Skywatchers in the North Atlantic region were treated on Saturday to an annular eclipse of the Sun.

Just after dawn, people standing in a broad path from Scotland to Greenland saw the Moon slip inside the Sun's disc to produce a "ring of fire" around the lunar limb.

But the low position on the horizon for the event meant many people had their view obstructed by mist and cloud...

Because the Moon is currently more than 400,000 kilometres from Earth in its orbit, its apparent size in the sky is insufficient to completely cover the Sun's disc - as happens in a total solar eclipse.

The sky does not go completely black; a ring or annulus of sunlight is still visible.

The effect is to throw an "antumbra" or "negative shadow" on the Earth's surface as the Moon moves across the face of the Sun. It is the track of this antumbra that is referred to as the path of annularity.

HYDERABAD, India - Sunstroke and dehydration claimed another 160 lives in a southern Indian state, raising the death toll from a two-week heat wave to nearly 800, a relief official said.

Temperatures rose as high as 118.2 degrees Fahrenheit and meteorologists promised no relief from the heat wave for another two days in Andhra Pradesh state, the state's chief relief official, D.C. Roshaiah, said Saturday. [...]

CLINTON, Ill. - Tornadoes cut across central Illinois for the second time in a week, destroying about 15 homes and damaging dozens of others, state and county emergency officials said. [...]

Damage in northern Illinois was less severe, but tornadoes were reported in Lee, Kendall and Winnebago counties, said meteorologist Joel Veeneman in the weather service's Chicago office. [...]

Some parts recorded temperatures of over 50C as weather officials say the monsoon, expected at this time of the year, has been delayed.

The district of Nalgonda is the worst hit area where the death toll has risen to 204.

The world's natural supply of underground water, on which two billion people depend, is being run down, according to the United Nations.

Water tables are falling by about three metres a year across much of the developing world, according to a study by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Launching its report on World Environment Day, the UN said governments must take immediate action to reverse the decline. [...]

In Arizona, the amount of water being taken from the ground is twice what is replaced naturally, the report says.

In parts of the Arabian Gulf, underground water sources are being contaminated by salty sea water pumped from the coast through leaky pipelines to boost city supplies.

Developing countries in particular are using up groundwater at what the report calls "an alarming rate".

Dhaka in Bangladesh has been tapping into its underground water sources so vigorously that in some places the water table has fallen by 40 metres. New boreholes produce a third less water than 30 years ago, experts say. [...]

BEIJING (AP, AFP) - Millions of people in China's north face water shortages this summer as the overused Yellow River falls to its lowest level in 50 years and heavy pollution limits supplies from elsewhere.

Environmental officials said yesterday that more than half the watersheds of China's seven main rivers are contaminated by industrial, farm and household waste.

'China is a country that lacks water resources and the problem of water pollution remains severe,' Mr Xie Zhenhua, head of the State Environmental Protection Administration, said in a bleak annual report on the nation's environment.

'This year, our top priority is to ensure clean drinking water for our people.'

Only one-quarter of the 21 billion tonnes of China's annual output of household sewage is treated, Mr Xie said. He described the discharge standards as 'pretty low'. [...]

BOMBAY (Reuters) - The southwest monsoon arrived in India Thursday a few days behind schedule but bringing welcome relief for the country broiling in a heat wave that has killed more than 1,200 people.

India's weather office said the rains hit the northeast first, coming off the Bay of Bengal instead of moving in from the Arabian Sea and hitting the southwest coast as is usual.

Heavy rain lashed Bangladesh's capital Dhaka and other parts of that country Thursday, bringing relief after weeks of a hot spell that has killed about 40 people.

People rushed out of homes to cool off, while flooded streets slowed traffic in the capital. [...]

They said previously that the devastating El Nino weather pattern that last year triggered the country's worst drought in 15 years was nearly over.

Large parts of India have been reeling under a three-week heat wave in which temperatures have touched 49 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit).

