How you can help Typhoon Haiyan survivors

How you can help Typhoon Haiyan survivors

In the wake of Typhoon Haiyan slamming into the Philippines, relief organizations are calling on Americans to donate funds to their efforts. Want to donate to a group not listed below?CharityNavigator.org rates organizations based on their financial health, accountability and transparency.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

• UNICEF staff in the Philippines is being repositioned to provide emergency aid and the organization is gearing up to deliver supplies to children and their families. Donations can be made online or by texting RELIEF to 864233 to donate $10.

• CARE teams are on the ground in the Philippines and the organization plans to provide emergency relief to thousands of families. Donations can be made online or by calling 1-800-521-CARE within the U.S. or +1-404-681-2552.

• World Vision is mobilizing nearly 500 staff around the country to respond to the disaster. Donations are accepted online and the organization also lets you sponsor a child in the Philippines.

• The American Red Cross has volunteers spread throughout the region and accepts donations online. You can also mail a check to your local American Red Cross chapter designating Philippines Typhoons and Flood in the memo line.

• The U.N. World Food Programme is urging Americans to make donations to support its emergency food relief after Typhoon Haiyan. You can donate online or by texting the word AID to 27722 to donate $10.

• Save the Children is mounting disaster relief efforts to help children and families in the area. Donations can be made online or by texting DONATE to 20222.

• AmeriCares is deploying medical aid and a relief team to Philippines, and says an emergency shipment with enough medical aid for 20,000 survivors is already on its way.

• The Philippine Red Cross has deployed staff and volunteers across the region. You can easily make a donation through organization's website.

• Doctors Without Borders has had emergency teams in Cebu since Nov. 9.

• To donate to the Salvation Army's Typhoon Haiyan relief efforts, visit its website or text TYPHOON to 80888 to donate $10 and reply YES to confirm your donation. The organization uses 100% of all disaster donations in support of disaster relief.

• The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has sent an emergency response team to assist with safe water, hygiene and sanitation needs, with additional aid to follow. Donations can be made online or by calling +1 855 9RESCUE.

• The International Medical Corps is on the ground coordinating with their partners in the Philippines to distribute and provide medical aid. Donations can be made onlineor by calling1-800-481-4462.

• Mercy Corps responders are working with local partners to provide food, water and shelter. Donations can be made online.

• Handicap International supports people with disabilities and vulnerable populations in situations of poverty, conflict and disaster. The group has been working in the Philippines since 1985 and is preparing emergency aid for the hard-hit city of Tacloban. Donations can be made online.

• The United Methodist Committee on Relief is providing funds for the purchase of emergency food, water and and water purification tablets in Tacloban. Donations can be made online or by calling 1-888-252-6174

• Looking for someone in the Philippines area that is in your family or a friend?Google has launched a person finder for the storm, also known as Yolanda in the Philippines, where you can try and find out someone's whereabouts or enter your own information.

'Nothing left to loot' in devastated Tacloban

TACLOBAN, Philippines - Hung outside a shattered church in the Philippine coastal city of Tacloban, on a road flanked with uncollected corpses and canyons of debris, is a handwritten sign.

It read, "We need help!"

Relief supplies are pouring into Tacloban three days after Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, turned this once-vibrant port city of 220,000 into a corpse-choked wasteland.

Tacloban city administrator Tecson Juan Lim says the death toll in this city alone "could go up to 10,000."

At least a dozen U.S. and Philippines military cargo planes arrived on Monday, with the Philippine air force saying it had flown in about 60,000 kg (66 tons) of relief supplies since Saturday. But the demand is huge and the supplies aren't reaching those who need it most.

"People are roaming around the city, looking for food and water," said Christopher Pedrosa, a government aid worker.

Aid trucks from the airport struggle to enter the city because of the stream of people and vehicles leaving it. On motorbikes, trucks or by foot, people clog the road to the airport, clutching scarves to their faces to blot out the dust and stench of bodies.

