In a universe where anything can happen, most things sooner or later do ‘Coincidence?” as an old friend of mine liked to say whenever one of her enemies fell down an open manhole. “I think not.” We have a strange relationship with chance. Ever since the philosopher Fred Hoyle compared the likelihood of life evolving spontaneously to the chances of a tornado assembling a 747 from a junkyard, we’ve tended to see extreme improbability as a sign that Something Is Messing With Us. In the case of my friend, of course, that may be the case. But other instances are enough to suggest that in a universe where anything can happen, most things sooner or later do. • In 1898, a novel called Futility described an “unsinkable” ocean liner called Titan colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage. Just as in the case of the real-life Titanic, a catastrophic shortage of lifeboats did for Titan’s passengers. • Chris Cleave’s first novel, Incendiary , about a terrorist attack on London, was published on 7 July 2005. • John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, second and third presidents of the United States and lead authors of the Declaration of Independence, both died on 4 July 1826, 50 years to the day after they signed it. • That other American founding father, Mark Twain, was born on the day Halley’s Comet visited in 1835 and died on the day of its return in 1910. He predicted it would see him out. • The 19th-century King Umberto I of Italy was eating in a restaurant when he noticed the owner was a near-exact physical double. It emerged that both were born on the same day, in the same town, and had married women with the same name. The restaurateur had opened his establishment on the day of Umberto’s coronation. Umberto was shot dead on the day he learned the restaurateur had died in a shooting. • Park ranger Roy Cleveland Sullivan was hit by lightning seven times: in 1942, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1977. On one occasion the lightning blew his shoe clean off. After the fourth of these strikes he became accustomed enough to having his hair on fire that he took to carrying a can of water around with him. He lived to 71, dying by his own hand after a love affair went wrong. Sam Leith’s novel The Coincidence Engine is published by Bloomsbury at £12.99. History Sam Leith guardian.co.uk
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Robot submarines reveal wreckage with bodies of passengers who died when Flight AF477 went down on its way to Rio The images from the ocean bed were a cause for celebration for the team of investigators on board the Alucia, off the northern coast of Brazil. For nearly two years, searchers have been scouring the Atlantic on and off in the hope of finding the Air France Airbus A330-200 that fell out of the sky on its way from Rio to Paris, and there it was. At least part of it – a pair of wheels resting on the seabed nearly 4,000 metres from the surface, two engines and a large part of the fuselage – was still intact. Then, from the sunless depths, came other images no one had expected. As the Remus robot submarines swept the submerged wreckage, there, clearly visible, were the bodies of some of the 228 passengers who perished when flight AF447 plunged into the sea, several still strapped into their seats. After the information was relayed back to Paris, it fell to Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, minister for ecology and transport, to break the news. “There are bodies still in the part [of the plane] that has been found,” she told French radio. “I’m not an expert, but it appears the whole thing didn’t explode … there is a part of the cabin, and in that part of the cabin there are bodies” – bodies, she added, “that could be possibly identified”. She said France would begin an operation to bring the wreckage and human remains to the surface within the next few weeks as the search to find the plane’s flight recorders, the black boxes that may solve the mystery of the crash, continues. The recovery operation will cost an estimated €5m (£4.4m) and will be financed by the French state, but is expected to cause controversy and arguments between relatives of the victims. Robert Soulas, vice-president of a support group for the victims’ families, said raising the bodies was a thorny question. Among those killed were passengers from France, Britain, Brazil, Italy, Ireland and China. Among several children to die on the flight was the 11-year-old British schoolboy Alexander Bjoroy, who was travelling back to the UK with a chaperone after spending the half term break with his parents in Brazil. “There’s a very traumatic side to this and it causes problems of identification. We don’t know what state they are in. And it risks causing a dispute between families who want to leave the bodies at the bottom of the Atlantic and those who want them brought to the surface,” Soulas said. For the families of those who died in the tragedy on 1 June 2009, the discovery of the wreckage marked the first breakthrough in nearly two years and brought a mixture of hope and despair. “We want to know what happened in that plane,” said Michel Gaignard, who lost his sister in the accident. An unnamed lawyer for several of the