Provincial officials in Fujian say the central government has allocated only $8.3 million to repair damaged businesses, farms, communications networks and water conservation projects.

The most recent storm, Saomai, hit Fujian in mid-August, killing 441 people. It was the worst storm since record-keeping began in 1949, according to the government.

Each summer brings catastrophic weather to China, usually in the form of torrential rains and tropical storms. But this year, while coastal regions are rebuilding from floods and typhoons, many inland areas are enduring their worst drought in decades.

Twisters, heavy rain and hail as big as grapefruit also struck the Dakotas, stripping trees of their leaves, and power was knocked out around the region.

In Nicollet County, Minn., a tornado ripped roofs, fronts or sides from farm homes along a 12-mile stretch of highway between Nicollet and St. Peter. Powerline poles lay along the road, and some treetops were sheared off.

Mary Rahm, 22, saw the tornado dip down twice from the clouds before it hit the ground. That's when she grabbed her newborn baby and ducked under a desk.

"My 5-week-old son just made it through his first tornado," Rahm said. "This is wicked."

A tornado in nearby Kasota killed a man who was trapped in his home, said Tom Doherty, chief sheriff's deputy in Le Sueur County.

Several residents were treated at hospitals for broken bones and other non-life-threatening injuries.

An earlier line of thunderstorms dropped hail as large as softballs in several communities, smashing the windshield of a New Prague fire truck. In Northfield, hail damage to 11 police squad cars forced officers to borrow vehicles from the sheriff's office.

At least a half-dozen tornadoes raked across central South Dakota, destroying farm homes and damaging power lines.

Jeff Miller said the storm looked like a blanket as he watched from his mother's home near Wolsey.

"I was worried about whether I was going to be here today," Miller said Friday, surveying the debris.

"That used to be a barn," he said.

Neighbor Bill Timm lost nine buildings, including two houses.

"They're not flattened, they're gone," said Kristi Brakke, Timm's sister.

North Dakota had heavy rain, funnel clouds, and grapefruit-sized hail.

"It didn't really hail all that much, but what it did hail was big," Stanton City Auditor Rick Honeyman said.

In Wisconsin, a 43-year-old woman was knocked to the ground while carrying an umbrella and groceries through a parking lot in Waukesha County.

"I don't remember hearing thunder or seeing lightning or anything," Kelly Owen told WISN-TV in Milwaukee. "It's the weirdest sensation."

Lightning also killed a dozen cows on a farm in Marshall, and strikes were suspected of starting fires at a seniors' apartment complex in Kenosha and a home in Cottage Grove home.

More rain was expected Friday in Michigan and the upper Mississippi Valley southwest to Kansas and Oklahoma.

Delays in the distribution of food, water, medicine and shelter stoked fears the death toll would rise in the devastated area where at least 364 people were killed when the Omo River burst its banks on August 13, displacing some 10,000.

"Our teams are still struggling to reach the affected areas, but the marsh and silt created by the floods are preventing us," said Petros Gebre, the deputy police chief of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People's state.

"And, aid distribution is becoming problematic as about 3,000 people who have declined to be relocated are unreachable by land," he told AFP by phone from Jinka, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) southwest of Addis Ababa.

"We are providing them with aid drops of aid from helicopters but it's not clear how long we can do this," Petros said, calling the situation a "logistical nightmare".

Despite assurances that the government would take care of their livestock while they are relocated to safer ground to facilitate relief distribution, the 3,000 herders are refusing to leave, he said.

"Even though we have promised that they can return to their cattle when the water levels decrease, they have refused to move," Petros said.

He added that the search teams were yet to recover an unknown number of bodies of drowned victims after villagers reported spotting them on the marshlands on the Omo River delta on Monday.

Floods caused by unusually heavy seasonal rains have battered huge portions of southern, eastern and northern Ethiopia since the beginning of the month, killing at least 626 nationwide and affecting 118,000 people, many of whom have been left homeless.

The Ethiopian News Agency reported Wednesday that 8,000 people had been displaced in Gode Zone, about 970 kilometers (600 miles) southeast of the capital, by floodwaters from the Wabi Shabelle River.

State TV agency said that thousands more were forced to flee to higher ground in the Gambella region when Baro River broke its bank, flooding farmlands.

"More than five villages in four districts in Gambella regional state were flooded when Baro River overflowed its banks displacing more than 7,000 people destroying their residential areas," the television added.

Concerns about the spread of water-borne diseases are also growing as rain continues to pound the Ethiopian highlands.

The downpours have pushed water levels at at least three critical dams to the breaking point, and authorities began controlled releases from one of the facilities, the Gilgel Gibe dam on the Omo River, on Monday.

