Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike O'Connor said skies were clear and there were no reports of aircraft in trouble in the area. He said he'd gotten about eight calls about it at the agency's Renton office.

O'Connor says -- quote -- "It sounds like somebody might be seeing a meteor."

A dispatcher at the Yakima County sheriff's office said two sightings had been reported by area officers.

---

A police officer in Union Gap who declined to give his name said he saw "something bright in the sky ... kind of like fireworks but up high, and then it went away."

63-year-old Mary Cline of Selah says what she saw was -- quote -- "just like a big bright light and it had a tail on it, kind of like a comet, but not real long."

Cline added -- quote -- "It seemed to be really close."

She said she didn't hear it land, and that she only saw the bright light -- "White, with a little bit of blue" -- for a few seconds.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike O'Connor said he received about eight calls about it, but no reports of any aircraft in trouble.

A dispatcher with the Yakima County Sheriff's Office said one woman and an area police officer spotted a bright object shooting across the sky.

"It was just like a big bright light, and it had a tail on it - kind of like a comet, but not real long," Mary Cline, 63, told The Associated Press.

Cline said she saw it near a warehouse in Selah, a town about five miles north of Yakima. "It seemed to be really close. It seemed like it was just right over the roof of the warehouse."

Asya Guerrero, 21 of Yakima, called the AP to say she spotted an object that looked like a shooting star, only much closer, headed toward the city's Terrace Heights area.

"More than three tons have been found so far, and our main - untested - hypothesis at the moment is that they tried to flee from predators and accidentally beached," said Luis Laria, chief coordinator of a marine protection unit working with the government.

Laria said a European Union moratorium on fishing anchovies along the northern Atlantic coast of Spain and the western coast of France has been in place for two months. Less rigorous fishing restrictions had been used for the previous two years.

These anchovies are considered susceptible to extinction and are therefore closely monitored by scientists, according to Spain's Environment Ministry.

Although anchovies are exported from elsewhere in the world, including Peru and Chile, Laria said anchovies from the Atlantic off Spain and France are the most valued and expensive because of their flavor, derived from their nutrient-rich environment.

If the beached specimens had grown to full maturity, they would have represented more than 100 tons of potential breeders.

"It's a bit of a disaster," said Laria. "We can't fish them because they're so rare, and now they've killed themselves."

Laria said that experts had studied the dead anchovies and found no evidence of toxic chemicals that could have caused the beaching. "The likelihood is that a shoal tried to swim away from hungry dolphins or tuna."

A factor that may have disoriented the fish is unusually high water temperatures off Colunga in the high 70s, Laria said, adding that such a mass beaching of anchovies is unprecedented in northern Spain.

A cleanup team was dispatched Friday to begin scooping up the dead fish to avoid further unwanted environmental side-effects.

Xangsane, downgraded from a typhoon just before it hit Vietnam, killed at least four people in Danang, a city of 770,000 people, said local disaster official Huynh Van Thang. At least 5,500 homes were destroyed or damaged in the city.

About 435 people were injured in Danang, said Trinh Luong Tran, director of the city's public health department.

In neighboring Quang Nam province, a woman was killed by falling debris, said deputy provincial governor Nguyen Ngoc Quang. Another 61,000 people, including nearly 500 foreign tourists from hotels in the ancient town of Hoi An, were evacuated.

In Quang Tri province, one person was killed by lightning, officials said.

More than 14,000 homes were destroyed or damaged and 43 people were injured in Thua Thien Hue province, said provincial disaster official Phan Thanh Hung.

In Danang, many houses had their tin roofs blown off, and tin sheets could be seen hanging over trees and electricity cables.

National carrier Vietnam Airlines said it canceled 48 domestic flights Sunday, and train service was interrupted, stranding thousands.

In the Philippines, nearly 40,000 people fled their homes in Manila and in 15 northern and central provinces. Damage to infrastructure, crops and livestock topped $7.2 million and the figure was likely to rise as more reports come in, the civil defense office said.

