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The storm system, which has unleashed floods from north of Brisbane in Queensland state to Sydney over 900 kilometers south in New South Wales and beyond, is the result of a slow but very wet swing down the coast by the remains of Tropical Cyclone Oswald that began last week. The system has dumped record amounts of rain in many areas, isolating dozens of communities and snarling traffic both in the air and on land.

The floods continue a period of bizarre and destructive weather in Australia, which has been in the grips of a four-month heat wave that shattered records and ignited bush fires large enough to be seen from outer space.

But now, talk has turned from the punishing heat to the sheets of rain and wind that battered the coast up through the early hours of Tuesday. Winds approaching 100 kilometers per hour hit Sydney, where they churned up huge swells at its famed Bondi beach and drenched the city center. The storm has shattered rainfall records in parts of New South Wales, the Bureau of Meteorology said, although the highest rainfall was recorded about 780 kilometers north of Brisbane, where 1,360 millimeters fell in the three days through Sunday morning.

The city of Bundaberg, which is located about 470 kilometers north of Brisbane, has been particularly hit hard. More than 7,000 residents have been displaced by the rising floodwaters there and at least 1,000 evacuees had to be airlifted from their homes by military helicopter on Monday and Tuesday morning as the streets churned with water.

The floods come two years after flooding in 2011 left at least 38 people dead and caused some $30 billion of damage across the state.

Queensland's premier, Campbell Newman, on Tuesday visited the stricken city, where he warned that the floodwaters were threatening to carry away entire buildings.

"Listen to the roar of the water - that's not helicopters," he said during a televised press conference in the city. "You see a lot of locations where there's literally rapids, white water out there."

"Those velocities are what we're concerned about in terms of taking buildings away," he added.

The situation was little better in northern New South Wales, where the State Emergency Services estimated some 23,000 people had been isolated by the floodwaters. The state government ordered 2,100 people to evacuate from the regional hub of Grafton, near the border with Queensland, as that city suffered its worst-ever floods.

All four deaths connected with the storm have been in Queensland, where a three-year-old boy became the latest victim after he was hit by a falling tree in Brisbane on Monday. The others included a motorcyclist whose body was pulled from a creek south of Brisbane and an 81-year-old man whose body was found near Bundaberg.

Meanwhile, Virgin Australia, the country's second largest commercial airline after national carrier Qantas, announced on Tuesday that it was canceling dozens of flights across the region, including its services between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne — the three largest cities in the country.

The worst of the winds and rain had passed by Tuesday morning, officials said, and Sydney's skies had turned blue by mid-afternoon, suggesting that any respite from the blistering heat in both states would be short lived.

Decades of state budget cuts have chipped away at California's community colleges, California State University and the University of California, once the state's brightest beacons of pride. But now Pat Brown's son, Gov. Jerry Brown, seems determined to restore some of the luster to the institution that remains a key part of his father's legacy.

Last year, he told voters that a tax increase was the only way to avoid more years of drastic cuts. Now, with the tax increase approved and universities anticipating more money from the state for the first time in years, the second Governor Brown is a man eager to take an active role in shaping the University of California and California State University systems.

Governor Brown holds a position on the board of trustees for both Cal State and UC. Since November, he has attended every meeting of both boards, asking about everything from dormitories to private donations and federal student loans. He is twisting arms on issues he has long held dear, like slashing executive pay and increasing teaching requirements for professors — ideas that have long been met with considerable resistance from academia. But Mr. Brown, himself a graduate of University of California, Berkeley, has never been a man to shrink from a debate.

"The language we use when talking about the university must be honest and clear," he said in a recent interview. "Words like 'quality' have no apparent meaning that is obvious. These are internally defined to meet institutional needs rather than societal objectives."

California's public colleges — so central to the state's identity that their independence is enshrined in its Constitution — have long been seen as gateways to the middle class. Mr. Brown said his mother had attended the schools "basically free." Over the last five years tuition at UC and Cal State schools has shot up, though the colleges remain some of the less costly in the country.

Governors and legislatures are trying to exert more influence on state colleges, often trying to prod the schools to save money, matters that some say are "arguably best left to the academic institution," said John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow of public policy and higher education at Berkeley. So far, Mr. Brown has not taken such an aggressive approach, but half of the $250 million increase for the university systems is contingent on a tuition freeze.

"He's creating stability, but basically he's looking at cost containment with an eye on the public constituency," Mr. Douglass said. "But the system has been through a very long period of disinvestment, and this may meet an immediate political need, but it is not what is going to help in the long term."

