Hanna death toll rises

Powerful Hurricane Ike charged across the Atlantic toward the Bahamas and the US east coast today while tropical storm Hanna's death toll from floods and mudslides in Haiti grew to 90.

Haiti's civil protection office said 37 of the 90 Hanna-related deaths had occurred in the port city of Gonaives, where floodwaters appeared to be receding. Gustav killed at least 75 people in the impoverished Caribbean nation of nine million, where most people live on less than $2 a day.

Gonaives residents were still stranded on their rooftops two days after floodwaters rose and the government did not know the fate of those who had been in hospitals and prisons.

Hanna churned just east of the far-flung Bahamian chain of 700 islands on a path that was expected to take it to the US East Coast near the South Carolina-North Carolina border on Saturday as a weak hurricane.

Ike posed no immediate threat to land and it remained too early to say if it would threaten Caribbean islands, the US East Coast or the US oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ike hurricane weakened slightly today after growing explosively in the space of a few hours yesterday from a tropical storm to an intense Category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson intensity scale.

Tropical storm Josephine also marched across the Atlantic on a westward course behind Ike but it had begun to weaken.

The burst of storm activity followed Hurricane Gustav's rampage through the Caribbean to the Louisiana coast, where it slammed ashore on Monday west of New Orleans, largely sparing the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina three years ago.

The flurry of storms was a clear signal that this six-month hurricane season is on track to be a ferociously busy one, though not like record-busting 2005 when 28 tropical storms, including Katrina, rolled across the Atlantic and Caribbean.