BBC News:菲律宾受灾严重,民众自救建集体墓地
Welcome to the latest global news recorded at 02:00 GMT on Tuesday, the 12th of November.I am Fredrick Dolf with a selection of highlights from across BBC World Service News today.
Coming up, a state of national calamity in the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan. The scale ofthe disaster leaves the UN humanitarian operation facing one of their biggest challenges yet.
"We've all seen the pictures that are coming through. The scale of devastation is massiveand therefore it would require the mobilization of a massive response."
Also in this podcast, we'll hear from the members of the Philippines diaspora desperate fornews from home.
"I am fearful because I have not been able to contact my loved ones. It's been days I've beentrying to contact my family and children."
Some ten million people affected, more than half a million displaced, many thousands killedand many more thousands of survivers now threatened by a lack of food, drinking water,medicines and shelter. The devastation wrought by typhoon Haiyan in the islands of the centralPhilippines has been compared to that caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Aidagencies are now joining in a major international rescue and relief effort. And their efforts areseverely hampered by the sheer scale of the havoc left behind by the storm. PresidentAquino of the Philippines has declared a state of a national calamity.
Rupert Whingfield-Hayes sent this report from the city of Tacloban, on the island of Leyte. "In asmall coastal community just outside Tacloban, Michael is making a list of the dead. In his onestreet maybe 100 meters long, there are 22 dead nearly half the residents. For three days now,no one has come to help bury them, no police, no soldiers, and other bodies are swollen andsmell overwhelming. The locals have decided to act. They are digging a huge hole-a massgrave. In a nearby house a teenage boy is wailing in grief and frustration. His dead mother'sbody has stuck underneath a tree. They cannot get it out. His father Hill stands beside him, hisface twisted in anguish. 'I could not sleep. I'm very hopeless. Everything is gone.' Allafternoon we watch the grim procession of bodies being carried in on bamboo poles anddumped into the mass grave. How many other informal graves like this have been dug alongthe coast hear, we don't know."
