Heavy rains and lightning storms lashed parts of Sydney late Friday, with close to 60 millimetres (nearly two and a half inches) of rain falling in some areas.

In Sydney’s west, which experienced some flash flooding, one suburb saw nearly 42 millimetres fall in a short downpour lasting just 30 minutes.

“It was a slow-moving storm with that warm humid air moving along the coast… that allowed for that increase of moisture,” Byron Doyle from the New South Wales Bureau of meteorology told AFP.

Images of cars submerged in floodwaters on main roads, broken traffic lights and fallen trees circulated on social media.

Energy companies reported that more than 40,000 customers were affected by power outages at the peak of the storm overnight, with more than 5,000 still without power early Saturday.

Emergency services fielded over 1,000 requests for assistance, including nine flood rescues in the Sydney area.

The rescues were “all for vehicles in flood water,” a New South Wales state emergency services spokesperson told AFP.

Flights were delayed at Sydney’s airport, while the storm caused havoc on some of the city’s train lines.

The start of a national Australian rules football women’s match was delayed twice, pushed back 45 minutes as heavy rain and lightning pummelled the oval.

Several light towers then went out mid-match during the live television broadcast, temporarily stopping the game during a reported blackout.

The Sydney storm comes as recovery efforts continue in Australia’s flood-ravaged northeastern state of Queensland, which over the past week has seen record-breaking rainfall, forcing hundreds of evacuations and thousands of requests for help.

Extreme heatwaves during the southern hemisphere summer have also led to temperature records being broken in some towns.

Eastern inland areas have been experiencing a severe drought, while firefighters in the country’s southern states have been recently battling bushfires.

High temperatures are not unusual in the Australian summer, but climate change has pushed up land and sea temperatures and led to more extremely hot days and severe fire seasons, scientists say.

Those criticisms are similar to those expressed by others in the development community. But that does not mean they have found a new ally in David Malpass, the senior US Treasury official who has pledged to reform the bank.

Nancy Pelosi, the newly reinstalled Democratic speaker of the US House of Representatives, says Trump’s choice threatens to “undermine the institution’s mission.”

And Liberia’s former minister of public works W. Gyude Moore tweeted that “an incorrigible arsonist will now be our fire chief.”

Still Malpass’s many criticisms of the Washington-based lender echo familiar refrains.

Many activists have long called for reforms at the World Bank, citing a litany of alleged human rights failures and scandals, and saying projects all too often left the world’s poorest even worse off, harmed the environment or entrenched the power of oligarchies and despots.

Those critics might well have nodded their heads in accord in 2017 when Malpass said international financial institutions such as the World Bank “spend a lot of money” but are “not very efficient.”

“They are often corrupt in their lending practices and they don’t get the benefit to the actual people in the countries,” he said in congressional testimony.

However, when pressed for examples, he cited situations in Venezuela and South Africa, countries that do not have programs with the World Bank.

Internal audits and outside reports have tied World Bank funds to forced labor in Uzbekistan, death squads in Honduras and a Chadian oil pipeline that enriched the undemocratic local government all while child mortality rose, to name just a few examples.

So is Malpass a kindred spirit?

Analysts and activists say probably not.

David Pred, head of Inclusive Development International, which has accused the World Bank of back-door financing for coal-fired energy in Asia that is likely to spur global warming, questioned Trump’s choice.

“While some of Malpass’s past critiques of the World Bank may be valid, the former chief economist of a financial institution whose recklessness helped blow up the global economy in 2008 is one of the last people we can count on to make the bank more accountable,” he told AFP.

Malpass served as chief economist at the former investment bank Bear Stearns, whose collapse marked the start of the global financial crisis.

‘Fundamentally opposed’?

Malpass is not viewed simply as a critic.

Moore, the former Liberian minister, told AFP that Malpass’ opposition to lending to China could be incompatible with the bank’s business model.

Returns from those loans provide helps to fund for assistance to low-income countries, many of which are now concentrated in Africa, he said.

“He’s never put forth an alternative about how the bank is going to grow its reserves,” Moore said.

“To have a person who is fundamentally opposed to the way the bank does business raises questions for me and is alarming.”

The bank did not respond to Malpass’s criticism in 2017 but it touts the precipitous drop in extreme global poverty — which it says fell to 10 percent from 36 percent between 1990 and 2015 — as evidence of its success.

The global lender also routinely blacklists corrupt companies and says it scrutinizes projects for corruption risk.

Malpass told reporters last week that the bank had changed since his 2017 testimony.

“There were criticisms that I had that were addressed in the reform package” of 2018, he said, adding that he wanted to focus on the bank’s “core mission” of poverty eradication.

The bank’s board will accept nominations for through mid-March, but under an unwritten rule Washington has anointed World Bank’s president since its creation following World War II — a practice that faces mounting opposition.

Elana Berger, executive director of the Bank Information Center, which scrutinizes World Bank lending, also is dubious about Malpass, despite sharing some of his concerns.

“I agree that the World Bank frequently falls short of achieving its mission because its projects are very often not well targeted” towards the goal of poverty reduction, she told AFP.

But it was unclear whether Malpass shares the bank’s goals.

In accepting Trump’s nomination last week, Malpass hailed the bank’s new Saudi-supported Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, spearheaded by the president’s daughter and advisor Ivanka Trump.

Berger said that $1 billion fund represented “a drop in the bucket” compared to the billions the bank spends in a given year.

In a statement, the State Department said talks during Stephen Biegun’s three-day trip explored Trump and Kim’s “commitments of complete denuclearization, transforming US-DPRK relations and building a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula” in preparation for the much-anticipated summit in Vietnam on February 27 and 28.

Biegun landed at Osan US Air Base Friday evening, foreign ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-duk told AFP.

The State Department confirmed Biegun agreed to meet his North Korean counterpart Kim Hyok Chol again before the summit.

Biegun is expected to share details of his Pyongyang meetings with his South Korean counterpart Lee Do-hoon and Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha on Saturday.

Attention will focus on whether the US team have offered to lift some economic sanctions in return for Pyongyang taking concrete steps towards denuclearisation.

Discussions on declaring an end to the 1950-53 Korean War could also have been on the table, with Biegun last week saying Trump was “ready to end this war.”

The three-year conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas still technically at war, with the US keeping 28,500 troops in the South.

The US envoy was also likely to have discussed with his counterpart protocol and security matters for the upcoming Trump-Kim summit.

At their landmark summit in Singapore last year, the mercurial US and North Korean leaders produced a vaguely-worded document in which Kim pledged to work towards “the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”

But progress has since stalled, with the two sides disagreeing over what that means.

Experts say tangible progress on Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons will be needed for the second summit if it is to avoid being dismissed as “reality TV.”

The crash occurred during the after-work rush hour, near Castellgali some 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the Catalan capital, national rail company Renfe said in a statement.

The collision claimed the life of a 26-year-old driver and severely injured four passengers, while another 100 suffered minor injuries, the emergency services said on Twitter.

Sixty-five people were unharmed.

Renfe said an investigation was opened into the crash.

In November, one person died and 49 others were injured on the same line when a landslide caused a train to derail.