Hundreds have already left on cargo planes to the capital, Manila, or the second-biggest city of Cebu, with many more sleeping rough overnight at the wrecked airport in the hope of boarding flights in the coming days.

Reuters journalists traveled on a government aid truck which took five hours to pick up 600 bags of rice, tinned goods and milk from the airport and take it to a distribution point at City Hall. Thousands more bags were left at the airport because the truck wasn't big enough, said officials.

Pedrosa, the government aid worker, said security concerns prevented supplies from being handed out after dark.

"There might be a stampede," he said.

The aid truck was guarded by soldiers toting assault rifles. "It's risky," said Jewel Ray Marcia, a Philippine army lieutenant who led the unit.

"People are angry. They are going out of their minds."

"NOTHING LEFT TO LOOT"

The official slogan of Tacloban is "A City of Progress, Beauty and Love". But Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda, has turned that on its head, as desperation and anger grow. Residents wait with increasing impatience for a trickle of aid to become a torrent.

Earlier on Monday, said Pedrosa, soldiers fired warning shots into the air to stop people stealing fuel from a petrol station.

A heavier presence of soldiers and police on the debris-choked streets has stopped most looting, at least for now.

People were still emptying one warehouse of rice and loading it onto carts and motorcycles. No police or soldiers stopped them.

A handwritten sign pinned to a makeshift police checkpoint near a looted department store warned of an 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. Reuters was unable to confirm whether the curfew was observed or enforced.

Also cleared out is a bottling factory for beer and soft drinks. In some areas, Coca-Cola was handed out free while drinking water was impossible to find.Officials were warning residents not to drink water from wells, which were likely polluted.

But there is another reason the looting had abated.

"There is nothing left to loot," said Pedrosa.

"THERE IS NOTHING HERE"

Officials attribute the high death toll to the many people who stayed behind to protect their property and were swept away in a storm surge of water and lacerating debris.

One of them was Marivel Saraza, 39, who moved her six children further inland before Haiyan struck, but stayed behind to look after her home only a stone's throw from the sea.

She ended up battling through chest-high water to reach higher ground, while the storm surge destroyed her two-story concrete home.

"My house just dissolved in the water," she said.

Saraza now struggles to feed her children. The government gave her 2 kg (4.4 lb) of rice and a single can of sardines - barely enough for one family meal - so her husband was foraging for fruit further inland. But trees have been combed flat by the force of the wind and rice fields inundated with salt water.

Haiyan struck with a force strong enough to drown hundreds of people in a storm surge and send cars and shipping containers tumbling through neighborhoods. All that's left of the main airport building is a carcass of twisted metal.

The sea has yet to retreat from some neighborhoods and the streets are flooded.The bay is littered with half-submerged cars.

Some people are making shelters from what the water has left of their broken homes. Others, unable to find any flat ground amid the ruins, sleep on sodden mattresses on their roofs. Some 5,000 people sheltered in a stadium.

The streets empty at night, the ruins lit here and there by cooking fires, or scoped by the powerful lights of passing army trucks.

Rusty Lacambra, 42, is joining the exodus along with his wife, two sons and niece. On Monday night he hitched a lift in an army truck bound for the airport to wait with hundreds of others hoping for a free flight on a cargo plane to Manila.

"My house is destroyed," he said. "Even if you have money there is no food to buy. There is nothing here."

Struggle for Survival in Philippine City Shattered by Typhoon

Edgar Su/Reuters

On the Ground in Tacloban: The Times’s Keith Bradsher reports on the devastation in Tacloban, Philippines, three days after Typhoon Haiyan ripped through the city.

By KEITH BRADSHER 

Published: November 11, 2013 255 Comments 

TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Decomposing bodies still lie along the roads, like a corpse in a pink, short-sleeve shirt and blue shorts facedown in a black, muddy puddle 100 yards from the airport. Just down the road is a church that was supposed to be an evacuation center but is littered with the bodies of those who drowned inside.

