A car plowed into pedestrians on a popular shopping strip in the heart of Australia's second-largest city on Friday, killing three people including a young child and injuring dozens more.

Australian leader Malcolm Turnbull took full responsibility Tuesday for a disastrous election campaign which has left his government in doubt, but said he would not resign.

Wild weather which smashed into Australia's east coast and whipped up giant waves on Sydney beaches has left at least three people dead and others missing, police said Monday as the clean-up began.

Ferocious storms pounded the coast over the weekend, causing flooding in New South Wales state. Huge seas eroded the shoreline, in one instance sweeping the in-ground swimming pool of a beachside home onto the beach.

Five young men face life behind bars after they were charged with terrorism offenses over a plan to sail to Indonesia to join jihadist groups in Syria, Australian police said.

The men, aged in their twenties and early thirties and whose passports had been canceled, included notorious Australian Islamic preacher Musa Cerantonio, who was detained in the Philippines in 2014 and deported for reportedly urging people to join jihad in Iraq and Syria, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Five men with cancelled passports were Wednesday accused of planning to sail to Indonesia from Australia en route to join jihadist groups in Syria.

The men included notorious Australian Islamic preacher Musa Cerantonio, who was detained in the Philippines in 2014 and deported for reportedly urging people to join jihad in Iraq and Syria, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said.

Australia's most wanted Islamic State terror suspect, linked to several attacks on home soil, has been killed in a U.S. air strike in Iraq, Canberra said on Thursday, warning others will be targeted.

The death of Neil Prakash is considered significant by Australian and U.S. authorities because of his highly prominent and influential role as a senior recruiter for the jihadist group.

The last asylum-seeker children in Australian mainland detention have been freed, the government said Sunday, although dozens of others are still being held on the remote Pacific island of Nauru.

Under Canberra's harsh immigration policy, asylum-seekers who try to reach Australia by boat are turned back or sent to Pacific camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea where they are held indefinitely while their refugee applications are processed.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Wednesday that Europe had "allowed security to slip", as he questioned the EU's Schengen passport-free zone in the wake of the Brussels attacks.

Turnbull's comments came as Belgium's neighbors France, Germany and the Netherlands tightened border security after some 35 people were killed in Belgium's worst extremist assault.

The rate at which suspected jihadists are being blocked from departing Australia has doubled in the past year, a report said Sunday, amid a government crackdown of its nationals traveling to Iraq or Syria to fight.

There were 312 people pulled off planes in the seven months to the end of January, compared to 336 in the almost 12-month period before that, Sydney's Sun-Herald newspaper reported.

Two people have died and more than a hundred homes have been destroyed in a huge bushfire, Australian authorities said Sunday, as firefighters battled to tame the out-of-control blaze.

The inferno -- which has razed about 71,000 hectares (175,000 acres) in Western Australia state -- is the most recent in a series of bushfires that have kicked off a hot summer season, with the latest deaths lifting the national toll to eight.