COLUMBIA, S.C. - Tropical storm warnings stretched across both Carolina coasts early Monday as the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season swirled far off the beaches of South Carolina.

The center of Tropical Storm Alex was about 100 miles south-southeast of Charleston, S.C., early Monday. Later in the day it was predicted to move a little closer to the North and South Carolina coasts. Its winds were blowing up to 40 mph, forecasters said.

The tropical storm's center was expected to reach the Carolinas early Tuesday.

The National Hurricane Center issued a tropical storm warning from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to the South Santee River, north of Charleston. A tropical storm watch was levied from Cape Hatteras to Oregon Inlet, N.C., and from the South Santee River to Edisto Beach. [...]

LONDON (AFP) - A 14-year-old boy was killed by lightning as violent storms swept across Britain causing flooding in the capital and closing down sections of London's underground train system, police said.

The youngster was killed when lightning struck as he played in the garden of his home in the Staffordshire town of Bloxwich.

In London, four 15-year-old girls were rushed to hospital after they were struck by lightning at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, police said.

The storms later spread south where they then lashed the capital.

The sudden rise in water levels in the streets of London after torrential downpours caused several underground stations to close and hail damaged several houses and commercial buildings in the centre of the city, British Transport Police said.

The flood waters notably swept through the ground floor of the BBC television centre in west London, disrupting the recording of at least one daily news magazine programme.

GENEVA (AFP) - Freak weather conditions since June have led to widespread flooding in much of East and South Asia, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported.

"The floods and and the associated mountain torrents, landslides and mud-rock flows caused loss of life, destroyed houses, roads, railways and farmlands," the WMO, a United Nations specialized agency, said in a statement.

Among the countries worst hit are Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, both Koreas, Nepal, the Philippines and Vietnam.

"The intensification of the Bai-u front (which brings seasonal heavy rain to southern Japan and parts of China) in June and July, the Indian monsoon and the tropical cyclones in the southwest Pacific were the cause of the heavy rains and floods," the statement said.

"Continued heavy rain and floods are expected in some countries into August."

Each of these weather conditions is abnormal, the WMO continued, "but with the combination of monsoonal rains, the intensity of the Bai-u front and tropical cyclones, the abormalities have resulted in disasters." [...]

Heavy rains and floods have devastated swathes of North Korea, leaving hundreds of people homeless and severely damaging crops, reports say.

The North's official news agency, KCNA, said at least 100,000 hectares (247,105 acres) of farmland had been washed away by the unusually strong monsoon rains.

It said homes of more than 1,000 families were destroyed in July alone.

Some five million North Koreans depend on foreign food aid, and famine has caused many to flee the country.

"At least 100,000 hectares of paddy and non-paddy fields were submerged or washed away and dwelling houses for more than 1,000 families and public buildings destroyed," KCNA said.

"It is hard to expect any harvest from the fields washed away and silted. Harvest in many fields is expected to drop 30%," the agency added.

It said hundreds of sections of roads and railways were destroyed and communications links affected, without providing any details on casualties. [...]

AHMEDABAD, India (AFP) - At least 25 people have been killed in torrential rains which destroyed mud homes and washed away 50,000 hectares (123,500 acres) of farmland in the western Indian state of Gujarat, police and officials said.

"It has been raining for four days and this has created havoc in southern Gujarat," said a police spokesman in Gujarat's commercial capital Ahmedabad, adding the death toll had risen to 25 in the past 24 hours.

The bodies of two adults and three children were found after a mud house caved in Monday in Halasa village in the state's Anand district, the spokesman said.

"Another woman died Tuesday when a mud wall collapsed on her in Gujarat's Bharuch district," he added.

Two women were killed when house collapsed in the Mankni village of Baroda district and two men were swept away in the creeks in Udhna in Surat district late on Tuesday.

The driving rain also caused road accidents. In one incident, a van carrying four people was swept away by the rain-fed Karjan river in Bharuch district. [...]

The local meteorological department has forecast more monsoon rain for the region overnight Tuesday and on Wednesday. [...]

The official said about 382 villages were affected by the rains and about 26,000 people had been evacuated to relief camps in Surat district. [...]

BUXTON, N.C. - Hurricane Alex, stronger than expected but sparing the North Carolina coast a direct hit, brought plenty of wind, rain and flooding to the Outer Banks, cutting power to thousands and flooding Hatteras Island's only link to the mainland.

Now the communities of North Carolina's barrier islands must clean up after the storm brushed the coast Tuesday. Winds reached 100 mph, sending trash bins and other debris floating along a flooded Highway 12.

"It blew a whole lot harder than what people expected," said Ollie Jarvis, who owns Dillon's Corner, a souvenir and tackle shop. "Last week we weren't even thinking about it. It came up on us quick."

The storm's glancing blow was a blessing for some communities still recovering from last year's devastating Hurricane Isabel. That storm made landfall Sept. 18, 2003, damaging more than 53,000 homes. [...]

Vancouver — It was a close call for the University of British Columbia as a wildfire ripped through the forested area surrounding the campus early Sunday morning.

Forty firefighters, eight trucks and three helicopters responded to the blaze, which scorched four square kilometres on the cliffs overlooking Wreck Beach, a popular bonfire and party spot.

Officials said the fire was likely sparked by people, rather than natural causes such as lightning, but hadn't determined exactly how it was lit just after 3 a.m.

The blaze was another example of the effects of a drought and soaring temperatures that have settled over the province in recent weeks.

There were 324 wildfires burning in B.C.'s tinder-dry interior on Sunday and hundreds of firefighters from Eastern Canada and the United States arrived over the weekend to help put them out.

Information officer Steve Bachup said Sunday that crews continued to make progress on the province's largest fire at Lonesome Lake, which has promoted the evacuation of dozens of people and consumed a pioneer lodge. [...]

Police will step up patrols in the North Seattle neighborhoods hit by a series of fires early yesterday that drew hundreds of people into the streets and stretched firefighters to their limits, officials said.

At least five of the seven blazes were intentionally set, Mayor Greg Nickels said. [...]

AHMEDABAD, India (AFP) - Relentless monsoon rains lashed India as troops and the air force rescued more people marooned by flooding and the nationwide death toll neared 1,000.

The north and west of the agriculture-dependent country had been facing the spectre of drought but have now been inundated by the rains which have wreaked havoc in many parts of South Asia, officials said on Friday.

Eleven construction workers were killed Friday when a landslide triggered by heavy rains crushed the shed in which they were sleeping in the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir near an important Hindu pilgrimage route.

Countrywide, the death toll was at least 994.

The rains in India, Bangladesh and Nepal have triggered landslides, devastated crops, washed away roads and homes, left millions homeless and killed at least 1,815 people, according to an AFP tally since July 10 based on official figures. [...]

(India) Thirty-six more people have died in floods in Bihar taking the toll in the recent spell to 641 even as the situation was likely to aggravate with rain fed rivers rising in some districts on Saturday.

State Disaster Management Department said that fresh deaths were reported from Darbhanga (15), Sitamarhi (10), Muzaffarpur (six) and Samastipur (five) in the last two days taking the toll so far to 641.

Gandak, Kosi and Bagmati rivers, which had started receding, suddenly began to rise following incessant rains in their catchment areas, which could aggravate the situation in Sitamarhi, Samastipur, Muzaffarpur and Darbhanga districts, a Central Water Commission report said. [...]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - El Nino, the weather phenomenon which has killed hundreds and wreaked havoc in the Asia-Pacific region over the years, will develop anew in late 2004, the Climate Prediction Center of the U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration said.

In a monthly report issued late Thursday, the Center said sea surface temperatures have risen sharply in the central Pacific Ocean which may signal the start of the weather anomaly.

"El Nino conditions are expected to develop during the next three months," the Center said on its web site.

El Nino is a weather phenomenon which leads to an abnormal warming of waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It usually occurs once every three years.

The anomaly was first noticed by Latin American anchovy fishermen in the 19th century and was named in honor of the Christ child because it would take place around the year-end Christmas holiday season.

Severe El Ninos, as happened in 1997/98, would cause searing drought in Australia, the Philippines and Indonesia while spawning rampant flooding in Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia.

The warming of Pacific Ocean waters can cause floods and drought as far as South Africa and trigger severe winter storms in California.
El Nino killed hundreds of people in 1997/98 and caused billions of dollars in damages.

Sunspot 649, which unleashed five X-class solar flares in July, has returned, and it's growing again. Witness this 3-day (Aug. 6th - 8th) animation from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory: [Link]

Sunspot 649 is the one on the left. If the active region continues to develop, it could soon pose a renewed threat for strong solar flares.

JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - South African relief services said that they were feeding about 15,000 people in emergency shelters after heavy rains hit low-lying shantytowns in Cape Town.

"The number of people affected is about 15,000 going by the fact that we are providing meals for that number," Johann Minnie, spokesman for the city's disaster management centre told AFP by telephone Monday.

But he added: "We don't have a European-style flood situation with fast flowing water but only rising ground water after heavy rains which started last night and are continuing today."

Disaster management set up 12 emergency shelters in affected areas including the shantytowns, and the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and several Muslim-based non-governmental organisations were helping to feed people, Minnie said.

Weather forecasters said the rains would stop on Monday night but resume on Friday, he added.

Four Ukrainian and Czech mountaineers were plucked to safety high in the Central Asian peaks of Kyrgyzstan, but many more may still be trapped in avalanches that killed 11, officials warned.

Forty Russians were unaccounted for as a helicopter lifted out four Ukrainian and Czech survivors and the bodies of three mountaineers after three days of snow and fog hampered rescue attempts.

"We cannot rule out the possibility that more may have been trapped," said Emil Akhmatov, spokesman of the emergencies agency in Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous former Soviet constituent republic.

There was virtually no chance anyone would still be found alive, he said.

"There is no way to survive in such conditions -- we don't expect more survivors," Akhmatov told AFP. [...]

MIAMI - Tropical Storm Charley formed in the Caribbean on Tuesday and moved toward Jamaica while Tropical Storm Bonnie was headed across the Gulf of Mexico toward the U.S. Gulf Coast, meteorologists said.

Bonnie, which grew to tropical storm status Monday, could hit the Gulf Coast anywhere from Louisiana to the Big Bend of Florida, said Navy Lt. Dave Roberts, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center.

A tropical storm watch could be issued for that area later Tuesday, he said. The storm could possibly make landfall by Thursday, said James Franklin, a specialist at the hurricane center.

At 11 a.m. EDT, Bonnie was centered about 350 miles south-southwest of the mouth of Mississippi River, with sustained wind blowing at nearly 60 mph. But it was a small system with tropical storm-force wind of at least 39 mph extending only 30 miles from the center. The wind was expected to strengthen over the next day.

Bonnie was moving toward the northwest at about 8 mph, with a gradual turn toward the north likely late Monday.

Charley was centered about 350 miles south-southeast of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and was speeding toward the west-northwest at about 24 mph, the hurricane center said.

A tropical storm watch was posted for Jamaica.

Charley had maximum sustained wind of about 45 mph and was expected to strengthen. Unlike Bonnie, tropical storm-force wind extended 105 miles from the center.

Bonnie and Charley are the second and third named storms of the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.

Borden-Carleton, PEI - Passengers on the Confederation Bridge were forced to stop around midday Monday as a rare waterspout crossed the span between the Island and New Brunswick.

The gyrating column of water and spray, formed by a whirlwind between sea and cloud, crossed right over the bridge around 12:30 p.m.

Michel le Chasseur, bridge general manager, said staff first noticed strange patterns on the water from some of the 20 cameras that are constantly scanning the structure.

"The bridge controller started to see something on water, like water movement, spinning, like dust, and it all of a sudden became a funnel," said le Chasseur.

"It stayed in position quite a long time before it started to move. When it started to travel, they were not sure what would happen. We decided to close for about three minutes to allow it to cross."

Debbie Campbell of Stratford, PEI, was on the bridge at the time and said she was frightened at first.

But after realizing conditions were safe, she said it was a real treat to see such a phenomenon up close.

Meteorologist Tim Bullock said while waterspouts are not as powerful as tornadoes, they can still pack a punch.

The spouts can reach speeds of about 80 to 100 kilometres per hour, which could easily toss a small boat.

Mr. Bullock said it's rare to see a waterspout because they normally form out at sea when a cold front lands over warm water.

There were no reports of damage from Monday's funnel.

Cargo ship traffic has been brought to a halt on the Elbe river in eastern Germany as dry weather forces down water levels and the authorities said Wednesday that they expect the problem to get worse.

"No shipments are in place in the ports of Riesa, Dresden and Torgau," said a spokesman for the Saxony state inland ports.

Several Czech freighter ships were stuck in port in Magdeburg waiting for the water to start rising, water and navigation authorities there said.

Levels on the Elbe sat at 87 centimetres (34.25 inches), compared to the summer average of 189 centimetres (74.4 inches), and are expected to drop to 65 centimetres (25.6 inches) by Monday, they said.

Traffic was last halted on the Elbe in 2003 amid record summer temperatures.

Water levels are also low on the Rhine river in western Germany and while a tanker carrying 1,500 tonnes of fuel ran aground there on Tuesday, water authorities said it was probably due to navigator error.

A small tornado tore through a camping site on an island off France's Atlantic coast Wednesday, tossing several people into the air including an 18-year-old man who died of multiple injuries, firemen called to the scene said.

"Several people were really lifted off the ground, some of them were thrown up to 20 metres (66 feet). A young woman fell on the sand, but the young man, he fell on the cliff," one of the fire officers said.

