The men fell from the amusement feature about 2am during one of its final rides.

North Queensland remains on alert as a deadly weather system continues to lash the region, causing dangerous flooding.

Heavy rain continues to batter the north-east tropical coast, where a severe weather warning remains in place today.

Coastal areas between Townsville and Bowen are expected to be lashed with 100 to 200mm rain today, with higher totals possible on the coastal fringe, all the way up to Cairns.

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The downpour could trigger further flash flooding, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, where waterways are already swollen as a result of heavy rainfall in recent days.

"We are still seeing heavy rain across northern Queensland," Bureau of Meteorology meteorologist Jonathan How said. 

"We're reminding Queenslanders that even though the rain is starting to ease from later today and into tomorrow, these heavy showers could still bring flash flooding and still cause river rises."

The deluge is expected to ease in the afternoon before picking back up this evening along the coast between Rollingstone and Ayr.

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Flood warnings are also current for the Mulgrave, Russell, Tully, Murray, Cloncurry and Georgina catchments.

Water levels along the Leichhardt River peaked near 16.25 metres at Lorraine on Tuesday, causing major flooding.

The main flood peak is now approaching Floraville, where river levels are expected to continue rising in the coming days. 

Moderate flooding is likely at Normanton, in the state's north-west, where river levels at Glenore Weir are just above 12 metres and slowly rising.

The body of a man in his 70s was found in a car submerged in floodwaters in Normanton on December 30.

Thankfully, a weather warning for heavy rain across the north-west of the state, including the Northern Goldfields, Upper Flinders, North West and Central West districts, has been cancelled after conditions eased.

Residents in Winton and Corfield could be hit by severe thunderstorms in the coming hours.

Record rainfalls across North Tropical Coast

Rainfall topped a metre at three locations on Queensland's North Tropical coast yesterday.

Bingil Bay was hit with a deluge of 1114.2mm over the last four days, while South Mission Beach and Cowley beach each received nearly 1050mm in the same period.

By comparison, Brisbane's annual rainfall is just over a metre, according to WeatherZone.

Parts of Queensland's North Tropical Coast could see a further 400 to 800mm by the start of next week, which could potentially take totals from this event close to two metres of rainfall.

Record-breaking rain also fell inland in Queensland's Gulf Country, North West, and Northern Goldfields and Upper Flinders forecast districts

Major flooding is expected to continue along many waterways in the north, including the Herbert, Bohle, Flinders, Nicholson, Leichhardt, Norman, Gilbert, Western and Diamantina Rivers.

Premier David Crisafulli announced disaster relief for the affected areas earlier this week.

People are urged to stay up to date on the BoM website and the Queensland government's disaster website.

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NZ will have an annual duty-free quota of 206,000 tonnes, rising to 214,000 tonnes.

800 driver breath tests were done at a Hawke’s Bay checkpoint and no-one failed.

A teenager has been charged after a firecracker was launched into Perth bushland during New Year's Eve celebrations, sparking a dangerous blaze that is threatening lives and homes and cut off power to thousands.

Police allege a 19-year-old man threw a firecracker into dry grass in bushland on Temby Avenue, KalamUnda, in the Perth Hills about 25km east of the CBD, about 12.20am.

The firecracker sparked a bushfire almost immediately, which quickly intensified.

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A waterbombing helicopter and multiple fire crews were called to try to extinguish the inferno, but it continue to burn into the morning.

An emergency warning was triggered just before 8.30am, urging residents in Maida Vale, Forrestfield and Kalamunda to leave immediately as the blaze spread across 25 hectares of land.

Residents were warned that their lives and properties were in danger.

The warning was downgraded to a Watch and Act just before 12.30pm.

Fire activity has decreased, but it still poses a danger to lives and homes in certain areas due to changing conditions, DFES warned.

Residents in parts of Maida Vale, Kalamunda, Forrestfield and Lesmurdie are urged to stay alert and monitor their surroundings for changing conditions.

That includes people in the area bound by Norwood Road, Taylor Road, Colac Place, Bird Road, Alpine Road, Wandoo Road, Holmes Road, Lewis Road and Anderson Road.

