Severe storms in Alabama have killed at least 45 people, emergency officials have said, bringing the death toll to at least 59 in the southern US.

A huge tornado levelled parts of the city of Tuscaloosa, in Alabama, killing at least 15, as storms tore through southern states from Texas to Georgia.

US President Barack Obama has approved emergency aid for Alabama, including search and rescue assistance.

Eleven more people were killed in storms earlier this week in the South.

The storms also killed 11 people in Mississippi, two in Georgia and one in both Arkansas and Tennessee.

The current storm system was forecast to hit North and South Carolina on Wednesday evening, before making its way further north-east.

Governors in Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee have each declared a state of emergency as a result of the newest round of heavy winds, rains and tornadoes.

President Obama declared a state of emergency for Alabama, releasing federal aid money.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13217726

Update 29/04/11:

Shocked Americans struggled on Thursday to grasp the magnitude of the worst US tornadoes in decades, which carved a trail of destruction across the south, leaving 280 people dead and some communities virtually wiped off the map.

Disbelief and despair were written on the faces of residents of cities and towns in seven states crippled by the ferocious spring storms as they picked through the remains of destroyed homes, businesses and schools, in surreal scenes of devastation more common to war zones and massive earthquakes.

The severe weather killed at least 184 people and injured several hundred more on Wednesday in Alabama alone, authorities told AFP, and President Barack Obama said he would travel to the state on Friday for a first-hand look at the devastation.

Fears are growing among US residents living along the Mississippi River as rising flood waters threaten communities in states from Illinois to Louisiana.

Police officers went door-to-door in Memphis, Tennessee urging residents to leave nearly 1,000 homes near the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

Sections of the Mississippi Delta also began to flood early on Friday.

The rising waters have already broken records set in 1927 and 1937.

But levees put in place over the past several decades are expected to prevent flooding from being as devastating as it was roughly 80 years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13314643

-------------------

Two Canadian provinces, Quebec and Manitoba, are facing flood emergencies.

At least 700 military personnel are in south-eastern Quebec to provide assistance with evacuations, sandbagging, and finding shelters for people forced from their homes.

The Richelieu River has reached record high levels and burst its banks in several places.

At least 3,000 homes have been affected with a third of them evacuated.

Farms and roads in the region have been washed out after the melting of an unusually heavy snowpack, combined with a week of rain.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/07/3210530.htm?section=justin

A DROUGHT spreading across France could affect cattle feed, farmers fear.

Farmers said up to 50% of grass and crops destined to feed livestock could be lost because historically-low rainfall has produced ground conditions not normally seen until mid-summer.

More than ten departments have introduced water restrictions already, banning the watering of public green spaces and people from filling up swimming pools.

Up to 58% of reservoirs in France are already below normal water levels, according to the ministry, which will hold a meeting on May 16 to discuss the issue. Underground water supplies are also affected.

"We are clearly ahead (in terms of drought measures) by comparison with previous years," said a spokesman for the ministry.

The north of France was seeing a level of drought not experienced for 50 years according to Météo France.

While it was impossible to say the situation was directly caused by climate change, a spokesman for Météo France said droughts were part of "expected changes" as a result of global warming.

April 2011 was the hottest April in France since 1900 according to the weather forecaster.

http://www.connexionfrance.com/Farmers-drought-climate-change-water-restrictions-12711-view-article.html

The worst floods to hit the central United States in more than 80 years have swallowed homes, farms and roadways and has swollen the Mississippi River to six times its normal width.

Thousands of people have been evacuated in the US city of Memphis as the Mississippi River reaches a near-record peak.

Residents have been moved from low-lying suburbs as the river swells to almost five kilometres in width.

Memphis will feel the full force of the Mississippi River within hours when it reaches its expected peak just below the record set in 1937.

Significant rainfalls upstream and the thawing of winter's heavy snow have contributed to the flood. A spillway above New Orleans has been opened to alleviate the flooding in the region.

As officials patrolled stressed levees in waterlogged Memphis after record spring flooding, Daryl Hissong and his three-year-old son were among thousands of people forced from their homes by the muddy waters.

