Monday, May 19, 2008
Myanmar's Neighbors to Coordinate Cyclone Aid Effor
May 19 (Bloomberg) -- Myanmar agreed to let Asian relief workers deliver cyclone aid to the hardest-hit areas after weeks of political pressure from Western countries trying to help victims stave off hunger and disease.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations may send medical teams and aid workers to Myanmar, Singapore's foreign minister, George Yeo, said after an emergency meeting of the group today.
``You're going to see quite dramatic steps by the Burmese to open up,'' said Mark Malloch-Brown, U.K. minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations, in a British Broadcasting Corp. interview that followed a visit with military leaders in the country. India, China, Thailand and Indonesia would be part of a group that Myanmar's military, traditionally suspicious of the West, can accept, he said.
Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar's ``rice bowl'' on May 3, flooding the low-lying cropland of the Irrawaddy delta, which analysts say could cause famine in coming months. The storm caused an estimated $10 billion in damage and left 134,000 people dead or missing.
The U.S. and United Nations, meanwhile, continued flying in tons of food and disaster supplies, which the military regime and private relief groups will distribute.
Thousands Lack Shelter
Myanmar's military junta had rejected most international help for relief operations in the southern Irrawaddy River delta, struck by the cyclone 17 days ago. Hundreds of thousands of people are without shelter as monsoon rains begin in the Southeast Asian country formerly known as Burma.
Today's Asean meeting and the aid plan will be a ``defining moment'' for the group, Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan predicted in Washington last week.
Asean has long been criticized by Western nations for failing to press Myanmar to restore democracy and censure the junta for inflicting abuses on its citizens. The Asean members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
``International assistance to Myanmar, given through Asean, should not be politicized,'' Yeo said. ``On that basis, Myanmar will accept international assistance.''
`Show Solidarity'
The meeting is a ``good opportunity for Asean to show solidarity'' with Myanmar, Thai Foreign Minister Noppadol Pattama said before the meeting, Agence France-Presse reported. ``There won't be any pressure. There would be persuasion to allow Myanmar to consider opening or giving more access to international humanitarian assistance.''
Asean will probably send Pitsuwan to Myanmar to see what is needed for the relief effort, he said.
Mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever may surge this week unless aid is rushed to survivors, the World Health Organization has said.
``The impact of the cyclone on Myanmar will be much greater economically and long-lasting than the tsunami was on Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand, because the areas that have been hit are the food basket,'' Tim Costello, head of World Vision Australia, said in an interview from Yangon last week. ``We're looking potentially at food scarcity and famine.''
The cyclone is the worst natural disaster to hit Southeast Asia since the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 220,000 people in coastal communities across the Indian Ocean.
Food Supply
The worst-affected areas produce most of Myanmar's rice, fish and pork, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said last week. Prices of goods have at least doubled since the cyclone struck, according to the UN.
No more than a quarter of the people affected by the cyclone have received help, Malloch-Brown said. French, British and U.S. ships carrying relief supplies are stationed off Myanmar's coast, and Asian nations may ferry those supplies to the delta region, Malloch-Brown said in the BBC broadcast.
The U.S. military flew 15 disaster relief flights into Myanmar during the weekend and today, Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said.
The cargo planes delivered 700,000 pounds (330 metric tons) of supplies, including water, blankets, hygiene kits, bed nets, plastic sheeting, food and medical supplies, he said. There have been a total of 31 such flights into Myanmar to help in cyclone relief.
Reports from aid organizations suggest the supplies are reaching affected areas. The U.S. has no aid workers there and is unable to verify the reports, Whitman said.
Ban's Visit
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to travel to Myanmar tomorrow to survey aid efforts, two days after UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes left for the country. Ban is expected to attend a joint Asean-UN aid-pledging conference in Myanmar's former capital, Yangon, on May 25.
While the coordination of aid inside Myanmar is better than anticipated, most UN aid workers are still awaiting visas to enter the country, said UN spokeswoman Michele Montas.
The UN's World Food Program has now purchased 8,500 tons of rice grown in Myanmar, enough to feed 1.5 million people for two weeks. An additional 1,050 tons of beans have been purchased.
The agency has landed 13 air shipments inside the country since the cyclone struck.
France would agree to take part in any donor conference in response to the disaster, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in an interview with Europe 1 radio today, while calling the process ``almost pathetic.''
``Aid isn't arriving,'' Kouchner said. ``It's heart- breaking and a scandal.''
France has a military transport ship with aid waiting outside Myanmar's territorial waters.
Junta chief Than Shwe met with storm survivors for the first time yesterday, the BBC reported. Myanmar state television showed the general visiting relief camps in the Hlaing Thar Yar and Dagon suburbs of Yangon, it said.