Locals bound by Hawtin Road, Norwood Road, Welshpool Road East, Lesmurdie Road, Kalamunda Road and Canning Road should also be vigilant.

Doors and windows should be closed to keep smoke out and residents should look out for spot fires on their properties.

Residents in parts of Forrestfield and Maida Vale, namely those bound by the Roe Highway, Quenington Court, Hawtin Road and Hartfield Road are no longer threatened by the fire.

The bushfire is currently moving slowly in a westerly direction. It is contained but not controlled.

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An evacuation centre has been set up at the High Wycombe Community and Recreation Centre, 200 Newburn Road, High Wycombe.

A community meeting will be held there at 1pm today.

Several roads in the area have been closed, including Temby Road, Holmes Road at Wandoo Road, Norwood Road at Holmes Road and Hawkin Road at Maud Road.

More than 2000 homes lost power overnight as a result of the blaze.

Power was restored to almost all impacted properties by 9am, according to Western Power.

The 19-year-old man, from Kalamunda has been charged with a breach of duty (of care).

He is expected to appear before Perth Magistrates Court today.

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Crowds packed Auckland’s CBD and waterfront as 3500 fireworks lit up the sky.

Betty Boop and "Blondie" are joining Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh in the public domain.

The first appearances of the classic cartoon and comic characters are among the pieces of intellectual property whose 95-year US copyright maximum has been reached, putting them in the public domain on January 1.

That means creators can use and repurpose them without permission or payment.

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The 2026 batch of newly public artistic creations doesn't quite have the sparkle of the recent first entries into the public domain of Mickey or Winnie. But ever since 2019 – the end of a 20-year IP drought brought on by congressional copyright extensions – every annual crop has been a bounty for advocates of more work belonging to the public.

"It's a big year," said Jennifer Jenkins, law professor and director of Duke's Centre for the Study of the Public Domain, for whom New Year's Day is celebrated as Public Domain Day.

"It's just the sheer familiarity of all this culture."

Jenkins said that, collectively, this year's work shows "the fragility that was between the two wars and the depths of the Great Depression."

Here's a closer look at what will enter the public domain on Thursday, based on the research of Jenkins and her center.

Cartoons and comics bring the boop-a-doop

Betty Boop began as a dog. Seriously.

When she first appears in the 1930 short "Dizzy Dishes," one of four of her cartoons entering the public domain, she's already totally recognizable as the Jazz Age flapper later memorialised in countless tattoos, T-shirts and bumper stickers.

She has her baby face, short hair with groomed curls, flashy eyelashes and miniature mouth. But she's also got dangling poodle ears and a tiny black nose. Those would soon morph into dangling earrings and a tiny white nose.

She started as essentially the Minnie Mouse to a popular anthropomorphic dog named Bimbo, whom she would eventually outshine – and push aside. She's got a supporting role in "Dizzy Dishes," performing a slinky song-and-dance in a tiny black dress. She's not named, but sings "boop boop, a doop."

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Jenkins suggests this canine Betty Boop could be rich for exploitation in new works, and has a free idea: "She was bitten by a radioactive dog, that's why she had this weird backstory," she said with a laugh. "This movie needs to be made."

The character was designed and owned by Fleischer Studios, and the shorts were released by Paramount Pictures. She was based at least in part on singer Helen Kane, known as the "Boop-Oop-a-Doop Girl," thanks to a hit 1929 song.

Kane would lose a lawsuit over Betty Boop's character and use of the phrase. During the proceedings the defence alleged Black singer Esther Lee Jones used similar phrases first.

Artists are now free to use this earliest Boop in films and similar work. But making merch won't be free. In an important distinction often raised by Disney over Mickey Mouse, a character's trademark is distinct from the copyright of works that feature them. The Fleischer Productions trademark of Betty Boop remains intact.

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Boops and doops were apparently in the air in 1930. Blondie Boopadoop was, like Betty, a young flapper, and the central character of Chic Young's newspaper comic strip that debuted in 1930. It inspired a film series and radio show, and is still running today in papers that still have comics.

