MANILA: The death toll from a tropical storm that struck the southern Philippines has risen to 30 as massive mudslides wiped out a mountain village, officials said Saturday. Nineteen deaths were reported near the town of Tubod on Friday on Mindanao, the archipelago nation’s second-largest island, where Tropical Storm Tembin unleashed flash floods and mudslides erased a remote village from the map, police said. The Philippines is pummelled by 20 major storms each year on average, many of them deadly. After slicing across Mindanao on Friday, Tembin sped west over the Sulu Sea with gusts of 95 kilometres an hour. Tembin struck less than a week after Tropical Storm Kai-Tak devastated the central Philippines, leaving 54 dead and 24 missing.

Source: New Strait Times December 23, 2017 03:22 UTC