TAIPEI, Taiwan -- As typhoon Longwang approached Taiwan, a moderate earthquake shook the island, prompting some residents to flee their homes.

Nature's double-whammy left 36 people injured from the storm, according to local media reports, but no one was reported hurt by the quake, a magnitude 5.4 -- capable of moderate damage.

Longwang made landfall on Taiwan's eastern coast Sunday at 5:50 a.m. (5:50 p.m. ET Saturday) with wind gusts over 125 mph (201 kph) and heavy rains. Sustained winds were clocked at about 83 mph. Longwang means dragon king in Chinese.

The storm forced officials to shut down public transportation, and it was expected to strengthen and possibly make landfall a second time in mainland China after crossing the Taiwan Strait.

Forecasters said up to 16 inches of rain had fallen along the northern and central portions of the eastern coast, especially in mountainous areas.

Some 187,909 homes were without power, the fire administration told Reuters.

Before landfall, Longwang was a supertyphoon with wind gusts over 150 mph.

Hurricanes are defined as typhoons when they develop west of the international date line, an imaginary time-zone border drawn north and south through the Pacific Ocean, largely along the 180th meridian.

GRANTVILLE, Kan. - A storm dumped up to a foot of rain over parts of northeast Kansas on Sunday, sparking flash flooding that left people stranded in homes and cars, emergency officials said.

No serious injuries were reported, but emergency crews used airboats to navigate fast-moving floodwaters that damaged many homes.

About a foot of rain fell overnight in Jefferson County, and up to 10 inches was reported in Jackson County. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius declared an emergency in four counties.

"The water in the creeks came up, and the homes are surrounded," said Don Haynes, Jefferson County's director of emergency services. "Who plans for this kind of rain?"

Emergency officials did not have an estimate of how many people had been rescued, but reports from several officials indicated there were at least two dozen. A voluntary evacuation order was issued for Rossville, a town of 1,070 people in Shawnee county. Shelters were being opened.

One of the rescued was Dennis Stanwix, 49, of Grantville. An airboat picked up Stanwix, his wife, daughter and daughter's friend Sunday morning. He said he was awakened by his phone and when he looked out the window saw nothing but water.

"I knew we were in big trouble," he said.

Ann and Will Roberts were sleeping in their small house in Grantville when their 6-year-old daughter, Danni, awoke them Sunday morning.

"The picnic table is floating," Ann Roberts recalled the girl saying.

A nursing home in Leavenworth County was evacuated, and the Kansas Highway Patrol rescued a man off his car on a highway, Moser said. A mobile home also was reported to have washed away in Jackson County, but the home's resident escaped safely.

The rains closed nearly all roads in Jefferson County, with as much as 3 feet of water reported on Kansas 24. But it was receding under sunny skies by noon, said Gayle Bickel, chief of Township Fire District No. 1.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. - Hurricane researcher William Gray on Monday forecast two hurricanes, one of them one major, for the rest of October - nearly double the long-term average for the month.

Gray and fellow researcher Philip Klotzbach of Colorado State University said the likelihood of a major hurricane crossing the U.S. coastline is 15 percent, more than double the long-term average of 6 percent.

"Unfortunately, the very active season we have seen to this point is not yet over," Gray said.

Gray and Klotzbach said the likelihood of a named storm hitting the U.S. coast in October is 49 percent, compared with an average of 29 percent from 1950 to 2000. The probability of a hurricane making landfall in the U.S. is 21 percent, compared with the long-term average of 15 percent, they said.

Through the end of September, the 2005 season has had nine hurricanes, five of them major, and 17 named storms. The 50-year average is 5.9 hurricanes, 2.3 of them major, and 9.6 named storms for an entire season.

Three of this year's major hurricanes - Dennis, Katrina and Rita - made landfall. Ophelia hit the North Carolina coast as a Category 1 hurricane although its eye remained just offshore.

Gray and Klotzbach said factors behind this year's active season include warmer-than-average Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures and lower-than-normal sea level pressures, lower-than-average vertical wind shears and moister conditions in the lower and middle atmosphere.

They said they do not attribute the active season to human-induced global warming. Instead, they cited "long-period natural climate alterations that historical and paleo-climate records show to have occurred many times in the past."

ERIE, Pa. -- State and federal environmental officials are trying to determine the cause of a big stink reported along Lake Erie.

Hundreds of residents called authorities or the National Weather Service yesterday to report the smell, which has been variously described as like gasoline, natural gas or even decaying garbage and rotten eggs. The smell was strongest yesterday morning when a cold front swept through the area, churning up larger than normal waves from Erie to Dunkirk, N.Y., officials said.

Scientists said tests run so far aren't conclusive, but they believe the churning waters may have released some naturally occurring gases that are normally trapped beneath the lake's deeper waters. Decaying plants and fish washed ashore by the waves could also be contributing to the stench.

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection biologist Jim Grazio said the wave-churning theory makes sense because the smell lessened when the waves diminished.

"It's like the lake burped, and then the burp passed by us," Grazio said.

CANADA - Municipal officials are urging Longlac residents to exercise caution as they investigate reports of 'gasoline-type' odours in the towns sewer system.

The problem first cropped up about ten days ago in a variety of homes and businesses...and is reportedly most noticeable in basement areas. The Municipality of Greenstone says it still doesn't know if the smell is from sewer gases, natural gas or an industrial solvent.

But it's called in both the Ministry of Environment and the District Health Unit to try and track down the problem.

In the meantime, residents who do notice a gasoline smell in their basements are being advised to open windows and doors to ventilate the area...and to contact the Municipality so their home can be tested.

They're also advising those who notice an odour and then begin feeling unwell with symptoms of dizziness , headaches of nausea to seek medical attention.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- A huge landslide down a remote peak in Alaska caught the attention of scientists because it registered on seismographs around the world.

"The rock slide is indeed enormous, but I think the thing that's really unusual is the seismic signal is much larger than what you'd expect," said seismologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach with the Alaska Volcano Observatory. "We're still trying to figure out why."

The slide shook the earth with as much vigor as a magnitude 3.8 quake and dumped an estimated 65 million cubic yards of rock and ice from the south face of 10,500-foot Mount Steller on Sept. 14. The mountain is about 240 miles east of Anchorage south of Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park in the eastern Chugach Mountains.

The landslide registered on instruments across the world, said seismologist Natasha Ruppert with the Alaska Earthquake Information Center in Fairbanks.

"I've never seen anything like this, and what surprised me is how huge it was," Ruppert said. "It's more like an explosion, I would say, than an earthquake. It hit the ground and seismic waves traveled in all directions."

It's not clear what triggered the release, the scientists said. It wasn't caused by an earthquake. No one knows if warming climate could have weakened ice holding the mountain together -- blamed for several landslides in the Alps.

"Someone would have to go there and see what kind of rocks were involved in this slide, if they were water saturated," Ruppert said.

Mountain ranges like the Chugach are perpetually crumbling, near a "state of failure" anyway, noted research geologist Peter Haeussler, with the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage.

"This was a big slide, but the rocks are weak, the slopes are steep, so I don't see that you need to invoke a climate change origin to this one," he said in an e-mail message.

Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.

Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.

