Sunday notes

Reasonably nice at the moment, with warm sunshine and big fluffy clouds. It's the big fluffy clouds I'm keeeping a beady eye on - I suspect we may get a downpour or two later on.

Here in Lewis, a woman of 63 died in a housefire in the village of Callanish, near the famous Stones, yesterday. She was rescued from the property, where the upstairs bedroom was alight. She was declared dead upon arrival in hospital in Stornoway. Her sister remains in hospital, being treated for the effects of smoke inhalation.

The man known as Chemical Ali, Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein, has been sentenced to death. He was involved in a campaign in 1988 against the Kurdish population of Northern Iraq, in which 180,000 people were killed, partly through the use of poison gas. The full details can be read in this BBC report.

After floods in India, storms have wreaked havoc in the Pakistani city of Karachi. More than 200 people died when galeforce winds and heavy rain lashed the city. Billboards were brought down and infrastructure destroyed. Only recently, temperatures topped 40C / 105F there. The storms are related to the former tropical cyclone which has traversed India over the last few days and is now in the Arabian Sea. Rainfall totals in India, resulting from this system, are as high as 420 mm / 17 inches in the last 24 hours. It does not look likely that the cyclone will regenerate in the Arabian Sea.