Rev. Danny Fisher

I’m a t-shirt guy. And the ones on display at Beliefnet are real humdingers:

“Best Friends Forever”

This from the Associated Press:

U.N. agencies and private humanitarian groups agree a feared second wave of post-cyclone casualties did not take place [in Burma]. And barriers the junta put in the way of foreign aid appears not to have caused a measurable increase in deaths from illness and lack of food.

“These parts of Myanmar are visited by cyclones almost every year, although not of the same scale,” said Ramesh Shrestha, the UNICEF representative in Myanmar. “Hence people were quite able to adapt to this sudden impact.”

Myanmar’s government said this week that a survey undertaken jointly with the U.N. and the regional Association of Southeast Asia Nations found no post-cyclone deaths related to lack of assistance, though the findings are preliminary.

No one is saying Cyclone Nargis was not a tragedy of epic proportions or that Myanmar’s military government was justified in turning aside offers of outside aid.

The images of swollen bodies lying unattended weeks after the May 2-3 storm and lines of desperate refugees camped along roadsides waiting for food handouts testify to the failures of the initial relief effort.

The government’s official death toll now stands at 84,537 dead, with 53,836 missing.

But almost all the casualties appear to have been caused directly by the cyclone — surprising in view of warnings circulated immediately after the storm, when most foreign assistance and foreign aid workers were kept out of the disaster zone.

Get the full story here.