YANGON, Myanmar - A powerful cyclone killed more than 350 people and destroyed thousands of homes, state-run media said Sunday. Some dissident groups worried that the military junta running Myanmar would be reluctant to ask for international help.

Tropical Cyclone Nargis hit at a delicate time for the junta, less than a week ahead of a crucial referendum on a new constitution. Should the junta be seen as failing disaster victims, voters who already blame the regime for ruining the economy and squashing democracy could take out their frustrations at the ballot box.

Some in Yangon complained the 400,000-strong military was doing little to help victims after Saturday’s storm.

“Where are all those uniformed people who are always ready to beat civilians?” said a trishaw driver who refused to be identified for fear of retribution. “They should come out in full force and help clean up the areas and restore electricity.”

Myanmar, also known as Burma, has been under military rule since 1962. Its government has been widely criticized for human rights abuses and suppression of pro-democracy parties such as the one led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for almost 12 of the past 18 years.

Last September, at least 31 people were killed and thousands more were detained when the military cracked down on peaceful protests led by Buddhist monks and democracy advocates.

The Forum for Democracy in Burma and other dissident groups outside of Myanmar urged the military junta Sunday to allow aid groups to operate freely in the wake of the cyclone — something it has been reluctant to do in the past.

It would be difficult for other countries to help unless they received a request from Myanmar’s military rulers.

“International expertise in dealing with natural disasters is urgently required. The military regime is ill-prepared to deal with the aftermath of the cyclone,” said Naing Aung, secretary general of the Thailand-based forum.

The storm’s 120 mph winds blew the roofs off hospitals and cut electricity to the country’s largest city.

Shari Villarosa, the top American diplomat in Yangon, said the storm’s whipping winds and torrential downpour had caused “major devastation throughout the city.”

“The Burmese are saying they have never seen anything like this, ever,” Villarosa told The Associated Press. “Trees are down. Electricity lines are down. Our Burmese staff have lost their roofs.”

At least 351 people were killed, including 162 who lived on Haing Gyi island off the country’s southwest coast, military-run Myaddy television station reported. Many of the others died in the low-lying Irrawaddy delta.

“The Irrawaddy delta was hit extremely hard not only because of the wind and rain but because of the storm surge,” said Chris Kaye, the U.N.’s acting humanitarian coordinator in Yangon. “The villages there have reportedly been completely flattened.”

State television reported that in the Irrawaddy’s Labutta township, 75 percent of the buildings had collapsed.

The U.N. planned to send teams Monday to assess the damage, Kaye said. Initial assessment efforts have been hampered by roads clogged with debris and downed phone lines, he said.

“At the moment, we have such poor opportunity for communications that I can’t really tell you very much,” Kaye said.

Yangon residents also said Sunday that the price of gasoline had jumped from $2.50 to $10 a gallon on the black market and everything from eggs to construction supplies had tripled.

The state-owned newspaper New Light of Myanmar, meanwhile, reported that the international airport in Yangon remained shut but state-run television said it could be opened by Monday. Domestic flights have been diverted to the airport in Mandalay.

The cyclone came only days before a May 10 referendum on the country’s military-backed draft constitution. Authorities have not yet said whether they would postpone the vote.

A military-managed national convention was held intermittently for 14 years to lay down guidelines for the country’s new constitution.

The new constitution is supposed to be followed in 2010 by a general election. Both votes are elements of a “roadmap to democracy” drawn up by the junta.

Critics say the draft constitution is designed to cement military power and have urged citizens to vote no.

[Source: Yahoo News]

Andrea Thompson
Staff Writer
SPACE.com

Images of a tsunami blasting its way through the sun’s lower atmosphere have been taken for the first time.

NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft captured one of the massive solar waves in action May 19, 2007, as it moved through four layers of the solar atmosphere. These images and videos, released today, have helped astronomers to revise estimates of the waves’ speeds.

Astronomers think that solar tsunamis, initially discovered by the SOHO spacecraft in the late 1990s, are something like the tsunamis in Earth’s oceans. Like these monster ocean waves, solar tsunamis are the result of a release of energy that creates a pressure wave that propagates through some kind of medium. On Earth, that medium is ocean water, but on the sun, it is hot, roiling solar gases.

