The quake struck near Yonaguni island, about 2,120 kilometers (1,310 miles) southwest of Tokyo, and was centered about 40 kilometers (25 miles) under the ocean floor, the agency said.

Tatsuki Yara, spokesman of the Okinawa prefectural (state) police, said there were no reports of damage or injuries from the tremor.

Japan sits atop four tectonic plates and is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world.

The quake was also felt in the Yonaguni islands in southwestern Japan, but there were no reports of damage or injuries there either, officials said.

Taiwan's weather bureau warned against aftershocks, but said they were not expected to cause any damage because of the epicenter's distance from the island.

Quakes frequently rattle Taiwan, but most are minor and cause little or no damage. However, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake in central Taiwan in September 1999 killed more than 2,300 people.

Lava and hot ash avalanched 685 metres down the volcano's slopes on Thursday, its second eruption since July 17, said Saut Simatupang, chief researcher at the government's volcanology agency.

Nearly 4,000 people were evacuated from five villages, said Iskandar Gobel, a North Sulawesi provincial official, and police in the area said more would likely leave in coming days.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval because of its location on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

Karangetan is on Siau, part of the Sulawesi island chain, which has not been affected by a recent string of natural disasters in the country.

A massive earthquake off Java triggered a tsunami earlier this month that left 600 dead and a temblor on the same island in May killed 5,800. Mount Merapi, also on Java, has seen heightened activity in recent months.

Rain would come as welcome relief to farmers, who in many countries have reported withering crops, and would also help boost perilously low water levels.

The French health-monitoring authority InVS updated the death toll in France to 64, from a previous estimate of 40, and the heat was also blamed for a further three deaths in the north of Italy.

This year, there has been no repetition of the massive loss of life caused by the last major heatwave in 2003 when in France alone 15,000 people died.

Factors such as greater awareness, slightly lower temperatures and preventative action by governments to protect the elderly are thought to have helped limit the number of deaths.

The director of the French InVS health monitoring body, Gilles Brucker, warned that the number of deaths could rise in France, even though wet weather lowered temperatures across most of France on Thursday.

Separately on Thursday, French weather office Meteo-France announced that July had been the hottest month on record, on average three to four degrees Celsius above the norm.

In Italy, a victim was found dead in his apartment in Padua and two elderly people also died, one in his garden near Padua and the other in north Lombardy during a walk to cool down.

Italian Agriculture Minister Paolo de Castra called the heatwave "dramatic" in an interview with newspaper La Repubblica and authorities have estimated the damage to the country's agricultural sector at about 500 million euros (637 million dollars).

Figures showing the fall in water levels in Italy were also cause for concern.

The level of the River Po, which runs across the north of Italy, fell by seven centimetres (2.8 inches) on Wednesday at one measuring station.

On Wednesday, French Environment Minister Nelly Olin had warned that groundwater levels in the Paris region were at their lowest level in 20 years and said that water restrictions were in place for nearly half of the country.

"It needs to rain without storms. That would be the ideal situation but I don't think we're there yet today," she told French television channel France 2.

In Germany, temperatures were back above 30 degrees Celsius on Thursday, after storms the night before, and a motorway was closed after concrete sections cracked and lifted in the heat.

The A5 highway near the western city of Frankfurt was set to undergo emergency repairs overnight Friday after pieces of the surface lifted 20 to 30 centimetres.

Temperatures in Germany were expected to reach 38 degrees Celsius in some parts on Thursday before cooling over the weekend when more storms were forecast.

On Wednesday night, storms above Paris led to the diversion of three Air France planes to Lille airport in the north of the country and caused 152 emergency incidents attended by the Paris fire service.

Farmers in France, the Netherlands, Poland, and Latvia have all warned about the impact of the heat on their harvests this summer.

On Thursday, a leading mushroom expert in the Czech Republic raised the alarm, saying that one of the nation's favourite hobbies, picking mushrooms, was being endangered by the drought.

