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BURMA
At Least 4 Dead After Cyclone Hits Rangoon
At least four people were killed after a large tropical cyclone, carrying winds of 120 mph, slammed into Burma's commercial capital of Rangoon, officials said Sunday.
State media reported that the city was without power and water and that streets were littered with debris from felled trees and battered buildings. Many roofs had been ripped off.
The military-led government of Burma, also known as Myanmar, declared five disaster areas, including Rangoon. The worst-hit area was the Irrawaddy Delta, where 50 percent of buildings in some towns had been damaged or collapsed, state media said.
Information was slow in coming out of the country, with Internet and phone connections down since Cyclone Nargis hit Saturday.
congo
U.N. Mission Chief Rejects Accusations
Allegations that U.N. soldiers in Congo traded in gold and arms are unfair and could prompt some countries to withdraw from peacekeeping operations, the top U.N. official in Congo said Saturday.
Reports of serious abuses by Indian and Pakistani peacekeepers based in Congo's lawless eastern borderlands have repeatedly dogged the U.N. Congo mission, which has also been hit by a series of sex scandals.
The United Nations has consistently said internal investigations had failed to turn up evidence of widespread abuse.
On Friday, however, New York-based Human Rights Watch published confidential U.N. documents detailing witness accounts of misconduct by U.N. peacekeepers and said investigators had "ignored, minimised, or shelved" corroborated allegations.
In an interview Saturday, Alan Doss, head of the U.N. mission in Congo, disputed the allegations.
"To somehow imply that there's some kind of massive coverup, that there are networks of trading in arms and gold and all the rest of it, I think is unfair," he said.