'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'

Usually dolphins were controlled via signals transmitted through a neck harness. 'The question is, were these dolphins made secure before Katrina struck?' said Sheridan.

The mystery surfaced when a separate group of dolphins was washed from a commercial oceanarium on the Mississippi coast during Katrina. Eight were found with the navy's help, but the dolphins were not returned until US navy scientists had examined them.

Sheridan is convinced the scientists were keen to ensure the dolphins were not the navy's, understood to be kept in training ponds in a sound in Louisiana, close to Lake Pontchartrain, whose waters devastated New Orleans.

The navy launched the classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission in San Diego in 1989, where dolphins, fitted with harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, were taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea.

Criticism from animal rights groups ensured the use of dolphins became more secretive. But the project gained impetus after the Yemen terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Dolphins have also been used to detect mines near an Iraqi port.

Sept. 28, 2005— A supernova blast 41,000 years ago started a deadly chain of events that led to the extinction of mammoths and other animals in North America, according to two scientists.

If their supernova theory gains acceptance, it could explain why dozens of species on the continent became extinct 13,000 years ago.

Mammoths and mastodons, both relatives of today's elephants, mysteriously died out then, as did giant ground sloths, a large-horned bison, a huge species of armadillo, saber-toothed cats, and many other animals and plants.

Richard Firestone, a nuclear scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who formulated the theory with geologist Allen West, told Discovery News that a key piece of evidence for the supernova is a set of 34,000-year-old mammoth tusks riddled with tiny craters.

The researchers believe that in the sequence of events following the supernova, first, the iron-rich grains emitted from the explosion shot into the tusks. Whatever caused the craters had to have been traveling around 6,214 miles per second, and no other natural phenomenon explains the damage, they said.

They think the supernova exploded 250 light-years away from Earth, which would account for the 7,000-year delay before the tusk grain pelting. It would have taken that long for the supernova materials to have showered to Earth.

Then, 21,000 years after that event, the researchers believe a comet-like formation from the supernova's debris blew over North America and wreaked havoc.

Firestone said they think the formation created superheated hurricanal winds in the atmosphere that rolled across North America at 400 kilometers per hour (about 249 mph).

"The comet (-like event) was followed by a barrage of hot particles. If that didn't kill all of the large animals, then the immediate climate changes must have," said Firestone.

Firestone said smaller animals could have sought shelter more readily, by going into caves or underground.

The findings were presented at last weekend's "World of Elephants" international conference in Hot Springs, S.D.

In addition to the tusk evidence, the scientists said arrowheads from North America's prehistoric Clovis culture, which went extinct around 13,500-13,000 years ago, Icelandic marine sediment, as well as sediment from nine 13,000-year-old sites in North America, contain higher-than-normal amounts of radiation in the form of potassium-40 levels.

Potassium-40 is a radioactive isotope, meaning a molecule that emits radiation.

Magnetic particles also were unearthed at the sites. Analysis of these particles revealed they are rich in titanium, iron, manganese, vanadium, rare-earth elements, thorium and uranium.

These elements all are common in moon rocks and lunar meteorites, so the researchers think the materials provide additional evidence that North America was bombarded 13,000 years ago by material originating from space.

Luann Becker, a University of California at Santa Barbara geologist, told Discovery News she was not surprised by the new supernova theory, since extinction events have been linked to similar comet or asteroid impacts before.

"What is exciting about Dr. Firestone's theory is that it can be easily tested," Becker said, and indicated she hopes future research will yield additional clues from North American and other sediment layers.

Hurricane Stan slammed into the port city of Veracruz, Mexico on Tuesday with winds of 128 km per hour. The heavy rains and punishing waves of the Category 1 hurricane forced the evacuation of thousands of residents and several offshore oil platforms after killing 46 people in Central America.

Mid-afternoon Tuesday found the storm centred 136 km southeast of Veracruz, population 425,000 people and was moving southwest at 11 km per hour.

Veracruz's busy port was closed, schools cancelled classes and officials at a nearby nuclear power plant prepared the facility for the hurricane's arrival. Thousands of residents abandoned their homes and stayed in dozens of shelters set up along the coast. Rivers overflowed into residential areas of Veracruz and high winds tore the roofs off houses in this normally laid-back colonial port. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

Wind and rain from Hurricane Stan also reached Central America, causing floods and landslides leaving at least 38 people dead in El Salvador. Rain was still falling in much of Central America on Tuesday, driving thousands from their homes in El Salvador and Guatemala. Forecasters are predicting the storm could dump up to 25 centimetres in some areas and are predicting the rains could continue for up to a week causing more landslides and flooding.

Officials are reported scattered power outages.

All three of Mexico's Gulf Coast crude oil loading ports were closed on Tuesday. The three, Coatzacalos, Dos Bocas and Cayo Arcas handle most of the 1.8 million barrels a day of crude oil exported by state-owned oil monopoly, Pemex. So far, the storm hasn't affected the company's production of 3.4 million barrels a day of crude oil.

Pemex is the world's third largest oil producer, and most of its exports are sent to the United States. The port closures were not expected to affect oil prices.

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - Portions of Montana, the Dakotas and Wyoming were hit by a slow-moving snowstorm that knocked out power, closed roads and dumped up to 2 feet by Wednesday night.

Thousands of power outages were reported and some schools were closed by the storm, which began Tuesday. Drifting snow contributed to road closings, and the National Guard was called out in North Dakota to aid the Highway Patrol in rescuing stranded motorists.

By nightfall, hundreds of people in vehicles, including three buses, had been rescued with equipment ranging from snow plows to bulldozers, said Rick Robinson of the state Department of Emergency Services.

There were no reports of injuries.

"It's really treacherous - heavy, deep snow. Visibility is just really poor. It's so heavy that vehicles just can't push through it," North Dakota Highway Patrol Capt. Mark Bethke said.

As much as 11 inches of snow had fallen in southeastern Montana by Wednesday morning. Billings had received 10.8 inches and set a record for snowfall Tuesday with 9.9 inches, National Weather Service meteorologist Tom Humphrey said.

At least 11,000 customers throughout the region lost power for a time as trees fell on power lines, officials said.

The storm, which moved in from the Rockies overnight, dropped up to two feet of snow in parts of western and central North Dakota, and winds up to 50 mph created blizzard conditions in some areas.

"It is, on our records, probably one of the earliest ones, as far as our recorded history goes, in 126, 130 years," said Sam Walker, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Bismarck, N.D.

The storm came just a few days after North Dakota had temperatures in the 90s. Warmer weather was forecast to return in the coming days.

In Utah, the ski industry was looking up.

Snowbird Ski & Summer Resort received its first snow of the year Tuesday with 6 inches atop 11,000-foot Hidden Peak. More snow was falling Wednesday.

"There are still projects to be done before winter arrives, but this first snowfall has put smiles on the faces of people all around Snowbird," said Snowbird President Bob Bonar.

At least 250 people have died in flooding and mudslides sparked by storms throughout Central America this week.

The dead include at least 50 people who were killed when the side of a volcano collapsed and buried two villages in Guatemala.

At least 100 more people have died elsewhere in Guatemala, while El Salvador has reported 65 deaths, and 21 more have been killed in Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica.

The storms were exacerbated by Hurricane Stan, which made landfall in Mexico on Tuesday.

