The quake, which also hit Bogor and Tangerang, south of Jakarta, and felt in Bandung, capital of West Java province, caused tall buildings to sway and many citizens to run out of houses, witnesses said.

The quake was centered 40 kilometers beneath the Sunda straits, said Budi Waluyo, an official at Indonesia's meteorological office.

It struck 190 kilometers southwest of Jakarta, he said.

Destruction of natural habitats and the effects of climate change are causing species to die out at 100 to 1,000 times faster than the natural rate, leading some scientists to warn we are facing the next mass extinction.

Nearly one-quarter of the world's mammals, one-third of amphibians and more than one-tenth of bird species are threatened with extinction. Climate change alone is expected to force a further 15%- 37% of species to the brink of extinction within the next 50 years.

Writing in the journal Nature today, the experts from 13 nations urge for the new body, the international mechanism of scientific expertise on biodiversity (Imoseb), to be set up to force better biodiversity policies around the world.

"We are on the verge of a major biodiversity crisis. Virtually all aspects of diversity are in steep decline and a large number of populations and species are likely to become extinct this century. Despite this evidence, biodiversity is still consistently undervalued and given inadequate weight in both private and public decisions," the authors say.

The new body will be modelled loosely on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collection of the world's top climate scientists that is convened to assess the latest research on climate change and its potential implications. Because the IPCC is funded by governments, it carries sufficient clout to influence international and regional policy.

Dr Watson, a former chairman of the IPCC, said the Imoseb may face a tougher task than the IPCC because biodiversity is often more complex than climate change. An 18-month consultation is under way to agree how the body will accumulate scientific evidence, identify causes of damage and recommend ways to limit or reverse them.

In May, the World Conservation Union said the number of known threatened species stood at 16,119. Polar bears, desert gazelles and sharks were all added to the list of species facing extinction. Melting ice caps, hunting and over-fishing were identified as the culprits.

"Whether it's forests, marine systems, grasslands, you name it, they are in disrepair," said Dr Watson. "For the sake of the planet, the biodiversity science community has to create a way to get organised, to coordinate its work across disciplines, and together with one clear voice advise governments on steps to halt the potentially catastrophic loss of species already occurring."

In danger

- Great white shark populations have decreased by up to 95% in the past 50 years

- Polar bears are expected to suffer a population decline of 30% in the next 45 years

- Unregulated hunting and habitat degradation in the Sahara desert have caused an 80% drop in the dama gazelle population

- A quarter of freshwater fish in Africa is threatened by human activity

The power outages will present a challenge to utility crews trying to get the power back on in temperatures expected to exceed 100 degrees today.

Until Wednesday, the two biggest storms to hit the area in the last few years were in July 2004, when about 225,000 lost power, and in August 2005, which affected about 250,000. It took AmerenUE crews four days to restore power to all customers in 2004 and five days in 2005.

The storm brewed quickly in central Illinois and swept southwest toward the St. Louis area shortly after 7 p.m. Meteorologists said the storm was unusual, not because of its path, but because a powerful "gust front" preceded the rain and thunder, causing damage from St. Charles County in the west to Madison County in the east, but hitting St. Louis and St. Louis County hardest.

Skies darkened with blowing dust, shingles flew from roofs, and windows were shattered, all before a drop of rain fell. Blowing dust and debris and then torrents of rain limited visibility on roads.

Westbound lanes of Highway 370 were shut down at the Discovery Bridge across the Missouri River because of at least two overturned tractor-trailers, according to the Missouri Highway Patrol. In downtown St. Louis, part of the Switzer building near the Eads Bridge collapsed onto the bridge, trapping a driver - eight months pregnant - in her car for some time.

Near Lambert Field, strong winds ripped off part of the terminal roof and dumped it across several lanes of Interstate 70. Power was out to all but the East Terminal. The airport was open to some flights but with heavy delays.

Drivers heading east on I-70 near the airport could see camper shells strewn across the highway, twisted sheet metal wrapped around light posts and at least one burning building east of the airport.