They packed up on Sunday and by Monday morning there was 1.5 metres of water inside his home in Millington, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis.

"They said it'll probably be a month before all of this goes down," said Mr Hissong, as he looked at the flood which had swallowed neighbouring trailers up to the rooftops.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/10/3212320.htm?section=justin

As for the country's waterways, reengineering has made some even more prone to flooding. "These are natural catastrophes but, essentially, they are man-made," Bruno Moro, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Colombia, told TIME. A vivid example is the Bogotá River, which runs through the capital and has become an all-purpose dumpster for garbage, sewage and industrial runoff. The waste plus the rerouting of streams into the river have swelled water levels, and massive earthen embankments are now required to keep the river on course. To make matters worse, the dykes sometimes fail.

The Universidad de la Sabana (University of the Savanna), one of the Colombia's elite academic institutions, sits next to the Bogotá River in the capital suburb of Chía. On April 25, the surging river punched a 60-ft.-long hole (18 m) in a nearby levee. Now, the university's library, amphitheatre and science laboratories sit five-feet deep (1.5 m) in putrid black water. As he climbed into an aluminum boat on a mission to salvage classroom desks and computers, volunteer relief worker Luis Gabriel Angel said: "Nobody imagined the flooding would be this bad."

Fortunately, the downpours won't last as long as they did in the fictional Macondo. Forecasters predict the rain will peter out by July. But thanks to global warming and climate change, Colombians should get used to extreme weather, says Ricardo Lozano, who heads the government's Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies. He points out that just before the floods, Colombia suffered through a lengthy drought. "It's wrong to think that climate change is a future threat because it is taking place right now," Lozano says. "The world should learn from what's happening in Colombia."

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — For all the attention on epic flooding in the Mississippi Valley, a quiet threat has been growing here in the West where winter snows have piled up on mountain ranges throughout the region.

Thanks to a blizzard-filled winter and an unusually cold and wet spring, more than 90 measuring sites from Montana to New Mexico and California to Colorado have record snowpack totals on the ground for late May, according to a federal report released last week.

Those giant and spectacularly beautiful snowpacks will now melt under the hotter, sunnier skies of June — mildly if weather conditions are just right, wildly and perhaps catastrophically if they are not.

Fear of a sudden thaw, releasing millions of gallons of water through river channels and narrow canyons, has disaster experts on edge.

“All we can do is watch and wait,” said Bob Struble, the director of emergency management for Routt County in north-central Colorado. The county’s largest community, Steamboat Springs, sits about 30 miles from the headwaters of the Yampa River, a major tributary of the Colorado River that has 17 feet of snow or more in parts of its watershed.

“This could be a year to remember,” Mr. Struble added in a recent interview in his office as snow fell again on the high country.

No matter what happens, the snows of 2011, especially their persistence into late spring, have already made the record books.

But the West has also changed significantly since 1983, when super-snows last produced widespread flooding. From the foothills west of Denver to the scenic, narrow canyons of northern Utah, flood plains that were once wide-open spaces have been built up.

Many communities have improved their defenses, for example, by fortifying riverbanks to keep streams in place, but those antiflood bulwarks have for the most part not been tested by nature’s worst hits.

And in sharp contrast to the floods on the Mississippi River — one mighty waterway, going where it will — the Western story is fragmented, with anxiety dispersed across dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of large and small waterways that could surge individually, collectively or not at all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/us/22snow.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

PARIS, May 16 [2011](Reuters) - France has imposed limits on water consumption in 28 [43 now since this article was written] of its 96 administrative departments, the environment ministry said Monday, amid signs that a prolonged dry spell that has hit grain crops would continue.

"We are already in a situation of crisis. The situation is like what we would expect in July for groundwater levels, river flows and snow melting," Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet told a press conference.

The government had previously put 27 departments under water consumption limits, and Kosciusko-Morizet said Monday that similar measures could be extended to three more – effectively affecting a third of the country.

One of the hottest and driest Aprils on record in France has parched farmland and cut water reserves, stoking worries of a drought similar to that experienced in 1976 and fuelling concern harvests will suffer in the European Union's top grain producer.

http://www.ecoseed.org/latest-news/article/102-latest-news/9834-france-in-crisis-as-drought-deepens-%E2%80%93-minister

This record heat wave is not far from one set in 2005, as per this article six years ago:

France is going though its worst drought in nearly 30 years after an exceptionally dry winter and spring, with more than two thirds of the country’s 96 departments imposing water restrictions .
Visitors this month to large swathes of western and southern France, including popular tourist areas such as Charente, Provençe and the Dordogne, will find a ban on refilling swimming pools, washing cars, watering vegetable plots and using sprinklers on golf greens.

Farmers across much of the southwest are facing a ban or severe restrictions on irrigation, and a fierce row is brewing over the recent huge increase in maize production – that crop alone consumes more water than the population of France .

Rationing has been introduced in some villages which depend on a sole – and dried-up – source , but the authorities are hopeful that early planning will mean large-scale cut-offs can be avoided. Low rainfall since September of last year has left the water table at drastically reduced levels in the western half of the country, from above the Loire estuary down to the Pyrenees. Even in normally wet Brittany, the island of Belle-Ile is being re-stocked with fresh water by tanker because reservoirs are too low to cope with the summer influx of tourists.

http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=45207

All this after the two most devastating winter storms only 10 years apart 2000 and 2010, if my memory is correct... Climate change for sure...

The outbreak of tornadoes that ravaged the southern US last week was the largest in US recorded history, the National Weather Service has said.

The three-day period from 25-28 April saw 362 tornadoes strike, including some 312 in a single 24-hour period.

The previous record was 148 in two days in April 1974.

The tornadoes and the storm system that spawned them killed at least 350 people in Alabama and six other states. It was the deadliest outbreak since 1936.

The review by US meteorologists came as the southern US states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky continued the huge task of digging out from the destruction.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13262644

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/25/us/joplin-aerial.html?hp

A debilitating drought along China's Yangtze river has affected more than 34 million people, leaving farmers and livestock without water and parching a major grain belt, the government said Saturday.

More than 4.23 million people are having difficulty finding adequate drinking supplies, while more than five million are in need of assistance to overcome the drought, the Civil Affairs Ministry said in a statement.

"The special characteristics of this drought disaster is that it has persisted a long time," the ministry said.

"Secondly the losses to the agricultural and breeding industries have been severe... while drinking water for people and livestock have been seriously impacted."

Rainfall levels from January to April in the drainage basin of the Yangtze, China's longest and most economically important river, have been up to 60 percent lower than average levels of the past 50 years, it said.

"Large areas of farmland have been severely parched and are cracking, making it impossible for early rice to take root," the ministry said.

The agricultural impact is likely to further alarm officials already trying to tame high prices, including grain prices which have been rising steadily on global markets in recent months.

So far the drought has led to direct economic losses amounting to 14.94 billion yuan ($2.29 billion), the ministry said.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/china-drought-affects-more-than-34-million-people-20110528-1f9mm.html

DEAUVILLE, France: Russia, Japan and Canada told the G8 they would not join a second round of carbon cuts under the Kyoto Protocol at United Nations talks this year and the US reiterated it would remain outside the treaty, European diplomats have said.

The future of the Kyoto Protocol has become central to efforts to negotiate reductions of carbon emissions under the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change, whose annual meeting will take place in Durban, South Africa, from November 28 to December 9.

Get Out the Kleenex — Climate Change Lengthens Allergy Season

By Bryan Walsh Tuesday, February 22, 2011

For about 36 million Americans with seasonal allergies, torture time is just around the corner. As spring flowers, the pollen will flow, resulting in nasal congestion, red itchy eyes and overall awfulness. It's not just cosmetic either — for an estimated 23 million Americans with asthma, allergies can pose a serious health threat. Nor is it cheap — allergies and allergy-driven asthma cost the U.S. an estimated $32 billion a year.