"The situation is really very bad," expert Miroslav Smotlacha told the news agency CTK.

About two thirds of Czech people are thought to pick wild mushrooms on a fairly regular basis, but this year a lack of rain has stunted growth of the edible fungi.

In France, there was also a warning that the heat had hit lavender plantations, the fragrant crop that forms part of the identity of the Provence region in southeast France.

Maryse Milesi, head of the National Federation of Lavender Producers, said that crops would be 10-30 percent lower than normal in the southeast.

In Spain, where nine people have died so far from the heat, temperatures fell by two to five degrees Celsius on Thursday, particularly in the north where storms and rain were expected.

The governor's Office of Emergency Services said that statewide 53 of the people were confirmed dead by coroners as a result of the heat; the others were presumed to have died from heat-related causes pending autopsies, said Roni Java, a spokeswoman for the office.

Among the dead here was a 38-year-old worker found in a field, an unidentified man around 40 who made it to a hospital emergency room where his body temperature was recorded at 109.9 degrees and a 58-year-old man who was found drunk, officials said. Statewide, Ms. Java said, the youngest heat-related death was a 20-year-old man from San Diego and the eldest a 95-year-old man in Imperial County, near the Mexican border.

A doctor and his assistant toiled here on Thursday in the cornor's office, a building that was fashioned from a converted eye glass factory several years ago with no air conditioning in the key areas. Decomposition has been a problem, said Loralee Cervantes, the Fresno coroner, and bodies have piled up because of the lack of space.

"This has been our biggest challenge," Ms. Cervantes said in an inteview. "It's frustrating."

Many of the suspected heat deaths were among the elderly, who often live as shut ins and will not open windows, she said. The morgue went from 25 to 50 beds recently after getting a bioterrorism grant and rarely has had 25 bodies. On Thursday morning there were 58.

While the Central Valley is used to temperatures crackling in the triple digits this time of year, the evenings tend to be cooler. But with temperatures lingering in the 80s after sunset, mixed with humidity far higher than this region is accustomed to, misery, power shortages and death have followed.

Midday Thursday the mercury had hit 112 in Fresno, though temperatures elsewhere had dropped and weather forecasters were predicting a break in the heat most everywhere in the state by Friday.

In a statement, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger promised that state workers were doing everything possible to prevent additional deaths.

"The summer heat wave continues to be dangerous as California has seen record-breaking, consecutive days of triple-digit temperatures," Mr. Schwarzenegger said. "A mobilized force of local workers will continue to knock on doors and make phone calls to protect our vulnerable residents who may be exposed to the relentless heat."

The record temperatures have also hit the state's farmers hard, with roughly one percent, or 16,500 cows, of the state's dairy herd dying from the heat, according to California Dairies, the state's largest milk cooperative. Further, panting, miserable cows have lowered their milk production between 10 and 20 percent, said trade groups and dairy farmers in the region. California is the largest milk producing state in the country, producing about 12 percent of the country's milk supply, according to trade groups.

Because of the large number of dead cows, the California Department of Food and Agriculture waived a regulation requiring dead animal haulers to transport animals to rendering plants in eight counties in the Central Valley - freeing them to put animals in landfills.

Six counties have declared states of emergencies because of the backlog of dead livestock.

"It is just a bad, bad situation," said Larry Collar, the quality assurance manager for California Dairies. "In 25 years in southern California, this is the most extreme temperatures we have ever seen and the most extreme length of time we have seen."

The high temperatures have also caused problems with field crops around the state.

"We have been having trouble mainly in the Central Valley with the walnuts," said Ann Schmidt-Fogarty, a spokeswoman for the California Farm Bureau. "The intensity of the sun and heat actually burns them inside the shell."

She said that delicate fruits like peaches, nectarines and plums are also ripening unevenly, causing further crop damage.

