U.N. warns of climatic disasters

The recent snowstorms in China have signalled that "freak weather' is becoming increasingly more common, a United Nations body that seeks to mitigate the impact of natural disasters has warned. The unprecedented scale, cost, and human impacts of China's snowstorms, its worst in 50 years, herald a need for the world to get ready for "new kinds of disasters,' said the Geneva-based International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR).