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Brazil

Brazil's landslide death toll reaches 803 - report

  • Hundreds missing, feared buried beneath mud and wreckage

* Disaster now second-worst in Brazil's history-newspaper

SAO PAULO, Jan 23 (Reuters) - The death toll from floods and landslides that devastated a mountainous region near Rio de Janeiro has reached 803, state authorities said on Sunday, as rescue teams scoured the mud for the hundreds still missing.

The disaster now ranks as the second-worst recorded in Brazil's history, according to United Nations data published in the Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper on Saturday, eclipsed only by a meningitis outbreak that killed 1,500 people in 1974.

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