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Tuesday's news in under 5 minutes.

We’ve rounded up all the latest stories from Australia and around the world – so you don’t have to go searching.

1. Three dead as the East Coast of Australia mops up after the weekend’s storms.

The East Coast low that destroyed beachfront homes and left chaos across Sydney and its suburbs has claimed the lives of three people and there are fears for the lives of five more.

Two bodies were found in cars caught in floods in Cotter River near Canberra and in Mittagong Creek near Bowral.

Robbie Pollard, 65,  (pictured above) died after his car became trapped in rising floodwaters in Bowral, in the NSW highlands.

Police say Mr Pollard was found dead inside his Mazda sedan, which is believed to have flipped in the floodwaters that then dragged the car 1km into the Mittagong Creek.

The body of another man was found in a ute at Leppington, near Camden in Sydney’s southwest.

Five people remain missing – one at Bondi Beach and four in separate locations in Tasmania.

Search and rescue efforts will resume at first light on Tuesday.

At Collaroy on the northern beaches of Sydney up to 10-15m of waterfront land was washed away.

Seven homes on the beachfront of Collaroy were last night hit again by a monster king tide including an entire block of flats

Dr Mitchell Harley, a senior research associate at the University of New South Wales told Fairfax Media last night that seven homes were “gone” as some houses are starting to break up.

“It’s eroded a further five or so metres and there’s a very huge concern that these houses won’t survive the night. They’re very much teetering on the edge.

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“There’s large cracks being heard as the buildings are starting to break away..”

2. Turnbull: Yes I am a feminist.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has declared himself a feminist and talked about his difficult childhood while he spent the day with female students yesterday.

“I am a feminist, yes,” Mr Turnbull said twice on Monday afternoon, saying his father ingrained in him a deep respect for women and he believes they are “taking the world by storm”.

“Girls can do anything and in particular they can do engineering,” he told a Melbourne event celebrating women in science, technology, engineering and manufacturing.

“And you’ve seen so many impressive, talented women who are engineers.”

His foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Minister for Women Michaelia Cash have both previously refused to say they are feminists.

In 2014 Senator Cash said she had “never been someone who really associates with that movement” and “set of ideologies”. While Ms Bishop said she didn’t find the term feminist “particularly useful these days.”

3. No charges against mother of boy in gorilla exhibit.

A prosecutor has announced overnight that he isn’t seeking charges against the mother of a three-year-old boy who got into the Cincinnati Zoo’s gorilla exhibit, resulting in the shooting of an endangered gorilla to protect him.

Prosecutor Joe Deters said the child’s mother, Michelle Gregg, 32, had three other children with her, and she was attending to them when the 3-year-old “just scampered off” on May 28.

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“None of the witnesses interviewed described the [boy’s] mother as anything but attentive to her children,” he said. “Our information is that the mother turned away for a few seconds to attend to another one of her young children and that is when the 3-year-old was able to climb into the gorilla enclosure. Any parent who is honest with himself or herself would have to understand how this could happen to even the most attentive parent.”

“I am very sorry about the loss of this gorilla, but nothing about this situation rises to the level of a criminal charge,” Deters said.

The Cincinnati police had investigated the family’s actions.

Members of the boy’s family said in a statement they were “very pleased with this decision. This is one more step in allowing us to put this tragic episode behind us and return to our normal family life. We extend thanks to all of those who have been praying for us and who have supported us through this trying ordeal.”

The zoo plans to reopen its Gorilla World on Tuesday with a higher, reinforced barrier.

4. Forbes’ most powerful women in the world in 2016 announced.

Forbes has released its annual list of the most powerful women in the world.

The annual list was topped by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for the sixth successive year. Merkel was placed ahead of the US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, who had “a clear shot at No 1 if she wins the nation’s vote”, the list’s compilers said.

The 2016 list had a celebrity cull, with Taylor Swift, Angelina Jolie and Ellen Degeneres gone replaced instead by political contenders like British SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.

