Flash floods kill at least 130 in Kashmir

SRINAGAR: Authorities stepped up rescue efforts as the weather improved Saturday, a day after flash floods sent rivers of mud down desert mountainsides in Indian-administered Kashmir, killing at least 130 people and injuring 400 others, officials said.

As the rain stopped in the morning, thousands of army, police and paramilitary soldiers cleared roads and the debris from flattened homes in the remote Himalayan region of Ladakh, said Kausar Makhdoomi, a businessman in the area. The airport and some food stores reopened.

Thousands of people in low-lying areas of Leh, the main town in Ladakh, moved to higher ground Friday and spent the night out in the open, Makhdoomi said.

The floods also severely damaged the town's main state-run hospital, forcing authorities to shift patients to a nearby army hospital, said Nawang Tsering, a local police officer.

Twenty-seven more bodies were recovered Saturday from collapsed homes, state police Chief Kuldeep Khoda said. Rescuers had found 103 bodies on Friday.

Nearly 2,000 foreign tourists were in Ladakh, a popular destination for adventure sports enthusiasts, when a rare powerful thunderstorm triggered floods and mudslides on Friday, burying homes and toppling power and telecommunication towers. There were no immediate reports of casualties among foreigners.

Gushing waters swept away houses, cars and buses in a 60-square mile swath in and around the town, Khoda said.

Police and soldiers rescued more than 150 people, including 100 foreign tourists, mostly Europeans, stranded in Pang village northeast of Leh, army spokesman Lt. Col. J.S. Brar said in Srinagar.

Leh residents, police, paramilitary and army soldiers helped pull people out of deep mud and damaged homes, but rescue efforts were hampered by fast-moving water and debris, Khoda said.

''It's a sea of mud,'' said Josh Schrei, a New York-based photographer on a trekking holiday in Ladakh.

The mud was about 10 feet high in places. ''A school building in Leh was buried under mud, with just the basketball hoop sticking out,'' Schrei said.

''The bus station in the town was washed away and the area is covered in mud. Buses were everywhere. Some of the buses have been carried more than a mile by the mud,'' Schrei said.

Ian Minns, a 53-year-old Australian tourist, said a big wave of water, rocks and mud came down from the hills.

''Buddhist monks, civilians and quite a few foreign tourists are helping officials in rescue operations. It's a great community effort,'' he said.

''Mud and rocks are everywhere, though most of water in Leh town has gone down,'' he told The Associated Press.

August is peak tourist season in Ladakh, about 280 miles east of Srinagar. It is a high-altitude desert with a stark moonscape-like terrain, and normally sees very little rain.

The deluge came as neighbouring Pakistan suffered its worst flooding in decades, with millions displaced and about 1,500 dead.

In Ladakh, two soldiers were missing and 14 were injured, Brar said. Khoda said at least three policemen had been killed during rescue operations.

Khoda said at least 2,000 displaced people had been housed in two government-run shelters.

The floods damaged highways leading to Leh, making it difficult for trucks with relief supplies to enter Ladakh and for tourists to leave.

Prof. Shakeel Romshoo, a geologist at Kashmir University in Srinagar, said the heavy rains had cut deep new channels in the mountain gorges of the region.

''It's a challenging topography with steep and unstable slopes. Water flow and velocity being very high, the flash floods have caused huge damage,'' he said.

Eight foreign medical workers killed in Afghanistan

KABUL: Eight foreigners, believed to be medical workers and including “several” Americans and up to six Germans, were killed by gunmen in Afghanistan's remote northeast, police and officials said on Saturday.

“We have reason to believe that several American citizens are among the deceased. We cannot confirm any details at this point,” US Embassy spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killings and accused the medical workers of proselytising Christianity.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, told Reuters from an undisclosed location that bibles translated into Dari had been found.

Afghan police said the eight foreigners, including six Germans, had been shot dead along with three Afghans.

Aqa Noor Kentuz, the police chief for Badakshan province, said the “bullet-riddled” bodies were found early on Saturday.

It was believed they had been shot several days ago.

Kentuz said the foreigners had identified themselves as doctors, while some reports said they were tourists.

He said they had been camping near jungle on a tour of Badakshan and Nuristan when they were attacked by unidentified gunmen. Travel documents were found near their bodies, he said.

“Before their travel we warned them not to tour near jungles in Nuristan but they said they were doctors and no one was going to hurt them,” Kentuz said.

Eye care team

Jamaluddin Badr, governor of nearby Nuristan province, also said the group was made up of doctors who had visited several districts in Nuristan and Badakshan, helping local Afghans.

The International Assistance Mission, which describes itself as an “international charitable, non-profit, Christian organisation” helping Afghans with health and economic development since 1966, said it appeared those killed were part of its eye care team.