Readers’ Comments 

"The scenes reveal the government's incompetence. As always the impoverished have to bear the brunt of the havoc. "

J. Von Hettlingen, Switzerland

When a wind-whipped ocean rose Friday night, the ground floors of homes hundreds of yards inland were submerged within minutes, trapping residents like Virginia Basinang, a 54-year-old retired teacher, who suddenly found herself struggling in waist-deep water on the second floor of her home.Screaming people bobbed in the water that surged through the streets, many grabbing for floating debris.

“Some of them were able to hold on, some were lucky and lived, but most did not,” she said, adding that 14 bodies were left on a wall across the street when the seawater receded a half-hour later. The bodies are still there, and the odor of their decay makes it impossible for Ms. Basinang and her family to eat meals at home.

Typhoon Haiyan, among the most powerful in history, slammed into the eastern Philippine city of Tacloban on Friday and cut a path of devastation barreling west across the archipelago nation. In its wake, corpses lay along roads lined with splintered homes and toppled power lines, as the living struggled to survive, increasingly desperate for fresh drinking water, food and shelter. The damage to everything is so great that it is hard even to tally. Mass graves began to fill as relief efforts struggled to get underway.

The roads of this once-thriving city of 220,000 were so clogged with debris from nearby buildings that they were barely discernible. The civilian airport terminal has shattered walls and gaping holes in the roof where steel beams protrude, twisted and torn by winds far more powerful than those of Hurricane Katrina when it made landfall near New Orleans in 2005.

One of the saddest and deadliest moments came when hundreds of people flocked to Tacloban’s domed sports arena at the urging of municipal officials, who believed its sturdy roof would withstand the wind. The roof did, but the arena flooded, and many inside drowned or were trampled in a frenzied rush to higher seats.

The top civil defense official of the Philippines said in an interview after inspecting the damage that the storm surge had been the highest in the country’s modern history. Nothing like this had ever happened, perhaps explaining why so few thought they needed to flee inland and instead went to evacuation centers near the coast. The sea level rose 10 to 13 feet and filled streets and homes deep in the city, propelled by sustained winds of at least 140 miles per hour and gusts that were much stronger.

“It was a tsunami-like storm surge; it is the first time,” said Eduardo del Rosario, the executive director of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council. Tacloban has been hit by typhoons for decades, but never had the sea risen high enough to pour over the swath of low salt marshes and inundate the city’s shady streets, he said.

As a violet sunset melted on Monday evening into the nearly total darkness of a city without electricity, lighted only by a waxing half-moon, some dispirited residents walked home. Others lay down in the ruins of the airport terminal after another day of waiting in hope of fresh water, food or a flight out. Grocery stores and pharmacies across the city were sacked over the weekend, leaving bare shelves for a population quickly growing hungry and thirsty.

A coast guardsman said that he had helped fill a mass grave in the nearby village of Hernani. “I personally threw in one body earlier, and it was a relative of my friend in Manila — I haven’t told her yet because I can’t get a signal” for cellphone usage, said the coast guardsman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. The same friend in Manila has lost her grandfather, whom the coast guardsman threw in the mass grave, as well as her aunt and two cousins, the guardsman added, saying that other relatives who survived the typhoon had confirmed the identities of the dead.

1,200 feared dead in typhoon-devastated Philippines

Leyte province residents queue for relief goods outside the totally damaged Tacloban airport, where many died after a storm surge spawned by Supertyphoon ‘Yolanda’ inundated the airport and nearby villages. JULIANNE LOVE DE JESUS/INQUIRER.net

