Hurricanes

Taiwan's military airlifted survivors from remote mountain villages devastated by mudslides triggered by last weekend's Typhoon Morakot, and announced today that it was sending an additional 4,000 soldiers to help with the rescue effort. The new troops will join the more than 10,000 soldiers already racing to save thousands of survivors stranded in several villages in the island's south, the Defense Ministry said in a statement. Rescue efforts have been slow because many bridges and roads to hard-hit villages collapsed or were washed out by raging floodwaters.

This could be a tumultuous year for tropical weather with 15 named storms, including eight hurricanes, if storm prognosticators William Gray and Philip Klotzbach are to be believed. The question is: Should they be? In issuing their revised seasonal outlook for 2008 on Wednesday, Gray and Klotzbach of Colorado State University reignited a controversy over whether long-range forecasts like theirs have any validity.

Nearly a week after a cyclone ravaged Myanmar, food, medicine and fresh drinking water are not the only necessities in short supply. So are independent news accounts from the isolated and politically repressive nation. Expatriates and others have been forced to rely mostly on secondhand accounts and reports from correspondents based in neighboring nations for information about the disaster, which the government says has killed more than 22,000 people.

Most schools reopened Monday in and around Yangon, despite the concerns of some teachers, parents and international aid groups about safety risks to students from damage caused by Tropical Cyclone Nargis. At Middle School No. 1 in this suburb, classes resumed in a building where strips of rusted corrugated iron roofing hung precariously overhead.

Divers managed to get inside a capsized ferry today but found only bodies and no survivors, three days after the vessel carrying more than 800 people capsized during a powerful typhoon, officials said. Philippine navy spokesman Lt. Col. Edgard Arevalo would not speculate on whether anyone still might be found alive but indicated that the amount of time that had passed since the disaster made it unlikely. He said the ship's interior was too dark to even determine how many bodies were there.

After a night of anxious pacing, when it seemed like Hurricane Dolly had decided to park and pelt them with rain, the Guevara family went to bed thinking the worst was over. They awoke at 5 a.m. Thursday, startled by an unusual rumbling sound, to find a river raging around their light blue cottage. The water kept rising. "I couldn't go back to sleep," Elvia Guevara, 43, said in Spanish. "I was so worried it was about to come inside."

The top U.N. humanitarian affairs official said Monday that the world body had suffered significant losses while delivering cyclone aid to Myanmar because of a distorted official exchange rate. This month, the United Nations issued an appeal for more than $300 million in extra aid to cope with the effects of Cyclone Nargis, which left about 140,000 people dead or missing when it struck the Irrawaddy delta region in early May.

Hurricane Norbert swept across Mexico's southern Baja California peninsula on Saturday, tearing off roofs and forcing hundreds of people to flee flooded homes. It hit land near Puerto Charley on Baja's southwest coast as a Category 2 hurricane, but weakened to Category 1 after emerging over the Gulf of California, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. Norbert was expected to reach mainland Mexico before dawn today.

Wanted: a charity with lots of freezer space. Or a town in need of flooding. Neither scenario is likely for Florida's State Emergency Response Team, which confronts a peculiar dilemma imposed by last year's dearth of hurricanes: The agency has almost 9 million pounds of ice cubes worth $1.8 million -- bagged, bundled and costing the state $90,000 a month in storage fees.