The eastbound lanes of Interstate 270 near the Chain of Rocks Bridge were closed as emergency crews responded to three tractor-trailers that had flipped over, authorities said.

St. Mary's Health Center in Richmond Heights and Forest Park Hospital in St. Louis were operating on backup power systems Wednesday night.

In St. Louis

Windows in the old Dillards building at 7th Street and Washington Avenue in St. Louis were shattered, covering the streets with a layer of glass. At the Millennium Hotel, a window at Top of the River, the revolving restaurant at the top of the building, was blown out while guests dined.

No one was seriously injured, said Mark Diaz, the hotel's assistant general manager - "just minor, minor cuts."

Winds also shattered a skylight in the south tower, Diaz said. "We are just going to board everything up and get the repair crews out here tomorrow," he said.

At America's Center, bus driver Gaylon Parker, 60, stood huddled at a corner outdoors, watching the storm rip up part of the center's sign.

"This thing was fantastic," he said. "I never saw anything like it my life ... The buses were blowing back and forth."

Parker said he stayed outside during most of the storm to be "adventurous."

"We did finally go inside," he said.

At the Missouri Botanical Garden, hundreds of people who had been attending the Whitaker Music Festival free concert were moved to shelters at the Schoenfeld Auditorium. Damage from shattered glass was reported to the Linnean House, one of the nation's oldest continuously operating greenhouse conservatories. Trees were reported down at the Garden and in neighborhoods around it.

In parts of south St. Louis, trees and limbs almost covered the pavement for whole blocks south of Meramec Street. South of Interstate 55 and in the area around Carondelet Park, motorists had to weave around limbs and thick mats of branches.

Witnesses reported a driver trapped inside a car at Morganford and Arsenal streets. A building collapse at Sidney Street and Lemp Avenue injured two people inside. An empty building near Natural Bridge and Harris avenues also collapsed.

St. Louis officials urged residents to stay within their homes if possible as crews worked to clean up streets. Residents may report downed lines by calling 314-231-1212.

In St. Louis County

In Bellefontaine Neighbors, 100-year-old trees were thrown down, said resident Stephanie Russell, an employee at St. Louis University.

"We had to use four-wheel-drive low just to get up the street," Russell said. "It was everything from water to debris to branches 5 feet to 20 feet long."

Russell said she eventually got to her driveway, but a fallen branch blocked her progress and then another fell behind her car.

"We can't get in or out," she said as neighbors worked to remove branches from the road. "... I've never seen anything like it."

Power went out during the Bridgeton City Council meeting, but the council continued its deliberations. By 8:30, the storm had left the North County area.

In north St. Louis County, the storm caused a gas leak in the 10000 block of Lord Drive. Authorities were evacuating the block, according to St. Louis County police.

Chairmaine Manse and Anna Hollins, customers at the St. Louis Bread Co. at Manchester and Interstate 270 were taken by surprise by the storm.

"It came up as a strong wind, knocking over umbrellas and tables," said Hollins, who lives in Normandy. "It got dark and all hell broke loose . . . I'm willing to go, but I'm not willing to chance it."

In Ladue, Elfriede Olney said at least two oak trees - one about 3 feet in diameter and one more than 50 feet tall - fell in her front yard.

"It's a total disaster area in the front," Olney said. "The driveways are blocked. I've never seen anything like this."

The Dierbergs store in Warson Woods stayed open by generator power and was doing a brisk business in batteries and ice.

In University City, William Conner, was outside late Wednesday night cleaning tree branches and other debris from his driveway. Storms have knocked out power in neighborhood at least a dozen times this year, he said.

"Here we go again," he said. "I hope I don't have to spend another night in the dark."

Kathleen Jensen, a dispatcher for Creve Coeur police, left her home in St. Clair in Franklin County about 8:45 p.m. to drive into St. Louis County to work. Trees were down and lights were out the entire way, but she was especially impressed with the number of road signs that were knocked over.

"We're talkin' the big, huge, green signs that are at the sides of the roads," she said.

