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tokyo — Japan and India on Saturday decried remarks by U.S. President Joe Biden describing them as "xenophobic" countries that do not welcome immigrants, which the president said during a campaign fundraising event earlier in the week.  Japan said Biden's judgment was not based on an accurate understanding of its policy, while India rebutted the comment, defending itself as the world's most open society.  Biden grouped Japan and India as "xenophobic" countries, along with Russia and China as he tried to explain their struggling economies, contrasting the four with the strength of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants.  Japan is a key U.S. ally, and both Japan and India are part of the Quad, a U.S.-led informal partnership that also includes Australia in countering increasingly assertive China in the Indo-Pacific.  Just weeks ago, Biden hosted Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on an official visit, as the two leaders restated their "unbreakable alliance" and agreed to reinforce their security ties in the face of China's threat in the Indo-Pacific.  Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also made a state visit to Washington last year, when he was welcomed by business and political leaders.  The White House said Biden meant no offense and was merely stressing that the U.S. was a nation of immigrants, saying he had no intention of undermining the relationship with Japan.  Japan is aware of Biden's remark as well as the subsequent clarification, a Japanese government official said Saturday, declining to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.  The official said it was unfortunate that part of Biden's speech was not based on an accurate understanding of Japanese policies, and that Japan understands that Biden made the remark to emphasize the presence of immigrants as America's strength.  Japan-U.S. relations are "stronger than ever" as Prime Minister Kishida showed during his visit to the U.S. in April, the official said.  In New Delhi, India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Saturday also rebutted Biden's comment, saying India was the most open society in the world.  "I haven't seen such an open, pluralistic, and diverse society anywhere in the world. We are actually not just not xenophobic, we are the most open, most pluralistic and in many ways the most understanding society in the world," Jaishankar said at a roundtable organized by the Economic Times newspaper.  Jaishankar also noted that India's annual GDP growth is 7% and said, "You check some other countries' growth rate, you will find an answer." The U.S. economy grew by 2.5% in 2023, according to government figures.  At a hotel fundraiser Wednesday, where the donor audience was largely Asian American, Biden said the upcoming U.S. election was about "freedom, America and democracy" and that the nation's economy was thriving "because of you and many others."  "Why? Because we welcome immigrants," Biden said. "Look, think about it. Why is China stalling so badly economically? Why is Japan having trouble? Why is Russia? Why is India? Because they're xenophobic. They don't want immigrants."  Japan has been known for a strict stance on immigration. But in recent years, it has eased its policies to make it easier for foreign workers to come and stay in Japan to mitigate its declining births and rapidly shrinking population. The number of babies born in Japan last year fell to a record low since Japan started compiling the statistics in 1899.  India, which has the world's largest population, enacted a new citizenship law earlier this year by setting religious criteria that allows fast-tracking naturalization for Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who fled to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, while excluding Muslims. 

