Natural Disasters News

After lengthy and wrenching debate, local leaders of the Boy Scouts of America have voted to open their ranks to openly gay boys for the first time, but heated reactions from the left and right made clear that the... By DAVID CRARY AP National Writer The Boy Scouts of America will get no reprieve from controversy after a contentious vote to accept ... (more)

A blistering heat wave has swept across most parts of north and western India, causing massive electricity cuts and leading angry residents to protest and even attack power company officials and property.

Residents in rural northeastern California assessed damage to their homes and businesses Friday from a magnitude-5.7 earthquake, one of the strongest temblors to hit the densely forested region in decades.

The twister that devastated Moore, Okla., was the 74th presidential disaster declared in the Sooner state in the past 60 years.

The Canadian centre said May 24 an unusually warm tropical Atlantic Ocean is one of the factors behind the forecast of an active hurricane season, which continues a 15-year period of high hurricane activity.

Craft breweries from around the country are teaming up to raise money for military families by selling a beer aged on baseball bats.

Simply put, storm surge is the abnormal rise of sea water. Predicting it is far more complicated and explaining it is tricky, too, as forecasters at the National Hurricane Center discovered, again, during a review of Superstorm Sandy.

When an EF5 tornado touched down in Moore, Oklahoma, this week, Tad Agoglia and his First Response Team of America were stationed at a hotel about 30 miles away, ready to take action.

Marina Kolomiyets, spokeswoman for Obninsk's seismic station of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said Friday the epicenter was in the Sea of Okhotsk, east of the Russian coast and north of Japan.

A magnitude 5.7 earthquake hit Northern California Thursday night that was widely felt across the region, but there were no reports of serious damage.

The epicenter of the magnitude 5.9 quake was near Greenville, or about halfway between Redding, California, and Reno, Nevada.

As a helicopter pilot for Los Angeles's KCAL-TV, Jim Gardner had flown over deadly mudslides and earthquakes, covered car chases and was shot at by snipers during the L.A. riots.

Health officials investigating a cluster of mysterious illnesses in Alabama closed their investigation Thursday after determining the illnesses were unrelated and no new bacteria or viruses were involved.

Weather forecasters are predicting another busy Atlantic hurricane season. The storms will get their names from an alphabetical list of 21 names: The National Hurricane Center started using women's names for Atlantic storms in 1953; men's names were added in 1979.

Having lived most of her life in this Oklahoma City suburb, Barbara Bryen never feared twisters.

Gay men in Canada can now donate blood, but there's a catch: You must not have had sex with another man in the last five years.

The federal government predicts an above-average hurricane season in the Atlantic this year, with seven to 11 hurricanes expected.

Warmer-than-average water temperatures are expected to help yield a few more Atlantic hurricanes than usual this year, forecasters said Thursday.

World Health Organization officials said Thursday that their probe into the deadly new coronavirus that has now claimed 22 lives is being delayed because of a dispute over the ownership rights to a sample.

Thursday's outlook calls for 13 to 20 named storms, 7 to 11 that strengthen into hurricanes and 3 to 6 that become major hurricanes.