A piglet with two heads was born in Barangay San Marcos, Dingras, Ilocos Norte on Tuesday evening.

The piglet, which had four eyes, two noses and three ears, died around nine hours after it was born.

According to Crisanta Sabug, the two-headed piglet was the fourth to be born by her pet pig on Tuesday night.

Sabug narrated that they helped her pet pig during delivery after they noticed that it was having difficulty giving birth to the fourth piglet.

She said they were surprised when they saw that the piglet had two heads.

It was the only one born with defects among 10 piglets, she said.

Sabug said they immediately brought the two-headed piglet to their house and fed it milk.

A pig born with two heads and three eyes has baffled a farm owner - who could be set to earn big money from the disfigured animal.

The tiny piglet, who has two snouts and three eyes, became an instant celebrity almost as soon as it was born.

And the farmer has also been flooded with offers from people who want to buy it to use as an attraction to pull the public into their own businesses.

The animal was a huge hit on social media as pictures of the strange looking newborn went viral.

Hundreds of locals from Robles, in Colombia, have also flocked to see the little piggy who has normal black spots and pink skin.

A three-week-old baby boy has died after being bitten by a terrier inside a house.

Police were called at around 4.15am today after a report a baby had been bitten by a dog.

The boy was taken from Falkland Road, Sunderland, to hospital where he later died.

The semi-detached house where the incident happened is home to a young couple and their five children, according to locals.

Neighbours say the couple, named locally as Maria and Ryan, had the small brown terrier dog for around a year.

A police car is today parked outside the property.

June is on track to be the coldest summer month for more than 40 years as the persistent rainfall and low temperatures blight hopes of a turn to warmer weather.

Scotland's average temperature up until June 15 was 9.3C, two degrees below normal and the coldest June, July or August since June 1972, Met Office records show.

Forecasters are predicting another 10 days of downpours from next week. But first, another cold front will bring cloud and scattered heavy showers tomorrow, followed by a wet Sunday with hail. Highs of 18C tomorrow will drop to 15C on Sunday.

Met Office forecaster Helen Roberts said: "An Atlantic cold front will bring a lot of cloud and showers, some heavy, on Saturday, and a cooler Sunday with showers."

Forecasters are predicting "generally unsettled" conditions from the middle of the next week for up to 10 days.

High in the sky where the cirrus ice crystal clouds form, jet contrails draw their crisscross patterns. Now researchers have found that these elevated ice cloud trails can influence temperatures on the ground and affect local climate, according to a team of Penn State geographers.

"Research done regarding September 2001, during the three days following 9-11 when no commercial jets were in the sky, suggested that contrails had an effect," said Andrew M. Carleton, professor of geography. "But that was only three days. We needed to look longer, while jets were in the air, to determine the real impact of contrails on temperature and in terms of climate. Certain regions of the U.S. have more favorable atmospheric conditions for contrails than others, " said Jase Bernhardt, graduate student in geography.

Data suggests night-shining clouds are increasingly common and occurring lower and lower in the atmosphere.

WASHINGTON, June 19 (UPI) -- A strange weather phenomenon spawned high in the polar atmosphere was recently seen as far south as the contiguous United States.

On June 10, both on-the-ground observers and NASA's Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) spacecraft spotted noctilucent clouds, or "night-shining" clouds. The high-altitude clouds form in the spring and summer as the warming lower atmosphere sucks heat from above.

The cooling upper atmosphere causes ice crystals to take hold of meteor dust and other high-altitude particles. Occasionally, enough ice crystals accumulate to form visible clouds -- long blue and white sparkling wisps.

Noctilucent clouds were first documented in the mid-1800s after the eruption of Indonesia's Krakatau volcano sent ash throughout the atmosphere. In addition to vivid sunsets, skywatchers observed thin, glowing clouds, high in the sky. Even after the ash subsided, observers continued to note the phenomenon.

Heavy storms that swept through several southern Chinese provinces this past week have killed 18 people and left four more missing, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

The storms have dumped more than nearly 8 inches of rainfall in 48 hours on some towns, toppled thousands of homes, and dislocated tens of thousands of residents, the ministry said Friday.

The deaths were caused by house collapses, landslides, drowning or lightning.

Hubei province, where heaviest rainfalls were recorded, reported the highest death toll of 10. The local civil affairs agency said 664,000 people were affected.

In the neighboring province of Hunan, the storms affected 527,000 people.

Another five people were reported dead in the municipality of Chongqing. Guizhou province reported two deaths, and one person died in Anhui province.

Authorities were also trying to dispose of nearly 17,000 pigs that drowned in heavy rain in the southwestern region of Guangxi.

The official Xinhua News Agency on Saturday said foul smell permeated the air at a hog farm where the animals died nearly a week ago in a rain that dumped 15 inches in 20 hours on the village of Liuye.

Time

1. 2015-06-20 02:10:06 (UTC)
2. Times in other timezones

Nearby Cities

1. 76km (47mi) NW of Talcahuano, Chile
2. 83km (52mi) WNW of Tome, Chile
3. 87km (54mi) WNW of Penco, Chile
4. 88km (55mi) NW of Concepcion, Chile
5. 430km (267mi) SW of Santiago, Chile

Scientific Data

Diverse animals across the globe are slipping away and dying as Earth enters its sixth mass extinction, a new study finds.

Over the last century, species of vertebrates are dying out up to 114 times faster than they would have without human activity, said the researchers, who used the most conservative estimates to assess extinction rates. That means the number of species that went extinct in the past 100 years would have taken 11,400 years to go extinct under natural extinction rates, the researchers said.

Much of the extinction is due to human activities that lead to pollution, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species and increased carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification, the researchers said.

"Our activities are causing a massive loss of species that has no precedent in the history of humanity and few precedents in the history of life on Earth," said lead researcher Gerardo Ceballos, a professor of conservation ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting professor at Stanford University.

Ceballos said that, ever since he was a child, he struggled to understand why certain animals went extinct. In the new study, he and his colleagues focused on the extinction rates of vertebrates, which include mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes.

First, they needed to establish how many species go extinct naturally over time. They used data from a 2011 study in the journal Nature showing that typically, the world has two extinctions per 10,000 vertebrate species every 100 years. That study based its estimate on fossil and historical records.

Moreover, that background extinction rate, the researchers found, was higher than that found in other studies, which tend to report half that rate, the researchers said.

Then, Ceballos and his colleagues calculated the modern extinction rate. They used data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an international organization that tracks threatened and endangered species. The 2014 IUCN Red List gave them the number of extinct and possibly extinct vertebrate species since 1500.

Heavy monsoon rain in Mumbai, India, has brought wide areas of the city to a standstill.

Roads have been blocked, rail services interrupted and flights delayed. Some power generating plants have been shut down by Mumbai electricity board after flooding was considered to pose a danger. Many schools have also been closed for the day.

Many areas have seen over 150 mm of rain fall in the last 24 hours. According to WMO, as much as 310 mm of rain was recorded in the last 24 hours in Santacruz, Mumbai. India Meteorological Department (IMD) report that some Mumbai suburbs received 283.4 mm of rain while south Mumbai recorded 208.8 mm rain between in 24 hours between Thursday and Friday.