Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing flash floods after being warned to evacuate as the death toll from severe monsoon rains in Pakistan and neighbouring India climbed to 457 people.

Army and air force troops worked to rescue thousands of people stranded in Indian-controlled Kashmir and northern and eastern Pakistan, where flooding and landslides have caused more than 320 deaths.

Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountaineer and former Nazi who fled a British prisoner of war camp in India for the northern Himalayas, where he befriended and tutored the Dalai Lama, died today. He was 93.