Bad news, snifflers — it's going to get worse. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows a link between warming temperatures and a longer ragweed pollen season. According to researchers led by Lewis Ziska of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the ragweed season is now 27 days longer in the northernmost areas of North America, largely because winters starts later and ends earlier, extending the time for pollen-bearing plants to thrive. It's not the first piece of research to make the claim that global warming will worsen allergies, but it's the most detailed and it's peer-reviewed. (More on Time.com: Asthma Hits Poor Minorities Worst in California)

As Kim Knowlton — a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a professor at Columbia University — wrote in a blog post, the evidence is strong:

We knew already that springtime was coming 10 to 14 days earlier than it did 20 years ago. But this new work measures the length of the ragweed pollen season in the US for the first time, and finds it's getting longer as temperatures rise, especially the farther north you go. (States like Minnesota and Wisconsin showed some of the strongest effects.) If these warming trends continue (as they're projected to) under a changing climate, the health of people with severe allergies or asthma could really suffer.


Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/02/22/get-out-the-kleenex%e2%80%94climate-change-lengthens-allergy-season/print/#ixzz1NvKkHby4

The future of Perth's water supply is becoming more urgent as the start of winter brings a dire rainfall forecast and the government admits it is considering unpopular measures to compensate for drying dams.

The city recorded just 104.4 millimetres of rain during autumn, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

That is 50 millimetres less than last autumn, which was followed by one of the driest winters on record, and 80 millimetres less than the long-term average

Read more: http://www.watoday.com.au/environment/water-issues/dire-winter-rain-forecast-throws-spotlight-on-perths-water-supply-20110531-1fego.html#ixzz1OA2bFYx3

NANJING, June 2 (Xinhua) -- The lingering drought continues to wreak havoc along the Yangtze, raising concerns about the ecological security in the areas along China's longest river.

"I've never seen it this bad. The waterweeds and fish are all dried dead," says Zhang Yueming, a 53-year-old farmer from Sushui County in Jiangsu Province.

Behind him is a large expanse of muddy water dotted with dying fish and clams. The enclosed crab-breeding farms are parched and cracked as a result of the relentless dry spell that is gripping central and eastern China. At the banks of the Shijiu Lake, fishing gear lies unattended.

The 207-square-kilometer lake is located at the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. The depth of the lake is usually around 10 meters, but this year, the lake is barely one meter deep.

This scene is not untypical in the regions affected by the drought.

"The meteorological drought has developed into hydrological drought and ecological drought, and farming and fishing is severely affected," says Jiang Jiahu, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Rainfall along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze has been at its lowest since 1951, down 40 percent to 60 percent from the average level, according to statistics from the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.

http://english.sina.com/china/2011/0602/376081.html

In Massachusetts, the first tornado touched down at about 4.30pm local time in Springfield, the third largest city in the state, said Chris Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Weather Service.

Heavy winds churned the Connecticut River and the area was pounded by hail and driving rain.

A second tornado hit Springfield, 90 miles west of Boston, at about 6.20pm, authorities said. State police said at least 33 people were injured in Springfield.

Damage included "trees and numerous power lines down, roofs ripped off of homes, things like cars and SUVs that have been toppled over," said Scott MacLeod, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

The severe weather was the result of colder air clashing with a warm, humid system that has produced some record temperatures for early June through much of the mid-Atlantic states, meteorologists said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-tornadoes-kill-four-2292175.html

At least 14 people have been killed in raging flood waters that have swept through south-western Guizhou province.

Scores of people are missing, and tens of thousands have left their homes ahead of more flooding.

Roads, bridges and hundreds of homes and cars have been destroyed in the onslaught.

The floods toll, reported by the state news agency Xinhua, comes after months of crop-destroying drought in the centre and north of the country.

The provincial civil affairs office in Guizhou said that floods have hit 11 cities and counties since 3 June.

At least 270,000 people have been affected, 45,000 evacuated and 3,000 stranded, said Xinhua.

Before the deluge

Some areas along the Yangtze River have suffered their worst drought in half a century.

Even with the rain - and more is forecast in the coming days - officials have warned that the crop shortages and dislocation caused by drought will remain severe.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13677860

Severe flooding in the midwestern US state of North Dakota has swallowed up thousands of homes and other buildings in and around the city of Minot.

About 12,000 people, more than a quarter of the city's 41,000 residents, were forced out of their homes as a result of the deluge.

Many more houses are at risk of being inundated because of a swift rise in water levels of the Souris river, which broke a 130-year-old record on Friday and is expected to rise more than six feet this weekend.