Most of the deaths have been in Andhra Pradesh state, where 1,209 people -- mostly rickshaw pullers, street hawkers and the homeless -- have died of sunstroke and dehydration. Dozens have died in Pakistan. In the Himalayan foothills of the north, six people, including four children, died in a forest fire, a government official said. [...]

WATERLOO, ONT. - New technology has helped astrophysicists in British Columbia to discover nine new moons orbiting Jupiter.

The moons' small size, distance and poor light made them difficult to spot; they range from about one kilometre to six kilometres across.

Scientists now count 61 satellites around Jupiter and 21 have been discovered so far this year...

Astrophysicist J.J. Kavelaars of the National Research Council Canada's Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics in Victoria said the moons appear as small specks of light that might be mistaken for stars.

By looking at many exposures with a computer, the researchers could track the satellites' movements. When the movements matched Jupiter's, the international search team tagged them as satellites.

An unusual orbit

One satellite, called S/2003 J20, has an odd orbit, said Kavelaars. It drifts towards the pole of the planet and then back down to the equator.

Kavelaars said this is the first time this kind of resonance has been observed for a satellite. The motion is caused by the interaction between Jupiter's gravity and the Sun's gravity, he added.

LONDON (Reuters) - Asthmatic children exposed to traffic pollution before getting a viral infection have more serious asthma attacks, doctors said on Friday.

In children, about 80 percent of attacks are due to viruses -- most of them from the common cold virus.
Researchers at St Mary's Hospital in Portsmouth, southern England have discovered that exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO2) from vehicle exhausts exacerbates the attacks.

"It drops the lung function and increases the symptoms after a virus infection. It can increase symptoms by as much as 200 percent," said Dr. Anoop Chauhan, a pulmonolgist at the hospital.

NO2 is common but the main sources indoors are gas stoves and, outdoors, traffic pollution.

Chauhan and his team measured the personal exposures of 114 asthmatic children between the ages of 8-11 from non-smoking families over almost a whole year. They found a strong relationship between higher NO2 pollution and the severity of an attack. [...]

Keep an eye on Cassiopeia - it contains a naked-eye star that may brighten and dim dramatically in the coming months.

That was the message at a January press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. Alex J. R. Lobel and Andrea Dupree (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) both reported observations of the active hypergiant star Rho (r) Cassiopeiae, which is visible to the naked eye at magnitude 4.5. That it shines so brightly from 10,000 light-years away means that it must be huge. Rho Cas is about as hot as the Sun but roughly a million times more luminous, which makes it is so big that, if it replaced our Sun, its surface would lie beyond the orbit of Mars.

[...] "We know this star did an amazing thing," says Dupree. It may be poised to do so again. Keep watch.

A run through the jungle is too easy; for the ultimate reality show contest, try a race through the Sun's atmosphere, where two comets recently lost their heads. The tails from a pair of comets survived a close encounter with the Sun, even after the Sun's intense heat and radiation vaporized their heads (nuclei and coma), an extremely rare event photographed by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft.

On May 24, 2003, a pair of comets arced in tandem towards the Sun, their paths taking them to just 0.1 solar radii above the Sun's surface, deep within the searing multimillion-degree solar atmosphere (corona).

They belong to the Kreutz family of sun-grazing comets, often seen by the SOHO spacecraft while diving towards their final rendezvous with the Sun. But as in humans, twins are rare. Even more so, this pair showed another very unusual trait: What looks like a faint tail (or "puff of smoke") can be seen moving away from the Sun, seemingly emanating from a point in the orbit beyond the comet's closest approach. Normally, sungrazers simply fade and disappear at an earlier stage, obliterated by the Sun's intense heat and radiation pressure. [...]

The secrets of El Nino, one of the most mysterious and destructive weather systems, could be unlocked by hundreds of thousands of ancient clay tablets now feared lost or damaged in the chaos of Iraq.

Researchers believe the tablets, written using a cuneiform text, one of the earliest types of writing, form the world's oldest records of climate change and could give vital clues to understanding El Nino and global warming.

Academics are demanding that ministers act to protect the unique cultural records, which have chronicled agriculture and other areas of everyday life in the Near East for nearly 5,000 years.

