It hit about 9:00pm (AEST), with the epicentre near Moe in west Gippsland, about 120 kilometres south-east of Melbourne.

Geoscience Australia says the 5.3 quake had a depth of about 10km and rumbled through Melbourne and communities including Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong and Shepparton.

People have reported hearing a roaring noise, with reports of cracks occurring in the walls and floors of homes.

Victoria Police say they have received a number of calls in relation to the tremor.

They say they have not received any reports of major damage.

The Victorian State Emergency Service (SES) says they have received 40 requests for assistance in the broader Gippsland area and parts of Melbourne, but no reports of significant damage.

The SES's Lachlan Quick says most of the request of assistance have come from areas near the epicentre.

A state of emergency has been declared in several eastern regions, where hundreds of wildfires are now raging.

­The wildfires cover an 8,331-hectare area in total, according to the Siberian Federal District Forestry Department. Around 1,600 people and 42 planes are now fighting the fires.

According to Greenpeace, the situation is worse now than at the same time in the summer of 2010, when Russia was devastated by forest fires.

Local authorities, however, claim there is currently no threat to local populated areas or businesses. The fires have decreased by one-third over the weekend.

Last month a virus broke out in several open water salmon farms in British Columbia that has the region's fish farm owners scrambling to mitigate their losses. Called infectious hematopoietic necrosis (IHN), the rabies-like virus was found among salmon in floating net pens belonging to Mainstream Canada, the biggest producer in the region. As a result, B.C. farms culled over 500,000 fish infected with IHN, which spreads rapidly and can kill up to 100 percent of a fish farm's population. And it's just the latest disease scandal to hit the province's salmon farming industry.

Critics of the industry say that the farms should have seen this coming. Their own alarm bells have been ringing ever since Rick Routledge, a professor at Simon Fraser University, claimed that wild sockeye tested by his lab in 2011 showed that another more serious virus, one that causes infectious salmon anemia (ISA), was present in B.C. waters. The government seized his samples and declared through their own testing that the virus was not present (since a verified case of the disease would be treated like other serious outbreaks such as mad cow disease under international convention, this would be devastating to the industry. In 2007, ISA caused a $2 billion loss to the Chilean salmon farming industry, and was found to be imported on Atlantic salmon eggs shipped from Norway).

Diseases like these are suspected by First Nations, activists, and fishing groups to be one cause of the drastic declines among some wild salmon populations that the province has witnessed in recent years. Home to some of the biggest wild salmon runs in the world, B.C.'s provincial government has also welcomed the salmon farming industry eagerly over the years, allowing 100 farms to be established in its waters. But activists charge that the open water pens are often located directly on the migration routes of wild salmon, where, as in the case of Chile, exotic diseases imported with the Atlantic salmon could multiply and spread into surrounding waters.

Talim is a rare storm in that it is coming toward the nation from the Taiwan Strait. Land and sea alerts are expected to be issued today.

Tropical Storm Talim is likely to be the first storm to hit Taiwan this year and is expected to bring heavy rainfall across the nation, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday.

The bureau said it would most likely issue a sea alert for the storm early this morning, while a land alert would be issued later in the day.

Violent lightning strikes that sent at least 3 people to the hospital and hail the size of golf balls marked a series of violent thunderstorms that swept South Florida from Palm Beach County to Homestead Friday.

CBS4 viewers sent in photos and video of hail ranging in size from dimes to golf balls, with even larger egg-sized hail being reported in Coral Gables.

As the afternoon progressed, more severe weather was reported offshore and in Miami-Dade county. Storms brought a violent cast in South Miami-Dade, when 3 men at a construction site were reportedly struck by lightning.

Funnel clouds were spotted in the west-central part of Saskatchewan and several of them touched down.

Three tornadoes have been confirmed in the province in Plover Lake, north of Biggar and Wilkie.

Last night's thunderstorms brought heavy rain and golf-ball sized hail to parts of southern Minnesota. A tornado reportedly touched down in Traverse County in western Minnesota. No damage was reported.

The death toll from Hurricane Carlotta has risen to three in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, officials said.

The storm, which weakened and broke up over the weekend, dumped heavy rains on western, central and southern Mexico.

The third person to die in the storm was a 56-year-old woman from the coastal city of San Jose Manialtepec, the Oaxaca Attorney General's Office said.

Plumes of smoke and ash are continuing to rise from Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz volcano.

People living on its slopes said they had heard "strong, strange noises" coming from the summit of the 5,346m-high mountain on Friday and Saturday.

Officials say an orange alert first declared three weeks ago is still in place for areas near the summit.

To the untrained eye, it could have been the first signal of the end of the world as nuclear war broke out.

But instead of anything sinister, the giant mushroom cloud spotted in the skies over the Chinese capital last week was simply a brilliant showcase of the wonder of nature.

The huge cloud, which appeared on Thursday, gradually took the shape of an explosion from an atomic bomb.