"The oceans are rapidly changing," said professor Stefan Rahmstorf on the sidelines of a U.N. conference on climate change that has drawn delegates from more than 100 countries to Kenya. "Ocean acidification is a major threat to marine organisms."

Fish stocks and the world's coral reefs could also be hit while acidification risks "fundamentally altering" the food chain, he said.

In a study titled "The Future Oceans - Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour," Rahmstorf and eight other scientists warned that the world is witnessing, on a global scale, problems similar to the acid rain phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s.

Rahmstorf, the head of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Research into Climatic Effects, says more research is urgently needed to assess the impact of ocean acidification.

David Santillo, a senior scientist at Greenpeace's Research Laboratories in Exeter, Britain, said it had come as a shock to scientists that the oceans are turning acidic because of carbon dioxide emissions.

"The knock on effect for humans is that some of these marine resources that we rely on may not be available in the future," the marine biologist, who was not involved in Rahmstorf's study, told The Associated Press by telephone.

Rahmstorf also reiterated warnings of rising sea levels caused by global warming, saying that in 70 years, temperature increases will lead more frequent storms with 200 million people threatened by floods.

Scientists blame the past century's one-degree rise in average global temperatures at least in part for the accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - byproducts of power plants, automobiles and other fossil fuel burners.

The 1997 Kyoto accord requires 35 industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The Kyoto countries meeting in Nairobi are continuing talks on what kind of emissions targets and timetables should follow 2012.

The White River flowed over Oregon 35 on Mount Hood's eastern flank on Monday and Tuesday, cutting 20-foot-deep ruts through the road and sending boulders and trees rolling down the mountainside, said Bill Barnhart, an Oregon Department of Transportation manager.

Two creeks also wiped out a section of the same highway to the north, Barnhart said. Reopening the highway near Mount Hood is estimated to take $20 million.

The storms damaged hundreds of homes and broke rainfall records. At least three deaths were blamed on the flooding: two men swept into a Washington river and a 78-year-old woman found along the Oregon coast, where another woman was missing.

Rescue teams also continued to search for hunters who might be trapped in the southwest Washington hillsides between Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens, officials said Thursday.

Floodwater from swollen creeks and rivers damaged roads and destroyed campgrounds at Mount Rainier National Park, closing it for the first time since 1980 when Mount St. Helens erupted. Superintendent Dave Uberuaga said it would be at least several weeks before the park reopens to visitors.

Washington authorities decided to shut down the stretch of North Cascades Highway on Thursday because of concerns about the stability of the ground under the roadbed.

On Mount Hood, as much as a million cubic yards of rock, mud and sand covered a quarter-mile stretch of road, the main highway connecting U.S. 26 from Government Camp to Hood River, Barnhart said.

"None of us at ODOT or the U.S. Forest Service have ever seen it this bad," Barnhart said. "Our biggest concern right now is the safety of our workers."

There were no estimates when the highway would reopen. The same highway washed out in the summer of 2005.

More rain was expected Friday and over the weekend, but "just a rainstorm, not a flooding rain," said forecaster Chris Burke at the National Weather Service. While river levels were dropping, some were still at flood stage, with recovery and damage assessment still days away.

There is more to this story than a piece of prurient poverty pornography. It has a point, which is the one made more genteelly by the UN's annual Human Development Report, published tomorrow. For Kibera is but one stark example of what is perhaps the greatest developmental challenge facing humanity.

More than one billion people live without clean water. Some 2.6 billion - half of the developing world's population - lack access to sanitation. The two issues are inextricably linked, for without proper sanitation pollution of drinking water is almost inevitable.

At the start of the 21st century, 5,000 children die every day for want of clean water. That is why, in the sprawling slum of Kibera, where typhoid and dysentery are rampant, Kevin Watkins, the chief researcher of the UN report, found that child death rates run eight times higher even than in the rest of Nairobi.

We know from our own history that providing sanitation and clean water is the biggest single thing that can be done for the poor. Dysentery, typhoid and cholera killed as many children in Manchester and London in early Victorian times as they do in Africa today. The increasing wealth from industrialisation boosted income, but child mortality barely changed - until the introduction of sewers. It was the same in New York, Birmingham and Paris.