The fear is that the tablets and other priceless records are being plundered from sites across the country in the aftermath of war. The tablets record the ancient Akkadian and Sumerian empires, which once dominated the land now divided between Iraq, Iran and Syria.

They outline the catastrophic collapse of the city of Ur more than 4,000 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have died in a disastrous series of flash floods and severe droughts that may have lasted up to 30 years. [...]

Cannibalism is increasing in North Korea following another poor harvest and a big cut in international food aid, according to refugees who have fled the stricken country.

Aid agencies are alarmed by refugees' reports that children have been killed and corpses cut up by people desperate for food. Requests by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to be allowed access to "farmers' markets", where human meat is said to be traded, have been turned down by Pyongyang, citing "security reasons". [...]

North Korea's ability to feed itself has been hit by floods, deforestation and lack of farm fertilisers and equipment.

The WFP says Japan provided 500,000 tons of food aid in 2001, making it the biggest donor, but sent nothing last year. Food aid from America has been cut from 340,000 tons in 2001 to 40,000 tons so far this year. Washington has pledged to send a further 60,000 tons if Pyongyang lifts restrictions on the operations of agencies such as the WFP.

I have received several notices telling of NASA's grave concern with the unusual increase in solar activity. Since I have not received an official response to my inquisition from NASA official's, let me just say there is quite a bit of "chatter" suggesting Earth could be at some risk. I would suggest it is our satellites which are at most risk.

The rumors suggest NASA has been handed a 'gage order' issued by DoD (department of defense). The reason for this order is directed at our spy satellites. It is suggested that 'in the name of national security' we cannot confirm or deny recent and current solar activity is at dangerous levels.

Over the past week a reported 65 C-Class flares, 16 M-Class flares, and 2 X-Class flares have occurred. Just the week prior, another 2 X-Class flares and 4 M-Class flares erupted. In addition to the solar flares, perhaps as many as 45 CME's (coronal mass ejections) emerged.

Another area of concern is our 'power grids'. If Earth experiences a direct hit from any one of these M-Class or X-Class flares, it could in fact cripple our infrastructure. There is good reason to be concerned over this issue. Some of you may remember what happened in 1989 when an X-Class flare ripped through our Magnetic Field knocking out power grids all across parts of the world.

One area which suffered a devastating hit was Quebec, Canada. Power grids where knocked out for almost two months. This had occurred during winter months and people literally had to set up emergency communities to survive. Those who had homes with "fireplaces" quickly filled to as many as 20 to 30 people per household. An area of over 7 million people was reduced to using fires as a method of warmth and to cook meals. When hearing testimonies of those who experienced this historical blackout of 1989, you can easily understand the desperation and struggle one had to endure. But there was also something magical which occurred. People described knowing their neighbor for the first time. Experiencing true togetherness, community, unity, and a sense of 'singleness of purpose'. Could this be a glance of what may lie ahead?

Today's sunspot count is at 168. I am a bit nervous of region 380. It is very large and is set dead center which could produce a direct hit to Earth. The odds of an X-Class or M-Class flare erupting from this region is 90%. I would suggest it is almost certain. The question is not if an eruption will occur, but in what direction. (see equation)

Watch for "freak storms" to continue. More than likely in the way of tornadoes or tonado-like winds. Sudden rain and hail storms are likely. Also watch for 'record breaking' temperatures.

Rivers overflow into four Puebla neighborhoods

PUEBLA, Mexico (AP) -- Twelve hours of heavy downpours pounded this colonial city Thursday, causing three rivers to overflow and sparking floods that damaged at least 500 homes, authorities said.

Torrential rains that fell overnight and most of the day caused the Manzinilla, San Antonio and Alseseca rivers to overflow in and around northeast Puebla, the capital of the state by the same name, 65 miles (105 kilometers) from Mexico City. A statement released by the state government said it was the most rain to hit the city in one day in 100 years.

PALOMINO VALLEY, Nev. (AP) -- Swarms of Mormon crickets are marching across the West, destroying rangeland and crops, slickening highways with their carcasses and leaving disgusted residents in their wake.

