Firefighters said Thursday they had gained control of a huge blaze that has raged in northern Portugal for more than four days and killed two people as the government found itself in the hot seat for not doing enough to prevent wildfires.

Officials said the fire, which has already destroyed at least 7,000 hectares (17,000 acres) of pine trees since it broke out Sunday afternoon, was still burning but had been stabilised. [...]

The US Government has acknowledged for the first time that man-made pollution is largely to blame for global warming.

But it has again refused to shift its position on the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty designed to mitigate global warming which the Bush administration rejected last year.

In a 268-page report submitted to the United Nations, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) endorsed what many scientists have long argued - that human activities such as oil refining, power generation and car emissions are significant causes of global warming.

The White House had previously said there was not enough scientific evidence to blame industrial emissions for global warming...

"The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities."

That position is at odds with the president's supporters in the motor, oil and electricity industries - who maintain that more research is needed to be certain of the link between global warming and the by-products of manufacturing.

The United States is the world's largest emitter of so-called greenhouse gases.

Last year, the Bush administration triggered international outrage when it walked away from the Kyoto treaty.

President Bush said the treaty's goal of reduction in emissions would be too costly to the American economy.

WASHINGTON, DC, July 31, 2003 (ENS) - The United States and Mexico signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) Wednesday to create permanent bilateral working groups to cooperate on issues of biotechnology, water resources, forest resources, sustainable rural development and environmental services...

Agricultural trade between the United States and Mexico reached some $12.8 billion in 2002, up more than 100 percent since 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect...

"By forging a closer working relationship with Mexico's principal environmental agency, we can work collaboratively on better watershed management and irrigation techniques and research to help develop drought-resistant crops," said Veneman.

WASHINGTON, DC, July 31, 2003 (ENS) - Environmentalists have filed a petition seeking to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to correct flaws in air regulations that would improve protection of air quality in national parks and wilderness areas across the country.

In response to a previous lawsuit by Environmental Defense, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ordered EPA in 1990 to review and revise its inadequate regulations, but the agency has not acted on these findings...

"In some of the most revered areas in the West - from Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon - smog levels are worsening and ecosystems are threatened by rising industrial pollution levels," said Vickie Patton, a senior attorney at Environmental Defense. "EPA was directed by a federal court of appeals to put in place sensible measures to guard against these worsening air pollution levels but has dropped the ball."

WASHINGTON, DC, July 31, 2003 (ENS) - The Bush administration today announced a public meeting to gather public input into the formation of the Rocky Mountain Energy Council, a controversial White House energy task force. The meeting will be held Tuesday, August 26, 2003, from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Sheraton Denver West hotel in Lakewood, Colorado.

The Rocky Mountain Energy Council is an administrative initiative to work across the federal governments and with state governments to more effectively manage energy development on public lands in the Rocky Mountains.

After learning that the council held closed meetings in Denver on July 8 and 9, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the White House Council on Environmental Quality demanding access to records related the recently established energy group.

The organization says that the White House's newly created Rocky Mountain Energy Council undermines the administration's statutory obligation to "foster and promote the improvement of environmental quality."

WASHINGTON, DC, July 31, 2003 (ENS) - Some ten members of Congress weighed in Wednesday with their concerns about public financing for a massive natural gas project in Peru known as the Camisea Gas Project...

The Export Import Bank is considering more than $200 million in financing for the $2.6 billion project, which seeks to develop two natural gas deposits in the Peruvian Amazon and to construct two pipelines to deliver the gas to Lim and Callao, Peru...

According to an internal report by the US Export Import Bank, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, proposals to mitigate the environmental impacts of the project are "woefully inadequate" and the project will likely lead to landslides, destroy critical natural habitats, and spread diseases among indigenous peoples.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A mysterious cancer is killing Australia's Tasmanian devils, whose spine-chilling screeches, dark color and reputed bad temper prompted early settlers to give them their chilling name, wildlife officials said on Thursday. [...]

The disease, thought to be caused by a virus, will not wipe out the devil as such diseases often spare a few isolated animals who reproduce and replenish the population. [...]

A narrow but intense wind may be the mechanism responsible for the existence of a newly discovered ocean convection site east of Greenland, says a University of Toronto scientist. [...]

Global warming has caused the Columbia Glacier to retreat 7 miles in the last 20 years, leaving calves of ice in Prince William Sound. Seth Borenstein, KRT.

Glaciers are receding. Permafrost is thawing. Roads are collapsing. Forests are dying. Villages are being forced to move, and animals are being forced to seek new habitats.

What's happening in Alaska is a preview of what people farther south can expect, said Robert Corell, a former top National Science Foundation scientist who heads research for the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment team.

"If you want to see what will be happening in the rest of the world 25 years from now, just look at what's happening in the Arctic," Corell said.

Alaska and the Arctic are warming up fast, top international scientists will tell senior officials from eight Arctic countries at a conference in Iceland next week. They will disclose early, disturbing findings from a massive study of polar climate change. [...]

What happens in the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer just above where commercial airplanes fly, may have a larger influence on our climate and weather than previously thought, according to research funded by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Science Foundation. [...]

Baldwin and his co-authors suggest, although the stratosphere is mostly clear and weather free, it appears changes to the stratospheric circulation can affect weather patterns for a month or more. Wind patterns in the lower stratosphere tend to change much more slowly than those near the surface. [...]

A better understanding of the stratosphere's effect on the troposphere could also be useful in gaining additional insight into the climatic effects of stratospheric ozone depletion, solar changes and variations in aerosol amounts associated with major volcanic eruptions. [...]

Firefighters are struggling to slow the advance of forest fires that have led to thousands of people fleeing their homes in the western Canadian province of British Columbia. More than 8,000 people have fled three major fires in the region - one southeast of the city of Kamloops, about 150 miles (240 km) north east of Vancouver, and two in the north. [...]

Forest fires have forced nearly 10,000 people to leave their homes in British Columbia, where the premier has extended a state of emergency to the entire province.