City leaders say a top priority is getting a federal declaration that would qualify Minot residents for individual aid.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/06/201162542326476131.html

The river has risen higher than any past records and is still rising...

As the river still flows silently past, at perhaps 15 miles an hour instead of the normal 7 or 8, the drone of pumps is punctuated by the trill of birdsong. Birds seem more plentiful, some say, because of the bumper crop of mosquitoes that the flooding has produced. Speed-limit signs in the neighborhood poke out of enormous ponds of water, and there are so many “Road Closed” signs that it is a wonder that Nebraska has not run out of them.

“We’ve had water at nuclear plants before, but this is the only time we can recall it to this extent or duration,” said Jeffrey Clark, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff member from the regional office in Arlington, Tex., who arrived here on June 9 for a quick look around but then stayed on.

The river is not expected to get substantially higher, but it may not get lower anytime soon, either. On Monday morning, Mr. Jaczko met with the Army Corps of Engineers but did not get a great deal of encouragement.

“We don’t like to give worst-case scenarios anymore because every time it rains, we get a new worst case,” said Col. Robert J. Ruch, commander of the Omaha District.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/us/28nuke.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

The United Nations says some parts of the Horn of Africa have been hit by the worst drought in 60 years, with more than 10 million people affected.

The UN says the food crisis in the region, which includes Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and Uganda, is the worst in the world.

Save the Children says the combination of drought and war in Somalia has led to unprecedented numbers fleeing across the border into Kenya.

The charity's Sonia Zambakides says families are often separated.

"A mother arrived at one of our feeding centres saying she'd actually left her children behind in a village because she couldn't watch them die," she said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/29/3256118.htm?section=justin

Including the severe drought in god's Texas, GLOBAL WARMING is pushing on, regardless of what we think:

Sitting amid buckets of rice in the market, Nguyen Thi Lim Lien issues a warning she desperately hopes the world will hear: climate change is turning the rivers of the Mekong Delta salty.

"The government tells us that there are three grams of salt per litre of fresh water in the rivers now," she says. "Gradually more and more people are affected. Those nearest the sea are the most affected now, but soon the whole province will be hit."

The vast, humid expanse of the delta is home to more than 17 million people, who have relied for generations on its thousands of river arteries. But rising sea water caused by global warming is now increasing the salt content of the river water and threatening the livelihoods of millions of poor farmers and fishermen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/21/vietnam-rice-bowl-threatened-rising-seas

Meanwhile temperatures in August in Sydney have been quite above average... I'd say about 3 degrees Celsius above... So far this year, only May was barely below average. Since January, temperature in Sydney have been at least 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above average.

Five million people have been affected by floods in the Pakistani provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh, according to regional officials.

At least 133 people have been killed, officials said, and the number is expected to rise.

About 900 villages have been submerged and about 100,000 homes have been completely destroyed.

"People are moving whatever little they can because of the rising waters," Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Badin, one of the worst-hit districts in Sindh province, said on Friday. "The water has been rising in the last few weeks because of heavy rain.

He said residents in the area were in desperate need of assistance, asking for food, drinking water and shelter.

"Because most cities have been submerged, there's no clean drinking water. People want tents, because most of the improvised shelters that they have built along the roads are inadequate and the weather department is warning of more floods."

Sindh province is a remote area, and relief efforts were hampered by bad weather, making airborne rescue missions impossible.

"This is indeed an emergency situation which is going to be a big challenge for the government," our correspondent said.

"Roads are cut off ... We're told hundreds of thousands of people are cut off, waiting for assistance. There's no way they can get out unless someone comes to get them".

Last year, about 20 million people were directly affected by the worst floods in the country's history. About 2,000 people were killed in the disaster.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2011/09/2011996630812976.html

A freak October snowstorm has killed at least 11 and knocked out power to about 3 million homes and businesses across the US north-east at the weekend.

Close to 60 centimetres of snow fell in some areas.

The storm was even more damaging because leaves still on the trees caught more of the particularly wet and heavy snow, overloading branches that snapped and wreaked havoc.

