This is the scary moment a huge cobra left drivers in Brazil in no doubt about who rules this certain section of road on the Sao Paulo highway.

The angry reptile can be seen striking out at vehicles as they pass by - and it seems he holds particular contempt for large lorries.

Oblivious to the small issue of their size, the snake repeatedly strikes at the tyres of the trucks as they tentatively roll past.

Police went door to door to get 250 residents out of Swall Meadows this weekend before a massive wind-driven wildfire swept through the town and destroyed 40 homes and other buildings along the Sierra mountains.

Ira Hanson milled around an evacuation center near tiny Swall Meadows on Sunday afternoon, not quite sure what to do after learning that the dream home he and his late wife had built 30 years earlier was damaged in a wildfire that consumed 40 homes and buildings.

Sheriff's deputies had banged on the door and urged him to get out less than 48 hours earlier, and he'd fled the house with little more than his medications and a pillow. Officials later told him that fire crews had to knock down one of the home's walls in an effort to save another house next door, but he had yet to see the damage.

"It's unbelievable," said Hanson, 79. "It's like having a nightmare and you're going to wake up any minute and it won't be true."

Fire crews increased containment of the wind-driven wildfire that ravaged communities along the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, but they said Sunday that they still didn't know when the roughly 250 residents evacuated from Swall Meadows and nearby Paradise would be able to return home.

The rising monkey population in Braj region has become a cause of concern for residents. In yet another tragic incident involving the rowdy primates, an elderly sant (holy man), identified as mahant Lal Baba, 75, of Madhav Kunj, fell from the terrace and died at spot on Wednesday evening.

Baba had gone up to the terrace to fetch items needed for a puja when a tribe of monkeys pounced upon him. The frightened man who tried to flee, lost his balance and fell off the terrace. He suffered severe head injuries. Police have sent the body for a postmortem examination.

Ashram inmates told police that Lal Baba had gone to the terrace to collect "bel-patra" for puja. "Just then a troop of rowdy monkeys attacked him. He fell down from the roof and died instantly."

A tusker killed three persons, including a couple, in Keonjhar district on Saturday night.

The deceased were identified as Laxmidhara Mohanta, 28, a resident of Chakulia village and Purna Chandra Mohanta, 65, and his wife Abanti Mohanta, 55, of Sitarampur village. Purna Chandra was a retired teacher.

Forest department sources said the tusker got separated from a herd at Similipal under Mayurbhanj forest division and entered Keonjhar from Patna range. It then wandered into Champua through Sadar forest range.

Around 10pm, the jumbo attacked Laxmidhara, a labourer, while he was working in a brick kiln near the village. Then it headed towards Sitarampur. Purna Chandra saw the tusker in his garden around 11pm and panicked. His wife rushed out hearing him scream. The elephant attacked and killed them, the sources added.

Here's a video that you absolutely must see.

Not, I hasten to warn you, because it's exciting, well-produced or informative; rather, because of the fascinating light it sheds on the debate about global warming in general and also, in particular, on the ongoing controversy about whether organisations like NASA and NOAA are playing fast and loose with the world's temperature data sets.

According to the video's creator and star, Dr Kevin Cowtan, the latter suggestion is a nonsense. Using charts of South American and global temperatures, he painstakingly refutes suggestions by Christopher Booker and also (though tragically I don't get a mention) by me that there is anything suspect, let alone corrupt or fraudulent, in the adjustments that NASA and NOAA have been making to the raw temperature data from weather stations around the world.

If you stumbled on it by accident on YouTube I think you'd be quite persuaded. Cowtan's tone is soft and reasonable; the science, as he presents it, seems to stack up: a) there are perfectly valid reasons for these adjustments, to do with homogenising the raw data when it looks out of kilter with neighbouring but possibly more accurate weather stations, and with the changing nature of measuring equipment and b) the adjustments are, in any case, minor - altering the raw data by no more than 3 per cent.