About 5,000 more people in the community of Armstrong in the Okanagan Valley have been ordered to evacuate at short notice, making it the largest community threatened by the fires. [...]

[...] FIRES that ripped through Canberra on January 18 could have been contained within the first 24 hours if they had been fought correctly, an inquiry found today.

He said fires of this kind had never before caused such damage to the region and no house had been lost to bushfire in suburban Canberra since 1952. [...]

Police have cut speed limits in Paris because of ozone pollution. [...]

Meteo France, the national weather service, has forecast no respite in the coming days from a heatwave that has struck France for most of the last month. [...]

The global-warming catastrophe is upon us. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1990. Every glacier in Glacier National Park may be gone within 30 years.

The government of Tuvalu is making plans to permanently evacuate the island, which will be wiped off the map by rising sea levels.

Even the staid World Meteorological Organization has released a warning that extreme weather events are intensifying. There is a strong consensus among the scientific community, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that human activities are significantly affecting our climate.

The Bush administration's response to this crisis? Replace global-warming data in Environmental Protection Agency reports with propaganda from the American Petroleum Institute. Announce a 10-year plan to study the "uncertainty" related to climate change.

President Bush is fiddling while Rome melts.

The heatwave that baked the country over the weekend could last for most of this month and even into September, with temperatures of up to 100F (37C) this week, the Met Office said yesterday.

Britain was as hot as many holiday destinations in France, Spain and Portugal. Bournemouth's highest temperature, 84F (29C), matched that in Jamaica. [...]

A devastating drought gripping large parts of China has left 8.6 million people short of drinking water and laid waste to millions of hectares (acres) of arable land, state media said Sunday.

Across the country record high temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius and above have been recorded, including in Shanghai.

China's industrial and commercial centre is sweltering in its longest period of sustained hot weather for more than 50 years, the Xinhua news agency said. [...]

If it isn't proof of global warming at last, it certainly looks like it. As much of Europe burns like a furnace and rivers run dry across the continent, Britain is bracing itself for its own record temperature.

Sometime tomorrow, in southern England or the Midlands, the mercury in the thermometer may pass 37.1C, which became the national record when registered in Cheltenham on 3 August 1990. That centigrade peak translates as 98.8 Fahrenheit, so the remarkable figure for Britain of 99 or even 100F- is on the cards.

"We reckon there's a 20 per cent chance it will happen, but in any case it's going to get very very close," said Andy Yeatman of the Met Office.

A record would be hugely significant - a three-figure Fahrenheit temperature for the UK would be breaking psychological as well as new meteorological ground as it would give many people for the first time the perception that global warning is a real, not a theoretical phenomenon - and that it is happening to them. [...]

The Portuguese Government has declared a national calamity - opening the way to those who have lost property to claim for compensation.

The Portuguese firefighters' association has called on the government to go a step further and declare a national emergency. [...]

Flooding caused by heavy rain destroyed several small bridges and swept away six homes as several families were rescued by helicopter in rural central Quebec Monday evening.

At least seven bridges were destroyed by the rushing waters of the Nicolet River, Quebec provincial police spokeswoman Chantal MacKels said early Tuesday. "The actual river is so high that it's going over the barriers and into the street," she said. Five summer cottages and one year-round residence were swept away in Chesterville and Tingwick. A police SWAT team used a helicopter to rescue six stranded families in Chesterville floodwaters isolated them in their homes.

A total of about 60 people were evacuated.

Bardstown, Ky. - Fire engulfed a seven-storey bourbon warehouse Monday, sending alcohol-fuelled flames more than 30 metres in the air.

The wood-frame Jim Beam warehouse collapsed about two hours after the fire was reported at 3 p.m. and continued burning. The company said the warehouse held about 19,000 barrels of bourbon, or less than 2 per cent of its bourbon inventory. [...]

Raindrops fell on Alabama. And fell, and fell, and fell.

Mobile and Birmingham had record three-month rainfall totals in the May-July period, more than doubling their normal rain, the National Weather Service reported Monday.

Georgia and Mississippi shared in the unusual wetness, with communities in those states recording May-July periods that were among their dampest. [...]

The North Pole is melting for the first time in 55 million years. Researchers have found that the icecap at the top of the world has turned into a mile-wide patch of open ocean. [...]

One of Europe's leading scientists yesterday raised the possibility that the extreme heatwave now settled over at least 30 countries in the northern hemisphere could signal that man-made climate change is accelerating.

"The present heatwave across the northern hemisphere is worrying. There is the small probability that man-made climate change is proceeding much faster and stronger than expected," said Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief scientific adviser to the German government and now head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall centre.

Prof Schellnhuber said "the parching heat experienced now" could be consistent "with a worst-case scenario [of global warming] that nobody wants to come true". He warned that several months' research would be needed to analyse data from around the world before scientists could say why the heatwaves are so intense this year.[...]

Thermometers in parts of Croatia, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal hit the symbolic 40-degree Celsius mark (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday, with no sign of relief until at least the start of next week and temperatures feared to soar to 42 Celsius in parts of Portugal. [...]

ROME - Unusually high temperatures and a summer-long dearth of rain have wrought serious damage to crops and weather-related deaths throughout Europe, a continent of increasingly scorched earth. [...]

Here in Italy, where anything beyond a squirt of rain is a memory so distant as to seem like a fantasy, farmers contemplated harvests of grapes, olives, peaches and apricots that might turn out to be 50 percent below usual. [...]

"I haven't seen heat like this in 70 years: my entire life," said Stefano Colvolino, a 70-year-old traffic policeman in Rome. [...]

Five more people have died in Portugal and Spain as blistering temperatures set records across Europe.

The French summer has been declared the hottest since World War II, Slovenian temperatures are at their highest for a century and in Germany a record night-time high was registered on Monday.

Fires were still burning in Spain on Tuesday, as villagers in some places beat desperately at the flames with branches to halt their advance.

But Portugal remains among the worst affected by forest fires. [...]

