Around the World

Sunday, May 4, 2008

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.

belarus

11 U.S. Envoys Depart As Tensions Escalate

Eleven U.S. diplomats left Belarus on Saturday after being declared personas non grata amid escalating diplomatic tensions between Washington and the ex-Soviet nation, an embassy official said.

On Wednesday, Belarus ordered 10 of the embassy's 11 diplomats to leave the country, giving them 72 hours to comply. All 11 left Saturday, a U.S. Embassy official said.

The departures leave the embassy with four U.S. staffers, down from 35 at the start of the year. The U.S. ambassador left in March after Belarus pulled its ambassador from Washington.

Washington is one of the fiercest critics of Belarus's authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko.

zimbabwe

Opposition Undecided On Contesting Runoff

Zimbabwe's main opposition party said Saturday it was still undecided on whether its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, should take part in a runoff election against President Robert Mugabe.

Election officials announced Friday that Tsvangirai, who heads the Movement for Democratic Change, had defeated Mugabe in a March 29 presidential poll but failed to win the absolute majority necessary to avoid a second ballot.

The opposition has accused election officials of rigging the results, saying that Tsvangirai won the election outright and that Mugabe's rule is over. But it has not signaled how it will handle the runoff.

china

Ministry Urges Efforts To Halt Deadly Virus

China's Health Ministry issued a nationwide alert calling for heightened efforts to control a virus that has caused the deaths of 22 children in one city and shows signs of spreading.

Health bureaus around the country must step up monitoring for hand, foot and mouth disease following a "relatively large" outbreak in the central city of Fuyang, the ministry said on its Web site.

Sudan Crash Called Accident

Engine failure is believed to have caused the plane crash in Sudan on Friday that killed 24 people, including key southern Sudanese lawmakers, a senior official said.

Missing British Girl Recalled

A year after Madeleine McCann vanished from a southern Portuguese resort, family members joined worshipers in marking the anniversary with church services in Britain and Portugal.

From News Services