Strong winds, coupled with rain, played havoc with the green cover of the city. Several trees fell, all across the Capital, leaving people to struggle with snapped power lines and blocked traffic Wednesday's storm ripped through Delhi, playing havoc with the green cover in various parts of the city. Heavy winds followed by rain uprooted trees and left people struggling through heavy branches blocking the roads. In certain areas, trees had collapsed on electric lines and transformers, disrupting power supply.

Officegoers were caught completely unawares on Wednesday morning when the sky darkened within minutes and a squall lashed the city and its neighbouring areas at a speed of over 100 kmph. The storm uprooted scores of trees and electricity poles and brought down roofs and walls of houses taking a toll of at least five lives in the city. In Greater Noida, poor visibility and rain caused a company bus to skid on the road

Desperate efforts have been mounted in Mianzhu as rescuers still have some hope of reaching survivors. The roads were black and eerily quiet for a city of such size. But on a street near the centre, floodlights and the grind of cutting equipment announced that rescue workers were toiling through the night. It had been a commercial bank, said one bystander; a Bank of China, said someone else. You couldn't tell any more. All that was left was a great mound where the building had slid forward into the road as if it were melting butter.

THE much-awaited monsoon is likely to hit the Kerala coast on May 29 this year. The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), using an indigenously developed forecast model, maintained on Wednesday that the forecast implied a model error of +/- four days from that date. The mean monsoon onset date over Kerala is June 1, two days later.

Myanmar's ruling junta has tightened access to the cyclone disaster zone in the country's south, frustrating aid groups trying to bring help to survivors, reporters and aid agencies said yesterday. Relief groups are furious over the regime's refusal to allow foreign experts into the country to mount a full-scale disaster response, and say they face even more constraints in bringing help to some two million survivors.

High-speed winds brought un-seasonal rain and thunder to the Capital on Wednesday morning, uprooting trees and wreaking widespread havoc that claimed four lives and left several injured.

At severely affected even as civic authorities received numerous complaints of water-logging from various parts of the city. The rains drenched the city for about two hours, measuring up to 6.2 mm and bringing the temperature down to 22

The death toll from China's deadliest earthquake in decades climbed to nearly 15,000 on Wednesday, as officials warned of calamities downstream from broken rivers and dams strained to bursting point. Tens of thousands of troops, fire-fighters and civilians raced to save more than 25,000 people buried across a wide swathe of southwest Sichuan province under collapsed schools, factories and hospitals after Monday's 7.9 magnitude quake. Many schoolchildren were buried as they were taking an afternoon nap. One body of a boy was found clutching a pen.

The 1.5 million people left destitute by Burma's cyclone are in increasing danger of disease and starvation, experts said on Wednesday, but its ruling junta said no to a Thai request to admit more aid workers. Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej met his Burma counterpart Thein Sein in Rangoon for 2 hours trying to convince him the former Burma should open up for international relief operations and ease visa rules for aid workers.

HONG KONG: On the day of the Sichuan earthquake, I happened to be in Bengkulu, the province of Sumatra, Indonesia, which has been experiencing almost weekly quakes that measure about 5 on the Richter scale, following one that measured 8.5 last September. Despite its magnitude, that earthquake killed just 25 people. This raises the question: What combination of nature, chance, human activity and government competence determines the death toll when a cyclone, earthquake or tsunami strikes?