30 passenger vehicles and four tractor-trailers were involved in a massive car crash that forced the closure of an icy highway in upstate New York, according to state police.

Photos and videos shared by motorists and passengers on social media show dozens of cars smashed together and splayed across the highway lanes in Jefferson County, New York.

Traffic is being re-routed after the multi-vehicle crash, while crews work to clear the area. It is not yet clear if there are any serious injuries. The crash was reportedly caused by severe winter weather and low visibility.

A pop-up shelter has been erected at a local fire department where drivers and passengers are being escorted. School buses have been sent in to transport those left stranded. Jefferson Country emergency officials have issued a travel warning for the southern parts of the country, local news reports.

This is the heart-stopping moment a runaway cow charged at a police officer and nearly trampled him.

Police were responding to a call about an escaped cow near the city of Jaromer, Czech Republic and this patrol car footage shows the moment an officer approached the angry animal.

What happened next is really scary, as the cow bows its head and runs at the officer.

The enormous animal even leaps on top of the patrol car and smashes the windscreen.

A time stamp on the video indicates that the attack happened on February 2nd at around 11am.

The officer was reportedly unharmed and the cow was returned to its owner with help of the local fire department.

Police officers put down a dog after it was seriously injured in an attack against its owner and his son, who were bitten several times Sunday afternoon, Chula Vista police said.

A family was in the backyard of their La Costa Avenue home near Masters Ridge Road when, for unknown reasons, a boxer turned on its owner's adult son and began biting him, police Lt. Kenny Heinz said. The owner tried to pull the dog away, and it began attacking him as well. Both men repeatedly tried to pull the dog off each other and were bitten a number of times in the process. Someone at the home called police about 2 p.m.

Firefighters got their first and tried to restrain the dog with "emergency equipment," Heinz said. When police arrived, they found the dog badly injured. An officer shot the dog to end its suffering and to protect against any other attacks, Heinz said.

"The family was extremely upset," he said. "They are totally shocked the dog would do this. It's a really upsetting situation."

The two injured men were taken to a hospital for their injuries.

"Within a few years winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren't going to know what snow is."

~ Dr David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK, in March 2000.

"Ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes - or eventually 'feel' virtual cold."

~ David Parker, head of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, UK, also in March 2000.

Last month, phenomenal amounts of snow were dumped in the Northeastern and Southern US, Western and Southeastern Europe, the Middle East, Western China, and Far Eastern Russia. Saudi Arabia and the Southwestern US desert were hit with snow for the third year running. The US media has apparently dropped the term 'Polar Vortex' because Arctic conditions extending all the way to the Gulf of Mexico is now 'normal'. The one place where you might expect a lot of snow this time of year - Moscow - instead enjoyed its warmest January in 100 years.

The Great Lakes in North America aren't as frozen over as they were this time last year, but those 'ice boulders' returned to Michigan in January, and the Niagara Falls have again partially frozen. Up to half a million people were affected by the worst flooding Southeastern Africa has seen for decades. The Balkans were flooded for the 5th time in 20 months, and barely two months on from receiving 70cm of rain in one day, Sicily was hit with a similar quantity of hail. Among the spectacular meteor fireball sightings in January were a comet fragment breaking apart over the Russian Far East, and a fireball that turned night into day in Bucharest, Romania.

'Mystery booms' continue to freak people (and animals) out across the US. We suspect that some of them are shockwaves from overhead meteor explosions, but others occur in clusters and are picked up by seismometers (despite there being no known fault-lines), so we are probably looking at general and unusual seismic activity resulting from the slow-down in the planet's rotation. This would also be responsible for all these volcanic eruptions, of which there were more spectacular ones in January. 'Earth opening up' also saw sinkholes swallow moving cars in Florida and Maryland.

As you watch this video summary of events in January, keep in mind that we had to leave out so many other unusual events because they're now part of 'the new normal'!


Or watch on Sott.net's Vimeo Channel:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records - on which the entire panic ultimately rested - were systematically "adjusted" to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline "How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming", I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world - one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.