"It's yucky," said Amy Nisbet of Elko in northeast Nevada, where this year crickets made their first appearance in recent memory. "You drive down the street and they pop like bubble wrap."

Mild winters and three years of drought have provided ideal conditions for the insects, which hatch in the spring and feed through the summer. Experts say this year's infestation in Nevada, Utah and Idaho could be the worst in decades.

CARSON CITY, Nev. - A wildfire burned more than 1,100 acres along the Sierra range, closing the highway from Carson City to Lake Tahoe, forcing evacuations and threatening 100 homes and businesses before firefighters got the better of it.

About 150 campers and counselors were evacuated from the Clear Creek Youth Camp near Carson City before fire officials announced Tuesday night the fire was no longer a threat. They expected it to be fully contained by Wednesday morning. [...]

Also Tuesday, a prescribed burn in Arizona escaped control lines and forced the evacuation of about 15 homes. The 4,500-acre fire was within a half-mile of homes in an area about three miles north of Cherry, officials said.

In the eastern part of Arizona, a 10,618-acre fire about 15 miles from Alpine was brought under control on Tuesday.

In Alaska, a 10,000-acre fire burned through the Goodpaster Valley southeast of Fairbanks, threatening a handful of recreational cabins. [...]

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are one of the most energetic and mysterious phenomena in the universe. In some galaxies indeed, the core generates amounts of energy which surpass those of normal galaxies, such as the Milky Way, by many orders of magnitude.

The central engine of these power stations is thought to be a supermassive black hole. Indirect lines of evidence have suggested that these massive black holes are enshrouded in a thick doughnut-shaped structure of gas and dust, which astronomers call a "torus". However, due to the limited sharpness of images that can be obtained with present telescopes in the 10-m range, such a torus has never been imaged to date.

Clearest-Ever Evidence from VLT Spectra of Powerful Event Summary

A very bright burst of gamma-rays was observed on March 29, 2003 by NASA's High Energy Transient Explorer (HETE-II), in a sky region within the constellation Leo.

Cosmological Gamma-Ray Bursts and Hypernovae Conclusively Linked

Within 90 min, a new, very bright light source (the "optical afterglow") was detected in the same direction by means of a 40-inch telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory (Australia) and also in Japan. The gamma-ray burst was designated GRB 030329, according to the date.

And within 24 hours, a first, very detailed spectrum of this new object was obtained by the UVES high-dispersion spectrograph on the 8.2-m VLT KUEYEN telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile). It allowed to determine the distance as about 2,650 million light-years (redshift 0.1685).

Continued observations with the FORS1 and FORS2 multi-mode instruments on the VLT during the following month allowed an international team of astronomers [1] to document in unprecedented detail the changes in the spectrum of the optical afterglow of this gamma-ray burst. Their detailed report appears in the June 19 issue of the research journal "Nature".

The spectra show the gradual and clear emergence of a supernova spectrum of the most energetic class known, a "hypernova". This is caused by the explosion of a very heavy star - presumably over 25 times heavier than the Sun. The measured expansion velocity (in excess of 30,000 km/sec) and the total energy released were exceptionally high, even within the elect hypernova class...

These observations therefore indicate a common physical process behind the hypernova explosion and the associated emission of strong gamma-ray radiation. The team concludes that it is likely to be due to the nearly instantaneous, non-symmetrical collapse of the inner region of a highly developed star (known as the "collapsar" model).

The March 29 gamma-ray burst will pass into the annals of astrophysics as a rare "type-defining event", providing conclusive evidence of a direct link between cosmological gamma-ray bursts and explosions of very massive stars.

BEIJING - Landslides and flooding caused by heavy rains have killed 51 people this month in China's northwest, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Wednesday.

The worst flooding occurred the night of June 5 when 27 people were killed by high waters in the Ili river valley, about 1,800 miles west of Beijing, Xinhua said. The report didn't explain why the deaths weren't revealed earlier.

Officials blamed heavier than usual rains, worsened by deforestation of hillsides caused by heavy logging that reduced the soil's ability to absorb rainfall, the report said.