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

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washington — Supporters of two U.S. nationals seen as unjustly imprisoned overseas are raising concerns about what they see as a murky process by which the U.S. government decides whether to designate such individuals as wrongfully detained. Granting a wrongful detention designation to a U.S. national means the U.S. special envoy for hostage affairs is authorized to work with a coalition of government and private sector organizations to secure the detainee's freedom. Hostage rights advocates and relatives of the two U.S. nationals jailed in Iran and Russia tell VOA they want answers as to why the pair have been waiting months or years for a wrongful detention designation, while other Americans jailed in the same two countries have received the designation much more quickly. Designations are granted if a review by the secretary of state concludes that the U.S. national's case meets criteria  defined in the Levinson Act of 2020. One U.S. national whose case has been under review for years is 62-year-old retired Iranian ship captain Shahab Dalili. After immigrating to the U.S. with his family in 2014 upon being granted permanent residency, he returned to Iran in 2016 to attend his father's funeral and was arrested. Iranian authorities sentenced Dalili to 10 years in prison for allegedly cooperating with a hostile government, a reference to the U.S. His family denies the charge. While not a U.S. citizen, Dalili is considered a "U.S. national" under the Levinson Act, by virtue of his lawful permanent resident status. The other U.S. national, whose case has been under review for months, is Alsu Kurmasheva, a 47-year-old U.S.-Russian dual citizen and Prague-based journalist with VOA sister network RFE/RL. Kurmasheva had traveled to Russia last year to visit her elderly mother, but authorities blocked her from departing in June and confiscated her U.S. and Russian passports. They jailed her in October and charged her with failing to register as a foreign agent and with spreading falsehoods about the Russian military, offenses punishable by up to 10 years in prison. RFE/RL and the U.S. Agency for Global Media say the charges were filed in reprisal for Kurmasheva's work as a journalist. Asked about Kurmasheva at a Tuesday news briefing, U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said the Biden administration remains "deeply concerned" about her detention and believes she should be released. He said a "deliberative and fact-driven process" is underway regarding a wrongful detention designation in her case, but he declined to elaborate. Speaking with reporters last August, Patel said Dalili's case "has not yet been determined wrongfully detained" and declined to say more. There has been no update since then, Dalili's son Darian told VOA. In contrast to the unresolved status of Dalili's eight-year detention, two Iranian Americans whom Iran freed from detention last September in a prisoner exchange with the U.S., and whom U.S. officials declined to name, received wrongful detention designations in what appears to be a relatively quick time. The two individuals, whose backgrounds are revealed for the first time in this report as a result of a VOA open-source investigation, are San Diego-based international aid worker Fary Moini and Boston-based biologist Reza Behrouzi of Generate:Biomedicines. Moini and Behrouzi were among five Americans released by Iran in the September exchange. The first indications that the two had been detained in Iran came from images of them published by news outlets and by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan as the group traveled to the U.S. via Qatar. A day later, Iran's NourNews site named the two previously unidentified Americans as "Reza Behrouzi" and "Fakhr al-Sadat Moini," but gave no detail of their backgrounds. NourNews spelled Moini's first name differently than "Fary," the name she uses publicly in the U.S. U.S. officials said all five of the Americans had been designated as wrongfully detained, including three previously known detainees who had been jailed for years: Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Sharghi. VOA contacted the State Department to ask when, where and why Moini and Behrouzi were detained in Iran, but it declined to provide an on-the-record response. Neither of the two responded to VOA requests for comment sent by email and through their social media profiles. But Behrouzi and Moini were active on their Facebook and X accounts until three months and 11 months respectively before their release, indicating both were detained for less than a year. Upon hearing from VOA about the State Department's silence on Moini's and Behrouzi's detentions in Iran, Darian Dalili said he believes "something is not right" about how they got their designations. "I think a lot of it has to do with the prominent status of these two people, whereas my father [Shahab Dalili] is a regular father of two," the younger Dalili said. Nizar Zakka — a Lebanese American who spent almost four years in what the U.S. said was unjust detention in Iran until being freed in 2019 — has urged the Biden administration to seek Shahab Dalili's release as a wrongfully detained U.S. national. Zakka told VOA he was happy that Moini and Behrouzi were released. But he said their attainment of wrongful detention designations in what appears to be a matter of months, while Dalili has waited years without securing that status, shows the designation process is not transparent. "The public has a right to know how two people freed by Iran in return for the U.S. unfreezing a huge sum of Iranian funds got their designations, whereas Dalili has not," Zakka said. "U.S. nationals like Dalili also should not be left behind," he added.   Russian American journalist Kurmasheva's wait for a U.S. decision on whether she is wrongfully detained after more than six months of Russian imprisonment also contrasts with the case of American reporter Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal. Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on March 29, 2023, on spying charges while working in the country as an accredited journalist. Twelve days later, Secretary of State Blinken announced his determination that Gershkovich was wrongfully detained. Kurmasheva's husband, Pavel Butorin, told VOA he does not know why Gershkovich got his designation so quickly while his wife continues to wait. "The designation of Evan's detention as wrongful was the right thing to do," Butorin said. "But the designation process is opaque, and I don't know where we are in it. I do know the State Department will prioritize those individuals formally designated as wrongfully detained in a prisoner exchange, so the designation is important for Alsu." Hostage rights advocate Diane Foley, president of U.S. nonprofit group Foley Foundation, told VOA she believes a big factor in Kurmasheva's wait for a designation is her dual citizenship. Foley said Gershkovich's case for a designation was clearer because he is solely a U.S. citizen. She said Kurmasheva's Russian citizenship means she is subject to Russian media regulations that the U.S. must examine to determine if she is jailed in violation of the detaining country's own law, one of the criteria of the Levinson Act. "That is what slows everything down," Foley said. "But we are pushing for Alsu to get the designation because she is a press freedom advocate and there is no excuse for Russia to retaliate by detaining her on a technicality."