In Normandy, neighbors were avoiding downed wires as they worked to clear roads and yards of debris.

The Hazelwood City Council met Wednesday night even though most of the city - including city hall - was without electricity.

"We have a power-point presentation, but no power," Mayor T.R. Carr quipped at one point. Members of the Hazelwood Police Explorer Post who had been meeting at city hall when the storm hit helped get a portable generator working in the council chamber so the meeting could go on.

In other areas

In St. Charles County, tree limbs were down, power was out and the River City Rascals baseball game was canceled.

In Metro East, there were widespread power outages in Fairview Heights. In Glen Carbon, the storm hit quickly about 7 p.m. and moved on without major damage.

In Arnold, Tom and Tana Harris of the 2800 block of Fannie Drive were home with their sons, Levi and Larry, and Larry's girlfriend, Angela Clark, when a tree crashed through the ceiling and the house collapsed. Levi, 5, was trapped.

"The beams fell on him and all I could see were his little feet," his mother said.

Levi was soon rescued and Angela Clark was taken to a hospital with a broken ankle.

In De Soto, the storm caused the collapse of the Spiedel Muffler building.

Shedding some light

At Mike Duffy's Pub & Grill in Kirkwood, manager Marty Smith said the patrons remained calm when the storm hit. But then a concrete street lamp came crashing down onto the driver's side of a red Dodge Caravan parked on West Jefferson.

Smith went from table to table seeking the owner of the car.

"As I approached her, she said, 'I have a red Caravan. Are my lights on?'" Smith recalled. "I said, 'There's a light - on it.'"

He said not all the spots were necessarily still burning as many would have been extinguished already.

Riau province on Sumatra island had the highest number of hot spots with 359, he told AFP.

As many as 1,560 local firefighters were battling the fires armed with backpack water pumps, shovels and rakes, said Haryanto Wahyu Sukotyo, another forestry minister official.

He said most appeared to have been started to clear land in commercial timber or palm oil plantations.

"Most are in plantations, mostly it is palm oil, but we don't know for sure because we haven't investigated. But it is probably for land clearing," said Sukotyo.

Five provinces in Thailand, including the holiday isle of Phuket, have been hit by haze from the fires as has neighbouring Malaysia.

Air quality in the Thai province of Songkhla, 950 kilometers (600 miles) south of Bangkok, fell to potentially hazardous levels Tuesday morning, when visibility was reduced to two kilometers in the province.

In Malaysia parts of the northern resort island of Penang, and Perak, Selangor and Kedah states were suffering poor visibility Wednesday from smoke particles being blown from Sumatra.

On Tuesday air quality in parts of Malaysia, including the major shipping centre of Port Klang west of the capital, plunged to unhealthy levels.

In May Indonesia's agriculture minister pledged to enforce a 2004 law. It imposes a maximum 10-year jail term and 10 billion rupiah (1.1 million dollars) in fines on plantations that defy regulations against using fire to clear land.

Haze caused by burning in Indonesia and some parts of Malaysia to make way for crops causes an annual haze that afflicts countries in the region including Singapore and Thailand.

The worst-ever bout in 1997 and 1998 cost the region an estimated 9.0 billion dollars in damage by disrupting air travel and other business.

Local test results from the two sisters, who are 3 and 4 years old, are expected to be returned Thursday, before which time no firm diagnosis can be made. Once the local test results have been returned, however, they must be confirmed by an official World Health Organization laboratory before an official statement regarding new human cases can be made.

The girls were initially sent to Ta Pan Hin District Hospital after developing flu-like symptoms, including respiratory difficulties above those associated with seasonal influenza, shortly after a number of local birds died of unknown causes. They were then moved to Phichit Provincial Hospital for additional care, where they have been placed under quarantine and their symptoms monitored for signs of deterioration.

--

Also in Thailand, health authorities across the country are preparing themselves for a possible resurgence in avian-influenza infections as a result of the imminent monsoon season.

