Utah: No injuries reported as tornado destroys homes

A tornado destroyed six houses, damaged more than 20 others and tore down power lines and trees Sunday in Manti, a central Utah town.

“The windows just blew out and everything came flying in,” said Joe Bennett, a Sanpete County Sheriff’s dispatcher whose house was destroyed. “We’re just lucky no one got hurt.”

Sanpete County Sheriff’s Lt. Rick Howe estimated damage at $1 million.

By evening, most of the damaged homes had been secured, with plastic over the roofs.

The twister appeared to be an F2 on the Fujita scale, said Gary Vetterly, a state emergency official. That means winds could have hit 157 mph.

Texas: Overpass collapses in crash; truck driver’s son killed

A truck driver whose rig crashed into an interstate overpass Sunday was freed almost eight hours after the structure collapsed on top of him. The man’s 19-month-old son died.

Rescuers cut away at the cab to get to the driver. Cleaster Broadway, 41, of Moro, Ark., had been communicating with sheriff’s and Department of Public Safety officials since the collapse, said Lt. Gary Myles.

Dr. Robert Kingman, a surgeon called to the accident site, said Broadway’s chest and leg were pinned by the roof of the truck.

Broadway was taken to a Waco hospital, where he was in stable condition Sunday night.

Southbound traffic of I-45, the main artery between Dallas and Houston, was rerouted through Richland while crews clear debris.

Australia: Quake damage assessed in Papua New Guinea

A strong earthquake struck today just off Papua New Guinea’s north coast Monday, causing a tidal wave that washed away at least 40 homes.

Several houses and roads in the coastal town of Wewak collapsed after the magnitude 7.5 quake, and the local hospital was evacuated when cracks appeared in its foundations, Chief Sgt. James Japele from Wewak police said by telephone.

An earthquake in the same area in 1998 caused a huge tidal wave that killed about 1,600 people near the town of Aitape. Bishop Tony Burgess from the Catholic diocese in Wewak said today’s quake was felt on islands just off the coast.

“About 40 or 50 houses were washed away,” he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. “It wasn’t this monstrous tidal wave we had at Aitape four or five years ago, it was more like a gentle swell and the waves came in and took the houses out with them.”

India: Intense shelling resumes along Pakistan border

Indian and Pakistani border troops exchanged intense artillery fire Sunday in the divided Kashmir region, as Pakistan’s president said relations between the two countries were at their “lowest ebb” in years.

In a speech at Harvard University, President Pervez Musharraf said that India’s and Pakistan’s “forces confront each other eyeball to eyeball with most dangerous possibilities of the eruption of conflict by accident or design.”

The two nuclear-armed nations have massed hundreds of thousands of troops at the border since India blamed Pakistan-based Islamic militants for a deadly attack on India’s Parliament late last year that threatened to push the neighbors into war.