BANGKOK, May 26 — Foreign relief workers began filtering into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on Monday, as aid agencies tested whether the ruling military junta would keep its promise to permit a major international effort to help the 2.5 million victims of Tropical Cyclone Nargis.
NAJAF, Iraq — When the revered head of Iraq’s largest Shiite opposition group was assassinated in 1999, the mantle of leadership passed to an unexpected heir: Moqtada al-Sadr, then a 25-year-old video game aficionado who oversaw the movement’s security forces.
RAMAPHOSA INFORMAL SETTLEMENT, South Africa — This was the kind of place that was not supposed to exist in the new South Africa. All black. All poor. Dense, squalid, dirty, angry — with charred patches of earth where men once stood.
MANILA, May 26 — The Philippines has been panicking for months about the soaring cost of rice, even as Japan feeds its surplus rice to cows and pigs. So a Japanese pledge last week to ship surplus rice to the Philippines has been greeted here with relief.
MOSCOW, May 26 — U.N. investigators concluded in a report released Monday that a Russian fighter jet almost certainly shot down a Georgian reconnaissance drone over the separatist region of Abkhazia last month. The finding supports Georgian assertions that Russia is providing military backing to…
