Bruce Hoyt was driving south along the Hawke's Bay Expressway when the sky lit up as if by lightning.

"It came down, heading south, then broke up into six to eight pieces, before fading out. A second or so later, I heard a bang.

"I would say the bang was from the meteor hitting the atmosphere. The sound came later because it travels slower than light."

That summation was right, said Hawke's Bay Astronomical Society president Gary Sparks. "When these things come in, it is explosive decompression. With the heat of re-entry they reach a critical temperature and they explode," he said.

The clear sky last night would have helped the sound travel. His guess was the meteor would have been no larger than a basketball.

August is one of the times of year when meteor showers were more frequent, Mr Sparks said, with the Earth - orbiting the Sun at 100,000km/h - meeting the dust trail of a meteor.

"What people saw last night was probably a rogue meteor, something that was not in the same path as the dust trail," Mr Sparks said.

Ernesto could come ashore near the densely packed area around Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, which is home to about five million people, forecasters say.

"The centre of Ernesto will be near the Florida Keys or southeast Florida by [Tuesday] evening," according to an update issued at 5 a.m. by the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

The storm is currently packing winds of close to 75 km/h, and could strengthen to hurricane force throughout the day, said forecasters. Its winds are extending 140 kilometres from the storm's centre.

Ernesto will become a Category 1 hurricane if its winds reach 120 km/h.

A tropical storm warning and hurricane watch extends down Florida's east coast from New Smyrna through the Florida Keys and up along the west coast to Bonita Springs.

Residents are lining up at gas stations and are stocking up on plywood, batteries and water after Gov. Jeb Bush advised them to have 72 hours worth of supplies on hand.

"My suggestion: Take this storm very seriously. A hurricane is a hurricane," Bush warned on Monday.

According to an early forecast track, Ernesto could travel north up the U.S. east coast later this week, and move into southern Ontario by early Sunday morning.

Ernesto soaks Cuba

Ernesto moving off Cuba's northern coast early Tuesday morning after drenching the island nation on Monday.

The rain prompted officials to evacuate homes in low-lying areas, and train and commercial flights were suspended.

There were no reports of major damage, but state television showed flooding in some eastern parts of the island. In Guantanamo province, home to a U.S. military base and prison, 194 millimetres of rain fell Monday, said officials.

A U.S. Defence Department spokesperson said none of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay were exposed to the weather.

Dominican Republic and Haiti mopping up


Ernesto is the fifth named storm of the hurricane season. Over the weekend, it became the first hurricane of the Atlantic season and lashed the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

In the Dominican Republic, rain-swollen rivers flooded more than 400 houses in Santo Domingo and nearby San Cristobal province, forcing more than 1,600 people from their homes. No injuries or death were reported.

In Haiti, a woman died Sunday after being swept away by floodwaters on Vache Island, off Haiti's south coast.

John forms in Pacific

As Ernesto churned northward, another tropical storm formed Tuesday in the Pacific.

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center warned tropical storm John could become a hurricane later in the day.

With winds near 110 km/h, tropical storm John was about 400 kilometres south of Acapulco on Tuesday morning.

Officials in the Baja Peninsula have issued a tropical storm watch for the region.

"The lie was that we were ready and that everything was working as a team. Behind the scenes, it wasn't working at all," Brown said. "There were political considerations going into all the discussions. There was the fact that New Orleans did not evacuate and the mayor (Ray Nagin) had no plan."

Brown said it was natural to "want to put the spin on that things are working the way they're supposed to do. And behind the scenes, they're not. Again, my biggest mistake was just not leveling with the American public and saying, 'Folks, this isn't working.'"

The former FEMA chief cited what he called an e-mail "from a very high source in the White House that says the president at a Cabinet meeting said, 'Thank goodness Brown's taking all the heat because it's better that he takes the heat than I do.'"

Also on "This Week," U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the administration still doesn't understand the magnitude of the reconstruction problem; but the president's Gulf Coast coordinator, Don Powell, said the federal government's No. 1 priority is to rebuild the area in a businesslike way.

More than 1,500 people were killed when the storm devastated the city, flooding huge areas.

Mr Bush this morning met the New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, and is due to attend a service at the city's St Louis Cathedral later today.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the president stood by the cathedral, in the French Quarter, and admitted that his administration had failed to respond adequately.

