A powerful earthquake jolted the western Indonesian island of Sumatra early Tuesday, killing a 12-year-old boy and sending people streaming from houses, hotels and at least one hospital in panic.
The magnitude-6.6 quake was centered 60 miles (100 kilometers) southwest of the city of Medan and 62 miles (110 kilometers) beneath the earth's crust, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
It was too far inland to generate a tsunami.
The quake hit at about 1 a.m. (1800 GMT Monday), rattling people from their sleep in towns and villages across the island's northern tip.
Maura Sakti, a mayor in Subulussalam, told local station TVOne a 12-year-old boy had been killed. At least one other person was injured.
Hundreds of people were evacuated to temporary shelters as authorities surveyed the extent of the damage, said Lt. Col. Helmy Kesuma, police chief in the hard-hit town of Singkil.
Some electricity poles were knocked down there, crashing into homes and causing blackouts.
"My wife was screaming, my children crying," said Burhan Mardiansyah, 37, a Singkil resident. "We saw our walls start to crack and everything inside the house was falling. Thank God we're all safe."
The panic extended all the way to Medan, the sprawling provincial capital of North Sumatra, where hundreds of patients from at least one hospital had to be evacuated, some in wheelchairs or with infusion drips still attached to their arms.
Hotels emptied out and residents ran into the streets or the balconies of their rented homes, clutching babies to their chests.
Fearing aftershocks, many refused to go back inside for hours.
Indonesia straddles a series of fault lines that makes the vast island nation prone to volcanic and seismic activity.
A giant quake off the country on Dec. 26, 2004, triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed 230,000 people, half of them in Indonesia's westernmost province of Aceh.
Just opening your eyes to the future of our life and keep in mind that we were warned yesterday & today and our future will be the same with the history in time.
Grim search after 37 die in Japan typhoon
Torrential rain brought by powerful Typhoon Talas, which made landfall Saturday and was one of the deadliest in years, caused rivers to swell and triggered floods and landslides that swept away buildings, homes and roads.
Police and firefighters resumed a search for the missing early Monday, warning that the number of victims was set to rise as the continued threat of landslides and damaged access routes hampered relief efforts.
In the deadliest typhoon since an October 2004 storm killed nearly 100 people, floods triggered by Typhoon Talas gave rise to scenes eerily reminiscent of the aftermath of the March 11 tsunami that hit northeast Japan.
In Nachikatsuura town, a railway bridge was swept into a river, while TV footage showed splintered trees, crushed houses and cars tossed onto walls and buildings by the raging floodwaters that inundated entire neighbourhoods.
By Sunday, Talas had been downgraded to a tropical storm after it moved over Japan and into the Sea of Japan (East Sea), the Meteorological Agency said, but risks of further landslides posed a threat to rescue and recovery efforts.
The storm came after new Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda was sworn in on Friday, replacing Naoto Kan, who was heavily criticised for the government's response in the aftermath of the March 11 disasters.
"We will do our best in saving lives and finding the missing," Noda told reporters Monday.
The Talas weather system dumped 1.8 metres (six feet) of rain on a village in Nara prefecture for five days through Sunday, more than Tokyo's annual average rainfall, said the Yomiuri daily.
The Kyodo News agency and Jiji Press late Monday said the death toll had risen to 37.
"We are struggling to get a hold on the current situation... electricity is out and destroyed roads are preventing our vehicles from going into affected areas," said an official at the fire department in Tanabe, Wakayama prefecture.
"We are conducting operations everywhere in the city. With phone lines down, however, we have no means of communication" with those stranded in areas hit by landslides or flooding, the official said.
The daughter of Nachikatsuura town mayor Shinichi Teramoto was killed as the official ran disaster relief operations on Sunday and his wife was also missing. His house was destroyed by a torrent of water.
"I saw the body of my daughter. The best I could do was to be by her side for half an hour," NHK footage showed the mayor saying in his office.
"While I'm here, I don't want to show my sorrow even though I have this in my mind," he said.
Television footage showed massive landslides crushing wooden houses in mountain communities, with muddy water submerging streets and washing away wooden debris and cars.
A tally by Kyodo said at least 3,600 people were left stranded by landslides and collapsed bridges.
In hard-hit Wakayama and Nara prefectures, officials told AFP that more than 1,300 people were staying at evacuation centres with around 7,000 households being asked to flee.
Astronomers discover planet made of diamond
The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.
"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.
Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.
In the case of pulsar J1719-1438, the beams regularly sweep the Earth and have been monitored by telescopes in Australia, Britain and Hawaii, allowing astronomers to detect modulations due to the gravitational pull of its unseen companion planet.
The measurements suggest the planet, which orbits its star every two hours and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the journal Science on Thursday.
In addition to carbon, the new planet is also likely to contain oxygen, which may be more prevalent at the surface and is probably increasingly rare toward the carbon-rich center.
Its high density suggests the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium, which are the main constituents of gas giants like Jupiter, are not present.
Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.
"In terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate," said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here."
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