Southern Sweden was rocked by an earthquake early on Tuesday morning which caused a flood of phone calls to emergency services operators from alarmed residents.
“The bed shook for about 20 seconds,” Helsingborg resident John O’Leary told The Local.
O’Leary said the quake woke him at about 6:20am and that the shaking knocked over several items in his apartment.
Uppsala University seismologist Reynir Bödvarsson estimated the quake measured between 4.5 and 5.0 on the Richter scale.
EIGHTY thousand homes were without electricity this morning and two people have died after bad weather hit across France.
Heavy snowfall continues to affect the Massif Central and severe downpours have hit the south east.
Four departments will remain under orange alert by Météo France until 16.00 today - the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, the Hautes-Alpes, the Alpes-Maritimes and the Savoie, with warnings of snow, black ice and avalanches.
The alert has however been lifted for the Auvergne region and the departments of the Ardèche, the Loire, the Lozère and the Var.
Torrential rain caused flash floods across much of the UK over the weekend, inundating hundreds of homes and claiming the life of an elderly motorist whose car was swamped by nearly three feet of water.
At one point, there were more than 300 flood warnings in place, with south-western England accounting for about a third of incidents. The Midlands, South Coast and parts of Wales and Scotland were also affected.
Heavy rain has left hundreds of homes flooded in parts of Britain and is being blamed for a road accident which left a woman dead.
Dual carriageways in both Devon and Somerset were under up to 18in (46cm) of water, trees down and people trapped in their cars.
A Dorset Police spokesman said officers were investigating whether the weather was a factor in an accident on the A35 at Upton, Poole, which left a 22-year-old Poole woman dead.
French search divers have recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the Airbus plane that crashed in the Mediterranean killing all seven people on board.
The black box was to be dried out in Paris before data was retrieved, said Air New Zealand’s Ed Sims.
Four of the airline’s staff, one aviation official and two German pilots were on the plane. Only two bodies have been found off the Perpignan coast.
A flight attendant was forced to land a UK-bound jet carrying 146 passengers after the co-pilot had a mental breakdown over the Atlantic Ocean, an official report disclosed today.
Another attendant suffered wrist injuries as the crew forcibly removed the co-pilot from the cockpit controls and restrained him in a seat in the cabin, the Air Accident Investigation Unit (AAIU) said.
As the Air Canada plane made its way over the Atlantic, the captain of the Boeing 767 from Toronto to Heathrow asked staff to seek out any trained pilots onboard.
MOSCOW – The fire safety system on a brand-new Russian nuclear submarine accidentally turned on as the sub was being tested in the Sea of Japan, spewing a gas that suffocated 20 people and sent 21 others to the hospital, officials said Sunday.
The Russian Navy said the submarine itself was not damaged in Saturday’s accident and returned to its base on Russia’s Pacific coast under its own power Sunday. The accident also did not pose any radiation danger, the navy said.
Yet it was Russia’s worst naval accident since torpedo explosions sank another nuclear-powered submarine, the Kursk, in the Barents Sea in 2000, killing all 118 seamen aboard.
Flash floods following torrential rains across Morocco have claimed the lives of at least 13 people, overwhelmed emergency services and forced factories and businesses to close.
Eleven people were killed in the village of Driouch, 500km north of Rabat, when 20 homes collapsed in what local authorities described as the heaviest rains in the area for more than 20 years.
Local officials confirmed on Friday that a two-year-old child was among the dead.
MADRID, - A storm washed away part of a wall designed to keep out illegal immigrants crossing into Spain’s North African enclave of Melilla on Sunday and heavy rains flooded many of the city’s streets.
Civil guard police reinforced the border near the 30-metre (yard) stretch of damaged wall, which was built to stem a flow of Africans trying to get into Spain in search of work, the Spanish government’s office in the city said.
ZAGREB (AFP) — Croatia’s top security body was to meet on Friday after a senior journalist was murdered in a car bomb attack as Prime Minister Ivo Sanader vowed he would not allow the country to turn into “another Beirut”.
Ivo Pukanic, founder and owner of the Nacional independent weekly, was killed outside his paper’s offices in downtown Zagreb on Thursday night in the third mafia-style killing in the capital since the beginning of the month.
The blast also claimed the life of his marketing director Niko Franjic, while two other people were also injured in the explosion.