TACLOBAN CITY, Philippines—One of the most powerful typhoons in history is believed to have killed 1,200 people in the Philippines, the Red Cross said Saturday, as rescue workers raced to reach towns devastated by tsunami-like waves.
A day after Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) whipped across the central Philippines with maximum sustained winds of around 315 kilometers an hour, a picture emerged of entire communities having been flattened.
Authorities said that, aside from the ferocious winds, storm surges of up to 10 feet high that swept into coastal towns and deep inland were responsible for destroying countless homes.
“Imagine a strip one kilometre deep inland from the shore, and all the shanties, everything, destroyed,” Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said after visiting coastal towns in Leyte, one of the worst-hit provinces in the east of the archipelago.
“They were just like matchsticks flung inland. All the houses were destroyed.”
The official government death toll on Saturday night was 138.
But with rescue workers yet to reach or communicate with many ravaged communities across a 600-kilometer stretch of islands, authorities said they were unable to give a proper assessment of how many people had been killed.
Philippine Red Cross secretary general Gwendolyn Pang said her organization estimated 1,200 people had died, while a UN official who visited Leyte described apocalyptic scenes.
“This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumbleweed and the streets are strewn with debris,” said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, the head of a UN disaster assessment coordination team.
“The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami,” he said, referring to the 2004 disaster that claimed about 220,000 lives.
Stampa made his comments after arriving in Tacloban City, the destroyed capital of Leyte with a population of about 220,000 people.
More than 100 bodies were littered in and around Tacloban’s airport, according to the facility’s manager.

A resident passes by dead bodies that lie on the street after powerful Typhoon Haiyan slammed into Tacloban city, Leyte province central Philippines on Saturday, Nov. 9, 2013. AP

AFP journalists who arrived in Tacloban on a military aircraft encountered dazed survivors wandering amid the carnage asking for water, while others sorted through what was left of their destroyed homes.
One resident, Dominador Gullena, cried as he recounted to AFP his escape but the loss of his neighbours.
“My family evacuated the house. I thought our neighbours also did the same, but they didn’t,” Gullena said.
Eight bodies had been laid to rest inside Tacloban airport’s chapel, which had also been badly damaged, according to an AFP photographer.
One woman knelt on the flood-soaked floor of the church while holding the hand of a dead boy, who had been placed on a wooden pew.
Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla reached the fishing town of Palo, about 10 kilometres from Tacloban, by helicopter and said he believed “hundreds” of people had died just in that area.
Pope Francis tweeted his support for the typhoon victims: “I ask all of you to join me in prayer for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda especially those in the beloved islands of the Philippines.”

Daanbantayan street in northern Cebu after the supertyphoon Yolanda.TONEE DESPOJO/CEBU DAIILY NEWS

Race to reach decimated communities
Meanwhile, the military, government relief workers and non-government organisations battled to reach communities and deliver desperately needed supplies.
Fifteen thousand soldiers were in the disaster zones and helping in the rescue effort, military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Ramon Zagala told AFP.
Zagala said helicopters were flying rescuers into priority areas, while infantry units deployed across the affected areas were also proceeding on foot or in military trucks.
Haiyan’s wind strength, which remained close to 300 kilometres an hour throughout Friday, made it the strongest typhoon in the world this year and one of the most intense ever recorded.
It exited into the South China Sea on Saturday and tracked towards Vietnam, where more than 200,000 people crammed into storm shelters.
Philippine authorities had expressed confidence on Friday that only a few people had been killed, citing two days of intense preparation efforts led by President Benigno Aquino.
Nearly 800,000 people in danger zones had been moved to evacuation centres, while thousands of boats across the archipelago were ordered to remain secured at ports. Hundreds of flights were also cancelled.
Aquino said on Saturday night it appeared some communities had not heeded the warnings.

Aerial photos show the devastation brought by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” in northern towns of Iloilo. RAUL BANIAS/CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

“I hesitate to say this, but it seems that Tacloban was not that prepared, shall we say, compared with other areas,” he told reporters in Manila.
An average of 20 major storms or typhoons, many of them deadly, batter the Philippines each year as they emerge from the Pacific Ocean.
The Philippines suffered the world’s strongest storm of 2012, when Typhoon Bopha left about 2,000 people dead or missing on the southern island of Mindanao.
Haiyan is expected to make landfall in central Vietnam early Sunday, with millions of people thought to be in its path.
Authorities have begun mass evacuations in at least four central coastal provinces, Vietnam’s state-run VNExpress news site said, as the country was put on high alert.
 
