He said the second earthquake, of 5.4 magnitude, struck at 5:16 a.m. It was centered about 21 miles below the sea and 80 miles southwest of Bengkulu city on the southern Sumatra Island.

A 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra on Dec. 26, 2004, triggering a massive tsunami that left 216,000 people dead or missing in 12 countries around the Indian Ocean - three-quarters of them in nearby Aceh province.

"There is a very small possibility of a destructive local tsunami in the Indian Ocean,'' the Japanese agency said today in an e-mailed statement. It gave no further details.

Nias was one of the areas worst affected by the Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and subsequent tsunami that destroyed coastal communities across the Indian Ocean and killed more than 200,000 people from Indonesia to Somalia.

The temblor struck at a depth of 1.9 kilometers, the USGS said. The epicenter was 269 kilometers (167 miles) southwest of Sibolga, on Sumatra, and 431 km south-southwest of Medan on the same island, the USGS said.

No tsunami threat exists in the Pacific, as a result of the quake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said in a separate e- mailed bulletin.

An Indian Ocean tsunami warning network is due to be operational by July. Countries around the ocean are installing monitoring equipment, buoys and communication links that will be known as the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake hit at 10:39 p.m. (6:39 a.m. EDT) about 90 miles below the seabed, and was centered about 180 miles south-southwest of Raoul Island in the Kermadec island chain, which is 712 miles northeast of New Zealand's largest city, Auckland.

It came hours before countries around the Pacific rim were to test a tsunami warning system spanning the world's largest ocean.

The powerful quake, which New Zealand seismologists said registered at magnitude 7.5, rocked a wide area of the country _ but was unlikely to have caused damage, seismologist Ken Gledhill told The Associated Press.

"It has been felt very widely but is unlikely to have caused any damage in New Zealand," he said, adding that within half an hour more than 500 people had reported the quake's impact.

"It was too deep to have ruptured the sea floor," Gledhill said, adding a tsunami was unlikely "if that depth is correct."

A policeman in the east coast North Island town of Whakatane said he was sitting on a chair talking to the police communications center in the northern city of Auckland when it struck.

"Things started moving and I thought, 'this is a goodie,'" said Sgt. Andrew O'Reilly.

Wellington police inspector Peter Stokes said there were no immediate reports of injury or damage.

"We sure did feel it. Our building swayed a bit," he said.

Raoul Island was the center of a series of earthquakes during a volcanic eruption in March that killed a New Zealand Department of Conservation worker and forced the evacuation of the island.

Several conservation workers returned to the island last month to perform tasks like eradicating weeds, monitoring birds and preventing the arrival of unwanted pests such as rats.

There was no immediate word on whether they were affected by the quake.

The quake was felt as far south as Christchurch on South Island.

New Zealand is among more than two dozen countries taking part in the drill to test the Pacific warning system that has been in place since 1965.

During the exercise early Wednesday, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii will send out warnings about mock earthquakes off the Chilean coast and Luzon island in the northern Philippines that are powerful enough to set off a tsunami across the vast ocean.

Governments will test if and how fast they receive the warnings and how rapidly they are relayed through domestic emergency alert systems.

Emergency crews steered boats along streets to help evacuate people, while National Guard soldiers set up checkpoints to block off roads. About 200,000 sand bags were used to hold back overflowing rivers across Massachusetts.

About 12 to 15 inches of rain has fallen since Friday, swelling the Merrimack River that runs through southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) above flood stage -- its highest since 1936.

"It's bad now but we're expecting it to get much much worse," said Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency spokesman Peter Judge, citing weather forecasts for more rain on Monday night with several rivers still rising.

"Right now we're looking at all of the rivers, from the Charles River in the Boston area all the way north and east to the Merrimack River on the New Hampshire border. We expect all of those rivers to reach and exceed flood stage in the next 24 hours," Judge said.

THOUSANDS EVACUATED

Several thousand New Hampshire residents had been evacuated from homes and more than 600 roads in the state had been closed, the New Hampshire Bureau of Emergency Management said.

A bulging dam in Milton, New Hampshire on the Maine border was in danger of failing and could send a 10-foot (3-m) wall of water downstream, the National Weather Service said.