Officials in Guatemala are calling for a number of remote communities to be declared mass graves, after they were engulfed by landslides.

Rescue efforts were suspended in some areas on Sunday after it was deemed too dangerous to dig for survivors.

More than 650 people in Guatemala have been confirmed dead in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Stan. Hundreds more are thought to be missing.

At least 100 people have died elsewhere in Central America and in Mexico.

Stan slammed ashore as a category one hurricane in southern Mexico on Tuesday. It quickly lost force, but most of the damage has been done by torrential rains lasting days on end.

Army and civil defence workers reached some remote communities including the western township of Tacana, near the Mexican border, on Sunday. But Guatemalan Vice-President Eduardo Stein said rescuers had still not been able to reach at least 90 villages cut off by mudslides.

Some estimates said as many as 1,400 people were feared buried.

Two Mayan villages in the worst affected area have been completely submerged by a slick of mud.

'Worse than Mitch'

Diego Esquina, the mayor of Panabaj, said his village "will no longer exist".

"We are asking that it be declared a cemetery. We are tired, we no longer know where to dig," he said.

"The bodies are so rotten that they can no longer be identified. They will only bring disease."

Some 77 bodies have been recovered from Panabaj, but about 250 are still missing, the mayor said. Nearby Tzanchaj was similarly devastated.

Firefighters said they had had to order villagers to give up their desperate digging on unstable ground.

"Most of the people are where the mud is thickest and we haven't been able to work there because of the danger," said firefighter Max Chiquito.

Correspondents say the Mayan villagers are struggling with a dilemma, as local cultural traditions dictate that bodies must be recovered and given a decent burial.

Not far from Panabaj, in Santiago Atitlan, on the shores of Lake Atitlan, an area popular with Western tourists, wooden coffins were stacked in the municipal cemetery waiting for burial. "Entire families have disappeared," local official Diego Sojuel told the Associated Press news agency.

Taxi driver Gaspar Taxachoy returned from working in Guatemala City to discover his home buried in mud.

The bodies of his wife, two daughters and a son have been found. "I'm only missing one more son," he told AP.

The BBC's Claire Marshall, in Mexico, says it is the region's poorest people who have been worst hit, with precariously-built hillside communities drowned by the mudslides.

Colombia and the US have said they will send food, blankets and first aid equipment to help victims in Central America and Mexico.

After Guatemala, El Salvador has suffered greatest loss of life, with at least 71 confirmed deaths.

The genesis of two category-five hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) in a row over the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented and troubling occurrence. But for most tropical meteorologists the truly astonishing "storm of the decade" took place in March 2004. Hurricane Catarina -- so named because it made landfall in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina -- was the first recorded south Atlantic hurricane in history.

Textbook orthodoxy had long excluded the possibility of such an event; sea temperatures, experts claimed, were too low and wind shear too powerful to allow tropical depressions to evolve into cyclones south of the Atlantic Equator. Indeed, forecasters rubbed their eyes in disbelief as weather satellites down-linked the first images of a classical whirling disc with a well-formed eye in these forbidden latitudes.

In a series of recent meetings and publications, researchers have debated the origin and significance of Catarina. A crucial question is this: Was Catarina simply a rare event at the outlying edge of the normal bell curve of South Atlantic weather -- just as, for example, Joe DiMaggio's incredible 56-game hitting streak in 1941 represented an extreme probability in baseball (an analogy made famous by Stephen Jay Gould) -- or was Catarina a "threshold" event, signaling some fundamental and abrupt change of state in the planet's climate system?

Scientific discussions of environmental change and global warming have long been haunted by the specter of nonlinearity. Climate models, like econometric models, are easiest to build and understand when they are simple linear extrapolations of well-quantified past behavior; when causes maintain a consistent proportionality to their effects.

But all the major components of global climate -- air, water, ice, and vegetation -- are actually nonlinear: At certain thresholds they can switch from one state of organization to another, with catastrophic consequences for species too finely-tuned to the old norms. Until the early 1990s, however, it was generally believed that these major climate transitions took centuries, if not millennia, to accomplish. Now, thanks to the decoding of subtle signatures in ice cores and sea-bottom sediments, we know that global temperatures and ocean circulation can, under the right circumstances, change abruptly -- in a decade or even less.

The paradigmatic example is the so-called "Younger Dryas" event, 12,800 years ago, when an ice dam collapsed, releasing an immense volume of meltwater from the shrinking Laurentian ice-sheet into the Atlantic Ocean via the instantly-created St. Lawrence River. This "freshening" of the North Atlantic suppressed the northward conveyance of warm water by the Gulf Stream and plunged Europe back into a thousand-year ice age.

Abrupt switching mechanisms in the climate system - such as relatively small changes in ocean salinity -- are augmented by causal loops that act as amplifiers. Perhaps the most famous example is sea-ice albedo: The vast expanses of white, frozen Arctic Ocean ice reflect heat back into space, thus providing positive feedback for cooling trends; alternatively, shrinking sea-ice increases heat absorption, accelerating both its own further melting and planetary warming.

Thresholds, switches, amplifiers, chaos -- contemporary geophysics assumes that earth history is inherently revolutionary. This is why many prominent researchers -- especially those who study topics like ice-sheet stability and North Atlantic circulation -- have always had qualms about the consensus projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world authority on global warming.

In contrast to Bushite flat-Earthers and shills for the oil industry, their skepticism has been founded on fears that the IPCC models fail to adequately allow for catastrophic nonlinearities like the Younger Dryas. Where other researchers model the late 21st-century climate that our children will live with upon the precedents of the Altithermal (the hottest phase of the current Holocene period, 8000 years ago) or the Eemian (the previous, even warmer interglacial episode, 120,000 years ago), growing numbers of geophysicists toy with the possibilities of runaway warming returning the earth to the torrid chaos of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM: 55 million years ago) when the extreme and rapid heating of the oceans led to massive extinctions.

Dramatic new evidence has emerged recently that we may be headed, if not back to the dread, almost inconceivable PETM, then to a much harder landing than envisioned by the IPCC.

As I flew toward Louisiana and the carnage of Katrina three weeks ago, I found myself reading the August 23rd issue of EOS, the newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. I was pole-axed by an article entitled "Arctic System on Trajectory to New, Seasonally Ice-Free State," co-authored by 21 scientists from almost as many universities and research institutes. Even two days later, walking among the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward, I found myself worrying more about the EOS article than the disaster surrounding me.

The article begins with a recounting of trends familiar to any reader of the Tuesday science section of the New York Times: For almost 30 years, Arctic sea ice has been thinning and shrinking so dramatically that "a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean within a century is a real possibility." The scientists, however, add a new observation -- that this process is probably irreversible. "Surprisingly, it is difficult to identify a single feedback mechanism within the Arctic that has the potency or speed to alter the system's present course." An ice-free Arctic Ocean has not existed for at least one million years and the authors warn that the Earth is inexorably headed toward a "super-interglacial" state "outside the envelope of glacial-interglacial fluctuations that prevailed during recent Earth history." They emphasize that within a century global warming will probably exceed the Eemian temperature maximum and thus obviate all the models that have made this their essential scenario. They also suggest that the total or partial collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet is a real possibility -- an event that would definitely throw a Younger Dryas wrench into the Gulf Stream.

