A month after devastating floods first brought havoc to Pakistan, thousands of people were still fleeing surging water yesterday as the Indus broke its banks close to a historic city in the country's south.
Officials said water had breached the river's defences close to Thatta and had also flooded a second canal that feeds from the Indus. Yesterday evening, officials estimated that the 20ft breach in the levee, which happened early in the morning, could cause flooding in the outskirts of the city by nightfall.
Most of the 200,000-strong population of Thatta, 75 miles south-east of Karachi, have already left the city, camping out by the sides of roads or trying to move to cities out of the flood zone. Hundreds of families were taking shelter in an ancient Muslim graveyard and in a nearby Hindu temple.
Up to a million people have been forced to flee their homes in the past 48 hours. With so many needing help and so little relief reaching the southern parts of Sindh province, scores of people blocked a road in Thatta to demand more assistance. They complained that the scant supplies available were usually thrown from the backs of trucks, resulting in crowds of people fighting among themselves for food and water.
"The people who come here to give us food treat us like beggars," an 80-year-old woman called Karima (who has just one name) told Associated Press. "They just throw the food. It is humiliating."
Another woman, Geeta Bai, 32, sitting outside an ancient Hindu temple, added: "I am fasting and praying for the flood to recede as it has snatched husbands from wives, sons and daughters from parents, brothers from sisters and sisters from brothers."
The floods began in the mountainous north-west of the country four weeks ago with the onset of annual monsoon rains. Ceaseless torrential downpours created flooding the likes of which had never been seen before. Then, as the water slowly began receding in the north-west, the floods moved southwards, enveloping large areas of Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan provinces. Aid organisations have estimated that around eight million people are now in need of emergency assistance and hundreds of thousands who need food, water and medicine are accessible only by air.
Of particular concern to the aid organisations are children, who are more vulnerable than adults to waterborne diseases and whose needs are often overlooked during emergencies.
"We fear the deadly synergy of waterborne diseases, including diarrhoea, dehydration and malnutrition," a senior official with Unicef, Karen Allen, said in a statement. Another UN official said if nothing was done an estimated 72,000 children in flood-affected areas and suffering severe malnutrition would be at high risk of death.
Having evacuated those homes that are at highest risk of flooding, the most pressing needs are to provide people with emergency supplies and shelter. But aid organisations say that with the lives of up to 17 million people affected, the authorities must also urgently start reconstructing homes, schools and infrastructure.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
Look away Eurosceptics. Those meddling Brussels bureaucrats have let you down again and are not going to ban the sale of eggs by the dozen.
When you have a little time on your hands, there is nothing nicer than to be in a kitchen surrounded by eggs, flour, sugar and butter: four ingredients that with a little mixing produce a glorious, sweet-smelling piece of joy.
It's a baking hot afternoon in New York and I'm standing in line at TKTS, commonly known as "the half-price ticket booth" in Times Square, crossing my fingers that the theatre ticket I am after will be a) available and b) offered at a price that is at least vaguely near the half-price mark. TKTS hovers close to the trading-on-false-pretences boundary, as its discounts are usually more like 20 per cent, but a discount is a discount, and I have guiltily taken the afternoon off in order to wait here, patiently, among the tourists and the flashing neon lights, for a few hours.
The next time Craig Bellamy dares to venture outside his house he will discover that he's wrong – not every living being in his city is so enthralled with Cardiff's biggest hero. His manager Dave Jones confessed that his horse is partial to taking his morning constitutional "right outside Craig's front gate".
They are not quite gone with the wind, but the dresses that the actress Vivien Leigh wore as Scarlett O'Hara in the Old South movie classic are well on their way to falling apart. Curators at a museum in Texas are appealing for $30,000 (£19,000) to restore them.
Roy Hodgson said last night that Liverpool were considering an appeal against the red card for Joe Cole, who was described as "devastated" by his manager for his first-half dismissal on his debut in the 1-1 draw with Arsenal.
Emma Bridgewater always knew that her now iconic British pottery company, which this month celebrates its 25th anniversary, was going to be a success. “If you think, oh I’ll have a little, tiny craft pottery, then that’s what you get. You don’t grow by accident,” she told me breezily over the phone last week. The idea came about while she was looking for cups and saucers for her mother’s kitchen and found nothing suitable. “The china was full of irrelevant formal stuff whereas her kitchen was resolutely informal,” she explains. Her mother, who was left permanently brain-damaged by a horse-riding accident in 1991, has been her biggest inspiration. “There wasn’t a question of a set of anything and that was and is my constant reference. Her style is my touchstone for the style of the business. That’s been absolutely crucial to the success.”