Grim DVDs of disaster top charts

PORT BLAIR, India — Pushing aside pirated Bollywood movies, new releases are ruling the black-market video charts: compilations of grisly pictures and videos of the tsunami horror.

"There is great demand for them," said Mukesh Vyas, a DVD dealer in Port Blair, capital of the hard-hit Andaman and Nicobar island chain. "We don't have the stock, they are so hard to get."

Sometimes, the DVDs, which often sell for a little as $1.50, are simply news footage recorded from television broadcasts. More often, it's highly graphic footage, often shot by amateurs, that would never make it to broadcast TV at all.

Police in the Thai resort town of Phuket arrested a man for selling DVDs of the disaster, but other sales people say the DVDs reflect what the public wants to see, a sort of high-tech rubbernecking of one of the most deadly natural disasters of the past century.

"It shows everything — how people died, how they were buried, people who were saved and destroyed property. Good quality. Good sound," said Palaniappan, a 14-year-old boy selling CDs on the sidewalk outside Port Blair's main Roman Catholic church. Palaniappan uses only one name.

Government, rebels agree to talks

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Mediators yesterday persuaded the Indonesian government and Aceh rebels to meet for negotiations on a cease-fire, trying to forge peace out of the Dec. 26 tsunami tragedy.

Finland's Crisis Management Initiative, headed by former President Martti Ahtisaari, said Indonesian government officials and rebel leaders would meet this week in Helsinki to discuss a formal cease-fire in tsunami-ravaged Aceh province, where separatists have been fighting for an independent homeland for nearly 30 years.

Despite an informal truce announced by both sides since the disaster, there have been isolated reports of fighting, raising concerns about the security of relief operations in Aceh on the island of Sumatra. The Indonesian military said yesterday it had killed 200 alleged rebels in the past four weeks.

Death toll up again for Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Two Indonesian ministries tracking the death toll in the country increased their counts yesterday, though they continued to vary greatly, as they have for weeks.

The Health Ministry raised its estimate by 7,661 to 173,981. The Social Affairs Ministry increased its estimate by 4,749 to 114,978.

The conflicting tallies stem from different ways of incorporating the number of missing.

Indonesia was the worst hit of 11 nations affected by the disaster. The increase brings the total death toll around the Indian Ocean to between 162,530 and 228,771.

Relief coordination still a problem

JAKARTA, Indonesia — The massive relief operation along the remote west coast of Aceh province, one of the areas hit hardest by the tsunami, has brought food and medicine to most large population groups but continues to be hampered by insufficient coordination, according to a report compiled by 14 government and private agencies.

Aid workers "do what they think is best, and sometimes a particular country or a particular agency may well send materials or equipment that may not be what is required at that stage," said Rob Holden, worldwide operations manager for the World Health Organization.

"Or it may be that they haven't asked the wider question: Is someone else sending that, do I need to send something else?"