Originally posted at 9:39 p.m. | November 9, 2013

Obama ‘deeply saddened’ by Philippines devastation

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama said he and his wife, Michelle, are “deeply saddened” by the deaths and damage caused by Typhoon “Yolanda” (international name:  Haiyan) in the Philippines this weekend.
Obama said the United States is providing “significant” humanitarian assistance and is prepared to further assist relief and recovery efforts.
“Yolanda” struck the eastern seaboard of the Philippines on Friday and quickly barreled across its central islands, packing winds that gusted up to 170 miles (274 kilometers) per hour.
The death toll has climbed into the thousands, and about 4 million people were affected by the storm.
Obama praised the Philippine people for their “incredible resiliency.”

‘Yolanda’ slams PH; high death toll feared

A resident passes by toppled car outside an airport terminal after powerful Typhoon Haiyan slammed into Tacloban city on Saturday. AP

TACLOBAN, Philippines  — The central Philippine city of Tacloban was in ruins Saturday, a day after being ravaged by one of the strongest typhoons on record, as horrified residents spoke of storm surges as high as trees and authorities said they were expecting a “very high number of fatalities.”
At least 138 people were confirmed dead in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan (local name “Yolanda”). But Philippine Red Cross Secretary General Gwen Pang said that agency field staff in the region estimated the toll was about 1,000. Pang, however, emphasized that it was “just an estimate.”
The typhoon slammed into six central Philippine islands on Friday, wiping away buildings and leveling seaside homes. At least 118 of the confirmed deaths were on hardest-hit Leyte Island, where Tacloban is located, said national disaster agency spokesman Maj. Reynaldo Balido.
But after arriving in Tacloban on Saturday, Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said it was too early to know how many people had died in the storm, which was heading toward Vietnam after moving away from the Philippines.
“The rescue operation is ongoing. We expect a very high number of fatalities as well as injured,” Roxas said. “All systems, all vestiges of modern living — communications, power, water — all are down. Media is down, so there is no way to communicate with the people in a mass sort of way.”
President Benigno Aquino III said the casualties “will be substantially more,” but gave no figure or estimate. He said the government’s priority was to restore power and communications in isolated areas to allow for the delivery of relief and medical assistance to victims.

Residents sit outside their damaged house after powerful Typhoon Haiyan slammed into Tacloban city, Leyte province, central Philippines on Saturday, Nov. 9, 2013. AP

The Philippine Red Cross and its partners were preparing for a major relief effort “because of the magnitude of the disaster,” said the agency’s chairman, Richard Gordon.
The airport in Tacloban, a city of 200,000 located about 580 kilometers (360 miles) southeast of Manila, looked like a muddy wasteland of debris Saturday, with crumpled tin roofs and upturned cars. The airport tower’s glass windows were shattered, and air force helicopters were busy flying in and out at the start of relief operations.
“The devastation is, I don’t have the words for it,” Roxas said. “It’s really horrific. It’s a great human tragedy.”
Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said Aquino was “speechless” when he told him of the devastation the typhoon had wrought in Tacloban.
“I told him all systems are down,” Gazmin said. “There is no power, no water, nothing. People are desperate. They’re looting.”
U.S. Marine Col. Mike Wylie surveyed the damage in Tacloban prior to possible American assistance. “The storm surge came in fairly high and there is significant structural damage and trees blown over,” said Wylie, who is a member of the U.S.-Philippines Military Assistance Group based in Manila.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement that America “stands ready to help.”
Tacloban is near the Red Beach on Leyte Island where U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur waded ashore on October 20, 1944, fulfilling his famous pledge, “I shall return,” made in March 1942 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered him to relocate to Australia as Japanese forces pushed back U.S. and Filipino defenders.
Tacloban was the first city to be liberated by U.S. and Filipino forces and served as the Philippines’ temporary capital for several months. It is also the home town of former Filipino first lady Imelda Marcos, whose nephew, Alfred Romualdez, is the city’s mayor.
The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said in a message to Aquino that the EC had sent a team to assist the Philippine authorities and that “we stand ready to contribute with urgent relief and assistance if so required in this hour of need.”

