Monsoons

Across India, people are awaiting summer monsoons for relief from severe water and power shortages in fast-swelling cities. The annual tropical rains should hit the south in June and the baked northern plains in July. Until then, residents of the southern city of Madras stay awake nights watching for a trickle from the tap, signaling the half-hour a day that the water supply is turned on without notice.

Flood waters roared through Pakistan's central province of Punjab, where officials Saturday said at least 26 people were killed in two days. Thousands of Pakistanis were rescued from rooftops by soldiers who were called in after 19 inches of monsoon rains flooded Lahore over a 24-hour period. Local newspapers said at least 30 people died and 100 were injured Friday in Lahore, the provincial capital, mostly by collapsing houses.

The death toll from two weeks of heavy monsoon rains across South Asia rose sharply to at least 521 as rescuers reached remote, flooded villages in northern India. The causes of death included electrocution, house collapses, snakebites and drowning. The storms across much of northern India, Bangladesh and Nepal have also left about 19 million people stranded, officials said.

Monsoon floods, tornadoes and rains roared through inundated villages in South Asia, killing 42 more people and raising the region's death toll from the annual deluge to 546, officials and news reports said. In India, 27 people died in Bihar state, including 11 killed when their boat overturned in the raging Gandak River, police Supt. Kapileshwar Manjhi said. In neighboring Bangladesh, 15 people drowned in two separate locations.

That pair of giant painted eyes staring down from the facade of the new Monsoon Cafe on Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica is enough to stop you right in your tracks. Go ahead; peer in the bamboo-framed windows at the raffish bar with woven palm roof and colored glass lanterns where dolled-up denizens of the night languorously sip exotic drinks.

Floods caused by monsoon rains have swept through three provinces of Pakistan, killing 158 people and causing extensive damage to property and crops, the minister of justice said Thursday. The disaster began three weeks ago in the provinces of Punjab, Sind and the North-West Frontier, said the minister, Wasim Sajjad. Sajjad said more than 1 million people have been affected by the floods and by rains nationwide and that 2.67 million acres of land have been inundated.

Monsoon rains have inundated drought-stricken cities in northern Pakistan, causing flash floods that washed away several homes and killed 17 people, officials said. Sunday's rains caused deaths in Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Peshawar and Mangora. Since the monsoon season began July 8, a total of 22 people have died in similar floods. The rains followed a drought of several months' duration that led President Zia ul-Haq to call on Muslim leaders to pray for rain.

Heavy monsoon rains lashed the southern province of Sindh in Pakistan, damaging hundreds of homes, rupturing a small dam and killing at least 33 people, aid workers said. Elsewhere in the province, 11 more people were killed in Hyderabad, northeast of Karachi, officials said. In western India, flash floods in the desert state of Rajasthan engulfed a village, washing away seven children. Two others drowned in a reservoir, Press Trust of India said.

Waterborne diseases and flooding caused by seasonal monsoon rains have killed more than 70 people and sickened hundreds in India over the past week, authorities and news reports said. A bus with more than 60 passengers was swept away by the swollen Banas River in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. Only seven people managed to swim to safety, the news agency Press Trust of India quoted police as saying.

Torrents of water washed away homes, crops and cattle, leaving hungry and frightened villagers perched in trees or on roofs as the death toll rose from monsoon rains across northern India and Bangladesh. At least 186 people have been killed and 19 million have been driven from their homes in recent days.