The violent wind hit the island of Houat before dawn, carrying off some people sleeping in their tents, devastating the campsite and sinking five boats in the port.

Eight people were injured. The surviving 80 campers were taken to a municipal building in shock and were being transported back to the mainland.

An alert for a force seven gale, considered moderate but dangerous, was issued for the area later in the day.

The phenomenon struck during France's peak summer vacation period, when many holidaymakers were on the island.

ON THE AMUNDSEN ICEBREAKER - Scientists on a research icebreaker in the high Arctic say melting permafrost could be causing a massive slump on the seafloor of the Mackenzie shelf.

The slump, or underwater landslide, is located about 125 kilometres northwest of Tuktoyaktuk under the Beaufort Sea.

Researchers say it could cause major problems for companies with oil and gas leases in that area.

Scientists on the Amundsen icebreaker discovered the slump when they were surveying the MacKenzie shelf with a multi-beam sonar.

David Scott of Dalhousie University in Halifax says if the slump completely gives way, it would transfer tens of cubic kilometers of sediment to the deep sea.

Scott says that could pose a problem for oil and gas exploration in the area.

"[It's] a huge, just a huge slump and nobody knew about it, there's an oil lease in the middle of that for example, you wouldn't ever want to be drilling in something like that because you could lose part of the ocean floor pretty quickly."

Andre Rochon says the slump is similar to those that occur when frozen ground begins to melt and creep.

"It's probably being caused by the thawing of the permafrost, what we can see on the image tells us it's a process that's been going on for quite some time," says Rochon, who's with the University of Quebec in Rimouski.

"We have no way of saying if it's being accelerated by the actual warming that we observe today."

Scott and Rochon say scientists will return the area next year to try and determine the extent of the slump, and how fast it's moving.

More than 29 people were killed and some 1,500 injured as a powerful typhoon slammed eastern China, whipping through coastal cities early Friday, weather officials and state media said.

Among some 1,500 injured, more than 100 had been seriously hurt late Thursday, while some 60 people had been trapped aboard beached fishing boats as waves pounded the shore, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Some 400,000 people were evacuated from coastal areas as the most powerful typhoon in seven years slammed east China, it said.

Heavy seasonal rains in eastern Nigeria triggered the worst floods in recent memory, killing at least 23 people and leaving more than 2,500 people homeless, a government spokesman said Thursday.

"We have 500 families that have been displaced by the flood camped in the primary school in Song," Willie Zalwalie, spokesman for the Adamawa State government, told AFP by telephone from the state capital Yola.

Heavy rains overnight on Tuesday triggered a flash flood which devastated the farming village of Loko, in the Song local government area 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Yola, he said.

MIAMI (AP) - Florida braced for a potential double dose of hurricanes Thursday, ordering Florida Keys visitors to move out of hurricane Charley's path and preparing for possible flooding as tropical storm Bonnie approached the already soaked Panhandle.

Bonnie, which was approaching hurricane strength Wednesday, was forecast to hit the state early Thursday, at least 12 hours earlier than Charley. The prospect of back-to-back hurricanes prompted Gov. Jeb Bush to declare a state of emergency for all of Florida as schools and government offices announced closures and forecasters warned residents to prepare for the worst.

Such a double-whammy hasn't happened in Florida since Oct. 17, 1906, when two tropical storms hit the state, said Ken Reeves, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, a commercial forecasting centre.

MIAMI - Hundreds of thousands of people in the Tampa Bay area have been ordered to leave their homes as Hurricane Charley churns toward the Florida coast.

[...] Officials ordered 380,000 people in the Tampa Bay area to leave coastal and low-lying areas as the storm approaches. It's the largest peacetime evacuation in the history of the state.

Tokyo continued to swelter in a heatwave Wednesday, the 37th consecutive day temperatures had reached 30 Degrees Celsius, equalling a record set in 1995, the Meteorological Agency said.

There was no immediate prospect of relief either as the agency forecast that the baking weather would continue for at least for the next seven days.

"The record is most likely to be broken tomorrow," an agency official said. The 37-day heatwave is the longest on record for Tokyo's financial district since the agency began recording data in 1876.

Heat waves in the 21st Century will be more intense, more frequent and longer lasting, US experts report in the journal Science.

Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) used climate modelling to predict geographic patterns of future heat waves.

Future heat waves in some areas of Europe and North America will become more common and extreme in the second half of the 21st Century.

The research shows greenhouse emissions are likely to exacerbate the problem.

People choose to believe the climate change deniers because the truth is harder to accept

"We live," the cover story of the current Spectator tells us, "in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history." And who in the rich world would dare to deny it? The aristocrats, the cardinals, Prince Charles, the National Front, perhaps: those, in other words, whose former social dominance has been usurped by the times. But the rest of us? Step forward the man or woman who would exchange modern medicine for the leech, sewerage for the gutter, the washing machine for the mangle, European Union for European wars, relative democracy for absolute monarchy. Not many takers, then.

But the party is over. In 2,000 words, the Spectator provides plenty of evidence to support its first contention: "Now is good." It provides none to support its second: "The future will be better." Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived. They are also the most fortunate generations that ever will.

Let me lay before you three lines of evidence. The first is that we are living off the political capital accumulated by previous generations, and that this capital is almost spent. The massive redistribution which raised the living standards of the working class after the New Deal and the second world war is over. Inequality is rising almost everywhere, and the result is a global resource grab by the rich. The entire land mass of Britain, Europe and the United States is being re-engineered to accommodate the upper middle classes. They are buying second and third homes where others have none. Playing fields are being replaced with health clubs, public transport budgets with subsidies for roads and airports. Inequality of outcome, in other words, leads inexorably to inequality of opportunity.

The second line of evidence is that our economic gains are being offset by social losses. A recent study by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the costs of crime have risen by 13 times in the past 50 years, and the costs of family breakdown fourfold. The money we spend on such disasters is included in the official measure of human happiness: gross domestic product. Extract these costs and you discover, the study says, that our quality of life peaked in 1976.

But neither of these problems compares to the third one: the threat of climate change. In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Three wholly unexpected sets of findings now suggest that the problem could be much graver than anyone had imagined. Work by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that the screening effect produced by particles of soot and smoke in the atmosphere is stronger than climatologists thought; one variety of man-made filth, in other words, has been protecting us from the effects of another. As ancient smokestacks are closed down or replaced with cleaner technology, climate change, paradoxically, will intensify.

At the same time, rising levels of carbon dioxide appear to be breaking down the world's peat bogs. Research by Chris Freeman at the University of Bangor shows that the gas stimulates bacteria which dissolve the peat. Peat bogs are more or less solid carbon. When they go into solution the carbon turns into carbon dioxide, which in turn dissolves more peat. The bogs of Europe, Siberia and North America, New Scientist reports, contain the equivalent of 70 years of global industrial carbon emissions.

Worse still are the possible effects of changes in cloud cover. Until recently, climatologists assumed that, because higher temperatures would raise the rate of evaporation, more clouds would form. By blocking some of the heat from the sun, they would reduce the rate of global warming. But now it seems that higher temperatures may instead burn off the clouds. Research by Bruce Wielicki of Nasa suggests that some parts of the tropics are already less cloudy than they were in the 1980s.

The result of all this is that the maximum temperature rise proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001 may be a grave underestimate. Rather than a possible 5.8 degrees of warming this century, we could be looking at a maximum of 10 or 12. Goodbye, kind world.

Like every impending disaster (think of the rise of Hitler or the fall of Rome), this one has generated a voluble industry of denial. Few people are now foolish enough to claim that man-made climate change isn't happening at all, but the few are still granted plenty of scope to make idiots of themselves in public. Last month they were joined by the former environmentalist David Bellamy.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Bellamy asserted that "the link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth". Like almost all the climate change deniers, he based his claim on a petition produced in 1998 by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and "signed by over 18,000 scientists". Had Bellamy studied the signatories, he would have discovered that the "scientists" included Ginger Spice and the cast of MASH. The Oregon Institute is run by a fundamentalist Christian called Arthur Robinson. Its petition was attached to what purported to be a scientific paper, printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, the paper had not been peer-reviewed or published in any scientific journal. Anyone could sign the petition, and anyone did: only a handful of the signatories are experts in climatology, and quite a few of them appear to have believed that they were signing a genuine paper. And yet, six years later, this petition is still being wheeled out to suggest that climatologists say global warming isn't happening.

But most of those who urge inaction have given up denying the science, and now seek instead to suggest that climate change is taking place, but it's no big deal. Their champion is the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg. Writing in the Times in May, Lomborg claimed to have calculated that global warming will cause $5 trillion of damage, and would cost $4 trillion to ameliorate. The money, he insisted, would be better spent elsewhere.

The idea that we can attach a single, meaningful figure to the costs incurred by global warming is laughable. Climate change is a non-linear process, whose likely impacts cannot be totted up like the expenses for a works outing to the seaside. Even those outcomes we can predict are impossible to cost. We now know, for example, that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years. If these rivers dry up during the irrigation season, then the rice production which currently feeds over one third of humanity collapses, and the world goes into net food deficit. If Lomborg believes he can put a price on that, he has plainly spent too much of his life with his calculator and not enough with human beings.

But people listen to this nonsense because the alternative is to accept what no one wants to believe.

We live in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history. And it will not last long.

NEW YORK - A young couple who leapt from their car as a flash flood engulfed it at a New York City intersection were electrocuted by a downed power line, authorities said.

Witnesses said the passenger, 19-year-old Alana Berenson, sprang from the car first Wednesday and was swept into the waist-high torrent. Her boyfriend, 23-year-old Joseph Cheethman, jumped out after her.

Authorities believe the couple, both students at SUNY Maritime College, were electrocuted by a downed power line at the intersection in the borough of Queens.

"It was awful," said a witness, Igor Yerokhin. "I wanted to help them because she was screaming. ... But it was too dangerous."

The freakish storms that moved through the city all afternoon also were responsible for lightning strikes near two boys, ages 8 and 13, who were hospitalized. Neither was seriously injured.

Unseasonal heavy rain has caused flooding in parts of south Wales and a severe weather warning is in place.

Five fire crews were sent to Neath following reports of flooding in the town centre, where several shops were closed.

Rain has caused a landslide on the railway between Abercynon and Aberdare, with delays expected for a few hours.

South Wales Fire Service says it was getting up to four emergency calls a minute and more heavy rain is forecast.

In Neath, Safeway supermarket was closed after a ceiling collapsed. Another town centre store, Wilkinsons, is also closed because of flooding.

South Wales Fire Service were taking up to four flooding calls a minute early in the afternoon.

Two people were trapped in a car outside a fire station in The Basin, Abercynon, where the water has been reported as being two feet high.

A landslide on the rail line between Penrhiwceiber and Abercynon initially blocked the Aberdare-Abercynon line.

It later re-opened, but a spokesman for Arriva Trains Wales said trains were only running at 5mph and continued delays were expected.

Replacement bus services had also experienced delays because roads in the region were flooded, he added.

Fire crews were also sent to Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan, where the High Street was reported to be under six inches of water.

Crews also dealt with flooding incidents in Cilfynydd near Pontypridd, Maindy Road in the Rhondda and Pontypridd.

Warning

The A4119 between Tonypandy and Clydach Vale in the Rhondda was reportedly flooded, and a caravan site in Kenfig Hill was also affected, as well as The Bear Inn in Llanharry.

Fire crews also pumped water from a house in North Cornelly.

Meanwhile, water has subsided from the Girls and Boys Club in Williamstown in the Rhondda and The New Globe public house in Llantwit Major.

Parts of Powys were also hit by storms. Lightning struck and damaged the roof of a house at Crickhowell.

A Met office severe weather warning was put in place and BBC Wales meteorologist Derek Brockway said more heavy rain was on the way before it dies out later on Thursday night.

TONOPAH, Ariz. -- A dust storm caused a string of fiery chain-reaction crashes involving dozens of vehicles on an interstate highway, killing at least two people and injuring 32 others, authorities said.

The pileup Wednesday night about 45 miles west of Phoenix involved a loaded passenger bus and six tractor-trailers, and started when a passenger vehicle had stopped in the middle of the road.

"This dust storm came in pretty quick," said Officer Erick Anspach of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. "Some drivers reported having only a second or two until impact."

Both lanes of Interstate 10 were blocked and emergency crews initially had a tough time reaching the crash scene. "We could see nothing but dust and smoke" upon arriving, said firefighter Nate Ryan.

One of the dead victims was in a car that had become wedged under a truck, DPS spokesman Steve Volden said. The second fatality was a truck driver.

Ambulances and numerous helicopters transported victims to nearby hospitals, Volden said. The injuries ranged from cuts and scrapes to life-threatening.

Several vehicles caught fire after the collisions, said Volden.

Early Thursday, officers could be seen walking on the quarter-mile line of wreckage, looking for victims with flashlights.

Volden said 24 people were on the bus, including two drivers. Officers didn't know how many passengers were injured.

(CNN) -- Firefighters Thursday are battling two fast-moving wildfires in Northern California that left more than 40 structures damaged or destroyed and forced the evacuation of more than 100 residences.

A fire in the Jones Valley area, about 20 miles northeast of Redding near Shasta Lake, blazed across 1,000 acres -- mostly in two hours -- leaving 40 structures damaged or destroyed, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. It was not clear whether any of the buildings were residences, department spokesman Kent Hiemforth said.

Some 700 fire personnel have been summoned to help control the blaze, which was 20 percent contained by early Thursday, Hiemforth said. Air tankers and helicopters will be dispatched after sunrise, he said.

Area residents were evacuated to a nearby elementary school.

