KATHMANDU/NEW DELHI (Dispatches) -- Torrential rain battered Nepal on Sunday, causing widespread flooding and landslides and raising the death toll from three days of severe weather to 49 people, according to officials.
The toll could go higher as three dozen people were reported missing. Another 17 were injured. The heavy rain, which mainly hit the country’s southern plains, led to the evacuation of 5,000 people, a Home Ministry official said.
Meanwhile, at least six people have been killed and dozens more are missing after a massive landslide swept two buses off a hillside into a deep gorge in mountainous northern India, an official said Sunday.
The coaches had stopped for a tea break around midnight Saturday in Himachal Pradesh when tonnes of rock and mud swept away an entire stretch of highway roughly 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the state capital Shimla.
The Press Trust of India reported 30 people were feared dead in the disaster, while other reports suggested an even higher toll.

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WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month finds that the rate of alcohol use disorder, or what's colloquially known as "alcoholism,” rose by a shocking 49% in the first decade of the 2000s. One in eight American adults, or 12.7% of the U.S. population, now meets diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder, according to the study.
The study's authors characterize the findings as a serious and overlooked public health crisis, noting that alcoholism is a significant driver of mortality from a cornucopia of ailments: "fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, liver cirrhosis, several types of cancer and infections, pancreatitis, type 2 diabetes, and various injuries.”

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TAIPEI (Reuters) -- Chinese military aircraft carried out two rounds of drills around Taiwan at the weekend, flying past its southern tip and then around its north near Japan, the self-ruled island's defense ministry said.
China has been increasingly asserting itself in territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas. It is also worried about Taiwan, which it claims as its own, but which is run by a government China fears is intent on independence.
On Sunday, two Chinese military transport aircraft flew through the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and the Philippines before going up near the Japanese island of Miyako, to Taiwan's north, where they were joined by two Chinese fighter jets, and then returned home, the ministry said.
 
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NAIROBI (Reuters) -- South Sudan's rebels said they had wrested control of Pagak, their stronghold town near the country's border with Ethiopia, from government forces, a day after launching an offensive to drive them out.
Formerly controlled by the rebels, the town was captured by South Sudan's military five days ago but heavy fighting erupted on Friday with rebels vowing to retake it.
Dickson Gatluak Jock, spokesman for South Sudan's Vice President, Taban Deng Gai, denied the military had lost Pagak but said they had lost three soldiers in the fighting while four were wounded.
South Sudan descended into civil war in 2013, only two years after it won independence, when President Salva Kiir fired his deputy, Riek Machar, unleashing a conflict that has since splintered along multiple ethnic lines.

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 MOGADISHU (Dispatches) -- A former Somali insurgent leader, Mukhtar Robow Abu Mansur, has defected to the government, a military official said on Sunday, severing ties with Takfiri group Al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab fell out with its former spokesman and deputy leader Robow in 2013 and he has been laying low in the jungles with his forces since then. The Takfiris have launched multiple attacks to try kill or capture him.
"Robow and his seven bodyguards are now in Hudur with local officials. He will be flown to Mogadishu soon," Colonel Nur Mohamed, a Somali military officer, told Reuters by phone from the southwestern town of Hudur.

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BERLIN (AP) -- Angela Merkel's main challenger in the country's upcoming general election says he remains confident he can unseat the chancellor despite her wide lead in the polls.
Martin Schulz, who was president of the European Parliament until January, said on Germany's ZDF television Sunday there are still six weeks of campaigning to go before the Sept. 24 vote.
He says "I think that I still have a good chance to lead the next government."
The latest poll, by the Emnid agency for Bild newspaper on Sunday, shows Schulz's Social Democrats gaining a percentage point to 24% support, compared to a steady 38% support for Merkel's conservative bloc. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.5%.