In other parts of Europe:

• Five deaths in Germany were blamed on the heat, which topped 40C in some places
• Mines left behind after the Bosnian war stopped firefighters battling a three-day-old blaze near Mostar
• 54 of France's 98 departments have requested state aid for drought-hit farmers
• Power cuts were imposed in Italy amid soaring demand
• Polish firefighers battled 35 forest blazes and said there was serious fire risk in about a quarter of the country's woodlands
• Amsterdam highs edged towards 30C, prompting zoo officials to spray ostriches with cold water and feed iced fruit to chimpanzees [...]

The Sun's shifting magnetic field is set to focus a decade-long storm of galactic dust grains towards the inner Solar System, including Earth.

The effect this will have on our planet - if any - is unknown. But some researchers have speculated that sustained periods of cosmic dust bombardment might be related to ice ages and even mass extinctions.

During the last decade, the magnetic field of the Sun acted like a shield, deflecting the electrically charged galactic dust away from the Solar System. However, the Sun's regular cycle of activity peaked in 2001.

As expected, its magnetic field then flipped over, so that south became north and vice-versa. In this configuration, rather than deflecting the galactic dust, the magnetic field should actually channel the dust inwards.

Had enough of this year's lousy weather? No, you haven't. William Gray, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, is predicting "higher-than-average hurricane activity this year with 14 named storms, eight of which are expected to be hurricanes, three of them intense." So batten down the hatches. And while you're at it, give your homeowner's policy a once-over.

Why? Because if you're hit by one of these windstorms, you could pay much more out of pocket than a standard deductible. In the late 1990s, insurers in 17 coastal states added further deductibles, specifically for hurricanes, to many policies. [...]

A Reader Comments:

I have a couple comments today that I would like to share. First and foremost concerning the weather and the blessing the pope gave to gm food. As I read from some of the C's material the current earth changes and such are the product of differing sources. One being 3rd/4th density consortium activities. More fear factor for the sheep???. Perhaps or a way to get us all addicted to this gm food. More matrix (see above fear factor)? Our weather patterns in my area have made for some great local produce the strawberries were wonderful and the corn is turning out sweet and tender even though in some areas close by its been a bit of a wet summer. There are some things on this earth worth waking up for as bad as it all is...The glass is half full, but sits on the edge of the table.

Secondly; I do get the sense that Dubya does not like Israel. His latest statement concerning sanctions against them in order to get them to tear down their wall is his strongest to date. He has been in the past at best sheepish, always recanting his remarks or not following thru. If he is true to forum and a reaction machine he will follow thru on these latest remarks which may put the final nail in his political term. Although,to date. I will still hold to my thought that he is a 2 term president. My dream told me 8 years of him (scared me to death).

D.Y

WEST GLACIER, Mont. - The forest fire that closed much of Glacier National Park was 50 percent contained Wednesday as crews kept up their counterattacks on the blaze. [...]

Washington's largest fire, about four miles from the Canadian border, had charred 77,000 acres since starting June 29 and was 60 percent contained, officials said. [...]

Large fires also were active Wednesday in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho and Wyoming, the National Interagency Fire Center said. So far this year, wildfires have blackened nearly 1.9 million acres, compared to 4.6 million at this same time last year, the center reported.

Europe's deadly heatwave, blamed for deaths, drying rivers and scorching wildfires, could last until September, weathermen said today.

Experts from Italy's state-funded CNR research centre said the heatwave was among the five worst in the last 150 years and would likely last until next month.

Intense monsoon activity in Africa south of the Sahara has contributed Europe's merciless summer.

Lightning killed three people in the Yemeni capital Wednesday during a storm that flooded homes, police said.

Police said the three men were killed when lightning struck their home in northern Sanaa. Houses in central San'a were inundated by rain water rushing down from the hills. People in the area fire shots into the air as distress calls.

The rains also damaged roads and brought down electricity and telephone lines in the capital.

At least 10 people have been killed in July due to torrential rains, and six others died in June in this impoverished nation at the southern end of the Arabian peninsula.

The heatwave gripping Britain claimed its first victims after two boys drowned while cooling off during near-record temperatures, police said on Wednesday.

Two 17-year-old boys died in separate accidents on Tuesday as temperatures reached about 35 degrees Celsius.

President Bush has issued his prescription for what ails the deteriorating national park system, but environmentalists and conservationists are becoming increasingly wary about his actions.[...]

Improving the national parks, generally in a state of disrepair owing to a $4.9 billion maintenance backlog, was a major cog in Bush's 2000 campaign. He is hoping that any progress on this front will help his re-election effort.

[...] Early last month, Interior Secretary Gale Norton gave the president a progress report. It showed that $2.9 billion has either been spent or committed to park maintenance, that 900 projects were completed and another 900 have been scheduled. The president's initiative, Norton said, was on track.

The report establishes "the good work the Interior Department is doing to safeguard these treasures and provide a better experience for visitors," she said.

However, conservationists offer a different view. They complain that although $2.9 billion has been spent on the maintenance backlog, all but $363 million were funds shifted from other vital parks programs, like conservation, that are now under-funded as a result.

Elliott Negin, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, compared the shifting of funds to a shell game. "He's not putting his money where his mouth is," Negin said.

A man was killed in central Vietnam by a rampaging wild elephant after venturing outside at night to investigate strange noises near his house, state media said Thursday. [...]

Three days earlier, three elephants went on the rampage in the province's Que Son district, seriously injuring a forest ranger.

Each year in Vietnam people are killed by wild elephants desperately seeking food and water as their traditional habitats are encroached upon by logging and unchecked development. [...]

David Quillin, a surfer from Maryland's Eastern Shore, knows what cold seawater feels like: It makes exposed flesh feel like it's burning, sets hands and feet to tingling, numbs the body and, after repeated dunkings, produces a painful "ice cream" headache.

The 38-year-old architect expects all of this when he surfs the frigid waters off Ocean City in January. He didn't expect it in the middle of summer. But it's just what Quillin encountered when he paddled his board into the surf two weeks ago.