“It is likely they are members of the International Assistance Mission eye camp team,” it said in a statement on its website. It said the team had been in Nuristan and was returning to Kabul.

“At this stage we do not have many details but our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of those who are presumed killed,” the statement said.

“This tragedy negatively impacts our ability to continue serving the Afghan people...we hope it will not stop our work that benefits over a quarter of a million Afghans each year.”

A spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin said it was checking reports through its embassy in Kabul and could not comment until more information became available.

Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst since US-led and Afghan armed groups overthrew the Taliban in 2001. June was the bloodiest month for foreign forces in Afghanistan since then, with more than 100 killed.

Hundreds of Afghan civilians have also been killed this year as they become caught up in the crossfire. It was not immediately clear why the group was in an area known to be frequented by the Taliban and other insurgent groups such as the Haqqani network.
The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan said it had no involvement in the incident and had no information.

Despite a record number of foreign forces in Afghanistan, standing at some 140,000 backed by tens of thousands of Afghan forces, the Taliban have extended their campaign out of traditional power bases in the south and east into the north and elsewhere in recent years.

Nuristan and Badakshan are close to Afghanistan's porous border with Pakistan.

More than 2,100 dead, missing in China floods

BEIJING: The number of people killed or missing in devastating floods across China this year has risen to more than 2,100, according to the government, as weather authorities warn of yet more rain.

The nation’s civil affairs ministry said late Friday 1,454 people had died in floods this year, another 669 were still missing and more than 12 million had been evacuated from their homes.

Large swathes of China have been hit by summer deluges that have triggered the worst floods in a decade, caused countless deadly landslides and swollen many large rivers to dangerous levels.

According to the ministry, 1.4 million homes have been destroyed by the floods that have also caused 275 billion yuan (41 billion dollars) in direct economic losses.

These official figures cover the entire year so far, and it is therefore unclear how many people have died or gone missing in the more recent, summer floods.

China’s northeast is currently the worst-hit area, with entire towns flooded and rivers bordering North Korea swollen to critical levels, prompting fears of inundations in both countries.

China’s national meteorological centre said Saturday that large swathes of the nation would see rain in the next 24 hours, although it added the rainfall would be light in most areas.

But it warned that the northeast would once again be hit by torrential downpours from Sunday. – AFP

HP CEO forced to resign amid harassment claims

SAN FRANCISCO: Hewlett-Packard Co. ousted its CEO on Friday for allegedly falsifying documents to conceal a relationship with a former contractor and help her get paid for work she didn’t do.

News of Mark Hurd’s abrupt departure sent HP’s stock tumbling. Shares of the world’s biggest maker of personal computers and printers have doubled in value during his five-year stewardship, and HP became the world’s No. 1 technology company by revenue in that time.

The company said it learned about the relationship several weeks ago, when the woman, who did marketing work for HP, sent a letter accusing Hurd, 53, and the company of sexual harassment. An investigation found that Hurd falsified expense reports and other financial documents to conceal the relationship. The company said it found that its sexual harassment policy wasn’t violated but that its standards of business conduct were.

Hurd’s “systematic pattern” of submitting falsified financial reports to hide the relationship convinced the board that “it would be impossible for him to be an effective leader moving forward and that he had to step down,” HP general counsel Michael Holston said on a conference call Friday with analysts.

“The facts that drove the decision for the company had to with integrity, had to do with credibility, had to do with honesty,” Holston said, declining to elaborate.

Holston said the inaccurate financial reports related only to Hurd’s personal expenses.

Hurd acknowledged there were “instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP.”

Hurd, who is married with two children, will get a $12.2 million severance payment, and nearly 350,000 shares of HP stock worth about $16 million at Friday’s closing price, plus an extension of options to buy up to 775,000 HP shares.

High-profile Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred said she is representing the woman and “there was no affair and no intimate sexual relationship” between her client and Hurd.

Allred, reached by The Associated Press late Friday, declined to comment further.

A person with intimate knowledge of the case told the AP that the woman worked as a host for more than a dozen events for CEOs that Hurd attended between 2007 and 2009.

The person said the disputed expenses range from $1,000 to $20,000 for travel, lodging and meals.

This person, who requested anonymity because this person wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the details of the investigation, said many of the expenses were for meals after the events and that Hurd insists they were legitimate business expenses. The total amount of the expenses in dispute could not be learned.

Hurd has offered to repay expenses that were incorrectly filed, this person said.

The company’s chief financial officer, Cathie Lesjak, 51, was named interim CEO. She has been with the company 24 years but has taken herself out of the running to fill the position permanently. HP has set up a search committee to look for a permanent replacement.

