Pakistan

Flooding death toll rises above 750

Monsoon rains in the past few days have triggered landslides, snapped electricity cables and inundated a wide swath of South Asia, pushing the region’s death toll from this year’s rainy season past 750, officials said Tuesday.

The heaviest one-day downpour in a quarter-century on Monday pummeled Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi with 4 inches of rain, killing 14 people, said Arif Mahmood, an official in the state-run meteorological department.

The combined death toll for South Asia stood at 756 on Tuesday after more than a month of monsoon rains. India has reported 333 deaths, Bangladesh 175, Pakistan 164, and Nepal 84.

Bangladesh

Husband to hang for attack on wife

A Bangladeshi court sentenced a man to death by hanging for hurling acid on his 9-year-old wife, leaving her partially deaf and blind, one of her lawyers said Tuesday.

The accused, Swapan Gazi, in his 20s, poured a glass of acid on the girl’s face and head after she refused to leave her parents’ house for his, lawyer Salma Ali said.

The attack happened in 1998 at a slum in the industrial town of Tongi in Gazipur district, 20 miles north of the capital, Dhaka.

The Gazipur court also ordered Gazi to pay $900 in damages to the victim.

Ivory Coast

Students protest lost school year

Thousands of college students — some brandishing knives, iron bars and sticks — rioted Tuesday in Abidjan, demanding compensation for a lost school year canceled by Ivory Coast’s civil war.

The youths vandalized and looted several stores in the downtown area of the country’s economic capital. The crowd topped 2,000.

Most students were from Bouake, Ivory Coast’s second-largest city and the stronghold of rebels who control the northern half of the country.

Nearly all government and private services — including schools, hospitals and banks — have been closed in the rebel-held north since fighting began after a failed attempt to oust President Laurent Gbagbo in September.

The war was declared over July 4.