A herd of wild elephants on Indonesia's Sumatra has repeatedly outsmarted efforts to stop them stealing crops, wising up to attempts to chase them off with burning torches, a report said Monday.
The head of Way Kambas natural reserve in Lampung province, Hudiono, told the state-run Antara news agency that a herd of 25 to 30 elephants had been nightly roaming out of the reserve to raid crops since Thursday.
Two earthquakes struck eastern Papua New Guinea on Wednesday but there was no fear of a tsunami or reports of damage, seismologists said.
The first quake, which reached 6.2 on the Richter scale, struck at 4:55 am (0025 IST) 90 kilometers of the largest city Lae at a depth of 47 kilometers.
CONEJOS, Colo. - Six snowmobilers missing for three days in the snowy Colorado mountains called for help Monday and reported they were hungry but alive, authorities said.
Crews were on their way to meet the six, who are all from New Mexico, said Barbara Smith, a spokeswoman for the Conejos County Sheriff's Department.
The snowmobilers called 911 from an isolated and snowbound train station and said they were cold but otherwise all right, Smith said. They had been missing since Friday amid heavy snow in the area.
Heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures that hit Bulgaria this week claimed a ninth victim Sunday, Info radio reported as the country struggled to get back to normal.
A severely frostbitten man found near the northeastern town of Kavarna died in hospital, the station reported.
The body of another victim of the cold, a 64-year-old gardener, was found Saturday in the southern region of Pazardzhik, Trud daily newspaper reported.
World temperatures will cool slightly in 2008, but it will remain among the top 10 hottest years on record, British weather experts predicted Thursday.
The impact of a strong La Nina climate pattern over the Pacific will help keep temperatures down, according to the annual forecast by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia.
Overall the global temperature is expected to be 0.37 degree Celsius above the long-term average of 14.0 degree, making it the coolest year since 2000 when the value was 0.24 degree C above the average.
Heavy snow and rain pounded the western United States for a third day Sunday as state officials confirmed two fatalities from the storms that have pummeled the region.
California was drenched with up to 10 inches (25 cm) of rainfall in some regions as mountain communities in the east of state and neighboring Nevada were blanketed by nearly six feet (two meters) of snow in places, National Weather Service figures showed.
Around 110,000 homes and businesses remained affected by power outages across California, down from more than 800,000 on Friday when the worst of a series of storms slammed into San Francisco and its surrounding areas.
An unexpected cold snap this week sent thermometers plummeting in Florida and heat-hungry iguanas dropping from tree branches like autumn leaves, scientists and witnesses said.
Passersby in Bill Baggs and Crandon parks in Key Biscayne, south of Miami, were seen picking up the seemingly lifeless lizards from the ground beneath trees and setting them in the sun, where after a brief warm-up, most revived and scampered off into the bushes.
The cold-blooded lizard-with-a-mohawk's comfort level begins at 23 degrees Celsius (73 Fahrenheit) and it positively thrives at 35 C (95 F). But on Wednesday and Thursday, the mercury in south Florida dropped to 4-5 C (39-41 F).
Australia experienced one of its hottest years on record in 2007, and climate experts have warned that the higher temperatures are likely a taste of things to come as weather patterns change.
The country has already kicked off 2008 with a spate of extreme weather -- several cities, including Perth and Melbourne, have suffered summer heatwaves, while bushfires have raged on the east and west coasts.
Meanwhile, heavy rain has caused flooding along the east coast, huge waves have forced the closure of Sydney beaches and Cyclone Helen has brought winds of up to 130 kilometres (80 miles) an hour to the northern city of Darwin.
Russian emergency services struggled to maintain the country's often creaky heating infrastructure on Saturday as temperatures in some of the coldest regions on Earth plunged to bone-chilling levels, officials said.
The Emergency Situations Ministry said in a statement it was providing emergency help in a village in the Siberian province of Yakutia where a fault in a main heating pipeline had left 11 apartment buildings, home to 175 people, without heat.
Outdoor temperatures in the village of Artyk had plunged to minus 54 degrees Celsius (minus 65 Fahrenheit) in recent days, according to the provincial newspaper Yasia.
THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.