Weather officials said Haiyan had sustained winds of 235 kilometers per hour (147 miles per hour), with gusts of 275 kph (170 mph), when it made landfall. By those measurements, Haiyan would be comparable to a strong Category 4 hurricane in the U.S., and nearly in the top category, a 5. Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are the same, but have different names in different parts of the world.
One Tacloban resident said he and others took refuge inside a parked Jeep to protect themselves from the storm, but the vehicle was swept away by a surging wall of water.
“The water was as high as a coconut tree,” said 44-year-old Sandy Torotoro, a bicycle taxi driver who lives near the airport with his wife and 8-year-old daughter. “I got out of the Jeep and I was swept away by the rampaging water with logs, trees and our house, which was ripped off from its mooring.”
“When we were being swept by the water, many people were floating and raising their hands and yelling for help. But what can we do? We also needed to be helped,” Torotoro said.
In Torotoro’s village, bodies could be seen lying along the muddy main road, as residents who had lost their homes huddled, holding on to the few things they had managed to save. The road was lined with trees that had fallen to the ground.
Vice Mayor Jim Pe of Coron town on Busuanga, the last island battered by the typhoon before it blew away to the South China Sea, said most of the houses and buildings there had been destroyed or damaged. Five people drowned in the storm surge and three others were missing, he said by phone.
“It was like a 747 flying just above my roof,” he said, describing the sound of the winds. He said his family and some of his neighbors whose houses were destroyed took shelter in his basement.
Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN showed fierce winds whipping buildings and vehicles as storm surges swamped Tacloban with debris-laden floodwaters.
In the aftermath of the typhoon, people were seen weeping while retrieving bodies of loved ones inside buildings and on a street that was littered with fallen trees, roofing material and other building parts torn off in the storm’s fury. All that was left of one large building whose walls were smashed in were the skeletal remains of its rafters.
Many packed evacuation centers collapsed in Tacloban as the typhoon raged, a police official said. He said he saw a popular mall being looted Saturday by residents who carted away anything they can lay their hands on, including a flat-screen TV, a small refrigerator, food items, clothes and even a Christmas tree. Smaller shops with guards brandishing their pistols were spared, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.
ABS-CBN television anchor Ted Failon, who was able to report only briefly Friday from Tacloban, said the storm surge was “like the tsunami in Japan.”
“The sea engulfed Tacloban,” he said, explaining that a major part of the city is surrounded on three sides by the waters between Leyte and Samar islands.
The Philippine television station GMA reported that its news team saw 11 bodies, including that of a child, washed ashore Friday and 20 more bodies at a pier in Tacloban hours after the typhoon ripped through the coastal city.
At least 20 more bodies were taken to a church in nearby Palo town that was used as an evacuation center but had to be abandoned when its roofs were blown away, the TV network reported. TV images showed howling winds peeling off tin roof sheets during heavy rain.

Residents walk by debris after powerful Typhoon Haiyan slammed into Tacloban city, Leyte province, central Philippines on Saturday. AP

