Typhoon relief for Philippines is welcome, but what of others?

The Philippines is Hong Kong's close neighbour but the archipelago seems to elicit interest only when something ghastly has happened. Right now, it's the worst storm in recorded history. That's saying quite a lot.

Luckily, Haiyan was also fast-moving enough to do far less damage than it might have. But it came on the tail of a 7.2 earthquake in Bohol. Isn't enough enough?

The Philippines has had one of the roughest histories in Asia. First to get independence, it was sold down the river by its American "liberators". But its own people don't get full credit. The Filipino liberator and first president, General Aguinaldo, went to Hong Kong by agreement and did a bit of selling out himself.

One wonders, why are these people, run roughshod over by Spanish, Americans, Japanese, and by their own greedy political class, so welcoming? It's pertinent now.

My biggest question is why the Philippines is a 24/7 top-drawer disaster show. Why is the whole journalistic pack of wolfhounds combing over Tacloban?

This is not to indicate the slightest indifference to the agony of Leyte and Samar, the two provinces that bore the brunt of the typhoon. A close friend has sent a heart-rending account of a 12-hour trip across Leyte, locating family and property, too often finding old family houses simply gone, or relatives present but living off the ground.

But this, on a world scale of disasters and even given that it was set off by the fiercest storm of world history, is distinctly a second-rung catastrophe.