Flash floods kill at least 100 people

AT least 100 people were feared dead yesterday after flash floods struck a remote mountainous area of northern India.

The victims were mostly migrant workers at a hydroelectric project being built about 220 miles north of New Delhi on a river in Himachal Pradesh state. Police said communications with the area had been severed after a heavy downpour, and that rescue teams were sent to the scene.

And in Italy the drought that has been plaguing the north of the country has put at serious risk many valuable cultivations, as the river Po, on which most of the irrigation systems in Northern Italy depend, is reaching record lows.