"I've never experienced it in my whole life," he recounted, "where the water right along shore could be that radically cold."

Quillin isn't alone in his observation. [...]

LISBON (Reuters) - Europe sweltered on Thursday in a heatwave that has killed at least 35 people, fanned wildfires, devastated crops and forced some Dutch schools to adopt a "tropical roster." [...]

Meteorologists blame the heat on high pressure reaching from west of the Iberian Peninsula into central Europe, along with a depression from North Africa into the peninsula. The combination is pumping hot air from North Africa and interior Spain north. [...]

Students on the Netherlands' northern islands are working on a "tropical roster," attending school from 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. [...]

There was no sign of a let-up to the European heatwave as temperatures remained close to record levels across much of the continent, leaving an exhausted population gagging for some cool. [...]

Authorities in Switzerland reported that Alpine glaciers as high up as 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) were melting in the unaccustomed heat, creating dangerous conditions for climbers and hikers and leading to the closure of some walking routes.

In France state-owned rail operator SNCF shut down part of the line between the eastern towns of Nancy and Belfort after tracks buckled. The metal reached a temperature of 51 degrees Celsius (124 Fahrenheit) on Tuesday, officials said. [...]

The heatwave was caused by an anticyclone which has anchored itself firmly over the west European land mass, holding off rain-bearing depressions over the Atlantic and funnelling hot air north from Africa. [...]

THE heatwave sweeping Europe could last till September, meteorologists said yesterday, with the risk of further deaths, dried out rivers, and forest fires.

In Scotland, police warned that remote Highland regions could see a repetition of the wildfires that ravaged rural areas in April, as the hot, dry conditions were predicted to continue tomorrow.

However, while England is on the brink of breaking the 100F mark on Saturday, thunderstorms north of the border are predicted to destroy hopes of the 1908 Scottish record of 32.8C being exceeded.

Scientists at the CNR research centre in Italy said that the heatwave, helped along by intense monsoon activity in Africa, is among the five worst in the past 150 years.

It had claimed 38 lives by last night through fires and soaring temperatures. The latest casualty was a 41-year-old Croatian policeman who died of heart failure triggered by the heat while guarding the American embassy in Zagreb [...]

KAMLOOPS, B.C. - Lightning has started 200 more fires across British Columbia, an official said this morning.

"Since midnight it was a little over 1,700 strikes," said Steve Bachop, fire information officer with the B.C. Forest Service.

We're going to have some lightning fires that are popping up today."

Lightning accompanied thunderstorms that brought a little bit of rain to the parched province, welcome especially in the Kamloops area, where crews are fighting three major fires that at the peak displaced 10,000 people. [...]

Photograph by Warren Faidley/Weatherstock

Often, it's difficult to tell whether disease cycles are driven by environmental factors or by processes intrinsic to disease transmission. The professor and her co-workers recently developed a method that makes it possible to distinguish between the two possibilities. [...]

Rats in New York are a fact of life. They scurry between the rails in subway stations. They startle late-night strollers, shooting across the pavement and vanishing into piles of rubbish bags.

The city's residents know they are there and ignore them. But sometimes, they just can't. The fire station in Queens has been battling rats for several weeks and, finally, the rodent army has triumphed. [...]

[...] The peak temperature has been recorded in Spain in Seville at 41C and zookeepers and forest rangers alike have been continuously spraying water to keep animals cool and quash fires.

Four nuclear power plants in Germany cut production drastically to avoid overheating water in cooling towers that empty into rivers.

It was so hot off Spain's Mediterranean coast that water temperatures were up by as many as three degrees from last summer. In one stretch between Tarragona and Murcia, the sea temperature rose to 29C (84.2F). [...]

BERLIN (Reuters) - Soaring temperatures have claimed the lives of 30,000 eels in Europe's busiest waterway, the river Rhine, authorities said on Friday.

A spokesman for the Environment Ministry in North Rhine-Westphalia said 15,000 of the eels had died in the state, with another 15,000 deaths recorded in the Dutch section of the 820 mile river. [...]

BRUSSELS - Forecasters offered little hope of relief Friday for Europeans baking in a heat wave that is blamed for dozens of deaths and wildfires that have forced hundreds of people to flee. The forecasters warned that the heat wave could last at least another week. Europeans "could see a drop in temperatures from Aug. 15," said Dominique Escale, meteorologist for France's national weather service, Meteo France. [...]

ROME (Reuters) - Saint Anthony of Padua can protect you against shipwrecks, starvation and losing things, believers say -- but apparently his powers are no match for the heat.

Votive candles dedicated to the saint, an item popular with pilgrims who flock to the northern Italian city to visit his shrine, are melting on souvenir stands in the merciless sunshine as the temperature hovers around 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). [...]

DALLAS (AP) -- Texans who've already dealt with days of furnace-like temperatures will have an added problem to contend with Friday as dangerously high ozone levels were predicted for some areas of the state. [...]

Thursday was the 32nd consecutive day of no measurable rain in the area, King said.

DENVER (AP) - Ozone is posing a new health threat to Denver residents, a year after health officials said they had stamped out smog as an air pollution problem.

Unlike the brown cloud produced by smog, ozone is a colorless, odorless gas. Air quality experts say the new problem reaches north from Denver all the way to the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, 30 miles away.

"We were stunned by it because it has been so many years since we have seen anything like this," said Richard Long, director of regional air and radiation programs for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Eclipses happen all over the solar system, but none lasts for three years. Our moon blocks out the sun for minutes. Jovian moons cast shadows on the face of Jupiter for hours or days.

So it was cosmic news when Wesleyan University astronomers documented a three-year eclipse about 1,000 light years away in the constellation Perseus. [...]

The death toll from the two-week heatwave in Europe has risen to 40, with the latest tragedy a three-year-old French girl dying in the garden of her home. [...]

The girl had climbed into the family car, parked in the garden of her home near the coastal town of Boulogne, while each of her parents thought the other was looking after her.

