A heat wave has claimed two lives in Greece and killed six more people in Romania as temperatures soared to 46 degrees Celsius (114.8 Fahrenheit) in parts of southeast Europe.
Turkey and Cyprus also reported deaths blamed on the intense heat, while three people drowned in Bulgaria swimming in unsupervised dams and beaches at the weekend as temperatures climbed well above early summer averages.
AFPTue, 26 Jun 2007 02:48 UTC
Torrential downpours around Britain left three dead and hundreds stranded on Monday as storms continued to batter Russia and a heatwave in southern Europe led to further deaths and sparked fires.
A plague of black flies has prompted authorities in north-eastern Spain to issue warnings on TV and fliers advising people to cover up and avoid riverside areas in the early morning and dusk.
The insect has been quickly breeding - and sucking blood - along the rivers and reservoirs of Catalonia and Aragon, causing alarm in small towns.
Only two to three millimetres long, the fly is much smaller and harder to spot than most mosquitoes, but its voracious bite sent more than 2,000 people to hospital last year in Catalonia alone. Its vigorous jaw, which releases a cocktail of chemicals, can produce allergic reactions.
California officials declared a state of emergency Monday in the area near Lake Tahoe where firefighters battled a raging forest fire that has destroyed 225 buildings and forced the evacuation of hundreds more.
Global climate change is causing Antarctic ice shelves to shrink and split apart, yielding thousands of free-drifting icebergs in the nearby Weddell Sea. According to a new study in this week's journal Science these floating islands of ice - some as large as a dozen miles across - are having a major impact on the ecology of the ocean around them, serving as "hotspots" for ocean life, with thriving communities of seabirds above and a web of phytoplankton, krill, and fish below.
Residents in the small town of Elie woke Saturday morning to the devastation caused by one of three tornadoes that ripped through southern Manitoba.
Eric Holt-Gimenez
AlternetMon, 25 Jun 2007 16:19 UTC
Biofuels invoke an image of renewable abundance that allows industry, politicians, the World Bank, the United Nations and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to present fuel from corn, sugarcane, soy and other crops as a replacement for oil that will bring about a smooth transition to a renewablefuel economy.
Myths of abundance divert attention from powerful economic interests that benefit from this biofuels transition, avoiding discussion of the growing price that citizens of the global South are beginning to pay to maintain the consumptive oil-based lifestyle of the North. Biofuel mania obscures the profound consequences of the industrial transformation of our food and fuel systems -- the agro-fuels transition.
Two swans have died from the deadly strain of bird flu in Bavaria, Germany, the press service of the European Commission said Monday.
The press service said German authorities had informed the European Commission that tests in Bavaria had revealed the H5N1 virus in the birds' bodies.
Mohamed Husain
AFPMon, 25 Jun 2007 10:16 UTC
Pakistan evacuated thousands of people from southern coastal areas ahead of a possible cyclone, two days after a storm killed at least 235 people in the port city of Karachi, officials said.
The meteorological department issued an alert saying that a tropical storm forming in the Arabian Sea 150 kilometres (90 miles) south of Karachi was likely to intensify into a cyclone in the next six to 12 hours.
Dozens of crocodiles bred in captivity in eastern India have been enlisted to protect their endangered counterparts in the wild and are being released in forests to scare away poachers, authorities said on Monday.
Illegal fishing in mangrove forests and habitat destruction in the states of Orissa and West Bengal had led to a steep fall in crocodile numbers, from several thousand a century ago to less than 100 in the early 1970s, they said.
But the same reptiles were breeding rapidly in captivity. Orissa's Bhitarkanika sanctuary has more than 1,400 crocodiles now.
"The swelling number of released crocodiles in the wild is working as a deterrent and keeping people away from the mangrove as villagers are more cautious before venturing into the forests," said Rathin Banerjee, a senior wildlife official.