As Time Runs Short, Clinton Claims Lead in Popular Vote
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is entering the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on Tuesday with one of the most pugnacious political messages of her campaign: That she is ahead in the national popular vote when all votes are counted, including from the unsanctioned primaries in Michigan and Florida and that party leaders who have a vote as super-delegates should reflect this level of appeal.
This argument is of a piece with Mrs. Clinton’s increasingly populist image, as a fighter on behalf of average people, but it is also a debatable claim: Most tallies of the national popular vote put Mr. Obama in the lead, especially when Michigan and Florida are not counted.
Mr. Obama has declared his own lead in the national vote and is solidly ahead in the overall delegate count, and he intends to use the results of the Kentucky and Oregon primaries to declare on Tuesday night that he has secured a majority of the pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses.
While that does not guarantee the nomination, his campaign argues that it is an important moment and crucial for superdelegates to consider as well.
Yet Mr. Obama does not plan to declare outright victory, his advisers say, because he does not want to appear to be pushing Mrs. Clinton out of the race. At this stage, his advisers say, he wants to treat her gracefully as a worthy Democratic fighter, not as a stubborn nemesis.
The arguments over the cold math of the nomination contest will play out against a backdrop of two states that are likely to show once more divisions in the Democratic electorate that have been exposed in this two-person contest: Mr. Obama is expected to win the primary in Oregon, a largely white, affluent state with a fairly liberal Democratic base, while Mrs. Clinton is expected to win in Kentucky, which has a strong working-class vote.
Mrs. Clinton won a commanding victory last Tuesday in neighboring West Virginia, where racial considerations emerged as an unusually evident factor for some Democratic voters, according to exit polls. Both Clinton and Obama advisers say they are unsure if this will happen again in Kentucky, but they do not rule it out; Clinton advisers add that they believe race was a relatively small factor in the West Virginia vote.
While the Clinton campaign has aggressively pressed its popular-vote argument in Kentucky, Mrs. Clinton has also been decrying the media in Washington for all but crowning Mr. Obama as the Democratic nominee, as NBC’s Tim Russert did two weeks ago on the night of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. Clinton advisers say that pitting Mrs. Clinton and the voters, on one side, against Mr. Obama and Washington pundits will be a main theme of hers in the final primary contests.
Mrs. Clinton has sounded almost like a professor of political science on the trail, explaining how the popular vote should be calculated by her lights, as she did before an audience in Kentucky on Monday.
“I believe that with your help we will send a message to this country because right now more people have voted for me than have voted for my opponent,” she said. “More people have voted for me than for anybody ever running for president before. So we have a very close contest for votes, for delegates, and this is nowhere near over. None of us is going to have the number of delegates we’re going to need to get to the nomination, although I understand my opponent and his supporters are going to claim that.
“The fact is we have to include Michigan and Florida — we cannot claim that we have a nominee based on 48 states, particularly two states that are so important for us to win in the fall,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Robert Zimmerman, a New York media consultant who is a major fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton, said that the popular-vote argument was a good political framework for her candidacy because it emphasizes her electability in the fall. He also said it would be fair to count Michigan and Florida when Democrats are also counting the votes from state caucuses, which require people to participate at a certain time of the day, and therefore tend to leave shift workers and laborers at a disadvantage.
“The controversies concerning the inequities of the caucus system, the Michigan and Florida primaries and the focus on electability by both campaigns makes the issue of the popular vote critically important to superdelegates,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “It should be expected that any potential nominee wins the popular vote on the way to the nomination”
Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has declared his own lead in the national vote by factoring out the Michigan and Florida contests, since the Democratic Party did not approve them, none of the candidates campaigned there, and Mr. Obama took himself off the ballot in Michigan.
His advisers argue that Mrs. Clinton’s claim of a popular vote lead is intellectually dishonest — and note that it echoes recent statements by none other than Karl Rove, President Bush’s former political adviser, who has argued that Mrs. Clinton would be a stronger opponent this fall against Senator John McCain in the electoral college contest.
Court upholds part of child pornography law
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that leading someone to believe you have child pornography to show or exchange is a federal crime, brushing aside concerns that the law could apply to mainstream movies that depict adolescent sex, classic literature or even innocent e-mails that describe pictures of grandchildren.
The court, in a 7-2 decision, upheld a law aimed at cracking down on the flourishing online exchange of illicit images of children.
Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, said Justice Antonin Scalia's narrow reading of the law in his majority opinion should result in "considerably less damage than it might otherwise have done." But Bertin said aggressive prosecutors still could try to punish people for innocent activity and put them "through a terrible ordeal."
The ruling upheld part of a 2003 law that also prohibits possession of child pornography. It replaced an earlier law the court had struck down as unconstitutional.
