Funnel clouds were spotted in the west-central part of Saskatchewan and several of them touched down.

Three tornadoes have been confirmed in the province in Plover Lake, north of Biggar and Wilkie.

Last night's thunderstorms brought heavy rain and golf-ball sized hail to parts of southern Minnesota. A tornado reportedly touched down in Traverse County in western Minnesota. No damage was reported.

The death toll from Hurricane Carlotta has risen to three in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, officials said.

The storm, which weakened and broke up over the weekend, dumped heavy rains on western, central and southern Mexico.

The third person to die in the storm was a 56-year-old woman from the coastal city of San Jose Manialtepec, the Oaxaca Attorney General's Office said.

Plumes of smoke and ash are continuing to rise from Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz volcano.

People living on its slopes said they had heard "strong, strange noises" coming from the summit of the 5,346m-high mountain on Friday and Saturday.

Officials say an orange alert first declared three weeks ago is still in place for areas near the summit.

To the untrained eye, it could have been the first signal of the end of the world as nuclear war broke out.

But instead of anything sinister, the giant mushroom cloud spotted in the skies over the Chinese capital last week was simply a brilliant showcase of the wonder of nature.

The huge cloud, which appeared on Thursday, gradually took the shape of an explosion from an atomic bomb.

Four dead sea turtles washed ashore on beaches along New Jersey Sunday, according to the Marine Mammal Stranding Center.

Three loggerhead sea turtles and one leatherback sea turtle were among those found at beaches in Spring Lake, Island Beach State Park in Berkeley, North Wildwood and the Townsends Inlet area of Sea Isle City, said Sheila Dean, co-director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center.

The three loggerhead sea turtles found weighed between 30 and 45 pounds each, she said. The leatherback, found in Townsends Inlet, weighed about 245 pounds, Dean said.

The turtle deaths did not appear unusual, she said.

Shortly after reporting to duty on Sunday, Dewey Beach lifeguards spotted a large object floating in the surf about 100 yards from shore, surrounded by seagulls. It turned out to be a severely decomposed leatherback which the guards brought on the beach at Cullen Street.

The remains were so heavy, lifeguards asked the police for an SUV to help drag it across the sand toward the dunes where they planned to bury it after experts from the Marine Education, Research and Rehabilitation Institute examine it.

Suzanne Thurman, MERR executive director, says this was the only leatherback reported so far this year. It was roughly five-feet long and 500 pounds in weight. She says leatherbacks can reach 1000 pounds. The leatherback is the largest of all living sea turtles and is critically endangered.

Coeur d'Alene - World-famous aircraft designer and North Idaho resident Burt Rutan looked at climate data and found deception - even fraud - behind the assertions of global-warming alarmists intent on implementing a world-wide climate fix that could bring about economic chaos.

Rutan found there was an enormous amount of data available to the researcher who might want to question these findings: thermometer measurements, ice cores, pine-cone and tree-ring proxies, thousands of different sources of data.

"Are they being ethical with the use of this data?" he asked. "You can cherry pick data."

Rutan started his career working as a civilian flight test engineer for the U.S. Air Force where there was no room for error in interpreting data - all the data. Later he found that some homebuilt aircraft kit builders were knowingly using bad data to sell their products, which gave him a healthy skepticism.

Propagandists know that if a lie is big enough and told often enough, it will then come to be seen as the truth. Al Gore's charge that human-caused global warming was leading to imminent cataclysmic climate changes spelling the end to life as we know it, fueled fears worldwide and helped to justify a second U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janero on June 20-22 to impose crippling carbon-use taxes on mostly first-world nations.

"If you want something to be, maybe a theory that you've modeled in a computer, you can 'prove it' with data and you can convince anybody who doesn't really look at all the data," Rutan said. "It's really easy to convince somebody that this is true and I found out real early that it's not true.

"I found out immediately that they weren't being ethical."

If someone is aggressively selling a product, whether airplanes or carbon credits, based on complex experimental data, he is likely lying, Rutan contended.

A 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Japan early on Monday, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The epicenter was 72 miles southeast of Morioka on Japan's Pacific coast, the USGS said, updating an initial report that said the quake was of magnitude 6.3 and 95 miles off the coast. The depth of the earthquake was 31.8 km (19.8) below the ocean floor. The epicenter of the 6.4 magnitude earthquake was 405 km (252 miles) NNE of Tokyo. No tsunami warnings have been issued and there were no reports of injuries.

Manali: Besides the eight Israeli nationals who are stranded in Pin valley of Lahaul-Spiti district of Himachal since June 5, the rising level of water in Kiri river has also put 2,500 residents of thirteen villages in trouble.

Stranded in their own treacherous valley, villagers had been seeking help for over a week as their ration and other commodities have almost depleted. Power supply and telephone connectivity to the valley has snapped and some confused and helpless villagers have already made failed attempts to cross the flooded stream, putting their lives in danger.