stabbed after group of men storm his family home

A NSW mayor has been hospitalised after he was allegedly stabbed when a group stormed his family home in Sydney's west just before 1am.

Hawkesbury City Council mayor Patrick Connolly suffered a stab wound to his left arm during the reported home invasion, which police believe to have been a case of mistaken identity.

Police found Connolly with the stab wound when they went to a home on Porpoise Crescent, Bligh Park about 12.45am, following reports five to six men had forced their way into the house.

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Connolly was treated at the scene then taken to Westmead Hospital in a stable condition.

Police have been told five to six men forced entry into the home and threatened him before he was stabbed.

The men then drove from the scene in his white Skoda, taking a few personal items from the home.

A woman and four children were home at the time of the incident. They were shaken but uninjured, according to police.

Police have released a statement this afternoon advising "initial inquiries have led police to believe the incident is a case of mistaken identity".

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Hawkesbury City Council has confirmed in a statement that Connolly was injured in the invasion and "received treatment" but that his family were uninjured.

Blue Mountains mayor Mark Greenhill sent his well wishes to Connolly in a Facebook post this afternoon.

Greenhill said while he didn't know the motivation for the attack he could empathise with the Hawkesbury mayor.

"In my time as mayor three people have been arrested for threats against me," Greenhill wrote.

https://twitter.com/stemplemanmp/status/1526010195582672896

"Someone phoned me one evening and threatened to stab me over a development they were pursuing.

"Another posted on social media a threat to my safety over an issue that was unclear.

"A third arrest was widely reported following years of harassment of myself and others."

Federal MP Susan Templeton has also taken to social media to denounce the "horrific incident".

"What a terrifying ordeal for his family," she said.

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North Korea reports 15 more suspected COVID-19 deaths

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has blasted officials over slow medicine deliveries and ordered his military to respond to the surging but largely undiagnosed COVID-19 crisis that has left 1.2 million people ill with fever and 50 dead in a matter of days.

More than 564,860 people are in quarantine due to the fever that has rapidly spread among people in and around the capital, Pyongyang, since late April.

Eight more deaths and 392,920 newly detected fevers were reported today, the North's emergency anti-virus headquarters said.

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An employee of the Kyonghung Foodstuff General Store disinfects the showroom countertops in Pyongyang, North Korea in November 2021.

State media didn't specify how many were confirmed as COVID-19, but North Korea is believed to lack sufficient testing supplies to confirm coronavirus infections in large numbers and is mostly relying on isolating people with symptoms at shelters.

Failing to slow the virus could have dire consequences for North Korea, considering its broken health care system and that its 26 million people are believed to be unvaccinated, with malnourishment and other conditions of poverty.

Kim during a ruling party Politburo meeting yesterday criticised government and health officials over what he portrayed as a botched pandemic response, saying medicine supplies aren't being distributed to pharmacies in time because of their "irresponsible work attitude" and lack of organisation, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said.

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North Korea's Kim Jong-un is seen in a mask as the Omicron sub-variant spreads rapidly.

The Politburo had issued an emergency order to immediately release and quickly distribute state medicine reserves and for pharmacies to open for 24-hour shifts, but Kim said such steps weren't being properly implemented.

Kim ordered the medical units of his military to get involved in stabilising the supply of medicine in Pyongyang, KCNA said.

Kim and Politburo members after the meeting made on-site inspections of pharmacies in a district in Pyongyang, where Kim lamented that most of the shops were in poor condition and lacked storage spaces and criticised some pharmacists for not wearing proper white gowns.

North Korea acknowledged a COVID-19 outbreak for the first time last Thursday, saying an unspecified number of people had tested positive for the omicron variant.

It instituted a lockdown and Kim ordered public health officials, teachers and others to identify people with fevers so they could be quarantined.

North Korea's claim of a perfect record in keeping out the virus for two and a half years was widely doubted.

But its extremely strict border closure, large-scale quarantines and propaganda that stressed anti-virus controls as a matter of "national existence" may have staved off a huge outbreak until now.

It's not clear if North Korea's urgent messaging about its outbreak indicates a willingness to receive outside help.

The country shunned millions of vaccine doses offered by the UN-backed COVAX distribution program, likely because they carried international monitoring requirements.

