All governments suck; however, I'm tired of the journalistic style and selectivity of AmeriKa's MSM, readers. I'm just sick and tired of it.
"Burma will seek up to $11.7 billion in relief aid; Specialists place damage far lower"
WASHINGTON - Burma's military junta will seek up to $11.7 billion in reconstruction aid at a donor conference today in Rangoon, raising fears among human rights activists and Western governments that Tropical Cyclone Nargis could become a diplomatic and financial windfall for the reclusive regime.
Burma has a gross domestic product of about $15 billion, and Burma officials have not indicated how they reached their damage assessment when hundreds of thousands of victims of the May 2-3 cyclone have not received assistance.
But the nation of about 55 million people is rich in natural resources, with major Asian regional players such as China, Japan, India, and Thailand long battling for access and influence.
Bot not the U.S., of course! Pffffftttt!!!!
Meanwhile, international financial institutions such as the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank - which have not made loans to Burma for decades - issued statements last week suggesting that reconstruction aid could once again flow to the nation....
The donor conference, organized by the United Nations and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, will be held on the same day the house arrest of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi expires. The military, which refused to recognize the landslide victory of her party in 1990, is expected to renew her detention, as it has annually for the past five years.
For those who don't know, she is CIA!!!
"The junta has skillfully used ASEAN and the UN to set up a bidding war among the major powers that compete with each other," said Michael Green, President Bush's senior director for Asia affairs on the National Security Council until 2006. The weekend conference could prove "a real turning point," he said.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband of Britain acknowledged the risks in an interview. "We are not going to allow this to become a ramp by which the regime resuscitates or reinforces its political position," he said.
He should have added: "And we will ignore the plight of Palestinians, too!"
Burma's financial situation is remarkably opaque. Though much of the country is desperately poor, the military junta has enriched itself with revenue from natural gas fields that bring in about $2 billion a year, boosting the country's reserves to $3.5 billion, analysts said.
Now, WHAT COUNTRY is that REMINDING ME OF?
U.SA., U.S.A., U.S.A!
The government has assigned 43 companies - many with close ties to the military - to receive lucrative reconstruction contracts, according to a report in Irrawaddy, a Thai magazine that focuses on Burma.
Burma's Bechtels, huh?
Good thing Bush's government didn't do the sane thing with Katrina, huh?
I'm kind of tired with the bias, readers.
Sean Turnell, a professor at Macquarie University in Australia and a specialist on Burma's economy, said the government exploits the tremendous gap between the official and unofficial exchange rates to hide the $200 million a month in revenue it receives from the gas fields. He estimated that the cyclone caused $3 billion in damage, or about 20 percent of the GDP.
"But Burma doesn't need money, it does not need cash. What it needs is the very thing it is refusing: expertise," Turnell said. "If the regime had the will to reconstruct the delta, it has the cash."
While I'm over there (and because it is all on the same page):
"YINGXIU, China (AP) - China warned Saturday that the death toll from a massive earthquake two weeks ago could take a major leap and pass 80,000, suggesting the government may be giving up hope of finding more survivors....
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made a brief visit Saturday to one of the hardest-hit towns, Yingxiu - a helicopter ride that offered a rare bird's-eye views of the destruction wrought by the 7.9-magnitude quake on May 12.
I don't recall him or Annan coming to the U.S. and giving it a once over after Katrina.
And hows does helicoptering in help the environment?
Burning all that fuel serves a purpose?
The mountains in central Sichuan province showed huge tracks of naked earth from landslides. Layers of mud covered fields. Rivers churned brown. Yingxiu itself was largely piles of rubble, and the buildings left standing had caved in, giving the surreal impression that they had melted.
The State Council, China's Cabinet, said Saturday the latest confirmed death toll for the quake - China's biggest disaster in three decades - was 60,560, with 26,221 people still missing.
Premier Wen Jiabao, on a return visit to the quake zone to accompany Ban, warned the toll could go much higher, as the number of missing are added to the number of dead.
Wen said the government's focus had shifted from rescue to rebuilding.
"Our priority now is to resettle the affected people and to make plans for post-quake reconstruction.''
About 15 minutes before Wen started talking, yet another minor aftershock rumbled.
Ban, who came to China directly from cyclone-stricken Myanmar, promised the U.N. would help with reconstruction and that it was waiting for China's assessment of what was needed.
"If we work hard, we can overcome this,'' Ban said, with Wen standing at his side. "The whole world stands behind you and supports you.''
Reconstruction won't be easy. The quake destroyed more than 15 million homes, Wen said. He said the government needed 900,000 tents and urged Chinese manufacturers to make 30,000 a day.As the government grappled with the task of rebuilding - a process Sichuan Vice Governor Li Chengyun has said could take three years - it also watched for a variety of secondary disasters.
Experts searched for 15 radiation sources buried in the rubble, although they said there were no leaks or public health risk.
Meanwhile, some 10,000 medical workers have been dispatched to prevent disease outbreaks, but no epidemics had been reported so far.
The premier also promised that China would continue its openness about the quake, in which the government has accepted foreign relief teams and allowed Chinese media to report in relative depth on the disaster."
That's the way my paper played it.
"Parents focus anger on poor maintenance of school buildings"
DUJIANGYAN, China - The earthquake's destruction of Xinjian Primary School was swift and complete. Hundreds of children were crushed as the floors collapsed in a deluge of falling bricks and concrete. Days later, as curiosity seekers came with video cameras and as parents came to grieve, the four-story school was no more than rubble.
In contrast, none of the nearby buildings were badly damaged. A separate kindergarten less than 20 feet away survived with barely a crack. An adjacent 10-story hotel stood largely undisturbed. And another local primary school, Beijie, a "key" school catering to children of the elite, was in such good condition that local officials were using it as a refugee center.
"This is not a natural disaster," said Ren Yongchang, whose 9-year-old son died inside the destroyed school. His hands were covered in plaster dust as he stood beside the rubble, shouting and weeping as he grabbed the exposed steel rebar of a broken concrete column. "This is not good steel. It doesn't meet standards. They stole our children."
I wonder if it was WTC Steel.
There is no official figure on how many children died at Xinjian Primary School, nor on how many died at scores of other schools that collapsed in the powerful May 12 earthquake in Sichuan province. But the number of student deaths seems likely to exceed 10,000 and could be much higher.
The staggering figure has become a simmering controversy in China as grieving parents say their children might have lived had the schools been better built....
Nothing is more central to the social contract in China than schools. Parents sacrifice and "eat bitter" so their children can get educations that lead to better lives. But the families who sent their children to Xinjian are neither wealthy nor well connected. They are among the hundreds of millions still struggling to benefit from China's economic rise. Many lost their jobs when a local cement plant shut down.
Angry parents at several destroyed schools are now staging demonstrations. On Wednesday, more than 200 Xinjian parents demonstrated at the temporary tents used by Dujiangyan's education bureau, demanding an investigation and accusing officials of corruption and negligence.
One of the parents, Li Wei, said his 11-year-old son was one of 54 students who died in a class of 60 fifth-graders. He said education officials told the demonstrating parents that the bureau had reported safety concerns to municipal leaders in the past. But their complaints were ignored.
"We want to bring justice for our children," one father said the day before the protest. "We want the local officials to pay the price."