SYDNEY (Reuters) -- Already-flooded towns across Australia’s east were on high alert on Monday after a weekend of heavy rains, with authorities warning a wild weather system could persist until later this week and trigger renewed riverbank bursts. Thousands of homes and farms over a wide swathe of New South Wales and Victoria, Australia’s two most populous states, have been inundated and five people in the country have lost their lives as the year’s fourth flooding crisis in the east enters its third week. About 200 flood warnings remained in place in both states as of Monday morning, with 132 of those in New South Wales. Many agricultural regions have been severely impacted, including Moree where the local river peaked near historic flooding levels. “The damage is horrific and extensive,” Moree Mayor Mark Johnson told ABC television. “There will be some farmers who will get some crops but there will be a lot ... who won’t get anything this year.”

***
BUCHAREST (Reuters) -- Romanian Defense Minister Vasile Dincu resigned on Monday, saying he could not collaborate with the country’s president, amid pressure weeks after he said Ukraine’s only chance to end the war was to negotiate with Russia. European Union and NATO state Romania shares a 650-kilometre (400 mile) border with Ukraine, is host to a U.S. ballistic missile defense system and, as of this year, has had a permanent alliance battlegroup stationed on its territory. Some 2.65 million Ukrainians have fled to Europe through Romania in the eight months since the war started. “My gesture (resignation) comes as it is impossible to cooperate with the Romanian president, the army’s commander-in-chief,” Dincu said in a statement. “I think my withdrawal from the post is necessary so as to not harm decisions and programs which require fluid command chains and to not block a series of projects which are absolutely necessary for ... the ministry and the army.”

***
BRASÍLIA (AFP) -- A former Brazilian congressman with ties to President Jair Bolsonaro shot and threw grenades at police officers, injuring two, in a failed attempt to prevent his arrest, authorities said Sunday. Bolsonaro immediately condemned the armed attack by Roberto Jefferson and distanced himself from the former legislator, calling him a “bandit”. The Federal Supreme Court (STF) had ordered Jefferson to be taken back into custody after he broke the terms of his house arrest by issuing online attacks against Supreme Court Justice Carmen Lucia, calling her a “witch” and a “prostitute.” Jefferson barricaded himself in his home, located in Levy Gasaparian in Rio de Janeiro state, for eight hours. He said in a video posted on social media that he had fired a gun, but that he did not intend to injure the officers.

***
DHAKA (AFP) -- Bangladesh authorities were evacuating hundreds of thousands of people Monday from the path of a cyclone heading for the densely populated, low-lying country. About 33,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, controversially relocated from mainland camps to a storm-prone island in the Bay of Bengal, were also advised to remain indoors. Scientists say climate change is likely making cyclones more intense and frequent, and Bangladesh is already rated by the UN and civil society groups as one of the countries most affected by extreme weather events since the turn of the century. Cyclone Sitrang, packing gusts of 88 kilometers (55 miles) per hour, was forecast to make landfall near the southern Bangladeshi town of Khepupara by Tuesday morning, the weather office said. Most worrying for authorities was the predicted storm surge of up to three meters (eight feet) above normal tide levels, which could inundate areas home to millions of people.

***
PARIS (Reuters) -- A group of victims of sexual abuse says the Catholic church is reacting too slowly to a report revealing assaults by French clergy on more than 200,000 children, urging President Emmanuel Macron to raise the issue directly with Pope Francis on Monday. Macron was meeting the pontiff in the Vatican a year after a 2,500 page report by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse detailed how the church repeatedly silenced victims and failed to discipline the clergy involved. Ahead of Macron’s visit to the Vatican, the president’s office said the subject had been addressed with the pope in the past, and that it was not likely to be brought up on Monday. “It’s about protecting the most vulnerable, especially children,” Olivier Savignac, a former abuse victim and co-founder of the Parler et Revivre association (Talk and Live Again) told Reuters. The church had shown “deep, total and even cruel indifference for years,” protecting itself rather than the victims of systemic abuse, Jean-Marc Sauve, head of the independent commission that compiled the report, said at the time of publication. The French conference of bishops (CEF) described the report as a “bombshell”. Its head said the church had been shamed, asked for forgiveness and promised to act.