Sparks from a lawn mower caused the blaze, state forestry officials told The Associated Press.

In addition, firefighters worked overnight to control a fast-moving fire about 100 miles away near Oroville, according to Cyndi Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. That fire destroyed one residence after officials ordered the evacuation of more than 100 homes in the wildfire's path, Wilson said.

News helicopters captured a scene of flames marching toward a number of buildings in the largely rural area.

The fire was reported Wednesday afternoon and had consumed 750 acres by early Thursday, Wilson said. About 30 percent of the fire has been contained, she said. Evacuees were taken to a local college.

The blaze was northeast of Oroville, about 75 miles north of Sacramento, and was moving north toward the historic town of Cherokee, Wilson said. More than 200 firefighters were battling the fire, with more on the way.

The cause of the fire is under investigation, said Janet Marshall, spokeswoman for the Butte County Fire Rescue.

TAMPA, Fla. - With a "scary, scary" Hurricane Charley zeroing in on Florida's west coast Friday, state officials urged about a million tourists and residents to evacuate and avoid the path of a storm that could submerge parts of this city's downtown and other neighboring areas.

Charley's expected 120 mph top sustained winds and massive storm surge could devastate coastal and low-lying areas in Tampa and St. Petersburg. Everything from waterfront condominium towers to vulnerable mobile homes were in danger on the Gulf Coast.

Charley's center was expected to pass west of the Florida Keys early Friday before hitting the Tampa Bay area later in the day, dumping heavy rain and possibly spawning sporadic tornadoes, Hugh Cobb, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said Thursday. About 6.5 million of Florida's 17 million residents were in Charley's projected path, the U.S. Census Bureau reported.

"It does have the potential of devastating impact. ... This is a scary, scary thing," said Gov. Jeb Bush, who had declared a state of emergency. [...]

ROCKY POINT, N.C. - Tornadoes spun off a tropical system and touched down in eastern North Carolina early Friday, killing three people and injuring more than two dozen others, officials said. Buildings also were damaged, and power outages were reported.

One of the victims, a girl, was killed at a trailer park in Rocky Point, north of Wilmington, said Andie Thomas, director of the emergency department at Pender Memorial Hospital. She said at least 15 people were hurt in the trailer park, including the girl's parents.

Ingar Sidbury, 27, said he and his wife and cousin, along with three young children, piled into the bathroom for shelter just before the tornado "sucked the roof right off" of his house in Pender County.

Sidbury was awakened when the power went off. "Then I heard a whistling noise like a train coming," he said.

A shelter was set up at a school for about 100 residents of destroyed houses and trailers. Officials said 25 homes had major damage, and Gov. Mike Easley planned to tour the damaged area.

Sheriff Carson Smith said he expected some weather effects from Hurricane Charley now that the remnants of Tropical Storm Bonnie had passed.

"Bonnie came right over the top of us," Smith said. "Hopefully we'll have most of our emergency operations over by the time it (Charley) gets here."

Identities of the three victims who were killed were not immediately available, said Scott Whisnant, spokesman for Cape Fear Hospital in Wilmington. A mass casualty plan was activated to treat the injuries.

Tornadoes were also reported in other communities Friday, with injuries and building damage. At least five homes in Harnett County were destroyed Thursday by severe weather when the remnants of Tropical Storm Bonnie blew across the state.

SHANGHAI (AFP) - At least 63 people were killed and more than 1,800 injured when a powerful typhoon ripped through eastern China, leaving massive destruction in its wake, local officials said.

Typhoon Rananim, one of the strongest storms in years, hit land in Wenling city on the coast of Zhejiang province, about 135 kilometres (85 miles) south of Shanghai, late Thursday.

Provincial officials said Friday 42,400 homes were destroyed and 88,000 were damaged while 260,000 hectares (642,000 acres) of farmland was ruined and thousands of trees uprooted.

The death toll was likely to rise as the storm roared its way through the province.

"Initial statistics show that at least 63 are dead and 185 are seriously injured," an official from the disaster relief section of the Zhejiang provincial civil affairs bureau told AFP.

The bureau said 1,800 people had been injured. More than 31,000 head of livestock also perished.

Another official at the same office, surnamed Su, said at least 15 people were missing and the death toll was likely to rise.

"The conditions are very bad and because we are still gathering information this figure is likely to increase," the official said.

There was no immediate news on the fate of more than 60 people stranded at sea on board fishing boats as the storm hit.

"The typhoon hit the city badly," a Wenling civil affairs bureau official surnamed Wang told AFP.

"Everywhere there are uprooted trees. Some trees have even been cut off in the middle. Virtually all the traffic signs have been blown over and are on the roads," she said.

"There's flooding and most of the roads are closed. Windows are shattered and walls have collapsed, houses have been destroyed."
The city was without power for most of the night although it had been restored by Friday morning.

Some 510,000 people were evacuated from coastal areas in the province before the typhoon, which was packing winds clocked at 160 kilometres per hour (99 mph), whipped in off the sea.

The Wenling Meteorological Bureau said Rananim had now been downgraded to a tropical storm but was still blowing force nine winds as it made its way west into Jiangxi and Hunan provinces.

"The eye of the typhoon has moved to Changshan county and lessened to a tropical storm," said spokesman Xu Huihuang.

"At the centre the wind is now force nine and over the next few days it will move to Jiangxi and Hunan provinces, bringing heavy rain."

An official at the Zhejiang anti flood and drought headquarters added: "The dangerous period had passed. Today the wind speed has reduced a lot but it is still blowing, it is still raining.

"Today's situation is better but it's not over yet."

East China is prone to typhoons and has been pummeled by at least 14 over the past 50 years.

The worst on record was in 1997 when 236 people were killed.

[...] Two years ago when local fishermen started hauling up pots filled with dead crabs, scientists figured out that a huge mass of sub-Arctic water with very low levels of oxygen and high levels of nutrients had welled up from the ocean's depths and settled in for the summer on the Continental Shelf off central Oregon.

The Dead Zone dissipated that fall, and based on 40 years of ocean monitoring and local fishing lore, many thought they would never see it again. This summer, the Dead Zone came back.

"What I think we are seeing is a tipping of the balance of the ecosystem," said Jack Barth, a professor of oceanography at Oregon State University. "We don't fully understand what the cause of that is. We have some good ideas that it is related to some fundamental changes in circulation and the source of water for the Oregon Continental Shelf."

There are more than 30 man-caused dead zones -- scientists call them hypoxic or low-oxygen events -- around the world in enclosed waters, including Hood Canal in Puget Sound, the Mississippi River delta and Chesapeake Bay.

There, excess fertilizer from farm fields washing down rivers fuels a surge in microscopic plants called phytoplankton. When they die, bacteria decompose them, using up the oxygen in the water and leaving fish, crabs and other sea life to suffocate.

Naturally caused dead zones in open water, like the one off Oregon, are rare and less well understood. Others have been found off the coasts of Peru and South Africa.

Hurricane Charley covers Florida, the Rigged Election State.

The Category 4 storm was stronger than expected when the eye reached the mainland Friday afternoon at Charlotte Harbor, pummeling the coast with winds reaching 145 mph and a surge of sea water of 13 to 15 feet. More than a million customers were without power statewide.

President Bush declared a major disaster area in Florida. His brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, projected damage from Charley could exceed $15 billion, but that estimate was preliminary.

Damage was especially heavy in downtown Punta Gorda on Charlotte Harbor.

"It looks like a war zone - power lines down everywhere, street signs, pieces of roofs blown off, huge trees uprooted," said Buddy Martin, managing editor of the Charlotte Sun.

Martin said he saw homes ripped apart at two trailer parks. "There were four or five overturned semi trucks - 18-wheelers - on the side of the road," he said.

Extensive damage was also reported on exclusive Captiva Island, a narrow strip of sand west of Fort Myers.

The hurricane rapidly gained strength in the Gulf of Mexico after crossing Cuba and swinging around the Florida Keys as a more moderate Category 2 storm Friday morning. An estimated 1.4 million people evacuated in anticipation of the strongest hurricane to strike Florida since Andrew in 1992.

By midnight, the center of the storm had moved offshore into the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Daytona Beach.

Charley reached landfall at 3:45 p.m. EDT, when the eye passed over barrier islands off Fort Myers and Punta Gorda, some 110 miles southeast of the Tampa Bay area.

Wayne Sallade, director of emergency management in Charlotte County, was angry that forecasters underestimated the intensity of the storm until shortly before landfall.

"They told us for years they don't forecast hurricane intensity well, and unfortunately we know that now," he said. "This magnitude storm was never predicted."

Florida Emergency Management Director Craig Fugate was adamant that local officials should have been prepared but acknowledged: "Hurricane forecasting is not a perfect science."

The president's declaration made federal money available to Charlotte, Lee, Manatee and Sarasota counties. "Our prayers are with you and your families tonight," Bush said from Seattle.

About 138,000 customers lost electricity in Lee County - including the emergency management center.

A crash on Interstate 75 in Sarasota County killed one person, and a wind gust caused a truck to collide with a car in Orange County, killing a young girl. A man who stepped outside his house to smoke a cigarette died when a banyan tree fell on him in Fort Myers, authorities said.

Anne Correia spent a harrowing two hours alone in a closet in her Punta Gorda apartment.

"I could hear the nails coming out of the roof," she said. "The walls were shaking violently, back and forth, back and forth. It was just the most amazing and terrifying thing. I just kept praying to God. I prayed with my whole heart."

Don Paterson of Punta Gorda rode out the hurricane in his trailer. It began to rock, a flying microwave oven hit him in the head, and then the refrigerator fell on him. He spent the rest of the storm hiding behind a lawnmower, as his home was demolished.

"Happy Friday the 13th," he said.

As an airplane hangar at the Charlotte County airport flew apart around him and his wife, "It sounded like a calypso band gone crazy," said Jim Morgan.

The eye of the hurricane passed directly over Punta Gorda, a city of 15,000. At the county airport, wind tore apart small planes, and one flew down the runway as if it were taking off. The storm spun a parked pickup truck 180 degrees, blew the windows out of a sheriff's deputy's car and ripped the roof off an 80- by 100-foot building.

At Charlotte Regional Medical Center in Punta Gorda, up to 50 people came in with storm injuries. The hospital was so badly damaged that patients were being transferred to other hospitals on Coast Guard helicopters.

"There's a lot of crush injuries," hospital CEO Josh Putter said. "Things have fallen on people, crushed their legs, crushed their pelvis - a lot of bleeding."

In Arcadia, 20 miles inland, one wall collapsed at a civic center serving as a shelter for 1,200 people. Only one person was hurt, and her injuries were minor.

The wall "started peeling back," said one evacuee, Alida Dejongh. "It lifted, and you could just see more and more light. You could hear this popping and zipping noise like a giant Ziploc bag."

On Sanibel Island and in Cape Coral, streets were flooded, trees uprooted and power lines down, but there were no reports of major damage. In Desoto County outside Arcadia, several dead cows, wrapped in barbed wire, littered the roadside.

On Fort Myers Beach, sea water swamped the barrier island. At least 20 people sought treatment at a hospital in Fort Myers.

"We're going under," said Lucy Hunter, a hotel operator. "When the ocean decides to meet my bay, that's a lot of water. It's already in my pool."

At 11 p.m. EDT, the center of the storm was about 10 miles southwest of Daytona Beach and moving north-northeast near 25 mph, with an increase expected. Maximum sustained winds were near 85 mph with higher gusts.

The center was expected to move into the Atlantic Ocean near Daytona Beach, then approach the South Carolina coast Saturday morning. A hurricane warning was in effect from Cocoa Beach to North Carolina.

About a million people in the Tampa Bay area had been told to leave their homes. Some drove east, only to find themselves in the path of the storm as it moved north.

"I feel like the biggest fool," said Robert Angel of Tarpon Springs, who sought safety in a Lakeland motel. "I spent hundreds of dollars to be in the center of a hurricane. Our home is safe, but now I'm in danger."

The storm forced the closing of Orlando theme parks Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando, SeaWorld and Animal Kingdom. The only previous time the parks closed for a hurricane was in 1999 for Floyd.

Charley was the strongest hurricane to hit Florida since the Category 5 Andrew hit south of Miami in 1992. Hurricane Mitch, which stalled over Honduras in 1998, also was Category 5 with sustained wind over 155 mph. Mitch killed some 10,000 people in Central America.

Charley was expected to slide along Georgia's coast on Saturday. Farther north, hurricane warnings and watches were raised along the South Carolina coast.

CHARLESTON, S.C. - Tourists and residents fled inland in droves as a slightly weaker Hurricane Charley bore down on the South Carolina coast after smashing into Florida.

Roads clogged Friday night as some of the 180,000 vacationers and inhabitants of the state's Grand Strand — beaches and high-dollar homes and hotels — heeded a mandatory evacuation order as Hurricane Charley's path swung toward South Carolina.

Gov. Mark Sanford had urged voluntary evacuation earlier Friday. Then the Hurricane's strength increased and it veered to the east as it made landfall in Florida with 145 mph winds.

"This has proven to be an unpredictable storm," Sanford said as he ordered the mandatory evacuation.

Early Saturday, the center of the storm was in the Atlantic Ocean, about 190 miles south-southwest of Charleston, S.C., and moving north-northeast at 25 mph. Forecasters expected Charley to increase in speed. Maximum sustained winds were near 85 mph with higher gusts. [...]

The sediment sampler was hammered into the ground under the ice in order to recover sediment samples. It is here filled with a mixture of mud and ice.

A team of international researchers working on the North Greenland Ice Core Project recently recovered what appear to be plant remnants nearly two miles below the surface between the bottom of the glacial ice and the bedrock.

