Avalanche Buries Afghan Village

Rescue workers are today plowing through an avalanche of heavy snow that destroyed a tiny Afghanistan village Sunday night, reports the AP. Snow buried Dasty, a 200-strong village in northeastern Afghanistan's Badakhshan province, and 37 casualties have been confirmed thus far—a number that officials expect to rise as rescuers trickle into the remote region. "It is a mountainous area with so much snow," says Badakhshan's deputy governor. "My concern is that many more people were killed."

Initial reports said that only three women and a child, who were not in Dasty at the time, were the sole survivors. The mountainous northeastern region is wracked by avalanches frequently, including one in 2010 that killed 170.