Over all, the University of California receives 44 percent less from the state than it did in 1990, accounting for inflation. The governor's proposed increase still leaves the schools with about $625 million less than they received in 2007. At the same time, a record number of students applied for admissions to the system's 10 campuses for next fall. While the California State University system has capped freshman enrollment, administrators at the UC system, which has about 190,000 undergraduate students, have been reluctant to formally do so, in part to prevent limiting access to in-state students.

Spurred by grumbling from voters, legislators have repeatedly complained that too many out-of-state students are enrolling in the University of California, arguing that they take spots away from talented local students. But others argue that without the out-of-state students, who make up less than 9 percent of undergraduates and pay much more in tuition, the university would have to make even deeper cuts.

Timothy White, the newly appointed chancellor for California State University and the former chancellor at UC Riverside, said the systems were facing a fundamental dilemma over access.

"Our budget is not going to allow us to grow enrollment at all, so I'm concerned that we are going to disappoint a lot of people in a lot of communities," he said.

So far, the governor has focused his attention on whether the universities should be offering more courses online, requiring faculty to teach more classes and cutting administrators' pay.

His plea that faculty members, particularly at the University of California, teach more undergraduate classes has been met with resistance, with one trustee fretting that doing so would "turn this place into a junior college in about 15 years." Faculty members say that requiring more teaching would take away from crucial research areas, which will bring in roughly $5 billion this year.

"You can talk abstractly about faculty teaching more, but that begs the question of what you give up by requiring them to teach more," said Daniel Dooley, the senior vice president for external relations for the University of California. Mr. Dooley, who worked in Mr. Brown's first administration in the 1970s, has had several conversations with the governor about the state colleges.

Even before he began attending the board of trustee meetings, Mr. Brown repeatedly criticized high salaries for university administrators, arguing that they should serve as "public servants" and be willing to accept smaller paychecks. During his last term he famously remarked that professors derived "psychic income" from their jobs. When the University of California board of trustees voted to approve the new chancellor at Berkeley, in November, Mr. Brown voted in favor of his appointment, but voted against his $486,000 salary.

Some see the governor's new focus as a sign that there could be major improvements afoot, but others are less optimistic.

"The old days of the social compact with the state is gone," Mr. Douglass said. "It seems clear that it will not come back."

The complex drugs, made in living cells instead of chemical factories, account for roughly one-quarter of the nation's $320 billion in spending on drugs, according to IMS Health. And that percentage is growing. They include some of the world's best-selling drugs, like the rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis drugs Humira and Enbrel and the cancer treatments Herceptin, Avastin and Rituxan. The drugs now cost patients — or their insurers — tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Two companies, Amgen and Genentech, are proposing bills that would restrict the ability of pharmacists to substitute generic versions of biological drugs for brand name products.

Bills have been introduced in at least eight states since the new legislative sessions began this month. Others are pending.

The Virginia House of Delegates already passed one such bill last week, by a 91-to-6 vote.

The companies and other proponents say such measures are needed to protect patient safety because the generic versions of biological drugs are not identical to the originals. For that reason, they are usually called biosimilars rather than generics.

Generic drug companies and insurers are taking their own steps to oppose or amend the state bills, which they characterize as pre-emptive moves to deter the use of biosimilars, even before any get to market.

"All of these things are put in there for a chilling effect on these biosimilars," said Brynna M. Clark, director of state affairs for the Generic Pharmaceutical Association. The limits, she said, "don't sound too onerous but undermine confidence in these drugs and are burdensome."

Genentech, which is owned by Roche, makes Rituxan, Herceptin and Avastin, the best-selling cancer drugs in the world Amgen makes Enbrel, the anemia drugs Epogen and Aranesp, and the drugs Neupogen and Neulasta for protecting chemotherapy patients from infections. All have billions of dollars in annual sales and, with the possible exception of Enbrel, are expected to lose patent protection in the next several years.

The trench fighting at the state level is the latest phase in a battle over the rules for adding competition to the biotechnology drug market as called for in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

A related battle on the federal level is whether biosimilars will have the same generic name as the brand name product. If they did not, pharmacists could not substitute the biosimilar for the original, even if states allowed it.

Biosimilars are unlikely to be available in the United States for at least two more years, though they have been on the market in Europe for several years. And the regulatory uncertainty appears to be diminishing enthusiasm among some companies for developing such drugs.

"We're still dealing with chaos," said Craig A. Wheeler, the chief executive of Momenta Pharmaceuticals, which is developing biosimilars. "This is a pathway that neither industry nor the F.D.A. knows how to use."

Biotech drugs, known in the industry as biologics, are much more complex than pills like Lipitor or Prozac.