If they are right, then we are living on the climate equivalent of a runaway train that is picking up speed as it passes the stations marked "Altithermal" and "Eemian." "Outside the envelope," moreover, means that we are not only leaving behind the serendipitous climatic parameters of the Holocene -- the last 10,000 years of mild, warm weather that have favored the explosive growth of agriculture and urban civilization -- but also those of the late Pleistocene that fostered the evolution of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa. Other researchers undoubtedly will contest the extraordinary conclusions of the EOS article and -- we must hope -- suggest the existence of countervailing forces to this scenario of an Arctic albedo catastrophe. But for the time being, at least, research on global change is pointing toward worst-case scenarios.

All of this, of course, is a perverse tribute to industrial capitalism and extractive imperialism as geological forces so formidable that they have succeeded in scarcely more than two centuries -- indeed, mainly in the last fifty years -- in knocking the earth off its climatic pedestal and propelling it toward the nonlinear unknown.

The demon in me wants to say: Party and make merry. No need now to worry about Kyoto, recycling your aluminum cans, or using too much toilet paper, when, soon enough, we'll be debating how many hunter-gathers can survive in the scorching deserts of New England or the tropical forests of the Yukon.

The good parent in me, however, screams: How is it possible that we can now contemplate with scientific seriousness whether our children's children will themselves have children? Let Exxon answer that in one of their sanctimonious ads.

Mike Davis is the author of "Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu" (The New Press) as well as the forthcoming "Planet of Slums" (Verso).

Tropical Storm Vince, the 20th named storm of the season, formed Sunday in the far eastern Atlantic. Vince was located between the Azores and the Canary Islands west of Morocco.

The storm appeared in waters that are cooler than what is typically needed for a tropical storm, said Chris Sisko, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

The storm, which had top sustained winds of about 80 km/h posed no threat to land. It wasn't expected to survive for long due to the cooler waters.

"Vince is a very odd one," Sisko said.

Only one other Atlantic season had more tropical storms and hurricanes since record keeping began in 1851. There were 21 in 1933.

After Vince, only one name is left for storms this season -- Wilma. After that, storms are named after letters in the Greek alphabet. That has never happened before in more than 50 years of regularly naming storms.

The hurricane season began June 1 and ends Nov. 30.

MANAQUIRI, Brazil - The worst drought in more than 40 years is damaging the world's biggest rainforest, plaguing the Amazon basin with wildfires, sickening river dwellers with tainted drinking water, and killing fish by the millions as streams dry up.

"What's awful for us is that all these fish have died and when the water returns there will be barely any more," Donisvaldo Mendonca da Silva, a 33-year-old fisherman, said.

Nearby, scores of piranhas shook in spasms in two inches of water -- what was left of the once flowing Parana de Manaquiri river, an Amazon tributary. Thousands of rotting fish lined the its dry banks.

The governor of Amazonas, a state the size of Alaska, has declared 16 municipalities in crisis as the two-month-long drought strands river dwellers who cannot find food or sell crops.

Some scientists blame higher ocean temperatures stemming from global warming, which have also been linked to a recent string of unusually deadly hurricanes in the United States and Central America.

Rising air in the north Atlantic, which fuels storms, may have caused air above the Amazon to descend and prevented cloud formations and rainfall, according to some scientists.

"If the warming of the north Atlantic is the smoking gun, it really shows how the world is changing," said Dan Nepstadt, an ecologist from the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Institute, funded by the U.S. government and private grants.

"The Amazon is a canary in a coal mine for the earth. As we enter a warming trend we are in uncertain territory," he said.

Deforestation may also have contributed to the drought because cutting down trees cuts moisture in the air, increasing sunlight penetration onto land.

Other scientists say severe droughts were normal and occurred in cycles before global warming started.

DRIVING CARS WHERE THEY ONCE SWAM

In the main river port of Manaus, dozens of boats lay stranded in the cracked dirt of the riverbank after the water level receded. Pontoons of floating docks sit exposed on dry land. People drive cars where only months ago they swam.

An hour from where it joins the Rio Negro to form the Amazon River, the Rio Solimoes is so low that kilometers (miles) of exposed riverbank have turned into dunes as winds whip up thick sandstorms. Vultures feed on carrion.

Another major Amazon tributary, Rio Madeira, is so dry that cargo ships carrying diesel from Manaus cannot reach the capital of Rondonia state without scraping the bottom. Instead, fuel used to run power plants has to be hauled in by truck thousands of kilometers (miles) from southern Brazil.

Dry winds and low rainfall have left the rainforest more susceptible to fires that farmers routinely start to clear their pastures.

In normal dry seasons, rains arrive often enough to put out blazes that escape from farms and spread to the forest. This year, the forest is catching fire and staying aflame.

In Acre state, some 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of forest have burned since the drought started and thick black smoke has on occasion shut down airports.

"It's illegal to burn but everyone around here does it. I do it to get rid of insects and cobras and to create fresh grass for my cows," a man who would only identify himself as Calixto said while using bundles of green leaves to smother flames and control fires near a highway.

RIVER COMMUNITIES SUFFER

The drought has also upset daily life in communities scattered throughout the basin's labyrinth of waterways.

"We closed 40 schools and canceled the school year because there's a lack of food, transport and potable water," said Gilberto Barbosa, secretary of public administration in Manaquiri. People whose wells have dried up risk drinking river water contaminated by sewage and dead animals.

Sinking water levels have severed connections in the lattice of creeks, lakes and rivers that make up the Amazons motorboat transportation network.

Many people in Manaquiri's 25 riverine communities are now forced to walk kilometers (miles) to buy rice or medicines.

Cases of diarrhea, one of the biggest killers in the developing world, are rising in the region. Many fear stagnant water will breed malaria. In response, the state government has flown five tons of basic medicines out to distant villages.

It will be two more months before the river fills again during the rainy season. Even then, residents fear polluted water will float to the top, causing sickness and economic plight.

"I've never seen anything like this," said Manuel Tavares Silva, 39, who farms melons and corn near Manaquiri, a town 149 km (93 miles) from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state.

DENVER - A powerful storm that dropped up to 20 inches of snow in parts of Colorado knocked out power Monday to thousands of people, closed an 80-mile stretch of a major highway and trigged rock slides in the foothills. [...]

Authorities closed the main east-west route across Colorado, Interstate 70, from Denver east to Limon. Seventy miles of U.S. 24 from Limon southwest to Colorado Springs were also closed. A day earlier, the Red Cross opened a shelter for stranded travelers.

The storm cut off power to 25,000 homes and businesses in Denver when power lines snapped and transformers failed, Xcel Energy spokesman Tom Henley said. [...]

Power had been restored by Monday to about 2,000 homes and businesses in Breckenridge.

Dozens of schools closed or were opening late, including three in the Denver area that closed because of power failures.

Two children were hospitalized with minor injuries after a school bus slid backward down a steep embankment south of Denver, Douglas County schools spokeswoman Carol Kaness said.

In southwestern Colorado, rain associated with the storm system was believed to have triggered two rock slides in San Miguel County, including one that shut down a lane of Colorado 145 near Telluride. No injuries were reported. Steady rain also caused two rock slides in Boulder Canyon northwest of Denver, forcing the closure of one lane of Colorado 119 and damaging a car. No one was hurt.