families said some had still not come to terms with their loss. “There’s been no burial, no goodbye … just lots and lots of suffering,” he told French radio. In the days after the crash about 50 bodies and parts of the plane – notably the tailfin – were pulled from the sea by the Brazilian navy. But since then there has been nothing. It was, as one expert said, “like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks”. Three previous search missions had already cost €21.6m and failed to find anything, but with Air France and Airbus, the plane’s operator and manufacturer, facing manslaughter charges, there was a legal and financial impetus to continue the search. The search boat Alucia, operated by a dozen specialists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, had left the port of Suape in Brazil on 22 March and arrived two days later in the zone where it hoped to find the aircraft wreckage. Three robot submarines, similar to those used to find the remains of the Titanic in 1985, found traces of the plane on Sunday as they scoured the seabed at a depth of 3,800 and 4,000 metres. Scanning a circle with a circumference of around 75km from where the plane is thought to have crashed, the robots sent pictures back of wreckage on the seabed a few hundred metres west of the last known position of the plane. After verifying the photos, investigators aboard the Alucia confirmed it was the missing Airbus A330. Flight AF447 sent out 24 automatic messages signalling system failures in the moments before it plunged into the sea. The autopilot was also disengaged, but investigators are unsure whether it was turned off automatically or by the pilots. Preliminary investigations have suggested the plane’s speed sensors may have been faulty. Several incidents involving the sensors had been reported to the air authorities before the crash. Other theories include pilot error and unexpected weather conditions. The debris is concentrated in one zone, suggesting the plane did not explode in flight but hit the water intact. However, investigators say they are continuing to search for the jet’s flight recorders, which they say are the only hope of finding out what caused the crash. The Airbus chief executive, Tom Enders, said: “We strongly hope the discovery of the wreckage will allow us to find the two records, because they are essential to understanding this terrible drama.” The head of France’s air accident investigations bureau, Jean-Paul Troadec, said the Alucia did not have the necessary equipment to raise and recover the wreckage, but its crew would continue to gather more detailed images of the remains of the aircraft. Plane crashes France Airline industry Airbus Kim Willsher guardian.co.uk
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As Google co-founder Larry Page takes over from Eric Schmidt as the company’s CEO, technology editor Charles Arthur looks at what Page needs to do to take the search engine through its next phase of growth In the 10 years since the last time Larry Page was Google’s chief executive, the company has changed a bit. It has gone from an ambitious startup to a publicly-listed giant of the internet which generates cash and has 24,000 employees (and will probably have 30,000 by the end of the year); it has a stake in the fast-growing smartphone market, which barely existed; and it has also begun facing up to the changes inherent in being so large, one of which – the risks of bureaucracy – are well-known to most chief executives; the other – the threat of antitrust action in Europe and the US – are not. As Page, who turned 38 last month, takes over the reins of the company again from Eric Schmidt, who announced in January he was stepping down , he knows he has to get those problems fixed. And although publicly Google is telling journalists “don’t look for dramatic or immediate changes”, Page has already begun tweaking the way that the company is organised and run in the three months he has had to prepare to take over fully. That’s not to say that Google’s big visions (projects such as driverless cars or the Google BookScan project ) are going away. Page is in many ways the ideal face to represent the company: he’s rather geeky, isn’t very outgoing, but is extremely smart. And he’s bringing a number of changes to the company and how it runs. • Product and engineering managers have been asked to email him about their projects now under way, with a view to slimming them down: they were asked to describe their projects in 60 words or fewer, effectively getting them to pitch the ideas. He also spent parts of February and March touring the company and its outposts asking those managers about what problems they think they face in getting things done. • The detail of meetings – which can be the making or the death of a large company – has also been tweaked: attendees are told to pick a decision-maker and hold off working on their laptops during the meeting. (That would be something of a departure for Page, who – as the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta documents – once spent most of a meeting with IAC’s powerful Barry Diller with his head buried in his Palm PDA reading emails.) • Page has reinstated a form of the “weekly meeting” that Schmidt