Australia news LIVE: H5N1 bird flu reaches Sydney with first confirmed case on city’s northern beaches; Two more Australians located in Nepal and Tibet as specialist drone operators sent to assist rescue efforts

Nepal will have to rebuild around 20,000 houses in flood-ravaged areas, authorities said overnight, as rescuers continued to search for workers trapped in tunnels linked to hydropower projects and thousands remain missing after last week’s catastrophe. A glacier collapse on August 26 sent a deluge of ice, rock and mud sweeping through the impoverished nation’s border region with China, and undamaged. “Our preliminary estimates are that 7,500 houses have been completely destroyed, either washed away or buried under debris and mud,” Dharma Raj Upreti, chief of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, told Reuters.

Even houses still standing were not habitable, Upreti said, with authorities estimating that around 20,000 would have to be rebuilt in different, safer locations. “We anticipate that the resources required for rebuilding will be substantial,” Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal told foreign ambassadors in Kathmandu. At least 1252 people were killed in Nepal last week as houses, streets and schools in towns and villages near the border with China’s Tibet were swept away.

More than 4200 people are still missing and thousands more displaced. Reuters