High waters and landslides also have killed dozens of people in China's south, raising concerns ahead of the annual flooding season on Yangtze and other rivers.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. - More heavy rain was forecast Wednesday as residents of the central Appalachians cleared mud and debris caused by flash floods...

A 37-year-old man died Wednesday while wading in a creek in West Virginia. Over the past week, at least six other deaths have been blamed on the floods: a 10-year-old boy in West Virginia; a 6-year-old girl in Kentucky; a cave explorer in Kentucky, and three members of one family in North Carolina. Rain delayed the search Wednesday for the body of an 8-year-old boy who was in the same car as the three North Carolina victims.

Several counties in southern West Virginia were under a flood watch until Thursday.

Parts of Georgia got heavy rain for the second night in a row, with more than 2 inches in some areas, prompting the evacuation early Wednesday of 22 people in the town of LaGrange.

An additional 2 inches of rain was possible in western Georgia and the Atlanta area, the weather service said...

In West Virginia, officials estimated nearly 200 houses were destroyed or heavily damaged by flooding Monday and on June 11 in and around Charleston. More than 60 homes were ruined or severely damaged in nearby Boone County, where as much as 5 inches of rain fell Monday.

JUNE SOLSTICE: The sun will reach its highest point in northern skies today, June 21st, at 3:10 p.m. EDT (1910 UT). This marks the beginning of northern summer and, at precisely the same moment, southern winter.

UNSEASONAL AURORAS: Solstices are usually poor times for aurora watching. (Follow the links at spaceweather.com to find out why equinoxes are better.) Curiously, though, the weeks leading up to today's solstice have been filled with Northern Lights. Since late May auroras have appeared as far south in the United States as Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin ... even Virginia. Much like Earth weather, it seems, space weather is full of surprises.

Official: Wildfire could burn tens of thousands of acres

TUCSON, Arizona (CNN) -- Residents of about 300 more homes in the path of a wildfire raging near Tucson, Arizona, were evacuated Friday, bringing to about 1,000 the number of people forced from their homes since Tuesday, officials said.

The 4,000-acre Aspen fire has burned down at least half the homes in the vacation community of Summerhaven, northeast of Tucson, and fire officials predicted Friday that the blaze would spread and do more damage before they contain it.

The blaze started in the "worst dreams of a place for a fire to start," incident manager Larry Humphrey said Friday.

Humphrey said the fire could swell into the "tens of thousands of acres" and burn many more homes than the 250 already destroyed. He told reporters that because of the rugged terrain, it could take at least two weeks to contain the fire. [...]

The winds -- some gusting up to 60 mph -- forced fire crews to retreat from 9,157-foot Mount Lemmon. The winds also were too strong and too erratic for an aerial attack. [...]

Arizona firefighters also were battling the 4,500-acre Lizard fire southeast of Flagstaff, the 1,000-acre Cherry fire in Prescott National Forest, and the 2,000-acre Picture fire in Tonto National Forest.

In all, 14 large wildfires were burning Friday in five Southwestern states and Alaska.

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Firefighters battling a fast-growing wildfire that has destroyed hundreds of homes in southern Arizona said Sunday they were making slow progress in containing the blaze.

"We still have a long, long way to go," said Carrie Templin, a spokeswoman for some 900 firefighters, who were battling the fire on the ground and in helicopters.

Templin said the fire, which broke out Tuesday in the thick Ponderosa pine forest northeast of Tucson, was about five percent contained, but had grown to more than 8,700 acres, from about 6,400 acres on Saturday. [...]

In a hot, dry region accustomed to summer fires, this blaze has caused unusual concern due to the extensive damage it has brought to residential areas. Some 450 people were evacuated as the blaze swept through a popular mountaintop resort, charring 259 homes and other structures. Three television and radio towers were also damaged.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, who has declared a state of emergency, said she was left almost speechless after she viewed the devastation by helicopter on Saturday. [...]

Fire crews battling a wildfire that has destroyed more than 250 homes in Arizona are digging lines to protect remaining houses, broadcast towers and an important space observatory.