The National Weather Service had predicted up to 4 feet of snow in the southern Colorado mountains, but some of the snow melted and the precipitation turned to rain, leaving an accumulation of about a foot.

Snowfall amounts ranged from 20 inches in Breckenridge to 12 inches in Strasburg, about 20 miles east of Denver. [...]

Another tornado has struck Birmingham under a mile from the scene of this summer's disaster.

Emergency services were called to Passey Road in Moseley early on Wednesday evening.

One home was evacuated after its roof was ripped off and a nearby road was closed, although no one was injured.

Weather experts said almost an inch of rain fell within an hour in Edgbaston and caused traffic chaos for many rush hour motorists.

Meanwhile, Central Trains services between Lichfield Trent Valley and Redditch have been suspended until further notice due to flooding in the Longbridge area.

More heavy downpours are expected throughout the evening.

Resident Mohammed Saleem said he had not been in the house when the tornado struck.

"When I came back I saw it. There was debris everywhere. I was shocked it had happened again," he said.

His wife, four children and disabled mother have been forced to stay with his brother overnight.

"The upstairs of the house is gutted completely and water is coming in downstairs," he said.

Fire crews said they were unable to cover the house with tarpaulin as the structure had been taken away by the winds.

Neighbour Ritesh Bara witnessed the twister, he said: "I couldn't get a signal on my TV so I looked out the window and it was dark black.

"For a couple of seconds I couldn't hear anything from the pressure. I went outside and there was a thick, black smoke going around.

"The trees were bending in and birds were getting caught up in it too. It was terrifying."

A teacher at a nearby school said debris had been thrown through the air.

Maggie Hazel, from Springfield School, said several tiles were ripped from the roof.

'Tornado conditions'

She said: "One colleague saw it pass by, she saw something whirring and something fell and dropped by the window.

"We all felt the wind blow right through the building and wondered what was going on, then we heard a big bang.

"The worst damage was to a business across the road, something like a wooden pallet was picked up and hurled through the roof. It is still sticking out of it."

The weather conditions are similar to those of the afternoon 28 July when a tornado struck the Moseley and Kings Heath parts of the city.

Entire roofs were ripped off homes, trees were uprooted and cars overturned in the street as the wind whipped down the streets.

A Met Office spokesman said the second tornado was possible because of the heavy rain some areas of the city had experienced.

The Environment Agency has reported the River Rea, which runs through Northfield and Solihull is rising rapidly and is in danger of flooding.

Roads were closed in Sutton Coldfield and Harborne and flooding affected many more in Erdington, Stirchley, Small Heath and Edgbaston.

In the forecast, more rain and snow.

Rising temperatures in the world's atmosphere and oceans will lead to more intense storms as the century progresses, according to a new report from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Evaporation increases when the surface temperature of the ocean rises and warmer air can hold more moisture. When this soggier-than-normal air moves over land, it results in storms wetter and more intense than those experienced in the past.

The greatest changes will occur over land in the tropics, according to the study, which was released Thursday. Heavier rain or snow, however, will also fall in northwestern and northeastern North America, northern Europe, northern and eastern Asia, southwestern Australia, and parts of South America during the current century.

"The models show most areas around the world will experience more intense precipitation for a given storm during this century," lead author Gerald Meehl said in a statement. "Information on which areas will be most affected could help communities to better manage water resources and anticipate possible flooding."

The Mediterranean and the southwestern U.S., meanwhile, will experience a different pattern. Storms will likely become wetter, particularly in the fall and winter, but dry spells may stretch for longer in the warmer months. A picture of how this pattern might develop was seen in Europe this year: While Germany endured unprecedented floods, Spain and Portugal imposed water rationing because of a lengthy drought.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April released a report predicting that hurricanes would become more intense over the coming century. It became an oft-cited study after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Climate change has become a hot-button issue for scientists, politicians and the general public. The scientific community now generally agrees that global warming is in fact happening, and most of the future scenarios aren't pretty.

Comment: Remember when the idea that global warming and the idea that the planet's climate was rapidly changing were just "wild theories" that only "crazy people" talked about? Makes you wonder what else the so-called "experts" have gotten dead wrong - and why they got it dead wrong when all the available data clearly indicated that something was amiss...

Rising sea levels could lead to more frequent flooding in Bangladesh and other low-lying nations. Food production could also be disrupted. Melting polar ice is expected by some to lead to a sea lane above Siberia in a few years.

While scientists generally agree that the world's climate is changing, there is more disagreement over how much of the change is due to human behavior. Some believe a great deal of the warming is caused by burning fossil fuels, which create greenhouse gases that trap heat. Examination of data from the 20th century implicates humans, Meehl said in a phone interview.

"Probably most of the climate change in the early part of the century was caused by natural events," he said, such as a rebounding of temperatures that ordinarily occurs after volcanoes. "But the change in the latter part of he 20th century was the result of human activity."

Others disagree. Still others assert that, because the stakes are so high, debating whether or not reducing greenhouse gas emissions can help makes no sense.

Flooding has affected many areas in central Quebec and the Eastern Townships, driving 150 people from their homes and forcing Bishops University to cancel classes. The worst-hit area is in and around Sherbrooke, Que., where 100 millimetres of rain fell over the weekend. Parts of the city's downtown flooded after the St. François River overflowed its banks.

About 150 people were forced to leave their homes.

In nearby Lennoxville, officials at Bishops University and neighbouring Champlain College shut their doors for the day on Monday.

Parts of the Bishops campus were under more than a metre of water and the main bridge linking the campus to Lennoxville was closed, leaving only two other access points.

Meanwhile, flooding was also affecting the Victoriaville area in Central Quebec, where several rivers overflowed their banks and forced officials to evacuate about 60 homes.

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras - Hurricane Wilma strengthened into a Category 5 monster early Wednesday packing 175 mph winds, and forecasters said a key reading of the storm's pressure showed it to be the most powerful of the year.

Wilma was dumping rain on Central America and Mexico, and forecasters warned of a "significant threat" to Florida by the weekend.

The storm's power multiplied greatly over the last day. It was only Tuesday morning that Wilma grew from a tropical storm into a weak hurricane with 80 mph winds.

Wilma's pressure readings Wednesday morning indicated that it was the strongest hurricane of the season, said Trisha Wallace, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Wilma had a reading of 892 millibars, the same reading as a devastating unnamed hurricane that hit the Florida Keys in 1935.

Comment: In another AP article, we read:

Its confirmed pressure readings Wednesday morning dropped to 882 millibars - the lowest ever measured in a hurricane in the Atlantic basin, according to the hurricane center. The strongest on record based on the lowest pressure reading is Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, which dipped to 888 millibars.

"We do not know how long it will maintain this Category 5 state," Wallace said.

Jamaica, Cuba, Nicaragua and Honduras were getting heavy rain from the storm, though it wasn't likely to make landfall in any of those countries, she said. Forecasts showed it would likely turn toward the narrow Yucatan Channel between Cuba and Mexico's Cancun region - then move into the storm-weary Gulf.