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Federica Mogherini, foreign policy chief of the EU, climbs the most places this year. Oprah, however, is the biggest faller in the top 30, dropping from 12th to 21st place.

Gina Rinehart is the sole Australian making the list. She has been named the world’s 51st most powerful woman by the magazine.

5. Gang rape brothers face extra charges.

The three brothers accused of abducting and gang raping a teenage girl in Geelong on November 1 last year face new charges.

Allan Wild, 30, Kevin Wild, 29, and Brodie Wild, 21 have had two extra charges each laid against them.

The three are accused of abducting the 14-year-old girl from a reserve in the Geelong suburb of St Albans Park and then raping her at a nearby home.

The new charges against Kevin Wild are both sex offences, the court heard, but it was unclear what the new charges against his brothers are reports The Age.

The Wild brothers are accused of approaching the girl in a park, where she had been with a male friend. The brothers are accused of taking the girl to the home of a relative of theirs and sexually assaulting her.

6. “Disastrous and calamitous” school camp leads to legal action.

A school camp for a group of private school girls from Melbourne was so disastrous that the deputy principal was pressured to resign and she is now seeking up to $250,000 in damages and other costs.

The camp or girls from St Catherine’s in Toorak took place in Fiji from March 25 to April 10. 30 girls attended.

The Age reports that the half the students came down with a “virulent strain of conjunctivitis”, some were hospitalised with gastro, a cyclone hit the area where the group was staying and the backpacker style accommodation led to the girls being leered at by drunken backpackers.

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These events rendered the camp “disastrous and calamitous” and traumatised some students and staff members, Rosemary Ward, the deputy principal has claimed.

Ms Ward alleges that she was accused of “four failures” which included incorrectly addressing an email, attending the wrong address for a parent evening and her conduct as the emergency contact for the Fiji camp reports The Age.

She was asked to consider resigning.

Law firm Maurice Blackburn is alleging that the private school breached protections under the Fair Work Act.

Clare Cannon, the chair of St Catherine’s school council, said Ms Ward was not asked to resign but that the school did not comment on matters before court.

7. Couple tried to sell baby for $1000.

A man and a woman in the US have been arrested for allegedly trying to sell the woman’s three-month-old baby for up to $US1000.

25-year-old Ashley Harmon and 20-year-old Jonathan Isaac Flint from West Virginia were arrested last week and are facing charges of selling or attempting to sell a child and child neglect.

Police believe Harmon and her fiancé were going to use the money to buy drugs.

Fayette County Sheriff Steve Kessler said the case was shocking.

“Law enforcement officers frequently deal with some pretty strange situations,” he said. “A situation like this is really out of the ordinary, though.”

Flint and Harmon are accused of offering to sell the baby to a neighbour.

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The neighbour told WSAZ she didn’t want the baby, who appeared sick. She said they then left the baby with her to go to the shops and never came back.

She said she eventually called 911 because the baby would not stop crying and was shaking. She said an EMS worker who showed up told her the infant may be suffering from drug withdrawal.

8. One of Britain’s worst paedophiles jailed.

Paedophile Richard Huckle has been given 22 life sentences to serve a minimum term of 25 years – for abusing up to 200 Malaysian children

The 30-year-old had previously pleaded guilty to 71 sexual offences on young children, mainly in Malaysia but also in Cambodia from 2006 to 2014.

Twenty-three children were identified in 71 charges, although Huckle’s tally of abuse on a so-called “Pedopoints ledger” was much higher.

Judge Peter Rook QC told Huckle his “self-delusion knows no bounds” and a 60-page paedophile manual he had written was a “truly evil document”.

“You were and are sexually obsessed with children. You have spent years abusing them. In one of your postings you stated that you had become consumed by your paedophilia.”

The youngest of Huckle’s victims was just six-months-old, while the oldest was only 12-years-old.

The freelance photographer had masqueraded as a devout Christian and English teacher to gain access to up to 200 children in Kuala Lumpur.

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