Nearly 78,000 are confirmed dead and another 56,000 missing in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, Reuters reports. Torrential rains continued to pound Burma today, complicating rescue efforts. The EU’s chief aid official met with military leaders to press for increasing foreign rescue workers' involvement, but he met with no more success than UN and US officials before him.
"Time is life," said the official, Louis Michel. "No government in the world can tackle such a problem alone. This is a major catastrophe." (More Cyclone Nargis stories.)