South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol said in Parliament today that the South was willing to send vaccines, medicine, equipment and health personnel to the North if it's willing to accept.

South Korean officials say Pyongyang so far has made no request for Seoul's help.

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Inter-Korean relations have deteriorated since 2019 after the larger negotiations between the US and North Korea collapsed over disagreements involving the North's nuclear arsenal and US-led sanctions.

Kim has previously praised China's pandemic response and urged his officials to learn from it, which may indicate North Korea is more willing to accept help from its major ally.

Chinese officials said last week that Beijing was ready to offer help but they had no information about any such request being made.

Even as he called for a lockdown of cities and counties to slow the spread of COVID-19, Kim also stressed the country's economic goals should be met, which likely means huge groups will continue to gather at agricultural, industrial and construction sites.

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While accelerating his missile tests in brinkmanship aimed at pressuring Washington for economic and security concessions, Kim has been grappling with domestic challenges and a pandemic-shocked economy, pushing him to perhaps the toughest moment of his decade in power.

State media in recent weeks have emphasised farming campaigns to protect crops amid a drought during rice-planting season, a worrisome development in a country with chronic food shortages.

Kim is also intent on achieving his stated goals in a five-year national development plan announced in early 2021 after he showed unusual candour by acknowledging that his previous economic plans weren't working.

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Tonga volcanic eruption biggest explosion ever recorded study finds

The volcanic eruption in Tonga was the biggest explosion ever recorded by modern sensors.

It was so powerful, the force lifted cloud over the United Kingdom and generated small tsunamis in the Mediterranean Sea.

A pair of research papers published in the journal Science have reviewed data and found the enormous eruption of the underwater volcano at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai in January was far bigger than any 20th Century volcanic event.

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The papers also compared it to atom bomb tests conducted after World War II and found they were dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the blast.

Only the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 – which is thought to have claimed more than 30,000 lives – rivalled the atmospheric disturbance produced.

"Tonga was a truly global event, just as Krakatoa was, but we've now got all these geophysical observation systems and they recorded something that was really unprecedented in the modern data," Dr Robin Matoza, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, told BBC News.

While Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai's explosion, and subsequent ash cloud and tsunamis, were not nearly as catastrophic, its effects on those tens of thousands of kilometres away surprised even scientists.

The papers discuss at length a phenomenon called Lamb waves – essentially a form of a shock wave – named after the early 20th Century mathematician Horace Lamb.

They are energetic waves in the air that travel at the speed of sound and are able to maintain their shape along a path guided by the surface of the planet.

In this photo supplied by the Royal Australian Navy, a resident of Nomuka Island in Tonga clears debris on Feb. 26, 2022, following the Jan. 15 2022 eruption of the Hunga TongaHunga Ha'apai volcano and subsequent tsunami. Three months on from a devastating volcano and tsunami in Tonga, the AP checks in on how the island nation is recovering. The bill from the tsunami is estimated at some $90 million and GDP is expected to fall by more than 7% this year. The cleanup has been hindered by an intern

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Scientists found Lamb wave pulses produced by the Tonga eruption were seen to circle the Earth at least four times.

In Reading, England, more than 16,000km from Tonga, the pulses began arriving about 14 hours after Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai's eruption and immediately lifted the clouds.

"At the time, we had a laser cloud-base recorder looking at the cloud base and as the wave went through the cloud was perturbed," Professor Giles Harrison, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Reading and co-author on one of the papers, told the BBC.

"If ever you wanted evidence that the atmosphere is a remarkably interconnected thing, this was it. And what happens on one side of the planet can propagate around to the other side at the speed of sound."

Where the Lamb waves coupled with ocean waves after the eruption, they generated tsunamis – not just in Tonga and New Zealand and other parts of the Pacific Ocean, but in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea as well.

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The audible shockwaves that were heard around Aotearoa were also heard by people 10,000km away in Alaska.

A global network of detectors set up to monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty picked up the infrasound signal, which indicated the blast produced an atmospheric pressure wave comparable with the biggest ever nuclear explosion – the Tsar bomb detonated by the Soviets in 1961 – but lasted four times longer.

New research is still to come on the cause of the tsunamis that struck Tongan islands in the immediate aftermath. Seafloor examination will determine how much, if anything, a collapse of part of the volcano contributed to them.