"Our biggest concern is our people," Ms. Schmidt-Fogarty said. "We make sure they are very hydrated and some are working half days."

At the Te Velde dairy farm in Bakersfield, about 100 miles south of here, 16 cows have perished over the last 11 days, when temperatures hovered well over 100 degrees daily, and 12 more were sent to slaughter because they could not handle the heat, said Ralph Te Velde, 59, who has run his family farm for three decades.

The remainder of his 1,600 cows sought relief under a patch of water misters Thursday morning, and by 9:30 a.m. some were already showing the telltale signs of distress, their fat pink tongues hanging dangling to their chin.

One cow, her five-minute-old baby being licked by a neighboring sow a few feet away, was being hosed down by Mr. Te Velde's son. At the end of the lot was a pile of dead cows, their bodies in a twisted black and white mass.

Mr. Te Velde and other dairy farmers have struggled to get rendering companies to come and get dead livestock. "The main challenge is a disposal challenge in the Central Valley," said Steve Lyle, a spokesman for the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Mr. Te Velde said his farm usually generates 72 pounds of milk daily per cow, but is now to about 60 pounds this week. He estimates the state may be losing 1.5 million pounds of milk a day.

"The question is, how many farmers can survive this," he said. "You never want to lose animals. We are trying to mist them and mitigate this, keep them happy and what not."

While cows are better accustomed than humans to manage cold temperatures, the heat is not their friend.

"The double whammy for cows," Mr. Collar said, "is that lose heat through their mouth when they breathe, but don't have sweat glands so are unable to dissipate heat. The other thing is that they are ruminant which means they have multi compartment stomach and have bacteria that breaks down food, and that bacteria generates heat."

Dino Giacomazzi, a dairy farmer in Hanford - which sits between Fresno and Bakersfield - said he has been watching Yahoo weather for days, hoping to see the last of the heat.

"We spend a lot of time and money making sure these cows are comfortable all the time," he said. "Because uncomfortable cows don't make milk."

As much as 10 inches of rain fell Thursday and Friday in Lake County, the National Weather Service said.

Firefighters and Coast Guard crews were busy plucking stranded people from flooding homes and searching for a man who disappeared early Friday while moving marina equipment out of high water near the swollen Chagrin River, an outlet to Lake Erie.

Marge Cox, who was rescued from her ranch-style home by firefighters, noticed water trickling into her house early Friday.

"I looked out the window and, 'Oh, my!' Everything was water, everything was flooded. And then it started coming in my house so fast. It went up so fast," she said.

By the time firefighters reached her, the water was up to her mattress. "They got me out of there, but all my furniture is ruined," she said.

The flood water was halfway up the wheels of one fire truck as it inched its way toward a waterfront neighborhood, where several homes were flooded to their first floors. At another location, an inflated raft rescued people from a rooftop.

"I thought we were going to drown," said Jeanette Fattori, 57, who fled her Eastlake home with her husband, grabbing only their prescription medication. "It was just filling up our basement and the only way we got out of there was in a small boat with people from the fire department."

The Grand River was already 4 feet above flood stage in the flooded city of Painesville early Friday and expected to rise another foot, according to the weather service. In Willoughby, the Chagrin River was 2 1/2 feet above flood stage and also rising.

Several storms have pounded the state over the past month, wreaking havoc on riverside homes and low-lying neighborhoods.

"It's just been a very active weather pattern for this part of the country," said Dan Leins, a weather service meteorologist in Cleveland. "When you have weather patterns like this, it's not uncommon to see showers and thunderstorms several nights in a row."

In Eastlake, officials opened City Hall as a temporary shelter.

In nearby Mentor, police helped remove more than 100 children from Ridge Pointe Child Care Center on Thursday as waist-deep water flooding the parking lot began seeping into the building.

Children were pulled through windows and bused to a nearby fire station, where their parents picked them up.

