World Watch
August 9, 2010 12:41 PM

The Human Condition: Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Topics
In The News ,
Afghanistan ,
Pakistan ,
China

(CBS/AP) Floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, wars and random incidents of violence. It's part of the human condition, broadcast in high definition around the world. Floods and landslides across Asia have plunged millions into misery as rubble-strewn waters killed at least 127 in northwestern China. More than 1,000 are missing in the China flood areas. 

The number of people suffering from the massive floods in Pakistan exceeds 13 million--more than the combined total of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the United Nations said Monday. In Indian-controlled Kashmir, rescuers raced to find 500 people still missing in flash floods that have already killed 132, while North Korea's state media said high waters had destroyed thousands of homes and damaged crops.

The daily mortality rate in Moscow has doubled and morgues are overflowing amid an acrid smog caused by the worst heatwave in Russia's thousand-year history, officials said Monday.

On the more directly man-made disaster front, 10 members of a medical aid group, including six Americans, two Afghans, one Briton and a German, were gunned down Thursday after they were accosted by gunmen after finishing a two-week mission providing care to impoverished villagers in Nuristan province. 

Civilian war deaths in the first seven months of 2010 in Afghanistan rose by 6 percent over the same period last year, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. The Taliban and their allies were responsible for 68 percent of the at least 1,325 civilian deaths, and 23 percent were ascribed to NATO or Afghan government forces. The remaining 9 percent could not be categorized as they occurred in areas too dangerous to investigate, the commission said.

Houses are submerged in flood waters in Sanawan, near Multan, in central Pakistan on Thursday, Aug. 5, 2010.

(Credit: AP Photo/Khalid Tanveer)

Residents salvage valuables from their flood-destroyed homes on Aug. 4, 2010, in Pabbi, near Nowshera, Pakistan

(Credit: Getty Images/Daniel Berehulak)

This aerial view, taken August 8, 2010, shows flooded streets in Zhouqu county after a deadly flood-triggered landslide, in northwest China's Gansu province.

(Credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Rescuers search for survivors in Zhouqu, in northwest China's Gansu province on August 8, 2010, after a deadly flood-triggered landslide.

(Credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images)
monsoon, India

A man wades though a flooded street during rainfall in Jammu, India, Thursday, Aug. 5, 2010.

(Credit: Ap Photo/Channi Anand)

A man walks past debris and earthquake damaged buildings in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on June 30, 2010. Six months after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, downtown Port-au-Prince, where much of the nation's industry and commerce was clustered and where about 80 percent of the buildings were destroyed.

(Credit: AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)

A tsunami wave embedded a car into a wall in the town of Pago Pago in American Samoa, in this Oct. 2, 2009 file photo. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

(Credit: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

An injured woman is taken away after an apparent suicide car bomb, detonated in front of the Heetal Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009.(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

(Credit: AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

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