The health authorities have placed three provinces -- western Suphan Buri and Kanchanaburi, and Nakhon Pathom, near Bangkok -- on special alert, as all have suffered outbreaks within the past two years. The northern provinces of Uttaradit, Sukhothai, Phitsanulok and Phichit have also been designated as worthy of special monitoring.

It has been more than six months since Thailand saw a human death from avian influenza, and prior to the current suspected infections in Phichit it was believed the Southeast Asian country's bird-flu surveillance program was one of the most effective in the region.

--

Azerbaijan is bracing itself for a fall resurgence in avian-influenza outbreaks, ever mindful of its position on the migratory flight paths that many believe place it at greater risk of increased poultry infections.

Having earlier seen human cases of H5N1 infection and a number of deaths from the disease, the country, with the assistance of the WHO, is increasing its efforts to stem the spread of the virus by better educating its healthcare workers.

The WHO office in Azerbaijan is preparing a range of recommendations for better health and hygiene practices designed to stem the spread of many communicable diseases -- with a particular view to avian influenza -- which will be distributed, free of charge, to healthcare workers across the country.

Hungarian poultry farmers have been pressing the government to compensate them for birds lost in the battle to halt the spread of avian influenza, which first arrived in the country in early June, affecting farms near Kiskunmajsa in the southern part of the country.

Around 100 farmers gathered in front of the Agriculture Ministry Tuesday demanding increased compensation more in line with their losses, bbj.hu news agency reported on its Web site.

Agriculture Minister József Gráf was presented with a petition by Magosz, the Hungarian farmers' association, requesting that he authorize an official assessment of the impact -- financial and otherwise -- of avian influenza on the Hungarian poultry industry. Once an assessment is complete, Magosz claims, the government will be in a better position to support what bbj.hu called the "ailing poultry industry."

Following the initial bird-flu outbreak approximately 500,000 local birds were culled to prevent the spread of the disease, a necessary measure that nonetheless dealt a sharp blow to the region's poultry farmers.

Compensation offered by the government and matched by the European Union is unlikely to exceed a fraction of the lost income.

--

Following the official WHO confirmation of another avian-influenza fatality, the bird-flu death toll in Indonesia has now reached 42.

The most recent death to be confirmed following official testing in a WHO laboratory was that of a 3-year-old girl.

The World Health Organization has now confirmed 132 deaths from avian influenza worldwide since the H5N1 strain of the virus re-emerged and began to affect humans in 2003.

More than 35,000 mainly elderly people died across Europe in 2003, including about 15,000 in France, as a result of dehydration and heat stroke.

In recent days, at least nine people have died from heat-related deaths in France. Germany, the Netherlands and Spain have reported two deaths each.

Parisians got welcome relief from the suffocating heat on Thursday as the city opened its annual artifical beach along the banks of the capital's Seine river.

The four-week-long Paris Plage initiative was extended this year with the creation of another beach on the Left Bank and a second swimming pool where residents and tourists could escape the summer heat.

Britain also sweltered with temperatures rivalling many of Europe's traditional summer hotspots such as Rome or Athens.

The thermometer hit 36.3 C just south of London on Wednesday, the hottest July day since 1911 when records began. The all-time record of 38.5 C, set in August 2003, still stands.

Meteorologists in Britain estimated that temperatures had peaked for the week but many counties, particularly in the south, were still expected to swelter in over 30 C. The average temperature in Britain in July is 22 C.

Denmark also recorded exceptionally high temperatures with beaches and parks packed by residents seeking cool water or shade.

The heatwave has been a boon for many Danish businesses as ice-cream sales have shot up 21 percent, sunglasses by 50 percent and entries to children's swimming pools have increased 25 percent.

But the heat has also brought drought.

Several Polish deputies on Thursday held mass in the parliamentary chapel to pray for rain.

Fires have flared across Europe as baked earth and scorched vegetation have created ideal conditions to fan flames far and wide.

In Portugal, 700 firefighters are battling at least nine separate forest fires across the country in temperatures reaching 41 C.