Mark Kelleher, an analyst with Brigantine Advisors, said Hurd’s resignation boils down to “one person doing some really stupid things.”

“That gave a great deal of comfort to investors that this was not a company-fundamental issue,” he said.

Still, HP’s shares – which closed Friday on the New York Stock Exchange at $46.30 – tumbled 9.7 percent after hours to $41.85 as investors reacted to the stunning news of his resignation. Preliminary financial results HP released Friday for its fiscal third quarter came in slightly above analyst expectations.

Beloved by investors for his relentless cost-cutting – and scorned by thousands of laid-off employees for the same – Hurd was seen as rescuing the company from the mess left behind by his ill-fated predecessor, Carly Fiorina.

Hurd has transformed the 71-year-old company from a computer and printer maker hooked on profits from printer cartridges into a company that looks a lot like its archrival IBM Corp., a major player in technology services and other fast-growing areas.

Though their underlying stories are very different, Hurd’s departure is like Fiorina's in one key way: Both were forced out with the company about to reap the benefits of sweeping changes they made at the Silicon Valley institution.

Fiorina left in 2005 in the wake of her decision to acquire Compaq Computer and an ensuing upheaval over her personality and her business strategies, but the divisive deal proved instrumental in HP's ascendance under Hurd.

By comparison, Hurd is departing after cutting tens of thousands of jobs and launching an expensive expansion, including the $13.9 billion acquisition of technology-services provider Electronic Data Systems, the $2.7 billion takeover of computer-networking equipment maker 3Com Corp. and the $1.4 billion deal for mobile phone maker Palm Inc.

To reassure investors, HP, based in Palo Alto, previewed its third-quarter results late Friday in advance of a detailed report Aug. 19.

The company said it expects to report earnings of 75 cents per share, compared with 67 cents a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, the company says results will be $1.08 per share, a penny ahead of analysts’ current expectations. Revenue is expected to rise 11 percent from last year to $30.7 billion, slightly higher than analysts’ expectations.

The company’s forecast for the current quarter, which ends in October, is roughly in line with analysts’ expectations.

Two killed in Myanmar border town explosion

BANGKOK: A bomb exploded in a crowded market in a Myanmar border town, killing at least two people and wounding at least eight others, an official said.

The blast occurred Friday evening in the town of Myawaddy, across a river from Thailand, according to the Mizzima news agency, run by Myanmar exiles in Thailand.

The explosive was believed thrown from a vehicle into the night bazaar.

An official in Yangon, Myanmar, who demanded anonymity since he was not allowed to speak to the press, confirmed that two persons had died and at least eight others were injured.

The area was cordoned off immediately after the blast and victims were taken to hospitals.

It was unclear whether the attack was related to fighting between Myanmar’s military and the ethnic minority Karen, who are seeking an independent state, or criminal activities.

The town is a center for both a vigorous illegal cross-border trade and smuggling of goods, drugs and people, mainly laborers seeking employment in Thailand.

Several bomb blasts have rocked Myanmar this year, including three blasts in Yangon that killed nine people and wounded 170. The incidents come as the ruling junta prepares for a general election that opponents have called unfair and undemocratic.

Amtrak train accident in California; 20 injured

SHAFTER: Police say an Amtrak train hit a big-rig truck at a California crossing, sending 20 people to hospitals for treatment for minor injuries.

Shafter police Sgt. Randy Milligan says the southbound Amtrak train hit the truck in Kern County at around 3:55 p.m. Friday.

Police say the truckdriver, 49-year-old Luis Camagro, walked away from the crash unhurt.

Amtrak officials said the train was traveling from Oakland to Bakersfield with 219 passengers on board. Officials say it was going about 79 mph (127 kph) when it hit the truck.

The remaining passengers were transported by bus to the Bakersfield Amtrak station.

Police say the signals and caution arms at the crossing were working properly at the time of the crash. – AP

Flood devastates 10 villages in Khairpur

SUKKUR: Ten villages were devastated by floodwater in Khairpur, reports said on Saturday. Meanwhile, people were being shifted to safer areas.

Water levels continued to surge in the Guddu and Sukkur barrages as the Meteorological Department issued a fresh flood warning for Sindh.

Some 962,468 cusecs of floodwater was currently passing through the Guddu barrage, the Irrigation Department said. However, more water was likely to enter the barrage.

Similarly, 400,710 cusecs was passing through the Sukkur barrage. If floodwater continued rising in the Sukkur barrage, it may lead to devastation of widespread areas of Rohri, Panu Aqil and Saleh Patt.

Floodwater has already destroyed several villages in the Kashmore district.

Meanwhile, the government has deployed Rangers and the army and has alerted all other concerned departments in the wake of the flood warning.