The White House hopes regeneration of the Gulf Coast will erase the damage done to Mr Bush by the sluggish official reaction to the storm. Earlier this month, an AP-Ipsos poll revealed that 67% of Americans disapproved of his handling of Katrina.

The president this week met local leaders involved in rebuilding plans. Speaking in Biloxi, Mississippi, yesterday, he said: "Money is beginning to go out the door so people can rebuild their lives."



He admitted that help in Louisiana had been "a little slower" in arriving, but claimed there was a "sense of renewal" on the Gulf Coast and stressed that states and local governments needed to play their part in getting government cash to victims.

Officials said the purpose of Mr Bush's trip was not to dwell on the disaster but to highlight rebuilding efforts, thank volunteers and celebrate community spirit.

"My message to the people down here is that we understand there's more work to be done, and just because a year has passed, the federal government will remember the people," Mr Bush said.

"This is an anniversary, but it doesn't mean it ends. It's the beginning of what is going to be a long recovery, but I'm amazed by the opportunity. I'm amazed by the hope that I feel down here."

However, frustration at the state, local and federal response in New Orleans - which still has no master rebuilding plan - remains intense. Only 50% of the city has electricity, half its hospitals remain closed and violent crime has risen.

Less than half the population has returned after the storm, tens of thousands of families are living in trailers and mobile homes, and insurance settlements are mired in red tape.

When he spoke in Jackson Square last year, Mr Bush put forward proposals to help fight poverty in the area. They included the Gulf Opportunity Zone, which will give more than £5bn in tax breaks to developers of low-income housing, small businesses and individuals.

However, worker recovery accounts - which were meant to help storm victims find work by paying for school, job training and childcare - did not materialise.

Neither did the Urban Homesteading Act, which had been intended to provide the poor with sites on which to build self-financed homes.

The evacuees, mostly American and Thai contractors, on Monday were flown to Hickam Air Force Base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, said Maj. Clare Reed, a spokeswoman for the 15th Airlift Wing.

The contractors work at a civilian base, Reed said. No other permanent residents live on the tiny island, she said.

Ioke had winds of 160 mph and gusts up to 185 mph on Monday, Powell said.

The storm was 560 miles southeast of Wake Island and on track for a direct hit, according to the forecast.

Wake Island is 2,300 miles west of Honolulu and 1,510 miles east of Guam. The storm is expected to strike at 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday, or noon Thursday on the island.

Those seals and two others found in North Carolina and Virginia - all of them pups about six months old - are being cared for at the Marine Mammal Stranding Center. The center has never had to rescue any in the summer months before, according to founding director Bob Schoelkopf.

The sudden influx has Schoelkopf and others searching for clues.

"We've never had this rate of strandings in the summer months, and we really have no definitive idea why it's happening," Schoelkopf told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "And why these animals are turning up in all these strange places. It's truly a mystery."

The bottlenose whales, which normally are found in the North Atlantic, have also been sighted along the East Coast, Schoelkopf said. And a manatee, whose habitat is chiefly the warmer waters off Florida, made its way up the Hudson River through New York City this month and was last spotted off Cape Cod.

Studies conducted by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego suggest the strange migrations could be attributed to underwater noise created by long-range sonar testing conducted by the Navy and to expanded global shipping.

Whales, dolphins and other marine mammals use sound signals to mate and communicate with each other and may be misreading the man-made sounds.

"We're very concerned about this because we think the research is clear that the sonar testing can have an adverse impact on the marine environment," said Michelle Duval, a senior scientist with Environmental Defense, a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group.

The group has opposed the establishment of a 500-square-mile sonar range in the Atlantic Ocean off the North Carolina coast.

Navy officials said the studies don't prove any long-term effects of sonar on marine mammals.

At the Brigantine facility, one of only a half-dozen federally licensed centers on the East Coast that aid stranded mammals, resources are being strained as workers dip into reserve supplies of fish to feed the seals.

If the seals survive, they will be taken to Maine and released into the North Atlantic.

Army helicopters flying rescue missions carried stranded people away from fast-flowing floodwaters to safer areas, state-run television showed Tuesday.

