Officials said nine people were killed in a house fire in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, including eight children.

The fire was reported around 2 a.m. Thursday at a home on Motes Lane, off Highway 62 in Greenville, about 35 miles northeast of Hopkinville.

There were 11 people inside the home when the fire broke out.

An adult and a child were able to escape and were being treated for burns and smoke inhalation. Both victims were transported by LifeFlight medical helicopter to Vanderbilt University Medical Center's trauma center in Nashville.

The house was a total loss.

Chief Darren Harvey with the Greenville Fire Department said multiple fire crews on the scene. Police were also on the scene.

Details about the cause of the fire were not available.

NewsChannel 5 has multiple crews on the scene. Stay with NewsChannel 5 for more information as it becomes available.

A new fire has broken out on the coast near Trondheim, after tinder-dry heather was again lit by sparks from power lines.

The new fire, on the island of Frøya in South Trøndelag county, broke out hundreds of kilometres south of Flatanger municipality, where firemen have been fighting blazes around two historic villages since Monday night.

"Police are now evacuating people in the Sandvika area," the county police said in a press statement issued at 3pm. "The fire is not under control, and efforts to extinguish it are still continuing. In addition to the fire crews on the ground, there are five helicopters in the area to assist putting out the fire. Many of these have come directly from the operation at Flatanger."

According to VG newspaper, 300 people have already been evacuated as police fear the fire could envelop the main village on the island.

The mayor of Flatanger said at a press conference at 1pm that firefighters had finally put out the fire that ravaged two historic coastal villages in his community throughout Tuesday.

"We have very positive news in that it looks as if the fire is extinguished," Mayor Olav Jørgen Bjørkås said as he opened the press conference.

The fire destroyed about 90 buildings in the coastal villages of Hasvåg and Småværet, and forced the evacuation of 33 residents from the area.

Northern Norway has seen an unusually dry period, with no rain since December, which, combined with the intense cold, has had the effect of freeze-drying the vegetation, making it extremely vulnerable to fire.

On Wednesday, Norwegian authorities started warning people against lighting fires outside, or even leaving candles at the graves of relatives.

Teacher arrested after police find bins full of snakes stacked to ceiling in his reeking home, along with 'cannibal' rats and mice

A schoolteacher has been arrested after hundreds of living and dead pythons in plastic bins were found stacked floor to ceiling inside his stench-filled suburban California home.

As investigators wearing respirator masks carried the reptiles out of the house by the score and stacked them in the driveway, reporters and passers-by gagged at the smell. Some held their noses or walked away from the five-bedroom home to get a breath of air.

"The smell alone I feel like I need to take a shower for a week," said police Corporal Anthony Bertagna. "They're pretty much in all the bedrooms everywhere."

Officers said they found more than 400 snakes at least 220 of them dead as well as numerous mice and rats, in the Santa Ana home of William Buchman after neighbors complained about the smell. He was arrested for investigation of neglect in the care of animals, Bertagna said.

Windy weather helped fuel the flames of a wildfire late Wednesday afternoon.

Crews throughout Woodbury County helped put it out.

The fire broke out a few miles north of Correctionville, Iowa around three.

A section of grass caught on fire.. but the flames quickly spread to a house and a Morton building.

"The house was vacant, nobody lived here since 1989. The owner of the property who lives just a little ways away saw the smoke and was the one that initially called it in," says Jeff Hill, Correctionville Fire Chief.

A Chicago woman has been basically trapped inside her home for weeks because her door has been encased in a block of ice.

River Bully told CBS 2′s Ed Curran that a neighbor's leaking pipe is to blame.

Since 1950, Bully has lived in her Fuller Park home. For weeks now, she has been a prisoner, her back door surrounded by ice from a neighbor's leaking pipe.

She called 311, and a worker with the Chicago Water Department responded, but it didn't bring results.

The government is to send in the army to help tackle the floods in the Somerset Levels.

The Ministry of Defence is to deploy equipment and manpower to help those in affected areas by delivering food, transporting people and distributing sandbags.

An MoD spokeswoman said : "We have tonight deployed military planners to help Somerset county council determine what support they might need."

She added they would be in the county overnight to assess what was required in time for first light on Thursday.

Speaking to the BBC, the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, said: "As we speak the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Local Government are discussing how we could deploy specialist vehicles which could help some of those villages which have been cut off, to help people travel backwards and forwards, to get fuel and food in and out, and to help with transport from dry land.

Mexico City - In winter, central Mexico's highland forests should be pulsing with orange and black. Not this year. Monarch butterfly colonies now cover less than a single hectare of forest, the smallest swath of land since data collection began in 1993, scientists reported at a press conference here today. The paltry figure highlights the uncertain fate of a natural wonder: the monarch's 4000-kilometer migration between North and Central America.

Each autumn, monarchs fly from their breeding grounds in the United States and Canada to Mexico, clustering by the thousands in pine and oyamel fir trees in Michoacán and Mexico states. Scientists had been bracing for bad news about this year's colonies since last spring, when few monarchs were tallied returning to their northern breeding grounds. A cold spring also pushed back the 2013 migration, interfering with the timing of monarch breeding, says Chip Taylor, an ecologist at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and the director of Monarch Watch, which monitors U.S. populations.

The figure announced today - 0.67 hectares - means that the population wintering in Mexico is down nearly 44% from last year's previous record low of 1.19 hectares. Monarch experts lay much of the blame on the decline of milkweed plants in North America. Adult monarchs lay their eggs on milkweeds, which the caterpillars consume before spinning their cocoons. Milkweed - and the monarchs that depend on it - once sprang up widely between rows of corn or soybeans in the U.S. Midwest. But with more and more farmers planting herbicide-resistant versions of these two crops, they are able to spray their fields with powerful herbicides, killing off milkweed.

A fire which razed an entire peninsula in Flatanger, Nord-Trøndelag on Tuesday flared up again in the evening, breaking through containment lines and creating a two kilometre fire front. Crews had spent the afternoon soaking a kilometre-wide fire break on the narrow section of the headland, but failed to contain the blaze.

The fire front stretches the peninsula, razing the small coastal communities in its path. About 90 homes and buildings were destroyed on Tuesday, but all residents escaped unharmed.

[Breaking news update 2:23 a.m. ET Wednesday]

Officials in Hoover, Alabama, were sending buses early Wednesday morning to pick up stranded motorists.

In the first run, two school buses were sent to transport as many as 100 people to local shelters, said Rusty Lowe of the Hoover fire department.

The buses will make several runs.

A helicopter has been deployed and fire crews remain on standby to guard properties as wildfires continue to burn across the Scottish Highlands.

Crews are holding a watching brief over a significant fire in the hills north of Gairloch, on the north-west coast, to ensure no properties are at risk.

A helicopter was sent to a significant fire in Kishorn, just north of Skye.