High winds and heavy rain lashed China’s densely populated east coast, after Typhoon Muifa forced around 1.6 million people to leave their homes and grounded most flights at Shanghai’s main airports.

Muifa is the strongest tropical cyclone to hit Shanghai — home to more than 25 million people — since record-keeping began in 1949.

However, there were no immediate reports of any deaths or casualties.

At least 426,000 people were evacuated in Shanghai and another 1.2 million people were taken to temporary shelters in neighbouring Zhejiang province.

Heavy rainfall led to traffic tailbacks and floods in several areas of the Yangtze river delta region, a major global manufacturing hub.

Giant waves were seen crashing onto the coastline in Hangzhou bay, to the south of Shanghai, and national radio reported a landslide in Ninghai County in Zhejiang province.

Packing winds of up to 125 kilometres (78 miles) per hour, the storm made landfall at 12:30 am Thursday (1630 GMT Wednesday) in Shanghai’s Fengxian district.

It had earlier led to the cancellation of all flights to China’s biggest financial hub.

according to state news agency, Muifa previously hit the city of Zhoushan in Zhejiang on Wednesday.

Air travel slowly resumed in Shanghai as the storm moved north, but most flights from the city’s two main airports were cancelled Thursday morning, according to aviation data provider Flightradar24.

Operations at some of Asia’s largest container shipping ports in Shanghai and neighbouring Ningbo that were halted because of the typhoon were scheduled to resume later Thursday, according to statements from port officials.

Officials ordered all fishing vessels in the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea to anchor in ports as northeast China braced for the typhoon.

The storm entered east China’s Jiangsu province on Thursday morning and the wind speed weakened to about 90 kilometres (56 miles) per hour, the Central Meteorological Observatory said.

The storm came soon after Typhoon Hinnamnoor hit Shanghai and its neighbouring region last week, causing the suspension of Shanghai ferry services and school closures in parts of Zhejiang.

Muifa is the 12th typhoon to hit China this year, according to state media.

Tropical storms, which are expected to increase as the planet warms, were sharply up in 2021, a report by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said earlier this month.

Flooding across Sudan has killed at least 20 people over the past week, Sudanese officials has announced, raising the official death-toll from the floods since the rainy season began in May to 134.

The office of Brig. Gen. Abdul-Jalil Abdul-Rahim, the leader of Sudan’s National Council for Civil Defense, said an additional 120 people were injured from the past week’s flooding.

Torrential downpours throughout August and early September — the peak of Sudan’s rainy season — have washed away roads, houses, and vital infrastructure across the country, cutting off supply lines to rural areas in need of humanitarian aid. According to the United Nations’ latest flooding report, some 286,400 people have been affected by the floods and 16,900 homes have been destroyed.

The civil defense council said this year’s deaths included 74 people who drowned, 32 who died when their homes collapsed, and six who were killed in water-related electrocutions.

The rural east and west of the country have been the most affected by this year’s downpours. On Wednesday, Sudan’s state media outlet, SUNA, reported that a newly built sugar factory near the eastern city of Kassala collapsed under heavy rainfall.

In 2020, flooding and heavy rains killed around 100 people and damaged more than 100,000 houses.

As repatriation gains rapid momentum in the world of artifacts, Egypt is now gearing up to bring back all the glories scattered across museums and private collections across the world.

Aiming to open “the largest archaeological museum in the world” at the foot of the pyramids of Giza in November, Egypt’s former Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass said he will soon demand the return of three of its greatest lost treasures.

Rosetta Stone

The basalt slab dating from 196 B.C. was the key that helped French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion crack the code of Egypt’s ancient hieroglyphs.

The stone was discovered by Napoleon Bonaparte’s invading French army in 1799 while troops were repairing a fort near the Nile Delta port of Rashid (or Rosetta), close to the Mediterranean.

It bore extracts of a decree written in Ancient Greek, an ancient Egyptian vernacular script called Demotic and hieroglyphics. Comparing the three scripts finally helped resolve a mystery that had bedeviled historians for centuries.

Champollion announced his discovery on Sept. 27, 1822.

The stele has been housed in the British Museum since 1802, inscribed with the legend “Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801” on one side and “presented by King George III” to the museum on the other. Egypt has been demanding its return for decades, with Egyptologist Heba Abdel Gawad saying the inscriptions alone were “an act of violence that no one talks about, and which the British Museum denies is the destruction of an artifact.”

The museum said the stone was “handed over to the British as a diplomatic gift.”