China warns of further floods near Nepal border

**Will Chalk** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Will Chalk, and in the early hours of Friday the 28th of August, these are our main stories. There are growing fears a second flood could make things a lot worse, as the search for survivors of the catastrophic floods in Northern Nepal and Tibet continues. The Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, who oversaw the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War, has died, and a trial that's gripped the US.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
She was very anxious and sad.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:32)
She was begging for help.

**Shannon Buckingham** (0:34)
This was a woman who acted intentionally to accomplish a very specific goal, to kill.

**Will Chalk** (0:40)
The story of Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children, but her defense say postpartum psychosis means it wasn't murder.
Also in this podcast, Donald Trump renames Lake Ontario as the tariff war between the US and Canada notches up yet another gear, and the telescope is designed to help us answer fundamental questions about the structure and the composition of the universe. NASA gears up for the launch of its flagship space observatory.
As the water recedes in Nepal and Tibet, the scale of the damage and the enormity of the task ahead is being revealed. Wednesday's flash flood on the border saw huge levels of destruction and there were growing fears that debris blocking a river could cause another disaster. In Nepal, almost 500 people have been confirmed dead. More than 1,400 are missing, many of them tourists. Nepalese soldiers have been sent to the region to search for survivors. Thousands of people are homeless. In Newarkot, a hospital has been turned into a shelter.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:50)
I don't know where to go. We had three houses, all of which were washed away by the floods.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:55)
The land where we had planted rice is also gone.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:58)
Everything in the house has been swept away.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:00)
We still can't reach my eldest son. I don't care for wealth, I just want my son back.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:06)
If any of you could rescue my son, please do it for me.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:11)
We've been staying in shelters since the floods hit. We didn't have anywhere else to go.
Some tarpaulins have been distributed, but we don't have a place to put one up. It doesn't make any sense because we need to search for someone else's land, even for temporary makeshift shelter.

**Will Chalk** (2:29)
Well, our correspondent Azadeh Mishiri is in one of the worst hit areas.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:34)
It's really quiet where I am in northern Nepal in Trishuli, and yet past the barricades, past the police checkpoints, emergency workers are racing to save more lives. The Prime Minister has ordered that all of these efforts should continue, and in some cases they have been successful. People's lives are being saved, and we have spoken to people, family members of those who are missing, who are holding on to hope. We started the journey back in Kathmandu, hours away from here, and we met one woman who is holding on to the memory of her lost phone conversation with her husband. It was a video call at about 8 a.m. on Wednesday, and he was driving tourists through this region when the flood happened, but she still hopes that she'll hear good news.
And yet, mixed with all that hope is the devastation that we've seen across Northern Nepal. The pictures of what's happened are still very difficult to see. Imagine being a family member and having to see that as well. I mean, this is a very painful time for them. And on top of that, there are warnings of more danger to come. There are warnings that some of the debris may have washed into the river systems and that there could be more flooding.

**Will Chalk** (3:46)
Azadeh Mashiri there. Now, while journalists are free to report from the pool, information from across the border in Tibet, which is controlled by China, has been limited and tightly restricted. Shortly before recording this podcast, I got an update on what's happening from our Beijing correspondent Stephen MacDonald.

**Stephen MacDonald** (4:04)
The latest we're hearing from officials is that more than a thousand people have been moved to safety in these flood hit areas, including over 500 tourists. The good news there seems to be that rescue teams are getting to these most remote parts of the Himalayas, which have been hit really badly by this devastating wall of mud and water, which struck there with such ferocity. What they're worried about, though, is this artificial lake, which is formed by the mud and water which came.
The fear is that there's so much water in there, and then when it bursts, that could lead to another round of flooding. People here are very mindful of this, because in recent months in China, man-made dams have burst following heavy flooding because of the typhoons. And so people have seen the devastation when this happens. It could just be like all over again, this water racing down those valleys.