World News joined 2

[JohnCenaFan28]

Thanks for the story.

[JohnCenaFan28]

I wouldn't want to see him ever again, let alone hear his name. I hope she enjoys what's left of her life.

[OMEN]

FORLORN SCENE: Rescue workers search the rubble of a destroyed building in Dujiangyan City.
Heavy storms and wrecked roads hampered efforts to reach areas hardest-hit by China's worst earthquake in three decades as official death toll estimates approached 12,000.

State media reports indicated that the number of dead was likely to soar, with Xinhua news agency saying 10,000 people were buried in the Mianzhu area of Sichuan province and that rescue troops had arrived for the first time at Wenchuan county, the epicentre of the quake.

Death tolls in different areas are official estimates, given lack of access to worst-hit areas and inability to make accurate body counts under collapsed buildings.

"So far the death toll from the earthquake has reached 11,921," Wang Zhenyao, head of the Civil Affairs Ministry's disaster relief department, told a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday.

A strong aftershock rocked Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, on Tuesday afternoon, one of several over the last day.

"Office workers in downtown Chengdu took the streets again after the quake," Xinhua said.

"Many said it was the strongest aftershock" since Monday's quake.

Premier Wen Jiabao, visiting Sichuan, ordered troops to clear roads to Wenchuan, a hilly area about 100km from the provincial capital Chengdu.

Damage from Monday's 7.9 magnitude quake left the area, about 1600km southwest of Beijing, completely cut off.

But rain and thick clouds over a province famous for its giant panda reserves meant that military helicopters dispatched to the area could not yet land. Parachutists belonging to the People's Liberation Army cancelled a rescue drop due to heavy storms, Xinhua said.

State television showed highways buckled and caved in from the quake and massive rockslides lining the roads.

In Dujiangyan – about midway between Chengdu and the epicentre – there was devastation, with buildings reduced to rubble and bodies in the streets, some only partially covered.

Troops and ambulances thronged the streets, and military trucks able to do heavy lifting had arrived. But many residents simply stood beside their wrecked homes, cradling possessions in their arms, and many huddled in relief tents under heavy rain.

"At least 60 or 70 old people lived there, as well as children," said a hospital worker surnamed Huo, gesturing to a building in ruins. Mattresses and household objects could be seen poking through the rubble.

"How could they survive that?" she asked.

Rescuers had worked frantically through the night, pulling bodies from homes, schools, factories and hospitals demolished by the quake, which rolled from Sichuan across much of China.

In the same city, about 900 teenagers were buried under a collapsed three-storey school building. Premier Wen bowed three times in grief before some of the first 50 bodies pulled out, Xinhua reported.

"Not one minute can be wasted," said Wen, a trained geologist.

"One minute, one second could mean a child's life."

Frantic relatives tried to push past a line of soldiers surrounding the school, desperate for news of their children.

"We're still pulling out people alive, but many, many have died," said one medical worker.

At a second school in Dujiangyan, fewer than 100 of 420 students survived, Xinhua reported.

The initial tremor, which the United States Geological Survey upgraded to magnitude 7.9 from 7.8, was followed by a series of aftershocks, which shook the area through the night.

"Some are still very strong," said a Dujiangyan resident.

"We have put up tents outside to sleep in."

A group of about 15 British tourists were out of reach near the epicentre, likely in Wolong, Xinhua reported. China said that there had been no reports of foreign casualties as of midday (4pm NZT).

China's benchmark stock index traded down after the quake, which forced suspension of trading in the shares of 66 companies.

However, analysts said they did not expect a major economic impact from the disaster though it could mean supply shortages that fuel inflation, already at a near 12-year high.

China's Communist Party leadership announced that coping with the devastating quake and ensuring that it did not threaten social stability were now the government's priorities.

But bloggers swapped information and opinions on the quake, from whether it could have been predicted to the quality of construction – and the reason for the high number of deaths of schoolchildren.

The Health Ministry issued an urgent appeal for blood and the Ministry of Railways imposed a state of emergency for trains linking Sichuan with other provinces.

"Time is life," said an official announcement from the Communist Party Standing Committee.

The Sichuan quake was the worst to hit China since the 1976 Tangshan tremor in northeastern China where up to 300,000 died. Then, unlike now, the Communist Party kept a tight lid on information about the extent of the disaster.