Researchers from the project, known as NGRIP, said particles found in clumps of reddish material recovered from the frozen, muddy ice in late July look like pine needles, bark or blades of grass. Thought to date to several million years ago before the last ice age during the Pleistocene epoch smothered Greenland, the material will be analyzed in several laboratories, said researchers.

The suspected plant material under about 10,400 feet of ice indicates the Greenland Ice Sheet "formed very fast," said NGRIP project leader Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute. "There is a big possibility that this material is several million years old -- from a time when trees covered Greenland," she said.

People are pulling and pushing to guide the 3 ton winch up through the narrow passage to the surface from 8 meters depth. In the other end, the camp bulldozer is pulling hard.

"Several of the pieces look very much like blades of grass or pine needles," said University of Colorado at Boulder geological sciences Professor James White, a NGRIP principal investigator. "If confirmed, this will be the first organic material ever recovered from a deep ice-core drilling project," said White, also a fellow of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

The ice cores in which the reddish material was found also contain a high content of trapped gas, which is expected to help researchers determine what the area's climate history was like on an annual basis during the past 123,000 years.

Each yearly record of ice can reveal past temperatures and precipitation levels, the content of ancient atmospheres and even evidence for the timing, direction and magnitude of distant storms, fires and volcanic eruptions, said White.

NGRIP is an international project with participants from Denmark, Germany, Japan, the United States, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Belgium and Iceland. NGRIP is funded by the participating countries, including the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The cores from NGRIP are cylinders of ice four inches in diameter that were brought to the surface in 11.5-foot lengths. Developed by the NGRIP research team, the specialized deep ice drill has been used to bore several deep ice cores.

The NGRIP drilling site is located roughly in the middle of Greenland at an elevation of about 9,850 feet. The temperature in the subsurface trenches where ice-core scientists worked is minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit.

CU-Boulder doctoral student Trevor Popp of INSTAAR was the lead driller on the 2004 NGRIP effort. Another CU-Boulder graduate student, Annalisa Schilla, also participated in the 2004 NGRIP field season.

PUNTA GORDA, Fla. - As the remnants of Hurricane Charley disintegrated off the New England coast on Sunday, Florida residents began the massive task of cleaning up from a storm that state officials estimated caused damages as high as $11 billion for insured homes alone.

President Bush flew over the most heavily damaged areas in a Marine helicopter Sunday before landing in this retirement haven of 15,000 people, which was devastated by Charley. The storm killed at least 13 people in Florida — including a man who was crushed outside his home when a banyan tree fell on him — and left thousands temporarily homeless. [...]

REDDING, Calif. - A wind-fueled wildfire roared through an old mining town near Redding on Sunday, destroying 20 homes and forcing nearly 125 residents to flee, officials said. The blaze broke out Saturday afternoon and quickly grew to 2,500 acres, sweeping through the mountain community of French Gulch, about 20 miles east of Redding, said Linda Galvan, spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The fire threatened nearly 100 homes and destroyed two commercial buildings.

"It didn't take long for this one to move through," Galvan said. "The winds are very erratic and going in every direction."

About 450 personnel worked to contain the fire, which was burning out of control and could expand to 5,000 acres by late Sunday morning, officials said. Firefighters were able to save several buildings, including a church, post office and elementary school, from the flames.

The cause was still under investigation. [...]

Beyond our best calculations lies a force over which we have no control

I live in a mobile home. It leaks. The ants really own it and I just rent it from them.

In many ways it suits a messy bachelor like myself. It's kind of like a little boat, but because it's jammed with so many books and things, I'm tired of bumping into stuff. Maybe someday I'll move into a yurt.

Low maintenance living allows me to spend virtually all my time reading and writing on the Internet. It's such an honor for me to have made so many genuine friends because of that. And I dearly appreciate all those recent inquiries about my well-being that my sudden unscheduled absence from the e-mail circuit has triggered.

Probably the major drawback about living in a mobile home is its fragility, especially in regard to heavy weather. Florida is hurricane country, and I always watch the weather forecasts with a keen interest. The 70-foot-tall pine tree that shelters my lanai with scented boughs and numerous sapling offspring is, in high winds, a potential bomb.

So when the Weather Channel tells me five days in advance that a tropical depression named Charley somewhere down around St. Kitts is on track to arrive in my hometown, I do take notice.

We in South Florida were more than adequately warned that a major disaster could befall us on Friday the 13th. The forecasters were soothsayers, in this instance.

Trouble is, everybody in this neighborhood has been lulled into a false sense of security. Hurricanes never come here. They sometimes fake like they're going to, but always veer off or vaporize before they actually hit. Many people suspect some kind of geomagnetic magic protects this region from harm.

It was probably this kind of thinking that cost a good many people their lives in Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte on this savage Friday the 13th, August 2004.

I've experienced numerous hurricanes, as a child in Massachusetts, as a young adult in Texas, and more recently in Florida, with the dreadful Andrew. So they scare me. I know what the power of those winds is like. Like an airplane taking off, when it shifts into second gear, is what.

I packed my car with books, papers, mementos and my computer, and by mid- Thursday evening was ready to roll on out of here, not far, just to higher ground and stronger walls, my sister's house, just up the road in western Port Charlotte.

I watched the local news station until 1 a.m. (Channel 2 in Fort Myers, excellent weather guys), and noticed that the leading edge of thunderstorms was about a half hour south of Marco Island, more than a hundred miles to the south of me. Time to get some sleep.

A series of loud thunder salvos woke me at 3 a.m. and I bolted upright. Visons of Armageddon danced in my brain. Visions of drowning.

The leading edge was moving fast, but it passed, and a grim calm followed. I obsessed about storm surge as Charley churned closer, and at 4 a.m. called my sister and told her we had about a two-hour window to get the hell out of here and bolt across the state to West Palm Beach.

Then, the TV guys reported the storm had moved a tenth of a degree of longitude to the west, and I calmed down a little. It was a good indication. After packing my computer and the last of my things, I headed to my sister's at 6 a.m. She was riveted to the TV. We talked it over, decided the storm would pass to the west of us about 60 miles out to sea, and decided to stay.

I slept for three hours. When I awoke, neighbors were chatting, and everyone seemed calm. Tense hours passed with edgy banter. At 2 p.m., as Charley's eye came careening over Captiva Island (created a new island as it did by cutting the existing island in half), the forecast changed radically. The fairly threatening Category Two storm had been upgraded to a monster Category Four, with winds of 145 mph (on TV tonight they say the killer winds that hit Punta Gorda might have been 155). The fairly threatening storm surge prediction of 7- 10 feet had been boosted to 10-15 feet (elevation of my sister's house is 13 feet, about a mile from the Myakka River, which near its mouth is the western half of Charlotte Harbor; she lives about a mile from the water).

And worse — the new predicted track had it aimed right at us. I was panicking. Repetitive calculations flitted through my brain like a jukebox gone mad. I had serious visions of being up to my chest in water — in her kitchen! — by 8 p.m. Then my sister came up with a great idea. Her office. It was on the fifth floor in the solidest building in Port Charlotte, a five- story cement behemoth on the main drag, Route 41.

So off we went, armed with peanut butter sandwiches and a weather radio (but not a flashlight) as the storm cycled closer.

For awhile we were content, if nervous. At least we were safe from the storm surge (which never actually happened). But as the day wore on — second by second — we began to realize that even the most rational, well-considered decision ultimately meant nothing when arrayed against the unfathomable and momentous caprice of Nature, which forever moves at her own speed, in her own direction, for reasons no one can ever anticipate.

We knew we were in real trouble when we noticed the pictures hanging on the wall of this formidably solid concrete building swinging back and forth like a pendulum. Looking out the windows we soon tired of the random debris amongst white foam flitting spastically across our field of vision.

The came the giant crunches. Roof blowing off. And the creaks and groans and the building rocking so hard that we had to hang onto something. More slams from the roof, and my sister saying, "We've got to go down a floor, in case the whole roof goes." It was still dry at that point, but when we made our way down the stairwell, water was dripping down the middle all the way from the roof to the ground, the wind whistled like that groaning man in the Munsch painting, and an occasional crunch from above rattled the fillings in my teeth. We hid in a fourth floor men's room, but only for a few moments, as water seeped through the ceiling, and we heard the distant sounds of heavy crashes.

"Let's keep heading down," my sister urged. "We can't stay here." I had to agree, and once again we were back in the leaky stairwell, negotiating the treacherous steps. At some point the fire alarm began its incessant blaring as we made it down to the second floor.

My sister was so brave. Hobbled by sciatica, wielding my metal baseball bat as a crutch, she plodded forth through pain in every step and suppressed panic in every step. We made it to the second floor, and thankfully found a family comfortably ensconced in the regional headquarters of a delicatessen chain — Obee's — and they welcomed us in.

Blissfully, we could barely hear the fire alarm, which filled the rest of the building with the banshee howl of the apocalypse. We kicked back a bit and got on the cellphones to assorted relatives and friends, all of whom were safe in unmolested locations.

Even more blissfully, it was at this point that the winds began to subside. We wouldn't learn until much later that we were only three miles from where literally dozens of mobile parks, close to the edge of lower Charlotte Harbor, were reduced to rubble by 120-mile-per-hour winds. TV reports said rescuers couldn't even get in to find the bodies.

With the winds lessening, I chanced a return to the fifth floor to retrieve our gear. My sister had been right. The floor was covered with water and most of the ceiling tiles had fallen. Two of the Obee's teens helped me cart our stuff back down to our second-floor sanctuary.

As time passed and the winds lessened, I poked my head outside from the ground floor, checked out my sister's car and saw that an Airborne delivery box had bashed out the back window. The box lay nearby. I tried to move it. It weighed about 300 pounds. Finally with the help of a muscular teenager also seeking shelter in the building, we managed to move it out of the way.

About that time the fire department arrived. I tried to tell them what I knew but they stoically didn't want to hear it. They had their own procedures. But the lead firefighter ordered me not to go back in the building. Yeah right, with my hobbled sister in there. I snuck around to another door, used her key, and found my way back to her before the fireguys found her in our comfortable sanctuary at Obee's. We gathered up our stuff and crept down the watery stairwell. Then the firefighters helped us down, and we got the hell out of there.

We speculated that the building would be condemned, for all the swaying it had undergone surely had destroyed its structural integrity. My sister, a Realtor, kvetched about all the real estate records and personal items she would have liked to retrieve from her office, now likely unobtainable if the building were to be condemned.

So we drove through lots of broken glass, shattered tree limbs and downed traffic lights back to her house, which was undamaged but without power. My nephew, who had been safely ensconced with his girlfriend up in North Port, arrived, and we went out and cut some brush that blocked the entrance to my sister's subdivision.

Finally, he stood guard at my sister's while I reloaded my car and drove off to check the status of my humble abode. It was a relief to see virtually no damage and only scrambled tree branches in my driveway. The fact that my power was still out was a very minor irritant. Even though I was sweating like a pig with no A/C, I had no trouble falling asleep.

Due to the medical needs of my sister, I wasn't able to re-hook-up my computer for another 24 hours, and then when I did it took me another four hours to start it. But start it did. And here I am.

Even though Hurricane Charley scared the living feces out of us, our ordeal seems trivial compared to the shocking savagery of nature that cost at least 15 people their lives in circumstances we could totally relate to only a few miles from where we were doing our crazy dance with the elements.

It's easy to second-guess these kinds of panicky decisions. Stay or go. Fight or flight. But with a hurricane, the right decision can still be wrong, and vice versa.

I am still in a placid kind of shock, as I dash off this diary to reassure my friends that I am safe. Two immediate reflections come to mind.
The first was shared by both me and my sister — but not spoken — while we were stuck on that fifth floor, feeling that building sway back and forth like some amusement park ride from hell. The thought was like we would soon be riding the building down to the ground, just like some towering inferno or — and I say this meaning no disrespect — a World Trade Center tower.

The second was the last look I took out the fifth floor window as we headed toward the stairwell on our journey toward safety — and sanity. What I saw was a kind of ethereal washing machine, a white churning mist, not unlike surf, flecked with fragments of flying rubble, tree limbs, pieces of signs, debris. It was a vision of hell I hope I never see again.

We were lucky. Others, not so far away from us and just as innocent, were not.

Let us now say a little prayer for all those who surely made logistical decisions as well-considered as mine, but who, opposed by the cold impartiality of ever-inscrutable nature, were unable to escape the vicious twist of meteorological fate that will forever be known as Hurricane Charley.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the west coast of Florida, which normally is very pleasant place to live. His new book, "The Perfect Enemy," will hopefully be available in a few weeks.

ON THE AMUNDSEN ICEBREAKER IN QUEEN MAUD GULF - Scientists are peering into the muck of an Arctic seabed, looking for ancient clues about present-day climate change.

[...] By looking at the six-metre long samples from top to bottom, researchers may also find clues about today's climate, and if the Arctic ice cover is being harmed by climate change.

"Current thinking is the ice cover is actually decreasing," said Dalhousie Prof. David Scott, one of the scientists in charge of the research project.

"We should be able to tell if that's a natural cycle, 100-year cycle, 200-year cycle, or whether this is totally out of line with what's happened over the last 10,000 years."

The researchers have taken several samples along the Mackenzie Shelf. Their next step is to analyze the sediments to reconstruct what the Arctic was like over the last 10,000 years.

The UK's Royal Society has launched an investigation into the rising acidity of the world's oceans due to pollution from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

The change could have catastrophic consequences for marine life.