The strip followed her carefree breeze through life with her boyfriend, Dagwood Bumstead. The two would marry (and she would change her name) in 1933, and the strip would become the sandwich-heavy domestic comedy familiar to later readers. Though the strip was meant to be based on a woman's life, Dagwood would in many ways become its breakout star – a proto-Adam Driver, if you will, as the breakout actor from "Girls."

Nine new Mickey Mouse cartoons also are becoming public domain, two years after "Steamboat Willie" made the first version of him public property. He's joined this year by his dog Pluto, who, in 1930, was known as Rover. (He would get his long-term moniker the following year.)

Books bring big detective debuts

The books entering the public domain this year open the door to three iconic detectives from the 20th century:

• The teen sleuth Nancy Drew, whose first four books came in 1930, starting with "The Secret of the Old Clock." They were written by Mildred Benson under the pen name Carolyn Keene.
• The middle-aged(-ish) sleuth Sam Spade, who debuted via the full-book version of Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon." (It had been serialized in a magazine the previous year.)
• The elderly sleuth Miss Marple, who solves her first mystery in Agatha Christie's "Murder at the Vicarage."
• A year after his "The Sound and the Fury" became public, William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" becomes public domain. It would help lead to his Nobel Prize in literature.
• And kiddie lit legends Dick and Jane, who taught generations to read and became essential parody fodder for decades, become public via the "Elson Basic Readers" textbooks.

Films include Marxes, Marlene and Oscar winners

A year after their film debut, "The Cocoanuts," entered the public domain, the Marx Brothers' beloved "Animal Crackers" joins it, as they entered their prime of high cinematic antics.

The film finds Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo invading a Long Island society party celebrating an explorer of Africa.

Other movies entering the public domain include:

• "The Blue Angel," the German film from Josef von Sternberg that emblazoned Marlene Dietrich's top-hatted image into film lore.
• "King of Jazz," featuring the first screen appearance of Bing Crosby.
• A pair of Oscar best picture winners, "All Quiet on the Western Front," which won in 1930, and "Cimarron," which won in 1931. The award was known as "Outstanding Production" then, and the Academy Awards eligibility period didn't sync with the calendar year.

The coming decade will bring a true bounty of Hollywood Golden Age films into the public domain. 2027 will be a truly monster year, literally, with the original 1931 Universal Pictures versions of "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" among the titles due.

Dreamy and embraceable tunes ring in the 1930s

As in the last several years, a whistle-worthy stream of tunes from the Great American Songbook will become public:

• Four cherished classics written by George Gershwin, with lyrics by his brother Ira: "Embraceable You," "I've Got a Crush on You," "But Not for Me" and "I Got Rhythm."
• "Georgia on My Mind," written by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell.
• "Dream a Little Dream of Me," written by Gus Kahn, Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt.

Different laws regulate the actual recordings of songs, and those newly in the public domain this week date to 1925.

They include Rodgers and Hart's "Manhattan" by the Knickerbockers, "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" by Marian Anderson and "The St Louis Blues" by Bessie Smith, featuring Louis Armstrong.

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The January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol "does not happen" without Donald Trump, former special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers earlier this month in characterising the Republican president as the "most culpable and most responsible person" in the criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee released on a transcript and video of a closed-door interview Smith gave about two investigations of Trump.

The document shows how Smith during the course of a day-long deposition repeatedly defended the basis for pursuing indictments against Trump and vigorously rejected Republican suggestions that his investigations were politically motivated.

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"The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit," Smith said, bristling at a question about whether his investigations were meant to prevent Trump from reclaiming the presidency in 2024.

"So in terms of why we would pursue a case against him, I entirely disagree with any characterisation that our work was in any way meant to hamper him in the presidential election," he added.

The December 17 deposition was conducted privately despite Smith's request to testify publicly. The release of the transcript and video of the interview, so far Smith's only appearance on Capitol Hill since leaving his special counsel position last January, adds to the public understanding of the decision-making behind two of the most consequential Justice Department investigations in recent history.