According to preliminary reports, the girl became ill due to the intense heat and died after spending no more than an hour and a half in the car, which had one door open. [...]

Nearly a dozen people were missing today after a tropical storm pummelled its way through northern Japan.

Etau - rated a typhoon until it was downgraded on Friday to a tropical storm - hit Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido early today, but gradually lost steam as it moved off into the Pacific Ocean, the Meteorological Agency said. [...]

Three people were killed, including a child, as torrential rains wreaked devastation across southern Mauritania over the past three days, official sources and witnesses said Sunday. [...]

Some southern districts had almost a full year's average rainfall in 24 hours, destroying houses and flooding markets. [...]

Britain entered a new hot-weather era yesterday when the temperature record was broken by a substantial margin, the thermometer exceeding the 100F mark for the first time.

In the mid-afternoon of a sweltering day in southern England the temperature at Heathrow airport was recorded at 37.9C (100.2F), higher than the previous record of 37.1C (98.8F) set at Cheltenham in August 1990. It was the hottest temperature since records began in 1659.

At least 50 people have died in the last four days from the heatwave in the French capital, a top Parisian hospital official said on Sunday, while government officials denied the claim.

"In the last four days there have been practically 50 deaths due to the heat," the president of the French emergency doctors' association, Patrick Pelloux, said in a television interview.

"The weakest are dropping like flies," Pelloux told commercial TV station TF1, accusing the authorities of standing idly by. [...]

The French government is considering national electricity rationing after engineers warned that they can no longer guarantee the safety of the country's 58 nuclear power reactors because the heatwave is defeating efforts to cool them.

A crisis meeting this morning at the Prime Minister's office will be told that France - which depends more heavily on atomic energy than any other European country - faces the prospect of shutting down half its power grid. [...]

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President Bush will promote an initiative to help control wildfires in a fire-blackened section of Arizona on Monday on his way to raising campaign money in Colorado. [...]

He will go on a tour and make remarks pushing his "healthy forest initiative," which backers tout as cutting the risk of fires, but opponents see as a way for timber firms to gain easier access to forests. [...]

The legislation eases procedural and judicial requirements for removing small underbrush and trees on 20 million acres of forest land susceptible to wildfires. [...]

As if you needed to be told, the National Weather Service in Ruskin issued a flood watch Sunday afternoon that remains in effect until 5 p.m. today. [...]

Bradenton received almost 7 inches of rain in seven hours Saturday, and one unidentified man who tried to cross a flooded street on a bicycle was swept away in front of onlookers. [...]

The culprit is a huge trough of low pressure sitting like a giant slug over the East Coast, from Canada to Florida. It hasn't moved for weeks. [...]

[...] If anything, it is the risk of an ice age which we have to fear. When ice ages arrive, the geological record tells us, they arrive quickly, within the space of a few years. A repeat of the last ice age would see the ice caps extending to the Thames. England would become like Greenland: capable of supporting marginal settlements on its southernmost fringes, but a wasteland within.

What is more, the geological record shows that ice ages have tended to occur at 10,000-year intervals and are preceded by few warning signs. The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago.

For anyone reading this on a sun-lounger in Bournemouth, enjoy it while you can. For readers in Skegness, it may be too late already. Even the mass of hot air generated by the climate-change lobby will not prevent the next ice age when it does arrive.

Since early 1992 Ulysses has been monitoring the stream of stardust flowing through our Solar System. The stardust is embedded in the local galactic cloud through which the Sun is moving at a speed of 26 kilometres every second. As a result of this relative motion, a single dust grain takes twenty years to traverse the Solar System.

Observations by the DUST experiment on board Ulysses have shown that the stream of stardust is highly affected by the Suns magnetic field.

In the 1990s, this field, which is drawn out deep into space by the out-flowing solar wind, kept most of the stardust out. The most recent data, collected up to the end of 2002, shows that this magnetic shield has lost its protective power during the recent solar maximum.

In an upcoming publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research ESA scientist Markus Landgraf and his co-workers from the Max-Planck-Institute in Heidelberg report that about three times more stardust is now able to enter the Solar System.

The reason for the weakening of the Suns magnetic shield is the increased solar activity, which leads to a highly disordered field configuration. In the mid-1990s, during the last solar minimum, the Suns magnetic field resembled a dipole field with well-defined magnetic poles (North positive, South negative), very much like the Earth.

Unlike Earth, however, the Sun reverses its magnetic polarity every 11 years. The reversal always occurs during solar maximum. Thats when the magnetic field is highly disordered, allowing more interstellar dust to enter the Solar System.

It is interesting to note that in the reversed configuration after the recent solar maximum (North negative, South positive), the interstellar dust is even channelled more efficiently towards the inner Solar System. So we can expect even more interstellar dust from 2005 onwards, once the changes become fully effective.

While grains of stardust are very small, about one hundredth the diameter of a human hair, they do not directly influence the planets of the Solar System. However, the dust particles move very fast, and produce large numbers of fragments when they impact asteroids or comets.

It is therefore conceivable that an increase in the amount of interstellar dust in the Solar System will create more cosmic dust by collisions with asteroids and comets.

We know from the measurements by high-flying aircraft that 40,000 tonnes dust from asteroids and comets enters the Earths atmosphere each year. It is possible that the increase of stardust in the Solar System will influence the amount of extraterrestrial material that rains down to Earth.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- It's 122 degrees in the shade.

The temperature in the Iraqi capital - already superheated by resistance to the American occupation - has danced around that enervating, shoe-sole frying figure for days now.

This year, with electricity in short supply after the war, what is normally a nuisance has become a catalyst for violence that raises the deadly threat facing U.S. and British soldiers. [...]

Baghdad is always hot in summer. The difference this year is the electricity cuts. Normally, most Baghdadis stay cool through the August heat with air conditioners or old water-evaporation coolers.

But with no electricity, there's no cooling. And who's to blame? The Americans, who haven't been able to bring electricity generation back to prewar levels. [...]

