Double storms claim 1,000 lives

MORE than 160,000 people fled to high ground or crowded into schools and town halls as yet another powerful typhoon battered the eastern Philippines yesterday, where 1,000 are dead or missing from an earlier storm.

Mudslides and flash floods have turned entire provinces facing the Pacific Ocean into a sea of chocolate-brown mud littered with bodies, uprooted trees, collapsed homes and bridges.

The military has listed 479 dead and 560 missing in three towns in Quezon province. Survivors sifted through piles of mud, which in some towns was ankle deep, for clothes and belongings.