Thousands homeless after Myanmar cyclone

[dArKeR]

Yangon - The death toll from May's cyclone which devastated Myanmar's west coast has risen to 220 with 14 000 people homeless, the Red Cross said Thursday ahead of launching an emergency appeal for relief aid.

"There are 220 people dead," Uma Narayanan, acting head of delegation of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Yangon, said, citing figures reported to the agency by government officials.

She added that an "unknown" number of people were missing from the worst cyclone to hit the coastal communities of Rakhine state in nearly 40 years.

http://iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=qw1086260570136B255&set_id=1

[Kool Kitty]

1. This is awful.

While the newsmodels' time is taken up with huge, "in-depth" reports about Scott Petersen's trial and reality TV, awful things continue to happen to the rest of the world with terrible regularity. Where was the report about this on any of our 24-hour news channels? I hope these people get help fast. (I'm not saying that we don't care about these disasters, I'm saying that maybe the news networks should start to report on them more and give us less junk, like who won the latest round of "American Idol", you know?) Anyway, I'm sorry if I sound too preachy or self-righteous, I'm glad you posted this.

[dArKeR]

2. I was overseas when survival, reality, idol... shows started. I'm sure

glab for that. Even when I come back for visits or now back for a long while, I've never once watched 1 second of them.

I did hear that 1400 jurors were interviewed for Petersen's trial. It really seems to me that they're all out for publicity. At any rate it sure cost us a lot of tax dollars.