Durango - The sun-baked northern states of Mexico are suffering under the worst drought since the government began recording rainfall 70 years ago. Crops of corn, beans and oats are withering in the fields. About 1.7 million cattle have died of starvation and thirst.

Hardest hit are five states in Mexico's north, a region that is being parched by the same drought that has dried out the southwest United States. The government is trucking water to 1,500 villages scattered across the nation's northern expanse, and sending food to poor farmers who have lost all their crops.

Life probably won't improve soon. The next rainy season isn't due until June, and there's no guarantee normal rains will come then.

Most years, Guillermo Marin harvests 10 tons of corn and beans from his fields in this harsh corner of Mexico. This year, he got just a single ton of beans. And most of the 82-year-old farmer's fellow growers in this part of Durango state weren't able to harvest anything at all.

At least 139 flamingos have died after being electrocuted by high tension wires in the Indian state of Gujarat, forest officials say.

The birds were part of nearly half a million flamingos who have migrated from Siberia to breed in the warm marshy areas of the state's coast.

Officials said the birds possibly got disturbed by traffic at night and flew into the newly installed wires.

Measures have now been taken to stop them from coming near the wires.

'Unprecedented numbers'

"The post-mortem has confirmed that the flamingos died from electrocution," Dinesh Kumar Sharma, chief conservator of forests in Gujarat, told the BBC.

"We have deployed forest officials in the area. We have also put up reflectors and flags to ensure that the birds don't come near the wires," he said.

The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant revealed Wednesday that melted nuclear fuel has nearly reached the bottom steel wall under the concrete.

Following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, all of the fuel inside the No. 1 reactor melted after cooling functions failed with a substantial amount of the fuel melting through the reactor pressure vessel and dripping into the outer container.

On Wednesday, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the melted fuel has eroded the concrete base of the reactor container by up to 65 centimeters.

If the erosion expands another 37 centimeters, it would be hitting the steel wall.

However, TEPCO's analysis is rough at best because it is a prediction of the current situation inside the reactor based on its temperature change and injection of cooling water.

One of the world's worst invasive species, the Argentine ant, is mysteriously disappearing from New Zealand.

The Argentine ant poses a huge risk to horticulture and is a threat to native species.

They attack birds, have been known to eat lizards in New Zealand and the World Conservation Union classed them as one of the world's 100 worst invasive species.

The small, brown insects were first found in New Zealand in 1990 and have spread throughout the North Island, usually attracted to warm climates like Northland and Hawke's Bay. Their colonies reach as far south as Christchurch.

But, the population has just started dying off, though the reason for their deaths is unclear, Victoria University associate professor Phil Lester said.

Lester and masters student Meghan Cooling concluded the species naturally collapses after about 10 to 20 years.

The pair assessed about 150 sites throughout the country that have been populated by the ants.

Residents in Beckham County near Sayre say a massive sinkhole suddenly appeared overnight. They say it's so big a small house can fit inside it. Jack Damron cares for the property and says the hole formed just two days after Oklahoma's last earthquake about two weeks ago.

Experts say it most likely isn't related. Either way, the hole is still growing day by day. "Kind of spooky. You don't want to mess with it today," Damron said. Because whatever lies beneath the flat Oklahoma soil, isn't quite finished. "We've got to let it finish settling, because we don't know how deep it's going to get. It's still growing," he said "When it first formed you could actually sit here for 30 minutes and see stuff just move."

Climatology, there are several indices or indicators that quantify the climate anomalies of pressure, wind and temperatures in some regions (for the atmosphere but also to the ocean). These anomalies are associated with natural oscillations whose frequency can vary from several months to several decades, and sometimes almost a century. These are the natural variability (including solar activity is also included) who are responsible for "change" climate as it is wrongly described in most media. The climate has indeed never been stable in the past. It went through phases of warming (as the Medieval Warm Period between the tenth and the fourteenth century) and then by cooling phases (such as the Little Ice Age from the late sixteenth century and the nineteenth century).

Since the beginning of this fall, the temperatures of the atmosphere in the stratosphere (20 to 50 km altitude) began to fall over the North Pole. This decrease is quite usual in this season as well as the polar vortex weakening in summer, then re-forms in winter as the sun's influence is diminishing. However, the current temperatures have gone below the average climate, indicating a strong enhancement of the vortex. It is customary to quantify the intensity of the strengthening of the polar vortex by a climatic index called Arctic Oscillation (AO), which measures the pressure difference between Greenland and the middle latitudes (about 45 ° North).

The higher the value of AO is high (positive values ​​so) over the vortex is strong and vice versa. Yet the intensity of the polar vortex partly determines the position of the jet stream. There is a persistent anomaly in the equatorial stratosphere winds since last winter. This anomaly is associated with the quasi-biennial oscillation mentioned above which, as its name suggests, at a frequency of about 24 to 30 months. During this period, winds in the middle stratosphere are now accelerating towards the west (called a westerly QBO phase), and sometimes accelerating to the east (from east QBO phase).

The highest atmospheric pressure ever recorded at Sea-Tac Airport was recorded Wednesday night, KIRO 7 Chief Meteorologist Rebecca Stevenson reports. At midnight, the barometer hit 1043.4 millibars, breaking the previous record of 1043.0 millibars, set on January 28, 1949. The all-time highest atmospheric pressure recorded in Seattle, with records dating back to the late 19th century, was 1043.9 millibars, or 30.83 inches of Mercury. It was recorded in downtown Seattle on December 3, 1921. - KIRO TV

Some 270,000 homes and businesses remained without power for a second day on Friday after powerful winds toppled trees and power lines and left debris across a wide swath of Southern California.

The fierce gusts that tore across Western states Thursday created a path destruction that closed schools and prompted some communities to declare emergencies.

The storms, described as a once-in-a-decade event, were the result of a dramatic difference in pressure between a strong, high-pressure system and a cold, low-pressure system, meteorologists said. This funnels strong winds down mountain canyons and slopes.

The system brought high wind warnings and advisories for California, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona and New Mexico. The blustery weather was expected to next hit Oklahoma, Missouri and Indiana.

In all, the Utah Department of Transportation reported 11 semis overturned by the wind on the state's highways Thursday morning. Utah Highway Patrol Corporal Todd Johnson said that between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m., at least six semis were blown onto their sides on I-15 in Davis County in the area of the Lund Lane and Parrish Lane exits in Centerville as violent gusts - hitting 102 mph around 9 a.m. - thrashed the region.

Johnson said none of the drivers suffered more than minor injuries.


All traffic through the affected area was diverted for about two hours, Johnson said. By 7:30 a.m., traffic through the area had resumed, but was periodically suspended as new semi-related accidents occurred throughout the morning. Motorists still were advised to avoid the area, if possible. High-profile vehicles were ordered off the gusty stretch of freeway until at least 6 p.m. Thursday.

Tokyo - Molten nuclear fuel at Japan's Fukushima plant might have eaten two thirds of the way through a concrete containment base, its operator said, citing a new simulation of the extent of the March disaster.

Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said their latest calculations showed the fuel inside the No. 1 reactor at the tsunami-hit plant could have melted entirely, dropping through its inner casing and eroding a concrete base.

In the worst-case scenario, the molten fuel could have reached as far as 65 centimetres (2 feet) through the concrete, leaving it only 37 centimetres short of the outer steel casing, the report, released Wednesday, said.

Until now, TEPCO had said some fuel melted through the inner pressure vessel and dropped to the containment vessel, without saying how much and what it did to the concrete, citing a lack of data.