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.

This Letter reports reliable satellite data in the period of 1980 - 2007 covering two full 11-yr cosmic ray (CR) cycles, clearly showing the correlation between CRs and ozone depletion, especially the polar ozone loss (hole) over Antarctica. The results provide strong evidence of the physical mechanism that the CRdriven electron-induced reaction of halogenated molecules plays the dominant role in causing the ozone hole. Moreover, this mechanism predicts one of the severest ozone losses in 2008-2009 (ended up among the largest) and probably another large hole around 2019-2020.

There is interest in studying the effects of galactic cosmic rays (CRs) on Earth's climate and environment, particularly on global cloud cover in low atmosphere (3 km) [1 - 5] and ozone depletion in the stratosphere [6 - 16]. The former has led to a different scenario for global warming, while the latter has provided an unrecognized mechanism for the formation of the O3 hole. The discovery of the CR-cloud correlation by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen has motivated the experiments to investigate the physical mechanism for the correlation. In contrast, the CR-driven electron reaction mechanism for
O3 depletion was first unexpectedly revealed from laboratory measurements by Lu and Madey. Then the evidence of the correlation between CRs, chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) dissociation, and O3 loss was found from satellite data by Lu and Sanche: the O3 hole is exactly located in the polar stratosphere and at the altitude of 18 km where the CR ionization shows a maximum.