Tsunamis and CMEs

Early on and still today, there are many unknowns about solar tsunamis. The speed of the waves as calculated based on the first SOHO snapshots didn’t match up with their estimated intensity. “They seemed to be going very slowly for the amount of energy we saw in the explosion,” said study leader Peter Gallagher of Trinity College Dublin. The explosions release about two billion times the annual world’s energy consumption in just a fraction of a second.

STEREO’s cameras took more images per day than SOHO, so Gallagher and his colleagues were able to more accurately clock the speed of the solar tsunamis at more than 1 million kilometers per hour.

“They’re actually traveling a lot faster than we previously thought,” Gallagher told LiveScience. “The speeds are astronomical, literally. These things [take] blinks of an eye to traverse the Earth.”

STEREO’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUVI) instruments also allow astronomers to monitor the sun at four wavelengths which correspond to temperatures from 60,000 to 2 million degrees Celsius. Each wavelength corresponds to a different layer of the solar atmosphere. To the team’s surprise, the tsunami seemed to move just as speedily through dense layers as it did through less dense layers, Gallagher said.

Unclear causes

What causes these giant solar waves isn’t clear. Astronomers know they are associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) which are like “a rope of gas and magnetic fields that gets accelerated away from the sun,” Gallagher explained.

Solar tsunamis could be the shockwave that results from the CME, or they could simply be related phenomena that have a common trigger. But whenever they see a solar tsunami, there’s always an associated CME, Gallagher said. “When [a solar tsunami] goes off, it tells you that there’s been an explosion on the sun.”

This relationship could be important in predicting CMEs, which can launch damaging material at Earth and the other the planets. Gallagher thinks further STEREO observations will help astronomers decide what causes what.

Gallagher and his colleagues will present their findings on April 2 at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

* Video: Solar Tsunami Blasts Across Sun
* Double Vision: STEREO Spacecraft to Scan Sun in 3D
* Images: Sun Storms

* Original Story: Solar Tsunamis Move at Astronomical Speeds

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By Ona Zachary
Israel “Cachao” Lopez, the Cuban bassist and composer who has invented the mambo music style, died Saturday at the age of 89.

Known by his fans as Cachao, the composer fell ill in the past week from kidney failure and died surrounded by his family at the Coral Gables Hospital, as Reuters reports.

Cachao was born in Cuba in 1918, in the middle of a musical family and he had already become a very talented bassist as a teenager. He left the communist country in the early 1960s and went to the United States, where he performed until the last months of his life.

In the 1930s, while experimenting with his multi-instrumentalist brother Orestes Lopez, he discovered mambo, which resulted from the two brothers’ improvisational work with danzon, and elegant musical style popular in that age. In an interview with the Miami Herald in 1995, Cachao said that he and his brother had first created a faster type of mambo, but they had to invent a slower version so the people could dance on it.

“We would take turns at the piano and try things out,” Cachao said in the above mentioned interview. “And that’s how things came up. We realized then that this rhythm was not common. And it was faster than it is today. . . . But it was too fast for dancing, and we were six months without any work. People didn’t like it. When we slowed it down, then it became danceable.”

The bassist went through a period of obscurity in the 1980s, after moving to Miami. But his career revived in 1990, following the documentary  “Cachao … Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos” (Like His Rhythm There Is No Other), made by the Cuban-American actor Andy Garcia. Garcia was a great admirer of Cachao, whom he considered the  “musical father” of Cubans.

After regaining popularity, Cachao released several successful albums and even won a Grammy for his album  “Ahora Si!” in 2004. The father of mambo was also honoured with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 2003.

“Imagine, this is for all of you. I want to dedicate this award not only to my country, but all Latin America and the United States,” he said, in his acceptance speech.

The funeral services for the Cuban musician were scheduled for Wednesday.

[Source: efluxmedia]

By CARA ANNA, Associated Press Writer
CHENGDU, China - China lashed out Sunday at critics of its crackdown on Tibetan protesters, describing U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “habitually bad tempered” while claiming the Western media serve those who want to smear the communist country.
The barrage of complaints carried in official media — which included more broadsides against the Dalai Lama — came as the country sought to present its own version of the deadly anti-Chinese protests and their aftermath. The crackdown has been a public relations disaster for China ahead of the Beijing Olympics — a Thailand torchbearer withdrew Sunday in protest.