got rid of when he took over in 2001. That meeting had brought together the company’s (then rather fewer) top executives and allowed anyone to come up and query them about something. Schmidt felt it distracted from their work. Page clearly thinks it’s time it came back: he has announced that the divisional heads will be available in a central space each day in the iconic Building 43 of the main headquarters, so that if someone does have a pressing query, they’ll know when and where to find them. • Google isn’t going to be the “bottom-up” culture of past years, when someone like Paul Buchheit could knock together the prototype of Gmail in a single day (as happened in 2001) and then build it up by accreting engineers from other teams. (Buchheit also came up with the ” Don’t Be Evil” motto that the company took to its heart.) Instead, a better model is how the Android platform has been driven, with a clear strategy (which despite claims to the contrary, has not diverged from its earliest intentions) driven by its lieutenants. The idea was never that Android would be an open-source project where absolutely anyone could make a phone, stick software in it, and call it “Android-powered”. Instead Andy Rubin, who Google acquired in 2005 with the eponymously-named Android company, has been given his head by Page to make the phone system into a money-spinner for Google; its rise to the lead in the US and world smartphone markets , and the increasingly tight restrictions that Google is making on what tweaks can be made to the software, means that that could easily be achieved. Gene Munster of the analysts Piper Jaffray reckons that by next year there will be more than 130 million Android users worldwide, and that their viewing of ads on phones, plus other income sources (such as the Android Market for apps, where Google takes a 30% cut of any purchase, just like Apple) could generate more than $1bn in straight revenue. • Data will remain the most important decision-maker. Google once tried to figure out what the best shade of blue was to get people to click on hyperlinks. An in-house designer picked one shade; an engineer then showed the results of a small test which suggested another shade would do better. For Google, more clicks means more ad revenue – so it embarked on a huge test with millions of GMail users as guinea pigs in which it tracked clickthroughs as they were served very slightly different colours of blue. The data won – and the rebooted Google, with a computer scientist at its helm, will reiterate the importance of always following the data. It might not seem like an inspired way to do design. But Google is about size. • Doing something in the “social software” space remains an ambition at Google, but Page stands somewhat aloof from it. He isn’t on Facebook or Twitter (unlike Schmidt, who elliptically announced his departure on the latter). Google already has a long track record of failure in social software: Jaiku wanted to be Twitter, and wasn’t; Google Buzz was so dreadfully implemented (released to the wild after some limited testing in-house) that it led to lawsuits and Federal Trade Commission slapdowns that mean Google will have to tolerate oversight on its privacy policies for the next 20 – that’s twenty – years . It’s possible that social software is simply a blind spot for a company whose culture is dominated by engineers and whose brand is built around search. It’s an oddity, because Google leapt to prominence a decade ago with the American public when they discovered that it wouldn’t just lead them to good factual answers, but that you could find out about potential dates and lovemates: “Googling” as a verb first appeared in a US paper at the end of 2000 when the New York Observer noticed that people used it to check out their upcoming dates because it could lead them to names. But Google has never managed to become a place where you connect with people – possibly because Page and Sergey Brin, its two inventors, designed it not as a destination but as a staging point on the web, your midpoint to whatever you were looking for. • The A-word – antitrust – might look like a headache for Page. The European Commission has sent out sets of three detailed questionnaires to advertising companies around Europe, asking about how well the online advertising market works and whether Google is behaving in an overly dominant way by using its heft to prevent others competing fairly (in antitrust lingo, this is known as “foreclosing the market”). The signals emanating from the EC suggest though that Google may escape this time – though its clearly preferential treatment of its own results, as has been highlighted by one of the principal complainants, the British search startup Foundem , may have to end. Industry observers shook their heads at the irony of Microsoft weighing in on this last week, in which it filed an antitrust complaint to the EC , offering a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone and acknowledging its own rocky antitrust past with the EC (which only stopped biting chunks out of it in 2004). Google may not have to adjust its behaviour too much. One thing that won’t change with Page’s ascent: the deeply felt antipathy inside Google towards Microsoft, which