amsterdam — Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Mark Rutte joined around 4,000 people Saturday for the country's annual World War II remembrance ceremony amid restricted public access and heightened security due to the war in Gaza.  The ceremony on Amsterdam's central Dam square, with the traditional two minutes of silence at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) to commemorate the victims of World War II, passed smoothly despite fears that there might be protests.  Normally some 20,000 people attend the Dam commemoration without having to register. But earlier this week, municipal authorities announced unprecedented security measures to keep the ceremony safe and avoid possible disruptions linked to the Israel-Hamas war.  At the opening of a Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam in March, pro-Palestinian protesters opposed to Israel's military campaign in Gaza set off fireworks and booed Israeli President Isaac Herzog as he arrived on a visit.  Every town and city in the Netherlands holds its own remembrance ceremony on May 4 and tens of thousands of people attend the events. Then on May 5, the Netherlands marks the anniversary of its liberation from Nazi occupation in 1945. 

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berlin — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Union leaders denounced Saturday a recent spate of attacks on politicians in Germany, including one that sent a member of the European Parliament to the hospital with serious injuries.  Matthias Ecke, 41, a member of Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD), was hit and kicked Friday by a group of four people while putting up posters in Dresden, capital of the eastern state of Saxony, police said. An SPD source said his injuries would require an operation.  Shortly before, what appeared to be the same group attacked a 28-year-old campaigner for the Greens, who was also putting up posters, police said, although his injuries were not as severe.  "Democracy is threatened by this kind of thing," Scholz told a convention of European socialists in Berlin.  The attacks exemplify increased violence in Germany in recent years, often from the far-right, targeting especially leftist politicians. The BfV domestic intelligence agency says far-right extremism is the biggest threat to German democracy.  Saxony premier Michael Kretschmer, a conservative, said such aggression and attempts at intimidation recalled the darkest era of German history, a reference to Nazi rule.  The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, a former German conservative minister, and the Italian head of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, both condemned the attack on Ecke.  "The culprits must be brought to account," von der Leyen said on X.  German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser vowed "tough action and further protective measures" in response to the attacks.  Far-right support  The heads of the SPD in Saxony, Henning Homann and Kathrin Michel, issued a statement in which they blamed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) for the rise in violence.  "These people and their supporters bear responsibility for what is happening in this country," they said.  The AfD did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The party says it is the victim of a campaign by the media and political establishment.  The AfD has seen a surge in support in the past year take it to second place in opinion polls nationwide. It is particularly strong in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, where surveys suggest it could come first in regional elections in September.  Nationwide, the number of attacks on politicians of parties represented in parliament has doubled since 2019, according to government figures published in January.  Greens party politicians face the most aggression, according to the data, with attacks on them rising sevenfold since 2019 to 1,219 last year. AfD politicians suffered 478 attacks and the SPD was third with 420.  Theresa Ertel, a Greens candidate in municipal elections in Thuringia this month, said she knew of party members who no longer wanted to stand because of the aggressive political atmosphere.  The Greens in her region had agreed that information stands should always have at least three staff for extra safety. 

JUNA, South Sudan — Following an appeal from the United Nations, South Sudan removed recently imposed taxes and fees that had triggered suspension of U.N. food airdrops. Thousands of people in the country depend on aid from the outside.  The U.N. earlier this week urged South Sudanese authorities to remove the new taxes, introduced in February. The measures applied to charges for electronic cargo tracking, security escort fees and fuel.  In its announcement Friday, the government said it was keeping charges on services rendered by firms contracted by the U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan.  "These companies are profiting ... (and) are subjected to applicable tax," Finance Minister Awow Daniel Chuang said.  There was no immediate comment from the U.N. on when the airdrops could resume.  Earlier, the U.N. Humanitarian Affairs Agency said the pausing of airdrops had deprived 60,000 people who live in areas inaccessible by road of desperately needed food in March, and that their number is expected to rise to 135,000 by the end of May.  The U.N. said the new measures would have increased the mission's monthly operational costs to $339,000. The U.N. food air drops feed over 16,300 people every month.  At the United Nations in New York, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the taxes and charges would also impact the nearly 20,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, "which is reviewing all of its activities, including patrols, the construction of police stations, schools and health care centers, as well as educational support."  An estimated 9 million people out of 12.5 million people in South Sudan need protection and humanitarian assistance, according to the U.N. The country also has seen an increase in the number of people fleeing the war in neighboring Sudan between the rival military and paramilitary forces, further complicating humanitarian assistance to those affected by the internal conflict. 