With foreign media banned and troops dispatched en masse to quell the most widespread demonstrations against Chinese rule in nearly five decades, independent information barely trickled out of the Tibetan capital Lhasa and other far-flung communities.

The People’s Daily, the main mouthpiece of the Communist Party, placed the blame for the recent riots on Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Dalai Lama.

“The Dalai clique is scheming to take the Beijing Olympics hostage to force the Chinese government to make concessions to Tibet independence,” it said.

The attacks on the Dalai Lama have been aimed at further demonizing him in the eyes of the Chinese public, which strongly supports the Olympics. The Dalai Lama, who advocates nonviolence and denies being behind the March 14 riots in Lhasa, asserted Sunday that he has supported China’s hosting of the summer Games.

“I mean the Olympics…take place in Beijing…so that more than 1 billion human beings, that means Chinese, they feel proud of it,” he said on the sidelines of a Buddhist prayer session in New Delhi.

The official Xinhua New Agency, meanwhile, published a commentary bashing Pelosi, a fierce critic of China who on Friday visited the Dalai Lama at his headquarters in India, where she called China’s crackdown “a challenge to the conscience of the world.”

Xinhua accused Pelosi of ignoring the violence caused by the Tibetan rioters. “‘Human rights police’ like Pelosi are habitually bad tempered and ungenerous when it comes to China, refusing to check their facts and find out the truth of the case,” it said.

“Her views are like so many other politicians and western media. Beneath the double standards lies their intention to serve the interest groups behind them, who want to contain or smear China.”

Reports of how many people died in the violence have varied and been impossible to independently verify. China raised its death toll to 22, with Xinhua reporting Saturday that the charred remains of an 8-month-old boy and four adults were pulled from a garage burned down in Lhasa last Sunday — two days after the city erupted in anti-Chinese rioting. The Dalai Lama’s exiled government says 99 Tibetans have been killed, 80 in Lhasa, 19 in Gansu province.

The Chinese government has sought to portray itself and Chinese businesses as the victims.

Xinhua said Sunday that 94 people had been injured in four counties and one city in Gansu province in riots on March 15-16. It said that 64 police, 27 armed police, two government officials and one civilian were hurt. It made no mention of any injuries to the protesters.

China has been hoping to use the August Olympics to bolster its international image.

There have been discussions of a possible international boycott of the Games, though the European Union and the United States have so far said they opposed the idea.

The official lighting of the Olympic flame is set for Monday in Greece, and some 1,000 police will surround Ancient Olympia to keep away pro-Tibetan protesters from the ceremony. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge is scheduled to attend.

Some fear the arrival of the Olympic torch — scheduled to travel through 20 countries before the Beijing Olympics open on Aug. 8 — could spark violent protests against China.

The torch relay is already becoming politicized.

Narisa Chakrabongse_ an environmentalist and one of Thailand’s six torchbearers — said in an open letter that she decided against taking part in the relay to “send a strong message to China that the world community could not accept its actions.” Narisa wrote, “The slaying of the Tibetans … is an outright violation of human rights.”

Despite media restrictions, some information was leaking out on troop movements.

One American backpacker who traveled to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, said he had seen soldiers or paramilitary troops in Deqen in northwest Yunnan province, which borders Tibet.

“What was an empty parking lot by the library was full of military trucks and people practicing with shields. I saw hundreds of soldiers,” said the witness, who would give only his first name Ralpha.

There have been no reported protests in Yunnan.

Xinhua issued several reports Sunday saying that in addition to Gansu province, life was returning to normal in other areas where protests took place in the wake of the Lhasa riots.

It said “more than half of the shops on major streets were seen reopened for business” in Aba, the center of northern Aba county in Sichuan province. It quoted county Communist Party chief Kang Qingwei as saying government departments and major enterprises were “running normally” and that schools would reopen on Monday.

Aba is where Xinhua has said police shot and wounded four rioters in self-defense. It was the first time the government acknowledged shooting any protesters.

In Lhasa Saturday, Champa Phuntsok, Tibet’s China-appointed governor, vowed that local authorities will make a concerted effort to maintain stability, Xinhua reported Sunday.

“We must…win the final victory in all respects against the secessionist forces to help ensure successful Olympic Games with a stable social situation in the Tibet Autonomous Region,” he said.