had already been the target of a sting earlier this year over search results, and with which Google is increasingly tussling for business contracts to offer cloud services such as email and document sharing. In fact, it may be the fight with Microsoft that will define Page’s tenure more than the driverless cars or the potential dominance of Android. There’s no chance that Google will chip away at Microsoft’s principal monopoly, Windows, which generates roughly half the Redmond giant’s profits; the Chrome OS laptops Google is encouraging PC makers to build will be suitable only for a small group who live always-connected lives. But if Google can start to undermine the Office monopoly, which generates the other half of Microsoft’s income, then it can begin to destabilise its ageing enemy. And at present, Microsoft remains the only company that can challenge Google on every front – smartphone operating systems, cloud services, search. Google Larry Page Search engines Internet Technology sector Smartphones Mobile phones Android Software Gmail Apps Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk
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Click here to view this media Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) thinks it’s time to take the fight in Libya to the next level. The senior senator from South Carolina said Sunday that the U.S. should directly target embattled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi with airstrikes. He also suggested that the opposition forces should be given U.S.-built Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire command data link, guided (TOW) missiles. “I think it’s time to go directly after Gaddafi,” he told CBS’ Bob Schieffer. “If you had TOW missiles given to the rebels in Libya, they could fight the tanks in addition to air power, but this strategy that President Obama has come up with, I think, is not going to defeat a determined enemy.” “So this strategy is going to lead to a stalemate. We should be taking the fight to Tripoli. You don’t need ground troops but we should take the air campaign to Tripoli to go Gaddafi’s inner circle. They live like kings. Go after them, to go after their propaganda machine. The way to end this war is to have Gaddafi’s inner circle to crack. The way to get his inner circle to crack is to go after them directly.” “You say what we need to do is air strikes on Gaddafi and his people?” Schieffer asked. “Absolutely. I think he’s an international war criminal,” Graham said. “The strategy should be to help the rebels help themselves. To take the best air force in the world and park it during this fight is outrageous. When we called for a no-fly zone, we didn’t mean our planes… As much as I respect our NATO allies, you take a lot of capacity off the table by grounding our airplanes.” “You’re ready to give missiles to the rebels there?” Shieffer pressed. “I think TOW missiles — I’m ready to look at arming them to help them help themselves. We need America air power back into the fight and we need to take the fight to Tripoli,” Graham insisted. Obama has reportedly signed a presidential directive authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct secret operations to support the Libyan opposition forces. “I’m not ruling it out,” the president said last week when Brian Williams asked him about arming the rebels. “But, I’m also not ruling it in.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Sunday that the U.S. should hold off providing arms to the opposition forces. “I spoke to the president yesterday about this, President Obama, and I think at this stage we really don’t know who the leaders of this rebel group is,” he told Schieffer . “We have others, as [Defense] Secretary Gates has said, that can do it more easily than we can,” Reid added. “So I think at this stage let’s just wait and see.”
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David Cameron announces four more strike aircraft to target Gaddafi forces as US moves out of frontline operations David Cameron has announced an increase in the number of Tornado strike aircraft to be deployed to hit Muammar Gaddafi’s forces. The prime minister made the announcement during a two-hour visit to the Gioia del Colle air base in southern Italy where he thanked British air crews policing the Libyan no-fly zone. The increase came on the day the defence ministry announced the first round of armed forces redundancies , and the Air Chief Marshall, Sir Stephen Dalton, warned of overstretch and called for more money. The prime minister said the number of Tornado ground attack jets deployed to the base would rise from eight to 12, to beef up British strike capability. Sourced from RAF Marham in Norfolk, the jets will arrive in the next few days. The increase is partly due to the US moving out of Libyan frontline operations towards logistical and intelligence support, placing pressure on other countries to come forward. It is also intended as a signal to other Nato member countries to increase their contribution. Cameron praised the British pilots, telling reporters: “I want to say ‘well done’ and give a heartfelt thanks from the British public to the brave Tornado pilots and their crews who have done an incredible