A powerful cyclone that swept along Pakistan's Arab Sea coast Tuesday killed 14 people and injured dozens, local TV companies reported citing various sources.
A tropical storm called Yemyin-03B hit the province of Balochistan at about 11:00 a.m. local time (06:00 a.m. GMT) flooding roads, tearing roofs from houses, and leaving several districts without electricity.
The cyclone caught several fishing boats while at sea. Unofficial sources said two fishing boats had sunk. Coast guard vessels currently searching for people have already rescued 25 people, but over 30 fishermen are still missing.
If you want to find out what sorts of plants live in a place, you can painstakingly hunt down every species or you can check with the local spiders, suggest a team of Chinese, Indian and British researchers.
A study of pollen captured in spider webs of southern and central Yunnan, China, shows that the sticky webs do a darned good job at capturing and hanging onto pollen grains from local plants. The method may be useful in plant surveys worldwide.
A heat wave has claimed two lives in Greece and killed six more people in Romania as temperatures soared to 46 degrees Celsius (114.8 Fahrenheit) in parts of southeast Europe.
Turkey and Cyprus also reported deaths blamed on the intense heat, while three people drowned in Bulgaria swimming in unsupervised dams and beaches at the weekend as temperatures climbed well above early summer averages.
AFPTue, 26 Jun 2007 02:48 UTC
Torrential downpours around Britain left three dead and hundreds stranded on Monday as storms continued to batter Russia and a heatwave in southern Europe led to further deaths and sparked fires.
A plague of black flies has prompted authorities in north-eastern Spain to issue warnings on TV and fliers advising people to cover up and avoid riverside areas in the early morning and dusk.
The insect has been quickly breeding - and sucking blood - along the rivers and reservoirs of Catalonia and Aragon, causing alarm in small towns.
Only two to three millimetres long, the fly is much smaller and harder to spot than most mosquitoes, but its voracious bite sent more than 2,000 people to hospital last year in Catalonia alone. Its vigorous jaw, which releases a cocktail of chemicals, can produce allergic reactions.
California officials declared a state of emergency Monday in the area near Lake Tahoe where firefighters battled a raging forest fire that has destroyed 225 buildings and forced the evacuation of hundreds more.
Global climate change is causing Antarctic ice shelves to shrink and split apart, yielding thousands of free-drifting icebergs in the nearby Weddell Sea. According to a new study in this week's journal Science these floating islands of ice - some as large as a dozen miles across - are having a major impact on the ecology of the ocean around them, serving as "hotspots" for ocean life, with thriving communities of seabirds above and a web of phytoplankton, krill, and fish below.
Residents in the small town of Elie woke Saturday morning to the devastation caused by one of three tornadoes that ripped through southern Manitoba.
Eric Holt-Gimenez
AlternetMon, 25 Jun 2007 16:19 UTC
Biofuels invoke an image of renewable abundance that allows industry, politicians, the World Bank, the United Nations and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to present fuel from corn, sugarcane, soy and other crops as a replacement for oil that will bring about a smooth transition to a renewablefuel economy.
Myths of abundance divert attention from powerful economic interests that benefit from this biofuels transition, avoiding discussion of the growing price that citizens of the global South are beginning to pay to maintain the consumptive oil-based lifestyle of the North. Biofuel mania obscures the profound consequences of the industrial transformation of our food and fuel systems -- the agro-fuels transition.
Two swans have died from the deadly strain of bird flu in Bavaria, Germany, the press service of the European Commission said Monday.
The press service said German authorities had informed the European Commission that tests in Bavaria had revealed the H5N1 virus in the birds' bodies.