That makes it extremely difficult to tell if a copy of a biological drug is identical to the original. Even slight changes in the cells that make the proteins can change the drug's properties.

The 1984 law governing generics does not cover biologicals, which barely existed then. That is why it was addressed in the 2010 law.

One reason generic pills are so inexpensive is that state laws generally allow pharmacists to substitute a generic for a brand-name drug unless the doctor explicitly asks them not to. That means generic drug manufacturers need not spend money on sales and marketing.

The bills being proposed in state legislatures would expand state substitution laws to include biosimilars. So Amgen and Genentech say the bills support the development of biosimilars.

That is because, while the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens clearly earned their way to the Super Bowl, questions have been raised about whether the top referee this season will be joining them.

The league is expected to announce this week that Jerome Boger, an N.F.L. referee for seven years, will lead the crew of officials here Sunday. Historically, that means Boger scored the highest among referees during the standard postgame evaluations — a notion that some observers and, privately, several other on-field officials find hard to comprehend.

"What's happening right now is that the best officials are not working the best games," said Jim Daopoulos, who worked 11 years as an on-field official and 12 years as a supervisor of officials before becoming an officiating analyst for NBC. Daopoulos added that he believed that the grading of some officials, including Boger, was altered because the league had a predetermined assignment in mind.

"I'm looking at the seven guys who are working in the Super Bowl, and to be quite honest, several of them should not be on the field," Daopoulos said.

Michael Signora, a spokesman for the N.F.L., disputed that, writing in an e-mail, "There is no merit to the suggestion that Jerome Boger's grades were treated differently from those of any other official."

Signora added, "Claims to the contrary are both inaccurate and unfair."

Still, some elements of the appointment seem strange. Ben Austro, the founder of FootballZebras.com, a Web site that focuses on news and analysis of officials in the N.F.L., first reported the Boger assignment several weeks ago. Austro said in an interview Monday that he was immediately struck by something unusual about the choice, noting that every official is graded by league observers following each game worked, with every call made being deemed correct or incorrect.

This season, according to Austro, there were approximately eight instances in which Boger was initially given what officials call a ding, or markdown, for a particular call, only to have those negative grades later overturned. In other words, Austro said, if Boger earned the best grades among referees this season, he did so with the help of significant after-the-fact revisions from those doing the grading.

Although it is not clear which grades were changed, Boger did have some unusual moments this season, most notably a sequence in Week 16 when he announced a penalty against Carolina quarterback Cam Newton for "bumping" him while protesting the officiating but did not eject Newton, as the rules require. Boger later said that he misspoke and that the penalty against Newton was only for "disrespectfully addressing" an official.

According to Daopoulos, the standard procedure is for one of several league supervisors to first review a game on his own. The supervisors then get together as a group to go over the downgrades detected, and generally, Daopoulos said, "the majority or consensus rules" when it comes to overturning a downgrade.

This season, however, Daopoulos — and several officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly — said Carl Johnson, the league's vice president for officiating, unilaterally overturned a number of Boger's downgrades.

Neither Johnson nor Ray Anderson, the league's executive vice president for football operations, were made available for comment. But Signora, the spokesman, said, "No downgrade is removed unless there is a consensus among the supervisors and the head of the department."

Regardless, while appealing a grade is not unusual — 14 of 18 referees did so successfully this season, according to Signora — the fact that Boger had eight reversals is odd, according to Gerry Austin, who officiated in three Super Bowls from 1982 to 2008 and is now an ESPN contributor.

"Based on my past experience, if you could get two downgrades changed in the course of the year, you've done real well," Austin said.

"What we need to do is put them on a bus," said Ken Sowell, 63, a lawyer from Greenville, as he ate lunch recently at the diner. "We need to enforce the border. If they want to apply legally more power to them. I don't think just because a bunch of people violate the law, we ought to change the law for them."

Six years ago, the intensity of that kind of sentiment was enough to scuttle immigration overhaul efforts led by President George W. Bush and a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans.

Now, as a new bipartisan group of eight senators, including Mr. Graham and Mr. McCain, try again — this time with President Obama as their partner in the White House — members of Congress will have to overcome deep-seated resistance like that expressed in the restaurant if they are to push legislation forward.

Republicans are betting that opposition from Tea Party activists and the party's most conservative supporters will have less impact because of the dire electoral consequences of continuing to take a hard line regarding immigrants. The senators on Monday released a blueprint for a new immigration policy that opens the door to possible citizenship ahead of a Tuesday speech on the subject by Mr. Obama in Las Vegas.

