BBC News with Jerry Smit
The president of the Philippines Benigno Aquino says his government is still trying to establish the number of people killed by typhoon Haiyan which ravished the country five days ago. He said initial reports that 10,000 people had died were too high. The latest estimate was about 2,500. Mr. Aquino said no one had imagined the sheer magnitude of the super typhoon. Tens of thousands of survivors are in desperate need of food, water and shelter as Jonathan Head reports from the devastated city of Tacloban.
The power of last Friday’s typhoon has made most of Tacloban uninhabitable. Several thousand people have already left on the military transport planes that fly in every hour. But most of the city’s population is still stuck here trying to scavenge what they can and to avoid the many corpses still buried beneath. Shelter is becoming an urgent need but even more worrying is the dwindling food supply. Outside Tacloban the promises of substantial international aid keep piling up, inside the city though, very little has arrived that fueling rising anger.
The United Nations estimates that more than 11 million people were affected by the storm and nearly 700,000 displaced. The UN humanitarian operations director John Ging said aid efforts were been hampered by the scare of the destruction.
“You’ve got to get the aid, from the airports, from the ports into the areas which are completely devastated including the road network. So the mobilization of air assets clearing a way the debris opening up the routes. This is top priority. It’s happening, it’s happening too slowly, but it’s happening and everybody is working flat-out to make it better.”
The Egyptian government has said it will lift the state of emergency and curfew imposed three months ago to control protests against the overthrow of the Islamist president Mohammad Morsi. Orla Guerin is in Cairo.
The end of the state of emergency and nightly curfew may not mean less control on the streets. The military backed government here has said it will respond by reinforcing the security presence in main streets and city centers. The interior ministry says it wants to tighten its grip and reinsure the public and stringent new limits on freedom of movement are expected to be introduced soon in a law on public protests. Human rights campaigners say it will give police the power to ban protests outright.
Coalition group in northeast Syria say they have formed a transitional administration that will govern the region until the Syrian conflict is over. A spokesman for the democratic union party said they wanted to become part of a future democratic Syria and will not form a separate state. Syrian government forces withdrew from Kurdish regions last year.
World News from the BBC
The United Nations Security Council has authorized an additional 4,000 peacekeepers in Somalia to combat the Islamist militant group al-Shabab. It will bring the total number of peacekeepers in the UN-backed African Union mission to just over 22,000. The UN has acknowledged that al-Shabab has changed its tactics from conventional to guerilla warfare.
The new world trade center tower in New York has been declared the tallest building in the United States by a panel of architects. The group decided that a needle on top of the skyscraper should be counted because it was a permanent feature. Nick Bryant reports from New York.
Now that this needle has been affixed the new world trade center soared to the symbolic height of 1,776 feet, the year of America’s independence. But is it the spire or is it an antenna? That was a decision facing the height committee of the council on tall buildings in urban habitat which are duplicates on these highly contested maters. Up until now the Willis Tower in Chicago perhaps better known as the Sears Tower has been America’s tallest building but the Chicago based council ruled that the new world trade center is now able to make that boast.
The American pop star Miley Cyrus who’s been criticized for her revealing stage outfits and raunchy dance routines says she considers herself to be one of the biggest feminist in the world. In a BBC interview she said her message to women was that they shouldn’t be scared of anything. The twenty-year-old made the headlines again on Sunday when she appeared to smoke marihuana at a world ceremony in the Netherlands where the drug is sold openly.
The British composer Sir John Tavener known for his religious works has died at the age of 69. He first came to public attention with his oratorio the Whale, a decade later, Sir John joined the Russian Orthodox Church and its musical traditions influenced his work.