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    Burmese junta pressed by US on relief flow
    Burma service members carry water supplies off a U.S. C-130 at the Yangon International airport. AFP/Sergent Andres Alcaraz

    The U.S. intensified diplomatic efforts on Monday to persuade Burma's ruling junta to accept international offers of help in tackling the country's humanitarian crisis. Washington entered into some of the most high-level discussions that it has conducted with Burmese officials in decades.

    But although a US military flight landed in Burma carrying provisions for the survivors of cyclone Nargis, the flow of emergency supplies remained at a trickle for the 1.5m people facing hunger and disease in the ravaged Irrawaddy delta.

    In New York, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, said only a tenth of the food vital to the survival of those affected by the cyclone had so far reached Burma and rice stocks in the country were close to exhaustion.

    Expressing his frustration with the junta, he said: "We are at a critical point. Unless more aid gets into the country very quickly, we face an outbreak of infectious diseases that could dwarf today's current crisis.

    "I call, in the most strenuous terms, on the government of Myanmar [Burma] to put its people's lives first. It must do all it can to prevent this disaster from becoming even more serious."

    U.S. State Department specialist heads to North Korea for nuclear talks
    WASHINGTON: A top State Department specialist on Korean affairs will travel this week to North Korea for nuclear discussions, the United States said Tuesday, part of a flurry of activity by U.S. officials working to break an impasse in six-nation disarmament negotiations.

    Hardliner to head Taiwan's China talks
    Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan's incoming president, has added uncertainty to the prospects for a rapprochement with mainland China by picking a former lawmaker from a pro-independence party to head the cabinet body in charge of relations with Beijing.

    China and Taiwan in high level meeting
    China and Taiwan held what amounted to the highest-level meeting ever between leaders from the two sides in a sign of a potential thaw in relations ahead.

    Hu Jintao, China’s president, met Vincent Siew, Taiwan’s vice president-elect, on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia on the Chinese island of Hainan.

    Rogge says IOC won't push China on Tibet
    BEIJING - The International Olympic Committee will not intervene to pressure China on Tibet or other political issues in the countdown to the Beijing Games.

    IOC president Jacques Rogge reiterated that stance Friday, saying it was not up to the Olympic body to get involved in the host country's political affairs.

    "This is the line we do not have to cross," he said at the close of a two-day IOC executive board meeting in the Chinese capital.

    China hits U.S. lawmakers over Tibet
    China said on Friday it was outraged by a resolution by US lawmakers urging Beijing to end a crackdown in Tibet and open dialogue with the Himalayan region’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

    The condemnation was in response to a U.S. House of Representatives resolution agreed on Wednesday urging China to open “substantive dialogue” with the Tibetan Buddhist leader and “end its crackdown on non-violent Tibetan protestors and its continuing cultural, religious, economic, and linguistic repression inside Tibet”.

     
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