Government spokesman Baman Prasad Neupane said Home Minister Krishna Prasad Sitaula, who made an aerial tour of the area Monday, had "directed the local administration in the flood- and landslide-affected areas to speed up rescue efforts".

He said rescuers were urgently trying to discover the fate of 63 people in a village in badly-hit Banke area in mid-western Nepal that has been cut off by floods.

He said the village inhabitants were missing but could not confirm the overall death tally of 31 reported in the media.

Monsoon rains that sweep Nepal and the rest of the subcontinent in the summer cause hundreds of deaths every year from flooding and landslides.

The worst flooding this year has been in Banke district, 510 kilometres (318 miles) west of Kathmandu, where 377 millimetres (15 inches of rain) fell over the weekend, local meteorological officials said.

The Rapti River flowing through the district broke its banks, washing away scores of mud houses and forcing tens of thousands of people to flee to higher ground.

"Some 40,000 people were displaced by the floods ... due to the incessant rainfall," said Banke chief district officer Narendra Raj Sharma.

One journalist in Banke, Janak Nepal, quoted locals as saying the flooding was the worst in four decades.

Officials said that the waters were gradually receding as the rains stopped and India opened a dam bordering Nepal.

"The water level has fallen after the Indian administration ...agreed to open the Laxmanpur Dam that was holding back floodwaters," Sharma said.

State-run television said nine labourers working on a road construction site died when they were hit by a landslide late Monday in the remote northern Mustang region.

Another 22 were killed in floods and landslides over the last two days, the Kathmandu Post reported.

The government has released an initial 28,000 dollars in relief for badly hit areas, the media said, and more funds were expected later.

She said the haze had forced another domestic flight to land at Palembang airport in nearby South Sumatra province.

"The plane tried six times to land here but it eventually was re-routed to Palembang. But so far, we are still in operation," Ida said.

Airport chief Basuki Mardianto, in a report on ElShinta radio, described Saturday's haze as the worst this week and warned the airport could close if conditions deteriorated.

Vertical visibility in Jambi at 0200 GMT was only 300 meters (990 feet), said Remus Tobing, a scientist at Jambi's meterological agency.

Tobing said Jambi's environmental impact agency registered Saturday's air pollution index at an unhealthy level but had provided no figures.

"The core problem here remains the burning of forests and ground clearing," he told AFP.

He said satellites had Friday recorded 40 hot spots or burning areas in four districts surrounding Jambi.

Jambi police said 1,000 officers were helping state forest firemen extinguish the hotspots.

In the neighbouring town of Pekanbaru in Riau province, haze continued to shroud parts of the city but had not disturbed flights there, said airport chief Alexius Kiswoyo.

Visibility at 0400 GMT was measured at 1.5 kilometres (0.93 miles).

"There is still some smoke blanketing the city. The meteorological agency predicted that today's (Saturday) weather should improve but the people who carry out forest and ground burning are unpredictable and ignorant," Kiswoyo said.

Burning in Indonesia and some parts of Malaysia to clear land for crops causes an annual haze that afflicts Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand as well as Indonesia.

Malaysia on Thursday urged Indonesia to crack down on forest fires and warned that the choking pollution was hurting economies and deterring tourists.

Singapore and Thailand have also been affected in recent years.

Malaysia's worst-affected region so far this year is in Sarawak where Kuching had an unhealthily high reading of 157 last week.

The Indonesian government has outlawed land clearing by fire but weak enforcement means the ban is largely ignored.

The Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia, the source of fresh water for the cities of La Paz and El Alto, is expected to completely melt within 15 years if present trends continue. Mount Huascarán, Peru's most famous mountain, has lost 1,280 hectares (3,163 acres) of ice, around 40% of the area it covered only 30 years ago. The O'Higgins glacier in Chile has shrunk by nine miles in 100 years and Argentina's Upsala glacier is losing 14 metres (46ft) a year.

Although a few glaciers in southern Patagonia are increasing in size, almost all near the tropics are in rapid retreat. Some glaciers in Colombia are now less than 20% of the mass recorded in 1850 and Ecuador could lose half its most important glaciers within 20 years.

The rate of glacier retreat has shocked scientists, says a report on the effects of global warming in Latin America by 20 UK-based environment and development groups who have drawn on national scientific assessments. Their study says climate change is accelerating the deglaciation phenomenon.

