World News joined 2

[OMEN]

Take one Pope, 1500 ministers and a racecourse full of the faithful, add 300 kilos of flour, 300 litres of water and 120 litres of wine, and what have you got?

Answer: holy communion for half a million people.

These are the logistics organisers are juggling with as they plan Pope Benedict XVI's huge July 20 mass at Sydney's Randwick racecourse, the final event of the church's week-long World Youth Day (WYD).

"Mass was not meant to be celebrated by quite so many people, so the challenges are great but not insurmountable," said Father Peter Williams, WYD director of liturgy, as he visited an inner Sydney bakehouse busy making one million communion hosts, or altar bread, for the event.

Half a million of the hosts will be used at the final mass, and the rest at other WYD events, including the opening mass celebrated by Sydney's Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal George Pell, which is expected to attract up to 180,000 people at Darling Harbour on July 15.

"We have doubled our production. We are now making 45,000 hosts a week to meet the July contract," said Rod Silber, business development manager for the Ozanam Bakehouse at Stanmore, a St Vincent de Paul Society operation providing supported employment for people with physical and mental disabilities.

"There is not usually a large market for communion hosts.

"It's something I can safely say will never happen again."

Bakehouse supervisor Aida Santos said the hosts were being made in plain, wholemeal and low gluten varieties, each 100,000 of them requiring some 30 kilos of flour and 30 litres of water.

Father Williams said bishops, priests and deacons would serve as ministers of communion at the mass, as well as commissioned laymen, seminarians and brothers and sisters from religious orders.

The Pope will administer holy communion to 24 young people he will confirm on the day.

The communion, planned to take 30 minutes, is so vast that many hosts will be "pre-consecrated" at other masses around Sydney.

Randwick will be divided into a grid system so that the hosts can be quickly ferried in 1,800 ciboria -- round metal communion bowls - to designated staging points and tents

.

AAP

[OMEN]

The Red Cross' first aid plane will fly into cyclone devastated Myanmar today as pressure builds on the reclusive Asian nation to open its borders to international aid.

The official death toll from the aftermath of the weekend's Cyclone Nagris stands at 22,980, but some experts fear that number could rise to 100,000.

Western countries, which have imposed tough sanctions against Burma over its human rights record, have been urging its military junta to urgently open its borders to help.

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said overnight that millions of dollars in assistance was waiting to be delivered and international disaster experts were on standby in nearby countries, ready to help, but they Burma is yet to give them visas.

"This is the kind of crisis which will only get worse without humanitarian assistance being made available from the international community," she said.

Some aid agencies with an established relationship with the Burmese government, such as the Red Cross and CARE Australia, have been able to begin work in the country.

Red Cross and Red Crescent, John Sparrow, said the organisation's first aid plane loaded with supplies would be flying from Malaysia into Burma today, and hoped it would be the first of many.

"We can't move quickly enough. We are a very happy though that later today our time we can get our first plane into Myanmar and we'll be taking shelter materials from Kuala Lumpur," Mr Sparrow told the Australian Nine Network this morning.

"So there are some positives. Of course we need to move much faster, there is no doubt about that. I'm looking right now at the positives."

But Mr Sparrow would not comment on the military regime's refusal to allow the freer flow of foreign aid.

"I think also it is time to be saying, for us right now, thank you for the go ahead on that first flight that's coming up today," Mr Sparrow said.

"For us it's a test run - for procedures, for getting a more active logistics pipeline going.

"We want to build on that. That's where we should be putting the emphasis right now."

CARE Australia spokesman Robert Yallop said it was not unusual for there to be a delay in aid getting into areas affected by major disasters, including New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

"In any disaster of this magnitude, no matter which government you are dealing with, it takes time to figure out the scale and the scope and the proportion," he told the Nine Network.

He said the challenge in Myanmar was enormous.

"It takes some time for the administrative arrangements, for the support and so on to be put in place," he told the Nine Network.

"CARE is making arrangements with the United Nations and the government authorities to bring in relief supplies within the next couple of days.

"But the real concern that we all have is to focus on how we get support and assistance to those in need."

He said he believed a UN relief flight from Italy was on its way to Rangoon.

"I have full confidence that the United Nations, working with the government authorities, will make the appropriate arrangements to get staff and to get materials and everything else in that is required for this relief effort.

He said relief was getting through to victims.

"Today we will be providing food and water to 10,000 people. In the coming days we will be providing assistance to another 50,000 people down in the delta

"That was given full support by the ministry of social welfare yesterday when our country director met with them.

"It is frustrating ... but I have complete optimism that it will happen and will happen in a way that is appropriate to the situation."

