Chile earthquake: Troops sent in to deter looting and violence
Armed soldiers are patrolling the streets to help quell unrest and protect shops and banks as the death toll rises to 723
Jonathan Franklin
The Guardian, Tuesday 2 March 2010
Armed troops yesterday patrolled the streets of Chile for the first time in more than two decades as widespread looting in the south led President Michelle Bachelet to order 10,000 soldiers to protect supermarkets, pharmacies, banks and department stores.Chilean National Television reported “neighbour versus neighbour” fighting in the coastal areas of Coronel and Lota as food shortages and lack of electricity caused by Saturday’s devastating earthquake created scenes of desperation.
Ice deposits found at Moon’s pole
A radar experiment aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft has identified thick deposits of water ice near the Moon’s north pole.
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, The Woodlands, Texas
The US space agency’s (Nasa) Mini-Sar experiment found more than 40 small craters containing water ice.
But other compounds – such as hydrocarbons – are mixed up in lunar ice, according to new results from another lunar mission called LCROSS.
The findings were presented at a major planetary science conference in Texas.
The craters with ice range from 2km to 15km (one to nine miles) in diameter; how much there is depends on its thickness in each crater. But Nasa says the ice must be at least a couple of metres thick to give the signature seen by Chandrayaan-1.
Dr Paul Spudis, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, estimated there was at least 600 million metric tonnes of water ice held within these impact craters.
USA
Nuclear projects face financial obstacles
By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Hopes for a nuclear revival, fanned by fears of global warming and a changing political climate in Washington, are running into new obstacles over a key element — money.A new approach for easing the cost of new multibillion-dollar reactors, which can take years to complete, has provoked a backlash from big-business customers unwilling to go along.
Financing has always been one of the biggest obstacles to a renaissance of nuclear power.
Team overseeing national database of dangerous or incompetent caregivers is removed
The reassignments come in response to a ProPublica-Los Angeles Times story that found the repository was probably missing thousands of serious disciplinary cases against health providers.
By Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber
March 2, 2010
Federal officials have removed the management team overseeing a national database of dangerous or incompetent caregivers after questions were raised about its accuracy.The reassignments of the division director and four managers came in response to a joint ProPublica-Los Angeles Times story last month that found the repository was probably missing thousands of serious disciplinary cases against health providers.
Congress ordered up the database more than 20 years ago. It was supposed to provide an alert system for hospitals, flagging them to disciplinary actions taken in any state against nurses, therapists, pharmacists and other licensed health professionals.
Europe
Poland’s ace reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski accused of fiction-writing
New book claims journalist repeatedly crossed boundary between reportage and fiction-writing
Luke Harding
The Guardian, Tuesday 2 March 2010
He has been voted the greatest journalist of the 20th century. In an unparalleled career, Ryszard Kapuscinski transformed the humble job of reporting into a literary art, chronicling the wars, coups and bloody revolutions that shook Africa and Latin America in the 1960s and 70s.But a new book claims that the legendary Polish journalist, who died three years ago aged 74, repeatedly crossed the boundary between reportage and fiction-writing – or, to put it less politely, made stuff up.
In a 600-page biography of the writer published in Poland yesterday, Artur Domoslawski says Kapuscinski often strayed from the strict rules of “Anglo-Saxon journalism”.
Karadzic defends Serb aggression as ‘just and holy’
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
By Arthur Max in the Hague, AP
The wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, defending himself against charges of Europe’s worst genocide since the Holocaust, told judges yesterday he was not the barbarian depicted by UN prosecutors, but was protecting his people against a fundamentalist Muslim plot.During a four-hour opening defence statement at the UN war crimes tribunal, Mr Karadzic barely referred to allegations of mass murder at Srebrenica, indiscriminate shelling of Sarajevo, the destruction of Bosnian Muslim and Croat villages or the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.
Middle East
Will Israel heritage sites spark next Palestinian intifada?
The declaration of two biblical tombs in the West Bank as Israel heritage sites last week sparked clashes. Though Monday was quiet, some fear a new Palestinian intifada in response.