Neighbouring areas were also affected, with 189 reported dead in the northwestern province of Gansu, 92 in Shaanxi province and school collapses in the municipality of Chongqing.

In Gansu, the quake caused a train to derail, spilling petrol tanks and sparking a fire, Xinhua reported. In Sichuan's Shifang, where the quake sparked a major leak of liquid ammonia, about 600 people died and as many as 2300 remained buried, Xinhua said.

Reuters

[OMEN]

Hillary Clinton appeared headed to a big West Virginia victory over front-runner Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential race, although it could be too late to turn around her faltering White House bid.

Clinton has an advantage of at least 20 points in most opinion polls in West Virginia, a bastion of the white working-class voters who have become her strongest supporters in the gruelling battle for the Democratic nomination.

But Obama retains a nearly insurmountable advantage in delegates who will select the nominee at the party convention in August. A big win in West Virginia for the cash-strapped Clinton will make barely a dent in Obama's advantage.

West Virginia has just 28 delegates at stake in Tuesday's voting, which ends at 7.30pm Tuesday (11.30am Wednesday NZT). Results are expected shortly afterward.

Clinton, a New York senator who has vowed to keep fighting despite her dwindling prospects and a mounting campaign debt, spent the day in West Virginia on Monday and showed no sign she was ready to step aside so Obama could focus on a November match-up with Republican John McCain.

"West Virginia is a real indicator of which way the political winds are going to go," she said at a rally in Logan, West Virginia. Clinton said her wins in crucial big states like Ohio and Pennsylvania made her a better choice against McCain.

"I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe that I could be the best president for West Virginia and America, and that I was the stronger candidate to take on John McCain in the fall," she said.

Obama, already looking to November, made a quick appearance in West Virginia on Monday and announced plans to visit general election battlegrounds Missouri, Michigan and Florida over the next week.

"The Democrats are going to unify, and we're trying to get some independents and we're trying to get some Republicans," Obama said at an evening rally in Louisville, Kentucky, which holds a nominating contest on May 20.

Despite calls from some Democratic officials for Clinton to quit, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll found nearly two-thirds of national Democrats say there is no rush for Clinton to get out of the race.

Even 42 per cent of Obama's supporters said Clinton should remain to the end of voting on June 3, rejecting the idea that a prolonged race would hurt the party. The poll found 85 per cent of Democrats were confident the party would come together once it settled on a nominee.

After West Virginia, five more contests remain in the Democratic nominating battle with a combined 189 delegates at stake. Oregon and Kentucky vote on May 20, while Puerto Rico votes on June 1 and Montana and South Dakota vote on June 3.

An MSNBC count gives Obama 1869 delegates to Clinton's 1703, leaving him 156 short of the 2025 needed to clinch the nomination. But neither can win without help from superdelegates – nearly 800 party officials who are free to back any candidate.

Obama has been gaining ground among superdelegates for weeks. He picked up four more on Monday and now has a narrow lead over Clinton among superdelegates, with less than 250 still uncommitted.

Reuters

[OMEN]

Potatoes are not traditionally high on the menu for Bangladesh's 140 million people, but a surge in rice and wheat prices has prompted the government to popularise the humble spud as a substitute food.

"Think potato, grow potato and eat potato," was the main slogan of a three-day potato festival in Dhaka last week.

Bangladesh's government is waging a campaign to convince millions of Bangladeshis to embrace potatoes as a staple food due to record high rice and wheat prices and an unusually good crop of potatoes that will need to be eaten quickly before they rot.

Since grain prices soared, about a third of Bangladeshis have had to skip one or two meals a day because they could not afford to buy rice which forms the bulk of their diet.

One kilo of rice has doubled in price over the past year and now costs 40 taka ($NZ0.76), almost half the daily wage of a factory worker. Wheat costs 44 taka for a kilo, up 150 per cent. By contrast, one kilo of potatoes sells at 13 taka in the capital, and far less in the countryside.

Potatoes are native to Latin America but were brought to South Asia from Europe sometime in the 18th century where they are mostly eaten as a vegetable ingredient in dishes such as curry.

Although an excellent carbohydrate substitute to rice, it is hard to convince Asians, who often don't regard a meal to be complete without a bowl of rice, to switch to spuds.

"It's not possible to change people's food habit overnight," said Nazrul Islam, the director of Bangladesh's Agriculture Information Service.