job in a short period of time to save, I think, thousands of lives in Benghazi and elsewhere. “The whole country should be proud of what they have done. They have responded incredibly quickly. They have flown many sorties and they have been extremely successful in holding back Gaddafi’s forces.” During the visit Cameron talked to 600 RAF crew, led by Group Captain Martin Sampson, and was briefed on the scale of the damage British fighters were inflicting on Gaddafi’s army. This has included the destruction of 10 armoured vehicles and three tanks at the weekend around the beseiged town of Sirte. Apart from the Tornado jets, Britain has 10 Typhoons engaged in its operations against Libya. Cameron said that, on the basis of briefings over the past 24 hours, he believed the Gaddafi regime was showing signs of stress and looking for a way out. But the government remains sceptical of the Libyan offers of ceasefires and will stick with previous statements made by the US president, Barack Obama, and his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, that no ceasefire offer will be taken seriously unless it includes a verifiable withdrawal of forces from rebel-held coastal towns. Shadow Defence secretary Jim Murphy said: “I am glad that the Prime Minister is rightly meeting our forces in Italy but there will be real anger amongst forces families that at the same time back home his ministers have announced the redundancy of many service personnel.” Speaking over the roar of two Tornado jets returning from a seven-hour mission over Libya, Wing Commander Andy Turk said: “We will be here for as long as it takes and we are well on the road to that”. Asked about the increase in Tornado fighter jets coming to the base he said: “We are rebalancing the number of offensive assets. We have control of the air and we are now refocusing on control of the ground. It is routine as an operation progress – it is all about protecting civilians.” Turk was the navigator on the first bombing flight out of RAF Marsham at the start of the Libyan operation. Cameron also spoke to Typhoon crew that had returned to base 10 minutes earlier. Cameron told the pilots “You are having an enormous impact. I know we have got to keep the pressure up. We are rightly saying no ground troops, no occupation, so it is less easy to know how the end game will work. “But the pressure you are putting on is giving every chance of some sort of Gaddafi-free future in Libya.” Libya Military Defence policy Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
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The health secretary acknowledges anxieties about the NHS bill and announces amendments to parts of it Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, has acknowledged that people have “genuine” concerns about his reforms to the NHS as he announced that the government would table amendments to the bill. Amid fears in Downing Street that Lansley has failed to explain the thinking behind his reforms, the health secretary said he would use a “natural break in the passage of the bill” to offer reassurances that the government’s sole intention is to improve the NHS. In a statement to MPs, Lansley announced a series of areas where the government would make improvements. They are: • Choice and competition. “Choice, competition and the involvement of the private sector should only be a means to improve services for patient, not ends in themselves. Some services like accident and emergency or major trauma clearly will never be based on competition.” • Private sector involvement. “People want to know that private companies cannot cherry pick NHS activity, undermining existing NHS providers. But competition must be fair.” • Transparency of new GP-led consortia that will control 60% of the NHS’s £103bn budget. “People want to know that the GP commissioning groups cannot have a conflict of interest, are transparent in their decisions and accountable not only nationally but locally, through the democratic input to health and wellbeing boards.” Lansley said 220 GP-led commissioning groups had already applied to be “pathfinder commissioning groups” covering 87% of the population of England. But he acknowledged that the pace of reform had caused concerns. “We recognise that this speed of progress has brought with it some substantive concerns, expressed in various quarters. Some of those concerns are misplaced or based on misrepresentations but we recognise that some are genuine. “We want to continue to listen to, engage with and learn from experts, patients and frontline staff within the NHS and beyond and to respond accordingly. I can therefore tell the house that we propose to take the opportunity of a natural break in the passage of the bill to pause, to listen and to engage with all those who want the NHS to succeed and subsequently to bring forward amendments to improve the plans further in the normal way.” Nick Clegg is also nervous about the reforms, which appear to run counter to the pledge in the coalition agreement to “stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS”. Liberal Democrats voted against the reforms at their recent spring conference. Lansley’s plans would transfer about 60% of the NHS budget to GP commissioning