Asia: Troops and volunteers shovelled snow from roofs and roads in Japan, while India's capital New Delhi recorded its lowest temperature in 70 years as a cold wave swept across parts of Asia yesterday.
In China, cattle have died of the cold in the far western province of Xinjiang and a 42km section of the Yellow River has frozen over in eastern Shandong, officials and news reports said.
At least 20 people have died from exposure, disease and malnutrition in northern Bangladesh over the past three days because of a cold snap there, local newspapers said.
In Japan, troops and workers tried to clear snow that had piled up to more than 3m in some of the worst-hit areas of Niigata prefecture and to reopen blocked roads in Nagano prefecture. Both areas are northwest of Tokyo.
At least 63 people have died and more than 1,000 have been injured since the unusually heavy snowfall began last month, Kyodo news agency said, citing a survey of local governments.
Many of the dead were elderly people who fell from their roofs while trying to clear snow, while others were crushed when their houses collapsed under the weight of the drifts.
"It's frightening," one woman in Akita City in the north of Japan's main island of Honshu told TV Asahi as local government workers began to shovel snow from her roof. "There were creaking sounds and I couldn't open the doors because of the weight of the snow."
China is in the midst of its coldest winter in 20 years, the China Daily said.
Even in the usually mild province of Guangdong in the south, temperatures dipped as low as 5 degrees on Friday while some local highways have frozen over with 1-3cm of ice, China Central Television said. In Xinjiang, where heavy snowfall and temperatures as low as minus 43 degrees forced the evacuation of almost 100,000 people earlier in the week, conditions remained testing.
In the province's northern Altay region, temperatures were hovering around minus 26 degrees after falling to minus 37 and killing cattle over the past few days, an official from the local meteorological bureau said by telephone.
In India, residents of the capital awoke yesterday to the coldest morning in 70 years with the temperature falling to about freezing point, forcing officials to shut primary schools for three days.
Local TV footage showed a thin layer of ice on the grass in parks and on the roofs of cars as people came out for early morning walks. "I was so excited. This is the first time I have seen it [ frost]," a teenage girl wearing a thick sweater told a local channel.
But thousands of homeless and those without heating were hard hit.
"My family kept shivering all night as we don't have a heater. How could one sleep in this cold?" said Premchand Upadhyay, a middle-aged security guard in New Delhi who stays in one room with his wife and their five-year-old daughter.
More than 100 people have died in northern India since December due to the cold.- (Reuters)