Oceans mop up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, lowering the water's pH value - an effect that may be exacerbated by burning of fossil fuels.

What an eye awakening day this was. I thought that I had seen it all having been involved from Viet Nam to the beginning of Desert Storm in my military and civilian law enforcement career, but today I learned about a new part of the shame game.

For those who won't bother to read all this report, let me spell out the body counts that 6 of us (all retired military and/or law enforcement) went out to confirm today in different areas. These are confirmed bodies in the trucks, restaurant refers, or refer vans, and they are NOT 'missing persons' or animals:

Charlotte Harbor areas - 58 dead as of 5pm today; Fort Myers & the barrier islands - 21 deaths as of 3pm today; Punta Gorda - 275+ deaths and escalating each hour; Desoto County - 36 deaths, expected to increase;

These figures came from our own eyes, medical personnel, various county sheriff's deputies, and eye witnesses or residents from the worst devastated areas. CNN and the rest of the world biased and controlled media are fooling none of us who live here. The current CONFIRMED body count in our 3 county area on the west coast of Florida is near 400 as I write this.

Readers should know right up front who is doing their best and who fails to pass the grade:

Honors awards to those people who have given and done the most: 1. City of North Port Police Department 2. Charlotte County Deputies 3. Desoto County Deputies 4. Visiting Pinellas County Deputies 5. Florida Power and Light

All of the above have gone beyond the call of duty. They are showing us what real cops and utility workers used to be... humanitarians.
Failing grades go to:

1. FEMA, the government loan people. 2. John Ellis Bush (JEB, the corporate Governor of Florida). 3. The untrained and unequipped remnants of the Florida National Guard. 4. George Walker Bush, the non-elected and appointed U.S. President. 5. Recycling firms who are stealing aluminum siding from destroyed mobile homes. 6. Those selling bags of ice for $10. 7. Thieves from Miami taking personal belongings from demolished homes. 8. Those thieves demanding money up front to file fake insurance claims.

Here's some of what went on today...

There are staging areas for FEMA (with their red and white signs to let you know they are 'there'), et al, that we could not openly enter into with photo and movie cameras having been 'discovered' in our vehicles... our cars and pick-ups were searched in the 'sensitive' areas where the worst devastation took place and where we were then refused entry. None-the-less, we still walked into most of these "off limits" areas at waterfront motels, I-75 restaurant/commercial areas, destroyed mobile home parks, and the temporary Charlotte morgue... to name a few. This is how we came up with the above figures for body counts. We spoke with medical personnel who have come from Miami to work triage and other temporary facilities, ambulance drivers (a special thanks to the Ambutrans people), homeless residents, and deputies from many different counties.

Considering most of the trained and experienced personnel and modern equipment from the Florida National Guard are now in the Middle East, JEB THE BUSH dared to send us antiquated equipment that broke down on I-75 driven by untrained personnel who have no idea what to do. Worse is that there were no water purification trucks (erdilators) sent, just old water tankers and old communications and storage trailers. It was a circus show and a true military cluster puck. There is no Florida National Guard... all the necessary equipment we need is sitting in Iraq or Kuwait right now.

A professional group of electronic thieves intercepted telephone calls from Lee and Charlotte counties to the special Allstate and State Farm insurance claims lines. They demanded credit card numbers and up-front payments from those calling in claims stating that they could guarantee 24 hour payment for all damages if the victims would pay $250-500 to them. [...]

As of this morning, our area has found the need to organize our own security 24/7. Last night and early this morning, we had thieves driving our streets stealing personal belongings and clothes that had not yet been collected from those neighbors who hadn't made it back here yet. We now warn all the Miami and Tampa gangs roaming our streets that if you dare to once again trespass in our community, you will deal with better armed resistance from us than you would from the local police and Sheriff's Departments. Other areas are now doing the same as we are. We will personally protect ourselves and what possessions we have left. We have been through far too much to be victims of prey. [...]

CHARLOTTE COUNTY - Two refrigerated trucks sat in the wind-torn parking lot of the Best Western Water Front Inn off the tranquil waters of Charlotte Harbor, serving as a temporary morgue for the casualties of Hurricane Charley.

Four people may have been killed by the storm in Charlotte County, some reports indicate, and Charley led to at least 16 deaths statewide during its forceful push Friday through Florida.

With ongoing search and rescue efforts stretching into the evening hours Sunday, Charlotte County emergency officials declined to confirm the county's fatalities.

"We've never dealt with a mass casualty event, and we're not yet prepared to (verify) or acknowledge the number of fatalities," said Wayne Sallade, director of Charlotte County's emergency management. "Yes, there are fatalities. Yes, there are people in those refrigerated trucks at the temporary morgue, but we're not prepared to say how many. At this point, I'm not sure that I have the accurate number. [...]

Comment: "Reluctant" because it might take away from Bush's attempts to capitalise on the event to assure more votes. Again we see the use of fear of death (the boogey man) to terrorise the public into accepting their own destruction.

FLASH floods sparked a massive rescue operation yesterday as a 10ft wave of water crashed through a town.

Seven helicopters, two lifeboats and more than 20 fire engines were scrambled to Boscastle, Cornwall, after 4ins of rain fell in minutes.

Buildings collapsed and 30 cars were swept into the harbour, where the water met the rising tide and the River Valancy burst its banks.

Dozens of people were airlifted from rooftops and trees and others were rescued from cars, including two adults and a baby. Some lit fires to attract rescuers. RAF Kinloss, co-ordinating the operation, said: "All down that river bank we are picking people out of trees, picking them off the bank and taking them out of cars."

One person was plucked out by helicopter after a suspected heart attack. A kidney dialysis patient was lifted from his house.

HANOI (AFP) - Torrential rains and rising river waters have damaged more than 100,000 hectares of rice and subsidiary food crops this month in Vietnam's southern Mekong Delta region.

An Giang province, 150 kilometres (nearly 100 miles) west of the southern business capital of Ho Chi Minh City, was among the worst affected, with 63,000 hectares of rice fields under water, the ruling Communist Party's Nhan Dan newspaper said Wednesday.

Rice is the Southeast Asian nation's top agricultural export earner and the Mekong Delta region is the main source of the staple.

However, the area is also prone to seasonal flooding which often causes widespread devastation and loss of human life. In 2002 around 170 people, the majority of them children, died from severe flooding in the region.

PARIS (AFP) - Freak storms packing howling winds and heavy rain that lashed Britain and France this week were set to continue, after already causing significant destruction and the deaths of at least four people.

Rescuers in southern France resumed searches for at least five swimmers caught by surprise by the sudden change in the weather that occurred Tuesday, roiling waters into huge waves and pushing out powerful gusts of up to 80 kilometres (50 miles) per hour.

The four people confirmed killed -- a 41-year-old woman on vacation with her family, a 46-year-old man, 36-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman -- drowned as they swam off separate beaches and in a river.

In Britain, residents of Boscastle, a coastal village in north Cornwall, were bracing for more rain two days after flash floods sent a wall of water tearing through the place, collapsing buildings and sweeping more than 50 automobiles into the sea.

Although no deaths were reported from the Boscastle disaster, police continued to search for more than a dozen people who remained unaccounted for.

In western Switzerland, the storms caused property damage but no casualties, according to police. Fallen trees crushed one building, and several houses had their roofs ripped off, while flooding swamped at least eight villages.

Weather forecasts said France could expect more storms later Wednesday with hail, lightning and very strong winds, prompting authorities to issue a warning for Paris just one level below its maximum alert.

In Britain, torrential and thundery rain was also expected. [...]

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Wildfires have scorched over 5 million acres in Alaska as of Tuesday, forestry officials said, a new record that signals possible changes in climate conditions and the composition of the vast forests.

"We will definitely not have the same kind of forest and landscape that we're familiar with today if this keeps up," Glenn Juday, a forest-sciences professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said.

While it is common for vast sections of Alaska wild lands to ignite and smolder under the extended summer daylight, this year's fires have been driven by unusually hot and parched weather and plentiful lightning strikes.

In a typical summer, 500,000 to 1.5 million Alaska acres burn, according to statistics from past years. And usually, fire is part of the natural cycle that clears black spruce and white spruce, slender, fast-growing conifers with high levels of flammable resin, out of the way for slower-growing hardwood trees like birch and aspen.

Six hundred fires have burned during the summer, topping the 4.94 million acres charred in 1957, the previous record Alaska wildfire season.

As of Tuesday, 103 fires were still burning, including the 1.1 million-acre Taylor Complex fire that was created when several blazes merged. About 50 buildings had been lost, including seven homes, and 1,075 firefighters were on duty, with about $30 million spent fighting the fires so far.

Fire managers were still waiting for the heavy rains that usually douse Alaska's blazes by August.

"We didn't get that ground-soaking, long-duration rain," said Andy Alexandrou, a fire information officer with the federal-state Alaska Interagency Coordination Center.

Scientists warned that Alaska's trend is for increased wildfires of this magnitude.

"Most of the explanations trace themselves back to the climate change," Juday said.

HONG KONG (AFP) - Hong Kong issued a health alert as air pollution reached critical levels for the second consecutive day.

With city air pollution index levels in the "very high" category, the government advised people with heart or respiratory illnesses to avoid outdoor activities.

The city appeared cloaked in dense smog Wednesday as the pollution index reached 111 on a 1-200 scale. On Tuesday it hit 115.

A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Department said the high readings were partly the result of calm air subsiding around Typhoon Megi, which is hovering over the northwest Pacific Ocean.

"Pollutants are trapped under the calm wind conditions," the spokesman said.

The pollution resulted from smog forming in the neighbouring heavily industrialised Pearl River Delta region of southern China.

Air quality was expected to improve as Megi moves further north and winds pick up, the spokesman added.

A study by the University of Hong Kong in 2000 found air pollution was responsible for accelerating the deaths of up to 550 people every year in the territory.

As we go on pumping carbon dioxide into the air, we might borrow a line from financial planners. Past performance is no guide to future results.

The buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) is forcing scientists to rethink their expectations - not only about the buildup of heat on Earth but also about the implications for the natural world far beyond warming.
Take those powerful Alaskan earthquakes. We expect land to rise as the weight of glaciers melts away. Should we also adjust our assessment of earthquake risk?

Two geophysicists say "yes." Glaciers hold down earthquake action even in a seismically active region like Alaska, argue Jeanne Sauber with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Bruce Molnia with the US Geological Survey in Reston, Va. They use history and current data to make their case.

For example, earthquake action picked up in places where the ice masses retreated some 10,000 years ago, Dr. Sauber notes. Scandinavia had major quakes back then. Canada also had many moderate quakes as its glaciers melted.

Melting glaciers do not cause earthquakes: Quakes are created when forces within the crust build up strain in rock until something slips. Alaska is seismically active because a North Pacific crustal plate is ramming into southern Alaska, creating pressures that must be relieved at some point.

However, these pressures do push up high mountains where glaciers form - and the weight of the glaciers pushing down can stabilize the situation, if not eliminate the risk altogether. Remove that weight, and the likelihood of a quake goes up as the strain accumulates.

That's what happened with the 7.2 magnitude quake in Alaska's St. Elias region in 1979, Sauber and Dr. Molnia believe. Photographs show how glaciers in the fault area had thinned substantially during the 80 years since the previous earthquake activity.

Sauber says it now is clear that "in areas like Alaska where earthquakes occur and glaciers are changing, their relationship must be considered to better assess earthquake hazard." She adds that satellites are helping seismologists do this "by tracking the changes in extent and volume of the ice and movement of the Earth."

Another nonwarming implication of global warming is plant growth. Because plants use the carbon in CO2 to make their food and structures, they should grow faster as concentrations of the greenhouse gas go up. Many experts hope this will take some of the excess CO2 out of the air. They count on increased nitrogen fixation to supply the extra nitrogen to fertilize the plants.

Not so fast, warn Bruce Hungate at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The experiments of Dr. Hungate and his collaborators show that this expected boon soon turns sour.

After burgeoning for a couple of years, the nitrogen fixers begin to lose their fixing ability. It looks as though molybdenum - a key nutrient - becomes less available as elevated CO2 levels change soil chemistry.

"Our results ... caution against expecting increased biological [nitrogen] fixation to fuel terrestrial [carbon] accumulation," the team warned in reporting its results in the journal Science last spring. The results also show the need for scientists to broaden their perspective when trying to foresee how Earth's ecosystems will respond to global change, the team added.

To adapt the financial guru's mantra, the way things worked in the past is an unreliable guide for expectations of how our planet will respond as humans force more unnatural change upon it.

WELLINGTON - A powerful winter storm battered central New Zealand yesterday, ripping a section of the roof from the capital's main airport and blocking key highways and railroads with snow and debris, the authorities said.

Wellington's airport and passenger ferry services were closed down because of the gale-force winds and pounding seas.

Gusts of winds blowing at up to 180kmh downed several trees and power lines, said police spokesman Andre Kowalczyk.

Floods, mudslides and fallen trees created traffic snarls in Wellington, he said. On major highways in some areas, traffic was reduced to a single lane.

There were no reports of deaths.

New Zealand has been repeatedly hit by wild weather this year, with heavy snowfalls on South Island triggering avalanches last week and torrential rainfall causing devastating flooding in February and last month.

Yesterday, waves up to 14.5m high were recorded just outside Wellington's harbour, said the harbour master, Captain Mike Pryce.

The first reported injury in the storm was that of a seaman who broke a leg on a freight ferry crossing Cook Strait between North and South islands early yesterday.

Overnight winds stripped off part of the main airport terminal's roof, blowing debris across the closed runway.

Dozens of other roofs were also damaged, police said.

