Event Time
2013-12-01 06:29:57 UTC
2013-12-01 12:29:57 UTC+06:00 at epicenter
2013-12-01 07:29:57 UTC+01:00 system time

Location
2.063°N 96.851°E depth=11.2km (7.0mi)

Nearby Cities
69km (43mi) SE of Sinabang, Indonesia
215km (134mi) WSW of Kabanjahe, Indonesia
217km (135mi) W of Sibolga, Indonesia
242km (150mi) SSE of Meulaboh, Indonesia
550km (342mi) WSW of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Technical Details

• The Okapi is revered in Congo and even features on banknotes

• The sub-Saharan White-winged Flufftail is one of Africa's rarest birds

The Okapi, or forest giraffe, and the sub-Saharan white-winged flufftail - one of Africa's rarest birds - are now on the brink of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The two animals are the latest additions to its Red List of Threatened Species, which now runs to a shocking 21,286 species.

However, there is good news. Two species of albatross, the leatherback turtle and the island fox native to California's Channel Islands are showing signs of recovery.

The update highlights serious declines in the population of the okapi (okapia johnstoni), a close relative of the giraffe, unique to the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

A bad odor that has settled in a large area of the city is making some people sick to their stomachs.

The Fond du Lac Dispatch Center received calls from businesses and homeowners beginning around 9:45 a.m. Friday.

"It's pretty much a mystery," said Lt. Joe Maramonte of the Fond du Lac Fire Department.

Calls started coming from the areas around Lenz Truck, Fleet Farm and then Holiday Dodge and a Fond du Lac County Airport hangar.

A crew checked an Alliant station across from Fleet Farm that injects odor into natural gas and determined that it was not the cause of the foul stench.

On Tuesday morning, yet another earthquake rocked the small Tarrant County town of Azle. It was the sixth within a week in Tarrant and Parker counties. More than a dozen quakes have rattled North Texas in November.

Azle residents are getting nervous and seismologists are trying to get to the bottom of what's going on. Some point to natural gas drilling that's happening in the Barnett Shale, a massive geological formation that covers about 20 North Texas counties. But a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center says more testing is needed to make such a connection.

Azle isn't the kind of place with a Starbucks or a quaint coffee shop. But at the popular gas station, Centerpoint Kwik Stop, the morning coffee crowd could only talk about one thing:

"Bam. It was like something hit the side of my house -- and it wasn't nothing but the earthquake," Janice Hammond said.

Residents' explanations range from volcano to unexploded bomb

Just outside the village, children fished in a tranquil pond bobbing with green algae and lined with willow trees, as cattle grazed nearby.

Now, Rezak Motanic gazes in disbelief down a gigantic crater where the pond used to be. It's like something from a science fiction movie: a sinkhole swallowed the water, the fish and even nearby trees.

"I sat here only a day before it happened, sipping plum brandy," Cemal Hasan said. "And then, there was panic. Fish were jumping out, and a big plum tree was pulled down like someone yanked it with a hook."

Residents of this remote north-western Bosnian village have been in shock since the pond vanished two weeks ago.

The pond was about 20 metres in diameter and about eight metres deep. Now, the "abyss", as the villagers have dubbed the crater, is some 50 metres wide and 30 metres deep - and growing.

Event Time
2013-12-01 01:24:14 UTC
2013-12-01 10:24:14 UTC+09:00 at epicenter

Location
7.006°S 128.351°E depth=10.0km (6.2mi)

Nearby Cities
343km (213mi) WNW of Saumlaki, Indonesia
351km (218mi) ENE of Dili, East Timor
366km (227mi) S of Ambon, Indonesia
410km (255mi) S of Amahai, Indonesia
446km (277mi) ENE of Atambua, Indonesia

Technical Details

Something weird is going on up north. It's a little early for rare owls to be visiting Maine, but here they come. An invasion from Canada is underway.

The star of the show is a northern hawk-owl in Lincoln. It first appeared about two weeks ago in the area between the Lincoln Regional Airport and Penobscot Valley Hospital. Once a rare northern owl finds a place he likes, he tends to stay awhile. This one has.

Snowy owls have been popping up all over southern Maine. They're also early. The owl sighting in Biddeford Pool doesn't surprise me. They've had a habit of visiting the area for years, usually perching offshore on Wood Island. But the other owls have appeared in places where they are not customarily seen. A young male in Kennebunk settled on top of Mt. Agamenticus for a day. It perched on the rail of an observation platform in full view of an existing web cam maintained by the Regional Conservation land trust. The rare owl spent several hours on camera for the world to see. Now that's just lucky.

It's too soon for qualified scientists to offer opinions on why an owl invasion is happening, but nothing prevents unqualified columnists from speculating. I assume it has little to do with weather. No frigid blasts have forced other subarctic birds such as northern shrikes and rough-legged hawks to fly south in unusual numbers. Generally, invasions are triggered by one thing: food scarcity.

Chino Valley, Arizona - Last year, about this same time, residents in Verde Valley heard some mysterious, unexplained booms.

Reports of similar booms are once again being called in to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office. This time, primarily from the town of Chino Valley.

"The way to describe it is like a hammer being slammed down next to the house," said Chino Valley resident Chris Schaich. "It was two hard hits and the house jumped, if felt like a jump, and I could hear the windows rattle a little bit, some glasses rattled."

In the last 100,000 years or so, our planet has endured an Ice Age and a few mini-ice ages. But now, with the earth on track to be four degrees Celsius warmer by 2100, a "Heat Age" is looming over us all.

This is not fear-mongering. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by 2100 we can expect a mean increase in surface temperature of 3.7ºC, with a likely range of 2.6-4.8 degrees. A warmer world will lead to mass migration from stricken areas and exacerbate existing wealth gaps between countries. In the words of David Victor, of the University of California, San Diego, the coming Heat Age will be "nasty, brutish, and hot."

Greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to reach a record high of 36 billion tons this year. That figure is expected to grow dramatically, as the great emerging-market boom of recent decades, which has lifted billions out of poverty and raised living standards around the world, puts increasing strain on the world's environment and resources. Indeed, by 2030, three billion new middle-class consumers - most of them in Asia - will add to the ever-growing burden of emissions.

We can already get a sense of the far-reaching consequences of climate change. In 2010, a major drought in eastern China damaged the wheat crop, forcing the country to rely on imports. This, combined with major wildfires in Russia's wheat-producing areas, helped to double average food prices in global markets.

In the Arab world, many people must spend around half of their income on food, compared with just 5-10% in Europe or the United States. Not surprisingly, the spike in food prices was a contributing factor in the civil unrest that sparked the Arab Spring.

As the link between global food prices and political instability demonstrates, we live in a globally interconnected world, in which we are failing to produce in the right way or create the right economic incentives to address profound environmental threats. As World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has put it, climate change is a big problem with small solutions.

Bulgaria is expecting a blizzard with 20 cm snow. Code orange for dangerous weather has been declared for half of Bulgaria. There will be strong winds, heavy snow and frost in Vidin, Montana, Vratsa, Pleven, Lovech, Gabrovo, Veliko Tarnovo and Smolyan.

In Sofia, there is a winter scenery and all cleaning machines are on the road, the capital's mayor Yordanka Fandakova told bTV. In her words, there will be plenty of rain but the heavy snow will be fully cleaned.

Experts advise people to refrain from traveling unless really necessary.