The heat has been deadly for American troops who patrol the city in 12-hour shifts, weighed down with weapons, helmets and 30-pound flak jackets. One soldier reportedly died of heat stroke over the weekend in a convoy, and a second was found dead in his living quarters - cause of death not immediately known. [...]

A weekend of heavy rains caused major flooding in southern Livingston County. The Nunda area was hardest hit. Nunda officials estimate it could cost millions of dollars to clean up, this is in a village with an annual budget in the thousands. [...]

Critics say holidaying ministers have done little or nothing as hospitals and mortuaries fill up, power supplies are threatened, pollution reaches dangerous levels and agriculture is devastated.

As the intense heat continues in many part of Europe, two more people have died in Spain from its effects, bringing the total there to at least 24. Five other people in Spain have died in forest fires.

Fires are still burning in a number of countries. [...]

Tornadoes are nature's most spectacular storms: A funnel of wind, spinning at speeds greater than 200 miles per hour, leaps from the bottom of a thunderstorm and cuts a swath of destruction, shredding farmhouses, uprooting trees and picking up automobiles and hurling them a quarter-mile.

Despite their frequency -- more than 800 tornadoes occur in the United States each year -- scientists know relatively little about them and how they do the damage they do. Tornadoes are short-lived, erratic and violent. They can be extremely unkind both to instruments and the researchers who operate them. [...]

Water released from Lake Vostok, deep beneath the south polar ice sheet, could gush like a popped can of soda if not contained, opening the lake to possible contamination and posing a potential health hazard to NASA and university researchers. [...]

Lake Vostok is a rich research site for astrobiologists, because it is thought to contain microorganisms living under its thick ice cover, an environment that may be analogous to Jupiter's moon, Europa. Europa contains vast oceans trapped under a thick layer of ice. Russian teams are planning to drill into Lake Vostok's 2.48 mile (four kilometer) ice cover in the near future, and an international plan calls for sample return in less than a decade. [...]

Scientists theorize that Lake Vostok probably existed before Antarctica became ice covered, and may contain evidence of conditions on the continent when the local climate was subtropical.

OSLO - Global warming will melt most of the Arctic icecap in summertime by the end of the century, a report showed yesterday.

The three-year international study indicated that ice around the North Pole had shrunk by 7.4 percent in the past 25 years with a record small summer coverage in September 2002.

"The summer ice cover in the Arctic may be reduced by 80 percent at the end of the 21st century," said Norwegian Professor Ola Johannessen, the main author of the report funded by the European Commission.

The Arctic Barents Sea north of Russia and Norway could be free of ice even in winter by the end of the century, said Johannesssen, who works at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway.

"This will make it easier to explore for oil, it could open the Northern Sea Route (between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans)," he said of the report, dubbed the Arctic Ice Cover Simulation Experiment.

Moscow and Norway reckon the Barents Sea could be a promising new area for oil and gas. The Northern Sea passage could save shippers about 10 days on a trip from Japan to Europe compared to traveling through the Suez Canal.

Johannessen said that the report, published on the Internet ahead of peer review, also indicated that a recent thinning of the polar icecap was linked to human emissions of gases like carbon dioxide blamed for blanketing the planet.

But the study showed a thinning of the icecap from 1920-1940 was caused by natural climate fluctuations, such as ocean currents and winds, rather than by a build-up of greenhouse gases.

Johannessen said the new survey added to evidence of a gradual thinning of the icecap and gave firmer signs that human emissions, such as exhausts from cars and factories, were mainly to blame.

Climate experts say that polar areas are heating up more than other regions.

The Arctic ice cap will melt completely within the next century if carbon dioxide emissions continue to heat the Earth's atmosphere at current rates, according to an international study.

"Since 1978, the ice cap has shrunk by nearly 3 or 4 per cent per decade. At the turn of the century there will be no more ice at the North Pole in summer," one of the study's authors, Professor Ola Johannessen, said.

"If the CO2 emissions continue to accelerate, that may occur sooner, but if we cut them back the process will be slowed," Professor Johannessen of the Nansen research institute in Bergen, Norway said.

Observations of the Arctic by satellite show that the polar ice cap has shrunk by one million square kilometres over the last 20 years and is only six million square kilometres in the summer.

According to Professor Johannessen, the total melting of the ice cap would set free a massive flow of cold water, which would strongly reduce warm surface ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream is the reason behind Europe's temperate climate and a reduction in its influence would have serious consequences for climate and the ecosystem in the continent.

However Professor Johannessen also said that contrary to received wisdom, a melting of the ice cap would not entail a rise in the level of the oceans.

"Because the ice cap is already in the water when it is melting, you are not adding any mass," he said.

"Only precipitation, discharge from rivers and the melting of glaciers can cause the water to rise," he said.

He added that the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap would benefit maritime transport as it would create a new northern shipping route along Russia's northern coast which could save some 10 days in journey time between Europe and Japan.

Ironically, the expanded ocean would also help absorb the carbon dioxide emissions which caused the ice cap to disappear in the first place.

"The ocean will play a major role in absorbing CO2. Out of the seven gigatonnes of CO2 that we emit today, the ocean is absorbing 2.5 tonnes just naturally. The bigger the ocean is, the more CO2 it will be able to absorb," Professor Johannessen said.

Fire in the mountains of southern Portugal threatened three more villages on Wednesday as strong winds blew it towards the Algarve coast, one of Europe's top holiday spots, threatening to increase the country's wildfire death toll which currently stands at 15.[...]

"It is a very complicated situation, the fire is out of control and it is burning along many fronts," the mayor of Bansafrim, Joao Gomes, told private radio TSF. [...]

"All the available means are insufficient and if we do not mobilize more means we will not be able to beat this indomitable enemy," he told reporters. [...]

Authorities believe both fires burning in the Algarve were started deliberately. [...]

Hundreds of Swiss firefighters battled a forest fire in the country's southwest which broke out late Wednesday and quickly destroyed a 150 hectares, local police said.

No injuries were reported but 100 people were evacuated when the flames neared a holiday village near Loeche, in Haut-Valais.

