Beijing: At least 155 people are dead and 24 missing in unusually heavy seasonal flooding in China.
Direct economic losses total 24 billion yuan ($6.5 billion), with large swaths of the country's southeast hit especially hard, according to the government's Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.
The office said virtually all of the country's major rivers were swollen, while lakes along the mighty Yangtze were at their highest levels since 1998, when catastrophic flooding killed about 4,000 people.
It said 140,000 houses had collapsed and more than 1.3 million people had been moved to temporary shelter. Overall losses were about four times what they were last year, it said.