- AAP

[OMEN]

Tonga is to spend more than $4 million - equivalent to a third of New Zealand's annual aid vote to the kingdom - on the July coronation of ageing bachelor King George Tupou V.

Details are due to be announced today by the Palace Office in Nuku'alofa, but leaks reveal the big bash is to have a celebrity guest list including Sir Elton John and Sir Mick Jagger.

It will also feature three balls: one for "very very important people", another for "very important people" and another for the rest who do not make the cut.

London tailors have designed the king's robes and a new sceptre in gold has been cast for the occasion. It is said to be similar to the Queen's. The king has reportedly given exclusive broadcasting rights to the BBC.

The Tongan Government is to keep its state of emergency in place fearing a repeat of the November 2006 riots that caused $86 million worth of damage to the capital.

The king, who turned 60 last Sunday, assumed the title in September 2006 on the death in Auckland of his father, Taufa'ahau Tupou IV. Riots broke out five weeks later with the commercial businesses owned by the current king targeted.

The Tongan Government delayed plans to hold the coronation last year, fearing public reaction to the extravagance.

Few public details are known yet of the coronation, which will run from July 30 to August 3. No official budget has been released, but Tongan Government sources say they expect it to run between T$5 million to T$6 million (NZ$4 million). Other sources say the cost could climb to T$10 million.

No aid money is expected to be spent. New Zealand aid to Tonga for the current financial year is worth NZ$11.5 million.

As crown prince, the king was seen as an unpopular dilettante who collected toy soldiers and dressed up in military uniforms.

He became a multimillionaire by taking over state businesses, including electricity generation, mobile telephone services, Internet domain name registration and the Royal brewery.

The dominion Post

[OMEN]

Brig.-Gen. Dennis Thompson, the next commander of Canadian troops in Afghanistan, arrives at Kandahar airfield on Wednesday.
The next commander of Canadian troops in Afghanistan arrived in Kandahar on Wednesday, saying he believes the mission will take on a different flavour during his nine-month tour.

Brig.-Gen. Dennis Thompson is replacing current commander Brig.-Gen. Guy Laroche. The official handover will take place soon, although a date hasn't been specified.

Thompson said evolving conditions in the war-torn region mean there will be a greater emphasis on the civilian side of development and reconstruction.

Still, he said, there will still be a military aspect and he doesn't expect the army will be adopting a defensive posture just because the focus is shifting.

"I think there will be a change in emphasis, but I'm not prepared to say how much that will be [because] there are other players here," Thompson said, referring to the Taliban.

Canada's Conservative government is in the process of refocusing the mission and setting down objectives to be achieved before Canada's military mission ends in 2011.

Thompson will be laying the groundwork for refocusing the mission, and for a civilian administration at the provincial reconstruction base, which Canada operates in the city of Kandahar.
Thompson coped with losses while leading in Petawawa

Thompson is the former commander of the 2nd Canadian Mechanized Brigade at CFB Petawawa in Ontario, a base that has suffered a lot of casualties, and he says that aspect of loss personalizes this assignment for him.

"You tend to know an awful lot of people that are either injured or killed," he said.

"It sharpens your focus and it makes you want to do everything you can to mitigate all of those risks."

Thompson arrived at Kandahar airfield one day after a Canadian soldier was killed in an ambush in the Pashmul region outside Kandahar city. Cpl. Michael Starker was killed while on patrol with his Civil-Military Co-operation unit, which reaches out to local Afghan villages and serves as a bridge to the community.

Despite the killing, Laroche said yesterday that Kandahar province is safer than when he took over almost 10 months ago.

He said the area where Starker was killed on foot patrol was an area Canadians couldn't enter a year ago.

CBC

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[JohnCenaFan28]

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[OMEN]

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said he had requested talks with senior Myanmar general Than Shwe over a humanitarian crisis in the country.

In a separate statement issued by his office at the UN headquarters, Ban suggested that it might be "prudent" for Myanmar's government to postpone a referendum on a military-drafted constitution because of the cyclone that has devastated the country.

The United Nations estimates 1.5 million people have been "severely affected" by the cyclone that swept through Myanmar.

The United States has expressed outrage at the delays in allowing in aid.

"We're outraged by the slowness of the response of the government of Burma (Myanmar) to welcome and accept assistance," US Ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, told reporters.

"It's clear that the government's ability to deal with the situation, which is catastrophic, is limited."

In Myanmar, desperate survivors cried out for aid nearly a week after 100,000 people were feared killed by Cyclone Nargis.

The United States is awaiting approval to start military aid flights. The UN food agency and Red Cross/Red Crescent said they had finally started flying in emergency relief supplies after foot-dragging by the military junta.