Water and sanitation are among the most powerful preventive medicines available to reduce infectious disease. The presence of a flush lavatory in a house, the UN report says, reduces the risk of infant death by more than 30 per cent. Sewers save more lives than antibiotics. Astonishingly, then - despite one of the Millennium Development Goals being to halve the number of people without water and sanitation - the amount of aid to this sector has, according to the Commission for Africa, fallen by 25 per cent over the past decade.

The problem is twofold. The first is that such basics are unfashionable among Western donor governments. The second is that many African and Asian governments do not prioritise the area; in Ethiopia the military budget is 10 times the water and sanitation budget; Pakistan spends 47 times more on guns than on sewers and clean water.

Why? Because water and sanitation are problems which disproportionately affect the poorest, women and children in particular, - a class which has no political leverage with urban Third World elites.

Water is about power. The most striking political example of which, the report shows, is that Israeli settlers take six times the water from the West Bank as local Palestinians. But there are countless economic examples. In Ghana the poorest, who use standpipes provided by private companies, pay treble what the better-off pay for water piped to their homes. In Kibera they pay five times more. People living in many of the world's most squalid slums pay more per litre for water than people in New York and London. The perverse rule operating in water markets is that the poorer you are, the less you get and the more you pay.

To set aside the financial resources to fulfil the Millennium Development Goal to halve the number of people without sustainable access to safe water would cost about $10bn (£5.3bn) annually over the next decade.

It requires sustained efforts and specific strategies. General economic development is not enough. It can be seen by contrasting India - which has a booming economy but no proper targeting on clean water and sewers - with Bangladesh - which has less growth but effective water strategies. India's people are becoming wealthier but not healthier. Some 700 million people there lack adequate sanitation - and in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai the water systems are collapsing, with rivers being transformed into fetid sewers. As a result infant mortality is down by just 22 per cent since 1990, compared with a drop of 40 per cent in much poorer Bangladesh.

The UN report is full of examples of strategies that have worked, and those that have not. It cites success stories in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Vietnam and comparative good news in South Africa, where water was once a symbol of apartheid division, but a system of entitlement has been introduced. It should be extended across the world, the report says, with all governments legislating for water as a human right, with a basic minimum of 20 litres per person per day - less than half of what we in Britain each flush daily down the lavatory.

To do that, the report says, would increase aid spending by about $4bn a year. That is less than Europe spends on bottled mineral water.

Liquid assets

* The average Briton flushes 50 litres of water down the lavatory each day - ten times what many Africans have for drinking and washing.

* One in six of the world's population lacks clean water and one in three lacks proper sanitation - that's pit latrines, not sewage systems.

* The average European uses 200 litres of water a day compared with less than 20 per person per day in Africa. (Americans use 400 litres.)

* 1.8 million children under five die each year from diarrhoea caused by contaminated water.

* Every $1 spent on sewage saves $8 in lost productivity.

* The $10bn the Millennium Development Goal needs to halve the number of people without clean water equals five days of global military spending.

The basic cleanup will take weeks, and in some places, park officials say they won't know the extent of the damage until after the snow melts in the spring.

"Some places get that much rain in a year, and we had it in 36 hours," said park spokeswoman Lee Taylor. "When we were finally able to get out and start assessing the damage, it was a very sobering day."

The Pineapple Express storm, named for its origin in warm Pacific waters, wreaked havoc across the region. It damaged hundreds of homes, washed out a major highway near Oregon's Mount Hood, closed part of the North Cascades Highway in Washington, and was blamed for at least three deaths in the two states.

Most river levels were down on Friday, and the National Weather Service said the precipitation through the weekend wasn't expected to cause more flooding, in part, because most falling in the mountains was expected to be snow. Still, recovery and damage assessments, particularly in hard-hit parts of Western Washington, are likely to take weeks.

At Mount Rainier, the Nisqually River engulfed the main scenic highway through the park and left a quarter-mile gash in Nisqually Road. The river now flows where a campground once stood.