Storm-force winds and high tides dumped seaweed and debris on coastal roads, adding to the hazardous driving conditions.

Across southern North Island, heavy snow closed scores of highways and smaller roads, cutting access to some rural areas.

The Wairarapa farming region north of the capital was on flood alert after up to 200mm of rain fell and swollen rivers threatened to overflow.

Weather forecaster Augie Auer said the storm had virtually brought the east coast to a standstill, and it would 'be a long slow clearance...with the very strong winds easing only slowly during the day'.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Typhoon Megi swept across the southwestern tip of South Korea, leaving thousands of people homeless and at least one person missing, emergency officials said Thursday.

The typhoon first hit Wednesday, bringing heavy rains to the southwestern South Korea and leaving more than 2,400 people homeless, said Park Min-ju, an official at the country's disaster agency. More than 1,200 homes were flooded or destroyed.

Park said a 74-year-old man remained missing after he was apparently swept away while working on a farm in Naju, about 280 kilometres south of the capital Seoul.

Officials said they were investigating reports another man was missing in the typhoon.

More damage was predicted as the typhoon headed northeast, Park said and it was expected to complete its pass over the Korean Peninsula by later Thursday.

The heavy weather shut down seven airports and caused the cancellation of 41 domestic flights.

Earlier, heavy rain fuelled by the typhoon lashed southern Japan, leaving at least eight people dead and causing landslides and blackouts, officials said. Two people were missing.

Megi brushed the main southern islands Kyushu and Shikoku, the Japanese Meteorological Agency said.

In Kagawa state in Shikoku, a 74-year-old farmer was found dead after he fell into a swollen canal Tuesday. Three more elderly people were killed by flooding rivers, police said.

In nearby Ehime, three men and a woman were killed, one by drowning and the others in mudslides, local police said.

More than 4,700 people were ordered to evacuate their homes in Kagawa, and nearly 300 in Ehime. Japanese national broadcaster NHK reported more than 600 homes had been flooded in Shikoku.

PRINCETON, B.C. - An overnight thunderstorm has caused more than a dozen landslides that have blocked Highway 3 between Princeton and Hedley in B.C.'s Similkameen Valley.

The hardest hit area was around Princeton, where the rain fell so hard the earth just gave way – completely closing the highway.

The slides stranded dozens of people. About 20 vehicles were stranded on the highway – and a provincial campground is also cut off from road access. [...]

Ice cream is melting in freezers in Skagway. Anchorage city gardeners are watering the hanging baskets downtown not once but twice daily. And even some of Alaska's fish are stressed out.

Yes, it is hot.

In fact, Tuesday tied the record for most days over 70 degrees in an Anchorage summer -- 43 days -- and it's only the middle of August. The last time we had so many 70-plus days was 1936.

It's also exceptionally dry in Anchorage and the rest of Southcentral.

"It's getting down to near desert conditions," National Weather Service meteorologist Sam Miller said, though the humidity rises at night. [...]

For Canadians who have spent the summer asking where summer has gone, new satellite observations show we're not alone.

According to an analysis by scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, July was the coldest worldwide since 1992. That year's cool spell was precipitated by the eruption of the Philippine volcano Pinatubo, which spewed 20 to 30 million tonnes of sunlight-deflecting dust into the atmosphere.

But scientists don't know why the Earth's thermostat has dropped this year.

In the Northern Hemisphere, July's temperatures were below the 20-year average by .14 degrees Celsius and in the Southern Hemisphere by .29 degrees. Both the tropics and Antarctica showed marked coolness.

The July weather tracks a drop in average worldwide temperature that has been going on since March, said John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the Alabama university.

What is not clear is whether a single physical phenomenon is responsible for the downward trend.

"There haven't been any new volcanoes or anything like that," Prof. Christy said, "so I think we just have to chalk this up to the natural variability of the system. Just as the hottest year in the past 20 years has to occur sometimes, the coolest summer in the last 10 years also has to occur sometimes."

Rick Walls, a meteorologist at Environment Canada in Winnipeg, said: "In the eastern Prairies it looks like it is going to be the coldest summer on record since data started being collected in the 19th century."

How cold did it get? In Saskatoon on July 29, the overnight low was .07 degrees, breaking weather records that had been started in 1892. In Winnipeg on July 23, the overnight low was three degrees, the lowest recorded since 1872.

It was the cold in the Prairies that may have been the most impressive. For May through mid-August, temperatures were on average three degrees below normal, beating records that go back to 1872.

But Dave Phillips, chief meteorologist for Environment Canada, pointed out that the cold wasn't just slightly beating the past. In weather terms it completely eclipsed lows of 14.2 C which were recorded in 1883 and 1907.

"A half of a degree average difference is like somebody in the hundred-metre dash in the Olympics not beating the former world record by the usual tenths of a second, but by a full second," he said. "It is really quite startling."

July hasn't been marked by bizarre weather, Mr. Phillips said. "We haven't had any frosts or freak snowfalls in July. The central fact of the whole summer has not been that it has been so cold; it is just that it hasn't been so hot."

However, a portion of coastal British Columbia has been experiencing one of its hottest summers on record, he said, noting that Victoria and Vancouver had their second-warmest July on record.

In Victoria, July was the second warmest in records that go back to 1898, and a similar record-setting month was experienced in Vancouver, where temperatures were on average 2.2 degrees above the monthly average. [...]

BRITONS were yesterday warned to brace themselves for more weather catastrophes.

After the disasters in Boscastle and Lochearnhead, the European Environment Agency said there were growing signs of climate change affecting the continent.

EEA Executive Director, Professor Jacqueline McGlade, said there was a "wealth of evidence" indicating climate change.

She added: "What is new is the speed of change. Strategies are needed, at European, regional, national and local level, to adapt to climate change.

"If we go on as we are, we have less than 50 years before we encounter conditions which will be uncharted and hazardous."

She was backed by Met Office forecaster Clive Burlton who said disasters like Boscastle and Lochearnhead would become more common.

He said: "The expectation is that there are going to be more heatwaves and more extreme events.

"These sort of events are expected to increase and there will be more extremes than in the past."

Serious flooding across Europe in August 2002 killed about 80 people and caused economic losses of at least £10billion.

In 2003, a heatwave in western and southern Europe was responsible for more than 20,000 "excess deaths", particularly of the elderly.

The EEA warn northern Europe is likely to see wetter conditions while the south gets drier.

Friends of the Earth campaigns director Mike Childs warned: "The consequences of climate change are a real and dangerous threat.

"Yet international leaders seem to pay little heed to the warning bells. The Prime Minister must convince his fellow world leaders that climate change is as big a threat to people and the planet as international terrorism."

Europe is warming up faster than the global average with temperatures rising by an average 0.95C over the last 100 years.

Temperatures are expected to rise by 2.0C to 6.3C over the next century - due mainly to greenhouse gas emissions.

The resulting wetter conditions in northern Europe and drier weather around the Mediterranean threaten to melt three-quarters of glaciers in the Swiss Alps.

Cold winters would disappear while hot summers, droughts and heavy rain become more common.

Carbon dioxide levels are at their highest for 420,000 years and a third higher than before the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.

Comment: 50 years is being generous. One of these days, winter is going to come, and it won't leave. In chaotic systems, once they find a new equilibrium, it will take another "catastrophe" or phase change to bring them back to where they were. We have been ignoring the scientific findings and will pay the price.

Of course, there may be elements in this change of which we are unaware. Things like cosmic energies. And given the bad vibes most humans are giving off these days, don't expect the effects of such cosmic juju to be positive.

European winters will disappear by 2080 and extreme weather will become more common unless global warming across the continent is slowed, warns a major new report.

Europe is warming more quickly than the rest of the world with potentially devastating consequences, including more frequent heatwaves, flooding, rising sea levels and melting glaciers, says the European Environment Agency (EEA) document, launched on Wednesday.

The changes are happening at such a pace that Europeans must put in place strategies to adapt to an unfamiliar climate, the researchers write, although they stress the importance of the Kyoto Protocol in cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

"Europe has to continue to lead worldwide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but this report also underlines that strategies are needed at European, regional, national and local level to adapt to climate change," says Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the EEA, based in Denmark. "This is a phenomenon that will considerably affect our societies and environments for decades and centuries to come,"

"What the report shows is that, if we go on as we are, we have less than 50 years before we encounter conditions which will be uncharted and potentially hazardous," she told the BBC.

Alpine glaciers

The report paints a dismal picture of Europe's future, based on climatic changes since the Industrial Revolution, which have accelerated over the last 50 years. The concentration of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, in the lower atmosphere is at its highest for possibly 20 million years, and stands 34 per cent higher than its pre-Industrial Revolution level.

The global warming rate is now almost 0.2°C per decade, and temperatures in Europe are projected to climb by a further 2 to 6.3 degrees this century, due to the build-up of greenhouse gases.

Picture postcard European snowscapes are destined to become consigned to history books before the end of the century, and 75 per cent of Alpine glaciers will have melted by 2050 – melting reduced the glaciers by one-tenth in 2003 alone, the study found.

Sea levels are predicted to rise for centuries to come, at a rate of up to four times faster than during the last century – a particular concern in low-lying countries such as the Netherlands, where half the population lives below sea-level. [...]

Comment: Like we said, nothing to see here folks, just go back to your normal lives, everything is fine, there is no real point to your lives, they are in no way related to events that transpire on the planet, there are no such thing as cyclic global cataclysms, and even if there was, which there aren't we hasten to add, we will all be dead before the next one happens...right?

WINNIPEG - A band of wild summer weather has settled over Manitoba, handing the province severe thunderstorms, snow pellets and frost.

People living in southern Manitoba woke up Friday morning to frost on their lawns, fields and windshields, said an Environment Canada spokesperson.

Wayne Miskolczi said the temperature dipped to zero degrees around Brandon and one degree below freezing in areas outside of the city.

At least seven records for cold were set overnight, including one in Winnipeg. There the mercury fell to zero at 3 a.m., breaking a record set in 1895.

[...] "Around July 16, there was a killing frost in a small area south of Brandon," says Scott Day, Manitoba Agriculture representative. "It looks like this year could be one of the very few years – the first year I've ever heard of – that we've had a frost in every month of the year."

On Wednesday, snow pellets fell on parts of downtown Winnipeg, said meteorologists. Environment Canada spokesperson Rick Walls says the office has no previous evidence of snow falling in August.

Earlier Wednesday, severe thunderstorms with winds of almost 65 km/hr knocked out power, toppled trees and doused parts of the province with rain.

A plague of biblical proportions threatens the fragile agricultural communities of west and central Africa: the culprit is a six-legged munching machine called Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome has warned repeatedly that not enough is being done to contain the immense swarms of locusts eating their way through vast swaths of food crops stretching from Mauritania in the west to Chad in the east.

Dense clouds up to 25 miles long and containing billions of insects have been sighted in southern Mauritania, northern Senegal, Mali and Niger. The FAO said there was a high risk of them spreading to Burkina Faso and the troubled Darfur region of western Sudan. Further south, Gambia has declared an national emergency. [...]

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - A Danish cattle farmer lost 31 of his 85 Jersey dairy cows when lightning struck the trees under which they had sought shelter during a rain storm.

The cattle were found dead Tuesday afternoon on farmer Kurt Nielsen's land near Assing, about 270 kilometres west of Copenhagen.

"This seems to be one of nature's caprices," Nielsen told Denmark's TV2 network, adding that lightning struck several times Tuesday morning around his farm and the lights went out briefly.

That day, the Danish Meteorological Institute recorded 5,808 lightning strikes across central Denmark.

Veterinarian Johannes Kejser told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper that the cows were killed instantly.

The Danish Insurance Information Service said it had never heard of so many cows being killed by lightning at one time. Nielsen said his insurance company had promised a compensation for the dead livestock and lost milk income.

AT least six people were killed today when a bolt of lightning struck a junior grade school in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, police said.

Twelve others were injured when the lightning struck a group, among them a number of children, who had taken shelter in the school during a downpour in Bhawanthpur village, the Press Trust of India quoted police as saying.

There is an environmental problem that is just beginning to be recognised as being of global significance: "Toyota-isation".

The surfaces of deserts are being broken up by four-wheel drive vehicles such as the Toyota Land Cruiser, the Japanese version of the Land Rover and a great favourite with drivers in the Sahel, the dry states to the south of the Sahara, as well as many other challenging places.

The surface disturbance is proceeding at such a rate in Africa, the Middle East and Asia that it is contributing substantially to a rise in dust storms, and to an increase in dust in the global atmosphere generally, which could have serious climatic and health repercussions. Andrew Goudie, the professor of geography at Oxford University, told the International Geographical Congress in Glasgow that annual dust production in some parts of north Africa had increased ten-fold in the past 50 years, and that across the Sahel, from the Sudan to the Gulf of Guinea, it had increased six-fold since the 1960s.

Global dust emissions were between two and three billion tons a year, and this was even being felt in Britain, Professor Goudie said, with an increase in episodes of "blood rain" - the deposition of dust from the Sahara on the British land mass. "The world is getting a lot dustier," he said. The reasons included land use changes caused by growing populations, such as deforestation and overgrazing, but Toyota-isation, a word coined by him to mean disturbance by 4x4s, was a specific cause, the professor said.

"If you take almost any desert now, people go all over it in four-wheel drives," he said. "The number of four-wheel drives in the south-west US and indeed in the Middle East is staggering.

"The desert surfaces have been stable for thousands of years because they usually have a thin layer of lichen or algae, or gravel from which the fine sand has blown away. Once these surfaces are breached you get down to the fine sand again, which can be picked up by the wind."

