Happy Halloween!! but.......

Halloween (or Hallowe’en) is a holiday celebrated on October 31. Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, ghost tours, bonfires, costume parties, visiting haunted attractions, carving jack-o'-lanterns, reading scary stories, and watching horror movies. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century. Halloween is celebrated in several countries of the Western world, most commonly in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, and at times in parts of New Zealand.

A 12-year-old boy has been shot and killed while celebrating Halloween in America.

The youngster was trick-or-treating with his family when he was gunned down in South Carolina.
They had approached a home at about 8.30pm local time and thought they heard fireworks, Sumter Police Chief Patty Patterson said.But a man was firing from inside the property and hit the boy.The youth's father and brother were also wounded by the gunfire.They were taken to hospital but their injuries were not life-threatening.A suspect has been taken into custody.Mrs Patterson has not released the man's name or the victim's details.

The police chief said she was in disbelief and did not know why the shooting occurred.Elsewhere, in Tijuana, authorities banned Halloween masks on teenagers and adults amid rumours of possible attacks in a city plagued by drug violence.Police spokesman Juan Mora said that older people wearing masks in public would be detained and could be fined up to 1,000 pesos ($79 or almost £50).Assailants in Tijuana on the Mexico-US border and close to San Diego, California, often wear ski and other masks to commit crimes. More than 500 people have been killed in the city year.Officials blame the violence on cartels fighting over lucrative smuggling routes.

Myanmar cyclone death toll soars

YANGON: Myanmar's military government raised its death toll from Cyclone Nargis yesterday to nearly 22,500 with a further 41,000 missing, nearly all of them from a massive storm surge that swept into the Irrawaddy delta.

Of the dead, only 671 were in the former capital, Yangon, and its outlying districts, state radio said, confirming Nargis as the most devastating cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people died in Bangladesh.

“More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself,” Minister for Relief and Resettlement Maung Maung Swe told a news conference in the rubble-strewn city of five million, where food and water supplies are running low.

“The wave was up to 3.5m high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages,” he said, giving the first detailed description of the weekend cyclone. “They did not have anywhere to flee.”

Information Minister Kyaw Hsan said the military were “doing their best”, but analysts said there could be political fallout for the former Burma's rulers who pride themselves on their ability to cope with any challenge.

The government lifted states of emergency in three of the five states declared official disaster zones and some parts of the worst-hit Yangon and Irrawaddy regions.

The Information Minister also said the government had sufficient stocks of rice despite damage to grain stored in the huge delta, known as the “rice bowl of Asia” 50 years ago when Burma was the world's largest rice exporter.

The total left homeless by the 190km per hour winds and storm surge is in the several hundred thousands, United Nations aid officials say.

Even in delta villages that managed to withstand the worst of the winds, food and water is already running low.

Residents of Yangon itself were queuing up for bottled water and there was still no electricity four days after the cyclone hit.

Prices of food, fuel and construction materials have skyrocketed, and most shops have sold out of candles and batteries. An egg costs three times what it did on Friday.

Asian nations yesterday joined the international community in offering support for victims of the devastating Myanmar cyclone, after a rare appeal for help from the nation's military junta.

Asean appealed for “generous” international aid for member Myanmar, with Surin Pitsuwan, secretary general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, saying the 10-member bloc has begun to mobilise help through coordination centres in its capitals.

Elsewhere around the world support and offers of assistance were tempered by criticism of Myanmar's rulers for failing to take steps to prevent the horrific death toll.

Get a latest news around the world@ http://www.read-hot-news.blogspot.com