South Asia

President Obama has taken painstaking care in the first days of his administration to calm the waters of international relations with promises of cooperation and respect for other nations. But his new envoy to South Asia has landed with a splash. Officials in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India have reacted uneasily to the appointment of Richard Holbrooke, a veteran diplomat nicknamed "the Bulldozer."

Helicopters dropped food to almost 2 million marooned Indian villagers as the death toll from unusually heavy monsoon rains and floods in South Asia rose to more than 225. The food drops to 2,200 villages cut off by flooding aimed to help desperate residents in the worst-hit eastern parts of India's Uttar Pradesh state. Umesh Sinha, the state relief commissioner, said nearly 280,000 acres of rice paddies had been destroyed.

INDIA SPLENDOR is being billed as one of the most ambitious privately funded South Asian festivals ever to take place in the U.S., with some 4,000 people expected to turn out over the next six days to experience the cultural offerings.

The death toll from two weeks of heavy monsoon rains across South Asia rose sharply to at least 521 as rescuers reached remote, flooded villages in northern India. The causes of death included electrocution, house collapses, snakebites and drowning. The storms across much of northern India, Bangladesh and Nepal have also left about 19 million people stranded, officials said.

In the 20th century, the great powers devised a new method for solving entrenched conflicts in faraway countries The tool kit was simple; it required only maps and pens. It appealed because it could be carried out relatively quickly by departing imperialists from their airy colonial offices, and it could be imposed from above on the peoples they formerly governed.

President Obama, emphasizing the use of vigorous diplomacy to settle seemingly intractable problems, named two Democratic heavyweights Thursday as administration envoys to two of the world's most troubled regions. Obama named former Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) as special envoy to the Middle East and former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It was, you could say, only a matter of time. Today, Pakistan becomes the first nation in South Asia to adopt daylight saving time, pushing clocks forward by one hour. The three-month experiment is aimed, as elsewhere, at cutting energy costs by taking advantage of long summer days. But what might make practical sense for Pakistan is yet another headache for a region that already clocks up more than its share of chronological confusion. For residents of South Asia, figuring out what time it is in the next country, let alone beyond that, can be an exercise in frustration.

As a search and rescue expert and former soldier, Los Angeles County firefighter Tim O'Neill said he'd seen his share of human suffering. But even as the 55-year-old Seal Beach resident was getting ready to board a plane for South Asia on Friday, O'Neill wondered just how much those experiences had prepared him for what would be the biggest emergency call in his life. A member of California Task Force 2, a specially trained arm of the county Fire Department, O'Neill is part of a contingent of U.

They spread out like ants across the landscape of destroyed buildings, twisted wire, fishing nets and tree limbs Friday, wearing pink gloves and surgical masks. In bands of twos and threes they searched, poking with sticks, prodding, kicking at stones and looking behind trees. The 150 or so young men, each earning $1 to $2 a day, are searching for cadavers, something they've been doing all week. They already have found most of the cadavers in the main part of this flattened beach town.

President Bush announced a tenfold increase Friday in U.S. aid to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami, pledging $350 million to address an "epic disaster" that he said could require still greater sums. The leap in assistance marked the fourth consecutive day in which the Bush administration has widened its response to the Asian catastrophe amid criticism that the U.S. reacted to the burgeoning humanitarian crisis with too little and too late.