Another 988 people were injured in the quake which hit the province of Lorestan near the border with Iraq with a force of 6.0 on the Richter scale, state news agency IRNA quoted the head of the province's medical university Qodratollah Shams Khoramabadi as saying.

"Forty-five have been killed in Borujerd area along with 900 people injured and the rest are from the Doroud area," he said.

But by morning Glenda had been downgraded to a category two with gusts of 150 kilometers per hour, the country's weather bureau said.

Emergency services officials said they had not yet been able to visit Onslow, a rural town of 800 which took the full brunt of the storm, to assess destruction there, but they had received no reports of serious damage. They did warn of the danger of severe flooding from torrential rains and a huge storm sea surge caused by Glenda.

The bureau of meteorology said Glenda was moving southwest back towards the Indian Ocean coast and could still do damage to banana crops in the region if its course shifted slightly westward.

Glenda was the second severe cyclone to hit Australia in two weeks after a maximum category five storm, Larry, slammed into the country's tropical northeast, causing extensive damage but no casualties.

There had been concern that Glenda would cause severe disruption to major iron ore, oil and gas mining and shipping operations centered in the Pilbara.

But the cyclone missed the key area of Karratha, the port and business hub of the region where several hundred people evacuated prior to the storm.

In the Czech Republic officials confirmed a five-year-old boy had been swept away near the town of Trebic two days earlier. Czech broadcaster CT1 added that a man had died of a heart attack as he tried to save belongings from his flooded house and that two people had drowned in their car near Terezin.

The situation was at its most serious in Moravia in the southeast of the Czech Republic, where the Vranov dam was overflown by the swollen Dyje river, a Danube tributary which was surging at 30 times its normal level.

Some 10,000 people in and around the town of Znojmo were evacuated on Wednesday evening because of the threat from the Dyje, which began to inundate buildings late on Thursday. Soldiers were drafted in to help with the flood preparations.

A emergency situation was declared late on Thursday by the governor of the South Bohemia region, where the ever-swelling Luznice river threatened the areas around two of the biggest towns, Tabor and Jindrich Hradec.

The levels of the Elbe, Danube, Morava and Vltava rivers, as well as other rivers crossing the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Austria and Hungary, have sparked flood alerts across the region.

However, fears of a flood disaster in eastern Germany faded after the environment minister of Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, said the situation was not potentially "catastrophic."

Nevertheless, officials said the Elbe river had reached worrying levels. In the city of Dresden, which was severely damaged by the 2002 floods, the level of the Elbe was reported three times higher than normal at 6.5 metres (21 feet). But this was still well short of the level reached four years ago.

Television news channels showed people standing up to their waists in water in towns along the river.

The Czech hydrological office warned on Thursday that the danger of severe flooding in the south of Moravia and around Zlin, as well as a dozen other sites across the country, would last until Saturday. Rain, predicted on Friday, threatened to worsen the flood risk, especially in the south and centre of the country.

The highest, level-three, flood alerts were declared at 78 locations in the Czech Republic on Thursday morning. That number fell to 44 by the end of the afternoon.

Flood protection barriers in the capital, Prague, were completed on Thursday morning. The city, where the catastrophic August 2002 floods are still fresh in many memories, remained on a level-two alert Thursday.

In Germany, a state of alert was announced in the eastern region of Saxony, after the Elbe reached a critical level, local authorities announced.

At Pirna, around 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the Czech frontier, people living near the river were evacuated as a preventive measure. At Bad Schandau, around 1,000 people already left their houses on Wednesday night.

In Bavaria, the area around Passau was on flood alert due to the high level of the Danube.

Flood alerts were announced for a number of rivers in Hungary. A section of the lower embankment of the Danube in Budapest was closed to traffic due to the high water level.

Alerts were also put into in effect in the south, west and parts of central Poland on Thursday but only local cases of flooding were reported.

Polish authorities in the Silesia region, in the south of the country, already declared a flood alert on Tuesday on fears that the river Oder would overflow its banks.

In Slovakia, the highest level flood alert was declared at many sites across the country, especially in the west where the Morava and Danube rivers continued to rise.

A spokesman for the fire service said that around 123 villages, 600 houses and around 2,000 hectares of agricultural land were flooded.

Storms also hit Romania where a teenager was reported missing on Thursday and around 50 houses and dozens of hectares (acres) of agricultural land were inundated at Bistrita-Nasaud in the north of the country and Mures in the centre of the country.

Temperature rise

Temperature rises on parts of the surface of Antarctica have been seen for some time. The western side of the Antarctic Peninsula is known to have the largest annual warming seen anywhere in the world with increases of over 2.5C in the last 50 years.

Until now, very little was known about air temperatures above the vast continent.

The new work uses meteorological data collected from weather balloons launched in the Antarctic winters between 1971 and 2003. The scientists collected information from nine international research stations, mostly in the east of the continent.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - It's widely accepted that a cosmic collision did in the dinosaurs. Now there's scientific suspicion that an extraterrestrial object, possibly a comet, is implicated in the demise of the large ice age mammals.