The Aspen fire, as it is called, has forced about 1,000 people to flee since it broke out on Tuesday.

On Saturday the fire - on Mount Lemmon - swept over a ridge of television and radio towers, fire officials said. Three broadcast transmission towers were lost.

Crews have been clearing the brush around the Mount Bigelow Observatory - which was used by the Nasa space agency to support its moon-landing Apollo programme.

Sprinklers have been set up around the facility to keep the nearby vegetation wet.

With high winds fanning the flames, firefighters have been looking for areas in the rugged terrain where they can create firebreaks to stop the spread of the blaze.

Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano declared a state of emergency earlier this week because of the raging fire, which experts believe will take two or three weeks to contain.

At present the fire is racing through dry forests on rough terrain that is largely inaccessible to firefighting vehicles.

KASABONIKA, ONT. - Hundreds of people in northwestern Ontario have fled their homes because of choking smoke from a major forest fire in the area.

The isolated community of Kasabonika, Ont., about 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, can be reached only by air.

About 720 people living in the community were flown out Sunday.

Four separate fires in northern Ontario have burned 30,000 hectares...

Most of the Ontario fires were caused by lightning.

Prospects look good on June 23rd for the launch of four rockets from Wallops Island, Virginia. Harmless chemicals released by three of the rockets will create some lovely high-altitude clouds visible from parts of the US east coast. Sky watchers near coastal Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, Washington DC, and possibly parts of lower New York and Pennsylvania are favored. The launch window extends from 9:30 p.m. to 2:24 a.m. EDT.

Visit Spaceweather.com for more information. If you happen to see the clouds tonight and take pictures of them, please submit your images to spaceweather.com for possible web publication.

TORONTO - Firefighters and water bombers are working around the clock to fight raging forest fires and tinder-dry conditions in several Canadian provinces.

Hundreds of thousands of hectares are burning in parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, the worst-hit province.

Dozens of fires are burning in northwestern Ontario, advancing at close to 30 metres per minute. The fires cover an area one-third the size of Prince Edward Island.

SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) - Florida Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency Tuesday for seven southwestern counties pummelled by torrential rain.

The order gives Bush power to evacuate residents and send resources and personnel to help city and county governments. Bush declared emergencies in Collier, Lee, Charlotte, Hardee, DeSoto, Sarasota and Manatee counties, which were hit with as much as 53 centimetres of rain in the last several days.

About 40 homes in Sarasota County were flooded, and storms did $2 million US in damage to seawalls in Punta Gorda Isles in Charlotte County.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft expects to experience a blackout in the transmission of its scientific data this week. It is estimated the blackout may last two to three weeks.

Engineers are predicting this problem after detecting a malfunction in the pointing mechanism of the satellite's high-gain antenna (HGA), which is used to transmit the large amounts of data from SOHO's scientific observations to Earth.

[..] If the problem is not solved, the Earth will be left outside the HGA beam on a periodic basis, with similar blackouts occurring every three months. European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA engineers are assessing several options to recover the situation, or minimize the scientific data loss.

SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA to study the sun, from its deep core to the outer corona, and the solar wind. It was launched in December 1995 on an Atlas IIAS/Centaur rocket. Besides watching the sun, SOHO has become the most prolific discoverer of comets in astronomical history. As of May 2003, more than 620 comets have been found by SOHO.

Severe storms raked the upper Midwest, spawning tornadoes that tore up houses and a church in Minnesota and wiped out a cluster of rural homes in South Dakota.

Hardest hit was the town of Buffalo Lake, Minn., although no major injuries were reported.

"The (grain) elevator's busted up, power lines are down, the whole city got hit. The whole north side of the roof of Zion Lutheran Church is gone," said Buffalo Lake City Councilman Douglas Rath.

Of all the world's great environmental tragedies it is the most compelling, and yesterday the deforestation of the Amazon was shown to be taking a huge turn for the worse.

After falling or staying steady for the past eight years, the rate at which Brazil's rainforest is disappearing has leapt by 40 per cent in a single year - and Europe's intensive farming may be a contributory cause.