All other roads in the park were already closed for the winter, but they also suffered extensive damage. Search-and-rescue teams were tracking down elk hunters between Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens who could find themselves trapped by washed out roads or mudslides.

The Nisqually River also took out the main power line, cutting electricity for the western half of the park, as well as the main sewer line at Longmire, where a historic inn sits.

"An optimistic estimate for repairs is two weeks for some road access. Utility repair work could still take longer, which would mean there are still no services at Longmire," Taylor said. "We're hoping we can have normal operations for the Christmas holiday."

Christmas is typically a busy time at Mount Rainier, with rangers offering guided snowshoe walks, cross-country skiers hitting the trails and sledders taking to the base of the mountain. The now closed Nisqually Road is key to those activities, as well as to construction work on the Paradise Inn, an aging lodge built in 1917.

Park Superintendent Dave Uberuaga flew over the area Thursday to assess the damage and was working to determine a cost estimate for repairs. In the meantime, crews were furiously working to fix the main road.

"Our focus is on the winter access route, so we can get that open again," Taylor said. "But if we aren't able to do repair work now, then it will have to wait until the spring melt-out, and that could delay some of the spring openings here."

A heat wave brought to the Southland by continuing Santa Ana winds made Tuesday a sticky election day for voters and produced a new batch of record high temperatures.

Just as the campaign rhetoric is due to cool, so is the weather, with temperatures forecast to fall over the next few days.

At the same time, the National Weather Service issued a fire weather watch for tonight through Friday for mountainous forest areas in Los Angeles and other Southern California counties. Wind gusts in some of those areas are expected to reach up to 50 mph with humidity possibly dropping to less than 10%.

Temperatures in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday reached 97 degrees about noon, making it the warmest Nov. 7 since such record-keeping began in 1877. The old record, 91, was set 50 years ago. Tuesday's temperature exceeded Monday's peak of 95, which also was an all-time high for the date.

The county's hottest spot, according to the National Weather Service, was Woodland Hills, where the mercury rose to 101. The old record in that west San Fernando Valley community, also set in 1956, was 94.

Records were also established in Lancaster, with a high of 85, over a previous high of 84 in 1950; Long Beach, at 92, up from 87 in 1961; Los Angeles International Airport, at 93, up from 92 in 1956; and Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, at 94, up from 92, also in 1956.

A low-pressure system is due back today, bringing ocean breezes and leading forecasters to predict a much more seasonable high of 76 for downtown Los Angeles.

The weather should cool a tad more Thursday before stabilizing Friday and Saturday, with downtown highs in the low 70s.

The report urges governments to guarantee that each person has at least 20 litres of clean water a day, regardless of wealth, location, gender or ethnicity. If water was free to the poor, it adds, it could trigger the next leap forward in human development.
Many sub-Saharan Africans get less than 20 litres of water a day and two-thirds have no proper toilets. By contrast, the average Briton uses 150 litres a day while Americans are the world's most profligate, using 600 litres a day. Phoenix, Arizona, uses 1,000 litres per person on average - 100 times as much as Mozambique.

"Water, the stuff of life and a basic human right, is at the heart of a daily crisis faced by countless millions of the world's most vulnerable people," says the report's lead author, Kevin Watkins.

Hilary Benn, international development secretary, said: "In many developing countries, water companies supply the rich with subsidised water but often don't reach poor people at all. With around 5,000 children dying every day because they drink dirty water, we must do more."

Many countries spend less than 1% of national income on water. This needs to rise sharply, as does the share of foreign aid spent on water projects, the UNDP says. It shows how spending on clean water and sanitation led to dramatic advances in health and infant mortality in Britain and the United States in the 1800s.

In the world's worst slums, people often pay five to 10 times more than wealthy people in the same cities or in London. This is because they often have to buy water from standpipes and pay a middle man by the bucket. "The poorer you are, the more you pay," says Mr Watkins.

Poor people also waste much time walking miles to collect small amounts of water. The report estimates that 40bn hours are spent collecting water each year in sub-Saharan Africa - an entire working year for all the people in France.

