Local residents return home in a boat in a flooded street near Bangbu in east China's Anhui province July 12, 2007. Almost half a million people have been evacuated from the flood basin of China's Huai River, swollen to its highest level in over half a century, with their misery compounded by a plague of rats blamed on a scarcity of snakes and owls. Most of the evacuees are villagers from the dirt-poor eastern province of Anhui with the rest from Henan to the northwest and Jiangsu to the east. [Reuters]

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