Boats bring Philippine flood victims to safety as death toll rises

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  • Boats bring Philippine flood victims to safety as death toll rises

Rescuers in the northern Philippines used boats to pick up residents stranded by flooding Friday as Typhoon Co-May was downgraded to a tropical storm and the death toll from a week of monsoon rains edged higher.

Schools remained closed and electricity was down in swathes of the archipelago nation's largest island as the national disaster agency reported 25 dead and eight missing since last Friday. But those numbers did not account for three construction workers buried in a landslide as they rested Thursday in Cavite province, south of the capital Manila, according to rescuers.

President Ferdinand Marcos on Thursday explicitly tied the recent flooding to climate change, saying his country had to accept this was the "new normal". The storm, which was weakening as it made its way north by northeast, was expected to be gone from the Philippines by Saturday morning.

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