More than 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of agricultural land was destroyed by blazes in France on Wednesday alone.

In central and northern Croatia, more than 250 hectares of forest and woodland have gone up in smoke over the last two days, local television stations reported.

The head of a French research laboratory said the unusually high temperatures were linked to global warming.

"The rules are changing, there's no doubt about it. This is the start of a process. We can expect heatwaves to be more frequent and more extreme as a result of the general rise in temperatures linked to greenhouse gas emissions," said Herve Le Treut, director of the National Centre for Scientific Research.

Germany said the exceptional heat had increased ozone pollution to potentially harmful levels in parts of the country and only storms could clear the air. "We are at the start of a cycle of ozone pollution," said an official at the federal bureau for the environment.

Denver is on a pace to eclipse the ozone-choked summer of 2003, the worst in 20 years, when the state issued 42 ozone alerts warning of unhealthy air. As of Wednesday, this summer has had 34.

Christopher Dann, a spokesman for the Colorado health department, said it's hard to point to one factor causing this summer's increase.

"There's no magic bullet out there that anyone can see," Dann said. "We're not out there generating ozone in great amounts, we're emitting precursor pollutants that are chemically changed in the atmosphere into ozone .... As long as human beings burn stuff, we're going to have pollution problems."

Ozone is created when the sun bakes common pollutants such as engine exhaust, wildfire smoke and vapors from everything from paint cans to oil and gas wells.

It's a particularly vexing problem for Denver, which vanquished its "brown cloud" in 2002 only to get tagged by the federal government two years later for missing new ozone standards.

While rebounding with acceptable ozone levels in 2004 and last year, this year's spike puts the region in jeopardy of coming under federal restrictions if it can't rein in the problem.

For most people, heavy ozone is only irritating, but for people with respiratory difficulties - such as the more than 250,000 Coloradans with asthma - it can lead to intense breathing problems, said Arthur McFarlane, who works with the state health department's asthma program.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency measures ozone at monitoring stations across the Front Range, using a complicated formula that allows for the effects of unusually hot weather.

If all-day smog ratings at any monitoring station, averaged over a three-year period, exceed the federal limit, the EPA can impose restrictions on the state, including limits on federal highway spending.

This summer, some Denver-area monitoring stations are hovering around the maximum. One near Boulder is at the limit; one south of Littleton and another north of Denver are slightly above. Those high numbers may still come down, averaged with last year's ratings, but it leaves the state on shaky footing if next summer's numbers continue the trend.

A station installed this summer west of Fort Collins has far exceeded the standard. Those readings should "set off alarm bells" about human risk and the need for policy makers to take action, said Vickie Patton, an attorney with Environmental Defense.

"The big picture for the Colorado Front Range is a paradox where you have millions of people who are raising families here because they value clean air," she said.

Denver has until the end of 2007 to show ozone levels are in compliance. Other regions around the country, including Roanoke, Va., Greenville-Spartanburg S.C., Johnson City-Bristol, Tenn., Nashville, Tenn., and Frederick County, Md. are also facing the deadline.

In Denver's case, it is a big job, but achievable, experts say.

State health officials ask people to do little things, such as not spilling gasoline at the pump, waiting to refuel until after dusk, when the vapors have less time to cook into ozone, and trading in old gasoline-powered mowers for newer models.

Clean air advocates say there should also be changes in the growing oil and gas fields north of Denver.

"Oil and gas is kind of the last virtually unregulated source of air pollution in the state," said Jeremy Nichols, a volunteer for Rocky Mountain Clear Air Action.

Greg Schnacke, executive vice president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, said the industry spent $20 million in Colorado over the past few years to curb escaped gases. Old clunkers on the road are a bigger problem, he said, and forcing any industry to spend millions more on questionable solutions doesn't make sense.

Patton said regardless of the cause or the cures, something must be done.

"Smog pollution problems are no longer confined to urban Denver, but reach far across the Colorado Front Range," she said. "The reality is that we need a comprehensive solution."