World News joined 2

[JohnCenaFan28]

OMG, that is awful... I hope he stays locked up for good.

[OMEN]

Authorities imposed a dawn to-dusk curfew in parts of India's historic western city of Jaipur a day after eight bombs ripped through bustling streets, killing around 60 people and injuring 150.

The blasts within minutes of each other brought fears that Pakistani or Bangladeshi Islamist militant groups were trying to undermine a fragile peace process between India and Pakistan. But police have not yet blamed any particular group.

Bombs, many strapped to bicycles, exploded by a main temple and markets inside the pink-walled city. Slippers, broken pieces of glass and bits of clothes now litter the main market place.

The bustling walled city's main courtyard was mostly deserted with a few people coming back to take personal belongings out of damaged cars and motorbikes left behind after the bombs.

Hundreds of policemen looked for unclaimed objects in the rubble, while many people in Jaipur preferred to stay indoors.

"It was very scary and most of us just ran as there was smoke and cries for help in every direction," said Anil Saxena, a businessman at a popular jewellery market.

Authorities cleaned a blood-splattered street in front of Hawa Mahal, or the "palace of wind," a five-storied sandstone building built by a Hindu king for his queen in 1799 AD.

Many Hindus offer prayers in temples on Tuesdays and officials say that was probably what attackers were looking for.

"There were hundreds of people there like me to offer prayers. I wonder what would have happened had the blast taken place inside the temple," Vikram Singh, an injured college student, said from his hospital bed.

India's junior home minister Sriprakash Jaiswal was quoted by local media as saying there "might be the involvement of some foreign hand in the blasts" - a phrase often used in India to refer to Pakistan.

Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee is due to visit Islamabad in a week's time to review a four-year-old peace process between the two nations.

Only in the last week, Indian soldiers came under heavy cross-border fire trying to stop armed men from sneaking into its part of Kashmir. Later eight people were killed in clashes in a Kashmir village. It was some of the worse violence in Kashmir this year.

But police in Jaipur said they did not know who was behind Tuesday's bombings.

"It is too early to name one particular group and we are analyzing the material used to cause the blast to determine what it exactly contained," AS Gill, Rajasthan's police chief said.

Authorities said they do not have information about any foreigners injured in the blast. It is low season in the tourist state of Rajasthan.

Reuters

[JohnCenaFan28]

Wow, that's harsh but I guess for the safety of everyone, it's a good idea.

[OMEN]

The death toll from China's deadliest earthquake in decades has climbed to nearly 15,000, as officials warned of calamities downstream from broken rivers and dams strained to bursting point.

Tens of thousands of troops, firefighters and civilians raced to save more than 25,000 people buried across a wide swathe of southwest Sichuan province under collapsed schools, factories and hospitals after Monday's 7.9 magnitude quake.

Many schoolchildren were buried as they were taking an afternoon nap. One body of a boy was found still clutching a pen.

The official death toll climbed to 14,866, as rescuers pulled at tangled chunks of buildings for signs of life.

The government sent 50,000 troops to dig for victims. A paramilitary officer who arrived at Wenchuan, at the epicentre, told Sichuan TV a third of houses there had been destroyed and more than 90 per cent damaged.

Amid the overwhelming gloom, there were also moments of joy.

In Mianzhu, where thousands have already been confirmed dead, about 500 people were pulled out alive from crushed buildings.

Rescuers in Hanwang, a village in Mianzhu, sustained a girl with food and water as they struggled to free her from the ruins of a school.

A woman eight-months pregnant and her mother, trapped under an apartment building in Dujiangyan, were freed by firefighters.

"We are very happy. We have been standing here shouting for two days," said Pan Jianjun, a relative. "But there are still three more people in there making sounds."

But television showed whole villages wiped out across the poor, mountainous region suggesting searchers would find many more bodies than survivors among the toppled buildings.

BLOCKED RIVERS, DAMAGED DAMS

Officials have also warned of dangers from increased strain on local dams as well as mudslides on brittle hillsides where rain has been forecast over the next few days.

Two hydropower stations in Maoxian county, where 7,000 residents and tourists remain stranded near the epicentre, were "seriously damaged". Authorities warned that dams could burst.

Landslides had blocked the flow of two rivers in northern Qingchuan county, forming a huge lake in a region where 1,000 have already died and 700 are buried, Xinhua said.