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sao paulo, brazil — The death toll from rains in Brazil's southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul rose to 57, local authorities said Saturday afternoon, while dozens still have not been accounted for.  Rio Grande do Sul's civil defense authority said 67 people were still missing and more than 32,000 had been displaced as storms have affected nearly two thirds of the 497 cities in the state, which borders Uruguay and Argentina.  Floods destroyed roads and bridges in several regions of the state. The storm also triggered landslides and the partial collapse of a dam at a small hydroelectric power plant. A second dam in the city of Bento Goncalves is also at risk of collapsing, authorities said.  In Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, the Guaíba River broke its banks, flooding streets.  Porto Alegre's international airport has suspended all flights for an indefinite period.  Rain is expected in the northern and northeastern regions of the state in the next 36 hours, but the volume of precipitation has been declining, and should be well below the peak seen earlier in the week, according to the state meteorology authority.  Still, "river water levels should stay high for some days," Governor Eduardo Leite said Saturday in a live video on his social media, adding it is difficult to determine for how long.  Rio Grande do Sul is at a geographical meeting point between tropical and polar atmospheres, which has created a weather pattern with periods of intense rain and others of drought.  Local scientists believe the pattern has been intensifying due to climate change.  Heavy rains had already hit Rio Grande do Sul last September, as an extratropical cyclone caused floods that killed more than 50 people.  That came after more than two years of a persistent drought due to the La Nina phenomenon, with only scarce showers. 

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ISLAMABAD — An Afghan diplomat in India, who was appointed before the Taliban seized power in 2021 and said she was the only woman in the country's diplomatic service, has resigned after reports emerged of her being detained for allegedly smuggling gold. Zakia Wardak, the Afghan consul-general for Mumbai, announced her resignation on her official account on the social media platform X on Saturday after Indian media reported last week that she was briefly detained at the city’s airport on allegations of smuggling 25 bricks of gold, each weighing 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), from Dubai. According to Indian media reports, she has not been arrested because of her diplomatic immunity. In a statement, Wardak made no mention of her reported detention or gold smuggling allegations but said, “I am deeply sorry that as the only woman present in Afghanistan’s diplomatic apparatus, instead of receiving constructive support to maintain this position, I faced waves of organized attacks aimed at destroying me.” “Over the past year, I have encountered numerous personal attacks and defamation not only directed towards myself but also towards ... close family and extended relatives,” she said. Wardak said the attacks have “severely impacted my ability to effectively operate in my role and have demonstrated the challenges faced by women in Afghan society.” The Taliban Foreign Ministry did not immediately return calls for comment on Wardak’s resignation. It wasn't immediately possible to confirm whether she was the country's only female diplomat. She was appointed consul-general of Afghanistan in Mumbai during the former government and was the first Afghan female diplomat to collaborate with the Taliban. The Taliban — who took over Afghanistan in 2021 during the final weeks of U.S. and NATO withdrawal from the country — have barred women from most areas of public life and stopped girls from going to school beyond the sixth grade as part of harsh measures they imposed despite initial promises of a more moderate rule. They are also restricting women’s access to work, travel and health care if they are unmarried or don’t have a male guardian, and arresting those who don’t comply with the Taliban’s interpretation of hijab, or Islamic headscarf.