By 2 a.m. EDT, the hurricane was centered about 170 miles southwest of Grand Cayman Island and about 400 miles southeast of Cozumel, Mexico. It was moving toward the west-northwest at nearly 8 mph, according to the Hurricane Center.

"It does look like it poses a significant threat to Florida by the weekend. Of course, these are four- and five-day forecasts, so things can change," said Dan Brown, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center.

Wilma already had been blamed for one death in Jamaica as a tropical depression Sunday. It has flooded several low-lying communities and triggered mudslides that blocked roads and damaged several homes, said Barbara Carby, head of Jamaica's emergency management office. She said that some 250 people were in shelters throughout the island.

While some Florida residents started preparing by buying water, canned food and other supplies, hurricane shutters hadn't gone up yet in Punta Gorda, on Florida's Gulf coast, and no long lines had formed for supplies or gas.

Still, Wilma's track could take it near that city and other Florida areas hit by Hurricane Charley, a Category 4 storm, in August 2004. The state has seen seven hurricanes hit or pass close by since then, causing more than $20 billion in estimated damage and killing nearly 150 people.

In Mexico, the MTV Latin America Video Music Awards ceremony, originally scheduled to be held Thursday at a seaside park south of Cancun, was moved up one day to avoid possible effects from Wilma.

The storm is the record-tying 12th hurricane of the season, the same number reached in 1969; 12 is the most in one season since record-keeping began in 1851.

On Monday, Wilma became the Atlantic hurricane season's 21st named storm, tying the record set in 1933 and exhausting the list of names for this year.

The deadly season has already witnessed the devastation of Katrina and Rita in the past two months, which killed more than 1,200 people and caused billions of dollars in damage.

Honduras and its neighbors already are recovering from flooding and mudslides caused earlier this month from storms related to Hurricane Stan. At least 796 people were killed, most of them in Guatemala, with many more still missing.

The government of flood-prone Honduras warned that Hurricane Wilma posed "an imminent threat to life and property of the people of the Atlantic coast." Neighboring Nicaragua also declared an alert.

Honduran President Ricardo Maduro declared "a maximum alert" along the northern coast and his office said emergency personnel and resources had been sent to the area, where evacuations were possible.

In Nicaragua, national disaster prevention chief Geronimo Giusto said the army, police and rescue workers were being mobilized and evacuation points readied.

Authorities in the Cayman Islands earlier called an alert.

Forecasters said Wilma should avoid the central U.S. Gulf coast that was devastated by Katrina and Rita. "There's no scenario now that takes it toward Louisiana or Mississippi, but that could change," said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center.

The six-month hurricane season ends Nov. 30. Wilma is the last on the list of storm names for 2005; there are 21 names on the yearly list because the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z are skipped.

If any other storms form, letters from the Greek alphabet would be used, starting with Alpha, for the first time. Storms have gotten alphabetical names only in the past 60 years.

There have been 10 late-season hurricanes of Category 3 or higher since 1995.

Police evacuated several thousand people from the Massachusetts city of Taunton as a dam threatened to burst and send a 10-foot (three-meter) surge through the downtown area.

Officials said heavy rainfall over the past week had placed enormous pressure on the wooden Whittendon Pond Dam which controls water flow along the Mill River that passes through Taunton.

If the dam was to fail, officials said a second dam further upstream would also likely collapse, emptying two lakes at the same time.

"If the dams go, they're expecting a 10-foot surge," said Taunton Police Department spokesman Eric Nichols.

"So anybody along that Mill River watershed area and anybody downtown has been evacuated," said Nichols, who put the number of displaced people at 5,000 people.

Taunton, which lies just south of Boston, has a population of close to 50,000 people.

All businesses, schools and government offices, including the court and city hall were closed.

In an effort to control the situation, engineers were carefully releasing water through both dams.

Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, said it could be some time before the evacuees could return home.

"It could go on for days," Judge said of the efforts to relieve the pressure on the dam.

LONDON - World scientists are aiming to spell out in graphic detail the threat of flooding faced by millions of people from America to Asia as global warming melts the polar ice caps.

A major coordinated study of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets intends not only to lay the bald facts before world leaders but offer courses of action.

"We want to be more prescriptive," said David Carlson, head of International Polar Year (IPY) starting in March 2007.

The two year study, announced on Wednesday by the International Council for Science (ICSU), will be the first coordinated probe in 50 years of the ice-bound ends of the earth under the onslaught of climate change.

ICSU is a non-governmental organization whose members include the national science academies of 103 countries.

"Part of the reason scientists stay in the comfort zone is that they can always say: 'well we don't know enough,"' Carlson told Reuters. "We are going to take away the uncertainty.

"If we come out of this and say 'we still don't know enough' then we will not have done our job," he added in an interview.

Scientists say the earth's temperature will rise by at least two degrees centigrade this century due to greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels for transport and electricity, putting millions at risk from extreme weather and rising oceans.

A new United Nations' report states that up to 50 million people could become environmental refugees from floods and famines due to climate change within five years. [...]

Mudslides triggered by hurricane Stan have unearthed human bones in a Guatemalan village, raising speculation they could be part of a mass grave from the country's long civil war.

Carlos Ajcum says he noticed the bones after hurricane Stan swept away the earth from one corner of his home in the western highland village of Las Nubes.

Neighbours may have had family members who were kidnapped during the country's 36-year civil war, says Ajcum.

Guatemala's civil war erupted in 1960 following a military revolt against the autocratic government of Gen. Ydigoras Fuentes. He came into power after a CIA-backed dissident coup overthrew former president Jacobo Arbenz.

Marked by human rights atrocities, the conflict left more than 100,000 people dead and created one million refugees. It formally ended in 1996.

It hasn't been proven that the area is a mass grave from the civil war, but it was home to a military base during the 1980s. In the past, other mass graves have been found near other Guatemalan military bases.

Rudy Castillo, with the office of the country's Human Rights Prosecutor, is involved in the investigation. He confirms a human leg bone and shoulder bone blade were found under the house. He says there are more bones under the house.

With many people still unaccounted for, Castillo hopes an investigation will give people some answers. Castillo hopes the investigation will begin within two weeks in case future landslides destroy the evidence.

The early October landslides crashed over villages, leaving thousands of people dead or missing.

A new species of marine worm that lives off whale bones on the sea floor has been described by scientists.

The creature was found on a minke carcass in relatively shallow water close to Tjarno Marine Laboratory on the Swedish coast.

Such "zombie worms", as they are often called, are known from the deep waters of the Pacific but their presence in the North Sea is a major surprise.

A UK-Swedish team reports the find in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Adrian Glover and Thomas Dahlgren tell the journal the new species has been named Osedax mucofloris, which literally means "bone-eating snot-flower".

"They look like flowers poking out of the whale bone. The analogy goes a bit further because they have a root system that goes into the bone," Dr Glover, a researcher at London's Natural History Museum, told the BBC News website.

"The part of the animal that is exposed to the seawater is covered in a ball of mucus, so they are quite snotty. That is probably a defence mechanism." [...]

HANOI, Oct. 20 (Xinhuanet) -- The floodwater caused by rainstorms hit Vietnam's southern Mekong Delta city of Can Tho, Vietnam News Agency reported Thursday.

