Pakistan says more than 1,000 people may have died in a powerful quake that also hit north India and Afghanistan.
The quake in Kashmir had a magnitude of at least 7.6. The epicentre was 80km (50 miles) north-east of Islamabad.

Pakistan’s interior ministry said several villages had been wiped out. A total of 172 are so far confirmed dead in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Rescuers are trying to reach dozens of residents feared trapped in collapsed buildings in Islamabad.

Residents in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and India’s capital, Delhi, are also reported to have felt the tremor.

Aftershocks are strong.

Oxfam has confirmed there is also “massive destruction” in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province.

Ben Phillips of Oxfam told the BBC a meeting of relief organisations was under way and is liaising with the UN and the Pakistani government on supplying aid.

Some of the hardest hit areas:

- In Indian-administered Kashmir, 157 civilians and 15 soldiers are confirmed dead and more than 600 people injured.

- The town of Uri close to the Line of Control that separates divided Kashmir was worst hit, with 104 dead.

- About 35 people were feared dead when a courtroom and two schools collapsed in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, police said.

- A meeting attended by India’s premier, Manmohan Singh, in the northern city of Chandigarh was stopped after his bodyguards ordered an immediate evacuation following the tremors.

- The 200-year-old Moti Mahal fort in Poonch district, Indian-administered Kashmir, has collapsed.

- Haikal Shah Falah, a government employee in Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan, said: “We’ve reports that two children were killed, one in Charbag and one in Chapliyar districts.”

- One child was killed and six injured in a school collapse in Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s information minister said.

BBC

Hurricane Stan

Heavy rains that were already battering southern Mexico last week were exacerbated by Hurricane Stan, which came ashore along that country’s Gulf Coast early Tuesday and moved over the states of Veracruz, Chiapas and Oaxaca before dissipating.

Rescuers with emergency supplies of food and water can’t reach thousands of people in mountainous regions of Mexico’s Chiapas state cut off by flooding and mudslides, officials said Friday.

“There’re at least 300,000 people in the region who are not receiving any kind of help,” said Chiapas Gov. Pablo Salazar Mendiguchia. He said floods and mudslides had affected at least 1 million residents of his state.

The official death toll in Guatemala stood at 177, but Oscar Sanchez, a spokesman for volunteer fire fighters nationwide said that 117 were confirmed dead in communities around Lake Atitlan and that the number killed all around the country had climbed to 287.

Benedicto Giron, a spokesman for the National Agency for Disaster Reduction, said of the mudslide in the Atitlan area “if what the villagers say is true, and there are 200 or 300 people buried, we could rise to 400 deaths.”