A storm carried heavy rainfall, lethal winds and drastic temperature swings into Uruguay last weekend. In the course of the three days that it lasted, the storm managed to take the lives of more than 30,000 of the country's sheep.

The storm, which was particularly damaging for the country's north and northwest regions, where much of Uruguay's sheep and ewes are raised, was unlike anything most of the country's northern residents had ever experienced. "I have never seen anything like it, and the people who have spent years working in the countryside haven't either - not even their parents or grandparents have told them stories like these," Walter Galliazzi, a farmer in Salto in the country's northwest told local newspaper El País The combination of near-freezing temperatures, some eight inches of daily rainfall and powerful winds was too much for the sheep, many of which had recently been shaven.

A fish native to North America has shocked British anglers by showing up on this side of the pond for the very first time.

The striped bass- a relative of the European bass- was caught by fisherman Martin White at Dover, Kent.

The 2lbs 7oz sea fish is the first of its kind ever to be hooked in Britain.

The striped bass is usually a bit of a homebody, and rarely strays more than five miles from America's east coast- so experts are baffled at its capture.

Dr Gary Nelson from Massachusetts State Fisheries said: "It's unheard of for a striped bass to travel all the way across the Atlantic.

"It is possible that it came over to the UK in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream when it was just a fry.

The driver and his passenger were forced to pull onto the hard shoulder of the M6 near Wigan after the red and black cornsake revealed itself

This is the three foot snake which crawled across a van driver's dashboard as he drove at 60mph on a motorway at night.

A horrified front seat passenger sparked a 999 alert after he watched the snake slither inches above the driver's hands on the steering wheel.

The passenger phoned police and yelled: "Pull over - now."

Amazingly, the unnamed driver in his fifties, did not see the snake until he stopped on the hard shoulder of the M6 motorway near Wigan at 2am.

The two men fled the white box van until police officers arrived at the scene with two motorway traffic officers and an RSPCA inspector.

Residents of a Gwinnett apartment complex told Channel 2 Action News they've been overrun by snakes in recent weeks. Channel 2's Tom Regan learned more about the snake invasion and what could be causing it.

The most recent snake sighting happened in the breezeway of the Bradford Gwinnett Apartment building. It was described as a giant copperhead that terrified residents.

"If it got into my house, I don't know what I would have done," said resident Juanita Kennemore.

Kennemore said one of the venomous copperheads was caught last Sunday. A resident took a picture of the snake after killing it with a brick.

An unusual spate of hornet attacks in central China has killed at least 18 people.

Zhou Yuanhong, a health official in the city of Angkang, in Shaanxi province, said more than 100 people in the area had been stung by swarms of the insects in recent months and treated at hospital, and that 18 of them died.

The local state-run newspaper Huashangbao reported that 21 had died in hospitals.

Zhou said a handful of people are killed every year in the region by hornets, especially in forested areas, but that this year has been unusually severe, possibly because of weather changes.

In the affected village of Sanping, local official Wang Zhengcai said people have been warned to be vigilant if they go into the woods.

Wildlife biologists will inspect the Sacred Heart Early Learning Center in Charleston after an employee found a small copperhead snake in a drawer beneath a crib on Tuesday.

The employee captured the 8-inch snake inside a Styrofoam cup until a biologist with the state Division of Natural Resources arrived. How the snake got there is still a mystery, said DNR spokesman Hoy Murphy.

The center is housed inside the Sacred Heart Pavilion on the corner of Quarrier Street and Leon Sullivan Way.

"This is not typical," Murphy said. "We are talking about it being right in the middle of downtown Charleston."

Eric Richmond, a DNR wildlife biologist, said the agency would sweep the building Tuesday night and early this morning and would then recommend how to prevent other snakes from getting in, Murphy said.

Even though the snake was small, it carried as much venom as an adult-sized copperhead, Richmond said. The snake was turned over to Noel Braley of Wildlife Removal Service in Charleston.

Dawn Snyder, director of the Sacred Heart Early Learning Center, did not return phone messages. The center is licensed by the state to provide care for 52 children age 6 weeks to 3 years, according to its website.

Rio De Janeiro - Around 30 large dolphins beached themselves in northeastern Brazil over the weekend, and news reports said Monday that at least seven of them had died.

The dolphins, known as false killer whales, ran aground early Sunday on the shallow sands of Upanema beach in Areia Branca, roughly halfway between the cities of Fortaleza and Natal.

Images distributed by the environmental police of Rio Grande do Norte state show beachgoers and passers-by attempting to aid the animals, which lay stranded in inches- (centimeters-) deep water. Most of the animals were still, occasionally twitching their tails, as beachgoers swabbed them with wet T-shirts.

O Globo newspaper reported Monday that at least seven on the animals died, six of them on the Upanema beach. O Globo said one animal died following an apparent shark attack after it was returned to the ocean. The report stressed that the dolphin was likely attacked in very deep waters and that area beachgoers needn't worry about shark attacks.

The paper said it was not immediately known why the animals beached themselves, but biologists were examining whether the pod leader might have been ill. Another hypothesis is that the dolphins were pursuing a school of fish and were trapped on Upanema's high sand banks.

O Globo said it was among the largest collective beachings in Brazil in recent decades. In 1991, around 19 whales beached themselves on the sands of the nearby town of Sao Miguel do Gostoso, the report said.

Source: Associated Press

A tiny snake "about the width of a pencil" is responsible for grounding a jet of 370 passengers.

While the eight-inch reptile didn't cause quite the same high octane scenes as his cold-blooded cousins in the Samuel L Jackson film Snakes On A Plane, it succeeded in raising the profile of the humble Mandarin Rat Snake.

The live specimen was found in the passenger cabin of a Qantas Boeing 747 in Sydney on Sunday night.

A number of dead birds found near the base of a Bell Aliant cellular tower in Conception Bay South have both a resident and a councillor concerned.

Ward 3 councillor and C.B.S. candidate for the mayor's chair Ken McDonald was out campaigning Thursday evening when a call came in from a resident who had been walking his dog near the cellular tower on Eason's Road behind the Manuels River Interpretation Centre.

The resident said he had seen a number of large, dead birds near the tower.

"He was concerned, one, for the dog and secondly that this is above the Manuels River and everything runs towards there," said McDonald. "He felt it might be something related to the tower or some seepage that's coming from the water that's trickling past it."

McDonald met with The Telegram at the site Friday morning.

There were at least a half dozen bird carcasses - what appeared to be crows and ravens, which belong to a group called the corvids.

An animal control officer on disability kept 850 snakes, including two 6-foot Burmese pythons, while running an illegal snake business out of his suburban New York home, according to authorities who made the discovery on Thursday.

Richard Parrinello, of Brookhaven, New York, kept the snakes in his detached garage, all neatly stacked in containers and at the right temperature, according to Roy Gross, chief of the Suffolk County SPCA.

Burmese pythons are illegal in New York, and Parrinello's were taken from the house to a reptile sanctuary in Massachusetts while the rest of the snakes are still in his garage, according to Jack Krieger, communications director for the Town of Brookhaven on Long Island.

Gross said all the snakes appeared to be in good health and there was no animal abuse or neglect.

"It was a well-maintained facility, it was very clean and organized, it was a business," Krieger said.