consortiums, abolish primary care trusts, appoint an independent NHS commissioning board and extend a regulated market in healthcare provision. Cameron’s spokesman insisted the thrust of the reforms was correct, but added that ministers would use the Easter break to put the bill on hold. The announcement of a delay was agreed at a meeting involving Cameron and cabinet colleagues on Thursday. The spokesman said: “We have got to a certain point in the bill. Committee stage [in the Commons] has been completed. There is a break now. “[The health secretary] is going to be setting out the next steps. We have a very clear objective in reforming and modernising the health service. We intend to push ahead with this.” The statement by Lansley follows the Policy Exchange warning that the health and social care bill’s proposals to abolish every primary care trust (PCT) by 2013 “could lead to the new structure simply replicating the existing system in all but name”. The report, entitled Implementing GP Commissioning, is based on interviews with the GP leaders or managers of 16 “pathfinder” consortiums, and with other experts. Its findings will add to pressure on Cameron to rethink how he sells the reforms and whether they should go ahead at the pace planned, given the growing hostility from GPs. Some of the Policy Exchange ideas would require radical recasting of commissioning. The study concedes that “the government has lost many potential supporters inside and outside the NHS”, and blames the Department of Health for not winning over GPs. It also questions “whether GPs have the necessary skills to run such highly complex operations before the transition to GP commissioning takes places”. Eve Norridge, the lead author of the report, said: “There are many GPs who have the potential to become highly successful commissioners. It would be a loss to everyone, especially patients, if the policy were discredited due to overly hasty implementation. “Ministers need to address GPs’ concerns before loading such huge new responsibilities on their shoulders. “The danger is that GPs take part so reluctantly in the new scheme that it ends up replicating the existing model rather than becoming the new and innovative system the government desires.” The Department of Health has insisted that applications to join the pathfinder projects show real support for the ideas contained in the bill, but others argue that GPs have merely bowed to what they regard as the inevitable. NHS Andrew Lansley Health policy Health Nicholas Watt Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be tried at the US military base in Cuba rather than in a civilian court on American soil Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, will be tried by a military commission in Guantánamo. It is the latest retreat by the Obama administration from its much-vaunted plans to overhaul the legal processing of terror suspects. Mohammed and four other terror suspects will be put on trial through a military system that President Obama had vowed to abolish when he began in office in January 2009. The White House had declared its intent in 2009 to push them through the civilian justice system with a landmark trial at the federal court in Manhattan, a stone’s throw away from Ground Zero. But the proposal invoked a groundswell of opposition, most powerfully from New York residents and the mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg. The US attorney general, Eric Holder, was expected to announce the administration’s U-turn at a press conference in Guantánamo. The about-face is hugely symbolic as Mohammed was al-Qaida’s main architect of 9/11, according to the commission of inquiry into the terrorist outrages convened in New York. How he is treated arguably sets the tone for America’s legal handling of terror suspects. Obama had wanted to bring that legal process back into the norms of civilian justice. But he was thwarted by a wall of opposition from Republicans in Congress, backed by some Democrats. Republicans inserted a provision into the latest defence budget effectively banning the use of Pentagon funds to transfer Guantánamo detainees to the mainland, thus blocking any civilian trials. Obama initially promised to repeal the restriction, but last month he backtracked by allowing the resumption of military commission trials at the US base in Cuba. Bloomberg also did a volte face. Initially, he approved the idea of a civilian trial for Mohammed in downtown Manhattan, but then turned against it, arguing that it would cost the city more than $400m (£248m) in security alone. Other opponents claimed that it would again make New York the target of terrorists’ wrath. Never Forget, a group of family members of victims of the attacks, as well as emergency workers and former military personnel, welcomed the announcement. “We are relieved that President Obama has abandoned his plan to try the 9/11 conspirators in a civilian court on US soil. Prosecuting war criminals, whose only connection to this country is the location of their victims, in military commissions is the right thing to do.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed United States Global terrorism Guantánamo Bay Cuba US politics Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk
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Four missiles reported to have been fired at a military base in Abidjan as UN seeks to stop weapons being used to hit civilians United Nations helicopters have launched attacks on president Laurent Gbagbo’s forces in Ivory Coast according to reports. The helicopters fired four missiles at a pro-Gbagbo military camp in the main city of Abidjan, witnesses told Reuters. “We saw two UNOCI (U.N. mission in Ivory Coast) MI-24 helicopters fire missiles on the Akouedo military camp. There was a massive explosion and we can still see the smoke,” one of the witnesses said. The camp is home to three battalions of the Ivorian army. Earlier, sources told the Guardian the UN was looking at the possibility of using helicopters to launch aerial attacks after its base was targeted and 11 of its peacekeepers shot. The UN is focusing on heavy weapons that troops loyal to Gbagbo are using to strike civilians, including BM-21 rocket systems. The international body has no air force of its own, and so there is no question of a full-blown air offensive along the lines of the Libyan conflict. But the UN does have a Ukrainian aviation unit with three Mi-24 attack helicopters, that have already been actively deployed in Ivory Coast. The security council is meeting to discuss the situation.The streets of Abidjan resemble a ghost town as residents, most too terrified to leave their homes, awaited a final battle for power between two rival presidents. There was a lull in fighting as reinforcements fighting for Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognised election winner, travelled from his northern stronghold. The UN evacuated 170 civilian staff from Abidjan over the weekend. “We are fast approaching a tipping point,” Choi Young-jin, the UN’s top diplomat in Ivory Coast, told the BBC: “We are planning action, we can no longer condone their [Mr Gbagbo's forces] reckless and mindless attack on civilians and the United Nations blue helmets with heavy weapons.” Choi, whose own office has been hit by sniper fire, added: “We are now in a way under siege, so we cannot go out freely, [they're] targeting us with snipers, it’s a deliberate shoot at United Nations. “For the last few days we have had 11 [peacekeepers] wounded by their gunshots. They are targeting the headquarters, they cut off the water … and we are now in the bunker.” A total of 20 peacekeepers have been injured since the crisis triggered by last November’s disputed election. Choi said the UN’s 9,000 troops did not have a mandate to dislodge Gbagbo but can respond to heavy weapons attacks against the UN or civilians. “We will be using our air assets,” Choi said. “We will be taking action soon.” Thousands of the rebels massed at a toll booth some 20 miles from the centre of Abidjan, which has been a fierce battleground in recent days. Several pickup trucks with mounted machine guns could be seen. The mood was described as surprisingly relaxed and even jovial. Speaking on Sunday on the pro-Ouattara TCI television channel, Ouattara’s prime minister, Guillaume Soro, said their side’s strategy had been to encircle the city, harass Gbagbo’s troops’ positions and gather intelligence on their arsenal. “The situation is now ripe for a lightning offensive,” he said. But in a rare boost for Gbagbo, it was claimed that his top army general had returned to the fold days after deserting. General Phillippe Mangou, his wife and five children left the South African ambassador’s residence in Abidjan after fleeing there last week. Lieutenant Jean-Marc Tago claimed: “The general is with us and has always been with us. Our plan is to defend the institutions of the republic against all its enemies, against the rebels, against the mercenaries, against the [United Nations] and all those who are attacking the institutions of the republic commanded by President Laurent Gbagbo.” A Gbagbo spokesman, Ahoua Don Mello, said on state TV: “Phillipe Mangou met with his fellow soldiers on the ground. But we still don’t know if he is willing to return at the helm of affairs. I don’t have enough information about that.” He added: “I saw him at the residence of the president with his colleagues. He is going to deliver a statement in person.” On Ouattara’s rival TV station, Serges Alla, a journalist, confirmed that Mangou had left the embassy and been picked up by a close collaborator of Gbagbo’s. But the journalist added: “Mangou was forced to leave the South African embassy because some of his relatives were made hostage by diehard supporters of Gbagbo, and Gbagbo militiamen were putting pressure on him, saying they would bomb his village if he doesn’t show himself or doesn’t return to the Gbagbo army.” Despite mass defections, Gbagbo has surprised many observers by fighting back, issuing a call to arms to his supporters, who descended on his residence on Sunday to form a human shield around it. Gbagbo’s spokesman, Abdon George Bayeto, told the BBC that there is an international plot against the incumbent. “When it comes to a fight we are going to put up a fight,” he said. “The president is not going to step down.” The UN has raised concerns about the possible involvement of fighters linked to Ouattara’s