BATTAMBANG, Cambodia — The high water is devastating even for a country inured to monsoon rains and waterlogged rice fields: wide swaths of Cambodia’s countryside have become giant lakes, with villagers and livestock marooned on scattered patches of dry land.

The floods that have affected three-quarters of the country, by the United Nations’ reckoning, have been overshadowed by similar troubles in its larger and wealthier neighbor, Thailand, where the government is scrambling to protect central Bangkok from inundation.

Here in Cambodia, though, aid workers describe a more Darwinian struggle, and a generally higher degree of desperation among villagers.

“This is the worst I’ve seen in my career,” said Soen Seueng, a 58-year-old doctor who tended to a long line of flood victims on Wednesday, most of them women and children, who were camped on a strip of raised land accessible only by boat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/world/asia/floods-in-cambodia-affect-more-than-a-million.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

At least 24 people have died in landslides in the west of Colombia, rescue workers say.

Sniffer dogs are searching for dozens of people feared buried under mud and rubble after their houses were washed away in the city of Manizales.

Firefighters said heavy rain temporarily halted the search for survivors.

Colombia is experiencing one of the worst rainy seasons in memory, forcing the evacuation of some 250,000 people.

Manizales in Colombia's coffee-growing region was worst hit by the mudslides.

At least 20 people were killed when a hillside collapsed in the city's Cervantes district.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15613951

see also

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-15613133

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15615202

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/06/world/asia/thailand-floods/?hpt=wo_c2

add this article to this blog:

Consumers worldwide could see increases of at least 10 percent in the price of external hard drives because of the flooding, according to Fang Zhang, an analyst at IHS iSuppli, a market research company. The effect will be less noticeable for laptops and desktop computers, he estimated, because demand has been weakened by the current global economic malaise.

The image of Thailand as a land of temples, beaches and smiles has over the years been reinforced by the country’s tourism advertising campaigns. But the flooding here, the worst in at least five decades, has revealed to the world the scale of Thailand’s industrialization and the extent to which two global industries, computers and cars, rely on components made here.

The world’s biggest names in hard-drive manufacturing, for example, operate from Thailand, where suppliers and customers come together.

Until the floodwaters came, a single facility in Bang Pa-In owned by Western Digital produced one-quarter of the world’s supply of “sliders,” an integral part of hard-disk drives. Over the weekend, workers in bright orange life jackets salvaged what they could from the top floors of the complex. The ground floor resembled an aquarium and the loading bays were home to jumping fish.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/business/global/07iht-floods07.html?hp

As Sydney may boast its "coldest December ever" this year (2011) for whatever reason (Antarctica is melting fast), Some parts of the world get new records of sorts...

Tropical storm Washi whipped the southern Philippines, unleashing mammoth floods across vast areas that left 440 people dead and nearly 200 missing, relief workers said.

About 20,000 soldiers had been mobilised in a huge rescue and relief operation across the stricken north coast of the island of Mindanao, where the major ports of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan were worst hit.

Cagayan de Oro city reported 215 dead, and nearby Iligan city lost 144 residents, Philippine National Red Cross secretary-general Gwen Pang said.

Iligan mayor Lawrence Cruz described rampaging floodwaters from swollen rivers that swamped up to a quarter of the land area of the city of 100,000.

"It's the worst flood in the history of our city," Mr Cruz told GMA television.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-18/hundreds-killed-in-massive-philippines-storm/3736782?WT.svl=news0

A town in Western Australia's Pilbara region has been feeling the heat, sizzling through the second-hottest December day ever recorded in Australia.

The mercury tipped 49.4 degrees Celsius in Roebourne yesterday.

The record temperature in the town was also the hottest-ever December day recorded in WA and the fifth hottest day ever recorded in WA.

The state's previous December record was 48.8, which was recorded at the Pilbara town of Mardie in 1986.

The Bureau of Meteorology's Neil Bennet says Roebourne's December record is just short of Australia's hottest December day.

It was just 0.1 degrees behind the 49.5 degrees recorded at Birdsville in Queensland on Christmas Eve in 1972.

He told the ABC it also fell short of beating the hottest day ever recorded in WA.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-22/pilbara-sizzles-through-record-heat/3744692