Burma’s ruling military junta took diplomats on a tour of the storm-ravaged Irrawaddy delta on Saturday as its toll of dead and missing soared above 133 000 people, making Cyclone Nargis one of the most devastating ever to hit Asia. An estimated 2,5-million people are clinging to survival in the delta.
Burma said on Friday that more than 133 000 people were dead or missing in the cyclone disaster, nearly doubling the toll from the worst disaster in the country’s history, which hit two weeks ago. State television said 77 738 were dead and 55 917 missing — with 19 359 people injured — according to the latest figures.
Torrential tropical downpours lashed Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on Friday, deepening the misery of an estimated 2,5-million destitute survivors of Cyclone Nargis and further hampering aid efforts. Burma state television raised its official death toll on Thursday to 43 328. Independent experts say the figures are probably far higher.
Chad’s foreign minister risked alienating his country even further from Sudan on Wednesday by urging the international community to arm-twist Khartoum into resolving the Darfur crisis. Sudan severed diplomatic ties with Chad on Sunday, accusing Ndjamena of backing a rebel assault on the Sudanese capital at the weekend.
China ramped up its massive military rescue effort in the quake-hit south-west on Thursday, where more than 40 000 people lay dead or buried under rubble and rescue teams fought to save the living. Premier Wen Jiabao ordered another 30 000 troops and 90 helicopters to the disaster zone to reinforce the rescue operation.
Western powers kept up the pressure on Burma’s generals on Thursday to allow a massive aid effort as relief workers struggled to help an estimated 2,5-million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis. The European Union’s top aid official has warned that the military government’s restrictions on foreign aid workers were increasing the risk of starvation.
Burma tightened access to its cyclone disaster zone on Wednesday, turning back foreigners and ignoring pleas to accept outside experts who could save countless lives before time runs out. A top European Union humanitarian official said there was now a risk of famine, after the storm destroyed rice stocks in a main farming region.
The most striking image of Spain’s drought, that has forced Barcelona to ship in water, has been that of the underwater church which emerged from a drying dam. For most of the past four decades, all that has been visible of the village of Sant Roma has been the belltower of its stone church, peeping above the water beside forested hills from a valley flooded in the 1960s to provide water for the Catalonia region.
Armed police tried to prevent the United States ambassador to Zimbabwe and several other diplomats from leaving a hospital where victims of post-election violence were being treated Tuesday, an Agence France-Presse correspondent with the convoy said.
China’s biggest earthquake for a generation left tens of thousands dead, missing or buried under the rubble of crushed communities on Tuesday, plunging the nation into an all-out aid effort. Rescue teams struggled by air, land and water to reach the areas of south-western China stricken by the huge quake that demolished schools, homes and factories.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s government intensified a crackdown against its political opponents on Monday, as the leader of the opposition prepared to return home to contest a run-off election. Journalists, union leaders and hundreds of political activists have been arrested since general elections in March.
The German government on Monday brushed off a verbal attack from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in which the leftist leader said Chancellor Angela Merkel was a political descendant of Adolf Hitler and German fascism. Merkel sets off for her first trip to Latin America on Tuesday.
Serbs began voting on Sunday in an election that will show whether the lure of European Union membership outweighs their anger over the Western-backed secession of Kosovo. The country is divided and the two frontrunners, the nationalist Radical Party and the pro-Western Democratic Party, will have to woo smaller parties to form a coalition.
The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session on May 23 to examine how the world’s food crisis is undermining the right to food for millions of people, officials said on Friday. The rights to adequate food and freedom from hunger are enshrined in international law as basic, universal human rights.
The Swiss government has agreed to ease restrictions on the importation of potatoes following fears that Euro 2008 soccer fans could face a shortage of French fries next month. A spokesperson for the country’s department of agriculture told national radio on Wednesday that the government would allow an additional 5 000 tonnes of potatoes to be brought in.
For centuries, Istanbul lured intrepid shoppers with colourful jewellery and carpets which tumbled from shops in the ancient alleyways of the Grand Bazaar. Today, the city’s affluent young middle-class is embracing a different kind of shopping experience in giant glass-and-chrome malls.