The new law sets a five-year mandatory prison term for promoting, or pandering, child pornography. It does not require that someone actually possesses child pornography.
Opponents have said the law could apply to movies like "Traffic" or "Titanic" that depict adolescent sex or the marketing of other material that may not be pornography.
Scalia, in his opinion for the court, said the law takes a reasonable approach to the issue by applying it to situations where the purveyor of the material believes or wants a listener to believe that he has actual child pornography.
First Amendment protections do not apply to "offers to provide or requests to obtain child pornography," Scalia said.
Likewise, he said, the law does not cover "the sorts of sex scenes found in R-rated movies."
Justice David Souter, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissented. Souter said promotion of images that are not real children engaging in pornography still could be the basis for prosecution under the law. Possession of those images, on the other hand, may not be prosecuted, he said.
"I believe that maintaining the First Amendment protection of expression we have previously held to cover fake child pornography requires a limit to the law's criminalization of pandering proposals," Souter said.
Scalia said the law would not apply to a situation in which both sender and recipient were talking about virtual images, not real pictures.
Jay Sekulow, a conservative public interest lawyer who filed a brief on behalf of members of Congress in favor of the law, said the decision reflects the importance of trying to cut down on child pornography on the Internet.
"The court understood, perhaps for the first time, how difficult and troubling the proliferation of online pornography is," said Sekulow, of the American Center for Law and Justice.
The case came to the Supreme Court after the 11th U.S. Circuit of Appeals struck down the provision in the 2003 law. The Atlanta-based court said it makes a crime out of merely talking about illegal images or possessing innocent material that someone else might believe was pornographic.
In the appeals court's view, the law could apply to an e-mail sent by a grandparent and entitled "Good pics of kids in bed," showing grandchildren dressed in pajamas.
But Scalia said the appeals court interpretation was unreasonable. "The prosecutions would be thrown out at the threshold," he said.
In 2002, the court struck down key provisions of a 1996 child pornography law because they called into question legitimate educational, scientific or artistic depictions of youthful sex.
Congress responded the next year with the PROTECT Act, which contains the provision that was challenged in the current case.
Authorities arrested Michael Williams in an undercover operation aimed at fighting child exploitation on the Internet. A Secret Service agent engaged Williams in an Internet chat room, where they swapped non-pornographic photographs. Williams advertised himself as "Dad of toddler has 'good' pics of her an me for swap of your toddler pics, or live cam."
After the initial photo exchange, Williams allegedly posted seven images of actual minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct. Agents who executed a search warrant found 22 child pornography images on Williams' home computer.
Williams also was convicted of possession of child pornography. That conviction, and the resulting five-year prison term, was not challenged.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Daily News
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China: Quake death toll could reach 50,000
As the massive military-led recovery operation inched farther into regions cut off by Monday's quake, the government sought to enlist the public's help with an appeal for everything from hammers to cranes and, in a turnabout, began accepting foreign aid missions, the first from regional rival Japan.
Millions of survivors left homeless or too terrified to go indoors faced their fourth night under tarpaulins, tents or nothing at all as workers patched roads and cleared debris to reach more outlying towns in the disaster zone.
Health officials said there have been no outbreaks of disease so far, with workers rushing to inoculate survivors against disease, supply them with drinking water, and find ways to dispose of an overwhelming number of corpses.
"There are still bodies in the hills, and pits are being dug to bury them," said Zhao Xiaoli, a nurse in the ruined town of Hanwang. "There's no way to bring them down. It's too dangerous."
Troops in the town of Luoshui in a quake-ravaged area used a mechanical shovel to dig a pit on a hilltop. Two bodies wrapped in white sheets lay beside it. Down the hill sat four mounds of lime.
In a sign of nervousness, 50 troops lined the road outside Luoshui. Five farmers watched them dig the burial pit, after performing brief funerary rites. Local police detained an Associated Press reporter and photographer who took photos of the scene, holding them in a government compound for 3 1/2 hours before releasing them without explanation.
Across the quake zone in Dujiangyan, troops in face masks collected corpses and loaded them onto a flatbed truck. Thick black smoke streamed from the twin chimneys of the town's crematorium.
Fears about damage to a major dam in the quake zone appeared to ease. The Zipingpu dam had reportedly suffered cracks from the disaster, but there was no repair work or extra security at the dam when it was reached Thursday by an AP photographer, indicating the threat to the structure had likely passed.
People trying to hike into Wenchuan walked on top of the dam as water spilled from an outlet, lowering levels in the reservoir and alleviating pressure on the dam.
