The nightmare scenario of a shutdown in the meridional ocean current which drives the Gulf stream was dramatically portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow. The climate disaster film had Europe and North America plunged into a new ice age practically overnight.

Although no scientist thinks the switch-off could happen that quickly, they do agree that even a weakening of the current over a few decades would have profound consequences.

Warm water brought to Europe's shores raises the temperature by as much as 10C in some places and without it the continent would be much colder and drier.

Researchers are not sure yet what to make of the 10-day hiatus. "We'd never seen anything like that before and we don't understand it. We didn't know it could happen," said Harry Bryden, at the National Oceanography Centre, in Southampton, who presented the findings to a conference in Birmingham on rapid climate change.

Is it the first sign that the current is stuttering to a halt? "I want to know more before I say that," Professor Bryden said.

Lloyd Keigwin, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, in the US, described the temporary shutdown as "the most abrupt change in the whole [climate] record".

He added: "It only lasted 10 days. But suppose it lasted 30 or 60 days, when do you ring up the prime minister and say let's start stockpiling fuel? How can we rule out a longer one next year?"

Prof Bryden's group stunned climate researchers last year with data suggesting that the flow rate of the Atlantic circulation had dropped by about 6m tonnes of water a second from 1957 to 1998. If the current remained that weak, he predicted, it would lead to a 1C drop in the UK in the next decade. A complete shutdown would lead to a 4C-6C cooling over 20 years.

The study prompted the UK's Natural Environment Research Council to set up an array of 16 submerged stations spread across the Atlantic, from Florida to north Africa, to measure flow rate and other variables at different depths. Data from these stations confirmed the slowdown in 1998 was not a "freak observation"- although the current does seem to have picked up slightly since.

In hard-hit Maine, a 165-foot crane with a wrecking ball attached toppled in one of the most populous neighborhoods of Portland, falling on three houses. No injuries were reported.

The wrecking ball narrowly missed a car. "The first thing I saw was the ball coming down really fast about 10 feet from us. It hit the roadway, and the rest of the crane just fell on the buildings in front of us," said Colleen Mowatt, 48, of Gorham, Maine, whose boyfriend hit the brakes in the nick of time.

Utilities in Maine reported 44,000 customers still in the dark at midday Sunday, and said wind gusting to 50 mph was causing new outages even as crews tried to restore service.

New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport, one of three major airports for the New York City region, had wind-caused delays of up to 1 1/2 hours, mostly for incoming flights, said spokesman Tony Ciavolella.

New York City's Central Park measured 2.54 inches of rain from the storm Saturday.

Power outages elsewhere across the region still affected more than two dozen communities Sunday across New Hampshire, 9,500 homes and businesses in Massachusetts, 1,500 customers in Rhode Island, 2,900 in Maryland, 2,000 in New Jersey, 4,700 on New York's Long Island and 11,000 in upstate New York, state and utility officials said.

The weather observatory atop New Hampshire's 6,288-foot Mount Washington, famous for severe weather at almost any time of the year, reported sustained wind of 100 mph and a gust to 114 mph. A 1934 gust to 231 mph atop the mountain remains a world record. The peak also got 11 inches of snow during the night for an October total of 39 inches.

The storm produced heavy "lake effect" snowfall in parts of New York state downwind from Lake Ontario, including 9 inches at Old Forge, the weather service said. A winter storm warning was in effect for the area Sunday with as much as 18 inches of snow possible at higher elevations.

The wind, rain and snow were produced by a stronger-than-normal low pressure system that passed through Pennsylvania and New York on its way to southeastern Canada, the weather service said.

About 1,000 homes in Toronto lost power, but service was restored by early Sunday evening, a Toronto Hydro spokeswoman said.

Hydro One, the Ontario power distributor, said the worst-hit areas include Georgian Bay, Bracebridge, Huntsville, and North Bay-Nippissing.

Hydro-Quebec was not able to predict when power will be restored. A spokesman for Hydro One said most customers would be able to throw the switch by Sunday night, but some would have to wait until Monday.

Winds gusting to 100 kilometres an hour knocked lines down.
The same storm system pummelled the Atlantic provinces, causing power outages in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and forced ferry cancellations in Newfoundland.

On Saturday, high winds had knocked out electricity to hundreds of thousands of people in the states of Maine, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York.

