FLOODWATERS SPREAD
In Bangladesh, monsoon floods continued to spread, inundating vast areas in 30 of the country's 64 administrative districts, officials said on Friday.
"Thousands of people have been marooned or displaced. We have opened flood shelters at several places and are bracing for the worst," said Ibrahim Khalil, an official in Sirajgan district, one of the worst-hit areas north of the capital Dhaka.
Across the border in India, incessant rains over the past week have displaced hundreds of thousands of people in the east and northeast, destroyed crops and damaged bridges, officials said on Friday.
In the eastern state of Bihar, 21 people have died and hundreds of thousands of villagers have seen their houses washed away. Road and rail networks have been disrupted by heavy monsoon rains over the past three days.
Rivers in the northeast -- including the Brahmaputra that also flows through Bangladesh -- have burst their banks. Floodwaters have submerged paddy fields and destroyed houses.
"The situation is grim," said Bharat Chandra Narah, flood control minister for Assam state.
Weeks of rain in China's mountainous southwest, home to the upper reaches of the Yangtze river, have made floods peak in Wuhan, capital of the central province of Hubei, state media said.
Authorities in Hubei had mobilised tens of thousands of people to check embankments as the Han River, a main tributary that converges with Yangtze, was also swollen.
But as parts of China battle floods and landslides, others are suffering from a heatwave and drought.
Temperatures have reached above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 days in seven southern and southeastern provinces, home to about 200 million people, the National Meteorological Centre said on Friday.
The heat is set to compound the drought in the rice-growing provinces of Jiangxi, Hunan and Fujian, where about 1 million residents faced shortages of drinking water.