Ferocious winds felled large branches and snapped coconut trees. A man was shown carrying the body of his 6-year-old daughter who had drowned, and another image showed vehicles piled up in debris.
Relief workers said they were struggling to find ways to deliver food and other supplies, with roads blocked by landslides and fallen trees.
Tim Ticar, a local tourism officer, said 6,000 foreign and local tourists were stranded on the popular resort island of Boracay, one of the tourist spots in the typhoon’s path.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon offered his condolences and said U.N. humanitarian agencies were working closely with the Philippine government to respond rapidly with emergency assistance, according to a statement released by the U.N. spokesperson’s office.
UNICEF estimated that about 1.7 million children are living in areas impacted by the typhoon, according to the agency’s representative in the Philippines Tomoo Hozumi. UNICEF’s supply division in Copenhagen was loading 60 metric tonnes of relief supplies for an emergency airlift expected to arrive in the Philippines on Tuesday.
The storm’s sustained winds weakened Saturday to 163 kph (101 mph) with stronger gusts as it blew farther away from the Philippines toward Vietnam.
Haiyan was forecast to hit central Vietnam’s coast on Sunday afternoon, making its way to the northern part of the country before likely weakening to a tropical storm.
Vietnamese authorities in four central provinces were evacuating more than 500,000 people from high-risk areas to government buildings, schools and other concrete homes able to withstand strong winds.
“The evacuation is being conducted with urgency,” disaster official Nguyen Thi Yen Linh said from central Danang City, where some 76,000 were being moved to safety.
Hundreds of thousands of others were being taken to shelters in the provinces of Quang Ngai, Quang Nam and Thua Thien Hue. Schools were closed and two deputy prime ministers were sent to the region to direct the preparations.

Associated Press 
 

8:51 am | Sunday, November 10th, 2013

‘Yolanda’ slams PH; high death toll feared | Inquirer Global Nation

General Gets Girlie Makeover for Marcos Birthday

Imelda Marcos returned to the Philippines after her husband’s death and the family slowly regained some political power. Imelda is a congresswoman and her son, Ferdinand Jr., is a senator eyeing a presidential run in 2016. Agence France-PresseFerdinand Marcos. AFP FILE PHOTO
Then Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos forced his military chiefs to parade as women during a tasteless, sycophantic birthday party planned by his unstable wife, according to US diplomatic cables. The US ambassador to the Philippines in the mid-1970s, William Sullivan, wrote a series of blistering criticisms of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in secret cables that have since been declassified and published by WikiLeaks. In one of the reports, dated Sept. 12, 1973, Sullivan recounted a “two-day blast” of a party for Ferdinand Marcos that he said was at odds with state-controlled media reports that he “spent a quiet birthday at his desk.” “In general, every aspect of the occasion was too much, too long, and in questionable taste,” Sullivan wrote in the report to Washington. Sullivan wrote that one of the lowest points was when military chiefs were required, under instructions from Imelda Marcos, to perform in a presidential Palace floor show “in garish female attire.” “This whole affair was a saccharine suffusion of sycophancy,” he wrote, according to the cables published on the website of the antisecrecy organization this week. Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines for nearly 20 years until an Army-backed “People Power” uprising involving millions of people forced him to flee into US exile in 1986. He died in Hawaii three years later. While Sullivan appeared in the cables not to personally care much for either of the Marcoses, the United States supported the dictatorship until the final moments of the revolution. Royal wedding Sullivan wrote repeatedly of what he saw as the personality flaws of Imelda Marcos, who cultivated immense power during her husband’s rule and famously lived a lavish lifestyle while most Filipinos endured brutal poverty. In one cable, he warned British diplomats that Imelda would not be concerned about protocol in trying to get herself invited to Princess Anne’s wedding. “First lady has reputation for royal manner of lifestyle in Philippines and would not be above lobbying for invitation to British royal wedding,” he wrote. ‘Perspective a bit awry’ In 1974 cables ahead of a visit by Imelda Marcos to the United States, Sullivan warned his head office that communist Chinese leaders had done a “very effective snow job” that had colored her outlook on the all things American. Sullivan said she was particularly concerned that her daughter Imee was surrounded by “faggots” while studying at Princeton University. “Given all this background, Imelda is in a slightly touchy state and a small offense or an untoward incident could spell lasting damage. She has not lost her sense of humor, but perspective is more than a bit awry,” he warned.

 

Tags: Diplomacy , Ferdinand Marcos , Imelda Marcos , Internet , Military , Philippines , US , WikiLeaks

 

via technology.inquirer.net

 

Philippines’ elite swallow country’s new wealth

MANILA – Optimism is soaring that the Philippines is finally becoming an Asian tiger economy, but critics caution a tiny elite that has long dominated is amassing most of the new wealth while the poor miss out.

