(live-PR.com)
- Death toll in Philippines storms is 175-In Mindanao, 97 people died
in the Misamis Oriental and Cagayan de Oro City areas. At least 125
others are missing and subject to search and rescue efforts, said Armed
Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Eastern Mindanao Command spokesman
Leopold Galon.Citing reports from the field, Galon said about 2,000
others were rescued.
Pounding rain from a
tropical storm swelled rivers and sent walls of water crushing into two
southern Philippine cities in the thick of night, killing at least 450
people, many caught in their beds.
Philippine
Red Cross Secretary General Gwen Pang told the news agency that the
latest toll was based on a body count in funeral parlors.
She
said that 215 died in Cagayan de Oro and 144 in nearby Iligan cities,
and the rest in several other southern and central provinces.
Most
of the dead were asleep Friday night when raging floodwaters tore
through their homes from swollen rivers and cascaded from mountain
slopes following 12 hours of pounding rain in the southern Mindanao
region.
Many of the bodies in parlors were unclaimed, indicating that entire families had perished, Pang said.
The
number of missing was unclear tonight. Before the latest Red Cross
figures, military spokesman Lt. Col. Randolph Cabangbang said about 250
people were still unaccounted for in Iligan.
Thousands
of soldiers backed up by hundreds of local police, reservists, coast
guard officers and civilian volunteers were mobilized for rescue and to
clear a massive deluge that left the two coastal cities strewn with
debris, trash, overturned vehicles and toppled trees.
Some
of the dead were swept out to sea from Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, which
are intersected by rivers and flanked by mountains, in a region that is
unaccustomed to the typhoons that are common elsewhere in the
archipelago nation.
Chief
of the government's Civil Defense Office Benito Ramos attributed the
high casualties in Mindanao "partly to the complacency of people because
they are not in the usual path of storms" despite four days of warnings
by officials of an approaching storm.(
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Rouhani wins Iran's Presidential election Moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani won Iran's presidential election on Saturday, the interior ministry said, scoring a surprising landslide victory over conservative hardliners without the need of a second round run-off.Interior minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar announced on state television that Rouhani secured just over 50 percent of the ballot based on a 72 percent turnout of 50 million eligible voters. Mr Hassan Rouhani ... got the absolute majority of votes and was elected as president," Najjar said. Tehran Mayor Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, a hard-line conservative, lagged behind with about 16 percent of the votes. Iran's top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, he too a hard-line conservative, earned 11 percent. The voter turnout was 72.7 percent. President-elect Hassan Rohani, sixty four years old, is known as a moderate conservative. He has been stressing the need to improve ties with Western nations, and is back...
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