And the water the poor do get is often contaminated, spreading diseases that kill people or leave them unable to work. The UNDP estimates that nearly half of all people in developing countries at any one time are suffering from an illness caused by bad water or sanitation and that 443m school days are missed each year.

There is plenty of water globally but it is not evenly distributed and is difficult to transport. Some countries use more than they have due to irrigation, population growth and so on. But many simply do not handle their water properly.

The Middle East is the world's most "water-stressed" region, with Palestinians, especially in Gaza, suffering the most.

Climate change is likely to hit the developing world hardest, reducing the availability of water, lowering agricultural productivity and leaving millions hungry. Changing weather patterns are already causing drought in countries such as Kenya, Mali and Zimbabwe, but wet areas are likely to become wetter still, causing devastating floods and loss of life.

It says governments need to get more water to people, either through the public sector or a regulated private sector. The end, the UNDP concludes, is more important than the means.

After ealier leaving the northern Tongan islands group of Vava'u, crew on board the "Maiken" glimpsed "pumice rafts" floating on the water before they "sailed into a vast, many-miles-wide belt of densely packed pumice".

The crew had earlier encountered huge streaks of pumice after passing Tonga's Late island, according to their web log.

"You might have heard about the sailor's superstition that you should 'never leave on a Friday'. Well, we did and the sea turned to stone, it is hard to get a stronger sign than that," skipper Frederik Fransson said.

Neither Tonga's Ministry of Lands nor the Tonga Defense Service would confirm the creation of a new island.

Separately, fishing boat captain Siaosi Fenukitau reported seeing the volcanic island, the Matangi Tonga website reported.

The researchers, from CSIRO Manufacturing Materials Technology in Melbourne, say the device increases the volume of the shower stream while reducing the amount of water used by about 30 per cent.

Given the average Australian household uses about 200,000 litres of water a year, and showers account for nearly a third of this, the 'air shower' could help the average household save about 15,000-20,000 litres a year. If you extend this across the population, that is an annual saving of more than 45,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The Aerated Showerhead creates the sensation of having a full and steady stream of water even though the water is now more like a wet shell around a bubble of air.

While the general concept of using an aerated showerhead to save water is not new, the technology behind the CSIRO's device is novel.

Developed by a team led by Dr Jie Wu, the aeration device is a small nozzle that fits inside a standard showerhead. The nozzle uses a small Venturi tube - a tube for which the diameter varies, creating a difference in pressure and fluid speed. Air is sucked into the Venturi tube as a result of the partial vacuum created, causing air and water to mix, forming tiny bubbles within the water stream.

"The nozzle creates a vacuum that sucks in air and forces it into the water stream," Dr Wu says.

"We make the water droplets in the stream hollow and the bubbles expand the volume of the shower stream."

Small-scale experiments using the aeration device found that people detected no difference in water pressure, sensation, or overall perception of showering.

After almost two years of research and development, CSIRO is ready to take the aerated shower head technology to the commercialisation stage.

"We have very promising results on the aerated showerhead's water-saving potential. Now we are looking for commercialisation partners who will be involved in the development needed to turn the technology into a marketable device," Dr Wu says.

He expects the nozzle would cost less than $20 and could be installed by householders.

By early afternoon the rescued whales were less than a mile off the shore and "starting to swim strongly" out to sea, spokeswoman Sue Campbell told The Associated Press from the North Island city of Whangarei, near the stranding site.

Boats were patrolling near the whales to encourage them to continue heading out to sea rather than return to Ruakaka beach.

About 70 volunteers and 15 department staff were standing by in case the whales turn back toward shore or begin to swim into nearby Whangarei Harbor, she said.

Workers from the nearby Marsden Point oil refinery, together with local volunteers, were already helping to refloat the whales when the department was advised of the stranding, she said.

The beached pod marked the first mass stranding of the season. New Zealand has several mass whale strandings each summer.

The biggest recorded mass stranding on the New Zealand coast involved 1,000 pilot whales on the Chatham Islands in 1918, and the largest in recent years saw 450 of the same species beached on Great Barrier Island in 1985. Rescuers successfully refloated 324 of those mammals.

Whale experts have been unable to explain why the mammals apparently swim into dangerously shallow waters.