US Aid Plane Lands in Burma

After days of negotiating, a US aid flight landed today in Rangoon, the BBC reports. It’s the latest sign Burma’s military junta might be relaxing its restrictions on foreign aid—a French charity’s plane also touched down—but relief workers still aren’t allowed in to distribute the goods. The US has offered the help of 11,000 servicemen; that, too, has been declined.

Officially, last week’s cyclone has killed 32,000, with another 30,000 missing. Observers think triple that number could already be dead, and without more powerful relief efforts, 1.5 million could perish. One Save the Children official in Burma estimated about half of the people who needed aid were getting it, and the Red Cross declared the operation “nowhere near the scale required.” (More Burma stories.)