LONDON — London Mayor Sadiq Khan has a lot of cleaning up to do. Khan, who made history Saturday by becoming the city's first mayor elected to a third term, has pledged to make the River Thames swimmable. It wasn't a top campaign issue, but it's an audacious goal considering the waterway was declared biologically dead not long before his birth in the city in 1970 and flows as an open sewer of sorts when heavy rains overwhelm London's ancient plumbing system. Taming the Thames would not be Khan’s first swim upstream. His narrative is built around overcoming the odds. As he frequently points out, he is the son of a bus driver and a seamstress from Pakistan. He grew up in a three-bedroom public housing apartment with seven siblings in South London. He attended a rough school and went on to study law. He was a human rights lawyer before he was elected to Parliament in 2005 as a member of the center-left Labor Party, representing the area where he grew up. In 2016, he became the first Muslim leader of a major Western capital, overcoming an opponent whose mayoral campaign was “at least somewhat Islamophobic,” said Patrick Diamond, a public policy professor at Queen Mary University of London. “It was seen as an affirmation of him in terms of his status as a leading Muslim politician, but also as an affirmation of London in terms of its diversity, its liberalism, its cosmopolitanism,” Diamond said. “That was significant in a country which doesn’t historically have a very strong track record for having diversity in its senior politicians.” Khan has faced subtle and overt discrimination throughout his career due to his ethnicity and religion. Some of the sharpest barbs have come from former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has feuded with him since Khan assailed Trump's campaign pledge in 2015 to ban Muslims from entering the United States. During a campaign rally Wednesday in Wisconsin, Trump said London and Paris were “no longer recognizable” after they “opened their doors to jihad.” Khan, who has referred to Trump as the “poster boy for racists,” responded by saying Thursday's election was a chance to "choose hope over fear and unity over division.” “One of the things that he does incredibly well, and I would defy anyone to disagree with this, is representing London’s different and diverse communities,” said Jack Brown, a lecturer in London studies at King's College London. “He hasn’t got absolutely everything right, but he is kind of a bringer together of different communities.” Khan, who was ahead of the national Labor Party in calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, has taken a lot of flak for large pro-Palestinian marches in the city since the Israel-Hamas war. But he's also known for speaking out against antisemitism and for building bridges with Jewish leaders, Brown said. Despite his success at the polls, Khan is not an incredibly popular mayor. He’s been blamed for a lot of problems, many of which are beyond his control. The mayor of London doesn’t have the authority of mayors in Paris or New York because power is shared with the city’s 32 boroughs and the financial district. Khan has a 20-billion-pound ($25 billion) budget that primarily goes toward transport, policing and working with councils and developers to achieve his affordable housing targets that he has fallen far short of meeting. Borough councils are responsible for schools, rubbish collection, social services and public housing. His time in office has been overshadowed by crises: first the U.K.'s break from the European Union, which weakened London's thriving financial services industry, and then the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a cost-of-living crisis. He has touted measures he put in place such as freezing rail and bus fares and providing free meals for all primary school pupils among his biggest achievements. Khan has deflected much criticism by blaming his difficulties on a Conservative government that has impeded his plans. He said a projected win by Labor in a national election later this year would change his fortunes. “For too long we’ve had a government that appears to be anti-London, that thinks the way to level up our country, to make it more equal, is make London poorer,” Khan told The Associated Press. But Diamond said a Labor government will face the same fiscal problems as the current administration and is unlikely to suddenly make Khan's life easier. “You can’t always play the party politics card,” Diamond said. “The general sense in London is that Sadiq Khan does that too often. Or you can blame the Conservative government once or twice, but if it’s your only message, I think people maybe get a little bit tired and switch off to some extent.” Khan has been criticized by opponents for a rise in crime — particularly incidents involving knives. He has responded by pledging more support for programs that work with youths to prevent crime while blaming government funding cuts. In the outer suburbs, Khan has come under fire for expanding the city’s Ultra Low Emission Zone that fines drivers of more-polluting older cars 12.50 pounds (about $16) a day. Although the policy was introduced in central London in 2015 by his predecessor, Boris Johnson, it has widely been attributed to Khan because of its unpopular expansion, although it only applies to a small fraction of vehicles. His main opponent, Susan Hall, a London Assembly member, vowed to “stop the war on motorists” and scrap the program on her first day in office if elected. Khan, who has made cleaning up London's air pollution a personal mission since he developed asthma as an adult, considers those efforts among his biggest wins. Making the Thames swimmable in the next decade would expand his mission from clean air to clean water. Brown said that might be a more tangible achievement — given that air pollution is often invisible — but it's probably not something that won over a lot of voters.

