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China's disaster
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A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said Friday that a devastating earthquake in southwest China destroyed 436,000 properties leading to 4.8 million homeless, according to official figures. Rescue workers recover bodies from a collapsed building in Dujiangyan Friday as relatives watch. At a news conference in the U.S. capital, Wang Baodong said the disaster had led to 500 deaths outside Sichuan province, the hardest hit area. The official death toll now stands at 22,000, with 14,000 still buried. The suffering of Sichuan's inhabitants has been prolonged by repeated aftershocks, some 4,400 since the quake hit, according to Baodong. The latest aftershock hit quake-damaged areas Friday, triggering landslides, blocking roads, knocking out phone lines and burying vehicles, state-run media reported.
Baodong said that rescuers now have reached all 58 counties and towns in southwest China that were stricken by Monday's earthquake.Quoting from a statement by the president, he said, "Saving lives is still the top priority," and the nation has to make more efforts to treat the injured. Hu described the current situation as "the most crucial phase" of the rescue effort. "We must race against time to overcome all difficulties." The original magnitude 7.9 earthquake hit Sichuan Province the hardest, shattering communities, leveling dozens of schools and burying transportation routes with landslides.As frantic search-and-rescue efforts entered a fifth day, the official death toll issued by authorities in Sichuan Province now stood at 22,069, with 14,000 still buried, 159,000 injured and 4.8 million homeless, according to China's Xinhua state news agency. China's state council said Thursday that the number of dead could eventually top 50,000. Yet hope still emerged from amid the horror of the nation's worst disaster in recent years, with survivors pulled from the rubble four days after being buried in the rubble.


May 16, 2008 | 11:38 AM Comments  0 comments

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Myanmar's junta
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The official death toll from Cyclone Nargis has nearly doubled to almost 78,000 and another 56,000 people remain missing two weeks after the storm, Myanmar state television reported Friday. The United Nations, meanwhile, said that severe restrictions by Myanmar's military junta have left aid agencies largely in the dark about the extent of survivors' suffering. John Holmes, U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, will go to Myanmar on Sunday in an attempt to convince junta leaders to grant more access to U.N. relief workers and massively scale up aid efforts, said Amanda Pitt, a U.N. spokeswoman in Bangkok, Thailand.With pressure mounting, the military regime has invited foreign diplomats to tour the hard-hit Irrawaddy delta on Saturday, providing their first opportunity to personally view the devastation. The handful of foreign experts who have been allowed into the country have been restricted to Yangon, the former capital. The Red Cross fears the cyclone toll may be as high as 128,000; the U.N. estimates more than 100,000 died. The U.N. estimates 1.5 million to 2.5 million survivors are in desperate need of food, water, shelter and medical care. Aid groups have reached only 270,000 so far."The risk increases with each passing day," Pitt said, referring to the vulnerability of survivors to outbreaks of disease and other problems.


May 16, 2008 | 11:38 AM Comments  0 comments

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Bush Disapproval Rating
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A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president."No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup Poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president's disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark," said Keating Holland, CNN's polling director. "Bush's approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon [22 percent and 24 percent, respectively], but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s," Holland said. "The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 67 percent disapproval in January 1952."CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, "He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974."The poll also indicates that support for the war in Iraq has never been lower. Thirty percent of those questioned favored the war, while 68 percent opposed it."Americans are growing more pessimistic about the war," Holland said. "In January, nearly half believed that things were going well for the U.S. in Iraq; now that figure has dropped to 39 percent."The numbers on the Iraq war come on the five-year anniversary of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" moment on board the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, when he proclaimed that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."The record-low support for the war in a CNN poll could be one reason behind the president's unpopularity, but it probably is not the only one."Support for the war, the assessment of the economy and approval of Mr. Bush are all about the same -- bad," Schneider said.The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted by telephone from Monday through Wednesday among 1,008 adult Americans.The poll's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.


May 2, 2008 | 11:41 AM Comments  0 comments

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