The southwest Washington mountain is going through another "dome-building" phase within its crater.

The volcano's May 18, 1980, eruption killed 57 people, sent superheated mud down the Toutle River Valley, flattened forests for miles and spewed ash across the state and, eventually, around the globe. It also reduced the 9,677-foot mountain to 8,363 feet, and replaced its symmetrical, snow-covered cone with a gaping crater.

The blast was followed by a period of dome building that ended in 1986.

The current flow of magma began in October 2004 after weeks of low-level seismic activity. For the first year it averaged more than 3 cubic yards, about two big pickup truck loads, per second, Gardner said. The extruded rock has been piling up brittle new structures, which then collapse onto the crater floor and form the foundation for the next gush of lava.

Since October 2005, the extrusion rate has slowed to less than 1.3 cubic yards per second, Gardner said. Since April, "we're in the half-cubic-yard range," she said.

But confirming a trend "takes a long time, because a lot of these are very small changes," she said.

Seismic readings, which had ranged above magnitude 3, have also dropped over the past year, Gardner said. The rate of deformation - the swelling or shrinking of the volcano's flanks - also has slowed, but in very small amounts, she said.

"We're not seeing anything ... that tells us we're in store for a change in eruptive style in the near future," she said. "Right now it looks like we'll be continuing with fairly benign rock extrusion and rockfalls that can send ash over the crater rim."

There's no telling when, or if, the activity could ratchet up again. "A lull's OK, as long as it's not another 18 years. I don't have that much time left in my career," Gardner said.

The current eruptive phase followed 18 years of silence.

A drumfire of seismic rumblings began on Sept. 23, 2004. A plume of ash and steam on Oct. 1, 2004, confirmed that an eruption was under way. Magma appeared in the crater 10 days later.

The Johnston Ridge Observatory about five miles from the peak was closed Oct, 2, 2004, due to safety concerns. It reopened the following May 6.

This summer, a hiking trail to the edge of the crater was reopened by the U.S. Forest Service.

"This is a great opportunity. I think people need to understand that this is so rare, that you can actually go up and see something like this - even for scientists," Gardner said.

Mount St. Helens, the youngest and most active of the Cascade Range volcanos, has a history of leveling and rebuilding itself. Scientists say the mountain that stood before 1980 was just 4,000 years old - the blink of an eye in geologic time.

There had been eruptions in the St. Helens area for hundreds of thousands of years, but for centuries they only produced small lava domes.

The victim was a 70-year-old man from Oklahoma, said Labette County Sheriff William Blundell.

About 50 people within a mile of the blast, including construction workers and residents, were evacuated, officials said. Southern Star Natural Gas Co. shut off gas to the area, and firefighters contained the blaze.

Gas service to about 275 customers was disrupted, said Southern Star spokeswoman Gayle Hobbs.

Double J was working on behalf of Admiral Bay Resources Inc. of Colorado, a gas production company with wells in the Mound Valley area.

Robert Carington, chief financial officer for Admiral Bay, declined to comment.

The researchers reached the conclusion by observing the universe with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which was launched by NASA in 2001 to measure fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The measurements of the probe agreed with a conventional spherical model of the observable universe, said the researchers. But when the data were measured on the largest scale, for instance taking in the entire night sky, the radiation was too low.

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data have confirmed the anomaly concerning the low quadrupole amplitude compared to the best-fit Lambda-cold dark matter prediction, the researchers wrote in their paper.

"We show that by allowing the large-scale spatial geometry of our universe to be plane symmetric with eccentricity at decouplingor order 10-2," they added.

"The quadrupole amplitude can be drastically reduced without affecting higher multipoles of the angular power spectrum of the temperature anisotropy."

These anomalies may signal "a nontrivial cosmic topology" that is different from the sphere, indicated the researchers led by Leonardo Campanelli of the University of Ferrara in Italy.

They found that the radiation discrepancies disappeared if the universe was shaped like an ellipsoid, with an eccentricity of about one per cent.