US ambassador Eric John told a news conference in Bangkok earlier that the United States and Thailand thought the Myanmar generals had agreed to let a US military cargo plane fly in supplies to the reclusive southeast Asian country.

But that turned out to be premature.

"We don't have permission yet for the C-130 to go in, but I emphasize 'yet'" John said.

Approval for such a flight would be significant, given the huge distrust and acrimony between the former Burma's generals and Washington, which has imposed tough sanctions to try to end 46 years of unbroken military rule.

Witnesses have seen little evidence of a relief effort under way in the hard-hit Irrawaddy delta region.

"We'll starve to death if nothing is sent to us," said Zaw Win, a 32-year-old fisherman who waded through floating corpses to find a boat for the two-hour journey to Bogalay, a town where the government said 10,000 people were killed.

AID PLANES ARRIVE

The storm pulverized the delta on Saturday with 190 km winds followed by a massive 12 ft wave that caused most of the casualties and damage, virtually destroying some villages. It was the worst cyclone in Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people were killed in neighboring Bangladesh.

The United Nations estimated at least 1.5 million people in Myanmar have been "severely affected", Holmes said. He was "disappointed" with the lack of progress being made in getting UN aid in, he said.

State television on Thursday night did not give an update of the death toll, which stood at 22,980 with 42,119 missing as of Tuesday. Diplomats and disaster experts said the real figure is likely to be much higher.

"The information that we're receiving indicates that there may well be over 100,000 deaths in the delta area," said Shari Villarosa, charge d'affaires of the US embassy in Myanmar.

About 1 million were left homeless.

UN officials who had earlier complained the generals were putting up obstacles to an emergency airlift, said a half-dozen cargo planes had been allowed to land at Yangon airport.

The Red Cross/Red Crescent confirmed its first aid plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, carrying six tonnes of shelter materials.

World Food spokesman Paul Risley said aid agencies normally expect to fly in experts and supplies within 48 hours of a disaster, but nearly a week after this cyclone, few have been able to send reinforcements into Myanmar.

France suggested invoking a UN "responsibility to protect" to deliver aid to Myanmar without the government's approval, but its bid to make the Security Council take a stand was rebuffed on Wednesday by China, Vietnam, South Africa and Russia.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called his Myanmar counterpart Nyan Win on Thursday and urged him to make it possible for international aid workers and relief organisation to reach the areas hit by the cyclone.

Some opponents accuse the junta of stalling because they do not want an influx of foreigners into the countryside during Saturday's referendum on an army-drafted constitution that looks set to cement the military's grip on power.

Medicins sans Frontieres, which has 1,238 people in Myanmar, said it was ferrying aid into the delta via trucks and boats.

"We are focusing on those still alive; 50 percent of them have wounds and they are infected," MSF official Frank Smithius in Myanmar told Australian radio. "Because of the winds and high water, people got smashed around."

Jean-Michel Grand, executive director of Action contra la Faim in London, said the logistical obstacles were formidable.

"The roads are very poor or destroyed, and in many cases there were no roads before. Everybody's looking at boats as an alternative. It's going to be a massive logistics challenge.

Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej failed to reach Myanmar's generals on Thursday after US President George W. Bush asked him to intervene over the aid delays.

"We couldn't reach them because the communication towers have been damaged," government spokesman Wichianchot Sukchotrat said.

Amid the death and destruction, life asserted itself. Than Win, who lost seven of her 10 children to Nargis gave birth on Wednesday to a boy, she named "First Love".

"After what happened, this is a beautiful present," she said, lying on a wooden table in one of the few houses left standing in Bogalay town.

reuters

[OMEN]

Murder squad detectives have been called in to investigate the circumstances in which a man died in an explosion which destroyed a house in north London, police said.

The body of the man, who has not yet been identified, was discovered in the rubble of the house in Harrow late on Wednesday.

Two other people, a man and a woman, were hurt and have been taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries. The man had head injuries and the woman burns.

Police said they had originally been called to reports of a gas explosion.

"The cause of the explosion has yet to be determined, however it is being treated as suspicious at this early stage," police said, adding that officers from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command had been sent to the scene.

London Fire Brigade said in a statement that two houses on the road had collapsed following the explosion.

Residents said the blast could be heard some distance away.

"I heard an enormous explosion – bricks and shrapnel sort of sent into the house and through the windows – doors blown through, screams," neighbour Dan Llewelleyn-Hall told the BBC.

Harrow Council said it had provided accommodation for 29 people after nearby houses were evacuated. It was unlikely residents would be able to return home until Friday.

reuters

[OMEN]

A man seized by Iraqi forces is not the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, a senior US military official said, following an announcement by several Iraqi officials that Abu Ayyub al-Masri had been captured.

