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• His advice? Start working now and get survivors involved in the process.
• "Please prepare warehouses now all over the region and fill them with construction materials," said Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, who headed a specially created, powerful government agency tasked with coordinating more than $7 billion in aid that flowed to the country after the disaster. "Fix the prices now."
• The Indian Ocean tsunami killed about 230,000 people in a dozen countries. Indonesia's Aceh province was the worst-hit area, accounting for about half the deaths. Much of the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, was leveled.
• Aceh's reconstruction didn't always run smoothly, especially during the first year, but it is now almost universally regarded as successful. Around 130,000 houses were built in less than three years, along with scores of airports, roads and schools. It was the biggest construction project in the developing world.
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• YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Myanmar may have a new tallest mountain, though so far it seems quite happy with the old one.
• A U.S.-Myanmar mountaineering team trekked through jungles crawling with cobras, made a brief, illegal detour through Chinese-controlled Tibet and survived a terrifying 600-foot drop into a crevice on their way to the top of what has long been thought to be the country's second-highest peak, Mount Gamlang.
• Satellite and digital data, together with recent U.S., Russian and Chinese topographical maps, indicate it may be No. 1 after all, said Andy Tyson, leader of the team that climbed the snow-capped mountain along the eastern edge of the Himalayas in September.
• When Myanmar's peaks were surveyed in 1925, back when the area was part of the British Indian empire, Gamlang was measured at 5,834 meters (19,140 feet), behind Mount Hkakabo at 5,881 meters (19,295 feet). Tyson's team, equipped with a hand-held GPS device, measured Gamlang at 5,870 meters (19,258 feet). Tyson also said digital elevation data indicate that the British overestimated the height of Hkakabo, which may be less than 5,800 meters (19,029 feet).
• That would make Gamlang the tallest mountain in Southeast Asia, not just Myanmar. But the country appears cool to the idea of rewriting a key national statistic that schoolchildren have learned uninterrupted for nearly a century, through colonial rule, bloody military coups and self-imposed isolation.
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