Apocalypse

Is the world ending? Since 2 weeks ago 2 major deadly natural phonomenas.

FIRST

YANGON (Reuters) - Desperation among Myanmar's 1.5 million cyclone survivors mounted on Wednesday as the international aid flow remained a trickle and police barred foreign aid workers from worst-hit areas.

The United Nations and Western powers piled more pressure on the military regime to speed up its slow and disorganized response to the disaster by suggesting that helpless victims could have been robbed of food and other urgent supplies.

The reports were un

confirmed, but the relief effort -- further complicated by heavy rains -- is only delivering one tenth of the supplies needed in the devastated delta region, where up to 100,000 people are dead or missing.

"It's just awful, people are in just desperate need, begging as vehicles go past," Gordon Bacon, an emergency coordinator for International Rescue Committee, told Reuters by phone from Yangon.

The international community has flown in tonnes of medicine, food and shelter materials, but getting it to low-lying delta area has been complicated by poor equipment, bad weather and government intransigence.

Myanmar's reclusive junta has also made it very clear it does not want outsiders distributing aid.

Foreign experts in sanitation, nutrition and medicine have either been prevented from entering the country formerly known as Burma or are restricted to the main city of Yangon.

Armed police send back foreigners who attem pto pass through checkpoints surrounding the former capital.

"It's such an immense area of devastation and so many people need help that I'm sure if these people could get in and be coordinated properly it would assist the effort dramatically," said Bacon. "There is frustration all around."

TRAGEDY

The international community has warned of an even greater tragedy if the aid effort is not ratcheted up.

In a statement after emergency talks on Myanmar in Brussels on Tuesday, EU development ministers called on Yangon "to offer free and unfettered access to international humanitarian experts, including the expeditious delivery of visa and travel permits."

The EU ministers stopped short of endorsing a French call to deliver supplies if necessary without the junta's permission.

France's junior minister for human rights said it had the backing of Britain and Germany to call on the U.N. Security Council for aid to be taken into Myanmar without the government's green light if necessary.

"We have called for the 'responsibility to protect' to be applied in the case of Burma," Rama Yade told reporters.

British officials said London would welcome discussion of the 'responsibility to protect,' a 2005 U.N. resolution conceived to assist victims of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not natural disasters.

But the official did not consider the proposal realistic given Russian and Chinese objections.

Tens of thousands of people throughout the delta are crammed into monasteries, schools and other buildings after arriving in towns that were on the breadline even before the disaster.

Lacking food, water and sanitation, they face the threat of killer diseases such as cholera and in some parts are waiting in vain for help to arrive.

SECOND

China quake death toll rises above 8,700

By WILLIAM FOREMAN, Associated Press Writer Mon May 12, 7:02 PM ET

CHENGDU, China - A powerful earthquake toppled buildings, schools and chemical plants Monday in central China, killing more than 8,700 people and trapping untold numbers in mounds of concrete, steel and earth in the country's worst quake in three decades.

The 7.9-magnitude quake devastated a region of small cities and towns set amid steep hills north of Sichuan's provincial capital of Chengdu. Striking in midafternoon, it emptied office buildings across the country in Beijing and could be felt as far away as Vietnam.

Snippets from state media and photos posted on the Internet underscored the immense scale of the devastation. In the town of Juyuan, south of the epicenter, a three-story high school collapsed, burying as many as 900 students and killing at least 50, the official Xinhua news agency said. Photos showed people using cranes, mechanical hoists and their hands to remove slabs of concrete and steel.

Buried teenagers struggled to break free from the rubble, "while others were crying out for help," Xinhua said. Families waited in the rain near the wreckage as rescuers wrote the names of the dead on a blackboard, Xinhua said.

Parents of the dead students built makeshift religious altars at the site, resting the corpses on any available piece of plywood or cardboard, and burning paper money and incense in a traditional honor for their child in the afterlife, according to NPR's Melissa Block.

The earthquake hit one of the last homes of the giant panda at the Wolong Nature Reserve and panda breeding center, in Wenchuan county, which remained out of contact, Xinhua said.

In Chengdu, it crashed telephone networks and hours later left parts of the city of 10 million in darkness.

"We can't get to sleep. We're afraid of the earthquake. We're afraid of all the shaking," said 52-year-old factory worker Huang Ju, who took her ailing, elderly mother out of the Jinjiang District People's Hospital. Outside, Huang sat in a wheelchair wrapped in blankets while her mother, who was ill, slept in a hospital bed next to her.

Xinhua reported 8,533 people died in Sichuan alone and 216 others in three other provinces and the mega-city of Chongqing.Worst affected were four counties including the quake's epicenter in Wenchuan, 60 miles northwest of Chengdu. Landslides left roads impassable Tuesday, causing the government to order soldiers into the area on foot, state television said, and heavy rain prevented four military helicopters from landing.

Wenchuan's Communist Party secretary appealed for air drops of tents, food and medicine. "We also need medical workers to save the injured people here," Xinhua quoted Wang Bin as telling other officials who reached him by phone.

To the east, in Beichuan county, 80 percent of the buildings fell, and 10,000 people were injured, aside from 3,000 to 5,000 dead, Xinhua said. State media said two chemical plants in an industrial zone of the city of Shifang collapsed, burying hundreds of people and spilling more than 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia.

Though slow to release information at first, the government and its state media ramped up quickly. Nearly 20,000 soldiers, police and reservists were sent to the disaster area.

Disasters always pose a test for the cmmunist government, whose mandate rests heavily on maintaining order, delivering economic growth, and providing relief in emergencies.

Pressure for a rapid response was particularly intense this year, with the government already grappling with public discontent over high inflation and a widespread uprising among Tibetans in western China while trying to prepare for the Aug. 8-24 Beijing Olympics.

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