Foreign dignitaries have brought welcome promises of help to Indonesia's devastated Aceh region, but they're also creating traffic problems at the area's tiny main airport. The stream of visiting VIPs has clogged the only landing strip and slowed critical aid deliveries, humanitarian workers complained Saturday.
Visits by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and US Secretary of State Colin Powell have shut provincial capital Banda Aceh's only airport briefly for security reasons, delaying deliveries by incoming aid planes.
"It slows things down," said Major Murad Khan, a spokesman for Pakistan's Tsunami Relief Task Force. "I think they need to coordinate that better."
Before the disaster struck, the tiny airstrip handled about three flights each day. Now it is a bustling hub for relief operations and has to cope with dozens of daily flights.
A delegation of American senators and representatives came by helicopter from the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier so as not to take up a landing strip slot.
Major General Bambang Darmono, Indonesia's military commander for Aceh, said standard security procedures required that flights be "reorganized" around the visits of dignitaries.
Also Saturday, the UN said it had begun a mammoth effort to feed up to 2 million survivors of the disaster around southern Asia, focusing particularly on young children, pregnant women and nursing mothers.
World Food Program Executive Director James Morris said at a Jakarta news conference that the operation would likely cost US$180 million for six months. He said the agency has now dispatched enough food in Sri Lanka to help feed 750,000 people there for 15 days.
"We will be distributing food ... by trucks, by barges, by ships, by helicopters, by big planes."
Meanwhile, Thailand on Saturday declined an offer from Japan of US$20 million in emergency relief, saying assistance should be directed to countries more in need.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
RSS