"The rising water could cause the mountains to collapse. We desperately need geological experts to carry out tests and fix a rescue plan," Xinhua quoted Li Hao, the county's Communist Party chief, as saying.

The quake had also stopped a river in the stricken Mianzhu region, prompting officials to evacuate residents and drain dams, downstream, the agency said.

Underscoring the urgency of relief efforts, the Communist Party's top discipline watchdog vowed to punish officials for any dereliction of duty.

Pictures from Beichuan, which rescuers have struggled to reach, showed near total devastation. Survivors lay alongside the dead in the open air, surrounded by rubble as state TV showed dramatic footage of soldiers parachuting in to help.

PREMIER'S APPEAL

Premier Wen Jiabao made emotional appeals to workers and comfort orphaned children.

"Your pain is our pain," he said, standing amid a cluster of residents, some of whom wiped away tears. "Saving people's lives is the most important task."

The quake, the worst to hit China since 1976 when up to 300,000 died, has drowned out upbeat government propaganda three months ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games.

It has also muffled criticism from abroad over recent unrest in Tibet, with images of the human tragedy and heroic rescue efforts spurring offers of aid and an outpouring of sympathy.

The Party's swift action to mobilize a massive rescue force has made a jarring comparison with that of Myanmar, whose government's slow response to a devastating cyclone has infuriated aid and rights groups.

China's stock market initially weakened after the quake, partly on fears it could add to inflation that is already at a 12-year high, but the Shanghai stock index ended 2.7 per cent higher as fears of the long-term impact ebbed.

Industrial production growth showed China's busy factories moving down a gear and economists said output growth could fade in coming months, partly due to the impact of the Sichuan quake.

Leading disaster modeling firm AIR Worldwide said the cost of the quake was likely to exceed $US20 billion.

Reuters

[JohnCenaFan28]

Thanks for the news.

[OMEN]

The United Nations has estimated those affected by the Myanmar cyclone at up to 2.5 million and called an urgent meeting of big donors and Asian states as the Myanmar junta continued to limit foreign aid.

The European Union's top aid official said the military government's restrictions were increasing the risk of starvation and disease.

UN humanitarian affairs chief John Holmes told reporters that there were now between 1.6-2.5 million people who were "severely affected" by Cyclone Nargis and urgently needed aid, up from a previous estimate of at least 1.5 million people.

Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej said after a two-hour meeting in Yangon, where he urged his counterpart Thein Sein to ease visa rules for relief workers, that he was told Myanmar could "tackle the problem by themselves."

In New York, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has expressed frustration over the response by Myanmar's reclusive leaders, called a meeting of key donor states and Asian powers later on Wednesday to discuss "what kind of concrete measures we can do from now on."

"Even though the Myanmarese government has shown some sense of flexibility, at this time it is far, far too short," he said. "The magnitude of this situation requires much more mobilisation of resources and aid workers."

A Western diplomat said the meeting would be at 4:30 p.m. EDT (8:30 a.m. NZT) and that among those invited were the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Bangladesh, Australia and Japan.

TRICKLE OF AID

Nearly two weeks after the cyclone swept through the heavily populated Irrawaddy delta rice bowl, killing tens of thousands of people, foreign aid still amounts to little more than a trickle.

Myanmar, formerly called Burma, was once the world's biggest rice exporting country but more than 40 years of military rule have left it impoverished. The military junta has repeatedly crushed pro-democracy movements and tightly restricts visits by foreigners.

Samak told reporters in Bangkok that Myanmar's leaders had insisted that teams of foreign experts, who have been refused entry, were not needed.

"They are confident of dealing with the problem by themselves. There are no outbreaks of diseases, no starvation, no famine. They don't need experts, but are willing to get aid supplies from every country," Samak said.

Louis Michel, the top European Union aid official, disagreed.

"There is a risk of water pollution. There is a risk of starvation because the storages of rice have been destroyed," he told reporters in Bangkok before flying to Yangon to seek better access for international aid workers and relief efforts.

"We want to convince the authorities of our good faith. We are there for humanitarian reasons," he said, throwing cold water on suggestions foreign countries move unilaterally to bring in aid.

