A strange yellow haze has shrouded cities in central China. Residents from Henan, Anhui and Hubei provinces are all wary of the haze, which some experts describe as harmful.


Last week a dark yellow haze enveloped Wuhan city. Days later, the weather forecasting agency issued a yellow alert, and medical face masks quickly sold out.

Date-Time
Tuesday, June 19, 2012 at 15:56:34 UTC
Tuesday, June 19, 2012 at 06:56:34 AM at epicenter

Location
53.392°N, 171.635°E Depth
20.9 km (13.0 miles) Region
NEAR ISLANDS, ALEUTIAN ISLANDS, ALASKA Distances
120 km (74 miles) WNW of Attu Station, Alaska
866 km (538 miles) E of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia
882 km (548 miles) E of Yelizovo, Russia
884 km (549 miles) E of Vilyuchinsk, Russia

Sunny and warmer weather may have returned to Somerset this week, but it's not going to last.

The Met Office has just issued another severe weather warning for the county as torrential rain is forecast to hit the region on Thursday morning.

The yellow warning is in place from midnight until midday on Thursday, and the Met Office is warning people to beware of localised flooding and extremely hazardous driving conditions.

"Heavy rain is expected to spread north-eastwards during Thursday across parts of southern England and South Wales, with torrential downpours and thunderstorms possible in places," said the Met Office.

"The public should be aware of large amounts of spray on roads and, in some places, minor flooding."

In the meantime, it is forecast to remain mainly dry and bright, with just a few light showers possible over higher ground.

Date-TimeTuesday, June 19, 2012 at 13:40:57 UTC
Tuesday, June 19, 2012 at 05:40:57 AM at epicenterTime of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location
43.431°N, 127.330°W Depth
13.5 km (8.4 miles)

Region
OFF THE COAST OF OREGON

Distances
239 km (148 miles) W of Bandon, Oregon

252 km (156 miles) W of Coos Bay, Oregon

324 km (201 miles) W of Roseburg, Oregon

344 km (213 miles) WNW of Grants Pass, Oregon

An outbreak of rip currents at beaches in Florida has claimed several lives and endangered dozens more in recent days, prompting the National Weather Service to extend its public warnings to beachgoers.

Over this past weekend, two people drowned and more than 70 had to be rescued from rip currents in a single Florida county on the Atlantic coast, officials there told ABC News.

A 14-year-old boy went missing Sunday after getting caught in a rip current while swimming with friends at New Smyrna Beach, Fla. His body was found on shore Monday morning. Volusia County Beach Patrol Capt. Tammy Marris told ABC News that the teens were swimming at an unguarded beach, over 300 yards away from the nearest lifeguard.

The same day the boy went missing, a 66-year-old man died after getting caught in a rip current just off another beach in Volusia. He was pulled in by lifeguards but fell unconscious during the rescue process and did not recover, Marris said. Authorities have not released the identities of either victim.

It hit about 9:00pm (AEST), with the epicentre near Moe in west Gippsland, about 120 kilometres south-east of Melbourne.

Geoscience Australia says the 5.3 quake had a depth of about 10km and rumbled through Melbourne and communities including Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong and Shepparton.

People have reported hearing a roaring noise, with reports of cracks occurring in the walls and floors of homes.

Victoria Police say they have received a number of calls in relation to the tremor.

They say they have not received any reports of major damage.

The Victorian State Emergency Service (SES) says they have received 40 requests for assistance in the broader Gippsland area and parts of Melbourne, but no reports of significant damage.

The SES's Lachlan Quick says most of the request of assistance have come from areas near the epicentre.

A state of emergency has been declared in several eastern regions, where hundreds of wildfires are now raging.

­The wildfires cover an 8,331-hectare area in total, according to the Siberian Federal District Forestry Department. Around 1,600 people and 42 planes are now fighting the fires.

According to Greenpeace, the situation is worse now than at the same time in the summer of 2010, when Russia was devastated by forest fires.

Local authorities, however, claim there is currently no threat to local populated areas or businesses. The fires have decreased by one-third over the weekend.

Last month a virus broke out in several open water salmon farms in British Columbia that has the region's fish farm owners scrambling to mitigate their losses. Called infectious hematopoietic necrosis (IHN), the rabies-like virus was found among salmon in floating net pens belonging to Mainstream Canada, the biggest producer in the region. As a result, B.C. farms culled over 500,000 fish infected with IHN, which spreads rapidly and can kill up to 100 percent of a fish farm's population. And it's just the latest disease scandal to hit the province's salmon farming industry.

Critics of the industry say that the farms should have seen this coming. Their own alarm bells have been ringing ever since Rick Routledge, a professor at Simon Fraser University, claimed that wild sockeye tested by his lab in 2011 showed that another more serious virus, one that causes infectious salmon anemia (ISA), was present in B.C. waters. The government seized his samples and declared through their own testing that the virus was not present (since a verified case of the disease would be treated like other serious outbreaks such as mad cow disease under international convention, this would be devastating to the industry. In 2007, ISA caused a $2 billion loss to the Chilean salmon farming industry, and was found to be imported on Atlantic salmon eggs shipped from Norway).

Diseases like these are suspected by First Nations, activists, and fishing groups to be one cause of the drastic declines among some wild salmon populations that the province has witnessed in recent years. Home to some of the biggest wild salmon runs in the world, B.C.'s provincial government has also welcomed the salmon farming industry eagerly over the years, allowing 100 farms to be established in its waters. But activists charge that the open water pens are often located directly on the migration routes of wild salmon, where, as in the case of Chile, exotic diseases imported with the Atlantic salmon could multiply and spread into surrounding waters.

Talim is a rare storm in that it is coming toward the nation from the Taiwan Strait. Land and sea alerts are expected to be issued today.

Tropical Storm Talim is likely to be the first storm to hit Taiwan this year and is expected to bring heavy rainfall across the nation, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday.

The bureau said it would most likely issue a sea alert for the storm early this morning, while a land alert would be issued later in the day.

Violent lightning strikes that sent at least 3 people to the hospital and hail the size of golf balls marked a series of violent thunderstorms that swept South Florida from Palm Beach County to Homestead Friday.

CBS4 viewers sent in photos and video of hail ranging in size from dimes to golf balls, with even larger egg-sized hail being reported in Coral Gables.

As the afternoon progressed, more severe weather was reported offshore and in Miami-Dade county. Storms brought a violent cast in South Miami-Dade, when 3 men at a construction site were reportedly struck by lightning.