350 dead - I've been there and even in the slight rain the Favellas were very dodgy I thought; in serious danger of mudslides.

In Tunisia many are killed in riots.

But much of that is ignored in the Western Media which gives much more coverage to Australia.

Could there be a racial ingredient here? Do Editors consider whites more worthy of Brit attention than browns?

The coverage of the QLD floods here has been non-stop and dominated every front and basically milked by every media outlet to the nth degree.

I was really quite horrified to see the front page of a Murdoch tabloid here yesterday. The paper had the usual huge photos and 'heart-rending' tales of pensioners losing their sofas and bed-linen and other inane stuff...whilst in a little box at the top was an announcement that up to 500 people had died in the Brazil floods.

One TV piece was actually quite funny. It had the man who was PM nine months ago, Kevin Rudd wading through the water in his constituency and trying to persuade an old gent to leave his first floor flat.

He told him to 'bugger orf' as he had a six-pack of beer and was going to sit and watch the water rise.