14/02/2014 Newsround

Morning. Leah here with Friday morning's top stories. Coming up: Go

Team Yarnold. GB skeleton racer goes for Gold.

And why this baby alligator took a trip to France.

This is Newsround. First up, most of us had a calmer

night but another band of stormy weather is already on its way, with

rain and high winds hitting the South West of England this morning.

17 severe flood warnings are in place across the UK and engineers

are still working to restore power to some of the thousands of homes

that were cut off on Wednesday. Ayshah been in Chertsey in Surrey

this morning. I in Chertsey near the River Thames. The River Thames is

still gushing with loads of water. Places are still flooding as the

water is not going anywhere. I am here by a flood defence which was

built yesterday by the Environment Agency. This is Alison from that

organisation. Can you tell me what this is here for? Where may have

flooding to the extent we have now, we use a lot of temporary defences

which can be sandbags, barriers or a watered'down. This is laid along the

road because it needs a flat surface to provide temporary protection to

the properties this side of it. The properties on the other side we are

supplying sandbags and temporary defences and supporting those people

to protect all the properties we can. Whatever we put here will not

make anything worse but we are trying to do what we can for each

property. Thank you. More rain is expected today and people will have

a nervous wait. Thanks, Aysha. The bad weather is affecting you guys

all over the UK and you've been getting in touch with your stories.

Ellie, Jake, Chloe and Max sent us this report.

Hello, I am Chloe. I am Jake. I am Chloe. I am Max. This is our story

of the floods. This is my usual route to school. It no longer

exists. We used to have this car park by my house. Now it is a

swimming pool. We used to spend all of our free time at the park but as

you can see there is no chance of that soon. Many people have been

evacuated from their homes due to the high volume of water caused by

the flooding, including us. Jack in Bath has contacted us because his

back garden is flooded. And Matthew in Rhyl got soaked and his next door

neighbour's ariel fell down! Thanks for the video report guys and

all your comments. If you've been affected by the floods, we want to

hear from you. Grab your mobile and if it's safe to do so, send us a

short clip or take some snaps of what's happening in your area. You

can also leave us your flood and bad weather stories over on the

Newsround website. Thousands of people have had to

leave their homes in Indonesia. The volcano chucked ash and sand more

than 100 miles away. Some towns have been turned completely grey after

getting covered in several centimetres of ash. Three major

airports have also been closed because of low visibility and fears

the ash could damage plane engines. Exciting news for Harry Potter fans.

JK Rowling says she's finished the draft script for her spin off movie!

The author revealed in a magazine interview that she wrote Fantastic

Beasts And Where to Find Them in just 12 days. The story's based on

the text book Harry Potter uses in Hogwarts. There's no news yet on

when the movie will start being made.

Over at Sochi and Lizzy Yarnold could become Britian's first Gold

medallist at the Winter Olympics today. She only took up the sport in

2010 but dominated the first two runs of the skeleton competition and

leads at the half way point by almost half a second. Her

competition starts at 4pm. Before that at 12.30pm, qualifying starts

for the Men's Skeleton, while at 10am, the British women's curling

team face Japan. Tennis news and Britain's Andy

Murray is through to the quarter finals of the ABN World Tennis

Tournament in Rotterdam after beating the Dominic Team 6-4, 3-6,

6-3. The Wimbledon champion is looking to repeat his 2009 success

in the tournament when he beat Rafael Nadal in the final. And two

baby albino alligators have been flown thousands of miles from

Florida to their new home at a Paris Aquarium.

Albino alligators are so rare there are only around 30 of them left in

the world. They don't usually survive in the wild because their

light skin would mark them out to predators in their dark habitat.

That is all from me. Jenny is here at 4pm. Have a great day.