Television images showed several houses and cars being swept by swollen rivers and clusters of people on the roofs of their homes in the Philippines in the aftermath of Typhoon Ketsana that hit the main island of Luzon. As of early Sunday, the death toll from the typhoon stood at 52 with more than 20 others missing and feared dead.

I awoke this morning to read of a horrible tragedy. There has been a major earthquake in Italy which has killed dozens of people, injured hundreds, and left thousands homeless.

Almost 15,000 people were forced to flee their homes in Indonesia's Lampung province on the southern tip of the island of Sumatra, local media reported on Friday.

Where natural disasters strike, political corruption is soon to follow, say the authors of a study in the Journal of Law and Economics. But it's not the wind and rain that turns good folks bad; it's the money that floods in afterwards from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Improved agricultural productivity can help developing countries reduce their reliance on international emergency food relief following natural disasters. This is one of the conclusions of a team of International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) scientists who visited cyclone-devastated Myanmar in August.

Heavy flooding in America's Midwest in recent weeks has caused severe damage. In one of the hardest-hit cities, Cedar Rapids, in the state of Iowa, as many as 2,000 homes may have to be demolished. VOA Correspondent Scott Stearns is in Cedar Rapids and reports that, despite the widespread devastation, people are optimistic that they will be able to rebuild.

When two catastrophic natural disasters struck within days of each other in May 2008, disaster relief, humanitarian aid, and health officials, as well as members of the news media tapped into a unique set of NASA data products describing the location of the exposed populations.

Thousands of toads appeared on the streets in one Chinese town days before it hit. Zoo animals started acting strangely hours before the worst earthquake in China’s history. Could these signs have been used to alert people something was about to happen?

The Ministry of Land and Resources Wednesday ordered its provincial offices to prepare for possible natural disasters triggered by extreme weather conditions.

China is building up a national natural disaster evaluation mechanism to strengthen its prevention and reduction capacity in the aftermath of recent blizzards, a senior official said.

The Chinese government has promised to help all those whose homes were damaged in recent winter storms to build permanent houses in the coming four months, said Vice Premier Hui Liangyu on Sunday.