At Least 10,000 Feared Dead in Burma Cyclone

The United Nations is prepared to send "urgent humanitarian
assistance," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, adding he is "very
much alarmed by the incoming news" about the number of dead. The U.N.
made a grant available from its central emergency fund.

A U.N.
humanitarian official told CNN a five-person disaster assistance
coordination team has arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, but they will not
know until Tuesday when they can enter Myanmar because they do not have
visas and because night has fallen in the region.

The
death toll from a devastating cyclone in Myanmar could reach more than
10,000 in the low-lying area where the storm wreaked the most havoc,
the country's foreign minister warned Monday. Tropical Cyclone Nargis
hit the Southeast Asian country, also known as Burma, early Saturday
with winds of up to 120 mph. It knocked out electricity to the
country's largest city, Yangon, and left hundreds of thousands of
people homeless.

An
international relief effort was mobilising today after Burmese military
rulers estimated that 10,000 people had been killed in a weekend
cyclone and acknowledged they were willing to accept foreign help.

Aid
workers believe at least 1 million people have been left homeless by
Cyclone Nargis, which barrelled across south-west and central Burma on
Saturday, unleashing 120mph (190kmph) winds, torrential rains and
flooding that caused a catastrophic trail of destruction.

Myanmar's military junta believes
at least 10,000 people died in a cyclone that ripped through
the Irrawaddy delta, triggering a massive international aid
response for the pariah southeast Asian nation.

"The basic message was that they believe the provisional
death toll was about 10,000 with 3,000 missing," a Yangon-based
diplomat told Reuters in Bangkok, summarising a briefing from
Foreign Minister Nyan Win. "It's a very serious toll."
The scale of the disaster from Saturday's devastating
cyclone drew a rare acceptance of outside help from the
diplomatically isolated generals, who spurned such approaches
in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
The secretive military, which has ruled the former Burma
for 46 years, has moved even further into the shadows in the
last six months due to the widespread outrage at its bloody
crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in September.

Aid
agencies Monday rushed emergency food and water into Myanmar after a
cyclone tore into the southwest of the impoverished nation, killing
more than 350 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.

Despite the devastation wreaked by tropical cyclone
Nargis, the ruling junta vowed to press ahead with its controversial
referendum this weekend on a new constitution, which critics say will
entrench military rule.

The death toll in Burma has reached nearly 4,000 people following a cyclone that hit the country on Saturday, state media says.

It says 3,969 people have been killed and almost 3,000 more are missing. Earlier on Monday, state media said the death toll stood at 351.

Five Burma's regions have been declared disaster zones.

Several hundred thousand people in the country are now in need of shelter and drinking water, the UN says.

AS
tropical cyclone Nargis hit Burma's main city of Rangoon, Win Myint
barely managed to save his two-month-old daughter as powerful winds
uprooted a tree and slammed it into his home.

He
scooped up the screaming infant and fled with the rest of his family
into the fury of the storm, pressing through the driving rain to seek
shelter at a Buddhist temple in the satellite city of Dagon.

"We had to run for our lives during the storm at 3am on Saturday," the 38-year-old said yesterday, while carrying his baby.