Atlantic Canada in path

"A wide swath of a low pressure system is moving to the northeast and will sweep across Atlantic Canada in the next 24 hours," CBC meteorologist Teresa Fisico said on Sunday afternoon.

The Marine Atlantic ferry service warned passengers to call ahead to check for cancellations and other schedule changes, as ferry service has already been affected in Newfoundland around Port aux Basques and Bay L'Argent.

High wind warnings were in effect for the southern and western shores of Newfoundland, with some areas told to expect gusts of 140 km/h. The provincial Transportation Department warned motorists to avoid those areas if they could.

Small outages hit N.B., N.S.

Strong winds left more than 3,000 customers of the New Brunswick Power Corporation without electricity. The outages were mostly in the Kennebecasis Valley near the southern New Brunswick city of Saint John. Crews said it should only take three or four hours to restore service.

There were also a few scattered outages in the south end of Halifax, which were later repaired.

Gusts up to 100 km/h were forecast for most of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

"This is probably one of the strongest typhoons ever to hit the country," Health Secretary Francisco Duqueso said at a news conference aired on Manila radio stations. "We need to be very careful and we need to instruct our people to make sure that all necessary precautions are being taken."

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered schools and government offices closed in the affected area and suspended bus services in the region.

"Let us pray," she said in a national radio address.

Although the storm did not appear to be drenching the mudslide-prone area as badly as feared, rising rivers made some bridges impassable. Officials said water would be released from two major dams to prevent them from overflowing.

Hours before Cimaron made landfall, Isabela province was placed under the highest of a four-step warning system to advise residents to abandon vulnerable coasts and mountains.

"The wind is really blowing strong. Trees are swaying and I can hear tin roof sheets banging about. Large areas are without light. We're expecting the worst," Armand Araneta, a provincial Office of Civil Defense officer, told The Associated Press by phone from Isabela.

Arroyo, who is visiting China, urged authorities and residents in four northern provinces to brace for the worst from the 16th typhoon to hit the country this year.

"I appeal to you not to venture out," Arroyo said in her radio address.

The typhoon threatened commemorations for All Saints' Day on Wednesday, a public holiday when millions travel to cemeteries to remember their dead, some leaving days in advance for outlying provinces. Officials warned people to cancel trips to threatened areas.

"We know in our culture that we should visit our dead, but this is not an ordinary typhoon, it's a super typhoon," a government official, Graciano Yumul, warned.

Forecasters said the storm was expected to weaken while traveling over land, but still should maintain typhoon strength as it emerges into the South China Sea.

The last time a typhoon this strong struck the Philippines was in December 2004, although in that case, the storm was deflected by a mountain range and casualties were minimal.

Last month, Typhoon Xangsane left 230 people dead and missing as it ripped through Manila and neighboring provinces.

About 20 typhoon and tropical storms lash the country each year.

Three victims' bodies were recovered and searches were continuing for the three others, SANA said on Sunday.

Police in Lebanon said a four-year-old boy and a shepherd, 16, died on Saturday.

The boy drowned after being swept away by floodwaters in an irrigation channel, and the shepherd was killed by a bolt of lightning.

Lebanese weather forecasters said they expected further heavy rainfall until Wednesday, and also snowfall above 1,800 metres (5,940 feet).

Medics said relatives recovered more bodies from the the drenched debris after the overnight downpour.

"The death toll has now reached 17. Some people have been recovered from houses that collapsed last night," said Abdullahi Sheikh Ali, nurse in the capital's Arafat hospital on Sunday.

A pharmacist who treated injured victims said that a woman and one child were killed in the city's northern Suuq-Bacad district while five children were found dead inside a collapsed house in a nearby neighbourhood.

"It was a tragedy," said pharmacist Omar Mohamed Ali. "I treated four family members but the mother and a three-year-old child had died by the time I arrived at the scene."

"The rain was so heavy and their house was old and collapsed," he added.

The bodies of five children were recoved from another house in Wardhigley district south of Mogadishu.

Abdulahi Shirwa Nur, a relative of the dead children, told AFP the walls of the house had caved in.

A neighbour, Amino Abduweli Rage, said: "It was about 8:30 pm (1730 GMT) when I was awoken by people shouting 'help.' I rushed to the scene and found people digging a collapsed part of a house and they recovered bodies of five children."

Three of the casualties were among the elderly living in a displaced people's camp in northern Mogadishu.