There is some evidence that the politics of immigration may be changing. Sean Hannity, the conservative host at Fox News, said days after the 2012 presidential election that he has "evolved" on immigration and now supports a comprehensive approach that could "get rid of" the issue for Republicans. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising star in the Republican Party, is pushing his own version of broad immigration changes — and getting praise from conservative icons like Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed.

But the Republican-controlled House remains a big hurdle. Speaker John A. Boehner on Monday was noncommittal about the emerging proposal, with a spokesman saying that Mr. Boehner "welcomes the work of leaders like Senator Rubio on this issue, and is looking forward to learning more about the proposal."

Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said that "when you legalize those who are in the country illegally, it costs taxpayers millions of dollars, costs American workers thousands of jobs and encourages more illegal immigration."

And if the lunch rush conversation at Tommy's is any indication, many Republican lawmakers will soon return home to find their constituents just as opposed to the idea as they were before. Concern about immigration varies regionally. But in many Congressional districts around the country, the prospect of intense opposition carries with it the threat of a primary challenger if Republican lawmakers stray too far from hawkish orthodoxy on the issue.

"The people who are coming across the border — as far as I'm concerned, they are common criminals," said Bill Storey, 68, a retired civil engineer from Greenville. "We should not adopt policies to reward them for coming into this country illegally. I have all the regard for them in the world if they come through the legal system, but not the illegal system."

Charlie Newton, a construction worker in the Greenville area, praised the work ethic of Hispanic co-workers, but said he opposes any laws that would provide benefits to illegal immigrants, including help becoming citizens.

"I think we need to help our own people before we keep helping somebody else," he said.

The president's proposals are expected to include more border enforcement, work site verification systems that allow employers to check the status of their employees online, and a road map to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants now living in the country. Democratic senators could begin work on a bill in the next couple of weeks.

In the Fourth Congressional District in South Carolina, which includes Greenville, the formal arrival of such a plan is likely to anger the constituents of Trey Gowdy, a Republican House member who was elected in the 2010 Tea Party wave and is now the chairman of a key subcommittee that will deal with immigration.

Mr. Gowdy has already taken a hard line, signing on last year to the "Prohibiting Backdoor Amnesty Act," which aimed to reverse Mr. Obama's plans to delay deportations for some young illegal immigrants. The congressman will be under pressure to change his mind from the White House and its allies, including groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But when he goes home to Greenville, Mr. Gowdy may find that his constituents want him to hold firm in his opposition.

The group hopes to have legislation drafted by March, and a vote before the August recess. Speaker John A. Boehner, whose support will be crucial for shepherding any bill through the Republican-controlled House, did not comment on the principles, but his office offered a brief statement.

"The speaker welcomes the work of leaders like Senator Rubio on this issue," referring to Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican. The speaker "is looking forward to learning more about the proposal in the coming days," said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner.

Five of the group's eight senators — Charles E. Schumer of New York, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, all Democrats, and Mr. Rubin and a fellow Republican, John McCain of Arizona — made the announcement. Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans, and Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, a Democrat, were not present but are part of the group.

The eight senators, Mr. Schumer said, "have come together on a set of bipartisan principles for comprehensive immigration reform legislation that we hope can pass the Senate in overwhelming and bipartisan fashion."

"We still have a long way to go, but this bipartisan movement is a major breakthrough," he said.

The group described four main pillars: border enforcement, employer enforcement, the handling of the flow of legal immigration (including temporary agricultural workers and high-skilled engineers) and a pathway to citizenship for those who entered the nation illegally. Mr. McCain called the pathway to citizenship the "most controversial piece of immigration reform," saying that the current situation amounts to "de facto amnesty" and that the illegal immigrants deserve a chance to live legally in the country and ultimately become citizens.

"We have been too content for too long to allow individuals to mow our lawn, serve our food, clean our homes and even watch our children, while not affording them any of the benefits that make our country so great," he said. "I think everyone agrees that it's not beneficial to our country to have these people hidden in the shadows."

Mr. Schumer said that he and Mr. Durbin spoke Sunday evening with President Obama, who plans to deliver his own speech on immigration Tuesday in Nevada, and that "he couldn't be more pleased." Mr. Menendez met with the president Friday as part of a meeting that the White House held with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Democratic and Republican senators alike had feared that any White House proposal could undercut their efforts by frightening away Republican lawmakers skittish about backing Mr. Obama's plan. When it became clear last week that the president planned to detail his own immigration blueprint on Tuesday, they rushed to make their announcement ahead of him. When asked if the senators' proposal was undercutting the president, Mr. McCain replied that he thought their principles helped Mr. Obama.