Water tides in the Hau River, which hit a peak of 2.2 meters or 0.5 meters above the third and highest warning level on Wednesday, have broken four sections of dykes and submerged most of the transport system in the city. In Some areas water is 0.5 meters above the surface, said the report.

The flood has caused many traffic accidents and brought about health problems to hundreds of families.

NAPLES, Fla. - Hurricane Wilma plowed into southwest Florida early Monday with howling 125 mph winds and dashed across the state to the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, shattering windows, peeling away roofs and knocking out power to millions of people. At least one death in Florida was blamed on the storm. [...]

The same storm that brought ruin over the weekend to resort towns along Mexico's Yucatan Coast came ashore in Florida as a strong Category 3 hurricane, but within hours had weakened into a Category 2 with winds of 105 mph. [...]

Wilma, Florida's eighth hurricane in 15 months, came ashore in Florida at 6:30 a.m. EDT near Cape Romano, 22 miles south of Naples, spinning off tornadoes and bringing a potential for up to 10 inches of rain, the National Hurricane Center said.

Wilma was moving northeast at about 25 mph, up the Atlantic coast. By early Wednesday, it was expected to be off the coast of Canada, but forecasters said it may not bring heavy rain because its projected track was far off shore. [...]

About 35 percent of Key West was flooded, including the airport, said Jay Gewin, an assistant to the island city's mayor. No travel was possible in or out of the city, he said. U.S. 1, the only highway connecting the Keys to the mainland, was flooded.

Key West Police Chief Bill Mauldin said the flooding was severe - "more extensive than we've seen in the past." [...]

MIAMI - A record-breaking 22nd named tropical storm formed in the Caribbean on Saturday and could bring life-threatening floods and mudslides to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the U.S National Hurricane Center said.

The storm was called Tropical Storm Alpha, the first time the hurricane center has resorted to using the Greek alphabet since it began naming tropical cyclones in 1953.

The 2005 hurricane season has had so many storms that all the storm names preassigned for this year were used up with Hurricane Wilma, which pounded the Mexican resort of Cancun on Saturday and was expected to head to Florida on Sunday.

Alpha made 2005 the most active hurricane season since records began 150 years ago, and the 2005 season still has five weeks to run. The 1933 season had 21 named storms. [...]

An older version of Alaska's license plates describes the state as "The Last Frontier," but that title might better fit the mysterious peaks and valleys in the dark world beneath the sea.

From the depths of a long ridge spanning the floor of the Arctic Ocean, researchers have pulled up evidence of a plant that now grows in rice fields in Vietnam. This suggests that the top of the world was once a very warm place. [...]

STATE COLLEGE, PA (AccuWeather.com) -- Hurricane Wilma has joined forces with a storm off the mid-Atlantic coast to produce what AccuWeather.com Meteorologists have termed "SuperStorm 2005." The SuperStorm is currently producing winds over 40 mph from New Jersey to New England. Martha's Vineyard, Mass., reported a peak wind of 49 mph and reports of winds up to 50 mph have been received from the New Jersey coast and Long Island, Ny.

The storm has three major components that will impact many people across the mid-Atlantic into the Northeast. The first component, as already mentioned, is the high winds lashing the coastal areas. The strongest winds and the potential for damage and even power outages will occur across eastern New England today. Winds in that area are forecast to gust up to 60 mph. Given the already soggy ground, the winds could easily cause trees to be blown over.

The second component of the storm is the flooding threat. Heavy rain has already fallen overnight across New England. Over an inch of rain has been reported in many areas. Another 2-4 inches of rain is forecast across New England and, based on the reports from emergency management in New England, 2 inches of rain will cause renewed flooding problems. Heavy rain will also impact parts of eastern Pennsylvania , eastern New York and New Jersey where flooding of small streams and creeks will occur.

The third component of the storm is the heavy wet snow. Reports of over 2 inches of snow and power outages have been received by AccuWeather.com across south-central Pennsylvania this morning. The bulk of the heavy snow has fallen across the higher elevations of West Virginia, where over 4 inches of snow has been measured. The heavy, wet snow will spread into central Pennsylvania this morning, then into the Poconos of Pennsylvania later today and tonight. Snow will also develop across the Catskills of New York, and the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire. Elevations about 1,500 feet will have over 4 inches of snow. With trees fully leafed in many of these areas, the heavy weight of the snow can weigh down tree limbs onto power lines, resulting in scattered power outages.

The SuperStorm is forecast to move up along the New England coast tonight and be in the Canadian Maritimes by midday Wednesday. Dry, chilly and blustery weather will follow the storm. If the stormy weather along the Eastern Seaboard is any indication of the winter pattern, then prepare for a wild winter. Keep in mind, AccuWeather.com Winter Outlook is calling for above normal snows over much of the Northeast and northern Appalachians this winter.

Flood warnings are in place across Britain tonight after heavy rain and 70mph winds swept across the country.

Homes and shops in Plymouth and Cornwall have been flooded and there are warnings of further bad weather.

The Met Office has issued a severe weather warning in England and Wales [...]

MIAMI -- It could be midweek before normal service resumes at major Florida airports, meaning hundreds of thousands domestic and international fliers will be inconvenienced at least another day because of Hurricane Wilma and the troubled airline industry will lose millions of dollars in revenue.

Airports in Miami, Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, which were closed because of extensive hurricane-related damage and power outages, were struggling to reopen by the end of Tuesday, but officials said there were no guarantees such goals would be met. At least 2,000 flights have been canceled into and out of South Florida's three major airports.

"For all practical purposes, if we don't get power by 2 o'clock or so, we probably will not be able to open up" until at least Wednesday, said Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport spokesman Steve Belleme. The airport terminal and at least one concourse sustained damage.

Officials also were trying to figure out how a Broward County curfew that begins at 7 p.m. would affect arriving passengers.

Miami International Airport, the busiest U.S. hub for Latin American travel and the busiest state hub for foreign travel, had power on Tuesday morning, but repairs were still being made to roofs, fences and loading bridges, according to spokesman Marc Henderson. [...]

The hurricane also wreaked havoc at some smaller airports and made others inaccessible by downing trees on access roads. Boca Raton lost most of its hangars, and Hollywood-North Perry sustained extensive damage to its tower and roof.

The runway at Key West is under water from the storm surge, Brown said. [...]

Almost 60 pilot whales have died after stranding themselves on a beach on the Australian island of Tasmania.

A Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service spokeswoman said on Tyesday that the pod of 67 pilot whales was spotted at Tasmania's Marion Bay on Tuesday morning.

Most were stranded on an area of the bay inaccessible by road and most had died by the time wildlife officers used boats to ferry volunteers across to them, spokeswoman Liz Wren said. [...]

Pilot whales, which can grow up to six metres (20 foot) long, frequently beach themselves in a phenomenon that remains a mystery to scientists.

Tasmania's rugged coastline has one of the highest stranding rates in the world, with state government records showing some 2,800 pilot whales and 500 dolphins had beached themselves up until 2003.

Wren said there were a number of theories on why the animals stranded. [...]

"Other people think it might be something to do with the magnetic fields that they use to navigate. We simply don't know."

CALHAN - Folks in this close-knit community on the eastern plains are baffled and worried about two mysterious incidents in which 22 horses and a burro were found dead.

