A magnitude 4.7 quake hit Eastern Honshu region of Japan on Thursday, injuring seven people.

Around 8.21 a.m. local time, the quake hit Nagano, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Tokyo, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

The quake was just four kilometers (2.5 miles) deep and no tsunami warning were issued after that, the agency said.

Mesa - Thousands of East Valley residents are without power after a transformer exploded at a Salt River Project facility in Mesa.

SRP spokesman Scott Harrelson confirm approximately 35,000 customers in Mesa and Apache Junction are affected by the outage.

Because of the fire and transformer outage the rest of the power grid is stressed, which has caused the loss of power across parts of the East Valley.

It is unclear at this time when power is expected to be restored.

SRP officials are also working to resolve an issue with their phone system, according to a tweet from the company just before 3 p.m.

The fire sent a thick plume of black smoke into the sky Thursday afternoon, and forced employees from the East Mesa Service Center near University Drive and Sossaman Road, according to fire department spokesman Forrest Smith.

Power was shut off to nearby transformers and a truck arrived at the scene and began spraying foam onto the flames just before 1:25 p.m.

• Tide shifted up to 164ft in a matter of minutes
  
• Shift in air pressure created static that left women's hair standing on end

A massive underwater landslide 200 miles off the coast of Cornwall caused a series of mini-tsunami waves and tides on Monday.

Holidaymakers, fishermen and conservationists were stunned when the tide suddenly shifted up to 50 metres in a matter of minutes.

The rapid drop in tide led to a perceivable shift in air pressure which remarkably created so much static in the air that it cause people's hair to stand on end.

The death toll from a flash flood that caught Davao City residents by surprise Tuesday night has now climbed to 27.

Five barangays have also been placed under a state of calamity.

As the local government assesses the damage, the search for the 15 people who are still missing continues.

Weather bureau PAGASA, meanwhile, warns of even more rains in the coming days.

Local officials and residents said the rains began around 10 p.m. Tuesday, with the Balusong river overflowing its banks that led to flashfloods in 4 barangays.

While some residents were able to evacuate in time, many were caught unprepared.

The latest bodies to be found were those of 16-year-old Keizl Tanio, who was seen floating on the bay in front of a resort in Punta Dumalag, and 1-year and 8-month old Rogelio Valderosa from Matina Pangi.

Tropical Storm Arlene, the first named storm of the 2011 hurricane season, has formed in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico.

At 5 a.m. Wednesday, the center of Tropical Storm Arlene was located about 190 miles east of Tampico, Mexico, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Arlene is moving west-northwest at 8 mph. Maximum sustained winds are near 40 mph, with higher gusts. Some strengthening is forecast, the Weather Service predicted.

Tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 115 miles, mainly to the northeast of the center.

A turn toward the west is forecast during the next day or so, and the center of Arlene is expected to reach the Mexican coast by Thursday. The Mexican government has issued a tropical storm warning for the coast of northeastern Mexico from Barra de Nautla north to Bahia Algodones, the Weather Service said.

A brief but burly storm moved through Great Falls on Tuesday evening on a northeast trajectory that took it through northcentral Montana.

The storm knocked out power about 6 p.m. Tuesday, affecting around 2,000 customers in the downtown Great Falls area, according to NorthWestern Energy spokeswoman Michelle Sullivan.

The brief outage occurred when wind blew two power lines together. Sullivan said NorthWestern crews responded to several scattered outages Tuesday night all over Great Falls. One was caused by a broken pole, one by a broken power line, and others by trees or branches falling on lines.

As of 9 p.m. Tuesday, firefighters with Great Falls Fire/Rescue said they still were responding to calls related to outages or down power lines.

Sullivan said NorthWestern workers also were sent to repair outages in Portage, Carter and Fort Benton.

"Our crews are pretty busy," she said.

When asked what I would like to write about for this issue of the Dot Connector, the first thing that came out of my mouth was "The Golden Age and how we got from there to where we are now and what it all means." That is the topic that has been exercising my thinking for a number of years and I gave it an overview in Witches, Comets and Planetary Cataclysms (DCM Issue 11), where the topic was how the feminine energy of our society was debased step-by-step over millennia, as a consequence of planetary cataclysm beginning with the Great Deluge, also known as the Flood of Noah. But noticing what has happened is not the same as explaining why and how it could happen sociologically speaking. In that article I wrote the following:

"Regarding the alleged Flood of Noah, we can say that at more than one point in our known history, civilizations and cultures have collapsed and/or disappeared or been destroyed by no-one-knows-what...

Researchers in the fields of archaeology and history are baffled by the lack of any direct archaeological or written explanations for the causes (as opposed to the effects), though there is a rich body of myth and folklore that very well might provide the answers if analyzed correctly...

Some decades ago, certain natural scientists became intrigued by the problem and, concentrating on the Bronze Age collapses listed above, realized that the range of evidence suggested natural causes rather than human actions like invasion or warfare. So, they all started talking about climate change, volcanic activity, and earthquakes. At present, these types of explanations are actually included in some of the standard historical accounts of the Bronze Age period, though many problems still remain: no single explanation appeared to account for all the evidence.

Immanuel Velikovsky upset everyone by suggesting that the Exodus - but only the Exodus - was caused by a bombardment of rocks, dust, carbons and so on as a result of Venus running amok in the Solar System. He collected an amazing assortment of myths and legends from around the world that strongly suggested that some sort of global cataclysm was being described, but when, where and how, exactly, it happened was rather iffy. There were others who wrote and talked about these matters before Velikovsky, including Ignatious Donnelly, who deserves an honorable mention for ascribing the myths to the Great Flood of Noah which he claimed was actually the destruction of Atlantis as described by Plato. Whether or not there was an advanced civilization known as Atlantis is not our concern here, but whether or not there was a flood, and when it may have occurred, is."

A record-breaking rain fell throughout the Bay Area much of the day Tuesday as a hefty storm system doused the region.

While rain was heaviest in the North Bay, the most surprising figures came in San Francisco where Tuesday's rainfall of just over three quarters of an inch marked the most precipitation to fall on the date since 1849 (the year of the earliest recorded rainfall statistics in the entire state) according to KTVU Channel 2 Chief Meteorologist Bill Martin.

Tuesday's rain also lifted monthly totals to make this the second wettest June since the Gold Rush Era.

One positive result of the late rain would be that the saturation of dried brush around the Bay Area should shorted the fire season in the region by about a month, Martin said.

The messy afternoon commute could also be blamed on the unseasonable rainfall as the wet roadways led to accidents and slowed freeway traffic.

In San Francisco, a branch of a tree weighed down by wet leaves split and fell on Hyde Street. The branch narrowly missed parked cars and temporarily stopped cable cars service.

A controversial new theory attributes climate change not to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels but water vapor. In an unpublished paper, Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences argues that the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the past hundred years could be due to atmospheric changes resulting from the Tunguska Event, a massive explosion over Siberia on the June 30th, 1908 that is thought to have resulted from an asteroid or comet entering the earth's atmosphere and exploding. Shaidurov says that the event could have caused "considerable stirring of the high layers of atmosphere" and triggered the subsequent rise in global temperatures.