Iraqi security sources had already begun to cast doubt on the earlier announcement that Masri, an Egyptian also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, had been captured in an operation in Mosul on Wednesday. One senior security source in Mosul said the man seized in that raid was an Iraqi.

"He has not been detained," the US military official told Reuters, without giving further details.

It is not the first time there has been confusion over the fate of Masri. Iraq's Interior Ministry said a year ago he had been killed, but soon afterwards Sunni Islamist al Qaeda released an audio tape purportedly from him.

The detention of Masri would have been another blow for al Qaeda, which has been forced to regroup in northern Iraq after a wave of US military assaults in the past year.

Earlier, Interior Ministry spokesman Major-General Abdul-Karim Khalaf said a detained associate of Masri took Iraqi security forces late on Wednesday to where the al Qaeda leader was hiding.

After being detained, the man confessed to being the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, he said.

Duraid Kashmula, the governor of Nineveh province of which Mosul is the capital, had told Reuters he was certain the detained man was Masri.

Al Qaeda in Iraq was headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi until he was killed in a US air strike in June 2006. His successor, Masri, was Zarqawi's close associate, and has a US bounty of $US5 million ($NZ6.55 million) on his head.

US officials blame al Qaeda in Iraq for most big bombings in the country, including an attack on a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that set off a wave of sectarian killings that nearly tipped Iraq into all-out civil war.

A build-up of US troops last year allowed the military to conduct a series of offensives against the group. The emergence of Sunni Arab tribal security units also helped to provide intelligence on al Qaeda activities.

The result was that al Qaeda has largely been pushed out of Baghdad and its former stronghold in the western province of Anbar to areas in northern Iraq, such as Mosul.

[I]Reuters[/

I]

[OMEN]

Australian police will continue to interview the mother of a five-month-old baby who died after being left alone in a car in Toowoomba in Queensland.

The mother left the girl in a parked car on Ramsay Street as she picked up her other children from St Thomas More's Catholic Primary School.

When the mother returned to the vehicle about 3.30pm (AEST), she discovered the baby dead inside her rear seat capsule.

It is not yet known how long the baby was left in the car, but it is believed school finished at 3pm.

Police had hoped a post-mortem examination would be conducted today, but that has now been pushed back to tomorrow.

Detectives interviewed the mother last night, and will speak to her again today along with other family members, a police spokeswoman said.

"The family is obviously distraught and is receiving support," the spokeswoman said.

Queensland Child Safety Minister Margaret Keech said her thoughts went out to the parents.

"The death of the child in Toowoomba is an absolute tragedy for all concerned," Ms Keech told reporters.

"My heart really does go out to the parents in particular.

"I'm advised by police that they are continuing their investigations and as a matter of course the department of child safety will investigate and support the police in their investigation."

Counsellors are at the school and teachers have been briefed on how to deal with students' questions.

AAP

[OMEN]

DON'T MENTION THE CYCLONE: Myanmar's military junta is pushing ahead with plans for a referendum, despite widespread damage from a recent cyclone.
Myanmar's junta is urging citizens to do their patriotic duty and vote for an army-drafted constitution, without mentioning the 1.5 million people clinging to survival a week after a devastating cyclone.

The constitution is a key step in the junta's seven-point "roadmap to democracy", which is meant to culminate in multi-party elections in 2010 and bring to an end nearly five decades of military rule in the Southeast Asian country.

It has been widely derided by the opposition and Western governments as a blueprint for the generals cementing a grip on the power they first seized in a 1962 coup.

"If you are patriotic and you love your nation you must give an affirmative vote," said one message broadcast on state-run MRTV on Friday.

Accompanying the appeals were performances by popular singers, actors and musicians and slogans such as "the approval of the draft constitution is the responsibility of every citizen, so go to the polling booth and approve the constitution."

The government announced on Tuesday it would go ahead with the vote in parts of the country not affected by Cyclone Nargis, but postponed it by two weeks to May 24 in the hardest-hit Irrawaddy delta.

Diplomats and disaster experts said the death toll is likely to rise to 100,000 people and the United Nations says 1.5 million people have been "severely affected".

Myanmar state-run radio and TV did not give an update on Friday of the official toll, which stood at 22,980 killed with 42,119 missing as of Tuesday.

While the military has appealed for outside help for disaster victims, it has been reluctant to allow a full-scale international relief effort, delaying the approval of visas and landing rights for aircraft carrying urgently needed supplies.

Some critics accuse the junta of stalling because they do not want an influx of foreigners into the countryside during Saturday's referendum.

The constitution gives the military an automatic 25 per cent of seats in parliament, control of key ministries and right to suspend the constitution at will.

Reuters

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