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Trump was indicted on charges of conspiring to undo the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, and of willfully retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Both cases were abandoned after Trump's 2024 election win, with Smith citing Justice Department policy against the indictment of a sitting president.

Smith repeatedly made clear his belief that the evidence gathered against Trump was strong enough to sustain a conviction. Part of the strength of the January 6 case, Smith said, was the extent to which it relied on the testimony of Trump allies and supporters who cooperated with the investigation.

"We had an elector in Pennsylvania who is a former congressman, who was going to be an elector for President Trump, who said that what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal," Smith said.

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"Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party."

Accounts from Republicans willing to stand up against the falsehood that the election had been stolen "even though it could mean trouble for them" created what Smith described as the "most powerful" evidence against Trump.

When it came to the Capitol riot itself, Smith said, the evidence showed that Trump "caused it and that he exploited it and that it was foreseeable to him."

Asked whether there was evidence that Trump had instructed supporters to riot at the Capitol, Smith said that Trump in the weeks leading to the insurrection got "people to believe fraud claims that weren't true."

"He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware in the days leading up to January 6 that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol," Smith said.

"Now, once they were at the Capitol and once the attack on the Capitol happened, he refused to stop it. He instead issued a tweet that without question in my mind endangered the life of his own vice president," he added.

"And when the violence was going on, he had to be pushed repeatedly by his staff members to do anything to quell it."

Some of the deposition focused on Republican anger at revelations that the Smith team had obtained, and analysed, phone records of GOP lawmakers who were in contact with Trump on January 6. Smith defended the maneuver as lawful and by-the-book, and suggested that outrage over the tactic should be directed at Trump and not his team of prosecutors.

"Well, I think who should be accountable for this is Donald Trump. These records are people, in the case of the senators, Donald Trump directed his co-conspirators to call these people to further delay the proceedings. He chose to do that," Smith said.

"If Donald Trump had chosen to call a number of Democratic senators, we would have gotten toll records for Democratic senators."

The communications between Trump and Republican supporters in Congress were an important component of the case, Smith said. He cited an interview his office did with Mark Meadows in which Trump's former chief of staff referenced that Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and current chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had been in touch with the White House on the afternoon of the riot.

"And what I recall was Meadows stating that 'I've never seen Jim Jordan scared of anything,' and the fact that we were in this different situation now where people were scared really made it clear that what was going on at the Capitol could not be mistaken for anything other than what it was," Smith said.

Smith was also asked whether his team evaluated former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson's explosive claim that Trump that grabbed at the steering wheel of the presidential SUV when the Secret Service refused to let him go to the Capitol after a rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021.

Smith told lawmakers that investigators interviewed the officer who was in the car, "who said that President Trump was very angry and wanted to go to the Capitol," but the officer's version of events "was not the same as what Cassidy Hutchinson said she heard from somebody secondhand."

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Three teenage girls have been charged after a 12-year-old girl was stabbed in Adelaide yesterday evening.

Just before 7pm, police were called to the Salisbury bus interchange.

They found the 12-year-old girl with a single stab wound to her abdomen.

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Her alleged attackers had fled on a train.

The girl was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Three teenage girls were arrested just after 7pm at the Mawson Lakes interchange.

Two 15-year-old girls and a 14-year-old girl from Craigmore were charged with affray and aggravated assault.

The girl who police alleged stabbed the 12-year-old was further charged with assault causing harm.

All three were refused bail and will appear in court in coming days.

Police claimed all parties involved were known to one another.

Any witnesses are urged to contact Crime Stoppers online or on 1800 333 000.

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Two men are in hospital with serious injuries after they were attacked with machetes in Melbourne overnight.

Emergency services were called to Lygon Street in Carlton at about 11.45pm.

It's believed a group of about seven men, armed with knives and machetes, attacked two men outside a restaurant.

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The group then fled in cars.

A 20-year-old Heidelberg West man and an 18-year-old NSW man were seriously injured and taken to hospital.

Police are investigating the possibility the attack was targeted.

Any witnesses or anybody with footage or information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or online.

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