Asia suffers in worst cold for 70 years

More proof of global cooling: If record hot days prove global warming, what do record cold days prove?

Delhi woke up shivering to an unfamiliar sight yesterday - frost on the ground. India's second biggest city had its first winter frost and ice in more than 70 years as a cold snap, sweeping in from the Himalayas, reached the northern plains, killing a hundred people in 24 hours, most of them homeless street-dwellers. Officials in Delhi ordered schools to shut for three days as the temperature fell to -2C (28.4F), the lowest in the city since 1935, when -6 (21.2C) was reached. The Indian Meteorological Department said: "The normal temperature at this time is 7C. We predicted it would drop to 2C to 3C, not three times as much, as has happened."

Supriya Singh, a fashion designer from Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, said: "I was born here and this is the first time I have seen ice on grass."

Across the capital homeless people huddled around bonfires lit by civic and voluntary groups. Premchand Upadhyay, a security guard who sleeps in the open with his wife and five-year-old daughter, said: "My family kept shivering all night as we don't have a heater. How could one sleep in this cold?" Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous and one of its poorest states, has had 104 confirmed deaths. For the first time in ten years parts of the Dal Lake in Srinagar, Indian Kashmir, were frozen. Authorities banned skating on it after one child fell through ice and drowned. Tourists, including Britons, received a taste of the unusual winter in the popular and usually warm desert resort of Pushkar.

The Indian Army announced it was evacuating troops from its insulated bunkers in the disputed Siachen glacier as temperatures fell below -40 in sectors of the Himalayas

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