PARIS, May 11, 2008 (AFP) - French charity Medecins du Monde on Sunday said Myanmar authorities, who have been blocking foreigners from overseeing aid relief to cyclone victims, had agreed to let it distribute the aid it has sent.
    "Medecins du Monde has obtained the authorisation ... to run the distribution of its aid upon arrival of the shipment in Yangon on Monday morning," it said in a statement.
    "We are authorised to go into the affected zone, including the delta region," Celine Morel, spokeswoman for Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World - MDM), told AFP.
    MDM's plane carrying 22 tonnes of aid left the French city of Bordeaux late Saturday, and the charity was due to send a second plane on Monday.
    The pace of aid deliveries into Myanmar has picked up but the country's ruling generals have been refusing to allow foreigners in to direct the relief effort.
    The cyclone, which slammed into the rice-growing Irrawaddy Delta region in the country's south, left 60,000 people dead or missing and as many as two million more short of food, water and supplies.