Some 300 firefighters backed by two helicopters appeared to have got the blaze under control early Thursday, but the emergency services were to remain on alert throughout the night, police said.

Switzerland has been hit by a heatwave and drought over the last two months.

The all-time temperature record was beaten earlier this week as the heatwave currently being felt across Europe pushed the mercury above 40 degrees Celsius for the first time since records began.

MeteoSuisse weather service said temperatures had soared to 41.5 degrees on Monday in the town of Grono in the eastern district of Grisons.

A devastating drought hitting large swathes of China's most fertile agricultural areas will lead to millions of tonnes of rice going to waste, state media said Wednesday.[...]

However, the State Cereal and Oil Information Center, which made the prediction, did not expect great damage to the market, because China has sufficient rice storage, the agency reported.[...]

A new forest fire broke out Wednesday on the Croatian island of Hvar, one of the country's most popular tourist destinations, and was threatening to reach inhabited areas, local authorities said.

Some 100 firefighters backed by four water-dropping planes were struggling to bring the fire under control, which was being fanned by scorching heat and strong winds.

The fire has so far destroyed some 500 hectares of (1,200 acres) of pinewood and brush.

The Adriatic coast island of Hvar in the central Dalmatia region was already hit by fires in July, which destroyed some 1,500 hectaresacres) of land.

More than 4,400 hectares (11,000 acres) of pinewood and brush, but also areas rich in olive groves, vineyards and fields of lavender have been consumed in over 400 fires which have ravaged the country's Adriatic coast since the beginning of July.

About 3,000 people have died in France of heat-related causes since abnormally high temperatures swept across the country two weeks ago, the health ministry said today.

"The number of deaths linked directly or indirectly to the heat can be estimated at around 3,000 for the whole of France," the ministry said in a statement.

Earlier, Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei acknowledged the blistering heatwave has caused a "veritable epidemic" of death in France, but he did not give figures. [...]

That single event was likely responsible for the most dramatic climate change of the last 10,000 years, according to a report by a Canadian team led by Professor Garry Clarke, a geophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, which appears today in the journal Science.

The 'superflood' was enough to alter ocean circulation in the Northern Hemisphere: analysis of ice cores taken in Greenland reveal that for the next 200 years or so, the mean temperature dropped by 5 C, snow accumulation decreased sharply and forest fires became more frequent. [...]

TO LISTEN TO THE FUSS Europeans are making about their weather, anyone would think that it was actually hot over there. In Paris, shops have experienced a run on electric fans. In Sweden, a male bus driver showed up for work in a skirt after his company informed him that he was not allowed to wear shorts. In Amsterdam, zookeepers are giving iced fruit to their chimpanzees to cool them off.

Okay, so maybe it's a bit warmer than usual. Temperatures across the continent have shot up into the 90s and once or twice have topped 100 degrees in London and Paris. But is this really hot -- hot enough to close businesses, hot enough to cancel trains (the tracks might buckle), hot enough to wax nostalgic for the summer rain to which some Europeans, notably residents of the British Isles, are more accustomed?

Last time we checked, the weather here in Washington was in the upper 80s, which is average to low for this time of year. Temperatures in Houston and Dallas in the past couple of days have topped 100, as they usually do in summer. Yet somehow, no one's talking about extraordinary measures being taken by Texans or Washingtonians. On the contrary, President Bush, who qualifies as both, by some measures, is currently mocking the press corps by pretending to enjoy jogging in the Texas heat. Not all Europeans may want to go this far -- but maybe they will now at least stop turning up their noses at those American summer inventions they've long loved to mock: The office window that doesn't open, the air conditioner that produces sub-arctic temperatures and the tall glass of water, served in a restaurant, filled to the brim with ice.

LONDON (Reuters) - A massive U.S.-style blackout is unlikely in Europe but cracks are appearing in the region's electricity system which struggled to cope with soaring power use during a heatwave this summer.

Sweltering temperatures caused blackouts in Italy and power supply problems elsewhere, a situation some analysts see becoming more frequent as liberalization forces companies to cut costs and delay investments. [...]

Global warming will not be helped much by efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere, say two scientists who have studied the matter. Dr. Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist from the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Prof. Jan Veiser a geochemist at the University of Ottawa in Canada and Ruhr University in Germany, say that temperature variations are due more to cosmic forces than to the actions of man.

In a recent article published in GSA Today (the journal of the Geological Society of America) and described in Nature, Shaviv and Veiser tell of their studies illustrating a correlation between past cosmic ray flux -- the high-energy particles reaching us from stellar explosions -- and long-term climate variability, as recorded by oxygen isotopes trapped in rocks formed by ancient marine fossils. The level of cosmic ray activity reaching the earth and its atmosphere is reconstructed using another isotopic record in meteorites. [...]

CLEVELAND - From beauty salons to homes to hospitals, people relied on bottled water Friday after an epic power outage sparked one of the worst water crises in the city's history.

Power was restored early Friday to four pumps that move water uphill from Lake Erie to 1.5 million customers in the city and suburbs, but the flow was a trickle at faucets because of low pressure. [...]

Ohio Gov. Bob Taft authorized use of about two dozen National Guard tankers to begin distributing emergency drinking water, but most businesses and residents were left with bottled water. [...]

Heavy rains and mudslides caused serious damage in central Norway on Friday as two rivers overflowed and floodwaters carried away bridges, railway lines and caravans but there were no victims, officials reported.

Helicopters went into action to locate and evacuate about 100 people stranded amid the floodwaters but no injuries were reported.

The heavy rains followed the hottest July in Norway on record.

One person died and dozens were injured when violent thunderstorms hit the Czech Republic's northwest on early Friday. [...]

More than 200,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and several art treasures in museums and libraries destroyed in the flood's wake.

CONDON, Mont. - Utility workers are joining firefighters as the state's biggest electricity supplier looks to save transmission lines from fires burning across the state.