Even so, one EU member said on Wednesday it was time to act. "If need be, the international community must force the Burmese regime to let more help and relief workers in," Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said.

ACCESS IS "CRITICAL"

One group of Christian doctors has been treating children in churches, operating below the government's radar. "We have to try to do something," said one Asian doctor from the group, giving out medicine to children for diarrhea in a rickety wooden church in a village just north of Yangon.

World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran said in Washington her organisation had so far reached 28,000 people. "A critical issue now is access. WFP has managed to reach more than 28,000 people with food aid so far, with 14 international and 214 national staff in-country," she said.

"Our flights are allowed to bring in some supplies, but far from enough - a massive effort is needed to save lives..." she said at a US Senate hearing on the global food crisis.

Holmes was asked if the United Nations might have to consider air drops to get food and other aid to cyclone victims who have not been helped and who are crowded into Buddhist monasteries and schools. He said it was not an ideal form of distributing aid but might become an option.

"It is something that could be contemplated," he said, adding that if barriers to aid workers were not lifted "one might have to look at it."

He also warned that epidemics of diseases like cholera, malaria and measles "can break out at anytime now."

Heavy rain and winds were forecast in the delta as a tropical depression moved in, but the UN weather agency discounted fears that a new cyclone was forming.

Myanmar state television raised its official toll to 38,491 dead, 1,403 injured and 27,838 missing on Wednesday.

The International Federation of the Red Cross estimated on the basis of reports from 22 organisations working in Myanmar that between 68,833 and 127,990 people had died.

ASIANS WELCOME, SAYS JUNTA

In a gesture to critics, Myanmar's rulers invited 160 personnel from Bangladesh, China, India and Thailand to assist in the sometimes chaotic relief efforts but that was a fraction of the number needed, experts said.

"It's just awful. People are in just desperate need, begging as vehicles go past," Gordon Bacon, an emergency coordinator for the International Rescue Committee, told Reuters from Yangon.

Some foreign aid workers who have reached Myanmar have been restricted to cobbling together assessment reports in Yangon for donors, based on what local staff tell them.

Experts say the relief effort is only delivering a tenth of the needed supplies. Heavy rains have slowed transportation of aid by land and added to the misery of tens of thousands of refugees packed into monasteries, schools and pagodas.

The operations in Myanmar are a shadow of the massive international relief operation begun just days after the 2004 Asian tsunami. The United States alone deployed thousands of its military and more than a dozen ships in the Indian Ocean.

So far the US military has made a total of eight aid flights into Yangon, an official said.

"We don't have confirmation of future flights yet but we are very optimistic," said Colonel Douglas Powell.

Three US naval ships were in international waters off Myanmar waiting for a go-ahead from Myanmar's generals.

Reuters

[JohnCenaFan28]

This was a terrible thing that happened... I really hope people can help them get over it quickly.

[Black Widow]

A JEALOUS husband who suspected his wife of an affair took revenge – by putting her for sale on eBay.

Paul Osborn, 44, kicked out wife Sharon and advertised her on the internet auction site – with bids hitting £500,100.

Take my wife ... Paul's eBay advert

Take my wife ... Paul's eBay advert

It offered his “cheating, lying, adulterous slag of a wife” to the highest bidder – and became an internet phenomenon, with users forwarding the link worldwide. But Sharon, 43, denies an affair and cops are now investigating Paul for harassment.

MoT inspector Paul heard rumours in March that Network Rail manager Sharon, his wife of 24 years, was having an affair with a man at work.

Complaint

Dad-of-two Paul, of Bletchley, Bucks, said: “I started checking her emails and I realised the rumours were true. They had been discussing their sex life together and making plans for the future.

“I was absolutely destroyed. I gathered all her stuff in bags and dumped it in the drive.”

Three weeks ago, Sharon pleaded for Paul to take her realised it wasn’t the right thing to do. I was just so angry.”

Sharon and her colleague made a police complaint against Paul. Neither was available for comment last night. But the unnamed man’s wife said at home in Hemel Hempstead, Herts: “There’s nothing going on. They work in the same office, that’s all.”

Thames Valley Police confirmed it was investigating, saying: “Statements have been taken from two people. ”



The Sun.co.uk

[Kaz]

my brother wants to make a bid

[JohnCenaFan28]

LOL, this is funny. Wonder if they stopped the bid?