President Benigno Aquino has overseen some of the highest growth rates in the region since he took office in 2010, while the stock market has hovered in record territory, credit ratings have improved and debt ratios have dropped.

“The Philippines is no longer the sick man of East Asia, but the rising tiger,” World Bank country director Motoo Konishi told a forum attended by many of Aquino’s economic planning chiefs recently.

However economists say that, despite genuine efforts from Aquino’s team to create inclusive growth, little progress has been made in changing a structure that for decades has allowed one of Asia’s worst rich-poor divides to develop.

“I think it’s obvious to everyone that something is structurally wrong. The oligarchy has too much control of the country’s resources,” Cielito Habito, a respected former economic planning minister, told AFP.

He presented data to the same economic forum at which Konishi spoke, showing that in 2011 the 40 richest families on the Forbes wealth list accounted for 76 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth.

This was the highest in Asia, compared with Thailand where the top 40 accounted for 33.7 percent of wealth growth, 5.6 percent for Malaysia and just 2.8 percent for Japan, according to Habito.

According to the Forbes 2012 annual rich list, the two wealthiest people in the Philippines, ethnic Chinese magnates Henry Sy and Lucio Tan, were worth a combined $13.6 billion.

This equated to six percent of the entire Philippine economy.

In contrast, about 25 million people, or one quarter of the population, lived on $1 a day or less in 2009, which was little changed from a decade earlier, according to the government’s most recent data.

Some of the elite families have dominated since the Spanish colonial era that ended in the late 1800s.

Prominent Spanish names, such as Ayala and Aboitiz, continue to control large chunks of the economy and members of the families are consistent high placers on Forbes’ annual top-40 wealth list.

Their business interests range from utilities to property development to banking, telecommunications and the booming business process outsourcing industry.

Many of the ethnic Chinese tycoons, such as Sy and Tan, got their start soon after the country gained post-World War II independence from the United States.

The tendency for the same names to dominate major industries can be partly attributed to government regulations that continue to allow near monopolies and protections for key players.

For decades after independence from the United States in 1946, important sectors such as air transport and telecommunications were under monopoly control, according to a Philippine Institute for Development Studies paper.

Despite wide-ranging reforms since 1981, big chunks of the market remain effective oligopolies or cartels, it said.

Habito said the path to riches for the few is also helped by a political culture that allows personal connections to easily open doors.

The Aquino government’s mantra since succeeding graft-tainted Gloria Arroyo’s administration has been good governance and inclusive growth, and their efforts have been applauded by the international community.

The government is spending more than $1 billion this year on one of its signature programmes to bridge the rich-poor divide.

The conditional cash transfers programme will see 15 million of the nation’s poorest people receive money directly in exchange for going to school and getting proper health care.

However Louie Montemar, a political science professor at Manila’s De La Salle University, said little had been done at the top end to impact on the dominance of the elite.

“There’s some sense to the argument that we’ve never had a real democracy because only a few have controlled economic power,” Montemar told AFP.

“The country dances to the tune of the tiny elite.”

Nevertheless, the government and economists say there are many other reforms that can be taken to bring about inclusive growth.

Analysts said the most direct path out of poverty was improving worker skills, using higher tax revenues to boost spending on infrastructure, and rebuilding the country’s manufacturing sector.

To this end, many economists endorse the Aquino government’s cash transfer programme as well as reforms to the education system, which include extending the primary and high school system from 10 to 13 years.

But for people such as mother-of-five Remy del Rosario, who earns about 1,500 pesos ($36) a week selling cigarettes on a Manila roadside, talk of structural reform and inclusive growth mean little.

With her bus driver husband out of work, the family has no savings and her income is barely enough to cover food, bus fare, and prescription medicines.

“Other people may be better off now, but we see no improvement in our lives,” she said.

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Tags: aboitiz , Asia , Asian Tiger , Ayala , economy , Elite , GDP , Henry Sy , Lucio Ran , money , Philippines , President Benigno Aquino , World Bank

 

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