Distant Disaster

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At best, it was a few paragraphs in the back pages of U.S. newspapers, a by- the-way story from somewhere off in the Third World -- less important, by inference, than the natural disasters in Hawaii, where four people died, or Florida last month, where 41 perished, in hurricanes. Yet the floods that have been building up in Pakistan over the past month have wrought one of the worst natural disasters there in 45 years. More than 2,000 people have drowned, and innumerable farm animals have been left floating in the polluted waters of a vast brown inland sea that has covered thousands of villages, the nation's ! major cotton and food crops, and a collapsed infrastructure of roads, power lines and bridges.