Yogyakarta - Indonesia's most volatile volcano spewed smoke and ash Monday, forcing hundreds of people to flee their villages along its slopes, a disaster official said.

Mount Merapi on the main island of Java rumbled as heavy rain fell around its cloud-covered crater, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, disaster mitigation agency spokesman.

The volcano unleashed a column of dark red volcanic material 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) into the air, and the ash made the rain thick and muddy in several villages as terrified residents fled to safety, he said.

The sound was heard 30 kilometers (18 miles) away, but an eruption did not occur and the volcano's alert level was not raised, Nugroho said. The 2,968-meter (9,737-foot) mountain is the most active of 500 Indonesian volcanoes. Its last major eruption in 2010 killed 347 people.

Indonesia, an archipelago of 240 million people, is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity because it sits along the Pacific "Ring of Fire," a horseshoe-shaped series of fault lines.

A long, silver, unpleasant-looking fish with sharp teeth which washed up at Rabbit Island was dubbed a monster fish by beach visitors.

However, it was likely to be a frostfish, said Nelson-based University of Otago marine educator Richard de Hamel.

Frostfish got their name because they tended to be found on frosty mornings when the temperature dropped and they came to shore, he said.

He recalled that one was found at Ruby Bay four years ago, and another at Mapua. Beach walkers were not the only ones to discover the frostfish at Rabbit Island - seagulls found it to be a large snack.

Source: Fairfax NZ News

Albuquerque - Friday's heavy downpour created a mystery in an Albuquerque backyard. After a lot of rain fell in a short time, the earth opened up revealing a deep underground pit at the home of Alex Sanouvon.

"I've been here 25 years and I have never seen anything like that," said Sanouvon. "Then suddenly, I just hear this collapse and all of the water rushed down and I came to look at it, and there was that hole." Sanouvon said.

The hole is a little less than 10 feet deep and about 3 ½ feet wide. Cinder blocks show the hole was built by someone and a large pipe sits at the bottom.

Sanouvon said when he moved in to the house decades ago, the hole wasn't mentioned..

New Zealanders ran screaming from buildings in Wellington yesterday as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake blew out windows and caused part of the city's port to slide into the sea.

The earthquake struck at 5:09 p.m. local time and was centered offshore, 57 kilometers (35 miles) south-southwest of the capital city, at a depth of 14 kilometers, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was New Zealand's biggest quake since a magnitude 6.3 killed 185 people in the South Island city of Christchurch two years ago, and the strongest to hit the central region of the country since 1942, GNS Science seismologist John Ristau said.

There is an 8 percent chance of another magnitude 6 event or larger in the next 24 hours, and 20 percent over the next seven days, Ristau said in a telephone interview. "A large earthquake can increase stress or decrease stress on neighboring faults, that's what we're looking closely at," he said.

If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, so they say, it will hop right out again. Frogs aren't stupid. Well, okay, but they're not THAT stupid.

However, if you put a frog in a pot of cool water, and gradually turn the heat up under it, the frog will not notice what's happening. It will happily sit there until the water boils, and it dies.

Now, I have never carried out this experiment personally - I prefer my frogs' legs fried - so I can't vouch for the truth of it. It's just a story the environmentalists like to tell. Besides, I already knew that human beings have trouble in detecting slow-moving threats. You can watch us failing to do it every day: we persistently ignore the fact that we are running into trouble at a civilisational level, even though the evidence is all around us.

The foundation of every civilisation is an adequate food supply: human beings simply cannot live at the density of population that civilisation implies without a reliable agriculture. But the supply of good agricultural land is limited, and the number of human beings is not.

You can postpone the problem for a while by increasing the yield of the available land: irrigate it, plant higher-yielding crops, fertilise the soil artificially, use pesticides and herbicides to protect the crops as they grow. But even these techniques have limits, and in many cases we have reached or exceeded them. So we are running into trouble. Why isn't anybody taking action?

Governments everywhere are well aware of the problem: we are now 7 billion people, heading for an estimated 11 billion by the end of this century, and the food situation is already getting tight. So tight, in fact, that the average price of the major food grains has doubled in the past ten years. But everybody finds local reasons to ignore that fact.