"Potato cannot replace rice as the main staple, but I think they will soon realise it can be a very good substitute at a reasonably low cost," he added.

Potatoes are regarded as a safe crop in the low-lying South Asian country as they are planted in October and harvested by the end of February when the land is dry and before annual floods ravage the country, leaving thousands of people homeless and hungry.

Potatoes are now Bangladesh's second biggest crop after rice. Consumption has risen from an average of 7 kilo per capita in 1991 to 24 kilo in 2007, according to agriculture officials.

Potato consumption in Britain is about 114 kilo per capita and in Belarus, the world's biggest potato consumer, it is around 338 kilo per capita, according to the International Year of the Potato website.

Bangladesh's government, which recently ordered 500,000 troops to eat potatoes, hopes potato consumption will jump drastically in the coming years as experts say it is unlikely rice prices will return back to previous lows.

"We grow potato every year as a subsidiary crop, along with pulses and spices," said Mariam, a village farmer near Dhaka.

"But I think (we) will have to rely on potato as a principal crop in the future. Growing wheat is difficult as it needs more fertilizer and irrigation. Potato is easier and cheaper to grow."

Experts see potatoes as a potential antidote to hunger caused by higher food prices, a global population that is growing by one billion people each decade, climbing costs for fertilizer and reduced cropland.

The potato has been called a "hidden treasure" by the United Nations which proclaimed 2008 as the International Year of the Potato.

Asian countries are seeing potatoes as their possible salvation as they scramble to feed their people at reasonable prices in the future in a region where the population is estimated to soar by some 35 per cent to 4.9 billion by 2025.

Food security is vital in the region as many governments fear unrest if food staple prices keep going up. India has said it wants to double potato production in the next five to 10 years. China, a huge rice consumer, has become the world's top potato grower. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the potato is expanding more than any other crop right now.

Potatoes are a great source of complex carbohydrates, which release their energy slowly and they have only five per cent of the fat content of wheat.

When boiled potatoes have more protein than corn and nearly twice the calcium, according to the Potato Centre in Peru. They are also rich in vitamins, iron, potassium and zinc.

"Rice and potato contain almost similar quantity of calories. But potatoes . . . are rich in Vitamin C and other food values. So nutritionally, potato can be a real good substitute for rice," said S.K. Roy, a nutrition expert in Dhaka.

This year, Bangladesh produced its biggest ever potato crop of over eight million tonnes, three million tonnes more than last year.

But the country lacks warehouses to store the potatoes, which spoil easily, and officials fear much of the stock will go to waste even as people starve and suffer from malnutrition because they can't afford rice and refuse to turn to potatoes.

"We cannot let the potatoes, which provide us a strong food backing in this period when food grains are short in supply and high in prices, rot and perish. So let us all take more potato and make it a viable substitute for other foods," army chief General Moeen U. Ahmed told the crowd at the potato festival.

Officials say Bangladesh can preserve only 2.2 million tonnes of potato in 300 existing cold storages across the country.

"It means we will have about 3 million tonnes left. . . This is huge, we have to consume it," said Harunur Rashid, the managing director of Canteen Stores Department, a supermarket chain run by the army which organised the Dhaka potato festival in a bid to popularise potatoes among the masses.

Leading local chefs whipped up dishes with potatoes for the thousands of people who attended the festival last week. One even made ice-cream from crushed potato, sugar and ice.

"I am just amazed to see and taste so many dishes," said university student Rafia Akther. "I never thought potatoes could make them all," she said, with a smile.

Potatoes are used in curries but these are usually served with rice. It is difficult to convince people that they can eat a meal based on potatoes without any rice at all.

"Normally we use potato to make curry mixed with vegetables and fish. We don't eat it every day but take it quite often," said Salahuddin Ahmed, a farmer and small businessman.

"But eating potato as the main dish? We never thought of it before!".

Reuters

[OMEN]

Eight Pacific islands have a "credible claim" to an extra 1.5 million sq km of ocean, giving them exclusive rights to potential oil, gas and biological resources, says a regional organisation.

Fiji, Cook Islands, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, Tonga and Papua New Guinea have until May 2009 to apply to the United Nations to extend their exclusive territorial and economic zones.

The inter-governmental Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) is staging a meeting of the eight states in Fiji this week to assist them prepare their applications.

