Firefighters and rescuers in Russia's Far East extinguished three forest fires over the past 24 hours and continue battling 11 more forest fires, a spokesman for the regional emergencies ministry said on Sunday.

"Satellite monitoring and aircraft surveillance registered a total of 14 forest fires in the last 24 hours. Three of them covering an area 43 hectares were extinguished," the spokesman said.

He added that the remaining 11 wildfires had spread over the area of 519 hectares.

An earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale jolted Nangchen County in the Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Yushu in northwest China's Qinghai Province at 3:48 p.m Sunday, said the China Earthquake Networks Center.

The epicenter was monitored at 32.4 degrees north latitude and 95.9 degrees east longitude with a depth of 10 km, the center said in a statement on its website.

A fresh 3.1-magnitude quake shook the Nangchen county four minutes after the 5.2-magnitude quake, according to the center.

No casualties have been reported so far, said Wen Guodong, vice secretary of the prefectural committee of the Communist Party of China.

"We felt the quake strongly in Nangchen, but near our office we haven't found any collapsed buildings," said Drimi Lhundrup, deputy chief of the county government.

Shanghai - Extreme weather conditions are plaguing China with a strengthening tropical storm on the eastern coastline and a prolonged drought in the northwest.

The full force of Meari, still gaining in strength and likely to soon become a typhoon, would be felt in Zhejiang Province as it makes landfall there Saturday evening, according to an alert from the meteorological station of Zhejiang Province.

Meari, heading northward, is forecast to hit Shanghai soon after, with its center about 150 km to the east and out to sea of the city, according to the Shanghai municipal meteorological station.

Shanghai has emptied reservoirs to make room for the water the typhoon is likely to bring, said Zhang Zhengyu, spokesman for the Shanghai Flood Control Headquarters.

Contrary to previous predictions, tropical storm Haima landed in Thai Binh province yesterday evening. At least 10 people were killed, 14 were missing and hundreds of others were injured in some northern provinces, Le Thanh Hai, deputy director of the Central Hydro-meteorological Forecasting Center, said.

Previously, the storm was expected to make landfall in the Vietnam-China border area, he said.

In the past few days, the storm has caused heavy rains in many Northern Vietnam provinces, with rainfalls measuring 50 mm to over 150 mm. In the central area of Hanoi, the rainfall reached 120 mm.

The coastal areas of Quang Ninh-Thai Binh province are experiencing winds of force 7-8.

After landing in Thai Binh with force of 6-7, the storm has weakened to a depression and continued moving west. It will fade away when it reaches Northern Laos this evening, he added.

The heavy rains are expected to continue in the next few days, Hai said.

So far the coastal city of Hai Phong suffered the most from the storm, with 6 people dead, including four by lightning, in four districts Thuy Nguyen, An Duong, Tien Lang and An Lao.

Power for some may not be restored until early next week, KUB says

After a second wave of major storms in three days, KUB said Friday that it is possible power may not be restored to all of its customers until early next week, even though it has an all-time high number of crews at work.

When the storms of Thursday night and Friday morning occurred, KUB had not fully recovered from Tuesday's storms that left more than 127,000 customers without power.

As of 9:17 p.m. Friday, 20,710 customers were still without power.

Thursday's was an imperfect storm, especially in hard-hit Rockland County. It dumped huge amounts of rain, much of it when large numbers of motorists were in transit. On top of that, the heavy rain fell upon ground already saturated, making for more runoff than might have been expected. Ongoing construction projects added to the congestion and the runoff; delays with other projects make it even harder to cope with inordinately heavy rains.

Such heavy rains have been an especially vexing problem for Rockland. Twice in March the area got hit hard, with rains causing spot flooding. On March 6 and 7, five communities - Valley Cottage, West Nyack, Hillburn, Nanuet and Thiells - all recorded rainfalls of 4 inches or more; Thiells registered 5.28 inches. This time there was less rain and more flooding. New City, with 3.4 inches, was treading water; Nyack had a river running through it; West Nyack was awash, as were several other communities.

Residents and officials in Minot, North Dakota, are bracing for record flooding from the swollen Souris River as the threat of more rain looms later today.

"A rain event right now would change everything. That's the scariest," Minot Mayor Curt Zimbelman told The Associated Press.

Some 4,500 homes are expected to be damaged from the expected surge of the river.

The flooding is due to the combination of excessive snow melt from an above normal winter snow pack, and above normal rainfall this past spring from the northern Rocky Mountain states through the Plains and Midwest.

Winnipeg - A massive flood that has turned fertile Manitoba pastures into lakes and driven people from their homes for weeks on end will probably deal another blow to the ailing prairie ocean known as Lake Winnipeg.

Flood waters that have settled across much of southern Manitoba are expected to carry various nutrients picked up from farmers' fields and urban run-off when they do finally recede into the world's 11th largest freshwater lake. It already has dangerously high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed huge blue-green algae blooms so large they are visible from space.

Experts say this year's flood, combined with a hot summer, could push nutrient levels up even more, as previous floods have done.

"The more land you inundate, the more potential there is for nutrients to come in," says Peter Leavitt, Canada research chair in environmental change and society, who recently conducted a study on Lake Winnipeg.

The sight of two Nebraska nuclear plants fighting off a severely swollen Missouri River this week has brewed a furious, Internet-fueled scare that warns of impending disasters of a scale similar to the tsunami-stricken Fukushima plant in Japan.

Operators of the Fort Calhoun and Cooper plants and the federal agency that regulate them say the reactors are flood-proof, are in no danger of leaking, and extra precautions have been taken.

"The rumors have been as difficult to combat as the rising floodwaters," said Victor Dricks, spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Once all the flight disruptions have stopped, the ash has been cleared from the South American highways, and human affairs appear to have returned to normal, the legacy of the ash and dust thrown up by the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano in Chile may well live on.

The longer-term effects of all this ash and dust could be of wider environmental concern than, say, a few hundred thousand stranded passengers, as difficult as it is for those people.

Volcanic eruptions are awesome spectacles. In part this is due to millions of tonnes of tiny ash and dust particles, known as volcanic aerosols, being blasted high into the air. We've all marvelled at the photographs.

In volcanic terms, the ash and dust plume created by Puyehue-Cordon Caulle was modest, only reported to have reached a height of around 15 kilometres. Large explosions, such as the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, can create plumes in excess of 34 kilometres high and 400 kilometres wide, ejecting more than 17 million tons of aerosols.

But even as a modest eruption, the Chilean volcano could have ejected enough ash and dust into the stratosphere to have some long-term climatic effects, which could in turn affect agriculture and impact on human wellbeing and quality of life.

The reason is that large volumes of aerosols can, depending on how high they 'sit' in the air and how long they remain there, have a measurable cooling effect. The higher the dust gets into the atmosphere and the more of it there is, the greater its capacity to reflect heat from the sun, which cools the land below.