By Josh Mitnick Correspondent / March 1, 2010
Tel Aviv
Amid spreading Palestinian protests against Israel’s decision to declare shrines in two West Bank cities as Israel heritage sites, the Palestinian cabinet held a solidarity meeting Monday in the city of Hebron near one of the sites while some here worried about a new Palestinian intifada.Clashes on the Temple Mount plaza in Jerusalem’s Old City Sunday capped a week of violence since the declaration of Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem as official Israel heritage locations.Critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu say the decision recalls controversial acts by Israel a decade ago near holy sites that helped spark waves of violence – most notably the violent demonstrations in 2000 after Ariel Sharon toured the Temple Mount, which deteriorated into the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada.
But will the dispute spark fresh conflict?
IAEA says it can’t confirm Iran nuclear program is peaceful
The IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog, said Monday that it can’t guarantee the Iran nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes, citing insufficient cooperation from the Islamic Republic.
By Scott Peterson Staff writer / March 1, 2010
Istanbul, Turkey
The UN’s top nuclear official on Monday said the Islamic Republic was not providing the “necessary cooperation” to guarantee that the Iran nuclear program is for exclusively peaceful purposes.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessment comes as Iran has been stepping up uranium enrichment levels and expanding its nuclear fuel cycle plans in recent weeks, moves that have prompted President Barack Obama to warn of tougher sanctions against Iran.“The agency continues…to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran, but we cannot confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities because Iran has not provided the agency with the necessary cooperation,” Yukiya Amano, the new IAEA chief, told the agency’s governing board at the start of its meeting in Vienna this week.
Asia
China appoints Panchen Lama in tactical move to quell unrest
Young monk will take increasingly political role in country’s highest legal body
By Clifford Coonan in Beijing Tuesday, 2 March 2010
The red stars and bunting are in place for China’s annual parliament, the National People’s Congress, which starts in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People tomorrow and had been shaping up to be a rubberstamp talking shop focused mainly on the economy.However, the event has taken on a broader political significance since Beijing named the Panchen Lama, the young man controversially enthroned by Beijing as the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, as a delegate to the country’s top legislative advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
Marjah’s residents wary of U.S. after Taliban ouster
By Dion Nissenbaum | McClatchy Newspapers
MARJAH, Afghanistan – One by one, the men of Marjah tentatively approached the high-ranking Afghan official with their complaints.One man accused U.S. Marines of insulting Afghan men by conducting intrusive searches. Two worried that the government would tax their poppy harvests – just like the Taliban did. A fourth was told he’d receive financial compensation for relatives killed during the fighting.With U.S.-led forces now in control of the one-time insurgent stronghold in southern Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai’s deputy flew from Kabul on Monday to reassure Marjah residents that the Taliban were gone for good – and that things would slowly get better.
Africa
Niger coup leaders name transitional government
The military leadership in Niger has formed a new transitional government of 20 ministers, including five soldiers and five women.)
The BBC Tuesday, 2 March 2010
According to state radio, the defence, sport and environment ministries, went to three generals close to the former President, Mamadou Tandja.
On Monday, the new military leader, Major Salou Djibo, promised to return Niger to democracy but set no date.
President Tandja was ousted last month, after he changed the constitution.
He had sought to remain in power beyond the end of his second term in office.
After the coup, the constitution was suspended and the cabinet dissolved.
Economic progress
Major Djibo, who heads the Supreme Council for Restoration of Democracy (CSRD), says elections will be held after a transitional period of unspecified duration.
“The Council commits itself to restoring the constitutional order that will be proposed by the consultative council” set up to advise on the country’s future, he said.
Latin America
Get Shorty: Mexico still searching for ‘El Chapo’, the 5ft 6in drugs lord
From The Times
March 2, 2010
Hannah Strange and Ruth Maclean
In the remote, rough terrain of the Sierra Madre mountains in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico’s most wanted, most feared and most elusive drug lord is hiding.Protected by a sophisticated reconnaissance operation with deep roots in the local population, he has been evading Mexican and US authorities since his escape from prison in 2001. Those who watch out for him are known as “rats”: taxi drivers, street sellers, shoe shiners, delivery men – “anyone equipped with a phone who wants to earn a few dollars” by informing on military or police activity, says José Ramón Salinas Frias, chief spokesman for the Public Security Secretariat.