About a thousand people were evacuated from their homes in the Massachusetts' suburbs of Melrose, Haverhill, Lawrence and Peabody, where flooding caused sewage to back up into cellars and sinks, rescue workers said

"Early in the season the Texas Gulf Coast faces the highest likelihood of a hurricane strike, possibly putting Gulf energy production in the line of fire," he said. "As early as July, and through much of the rest of the season, the highest level of risk shifts to the Carolinas."

At the tail-end of the season, the Northeast and southern Florida will be most at risk from storms, he said.

This year features fewer named storms than last year's record of 28, but will still be a season of above-average storm frequency, AccuWeather said in the press release.

Last year, there were eight tropical storm landfalls in the U.S., including two separate strikes by Katrina as the storm crossed the Florida peninsula and then plowed into the central Gulf Coast in late August. Four of these were major hurricanes - with winds over 110 mph: Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

Hurricane Katrina was the costliest storm on record, causing more than $80 billion in damage.

"Of course, we don't know whether this means volcanic activity is dying down or whether it's building toward a major eruption."

Scientists believe it's almost inevitable that the volcano's lava dome will collapse, causing a dangerous surge of gas and steam to pour out.

16,000 forced from homes so far

So far, about 16,000 Indonesians have fled the area.

However, efforts to move everyone from the vicinity of the 3,000-metre volcano are being hampered by the presence of an 80-year-old mystic who watches over Merapi.

The man, called Maridjan, makes offerings of rice and fruit to the spirits many Indonesians believe inhabit the sacred volcano.

"He says he's waiting for a vision from them [spirits] to say whether or not the eruption is going to happen," Meo said.

In the absence of such a vision, Maridjan says it's safe to continue living and working near the mountain.

President urges neighbours to flee

That flies in the face of advice from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who visited the area Monday to urge people to obey the warnings of emergency officials.

"I have learned a lot from past disasters including the [December 2004] tsunami, and from that I can draw that if we conduct very good preparations ... there will be a lot that we can save," Yudhoyono said, according to the Associated Press.

Seventy people died in Merapi's last eruption, in 1994. A much more deadly blast in 1930 claimed 1,300 lives.

The volcano is located about 450 kilometres east of Jakarta on the Indonesian island of Java.

She said a Warwick farmer alerted police about 6.30pm (AEST) of what he thought was a "fire ball" from a plane crashing on his property.

A search of the area found nothing.

Police were then inundated by sightings of a "green ball of light".

Andre Claydon of the Springbrook Observatory near the Gold Coast said he had received scores of sightings of what he thought was a meteor shower from across the region.

He said the meteor shower would have appeared much closer than it actually was.

"As it comes in through our atmosphere we get a magnification effect so it always looks a lot closer but it is probably 60 to 70km inside our atmosphere," he said on ABC Radio.

"I had a number of phone calls specifically from the eastern part of Australia regarding a meteor shower that has come through and broken up into a few pieces."

The Astronomical Association of Queensland's Peter Hall told ABC Radio: "It sounds like a meteor to me.

"Most of them are the size of a grain of sand but this one must have been larger."

"Poor people will take the brunt, so we are calling on rich countries to help them adjust as the seas rise, the deserts expand, and floods and hurricanes become more frequent and intense."

The author of the report, John McGhie, said that for $50bn (£26bn) the whole of sub-Saharan Africa could be turned into a solar-generated economy.

"And $50bn is exactly the same amount as actually the continent would have to pay on extra fuel bills from oil," he said.

Kyoto Protocol

The report argues that economic growth can be stimulated through localised renewable energy.

However, critics argue developing countries should be left to concentrate on economic growth in whichever way they see fit.

Although scientists are divided on the impact of global warming, recent calculations suggest global temperatures could rise by three degrees by 2100.

Christian Aid says effects such as increased floods and droughts and a growth in areas infested by malaria-carrying mosquitoes could cause a huge rise in deaths.

The Kyoto Protocol on cutting carbon dioxide emissions, believed to be the key cause of global warming, expires in 2012 and does not require major developing nations to make reductions. In addition, the US has rejected it.

Christian Aid said developed nations must cut carbon dioxide emissions by two-thirds by 2050.

At the two-day dialogue on climate change in Bonn, developing nations are expected to urge richer countries to take a greater lead.

The poorer countries say the richer ones are mainly responsible for the situation today.

The Kyoto Protocol's supporter nations are supposed to reduce emissions by an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

The Bonn meeting is a precursor to talks from 17-25 May that will begin discussions on how to extend Kyoto to beyond 2012. Those talks could take several years.