Officials said local authorities planned to start releasing overflowing water from Koka dam on the Awash River that has flooded in the east, and the Tise Aby on the Blue Nile in the north.

Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation officials said water would be released from the dam starting 6:00 am (0300 GMT) on Thursday.

"Dykes they have built in the area are capable of holding the amount of water that will be released," the firm's spokesman Sendeku Araya told AFP.

"There is nothing to panic about as it is going to be monitored closely and every preparation has been made for any eventuality," he added.

The United Nations has made an urgent appeal for 5.82 million dollars (4.54 million euros) for the thousands who have been displaced as well as for the rehabilitation of infrastructure in the flood-hit eastern town of Dire Dawa, where 254 people were killed on August 6.

Forecasters have warned that six areas in the north, west and south of the country will likely face further flood threats from the rains that are expected to continue until the end of the wet season in September.

Ethiopia, home to some 70 million people, has faced heavy floods and droughts in recent years.

The Scottsdale portion of the wash runs for eight miles and was built in the 1970s as a flood-control measure, said city spokesman Mike Phillips.

It's normally dry and contains parks, golf courses and lakes, but it runs with water during heavy storms. At those times it can look like a raging river.

"Today it's functioning as it was intended to do, and that is carry a heck of a lot of water out of the mountains," Phillips said.

Elsewhere, a woman driving through a flooded Phoenix intersection became trapped momentarily, but firefighters rescued her without incident, said Mike Sandulak, a division chief with the Phoenix Fire Department. Several other cars were stranded in the intersection but no one else needed to be rescued.

Emergency personnel in other jurisdictions also reported calls to pull people from stranded vehicles.

National Weather Service meteorologist Doug Green said between 1 1/2 inches and 2 inches of rain fell early Thursday in spots around the Phoenix metro area.

Elsewhere Thursday, severe thunderstorms moved through southern Minnesota, spawning tornadoes that damaged buildings, twisted trees off their trunks and downed power lines. No injuries were immediately reported.

Thunderstorms earlier in the day dropped softball-sized hail on several communities south of the Twin Cities. Hundreds of cars, trees and homes were damaged.

"Every car in the lot was damaged," said Doug Fitzgerald, sales manager at Dokmo Ford-Chrysler in Northfield. "It looks like a war zone."

The fact that 15 million years later, the Arctic was tropical has nothing to do with the current fact that over the last 30 years, man-made carbon-dioxide emissions and forest destruction are warming our atmosphere and ocean surface temperatures to the point that our ice caps and glaciers are melting at a dangerously rapid rate.

While every legitimate and independent scientist recognizes that global warming is a fact, the skeptics and their friends in government and the media continue to offer "junk science" explanations for global warming.

Now they cite ice core samples taken from the North Pole that show that the polar regions were tropical 55 million years ago as evidence that current global warming is merely natural and cyclical. Some 30 years of carbon-dioxide emissions, rain forest destruction, and other man-made actions have nothing to do with millions of years of planetary change. That math just doesn't add up.

Such statements are irresponsible and akin to failing to warn the public about an impending hurricane or tornado.

There is no question that man-made greenhouse gases being pumped into our atmosphere are having disastrous consequences for all of Earthkind. The United States is the world's worst polluter, yet the Bush administration continues to ignore all the facts compiled by years of painstaking research by scientists in locations from Antarctica and the Himalayas to the Amazon and the Arctic tundra.

If quick action is not taken to reverse global warming and polar and glacial ice melt, hundreds of millions of people and countless species of animals and plants will be placed in jeopardy.

A projected 20 feet rise in sea levels from global warming will cause many low lying atolls and such nations as Bangladesh and the Netherlands to disappear under the sea.

Severe storms will destroy coastal regions. Rising sea levels will submerge coastal urban centers such as New Orleans; San Jose, Calif.; Venice, Italy; Baltimore; and parts of Manhattan. Fresh water aquifers will be penetrated by salty and brackish seawater, making them unfit for use.

Coral bleaching and the loss of wetlands will cause the extinction of important food sources, resulting in famine in many parts of the world. Methane released from melting permafrost and warming sea bottoms will add to already dangerous carbon-dioxide levels in our atmosphere and further increase rising temperatures. Methane is 25 percent more dangerous to the eco-system than carbon dioxide.

The sea-dwelling trilobites that perished in the meteor-caused Permian-Triassic mass extinction 250 million years ago and the Cretaceous dinosaurs that perished in a similar meteor-caused global extinction 65 million years ago were certainly not intellectually advanced to the point where they could save themselves.

Yet today's humans - acting together - can save themselves and their planet. Sadly, some Americans are putting their own selfish interests ahead of Mother Earth's. We need to ignore their cynicism and get to work on what promises to be a gargantuan, but noble task.