Event Time
2013-07-22 07:01:42 UTC
2013-07-22 09:01:42 UTC+02:00 at epicenter

Location
46.042°S 34.825°E depth=10.0km (6.2mi)

Nearby Cities
244km (152mi) WNW of Marion Island, Prince Edward Islands
1538km (956mi) SSE of Port Alfred, South Africa
1558km (968mi) SSE of Port Elizabeth, South Africa
1562km (971mi) SSE of East London, South Africa
1963km (1220mi) SSE of Maseru, Lesotho

Technical Details

36,000 bees found dead in Niestetal (Germany) - HNA

Fipronil is held responsible for the mass death of honeybees.

Mysterious Carp dead in Holter Reservoir (Montana) - KRTV

Hundreds of dead carp are floating in the popular reservoir on the Missouri River between Helena and Great Falls. Bruce Rich, the fisheries bureau chief for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said they're investigating the reason behind the dead carp, but at this point he can only speculate on the cause of their demise.

Sargodha (INP): Mysterious disease continues to killing cattle heads in different areas of Sargodha district. Highly perturbed over the death of their precious animals which are main source of their earnings, farmers have protested against the livestock department negligence.

According to details, three buffaloes worth more than seven lac rupees died of mysterious disease in Chak 32 of Southern Sargodha on Saturday. It should be mentioned that the disease which could not be detected by cattle owners and veterinary experts also has so far left dozens of cattle dead in various areas of the district. The cattle rearing people have started moving to other villages due to fear of the disease affecting their animals.

The farmers have expressed grave concern over the criminal negligence of the livestock department officials in taking steps to control the spread of disease and treatment of affected animals.

They demanded the authorities concerned for taking notice and financial assistance of the farmers who suffered losses due to deaths of cattle.

Two powerful earthquakes have struck China's north-west Gansu province, killing at least 75 people and leaving more than 400 others injured. The first earthquake near Dingxi city had a magnitude of5.9 and was shallow, with a depth of just 9.8 km (6 miles), the US Geological Survey said. Just over an hour later, a magnitude 5.6 quake hit the same area, it added. In 2008, an earthquake in Sichuan province left up to 90,000 people dead and millions homeless. A factory worker in Minxian county told AFP that he felt "violent shaking" and "ran to the yard of the [factory] plant immediately. Our factory is only one floor. When I came to the yard, I saw an 18-storey building, the tallest in our county, shaking ferociously, especially the 18th floor," he said. The area has been hit by 371 aftershocks, according to the Earthquake Administration of Gansu province. Tremors were felt in the provincial capital, Lanzhou, and as far away as Xian, 400km (250 miles) to the east.

At least 5,600 houses in the province's Zhangxian County are seriously damaged and 380 have collapsed, while some areas suffered from power cuts or mobile communications being disrupted, the earthquake administration added. "Many have been injured by collapsed houses," a doctor based in Minxian County was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying. "Many villagers have gone to local hospitals along the roads." The earthquake has caused a direct economic loss of 198 million Yuan ($32m; £21m), the Dingxi government said on its micro-blog. The closer to the surface an earthquake strikes, the more damage it can cause, our correspondent adds. The earthquake reportedly triggered a series of mudslides and landslides, making it difficult for rescuers to access some areas hit by the quake. The Gansu military police have deployed 500 soldiers, including 120 specialist rescuers, while 500 emergency tents and 2,000 quilts are also being transported to affected areas, Xinhua added. Officials from the civil affairs, transportation and earthquake departments were also visiting local towns to assess the damage, a statement on the Dingxi party website said. - BBC

A powerful earthquake has hit China's north-west Gansu province, killing at least 11 people and seriously injuring at least 81 more, officials say.

The earthquake near Dingxi city had a magnitude of 5.98 and was shallow with a depth of just 9.8 km (6 miles), according to the US Geological Survey.

Dingxi local authorities say several houses have collapsed in the quake. In 2008, an earthquake in Sichuan province left up to 90,000 people dead and millions homeless.

Officials from the civil affairs, transportation and earthquake departments are visiting local towns to assess the damage, a statement on the Dingxi party website said.

Crews of fire fighters and rescue dogs have already arrived at the scene, the BBC's Celia Hatton in Beijing reports. The closer to the surface an earthquake strikes, the more damage it can cause, our correspondent adds.

"You could see the chandeliers wobble and the windows vibrating and making noise, but there aren't any cracks in the walls," AFP quoted a clerk at Wuyang Hotel, about 40 km (25 miles) from the epicentre, as saying.

"Shop assistants all poured out onto the streets when the shaking began," the clerk said.