forces in hundreds of killings in the west of the country – something the Ouattara camp denies. France is sending an extra 150 soldiers from Gabon to Ivory Coast to help protect civilians, a spokesman for the armed forces said. The soldiers’ deployment brings the number of French troops in Ivory Coast to 1,650. In Britain, foreign secretary William Hague said a team is on standby to assist in an evacuation of European Union nationals if the situation in the Ivory Coast deteriorates. Hague said: “We call for an end to the violence, for defeated former president Gbagbo to step down, for all human rights abuses to be investigated and for the International Criminal Court to investigate the crimes which appear to have taken place.” Hague added that Gbagbo’s supporters in the African Union were “down to zero”, but he understood there was no prospect of African military intervention. Ivory Coast Laurent Gbagbo Alassane Ouattara United Nations Ed Pilkington David Smith guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …TEPCO Attempt To Plug Leak With Absorbent Material Fails To Stop Radioactive Water
April 4, 2011 No CommentSo this didn’t work , either. And now experts says it could take as long as a year to get the Fukushima nuclear reactor under control: Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s attempt to clog a cracked pit with a mixture of sawdust, newspaper and plastic failed to stop radioactive water leaking into the sea from its crippled nuclear plant. The absorbent material, including the same polymer used in baby diapers, was injected into a power-cable storage pit at the plant where radiation-contaminated water is escaping through a crack, the power utility said yesterday. The company is injecting a tracer dye to try to gain more information about where and how fast the water is flowing before continuing efforts to halt it, a spokesman said at a Tokyo press conference. The leak may not pose a severe threat to the public or wildlife, said Kathryn Higley, department head and professor of nuclear engineering and radiation health physics at Oregon State University. “You’re likely to have a footprint in the soil and the sands and sediments as that material leaks out, but the impact is likely to be pretty minimal,” Higley said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Even if it does get out into that marine environment, that area around there has been pretty badly torn up, so there’s not a lot of life to be impacting.” Tokyo Electric has been working to stop radiation leaks since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out the plant’s cooling systems, resulting in a partial meltdown of some of its reactors. Tokyo Electric, also called Tepco, said it overestimated the absorption power of the polymer products it used. It believed the material would absorb 1,000 times its volume in water, Tepco said yesterday in a press conference webcast over the Internet. Instead, the rate was 20 times the volume , the company said. Tepco needs to understand the water’s flow rate so that it can determine how to use the absorbent material successfully, said Akira Tokuhiro, professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering at the University of Idaho.
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On April 2 nd , The New York Times published a piece by Ethan Bronner titled, “In Israel, Time for Peace Offer May Run Out.” In the piece, Bronner discussed various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including statehood, violence, peace talks, religion, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Muslim Brotherhood. But while Bronner spent many paragraphs detailing the difficulties in establishing peace between Israel and Palestine, it wasn't until the 2 nd page that he Donner admitted a “central obstacle to the establishment of a State of Palestine” is the political and physical divide between the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Gaza. The more moderate PA has suggested elections for a unified government in both territories. “But Hamas, worried it would lose such elections and hopeful that the regional turmoil could work in its favor – that Egypt, for example, might be taken over by its ally, the Muslim Brotherhood – has reacted coolly,” Bronner wrote. After 1,138 words, he finally made a crucial connection between the terrorists of Hamas and the supposedly moderate Muslim Brotherhood – and obliquely showed that Hamas is more interested in killing Jews than in establishing a Palestinian state. Unfortunately by burying this vital information, Bronner and The New York Times follow a path similar to the mainstream media reporting on the Muslim Brotherhood. For 17 years, ABC, CBS and NBC have mentioned the Muslim Brotherhood in hundreds of stories but only linked the group to fundamentalist Islam or “extremism” in 37 percent of those stories. For the most part, the networks chose to stick with the meme that the Brotherhood is “peaceful” and “moderate,” even “charitable.” And even in the wake of the Egyptian uprising in January, the networks glossed over the Brotherhood's violence, only linking 32 percent of stories to radical Islam, violence and extremism.
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