Vast new tracts of virgin forest in the states of Mato Grosso and Para are being put to the chainsaw, according to figures from the Brazilian government, and turned into farmland - much of it used for growing soya beans, which end up as industrial cattle feed in Europe.

What is being destroyed is the most species-rich habitat on Earth. It provides much of the world's oxygen. It has been the subject of more green protests, and had more voices raised in its defence, than any other piece of ground on the planet. They seem to have availed it nothing. [...]

GENEVA (Reuters) - Chances of floods and typhoons from the weather phenomenon La Nina are increasing, but the latest incarnation of its alter-ego, El Nino, is finished, weather experts said on Friday.

"The El Nino of 2002-2003 is now over," the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a statement.

While wreaking less havoc than its 1997-98 predecessor, which caused $34 billion of damage, the latest El Nino brought droughts to Australia and southern Africa and higher temperatures to Asia. [...]

Scientists have discovered a remarkable hot zone beneath the Arctic ice, where the Earth's thick, rocky crust has come apart at the seams and lava and scalding water spew out of volcanoes and hot vents.

An international research team spent two months dangling probes and dredging gear off icebreakers in the high Arctic to get a close look at the "spreading" ridge. It stretches 1,800 kilometres along the seafloor from Greenland to Siberia, most of it in international waters.

The scientists retrieved tonnes of rock, including chunks of "black smokers" created as hot, mineral-rich water gushed out of the seafloor, lava tubes from volcanoes and rare samples of rock from deep inside the Earth.

The researchers describe the scientific treasure fished from the deep in the journal Nature today.

They have also produced the most detailed map yet of the zone, called the Gakkel Ridge.

The ridge is about five kilometres beneath the Arctic ice and is the most remote and deepest spreading ridge on the planet.

Such ridges, which are also found in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, form when hot rock from inside the Earth wells up between the 100-kilometre-thick crustal plates that cover the planet.

"The Earth is pulled apart at these ridges and material from the interior comes up," says Prof. Peter Michael of the University of Tulsa, one of the expedition's chief scientists.

The Gakkel Ridge has proved unexpectedly active. At least 20 volcanoes rise out of the ridge, and one erupted as recently as July 1998, Michael says. The largest rises about two kilometres off the sea floor...

Michael says the Arctic vents are so isolated they likely harbour life that is different from the tube worms, clams and other creatures that inhabit other deep-sea vents.

But Michael, a geoscientist, is most intrigued by the exposed mantle rock they discovered. Mantle is "white-hot" rock that rises from as deep as 2,900 kilometres inside the Earth. Normally, mantel rock is covered by magma and crustal rock, but on the Gakkel Ridge it is exposed in a canyon about 100 kilometres long and two kilometres wide...

A tropical storm rapidly developed in the Gulf of Mexico today and was expected to hit somewhere along the Texas or Louisiana coasts by Monday night...

While Bill is only predicted to be a minimum tropical storm, Lichter said parallels can be drawn to another minimum storm: June 2001's Tropical Storm Allison, which paralyzed the nation's fourth largest city.

Allison, which organized for less than a day from a disturbance off the upper Texas coast, came ashore near Houston on June 5 as a minimal tropical storm. Its remnants drifted into deep East Texas, only to backtrack and swamp Houston the night of June 8. By week's end, it had dumped more than 36 inches of water on some spots, caused $5 billion in damage and killed 22 people.

It was the costliest tropical storm in U.S. history and crippled Houston's downtown, the Texas Medical Center, and large residential areas across central and northeastern Harris County...

Monsoon floods battering parts of Bangladesh have claimed 45 lives in the past four days.

The rains have washed away many houses and displaced thousands of villagers, relief officials say.

Twelve people drowned in floods in the southeastern Chittagong district when another three died of diarrhoea after drinking flood-tainted water in neighbouring Khagrachari district.

The floods, which started on Thursday, forced about 5,000 people from their homes in hardest-hit Khagrachari district, where officials reported an outbreak of diseases such as diarrhoea and fever.