Just behind the dam, soldiers set up a staging area preparing speed boats to lower into the reservoir and ferry soldiers in lifejackets, engineers and medical staff up river to Yingxiu, a town flattened by the quake.
The government says "the dam will hold, but then the longer-term question is what to do with it — to keep it or dismantle it," said Andrew Mertha of Washington University in St. Louis, author of a book on Chinese dams, "China's Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change,"
The emergency headquarters of the State Council, China's Cabinet, said the confirmed death toll had reached 19,509 — up more than 4,500 from the day before. The council said deaths could rise to 50,000, state media reported.
The provincial government said more than 12,300 remained buried and another 102,100 were injured in Sichuan, where the quake was centered.
Experts said hope was quickly fading for anyone still caught in the wreckage of homes, schools, offices and factories that collapsed in the magnitude-7.9 quake, the most powerful in three decades in quake-prone China.
"Generally speaking, anyone buried in an earthquake can survive without water and food for three days," said Gu Linsheng, a researcher with Tsinghua University's Emergency Management Research Center. "After that, it's usually a miracle for anyone to survive."
Amazing survival stories did emerge, and were seized on by Chinese media whose blanket coverage has been dominated by images of carnage.
In Dujiangyan, a 22-year-old woman was pulled to safety after more than three days trapped under debris. Covered in dust and peering out through a small opening, she waved and was interviewed by state television as hard-hatted rescuers worked to free her.
"I was confident that you were coming to rescue me. I'm alive. I'm so happy," the unnamed woman said on CCTV.
Premier Wen Jiabao, who has been in the quake zone since Monday as the public face of a usually remote communist leadership, urged those helping the injured to keep up their efforts. Repeating a phrase that has become a government mantra this week, Vice Health Minister Gao Qiang said every effort would be made to find survivors.
"We will never give up hope," Gao told reporters in Beijing. "For every thread of hope, our efforts will increase a hundredfold. We will never give up."
With more than 130,000 soldiers and police mobilized in the relief effort, roads were cleared Thursday to two key areas that took the brunt of the quake, with workers making it to Wenchuan at the epicenter and also through to Beichuan county, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Communication cables were also reconnected to Wenchuan.
Power was restored to most of Sichuan for the first time since the quake, although Beichuan county remained without electricity, Xinhua said.
Much of the official publicity dwelled on efforts to reach the trapped but actual ground operations focused on delivering food and medical aid to survivors and disposing of the dead.
In Dujiangyan, on the road between the provincial capital of Chengdu and the epicenter, a dozen bodies lay on a sidewalk as police and militia pulverized rubble with cranes and back hoes. The bodies were later lifted onto a flatbed truck, joining some half-dozen corpses.
At the crematorium, some grieving relatives were rushed through funeral rites by harried workers. Scores of bodies lay on concrete in a waiting area — outnumbering the handful of chapels usually used in funerals.
Thick black smoke streamed from the crematorium's pair of chimneys as families cleaned and dressed the dead in funeral clothes, including fresh socks and sneakers for children.
Fireworks were set off every few minutes and families burned incense, candles and spirit money. Such traditions meant to send the dead peacefully into the afterlife were once banned by the communist authorities but have revived in recent years with free-market reforms and rising prosperity. Burial, which likewise the government once tried to stamp out, has become common in the countryside, although still difficult for people in crowded cities.
In an appeal posted on its Web site, the Ministry of Information Industry called on the Chinese to donate rescue equipment including hammers, shovels, demolition tools and rubber boats — 100 cranes were also needed, it said.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has also issued an emergency appeal for medical help, food, water and tents.
After initially refusing offers of foreign aid workers, China welcomed a Japanese rescue team. Made up of firefighters, police, coast guard and aid officials, the first half of the team arrived in Beijing on Thursday and would head to the disaster area Friday, Xinhua said.
Japan and China have been at odds for years over disputed borders, Japan's treatment of its wartime invasion of China, anti-Japanese protests in China, and general Japanese unease over Beijing's rapidly growing diplomatic, military and economic power. Leaders of the two countries met in Tokyo earlier this month to try to resolve their differences.
The Foreign Ministry said Russian, South Korean and Singaporean teams would join soon.
China had so far received international aid worth more than $100 million and materials worth more than $10 million, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a briefing. But it still needed supplies of tents, clothes, communication equipment, machines for disaster relief, and medicines, he said.
"The Chinese authorities have done a fantastic job mobilizing troops, but troops are not everything. You need specialist teams with equipment otherwise you're not going to find them," said John Holland, operations director of Rapid UK, a search and rescue charity with two decades of experience handling international disasters.
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Associated Press writers Audra Ang in Mianyang, Christopher Bodeen in Dujiangyan, and Cara Anna and Anita Chang in Beijing contributed to this report.