Date-Time Friday, March 27, 2009 at 08:48:18 UTC

Friday, March 27, 2009 at 02:48:18 AM at epicenter

Location 17.580°N, 100.522°W

Depth 49 km (30.4 miles) set by location program

Distances 80 km (50 miles) SSW of Arcelia, Guerrero, Mexico

105 km (65 miles) NW of Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico

110 km (65 miles) W of Chilpancingo, Guerrero, Mexico

250 km (155 miles) SW of MEXICO CITY, D.F., Mexico

Heavy rains caused a large dam in a crowded urban area on the outskirts of Jakarta to burst early Friday morning, sending a deadly wall of water and mud crashing through hundreds of houses, killing at least 60 people, police said.

The dam broke at about 2 a.m., tearing through a low-lying valley, surprising residents in their sleep, witnesses said. Within minutes, several whole neighborhoods were ensconced in mud and water.

Rescue workers clawed through thick mud and dredged houses and roadways Friday afternoon looking for survivors. Hundreds of residents were being evacuated to a nearby university where family members were searching through bodies for loved ones. Police said the death toll could be higher as more victims are found.

A freak twister and hailstorm swept through Larnaca yesterday, uprooting trees, tearing off rooftops and snapping power cables.

All it took was five minutes for the storm and whirlwind, which broke at the same time, to wreak havoc on the town and its outskirts, as walnut-sized hail stones struck homes and the fierce wind shook cars.

The worst happened in the area near the Antonis Papadopoulos stadium and the Kokkinos refugee settlement. Debris sucked by the twister was hurtled on vehicles, kiosks and residences.

Officials ordered the evacuation of one neighborhood and a nursing home late Thursday after authorities found cracks in an earthen levee built to protect the area from the threat of the rising Red River.

Residents were not in immediate danger, and floodwaters was not flowing over the levee, Mayor Dennis Walaker said Thursday night. The evacuation was being enforced as a precaution.

Fargo - Bad news turned dire Thursday for residents scrambling in subfreezing temperatures to pile sandbags along the Red River: After they spent the day preparing for a record crest of 41 feet, forecasters added up to 2 feet to their estimate.

The first estimate sparked urgency among thousands of volunteers in Fargo, but the second sparked doubts about whether a 43-foot-high wall of water could be stopped. Across the river in Moorhead, Minn., City Manager Michael Redlinger said portions of his city's dike could not be easily raised to withstand a 42-foot crest.

"Now everything's up in the air," he said.

Starting in New Zealand's remote Chatham Islands, thousands of cities, towns, and landmarks around the world will start to go dark for Earth Hour on Saturday evening.

Up to a billion people worldwide are expected to participate in this global voluntary blackout by switching off their lights from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time.

The movement, sponsored by the conservation nonprofit WWF, is designed as a symbolic gesture in support of action against global warming.

When Atlantic herring get together, they don't mess around with small gatherings. Using a new ocean imaging technology, scientists have found that the fish form "mega-shoals" of hundreds of millions of fish, covering dozens of square kilometres.

Such observations could help conserve dwindling fish stocks, says Nicholas Makris, an oceanographer at MIT, who led the study.

"If we see what's in the ocean we'll be more mindful of conserving it," he says.

The technology - called ocean acoustic waveguide remote sensing (OAWRS) - has also helped researchers confirm theoretical predictions as to why and how so many animals get together and act as one.

"I don't know anything that's close to this scale," says Iain Couzin, a biologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, who was not involved in the study.

Alaska's Mount Redoubt erupted twice Thursday, spewing a more than 12-mile-high cloud that could drop ash on Anchorage for the first time since the volcano began erupting Sunday night.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory said the first eruption about 8:30 a.m. shot an ash cloud about 30,000 feet in the air, and the second eruption about an hour later sent ash 65,000 feet high - the highest cloud since the eruptions began. The larger eruption caused a mud flow into the Drift River near the base of the volcano.

Before Thursday's eruptions the volcano had been relatively quiet for more than a day.

Magee - Severe weather across the South unleashed tornadoes in rural Mississippi, including one that shattered dozens of homes, flattened a church and injured at least 17 people, authorities said Thursday.

There were no immediate reports of fatalities, Magee Mayor Jimmy Clyde said. The most seriously injured were hospitalized, but most others had minor injuries.

The twister was reported around 1:30 a.m., and swept through Mississippi's pine-covered hill country as severe thunderstorms rumbled across several Southeast states. Power blackouts affected tens of thousands of Louisiana residents, and authorities reported damage to some Alabama homes. Georgia residents also braced for potentially heavy rains.

For more than half a century the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country's most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming "out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned," as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors' letter boxes and Dyson's own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as "a pompous twit," "a blowhard," "a cesspool of misinformation," "an old coot riding into the sunset" and, perhaps inevitably, "a mad scientist." Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred "carbon-eating trees," whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded - there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford - and suggested that "perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers." Dyson's son, George, a technology historian, says his father's views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone - out of his beautiful mind.