The effect was particularly bad near cities. "If you take a city like Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, there are tracks leading out across the desert in all directions," he said.

Sand is often carried by the wind at the base of the storm. A typical storm could move on a front 100 kilometres or more across, and contain 30 to 40 million tons of dust. It was possible that disease-causing organisms - such as those responsible for foot-and-mouth disease - could be transported with it, the professor said.

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. -- Weekend storms battered parts of eastern New York, knocking down trees, flooding roads and leaving thousands of residents without power.

Police reported minor accidents on the New York State Thruway, the Taconic Parkway, the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge and throughout the mid-Hudson Valley. Emergency crews blocked off parts of Route 216 and Route 218 in Orange and Dutchess counties after the storms dumped more than 2 1/2 inches of rain there.

Crews that worked to restore power to about 7,000 people early Friday evening had to return after 11 p.m. to respond to 4,800 outages. By Saturday evening, about 1,500 people were still waiting for power.

Firefighters are working overtime as the Taylor Creek fire near Vernon has grown from 30 hectares to 200 hectares in less than a day.

Fire information officer Dale Bojara says the fire is in steep terrain and winds aren't helping matters.

But, even with 50 firefighters, heavy equipment, helicopters and air tanker support, holding the fireline proved next to impossible.

Bojara says for the time being the crews have been pulled off the line because the situation is too dangerous.

He says a new battle plan will be put in place today.

More than 750 people were killed by air pollution in last year's record temperatures, a government-funded study has revealed.

The sudden surge in deaths occurred last August as most Britons were basking in the highest summer temperatures since records began.

The study suggests there will be further increases in the numbers of pollution-related deaths as global warming takes effect.

The findings, which will be presented at an international air-quality conference in London on Tuesday, are likely to lead to even stronger warnings about the risks of ill-health during heatwaves.

Dr John Stedman, the study's author, said his findings suggested more stringent measures were needed, such as banning cars from city centres in heatwaves and keeping people indoors.

Tim Brown, from the National Society for Clean Air, said about 2,000 people were thought to have died directly because of last August's heatwave and that up to 40 per cent of those were killed by air pollution.

"We need to be much more aware of air pollution levels when there's a heatwave going on. When air pollution episodes like this happen, the Government needs to redouble its warnings," he said.

The boast made earlier this year by Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong's chief executive, about improved air quality under his administration was left sounding hollow this week after the territory was blanketed in toxic smog from power stations, vehicles and factories in the Pearl River Delta.

Air pollution was so severe on Thursday that visibility in the harbour fell to as little as 550m and officials said the smog contributed to collisions on the water involving eight vessels. In some areas, people with heart problems or respiratory ailments were advised to stay indoors.

The smog, much of which comes from neighbouring Guangdong province in southern China, is only the latest sign of the heavy environmental price paid by Chinese city-dwellers for the country's rapid economic growth.

On Wednesday the coal mining province of Shanxi became the first area in China to calculate its "green GDP". It concluded that its sustainable gross domestic product - economic output minus environmental costs - had barely grown in the past two decades.

Hong Kong government officials yesterday blamed the latest smog on the weather. They said two typhoons in the Pacific had caused very stable atmospheric conditions over Hong Kong and prevented pollutants being blown away in the usual way. [...]

Record lows temperatures were recorded this morning in Minneapolis, St. Cloud and Little Falls.

The National Weather Service says the temperature dipped to 33 degrees in St. Cloud this morning -- the coldest Aug. 21 on record there. The previous record was 42 degrees, set in 1923.

The St. Cloud temperature tied that city's previous all-time low, set on Aug. 31, 1974.

The 44-degree reading in Minneapolis broke the old record of 50 degrees set on this date in 1956 and 1920.

Little Falls set a new record for today, too, with a low of 34 degrees. That broke the old record of 40 degrees, set in 1956.

The Weather Service says the record cold will soon give way to more normal weather. Gusty south winds and warmer temps are on the way. Highs today are expected from the mid-60s in the Arrowhead to the upper 70s in western Minnesota.

The globe's rising temperatures are threatening Europe's premier wine-producing regions and could change them irrevocably within decades, three American climatologists have warned, the Italian daily La Repubblica reported Monday.

"We estimate that within 50 years temperatures in the region of Chianti, where summers are already very hot, will rise by an average of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)," Gregory Jones, of the Southern Oregon University, said at an international conference.

Legendary vineyards in Bordeaux and Chianti may come to resemble those in northern Africa, and the ideal growing environments that made them prosper could shift northward.

Comment: We think things are going to cool off rather more quickly than the author's of this study. Rather than facing a protracted period of global warming, there is evidence that a shift in the gulfstream will bring a rapid cooling of the northern climes. In either case, the globe is transforming and we can expect food shortages and civil strife when the new climate kicks in.

Global warming is causing China's highland glaciers, including those covering Mount Everest, to shrink by an amount equivalent to all the water in the Yellow River every year, state media said Monday.

A staggering seven percent of the country's glaciers vanish annually under the sweltering sun, enough to fill its second-largest river to the brim, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Xinhua, quoting leading glacier expert Yan Tandong, said this has been going on for the past four decades.

This would seem to imply that the glaciers regain some of their losses during the cold months of the year, or there would be very little of them left by now.

The issue is of particular concern to Tibet, home to nearly all the country's glaciers, and even Mount Everest has been found to be suffering, Xinhua reported.

A potential silver lining in the form of additional water for China's arid north and west has not materialized, according to the agency.

Much of the melted glacier water vaporizes long before it reaches the country's drought-stricken farmers and again global warming is to blame, it reported.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Thunderstorms raked parts of the Midwest early Tuesday, a day after flash flooding swamped basements, stranded motorists and left some cars floating in water.

The National Weather Service reported some Kansas roadways under 6 inches of water on Monday, when several motorists had to be rescued from their cars.

"It was a very dangerous flash-flood situation," meteorologist Curt Holderbach said.

Thunderstorms in North Dakota downed trees, flooded streets and knocked out power to several thousand people Monday. Golf-ball sized hail was reported in Bismarck, and winds of 70 mph were reported in Riverdale when the storm hit Monday night.

"With this kind of damage, it will take some time to get the power restored," said Montana-Dakota Utilities spokeswoman Cathi Christopherson.

The storm also brought hail and high wind to Kansas and spawned some funnel clouds, a few of which touched down but didn't cause significant damage, Holderbach said.

Small hail and rain fell across parts of eastern and central South Dakota on Monday night and thunderstorms moved across Nebraska on Tuesday, but there were no reports of damage.

In northwest Missouri near the Iowa line, as much as 4 inches of rain fell early Tuesday. Strong to severe thunderstorms were expected to move across the Great Plains and Midwest later in the day, bringing heavy rainfall, severe hail and high wind.

At least 3,200 customers lost power in Kansas at the height of Monday's storm, Westar Energy spokeswoman Karla Olsen said.
On Sunday and early Monday, as much as 15 inches of rain fell in Texas between San Antonio and Laredo, causing flash-flooding that forced a few residents to flee their homes. Officials closed Interstate 35 for most of the day Monday.

HAVANA (Reuters) - Hurricane Charley caused more than $1 billion in damage to Havana and its surrounding provinces when it roared through western Cuba on Aug. 13, killing four people, a leader of the ruling Communist Party said on Wednesday.

The storm demolished 4,177 houses and damaged almost 70,000 other homes, Politburo member Pedro Saez said in comments published by Cuban newspapers Granma and Rebel Youth.

Charley has been nicknamed the "lumberjack" hurricane because its 105 mph (169 kph) winds uprooted or snapped more than 8,000 trees in Havana, and destroyed 300 hectares (7,400 acres) of tree plantations outside the city, he said.

It was the worst storm to hit Cuba since Hurricane Michelle in 2001 plowed through the center of the island in 2001, leaving 200,000 homeless and $1.8 billion in damages.

Saez, the party's first secretary for Havana, said Charley's most painful impact was to leave 2 million inhabitants without water for days on end because pumping facilities had no power.

Large parts of the city's westside, as well as Havana and Pinar del Rio provinces had no electricity for 11 days due to the downing of 28 high-voltage towers from a power plant in Mariel.

Some 23,000 hectares (56,800 acres) of bananas, citrus and other fruit were flattened in Havana province, where cattle, chicken and pig farms were badly damaged.

Cuba rejected an offer of $50,000 in aid made by the State Department, calling the amount a "ridiculous and humiliating charity."

A government statement issued on Sunday called the U.S. gesture "hypocritical" in view of the economic sanctions Washington has maintained against Cuba for four decades.

East China's Zhejiang province has evacuated some 249,000 people as Typhoon Aere is forecast to make landfall in the coastal province Wednesday, state media said.

Xinhua news agency said nearly 31,500 fishing boats in the province were also called back to port as a precaution.

Farmers are driving Asian countries towards an environmental catastrophe, using tube wells that are sucking groundwater reserves dry, New Scientist says.

Tens of millions of these wells have been drilled over the past decade, many of them beyond any official control, and powerful electric pumps are being used to haul up the water at a rate that far outstrips replenishment by rainfall, the British weekly says in next Saturday's issue.

The extraction is providing many countries with a lavish harvest in thirsty crops like rice, sugar cane and alfalfa, but the boom is bound to be shortlived, it says.

Indeed, water tables are falling so dramatically that within a short time, some landscapes could become arid or even be transformed into desert, it says, quoting scientists at a worldwide water conference.

One third of the nation's lake waters and one-quarter of its riverways are contaminated with mercury and other pollutants that could cause health problems for children and pregnant women who eat too much fish, the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

States issued warnings for mercury and other pollutants in 2003 for nearly 850,000 miles of U.S. rivers — a 65% increase over 2002 — and 14 million acres of lakes. The warning level is the highest ever reported by the EPA. It is partly a result of states taking a more aggressive role in monitoring for mercury, according to environmental officials.

The warnings do not apply to fish caught in the deep seas that are sold in stores and restaurants. An extremely small percentage of commercially sold fish come from inland lakes and rivers.

"This is about trout, not tuna. It's about what you catch on the shore, not what you buy on the shelf," said EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt. "This is about the health of pregnant mothers and small children."

Adults seldom suffer health problems from eating fish laden with mercury. But a diet rich in mercury-tainted fish can severely damage the nervous systems of children and fetuses. That's why states issue fish warnings not only to children but also to women young enough to have children. Many states advise that women and children eat no fish at all from the most heavily contaminated lakes and rivers, which are listed in state Web sites. Recommended consumption limits on fish from other water bodies range from once a week to once every two months.

Eighteen states have issued warnings on eating fish caught from all lakes and rivers. In Minnesota and Michigan the advisories apply only to lakes and in Indiana only to rivers.

Another 23 states warn that fish caught in some lakes and rivers could be contaminated. Utah, Wyoming, Iowa, Oklahoma, Hawaii and Alaska issued no mercury warnings.

The warnings apply to well-known water bodies ranging from Lake Champlain and Lake Michigan to San Francisco Bay and the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

Mercury is emitted primarily by incinerators and power plants that burn coal. The EPA plans to publish rules restricting mercury from power plants by mid-2005, although environmentalists say the preliminary draft of those rules does not go far enough.

The statistics released Tuesday are based on data the EPA collected from states for 2003. The states are responsible for issuing warnings about fish caught in local streams and lakes.

The UN says the world faces a silent emergency because of the continued lack of clean water and sanitation.

A new report reveals that more than 40% of the world's population does not have even the most basic sanitation.

More than one billion people have no access to clean water sources, the document adds.

The report was prepared by the UN's children's fund, Unicef, and the World Health Organisation to assess progress towards reaching millennium goals.

A key development goal is to cut by half the number of people without clean water and sanitation by the year 2015.

The report makes depressing reading.

If things continue as they are, half a billion people will still have no sanitation nine years from now.

[...] Unicef points out that it is the young who suffer most.

Some 4,000 children die every day from illnesses caused by lack of clean water.

The world has barely begun to recognise the danger of setting off rapid and irreversible changes in some crucial natural systems, a scientist says.

Professor John Schellnhuber says the most important environmental issues for humans are among the least understood.

He told a briefing in Sweden that the Asian monsoon was one of the "tipping points" that could change very quickly.

He said a better understanding of the risks was as important as the programme to prevent collisions with asteroids.

Professor Schellnhuber is research director of the UK's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

High stakes

He was speaking at the EuroScience Forum in Stockholm, at a briefing by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme entitled Beyond Global Warming: Where On Earth Are We Going?

Professor Schellnhuber said 12 "hotspots" had been identified so far, areas which acted like massive regulators of the Earth's environment.

If these critical regions were subjected to stress, they could trigger large-scale, rapid changes across the entire planet. But not enough was known about them to be able to predict when the limits of tolerance were reached.

"We have so far completely underestimated the importance of these locations," he said.

"What we do know is that going beyond critical thresholds in these regions could have dramatic consequences for humans and other life forms."

One example of a hotspot was the North Atlantic current, the ocean circulation pattern responsible for bringing warmer air to northern Europe, the collapse of which could lead to a very large regional climate shift.

Faltering monsoon

Others were the West Antarctic ice sheet, the Sahara desert, and the forests of the Amazon basin. Yet another hotspot, Professor Schellnhuber said, was the Asian monsoon system.

[...] "That means we have to know where they are, and they've been off the radar screen for far too long.

"Scientists have begun to realise that change could be sudden, not gradual - in some cases it could happen within a few decades."

Professor Schellnhuber urged a coordinated global effort to improve understanding and monitoring of Earth's "Achilles' heels".