SOPAC said the islands, all of them developing nations which rely on tourism, mining, fishing or agriculture, "have a credible claim to more than 1.5 million sq km of extra space beyond their current 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone".

The collective 1.5 million sq km of extra sovereignty represents a swathe of ocean the size of Mongolia, the second largest landlocked nation in the world.

SOPAC said scientific studies have revealed access to an extended continental shelf could mean more access to mineral rich resources for the island states and that assessments had identified strong grounds for the territorial extensions.

"It's the first time the Pacific region is combining their efforts in its bid to extend their exclusive economic zones," SOPAC Director Cristelle Pratt said in a statement received on Tuesday.

Pratt said securing the extended sovereignty was "critical to securing exclusive ocean development of potentially rich non-living resources, such as oil, gas, gold and silver, as well as living organisms that live on and beneath the seabed".

"Securing greater maritime sovereignty can provide increased revenue for Pacific states and deliver significant economic and social benefits," Pratt said.

Australia extended its rights over an extra 2.5 million sq km of seabed in April under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said at the time that Australia, currently self sufficient in oil and gas, needed to find a major new offshore oil source or be forced to import 80 percent of requirements by 2015.

Reuters

[OMEN]

STUDENT PROTEST: Primary school teacher Lynne Tziolas with her husband Antonios with the magazine shot that got her sacked. One of her former students appears to have started a petition to have her reinstated
The Australian primary school teacher sacked for posing nude with her husband in a magazine has sparked a classroom protest.

One of her 10-year-old students at Narraweena Public School on Sydney's northern beaches appears to have started a petition to get her reinstated.

But one parent, who did not wish to be named, said the buzz at the school was that the principal had taken the book with the petition and ripped out the pages - a claim the principal was not prepared to comment on today.

This act of youthful activism follows the sacking last week of 24-year-old Lynne Tziolas after she and her husband appeared in a Cleo magazine article titled "Buck naked couples talk about their sex lives".

The article ran interviews with 10 couples about "what they get up to between the sheets" and asked Ms Tziolas and her husband, Antonios, how many times they have sex a week, their favourite body part and the most risque sexual thing they've done.

"Leaving the blinds up and the lights on, which is all the time," Antonios said in response to the last question.

Ms Tziolas's sacking prompted some parents to complain.

One parent, Eileen Sawaid, organised a petition to demand Ms Tziolas's reinstatement, and she said she has received about 300 signatures.

"I fully support Lynne and will fight damn hard to help her because what happened is wrong," she said this morning.

Instead of protecting the children from the contents of the magazine, the sacking of Ms Tziolas had in fact brought it to their attention, she said.

"The way the children found about about Ms Tziolas's [magazine shoot] was after she was sacked, it had been out for a while before then and none of them had even heard about it," she said.

Ms Sawaid also said she had misgivings about how the children at the school had become part of the issue, and criticised a story in the Manly Daily today which discussed the student petition to reinstate Ms Tziolas.

"Her dismissal affects the children in many ways but the [issue] is an adult one and I don't think it's good for the children to be involved," she said.

Ms Tziolas's husband Antonios also said he regretted the involvement of the children.

"We're a little bit upset that the kids are being damaged collaterally by all this ... it would upset Lynne and I if they get punished for what they've done," he said.

The principal of the school, Julie Organ, referred questions about the alleged confiscation of the classroom petition to the Department of Education.

A spokesman for the department said: "As the situation is complex and not one easily explained to junior primary school age children, it is inappropriate for them to be asked to sign a petition without the advice and guidance of parents.

"A parent raised her concern with the school about a petition being created during class time.

"The petition, which had only a small number of signatures, was provided to the principal and the exercise book in which it had been written was returned to the parent of the student involved."

Mr Tziolas also said the couple were due to meet a lawyer provided by the Teacher's Federation this afternoon to begin legal action to have Ms Tziolas reinstated, he said.

"Lynne and I have just been overwhelmed by the response - people we've never met have been sending us letters, people have been stopping us in the streets to give us their support," he said

SMH

[JohnCenaFan28]

She shouldn't be fired just because she decided to take a nude photo... it's not like the children would be seeing it...

[JohnCenaFan28]

That's awful, earthquake then a storm? How unfortunate...

[JohnCenaFan28]

Thanks for the news.