"In this camp, three people were drowned. All of them were elder people," said Sheikh Nur Hilowle, the chairman of the camp. Mogadishu is home to at least 250,000 people displaced by the conflict that has raged across the Horn of Africa nation for the past 15 years.

Residents said that at least 61 houses were destroyed by the heavy seven-hour downpour.

In August, thousands of Mogadishu residents were forced to flee to higher ground by flooding which destroyed dozens of makeshift homes.

Last week, heavy rains also killed at least 10 people in the country's southern Gedo region, which was recently hit by a scorching drought that put millions on people on the verge of starvation.

The latest deaths came amid heightened tension between increasingly powerful Somali Islamists and the fragile government over territorial control. Several bouts of fighting has forced thousands to flee into neighbouring Kenya from the southern region.

Humanitarian workers fear that the health of the displaced civilians would be affected since host aid agencies, including the United Nations, have pulled out of the country owing to deteroriating security.

Somalia, a nation of about 10 million, has lacked any disaster response mechanism since the country plunged into bloodletting after the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

Ornithologists at the main reserves that host the birds, the smallest of Britain's swans, said only a handful had appeared on lakes and water courses. Normally, there would be several hundred.

The latest arrival in a decade of Britain's seasonal influx of 8,000 Bewick's swans throws into sharp relief the debate on the effects of climate change as it enters a crucial week. As the Government's forthcoming Climate Bill is finalised, Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist, is expected to warn in a report on Monday that failure to tackle global warming will provoke a recession deeper than the Great Depression.

But far from Westminster, the potential ecological impact of the same phenomenon was being noted in the absence of the high-pitched honking call of Bewick's swans on reservoirs and wetlands from the Ouse to the Severn estuary. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) said its first three birds had arrived at its Slimbridge reserve in Glouc-estershire, only on Thursday, the latest arrival since 1995.

In Welney, Cambridgeshire, where there are normally 100 Bewick's by the end of October as the vanguard for a winter population of 1,000; a solitary male was this week the sole representative. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said that two of its reserves in East Anglia which host the bulk of the British population - the Ouse Washes and Nene Washes - were also devoid of Bewick's. Experts said that the slow arrival was due to warmer than usual conditions on the continent, in particular the birds' other main wintering grounds in the Netherlands, and an absence of the north-east winds that aid their migration from the Arctic tundra of northern Russia.

The disruption to the swans' migration pattern fits into an emerging pattern of fluctuating numbers of bird species and population movements blamed on climate change. Redwings, another winter visitor to the British Isles, started arriving from Scandinavia only this week. Normally, they come in early September.

Other species which normally leave Europe for the winter, such as the blackcap, are now staying through the year. The WWT and other bird conservation groups said that it would take weeks to assess whether the late arrival of the Bewick's, named after the 18th-century English engraver and ornithologist Thomas Bewick, would affect the overall numbers wintering in Britain.

Since reaching a peak of about 9,000 in 1992, numbers of the swans have fallen by about 5 per cent. In 2004, numbers of wintering ducks, geese, swans and wading birds fell to the lowest level for a decade.

Evidence of the crater left by the giant asteroid or comet has been found under the sea off the coast of Yucatan.

But according to Dr Keller, Chicxulub was only the warm-up for a much larger impact more than a quarter of a million years later. It was this meteor which left a tell-tale layer of extraterrestrial iridium in rocks around the Earth, not the earlier one, she says.

However, no-one has yet found the crater from the "final straw" impact which ended the age of reptiles in one of the largest ever mass extinctions.

"There is some evidence that it may have hit in India," said Dr Keller.

The crater, named Shiva by one expert, is estimated to measure 310 miles in diameter. However, there is little proof of its existence.

Dr Keller said marine microfossils in sediments drilled from the ocean floor showed that Chicxulub hit Earth 300,000 years before the mass extinction it was supposed to have caused.

The small marine animals that produced the microfossils escaped virtually unscathed.

The Chicxulub impact combined with the Deccan-flood basalt eruptions in India - a long period of intense volcanic activity - to nudge species towards the brink, said Dr Keller.

Vast amounts of greenhouse gas were pumped into the atmosphere by the Deccan volcanism over a period of more than a million years. By the time Chicxulub struck, land temperatures were 7-8C warmer than they had been 20,000 earlier.

Weakened by these events, species were finally killed off by the second impact.