• South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who is standing trial on charges of fraud and embezzlement for his team's research on stem cells, has resumed work on animal cloning. He has opened a

Entire Himalayan region is vulnerable to rain-induced (torrential rainfall) hazards in the form of flash flood, cloudburst or glacial lake outburst flood. Flash floods and cloudburst are generally caused by high intensity rainfall followed by debris flow or landslide often resulting into blockade of river channels. The examples of some major disasters caused by torrential rainfall events in last fifty years are the flash floods of 1968 in Teesta valley, in 1993 and 2000 in Sutlej valley, in 1978 in Bhagirathi and in 1970 in Alaknanda river valleys.

Intense rainfall often leads to floods and landslides in the Himalayan region even with rainfall amounts that are considered comparatively moderate over the plains; for example, ‘cloudbursts’, which are devastating convective phenomena producing sudden high-intensity rainfall (∼10 cm per hour) over a small area. Early prediction and warning of such severe local weather systems is crucial to mitigate societal impact arising from the accompanying flash floods. We examine a cloudburst event in the Himalayan region at Shillagarh village in the early hours of 16 July 2003.