Weather

IOWA (AP) — Floodwaters were receding Saturday in Cedar Rapids after swamping 1,300 city blocks, forcing 24,000 evacuations and nearly crippling the water supply for the state's second largest city. But as the Cedar retreated, waters in Iowa City had already invaded parts of the University of Iowa campus and weren't expected to crest until sometime Monday or Tuesday. "This is our version of Katrina," Johnson County Emergency Management spokesman Mike Sullivan said. "This is the worst flooding we've ever seen — much worse than 1993," when much of the Midwest was hit by record flooding. About 36,000 Iowans in 11 counties are homeless, Gov. Chet Culver said Sunday. In Cedar Rapids, 25,000 people were forced from their homes. Flood water could spill over about two dozen levees along the Mississippi River in Iowa, and Missouri this week unless people top the levees with enough sandbags, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said. As many as 27 levees between Davenport, Iowa and St. Louis, Missouri, are said to be at risk.

BEIJING (AP) — At least 112 people have died and seven are missing in flooding across a broad stretch of southern China, state media reported Sunday. More than 1.3 million people have been forced to flee their homes across nine provinces, including Sichuan, which is still reeling from last month's earthquake that killed almost 70,000 people, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Raging rivers have collapsed tens of thousands of homes, damaged crops across more than 2.12 million acres and causing more than an estimated $1.5 billion in economic losses. Heavy rain in Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan provinces will further raise water levels downstream, especially in the coastal manufacturing powerhouse of Guangdong, Xinhua says. Most of those areas are expected to receive more heavy rain over the next 10 days.