February 20, 2016 - AUSTRALIA - Snakes are creepy enough, but a python that hatched with two heads is taking the Internet by storm.
The baby snake is only a week old, born last Saturday.
Owner John McNamara, who is an Australian snake breeder, thought he just had twins, but it was more.
From the tail to the neck, the little coastal carpet python looks like
any other snake, but from the neck up, that's when you see four eyes,
two mouths and two heads.
As The Border Maildescribed it,the snake looks like the mythological hydra.
WATCH: A snake with two heads has been born in Wodonga, Victoria.
"There would have been two yolks and they just haven't split properly ... and I ended up with this," McNamara said.
The breeder's daughter has already become attached to the little baby, calling it the Twin Destroyers.
McNamara said he is talking to media to get publicity just to get some veterinary help.
"Just to see which head is the dominant head and which goes down to the
stomach and what organs and other things are joined or can cause
complications," McNamara said. - WPXI.
February 20, 2016 - FIJI ISLANDS - Authorities in Fiji are assessing the damage after the most powerful storm left at least five people dead.
Cyclone Winston brought winds of over 320km/h (200mph), torrential rain and waves of up to 12m (40ft).
It destroyed hundreds of homes and cut electricity lines. There are reports of entire villages flattened.
The government has imposed a nationwide curfew and 30-day state of
national disaster giving extra powers to police to arrest people without
a warrant.
The Category-five storm - the highest level - moved westward since
making landfall at 18:30 local time (06:30 GMT) on Saturday in the north
of Fiji's main island, Viti Levu.
It changed direction at the last minute, sparing the capital Suva the full force of its winds.
The government had opened about 750 evacuation centres.
More than 1,000 people were sheltering in one on the second largest island of Vanua Levu, north-east of Viti Levu, the Fiji Broadcasting Company said.
Among the victims was an elderly man who died on the smaller Koro Island when a roof fell on him.
Some villages reported that all homes had been destroyed, Jone
Tuiipelehaki of the UN Development Programme tweeted after the storm
hit.
WATCH: Extensive damage in Fiji from Cyclone Winston.
He said 50 homes in Navaga village on Koro Island had been reported ruined.
"The images that we're starting to see roll in are terrifying," Alice
Clements, from the UN children's organisation Unicef in Suva told
Reuters news agency. She said she could see a car on a building roof and
a small plane stuck in debris.
In the north coast of Fiji's main island where the cyclone made
landfall, a man told Reuters the damage was so extensive that "it looks
like a different country".
George Dregaso, of Fiji's National Disaster Management Office, told the
Associated Press that about 80% of the nation's 900,000 people were
without regular electricity supplies.
Schools have been ordered to shut for a week even though the main airport has been reopened to receive humanitarian supplies.
Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama described the storm on Saturday as "an ordeal of the most grievous kind".
"When we are able we will provide timelines for the return of water and power," he said.
New Zealand and Australia have promised to send aircraft to assess the damage in remote areas.
Red Cross Pacific office head Ahmad Sami told AFP news agency humanitarian needs were likely to be "very high".
The cyclone has now moved out to sea, although strong winds and heavy rains remained likely, Fiji's Meteorological Office said. - BBC News.
February 20, 2016 - OREGON, UNITED STATES - Portland International Airport set a rainfall record for December through February (the meteorological winter) at 25.27 inches, the National Weather Service reports.
Normal rainfall for the airport during the same period is 14.14 inches.
Records have been kept at the airport since 1940.
That's a lot of rain. And February's not over yet, so the number will climb.
Other near-record-setting areas (where records have been kept since the 1890s) include:
Vancouver with its second wettest winter (25.77 inches)
Downtown Portland's third wettest winter (31.06 inches)
and Hillsboro with its fourth wettest winter (24.74 inches).
The ranking is for the period of Dec. 1 1 through Feb. 28-29.
And the Portland area's rainy season is far from over. Keep those rain boots and umbrellas handy. - OregonLive.
February 20, 2016 - NEW JERSEY, UNITED STATES - Many people said they heard a loud boom and could feel their homes shake. Some even said they smelled burning afterward.
"I heard a loud boom and I'm on the other side of the highway," Lori Milone wrote on Facebook.
"Shook our house and then we detected a burning smell for a little while," wrote Mark Selz.
"Double shakes here off Cascade Way, sounded like someone was in my house," wrote Carrie Shaver. "What happened?"
USGS shakemap intensity.
"Me and my husband were watching TV and he said, "What was that?" It
sounded like an explosion," one Butler woman told WCBS 880's Sean Adams.
"We just went about our business. We didn't hear anything else. He said
to me, "You know, that almost made the house shake."
CBS2's Lonnie Quinn explained that low-magnitude earthquakes happen
often in the Morris County area, as it - and Butler specifically - sit
on the Ramapo Fault Line - one of the major fault lines in the U.S.
WATCH: Earthquake in New Jersey.
Quinn reported the reason the earthquake was felt by so many people in the area was that it was very shallow - occurring only about a mile to a mile and a half underground.
By contrast, the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles was 11 miles deep. - CBS.
Earthquakes in the New York - Philadelphia - Wilmington Urban Corridor
Since colonial times people in the New York - Philadelphia - Wilmington urban corridor have felt small earthquakes and suffered damage from infrequent larger ones. New York City was damaged in 1737 and 1884. Moderately damaging earthquakes strike somewhere in the urban corridor roughly twice a century, and smaller earthquakes are felt roughly every 2-3 years.
Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S., although less frequent than in the western U.S., are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast. A magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 100 km (60 mi) from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 500 km (300 mi) from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 40 km (25 mi).
Faults
Earthquakes everywhere occur on faults within bedrock, usually miles deep. Most bedrock beneath the urban corridor was assembled as continents collided to form a supercontinent about 500-300 million years ago, raising the Appalachian Mountains. Most of the rest of the bedrock formed when the supercontinent rifted apart about 200 million years ago to form what are now the northeastern U.S., the Atlantic Ocean, and Europe.
At well-studied plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault system in California, often scientists can determine the name of the specific fault that is responsible for an earthquake. In contrast, east of the Rocky Mountains this is rarely the case. New York City, Philadelphia, and Wilmington are far from the nearest plate boundaries, which are in the center of the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea. The urban corridor is laced with known faults but numerous smaller or deeply buried faults remain undetected. Even the known faults are poorly located at earthquake depths. Accordingly, few, if any, earthquakes in the urban corridor can be linked to named faults. It is difficult to determine if a known fault is still active and could slip and cause an earthquake. As in most other areas east of the Rockies, the best guide to earthquake hazards in the New York - Philadelphia - Wilmington urban corridor is the earthquakes themselves.
Felt at Bloomingdale and Butler.
February 20, 2016 - GERMANY - A huge sinkhole opened up between two buildings in Nordhausen, Germany.
The giant 40 to 50 meters deep, 30 meters wide crater is filled
with water and still growing. It has already swallowed parts of an
office building. Another house is on the verge of collapsing.
A first sinkhole opened up between two farm buildings in Nordhausen at around 7pm on Friday evening.
Then the ground collapsed another time. The two holes than merged into a
giant cavity measuring 30 meters in diameter and 40 to 50 meters deep.
That is gigantic.
As the ground collapsed, witnesses reported a strong rumbling noise like that we hear during an earthquake.
The two buildings were empty as they collapsed into the ground.
In this video, you see one of the house collapse @ 3:33:
WATCH: Massive sinkhole in Germany.
Although the hole is still growing up, the area is well protected and nobody is in danger.
The two buildings may however disappear underground. - Strange Sounds.
February 20, 2016 - MISSOURI, UNITED STATES - Firefighters battling a massive wildfire in Missouri captured video of a
"firenado," or fire tornado, blowing flames into the sky.
The Southern Platte Fire Protection District, one of several agencies
battling the wildfire Thursday in Platte County, just north of Kansas
City, posted a video to Facebook showing the firenado, also known as a
fire whirl, spinning flames high into the sky.
"Oh, that's freakin' awesome," a firefighter can be heard saying in the video.
WATCH: 'Firenado' filmed during Missouri wildfire.
Authorities said the wildfire, which spread across more than 1,300 acres, was started by sparks that shot from a malfunctioning prison lawnmower near the Centennial Bridge.
Posted by Southern Platte Fire Protection District on Thursday, February 18, 2016
No injuries were reported from the wildfire and SPFPD Fire Chief Rich
Carrizzo tweeted late Thursday that the fire had been brought under
control. - UPI.
February 20, 2016 - BRAZIL - Hundreds of swimmers in Brazil are being warned to stay out of the water
following a spate of attacks by shoals of deadly piranha,which has left more than 50 people injured in just over a month.
Unsuspecting tourists have had chunks of flesh bitten out of their hands
and feet as drought conditions in the South American country force the
lethal predators to migrate from their natural habitat to deeper waters
packed with holidaymakers.
This week at least eight bathers were bitten by the man-eaters, known as "white bitches", the 6in-long species blamed for the attacks,
on beaches in Palmas, in Tocantins State, north-east Brazil. Three
children were among the casualties as people took to the waters to cool
off during the hot holiday weekend. A four-year-old boy had a chunk
taken out of his heel.
Veraluci Milhomem's toe was bitten on the same day. "I felt a
stab of pain in my foot and started screaming," said the 55-year-old
administrative assistant. "My friends dragged me out of the water before
anything else could happen."
Also in the north-east in the last 10 days, 25 people reported vicious attacks scaring off swimmersin a popular stretch of the San Francisco river in the town of Pao de Acucar, in Alagoas.
On a freshwater beach in Populina in Sao Paulo, south-east Brazil, 20 holidaymakers were injured by lone piranha. Juraci de Souza, 42, was just getting out of the Rio Grande when it happened.
"I was swimming to the shallower part of the river when I felt a twinge.
As I came out onto the sand I saw that I was bleeding heavily from my
foot," said the forklift truck driver. "Thankfully I'd been bitten by a
bitch [piranha]. If it had been a whole school it would have been much
worse," he said.
According to Bruno Benhocci, a biologist at the Votuporanga University
in Sao Paulo, the unusually high numbers of piranha plaguing the
waterways could be linked to drought conditions in recent years which
has affected food supplies.
"In the absence of their natural food, piranha are moving from shallow
areas to deeper parts where they can find it," he said. "Piranha can't
detect whether a movement is made by a finger or a fish, they just bite
what they can get."
The predators can smell blood up to two miles away and pound for pound
their sharp toothed bite is more powerful than a great white shark's and
three time stronger than that of an alligator.
Every year hundreds of piranha attacks are reported in South America.
The most frightening in Brazil was in 2011 when a series of incidents
left 100 people injured. In 2012, a five-year-old girl died after she was eaten by piranhas when her canoe capsized in the Amazon. - The Independent.