Russia’s deployment of extra troops in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has brought the prospect of war ”very close”, a minister of ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday. Separately, the ”foreign minister” of the breakaway Black Sea region was quoted as saying it was ready to hand over military control to Russia.
A powerful cyclone that slammed into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta triggered a massive wave that gave people nowhere to run, killing at least 15Â 000 and leaving 30Â 000 others missing, officials said on Tuesday. ”More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself,” Minister for Relief and Resettlement Maung Maung Swe told a news conference.
The Asian Development Bank called on Saturday for immediate action from global governments to combat soaring food prices and pledged fresh financial aid to help feed the Asia Pacific region’s poorest nations. ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda told a news conference in Madrid, where the bank is holding its four-day annual meeting, that total lending ”could be sizeable, but not enormous”.
Diplomats failed to agree on Friday on a follow-up meeting to an acrimonious 2001 conference on racism after two weeks of difficult negotiations between Western and Islamic countries. The meeting was unable to decide on the venue or duration of a conference to chart progress in the fight against racism since the landmark conference in Durban seven years ago.
Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe accepted that the opposition’s Morgan Tsvangirai won more votes in the presidential election and will contest a run-off in a political battle that has raised fears of bloodshed. Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) cried foul after Zimbabwe’s electoral body announced on Friday that he had won 47,9% of the vote
Forget frozen fish-fingers and chewy mashed potatoes. A French school has become the country’s first to hire a professional chef to cook up fresh, cheap food from local products every day. The aim? To energise listless teenage taste buds and control weight problems.
The United Nations’s new top adviser on food blamed two decades of wrong-headed policies by world powers for the food crisis sweeping the globe in a stinging interview published on his first day in office. Frenchman Olivier de Schutter told <i>Le Monde</i> newspaper the world needed to prepare for the end of "cheap food".
Israel will be urged on Friday to ease its blockade of the Gaza Strip to avert a humanitarian disaster as the Middle East ”quartet” meets to consider the state of the faltering peace process. Oxfam and five other United Kingdom aid agencies are calling for the quartet to end its ”complacency” by putting the ”highest diplomatic pressure” on Israel.
Nato on Wednesday accused Russia of ramping up tensions with neighbour Georgia and said Moscow’s rapid build-up of troops in the breakaway republic of Abkhazia threatened Georgia’s territorial integrity. The alliance called on Russia and Georgia to resolve their differences over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia’s two rebel republics.
The Zimbabwe government savoured a rare diplomatic victory on Wednesday after the United Nations Security Council failed to agree on how to respond to the country’s post-election crisis. Western countries such as former colonial power Britain had been trying to steer the council to adopt a common strategy on the situation in Zimbabwe.
Russia accused Georgia on Tuesday of planning to invade the breakaway republic of Abkhazia and said it was sending more troops to the region. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Georgia had amassed more than 1 500 troops in the mountainous Upper Kodori valley — a small but strategic enclave inside the separatist territory but controlled by Georgian forces.
Representatives of the world’s leading gas producers are discussing Russian proposals for greater cooperation, according to the Iranian Oil Ministry. Ministers from the Gas Exporting Countries Forum are meeting amid speculation that members are considering an Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec)-style club for gas producers.
North Koreans waved flags, plastic flowers and danced in the streets of Pyongyang to welcome the Olympic torch on Monday after the destitute state had promised its main benefactor China an ”astonishing” show. The global torch relay ahead of the Beijing Games in August has prompted protests against China’s rights record in Tibet.
The European Union launched the second and final test satellite for its ,3-billion rival to the United States Global Positioning System on Sunday, brushing off industry doubts over its viability. The Galileo project, Europe’s biggest single space programme, has been plagued by delays and squabbling over funding.
Germany’s Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrück, blamed the Bank of England on Friday for the collapse of Northern Rock and the loss of 2 000 jobs, savaging the central bank for not pumping enough liquidity into money markets last year. Unlike the central banks of the United States and European Union, the Bank of England failed to support the banking sector with vital loans, Steinbrück said.
European biodiesel producers said they were asking Brussels on Friday to impose punitive import duties on United States biodiesel but their US rivals said they would hit back with a complaint of their own. The trade in biofuels has surged due to growing demand for alternatives to fossil fuels as a way to cut greenhouse gas emissions.