Large-scale crop plantations are expanding at a rapid pace across southeast Asia, with multinational firms often benefiting the most at the expense of local communities and the environment, two U.N. rights experts warned on Wednesday.

Demand for agrofuels, such as those derived from sugar cane and palm oil, has boomed thanks in part to the United States, Europe and other rich economies seeking alternative ways to fuel their cars and homes in order to reduce their carbon emissions.

A growing threat of landslides on ground surrounding the massive Three Gorges Dam reservoir could force the government to relocate 100,000 more residents of the area, from which 46,000 were moved earlier, an expert with China’s land and resources ministry said this week.

The official, Liu Yuan, told China National Radio that rising water levels in the reservoir had made adjacent land increasingly unstable. Since the reservoir reached its high-water mark in 2010, landslides and other accidents have risen 70 percent.

Massive boulders crashed onto houses on Wednesday in Mathare, a Nairobi slum, killing at least eight people after a night of heavy rains, police and the Kenyan Red Cross said.

“Eight people have died in this disaster. Six bodies were retrieved from under the rubble, another died on the way to hospital while the eighth died in hospital,” a police officer involved in the rescue operation said.

Hopes of retrieving any more people alive from the rubble faded late in the afternoon after bulldozers cleared the site.

At least 72 people were killed when the tropical storm Irina hit northern Madagascar in late February, causing floods and landslides, authorities said on Thursday.

Three people were also reported missing and some 77,911 displaced, said the National Office for Disaster and Risk Management, BNGRC. The storm destroyed 1,348 homes.

Irina passed through the country on February 26-27, mostly in the north of the island.

Landslides and shooting stones on Wednesday blocked the Srinagar-Jammu highway even as the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) started road clearance operations early morning, an official said.

According to an official of the BRO, there were landslides in Panthal and Khoni Nallah areas and fresh snowfall in Bannihal and Patnitop sectors during Tuesday night.

Syarpu lake of Banfikot, Rukum one of the major tourism hubs in the mid-west of the country drawing hundreds of home and

foreign visitors alike every year, is on the verge of extinction, thanks to the lack of proper conservation measures.

The lake originally sprawled in an area of 2.6 square kilometres earlier is shrinking in size day-by-day owing to the almost annual evens of floods, landslides and soil erosion.

Earlier having lost its