Britain is braced for another day of heavy rain and storms causing flooding, disruption to travellers and another mudbath for Glastonbury-goers.
The Environment Agency has four flood watches in place - at Faustian Beck and Pinxton near Nottingham, the River Doe Lea in Derbyshire, and Frisby near Leicester.
And flooding is also causing problems on the railways, disrupting the journeys of thousands of passengers.
A Network Rail spokesman said the east coast mainline outside Nottingham is blocked by a landslip and the west coast mainline south of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire is also blocked both ways.
Ernest Sweat paused by the charred pine trunk he found burning like a match two months ago and wondered - could he have stopped the largest Southeastern wildfire in more than a century?
Sweat was driving home April 16 when he spotted smoke along the dirt road to his tobacco farm. Power lines were snapped by fallen pine and flames climbed surrounding trees. He dashed home to call the fire department, but the blaze had already spread.
It would become the Southeast's biggest wildfire since 1898, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
''If I could have just been here a little bit earlier, before it got into those roots, I could've outed it,'' he said.
Within a day, the wildfire burned a 9-mile path through rural timberland. A week later, the blaze had destroyed 18 homes and spread into the Okefenokee Swamp.
More than 200 localities in Arad, western Romania, were left without electric power on Thursday night, after a strong storm. The authorities are working to solve the problems.
Over 50 localities in Dobrogea, southeastern Romania, have water supply problems because the drought left many wells dry or with a very low water level.
Trees toppled, several houses were struck by lighting and set on fire and a motorcyclist was seriously injured from a falling tree in a storm that passed over Hungary last evening, the spokesperson of the national disaster management authority said on Friday, quoted by Hungarian news agency MTI.
The fire services were called out to more than 400 locations throughout Hungary on Thursday evening, mostly because of fallen trees and damaged roofs, Tibor Dobson said.
Content of phenols 1.4 times exceeding the safe levels is detected in the Amur river near Khabarovsk, and near Komsomolsk-on-Amur, it is 1.2 higher than the safe levels.
Monitoring also showed high concentration of nitrate nitrogen and oxygen biochemical levels exceeding the safe levels by 1.4-1.5 times, a Khabarovsk territorial government source told Itar-Tass on Friday, referring to the results of the river ecological monitoring over the period from June 15 to 21.
Krasnoyarsk police and hunters have been searching for a bear in Krasnoyarsk Akademgorodok for the second day. The bear was last seen by citizens of Oktyabrsky district of Krasnoyarsk near the main academic building of the Siberian Federal University and has not been found so far, the district interior department reported.
Hunters of the federal agricultural regulatory agency Rosselkhoznadzor joined police officers in the search of the dangerous forest predator. If the bear is found he will be killed immediately, Rosselkhoznadzor reported.
The search groups are combing through the area focusing on the places where the bear was seen by citizens: in the wood near the main high school building.
Unless the predator is found, the search will be continued Friday.
Southeastern Europe baked in searing temperatures Friday, with nearly 30 deaths blamed on the heat in recent days across the region.
Electricity supplies, particularly in Greece and Albania, were straining to keep up with demand as air conditioning use spiked during the year's first major heat wave.
Temperatures reached 40 (104F) degrees Celsius in Athens on Friday, with a top recorded temperature of 45 C (113F) on the island of Rhodes, according to state NET television.
A swath of the Midwest will get some relief from summer heat in the next three months, while the eastern and western thirds of the country can expect a hotter-than-normal season, forecasters said.
An international team of scientists is embarking on a search for life on the floor of the ocean at the roof of the world.
Led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution -- and equipped with unique robotic vehicles designed to explore mountain ranges miles beneath the polar ice cap -- 30 geophysicists, biologists, engineers, chemists, and other deep-sea specialists will depart July 1 from a remote Norwegian archipelago, Svalbard, aboard a powerful icebreaker that will smash a path to exploration sites near the geographic North Pole.
The Arctic, its mysteries concealed beneath thick ice, is the smallest but least known of the world's oceans.
"This is about exploring a portion of the earth that has been largely inaccessible to science," said Robert Reves-Sohn, a geophysicist from the institution who will be chief scientist on the 40-day voyage.
"We're looking for underseas habitats and creatures never seen before," he said during a news conference yesterday.