The rural residents in these parts are pretty level-headed people, and they scoff at the notion that UFOs might be responsible. But many were around when a spate of unsolved cattle mutilations occurred in the 1970s and again in the early 1990s, and they're willing to entertain the notion - maybe with a little tongue in cheek - that cults, creeps and "black helicopter" people might be to blame.

"There's strange stuff going on," Terry Ashcraft said Monday while doing some business at the Pikes Peak Co-op in Calhan.

Ashcraft, who lives 19 miles east of town, remembers driving a farm truck down a dark rural road 15 years ago at harvest time and "running off" a helicopter in a field where cattle were later found mutilated. [...]

The veterinarian investigating the deaths of the animals, John Heikkila, fielded lots of questions from worried stockmen Monday as he performed state- required inspections of animals at the weekly Calhan livestock auction.

The tall, burly Montanan, who has cared for animals in the area for years, said he's pretty certain the 16 horses found dead Saturday in rancher William DeWitt's pasture were killed by lightning. All of the horses were found lying within 50 yards of one another, including one found still perched on its knees, snout to the ground. [...]

Sixkiller found his animals dead on Oct. 11, less than two miles from where the 16 horses were found Saturday.

Heikkila performed autopsies on Sixkiller's animals and found perfectly round puncture wounds in their hides or skulls, about the size of 22-caliber bullets. But the wounds were no more than three-quarters of an inch deep, and exams and X-rays revealed no bullet fragments or slugs in the carcasses.

The vet said a first round of tests for poisons and for a feed additive for cattle that is deadly to horses have come back negative. He said he's waiting for further tests that might reveal why the blood in Sixkiller's animals didn't clot, which he said would be expected.

If that test doesn't solve the mystery, he said, a definitive cause of the animals' deaths might never be known.

"Ned's was not a case of lightning," Heikkila said. "In real life, there are a lot of incidents where we just don't know." [...]

Gov. Jeb Bush took the blame Wednesday for frustrating delays at centers distributing supplies to victims of Hurricane Wilma, saying criticism of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was misdirected.

"Don't blame FEMA. This is our responsibility," Bush said at a news conference in Tallahassee with federal Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who oversees the agency.

Many Floridians were still struggling to find food, water, ice and gas on the third day of recovery from Wilma, waiting in line for hours - sometimes in vain. Miami-Dade's mayor called the distribution system flawed and said at least one relief site of 11 in his county ran out of supplies.

The 21st storm in the busiest Atlantic hurricane season on record, Wilma killed at least 27 people. Florida's official death toll doubled from five to 10 Wednesday, and the storm also killed at least 12 people in Haiti, four in Mexico and one in Jamaica.

Frustration with Florida's relief effort flared Tuesday, when trucks carrying the first wave of relief - food, ice and water - either arrived much later than local officials expected or didn't show up at all.

Myriad problems affected supply deliveries, according to local and state officials. Cell phone service was down or spotty, complicating communications between government officials and truck drivers. Some drivers got lost on their way to distribution points and had to be brought there by police escort.

Local governments prematurely released distribution sites and times, causing crowds to gather hours before any supplies got there. In many cases, there simply was not enough ice, water and meals ready-to-eat to go around, or it took far too long to get the supplies to the proper places, officials said.

"We did not perform to where we want to be," Bush said. [...]

MIAMI - Tropical Storm Beta formed Thursday in the southwestern Caribbean Sea, extending this year's record of named storms in the Atlantic hurricane season.

Beta is the season's 23rd tropical storm, the most since record keeping began in 1851. The disturbance formed Wednesday night but forecasters said it was not expected to threaten the United States.

Richard Knapp, hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, said it was not unusual to get storm activity toward the end of hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30.

"It may not be over with Beta, but let's hope so," he said.

At 5 a.m. EDT, it was located about 75 miles south of San Andres Island and about 140 miles east-southeast of Bluefields, Nicaragua. A hurricane watch and a tropical storm warning has been issued for the islands of San Andres and Providencia. Heavy rain and strong winds were expected there Thursday.

A tropical storm warning has been issued for the entire Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and adjacent islands. Hurricane conditions are possible in the next several days, forecasters said. [...]

Sun worshippers took to Brighton beach in their hundreds yesterday, where the temperature hit 18.1 C. In Kinlochewe on the far north-west coast of Scotland, it was a balmy 22.4 C.

Just four days before Hallowe'en, Britain was enjoying the warmest 27 October since records began in 1880.

As the UK basked in the freakish heat, it seemed almost churlish to seek an explanation. But these days, in the shadow of global warming, extreme weather patterns come with a health warning attached. Why was it so warm?

The weather experts explained that the mini-heatwave was the result of a large area of high pressure over southeastern Europe and low pressure well to the west of Ireland.

Sandwiched in between these two weather systems was Britain, which happily found itself right in the way of a warm southerly breeze blowing directly from the hot sands of north Africa. The dryness of the air was explained by it coming from the continent rather than from the Atlantic. The Scottish glens enjoyed the added benefit of a meteorological phenomenon known as the Fone effect, when air warms even further after descending from higher ground.

Is this yet more evidence of climate change? Was this the sort of October day Britain might expect in a world where global warming has become reality?

The Prince of Wales said yesterday that climate change was one of the greatest problems facing man. Meanwhile, the chief scientist, Sir David King, reiterated his belief that global warming was a greater threat than terrorism. [...]

BULLETIN:
TROPICAL STORM BETA INTERMEDIATE ADVISORY NUMBER 6A
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
8 AM EDT FRI OCT 28 2005

...TROPICAL STORM BETA GETTING CLOSER TO SAN ANDRES AND PROVIDENCIA AS IT CONTINUES TO MOVE SLOWLY NORTHWARD...

A HURRICANE WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FOR THE ISLANDS OF SAN ANDRES AND PROVIDENCIA.

A TROPICAL STORM WARNING AND A HURRICANE WATCH REMAIN IN EFFECT FOR THE ENTIRE CARIBBEAN COAST OF NICARAGUA FROM THE BORDER WITH COSTA RICA NORTHWARD TO CABO GRACIAS A DIOS NEAR THE NICARAGUA/HONDURAS BORDER...AND ADJACENT ISLANDS. HURRICANE WARNINGS WILL LIKELY BE REQUIRED FOR PORTIONS OF THE COAST OF NICARAGUA LATER TODAY.

A HURRICANE WARNING MEANS THAT HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. [...]

NEW YORK - New York City has many odors, but when the city began to smell a little too good, New Yorkers became alarmed.

Residents from the southern tip of Manhattan to the Upper West Side nearly 10 miles north called a city hot line to report a strong odor Thursday night that most compared to maple syrup, The New York Times reported Friday.

There were so many calls that the city's Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to find the source of the mysterious smell.

Air tests haven't turned up anything harmful, but the source was still a mystery.

"We are continuing to sample the air throughout the affected area to make sure there's nothing hazardous," said Jarrod Bernstein, an emergency management spokesman. "What the actual cause of the smell is, we really don't know."

Although many compared the smell to maple syrup, others said it reminded them of vanilla coffee or freshly-baked cake. All seemed to agree that it was a welcome change from the usual city smells.

"It's like maple syrup. With Eggos (waffles). Or pancakes," Arturo Padilla told The Times as he walked in Lower Manhattan. "It's pleasant."