"The speeding up of the ... process is a catastrophic danger," says Carmen Felipe, president of Peru's water management institute. In the short term, the president says, it could cause overflows of reservoirs and trigger mudslides, and in the longer term cut water supplies.

According to the Colombian institute of hydrology, back in 1983 the five major glaciers in El Cocuy national park were expected to last at least 300 years, but measurements taken last year suggest that they may all disappear within 25 years. Meanwhile, the ice sheet on the Ecuadorean volcano Cotopaxi and its glacier has shrunk by 30% since 1976.

"The [drastic melt] forces people to farm at higher altitudes to grow their crops, adding to deforestation, which in turn undermines water sources and leads to soil erosion and putting the survival of Andean cultures at risk," says the report by the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, which includes the International Institute for Environment and Development, Christian Aid, Cafod, WWF, Greenpeace and Progressio.

Their report, Up in Smoke, says snow and rainfall patterns in South America and the Caribbean are becoming less predictable and more extreme. "East of the Andes, rainfall has been increasing since about 1970, accompanied by more destructive, sudden deluges. Meanwhile, the last two hurricane seasons in the Caribbean rim have caused $12bn (£6.3bn) damage to countries other than the US. Tropical storms are expected to become more destructive as climate change intensifies. Climate change models predict more rainfall in eastern South America and less in central and southern Chile with a likelihood of greater and opposite extremes. The 2005 drought in the Amazon basin was probably the worst since records began."

Rises in sea level are expected to be especially severe in the region over the next 50 years, with 60 of Latin America's 77 largest cities located on the coast. The first hurricanes have recently hit south of the equator line in Brazil. "The net effect ... is to reduce the capacity of natural ecosystems to act as buffers against extreme weather."

"What we are seeing are many more negative and cumulative impacts. The larger the rate of [climate] change, the more the adverse effects predominate. Climate change is set to turn an already rough ride into an impossible one," says the report, which adds that the impact of climate change is "hugely" magnified by existing environmental abuse.

It proposes that Latin American governments do not repeat the mistakes made by past and present North American and European governments. Several countries in the region are proposing a new generation of mega dams which would displace thousands more people and destroy vast areas of the Brazilian Amazon. The new importance of soya, both as a food and biofuel crop, could also devastate the environment, leading to a battle for land between companies.

Large-scale coal, oil, and copper mining not only threaten fragile environments, says the report, but in some cases can physically endanger remaining glaciers and greatly increase climate changing emissions. "The Pascua Lama project on the borders of Chile and Argentina intends to move three glaciers that cover gold, silver and copper deposits. The glaciers sustain the mountain and valley ecosystems and there are fears that toxic wastes used in the mining will contaminate land and water," says the report.

Yesterday, the groups called on rich countries to urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions and proposed that Latin America and the Caribbean governments be helped to reduce their vulnerability to extreme weather.

"The only option we have, apart from demanding that developed countries take responsibility for the damages that climate change is causing, is to try to neutralise the adverse impacts that are [already] upon us. It is time to rethink the model of international aid," said Juan Maldonado, former Colombian environment minister and president of the UN convention on biological diversity.

Backstory

"With each new flood, drought or hurricane in Latin America, precious gains in poverty reduction are lost. Extreme weather is set to cause massive loss of life in developing countries throughout the region. The international community must invest more in helping poor communities cope with the effect of climate change," said Simon Trace, chief executive of Practical Action.

The world's many thousands of glaciers have been stable or in slow retreat for more than 100 years but since around 1980 they have mostly been retreating drastically. The fastest decline is in the Himalayas, the Arctic, the Alps, the Rockies and the tropics. Most glaciologists believe this natural phenomenon is being accelerated by global warming. The effects of glacier melt are expected to be severe. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Latin America are dependent on glacier water. A reduction in runoff will affect the ability to irrigate crops and will reduce summer stream flows to keep dams and reservoirs replenished. In Norway, the Alps, and the Pacific north-west, glacier runoff is important for hydropower. If all the ice on the polar icecaps were to melt, the oceans would rise an estimated 70 metres (230ft). But even a small melt will affect coastal life.