HOUSTON, TEXAS — High waters flooded neighborhoods around Houston on Saturday following heavy rains that have already resulted in crews rescuing hundreds of people from homes, rooftops and roads engulfed in murky water. A flood watch remained in effect through Sunday afternoon as forecasters predicted additional rainfall Saturday night, bringing another 1 to 3 inches (2.5 to 7.6 centimeters) of water to the soaked region and the likelihood of major flooding. Friday's fierce storms forced numerous high-water rescues, including some from the rooftops of flooded homes. Officials redoubled urgent instructions for residents in low-lying areas to evacuate, warning the worst was still to come. “This threat is ongoing, and it’s going to get worse. It is not your typical river flood,” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in the nation’s third-largest county. She described the predicted surge of water as “catastrophic." Schools in the path of the flooding canceled classes and roads jammed as authorities closed highways taking on water. For weeks, drenching rains in Texas and parts of Louisiana have filled reservoirs and saturated the ground. Floodwaters partially submerged cars and roads this week across parts of southeastern Texas, north of Houston, where high waters reached the roofs of some homes. More than 21 inches (53.34 centimeters) of rain fell during the five-day period that ended Friday in Liberty County near the city of Splendora, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northeast of Houston, according to the National Weather Service. In the rural community of Shepherd, Gilroy Fernandes said he and his spouse had about an hour to evacuate after a mandatory order. Their home is on stilts near the Trinity River, and they felt relief when the water began to recede on Thursday. Then the danger grew while they slept. “Next thing you know, overnight they started releasing more water from the dam at Livingston. And so that caused the level of the river to shoot up by almost five or six feet overnight,” Fernandes said. Neighbors who left an hour later got stuck in traffic because of flooding. The Harris County Joint Information Center told KPRC-TV that 196 people and 108 animals have been rescued by emergency response agencies in Harris County. Elsewhere, in neighboring Montgomery County, Judge Mark Keough said there had been more high-water rescues than he was able to count. “We estimate we’ve had a couple hundred rescues from homes, from houses, from vehicles,” Keough said. In Polk County, located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northeast of Houston, officials have done over 100 water rescues in the past few days, said Polk County Emergency Management Coordinator Courtney Comstock. She said homes below Lake Livingston Dam and along the Trinity River have flooded. “It’ll be when things subside before we can do our damage assessment,” Comstock said. Authorities in Houston had not reported any deaths or injuries. The city of more than 2 million people is one of the most flood-prone metro areas in the country and has long experience dealing with devastating weather. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 dumped historic rainfall on the area, flooding thousands of homes and resulting in more than 60,000 rescues by government rescue personnel across Harris County. Of particular concern was an area along the San Jacinto River in the northeastern part of Harris County, which was expected to continue rising as more rain falls and officials release extra water from an already full reservoir. Judge Hidalgo on Thursday issued a mandatory evacuation order for those living along portions of the river. Most of Houston’s city limits were not heavily affected by the weather, except for the northeastern neighborhood of Kingwood. Officials said the area had about four months of rain in about a week’s time. Houston Mayor John Whitmire said rising flood waters from the San Jacinto River were expected to affect Kingwood late Friday and Saturday. Shelters have opened across the region, including nine by the American Red Cross. The weather service reported the river was nearly 74 feet (22.56) meters late Saturday morning after reaching nearly 77.7 feet (23.7 meters). The rapidly changing forecast said the river is expected to fall to near the flood stage of 57.7 feet (17.6 meters) by Thursday. The greater Houston area covers about 10,000 square miles (25,900 square kilometers) — a slightly bigger footprint than the state of New Jersey. It is crisscrossed by about 1,700 miles (2,736 kilometers) of channels, creeks and bayous that drain into the Gulf of Mexico, about 50 feet (80 kilometers) to the southeast from downtown. The city's system of bayous and reservoirs was built to drain heavy rains. But engineering initially designed nearly 100 years ago has struggled to keep up with the city’s growth and bigger storms.

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Sulaimaniyah, Iraq — Floods caused by torrential rainstorms have killed four hikers in the Sulaimaniyah region of northern Iraq, local officials told AFP.  "Four members of a hiking team drowned because of heavy rains and flooding in Awaspi village" in the Qaradah district, local official Rouf Kamal said.  Civil defense spokesperson Aram Ali confirmed the toll and said eight other hikers survived the incident south of Sulaimaniyah on Friday, the autonomous Kurdistan region's second city.  He said a weather warning was issued Thursday, with hikers particularly urged to avoid mountainous areas.  Heavier than usual rainfall has caused flooding in several parts of Iraq, especially the north, and some roads in Kurdistan region capital Arbil were blocked.  Iraq has suffered four consecutive years of drought, with irregular rainfall badly affecting water resources, forcing many farmers to abandon their land.  But Ammer al-Jabiri, spokesperson for the weather service in Iraq, where the rainy season is generally from December to March, said precipitation in 2024 was "better than last year." 

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan has recorded its wettest April since 1961, with more than double the usual rainfall for the month, the national weather center said. The country experienced days of extreme weather in April that killed scores of people and destroyed property and farmland. Experts said Pakistan witnessed heavier rains because of climate change. Last month’s rainfall for Pakistan was a 164% increase from the usual level for April, according to a report published Friday by Pakistan’s national weather center. The intense downpours affected the country’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southwestern Baluchistan provinces the most. Devastating summer floods in 2022 killed at least 1,700 people, destroyed millions of homes, wiped out swaths of farmland and caused billions of dollars in economic losses in a matter of months. At one point, a third of the country was underwater. Pakistani leaders and many scientists worldwide blamed climate change for the unusually early and heavy monsoon rains.

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