"It was the most organized chaos I have ever seen," said Tonja Schleicher, owner of the day care. "Some of the kids were a little upset, so we just hugged them a little tighter."

Astronomers think the gas clouds are the progenitors of the most massive galaxies that exist in the present universe.

The finding is considered important, because it gives researchers new insight into the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Previously, astronomers expected the universe to look relatively smooth 2-billion years after the Big Bang.

"Something this large and this dense would have been rare in the early universe," said astronomer Ryosuke Yamauchi of Tohoku University in Japan. "The structure we discovered and others like it are probably the precursors of the largest structures we see today, which contain multiple clusters of galaxies."

The research group used the Subaru telescope to make a detailed study of a region of sky 12-billion light-years away known to have a large concentration of galaxies.

They used the Subaru Suprime-cam camera outfitted with special filters designed to be sensitive to the red-shifted light from galaxies at that distance. The results showed this concentration of galaxies is just a small portion of a much larger structure.

The newly found giant structure contains up to four times more galaxies than the universe's average for a space that large. The other known structures with such a high density are much smaller, measuring about 50-million light-years across.

Using Subaru's Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph to study the 3D distribution of galaxies in the filament, the team also discovered at least three overlapping filaments that make up the giant structure.

Astronomers knew this region contained at least two large concentrations of gas, one of them extending across 400,000 light-years, or more than four times the diameter of the Milky Way.

The researchers found these large concentrations of gas are located near the overlap regions of the filaments.

The Subaru observations also found much fainter objects than previously discovered in the region. For example, they found 33 new large concentrations of gas along the filamentary structure extending across 100,000 light-years.

This is the first time so many large concentrations of gas, known to astronomers as Lyman alpha blobs, have been discovered in the distant universe.

Astronomers think such Lyman alpha blobs - named because since they are seen in the Lyman alpha emission line of hydrogen - are probably related to the births of the largest galaxies.

In the gravitational-heating model of astrophysics, the blobs are regions where gas is collapsing under its own gravity to form a galaxy. In the photo-ionization model, emissions from the gas result from the ionization by ultraviolet light from newborn stars or a massive black hole.

The shock-heating and galactic-superwind models hypothesize that the glow of the gas is caused by the death of many massive stars born early in the history of the universe. They lived out their short lives, then died in supernova explosions that blew out surrounding gas.

Team members Yoshiaki Taniguchi and Yasuhiro Shioya of Ehime University in Japan have been advocating the galactic-superwind model.

Observations with the DEIMOS spectrograph at the Keck II telescope revealed the gas inside the blobs moves with speeds greater than 500 kilometers (300 miles) per second, or more than 1-million miles per hour.

The extent of the gas concentrations and the speed of the material within them suggest these regions must be up to 10 times more massive than the Milky Way.

The blobs show a great variety in shape and brightness. For example, some show bubble-like features that match computer simulations of galactic winds. There also are diffuse blobs and those consisting of several galaxies.

"Galaxies of various sizes surround us," said Yuichi Matsuda of Kyoto University in Japan. "The large gas concentrations we found may tell us a lot about how the largest of these came to be."

The research was published in a series of research papers in the Astronomical Journal and the Astrophysical Journal.

She also said some people would even take a leave of absence from their jobs to join the global marathon.

"It is simply that a very good feeling arises when you do something meaningful together. Besides, this event will foster the community of idealists throughout the world," she said.

The meditation marathon will start on July 30 at the German city of Kassel, when the participants of a European Buddhist gathering to be held there will begin reading the compassion mantra "Om Mani Peme Hung."

The participants in the marathon will read this mantra for three days and nights in a row, relieving one another and counting the total number of the mantra repetitions. In total, over 100 million mantras are expected to be read throughout the world.

The marathon will be held in 45 countries and will involve 470 Buddhist centers. In Russia, 55 cities and settlements will participate.

The Buddha of Boundless Compassion meditation was started by the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and has been observed invariably since the 11th century.