The UN says it only has enough money to keep its fleet of helicopters operating for one more week. With many victims stranded in remote mountain valleys, they are essential to the aid effort.. Nine more people drowned in flooding on the south-eastern coast of India as a slow-moving storm tracked inland. The storm, with winds of up to 43 miles per hour, was triggered by a depression in the Bay of Bengal and crossed into the state of Andhra Pradesh yesterday, prompting the evacuation of 5,000 people from low-lying villages. Rising water from the storm also washed away two cars in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, leaving six people missing.The rains and the consequent flooding over the past week have claimed at least 90 lives in the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, according to official estimates. Even the EU is no longer giving the regime the benefit of the doubt over its suspect nuclear weapons programme.. Thousands of earthquake survivors in Pakistan will die in the coming weeks unless more money is donated to the international relief effort, the UN has warned.
In a stark assessment of the situation, the UN's emergency chief said yesterday that funds were already running out, and that the relief operation will have to be cut back unless at least another $200m (£113m) is raised immediately. His remarks about wiping Israel "from the map" have prompted calls for Iran to be thrown out of the UN and led to dark hints about possible military action. Last night, there were already calls on Capitol Hill from Democrats for such a widely-based inquiry.. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has defied worldwide outrage at his call for the destruction of Israel, by joining a demonstration in Tehran and restating his desire to see Israel "wiped from the map". Any hearings could also lead to a much broader examination of how the administration secretly engineered the case for the war in Iraq Mr Cheney could also find himself as a key witness. Branded by President George Bush as a member of the "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and North Korea, Iran was beginning to emerge from a long period of isolation when the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cast a new chill over his country's tentative relations with the West. The populist firebrand sparked a crisis in Iran's foreign relations on Tuesday when he told a Tehran conference that Israel should be "wiped out" in a new wave of Palestinian attacks..
A trial of Mr Libby - who immediately resigned from his position - could lead to an investigation of any role Mr Cheney played. The Vice-President was named in Mr Libby's indictment as his source on the covert CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. If convicted, he could face up to 30 years in jail and fines of $1.25m (£750,000). It was also announced investigators would continue to investigate the alleged role in the affair of Mr Bush's senior political adviser and close confidant, Karl Rove. Prosecutors struck a reverberating blow to the very heart of the Bush administration yesterday when a senior White House official was charged with five criminal offences connected to the CIA leak affair. At the end of an already bruising week for the President, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, was charged with two counts of perjury, two of making false statements and one count of obstructing justice.