As this year’s unusually nasty flood season continues, China finds itself considering measures both harrowing and strange. First, from the Bankok Post:
An estimated 2 billion field mice are chomping their way hungrily through crops in 22 counties (discricts) around the Dongting Lake in central China’s Hunan province after their homes on islands in the lake were flooded.
In less than three weeks, local people have killed more than 2.25 million mice, making a pile equivalent to 90 tonnes of rodents, but haven’t made a dent in the rodent invasion. [Full Text]
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that officials in Anhui Province are planning to deliberately flood 75 villages near Fuyang (ÈòúÈò≥Â∏Ç) to relieve pressure on the precariously rising (and notoriously polluted) Huai River. The agency quotes People’s Daily as reporting 101 flood-related deaths in six provinces so far this summer. See the article here (via Yahoo! News).
(Xinhua Photo via Beijing Review: Flood water bursts out of the Three Gorges Dam.)