He said: "Such an effort is every bit as important as Nasa's valuable asteroid-spotting programme designed to protect the planet from collisions.

"If we can afford to gaze up at the sky looking for asteroids, we should be able to watch our own planet with as much care."

RENO, Nev. - A wind-whipped wildfire sparked by a target shooter erupted near Reno and quickly spread to at least 2,600 acres, destroying at least four homes, threatening hundreds of others and forcing evacuations.

At least 16 structures, including the homes, burned Wednesday in the Pleasant Valley area, about seven miles from Reno, according to fire officials. Because of dense smoke, it was not immediately known exactly how many of the structures were homes or outbuildings.

"When we left, the flames were coming right down the canyon," resident Joseph Martin said. "They were just saying, 'You might have to evacuate,' and 10 minutes later, they said, 'You got to get the hell out of there.'"

At least 350 homes were threatened by the fire, which was being whipped by winds gusting to 35 mph.

Firefighting crews on the ground were being assisted by helicopters and air tankers, officials said.

"They're doing a great job, but it's kicking our butt right now," Reno Fire Marshal Larry Farr said.

Farr said the fire was sparked by a man who was target shooting and fired a bullet that ricocheted off a rock.

Residents were urged to evacuate. Crews cut electricity to the area to help decrease the possibility of power lines snapping and sparking more fires.

A section of U.S. 395, which links Reno with Carson City, was closed for several hours before reopening at nightfall.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Some 200 storks migrating from Europe to Africa flew to their deaths in Israel Monday, landing in an acid-filled pool of waste outside a chemical plant, veterinary officials said.

Media reports said the chemical dump, in the southern town of Dimona, is covered during the migration season to prevent such accidents but the storks made their stopover in Israel early this year.

Comment: Symbolic? Perhaps, but then so are most things here on the BBM.

WESTERN BUREAU - A freak storm on Monday swept across Anchovy and Roehampton in St James, leaving thousands of dollars worth of damage.

Residents said the storm tore off roofs, uprooted trees and flattened acres of crops, including bananas.

Egbert Kerr, an 83 year-old farmer of Bueno Vista in Roehampton, told the Observer that his crop of 150 banana plants, most of which were due for harvesting in weeks, were wiped out by the wind. He said he lost more than $50,000 in crop damage.

Vaughn Birch, 25, of Spring Bottom, also in Roehampton, said a tree fell on his house and that a section of the roof was torn off by the wind. He also lost his Digital Satellite System (DSS) dish.

"I was at work when the storm past through, and when I got home I saw the tree on top of my house. A whole lot of things inside the house were damaged," Birch said.

Birch said he was yet to find out if all the electrical appliances in his house were working, as the wind caused trees to fall on power lines which left the more than 80 residents in the communities without electricity.

Ireta Robinson, 55, said a one-room house which she had just completed a few days ago was blown from its spot. A huge ackee tree in Robinson's yard was also uprooted by the strong wind. She said no one was in the house at the time of the incident.

Beres Housen, a farmer and father of six, said he was at Granville, about eight miles away, when he received a phone call that his house at Anchovy was affected by the freak storm. According to Housen, when he reached home, he saw sections of his roof blown off and his family apparently in a state of shock. [...]

MIAMI (Reuters) - Hurricane Frances was born in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday but the rapidly growing storm was many days from threatening any populated area.

The fourth hurricane of the Atlantic season was on a track that would put it well north of Antigua, Anguilla and the other vulnerable islands of the northeastern Caribbean by next Tuesday.

At 5 p.m. (2100 GMT), the center of Hurricane Frances was 1,005 miles east of the Lesser Antilles at latitude 13.7 north and longitude 46.4 west, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (news - web sites) said.

The storm system was moving to the west-northwest at about 16 mph (26 kph). Its top sustained winds were 80 mph (129 kph) and could be near 100 mph (160 kph) by Friday, forecasters said.

Forecasters have predicted the 2004 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, would be a busy one. Already, six tropical storms or hurricanes have formed and the busiest part of the season, from late August to early October, has just begun.

An average hurricane season sees about 10 tropical storms, with about six becoming hurricanes.

Frances formed as a tropical storm on Wednesday, just 12 days after Hurricane Charley struck southwest Florida. Charley was the worst hurricane to hit the state in 12 years and caused an estimated $7.4 billion in insured damages.

NEW DELHI - Indian military helicopters have been plucking survivors out of the water after flash-floods swept away 29 people on Thursday morning in the northern Indian state of Uttaranchal.

But more than 20 of those people, feared dead in the rushing waters of the Kailashu river at Akrouli village, have been rescued. The bodies of two others have been recovered.

They had been sleeping outdoors and had taken refuge from the rushing waters in a trolley, when the vehicle itself was washed away.
Of 30 people who were in the trolley, one managed to escape and swim to safety.

Officials in the area say the river continues to rise because of heavy rains.

Hundreds of people have died this year and millions have been affected by monsoon flooding in parts of India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

People who live in the area say flooding, a regular occurrence during monsoon season, could be controlled if governments would co-operate on managing water resources.

Shanghai — Typhoon Aere crashed into mainland China on Thursday, unleashing torrential rains and prompting the nearly a million people to seek safety, as the death toll climbed to 35 after a mudslide killed 15 villagers in Taiwan.

Aere came ashore on the mainland late Wednesday after battering northern Taiwan, where up to 1,500 millimetres (1.5 meters) of rain fell over the past 21⁄2 days in some areas. State television in China showed footage of howling winds and pounding rain. Cars plowed through flooded streets littered with uprooted metal barriers.

Officials in Taiwan said the mudslide in a remote northern mountain village buried all of the homes in just 10 seconds, killing 15. The island's death toll rose to 30 after officials reported a man died when flood waters washed away his riverside home in central Taiwan.
Another five people were reported dead in the Philippines.

Apart from one man reported missing in eastern China's Zhejiang province, no casualties were reported on the mainland.

It was the second-strongest storm to hit China this season after Typhoon Rananim, which killed 164 people and devastated the southern Chinese coast. [...]

Intense downpours flooded several streets and intersections around Anchorage late Thursday afternoon, stranding a few motorists in rising water, according to Anchorage police. Residents, commuters and patrol officers were calling in dozens of reports to police dispatch, including one of "a large lake" at A Street and Benson Boulevard near Wal-Mart.

The National Weather Service issued an urban flood watch for Anchorage for the evening. [...]

Super Typhoon Chaba pounded the southern Japanese island of Amami-Oshima Sunday with heavy rain and strong winds, cutting off electricity to some 5,800 households, officials said.

Chaba, meaning hibiscus in Thai, is moving slowly northwest and generating maximum windspeeds of around 160 kilometers (100 miles) per hour, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

Due to the typhoon, some 5,800 households had no electricity in the island, 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) south of Tokyo, police in Amami-Oshima said.

The typhoon is likely to hit parts of Kyushu island in southwestern Japan by early Monday and dump up to 800 millimeters (32 inches) of rain in the region, the Meteorological Agency said.

Waves in Kyushu could reach as high as eight meters, the agency added.

At least 27 flights from Tokyo to Kyushu were cancelled Sunday due to the typhoon, an airport official said.

Thirty-two people have been killed and more than a million other people received assistance amid massive floods, civil defense officials said Sunday.

More than 100 towns and cities of the main island of Luzon went under water or were isolated by landslides following last week's heavy southwest monsoon rains induced by Typhoon Aere, they said.

The extreme weather killed 24 people, mainly drowning victims or buried by landslides, the civil defense office said. Eight other people are presumed dead after being carried off by rampaging floodwaters last week.

Portions of the main north-south Luzon highway were cut off after the Pampanga and Tarlac rivers burst dikes, while landslides blocked key arteries in the upland Cordillera region of northern Luzon.

Civil defense officials said 1.12 million million people out of the national population of 84 million received relief assistance worth 7.96 million pesos (about 142 million dollars).

Of that number, more than 6,000 lost their homes and sought refuge at government-run evacuation centers.

Although the heavy rains have stopped and floods are receding, Red Cross spokeswoman Tess Usapdin said the affected population would need a week more of food and medical support before things could return to normal.

"The waters are subsiding. Hopefully, there would be no typhoons arriving soon that could induce more monsoon rains," Defense Secretary and civil defense chief Avelino Cruz said over DZBB radio.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Powerful Typhoon Chaba was racing toward the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido on Tuesday, leaving at least seven people dead and four missing after torrential rains that forced thousands into shelters.

Chaba, one of the strongest storms to hit Japan this year, had generated winds of up to 130 miles per hour at one point on Monday as it crossed the southwestern island of Kyushu, near the highest on record for the area.

The typhoon was traveling over the Sea of Japan on Tuesday and was expected to reach Hokkaido later in the day.

As of 10 a.m. (2100 EDT), the center of the storm was off the western coast of Aomori prefecture, which is just below Hokkaido, the Meteorological Agency said.

It was traveling northeast at 40 miles per hour.

An 82-year-old woman was found dead early on Tuesday in her flooded home in Okayama prefecture in western Japan, Kyodo news agency said, raising the number of people killed in the storm to seven.
A man was also found dead in Takamatsu, western Japan, trapped in a car on a flooded street, police said.

The others who have died include an elderly man who fell from a storehouse roof and two men who died when their truck was washed away.

Four crew members of a Vietnamese cargo ship were missing after the vessel ran aground on Monday near Shikoku island.

Some 8 to 10 inches of rain was forecast to fall on some areas of Hokkaido by Wednesday morning, public broadcaster NHK said.

Some 2,700 people had left their homes to be safe from the storm, and local authorities had also urged 4,800 people to evacuate, NHK said, adding that over 200 around the country had been injured by the typhoon.

Tohoku Electric Power said the typhoon had caused blackouts in around 16,000 homes in northern Japan as of 9 a.m. (2000 EDT).
The typhoon caused fresh disruptions to transport, with 140 domestic flights in and out of northern Japan already canceled on Tuesday and more cancellations possible, NHK said.

More than 750 domestic flights were canceled on Monday.
Some bullet train services in northern Japan were operating at a reduced speed, causing minor delays, NHK said, adding that a number of local train lines in northern Japan including Hokkaido had stopped services.

Japan Energy Corp. said it had shut its Mizushima oil refinery in western Japan due to flooding caused by the typhoon.

The northwest Pacific is regularly hit by typhoons at this time of the year and Chaba -- which means "hibiscus" in Thai -- is the 16th to affect the region this year.

The arrival of the storm coincides with the highest tides of the year, increasing concerns about flood damage.

Chaba is following a similar route to Typhoon Megi, which set off landslides and flooding that killed 10 people in Japan and at least three in South Korea earlier this month.

Another storm, Typhoon Songda, is brewing in the Pacific and also appears to be headed for southern Japan in the next week.

MIAMI (AFP) - Florida and several Caribbean islands were keeping a close eye on Hurricane Frances, a powerful storm packing winds of over 200 kilometers (125 miles) per hour.

Tropical storm warnings were in effect for several Caribbean islands, including Puerto Rico, the British and US Virgin Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

A tropical warning means sustained winds of at 63 to 118 kilometers (39-73 miles) per hour are possible in the area within 24 hours.

At 8:00 pm (midnight GMT), the center of Hurricane Frances was located 305 kilometers (190 miles) northeast of the northern Leeward Islands.

The system packed winds of 205 kilometers (125 miles) per hour, and was moving toward the west at 22 kilometers (14 miles) per hour, the NHC said.

The long-range forecast, which is subject to a large margin of error, calls for the storm to hit Florida's southeastern coast on Saturday with winds around 220 kilometers (140 miles) per hour.

The southeastern US state is still trying to recover from Hurricane Charley, which hit earlier this month, killing at least 20 people.

Officials in coastal areas, including Miami, pointed out such storms were largely unpredictable but get ready for the hurricane by stocking up on water, canned food and batteries.

"We are keeping a close eye on this, and everyone else should," said Carlos Castillo, Miami's emergency management director.

"Long week ahead," said Max Mayfield of the NHC.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - The remnants of tropical storm Gaston battered parts of Virginia with torrential rain Monday, sending cars floating down streets and stranding people in downtown buildings.

Virginia Gov. Mark Warner declared a state of emergency due to flooding in central Virginia, making state resources available and putting the Virginia National Guard on standby. "It looks like rapids outside our building," said Nick Baughan, who was stranded with about 20 other people on the second floor of the Bottoms Up pizza restaurant in Richmond.

"All of our cars have floated away."

The first floor was under more than three metres of water, Baughan said.

About 28 centimetres of rain fell in Richmond, causing cars to float down flooded streets and ram into the restaurant and other buildings in the Shockoe Bottom district, a popular entertainment area. [...]

About 82,000 Dominion Virginia Power customers in the Richmond area and southeastern Virginia were without service Monday night.
Farther south, residents and officials in the Carolinas on Monday were cleaning up from Gaston - and keeping their eyes on hurricane Frances.

At 8 p.m. EDT on Monday, Frances was centred about 305 kilometres east- northeast of the northern Leeward Islands and was moving west at about 23 kilometres an hour. [...]

Gaston, which came ashore Sunday just under hurricane strength with winds of 113 km/h, brought rains estimated at 33 centimetres in places in South Carolina.

The storm flooded areas already saturated by hurricane Charley earlier this month and cut power to 172,000 electric customers in the state. Fewer than 29,000 customers remained without power Monday.

In Berkeley County, where damage from Gaston was severe, 10 houses were completely flooded and more than two dozen people had to be rescued from flood waters, said Jim Rozier, a county supervisor.

"It just seemed to rain forever," he said.