Workers for NorthWestern Energy were hauling 95-foot power poles into the still smoldering fire west of Billings, looking to rebuild the torched lines responsible for a brief outage earlier in the week.

NorthWestern Energy officials warned that more damage to its lines could lead to major blackouts this weekend and specifically warned customers in Missoula, Butte, Bozeman and Hamilton to prepare for that possibility. [...]

KATMANDU, Nepal - A landslide swept through an army base in northern Nepal, killing at least seven soldiers and leaving 13 missing, a government official said.

The landslide struck close to midnight on Friday at Ramche village, about 50 miles north of Katmandu. [...]

Heavy monsoon rains in the past few weeks have been blamed for mudslides that have killed at least 190 people and stranded hundreds in this Himalayan kingdom. [...]

Seven people, including four children, have been killed in jackal attacks in the east Indian state of Bihar, with 11 people perishing in floods, officials said Saturday. [...]

At least half a dozen children were injured in the jackal attacks, village officials said.

Singh said the jackals had come near to human settlements because of the floods in the region. [...]

Wolves have killed at least seven children and injured more than a dozen people in northern India over the last three months, according to officials.

Residents in Uttar Pradesh state are keeping children indoors, and male villagers are standing guard through the night.

Forest official AP Sinha, in Bahraich district, 80 miles north of the state capital Lucknow, says his department has ordered the animals be shot on sight.

Wolves usually avoid human habitats, but experts believe dwindling forest may be pushing them closer to villages in search of prey. [...]

Britain may be basking in one of the hottest summers on record, but scientists now fear that the UK could face an abrupt switch to freezing winters and Icelandic summers.

Leading global warming experts suspect that climate change, instead of being a gradual and largely predictable process, could mean that Europe's weather patterns will worsen severely with very little warning. [...]

The French government rejected blame Sunday for an estimated 3,000 deaths that occurred during a record-breaking heatwave, faulting the abandonment of the mostly elderly victims rather than the state health system or lack of leadership.

"Obviously, I own up to my share of responsibility in this tragedy, but I reject any notion that the public authorities did not work properly," Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

Just two days after seeing off a heatwave that killed up to 3,000 people, France's emergency services were back on call Sunday, this time to deal with violent storms that ripped up trees, cut power lines and left one person dead.

Southern regions were the first hit on Sunday by the severe storms that were expected to move on up through the country, as the French braced for another assault from the weather, in the form of rain, hail and violent winds. [...]

Violent storms and torrential rain disrupted train traffic between Barcelona and Valencia on Spain's east coast Sunday.

Railway officials said trains carrying about 800 passengers were immobilized for up to several hours in Castellon and other provinces because of power outages caused by the storm.

HALIFAX - Thick smog and endless rain continued to cover most of Atlantic Canada on Sunday, bringing added worry to farmers faced with rotting crops.

Especially hard hit has been Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley where veteran farmers have seen 120 millimetres of rain fall in the past 10 days.

The excess water has turned crops such as green beans to mush, wilted carrots and potatoes and halted the harvest of peat moss. After six years of scorching hot weather, the deluge of rain caught many farmers unprepared.

[...] Kleppe is betting the perfectly preserved trees deep in the lake hold key historical climate information about the Sierra Nevada. He theorizes that carbon dating and the study of tree rings will indicate periods of extreme dry weather that arrived in 400-year cycles.

"I think we're sneaking up on it," said Kleppe, with a glint in his eye and a keen grasp of science, nature and ecological systems. "I think the trees out here might hold a secret."

If dry periods come in cycles, then maybe it's not the Industrial Age or the aerosol can that caused global warming. Maybe it's the sun, Kleppe said. [...]

President George W. Bush is barnstorming the United States these days trying to burnish his meager environmental credentials. Mostly he's just talking.

There is, however, one urgent matter that he could do something about while winning points in the process. The $8 billion plan to restore Florida's threatened Everglades is at a critical point. Decisions taken in the next few weeks may determine whether it lives up to its promise of reviving the South Florida ecosystem or whether it becomes just another water supply project for Florida's booming cities and suburbs. Bush's personal intervention could keep the project from veering off course. It might also send a useful warning to his brother Jeb, whose commitment to restoration has wavered since his re-election as Florida's governor.

PARIS (AP) - A senior French health official resigned Monday after the health minister acknowledged that as many as 5,000 people might have died in a blistering heat wave.

Lucien Abenhaim, director general of health, sent a letter to Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei saying he would resign because of intense criticism leveled at the government over its handling of the heat wave earlier this month. Mattei accepted the resignation.

Abenhaim suggested that the criticism faced by the government was unfair.

"We faced a heat wave catastrophe the likes of which had not been seen for more than 100 years," he said on France-Info radio. "But clearly in our country we tend a bit to look for scapegoats, which is totally unacceptable."

The departure was likely to step up pressure on Mattei, who has also faced calls to resign. Earlier Monday, Mattei acknowledged that it is "plausible" that up to 5,000 people could have died during the heat wave but said a final toll would not be known for weeks.

The wrecks of a German tank, two military jeeps and a truck dating from World War II emerged from the Danube in eastern Croatia as the result of a severe drought that has caused record low water levels, the HINA news agency reported Monday.

The wrecks dating from a 1943 battle between the Germans, the Soviet Red Army and Yugoslav partisan forces were found at the place of the wartime pontoon bridge in Batina, near the eastern town of Osijek, it added.

The site is being secured by police as it is suspected to contain explosive devices left from the war.

Remains of some 1,300 soldiers, mostly Russians, are buried in a memorial cemetery nearby.

In Croatia, suffering through its worst drought in 50 years, the water level of the Danube has fallen 45 centimeters (about 18 inches) below the average level.

The weather continued to challenge France's emergency services Monday as brief but brutal storms lashed the south and east, days after a gruelling heatwave.

At least two people were killed in the Alps -- a man who drowned when his small boat capsized on a lake and a 37-year-old motorcyclist who was struck by a falling tree -- and some railway lines disrupted for several hours, officials said. [...]