Time

1. 2015-04-22 22:57:15 (UTC)
2. Times in other timezones

Nearby Cities

1. 158km (98mi) SSE of Lata, Solomon Islands
2. 396km (246mi) NNW of Luganville, Vanuatu
3. 663km (412mi) NNW of Port-Vila, Vanuatu
4. 763km (474mi) ESE of Honiara, Solomon Islands
5. 988km (614mi) N of We, New Caledonia

Scientific Data

Hundreds of people are being evacuated in southern Chile following a massive eruption of the Calbuco volcano - its first in over 42 years. The government has declared a red alert, as thick clouds of ash and smoke shot up several kilometers into the sky.

The volcano is located near the tourist location of Puerto Varas, about 1,000 km (625 miles) south of the nation's capital Santiago.

Most parts of Kerala, the southern districts in particular, received heavy rainfall on Tuesday with summer showers intensifying. Three deaths on account of lightning was reported from the state capital. The state is expected to receive heavy rainfall in the next few days, according to Met forecast. The deceased were identified as Jagan Purushothaman, 50, of Kunnukuzhy, and Freddy, 55, and Michael Adima, 56, of Puthiyathura. Jagan was reportedly clearing a drain next to his house when the lightning bolt struck him.

Freddy and Michael were inspecting a fishing net in shed on the beach when they were hit by lightning.

A 50-year-old woman was mauled by a sloth bear near Dhanpur taluka in Dahod district on Sunday morning. Rauli Baria was rushed to SSG Hospital with severe injuries to her face and skull.

Rauli and her husband Varsan Baria are farmers and residents of Jojgam village. The incident occurred when the couple had gone to their fields to collect mahua flowers. The bear was hiding behind the thicket fencing and it attacked Rauli, who was close by. A scared Varsan fled from the spot.

The bear tore into her skull damaging a major part of her brain. Sources in the hospital said Rauli's eyes and nose has been irreversibly damaged. She has also suffered wounds on her neck, back and abdomen. She was admitted in a critical condition and is still in danger. Her husband suffered minor abrasions and was discharged after first aid.

The farm where they were attacked is near Ratanmahal Sloth Bear Sanctuary. District forest officials said that while two bear attacks in the area were registered in March, this is the first severe attack of the year.

The chances of being attacked by a bear are extremely slim. It's even less likely it would happen twice. But the victim of an attack last week also came face-to-face with an aggressive bear four years ago. And both times, it was a fight for his life.

"Multiple attacks on my shoulders, he bit me on my head, my arms, my hand," said Bob, who asked us not to use his last name.

Bob describes receiving more than 40 bites, severe claw swipes and deep bruises in a black bear attack last week.

"It would whip around, do this 180 and go for my leg, my shoulders, my head, and just come in and bite me again, and I would just try to nail it when it came in," he said.

Bob says he was running on a well-used trail in the woods surrounding Joint Base Lewis McChord when his dog Abby spooked the bear. As it charged in his direction, Bob grabbed a four foot long tree branch and readied himself for a fight.

It was a rare scenario. But remarkably, not for Bob.

One person was taken to hospital with minor injuries after a van fell into a sinkhole near York University during the Tuesday morning rush hour.

The van was travelling along Tangiers Road near Finch Avenue and Keele Street at around 7 a.m. when its front-right wheel fell into a giant sinkhole that had opened up on the street.

Police are urging drivers to avoid the area.

A fire engine had to be rescued in Brooklyn on Tuesday.
The stuck truck was parked on the street outside Brookdale Hospital in East Flatbush when a 15-foot-deep sinkhole opened up and swallowed its front right wheel around noon.

About a dozen firefighters stacked pieces of wood near the tire of the Engine Co. 257 truck to keep it from sinking deeper into Rockaway Parkway.

But one of the planks then sprang out and hit two of the emergency responders.

Both were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. Puzzlingly, they were taken to Kings County Hospital instead of being treated at Brook­dale. Authorities could not immediately explain why.

FDNY Chief Stephen Moro of Division 15 said it's unclear what caused the sinkhole. "This is an odd one," Moro said.

A few hospital workers who witnessed the incident said it was frightening.

"It's scary because they just [repaved] this street after putting in new pipes," said Paulie Johnson, who works in the security office at Brookdale's Urgent Care Center. "It looks good from the surface, but we don't know what's underneath."

Authorities said a dead humpback whale washed up near the east end of Fire Island.

A spokeswoman for the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research & Preservation told Newsday that the organization was making plans to do an on-scene necropsy.

The whale was discovered Tuesday afternoon in an area not easily accessible. She said the necropsy has to be done on the scene at low tide.

Heavy equipment will be needed to pull the whale away from the surf on Wednesday, the spokeswoman said. A thunderstorm is expected Wednesday afternoon.

Humpbacks are endangered.

Source: AP

A tornado struck the town of Xanxerê in the southern Brazil state of Santa Catarina on Monday, killing at least two people and leaving more than 1,000 homeless, according to The Associated Press. In addition to the deaths, globo.com says that more than 100 people were injured.

Photos and video from social media showed cars flipped over and significant damage to buildings. The state of Santa Catarina's civil defense department said Tuesday that 500 homes were damaged.

Meteorologist Mamedes Luiz Melo of Inmet Brasilia told globo.com that based on the photos available, the damage rating estimate for the tornado is between F2 and F3.

At first light on June 4, 2013, Steve Fradkin, a National Park Service ecologist, led a small team down a gravel strand called Beach 4 on Washington's Olympic coast. The group's destination was a rocky bench known—fatefully, it would turn out—as Starfish Point. There it would carry out an annual count of intertidal life forms as part of a long-term survey of the Pacific shore. Conditions were perfect, the sea calm beneath a blue sky dotted with cotton-ball clouds.

The day's beauty ended at Starfish Point. "It was a horror show," Fradkin told me. Instead of the usual spangling of purple, orange, and brick-red on the rocks, many of the starfish, which are known to biologists as sea stars, were contorted, marke­d with white lesions, or seemingly melting into goo. "They were missing arms," Fradkin said, "and there were even instances of arms walking around by themselves."

The team's observations are considered the first official record of an ongoing outbreak of a sea-star wasting disease that has killed millions of starfish from Baja California to southern Alaska, typically wiping out more than ninety per cent of each population it strikes. It's the greatest wildlife mass-mortality event, or "die-off," of the present day.

Mass-mortality events are sudden, unusual crashes in a population. On the spectrum of death—mortality's rainbow, if you will—they fill the space between the cool regularity of background death rates and the hot flare of species burning out into extinction. If you think that you are hearing about them more often these days, you're probably right. (Elizabeth Kolbert described frog and bat die-offs in a 2009 article; her subsequent book won a Pulitzer Prize this week.) Even mass-mortality experts struggle to parse whether we're witnessing a genuine epidemic (more properly, an epizootic) of these events. They have also raised another possibility: that we are in the throes of what one researcher called an "epidemic of awareness" of spooky wildlife deaths.