Tag: Six In The Morning

Rebels hope tribal rifts will speed their march to Gaddafi’s birthplace

Loyalists offer little resistance ahead of battle for Sirte. Kim Sengupta joins the advancing forces.

Tuesday, 29 March 2011

The scale and nature of resistance from the regime’s soldiers indicated how much their firepower had been devastated by Western air strikes. There was little of the heavy shelling that had made the revolutionary forces flee in the past. This was replaced instead by sporadic rockets and small-arms clashes on the ground.

The rebel commanders, nonetheless, remain worried after reports that the male population of Sirte had been armed and what remains of the regime’s armour and artillery on the eastern front has been deployed to protect the city. Renewed bombing of the military positions in the city by international coalition warplanes are said to have caused some damage, but the city remains well guarded.

Libya: coalition attacks Sirte for first time

Coalition planes launched air strikes on Sirte, Col Muammar Gaddafi’s home town, for the first time on Sunday night.

2:39AM BST 28 Mar 2011

Libyan television confirmed the Gaddafi stronghold had been the target of strikes by “the colonial aggressor”, as had Tripoli, and there was a large deployment of troops on the streets of Sirte.

Nato commanders say Libyan regime forces have begun digging in to make a stand in Sirte, raising the prospect that a bloody battle lies ahead as rebel forces barrel westward.

Regime forces who retreated in the face of the rebel advance have begun locating their armour and artillery inside civilian buildings in Sirte, Nato sources said, a tactic designed to make air strikes fraught with risk.

Sirte, which Col Gaddafi repeatedly tried to turn into Libya’s capital, is dominated by members of his tribe, the Gaddafi, who remain largely loyal to the regime.

Japan nuclear: Workers evacuated as radiation soars

Radioactivity in water at reactor 2 at the quake-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant has reached 10 million times the usual level, company officials say.

The BBC  27 March 2011

Workers trying to cool the reactor core to avoid a meltdown have been evacuated.

Earlier, Japan’s nuclear agency said that levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the plant had risen to 1,850 times the usual level.

The UN’s nuclear agency has warned the crisis could go on for months.

It is believed the radiation at Fukushima is coming from one of the reactors, but a specific leak has not been identified.

Leaking water at reactor 2 has been measured at 1,000 millisieverts/hour – 10 million times higher than when the plant is operating normally.

Fear and devastation on the road to Japan’s nuclear disaster zone

Daniel Howden travels through a post-tsunami wasteland to the gates of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi power station

Saturday, 26 March 2011

Once this road was thronged with traffic: an expressway, one of the arteries of a nation’s economic life, as familiar and modern a sight as you would find anywhere in Japan. The only barriers on the route to Fukushima Daiichi were the other people heading in the same direction.

Today the journey is different. It is a journey to the heart of a catastrophe. About 10 kilometres beyond the half-deserted city of Iwaki, the coastal road is blocked not by commuters but by landslides; the satellite navigation system that might once have flashed up traffic jams shows clusters of red circles that denote barred roads.

Nato takes over Libya no-fly zone



Nato says it has agreed to take over responsibility from the US for enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya.

The BBC  25 March 2011

Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said talks would continue on giving Nato a “broader responsibility”, with a decision possible in the coming days.

There have been differences of opinion about whether attacks on ground troops should form part of the action.

British jets have launched missiles at Libyan armoured vehicles near Ajdabiya during a sixth night of allied raids.

The UK government said Tornado aircraft fired missiles at Libyan military units close to the town, where there has been fierce fighting between rebels and forces loyal to Col Muammar Gaddafi.

Tokyo radiation fears spark run on bottled water

More countries impose curbs on imports of Japanese food

msnbc.com news services

TOKYO – Workers doled out bottled water to Tokyo families Thursday after residents cleared store shelves because of warnings that radiation from Japan’s tsunami-damaged nuclear plant had seeped into the city’s water supply, while more countries imposed curbs on imports of Japanese food.

Engineers are trying to stabilize the Fukushima nuclear facility nearly two weeks after an earthquake and tsunami battered the complex and devastated northeast Japan.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency said Thursday that three workers have been exposed to radioactive elements and injured while laying electric cables. Two of the workers were taken to a hospital for treatment, spokesman Fumio Matsuda said.

Tokyo’s 13 million people have been told not to give infants tap water because of contamination twice the safety level.

U.S.-Led Assault Nears Goal in Libya



By ELISABETH BUMILLER and KAREEM FAHIM

Published: March 22, 2011

WASHINGTON – An American- led military campaign to destroy Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s air defenses and establish a no-fly zone over Libya has nearly accomplished its initial objectives, and the United States is moving swiftly to hand command to allies in Europe, American officials said, despite some fighting reportedly continuing on Tuesday.

But the firepower of more than 130 Tomahawk cruise missiles and attacks by allied warplanes have not yet succeeded in accomplishing the more ambitious demands by the United States – repeated by President Obama in a letter to Congress on Monday – that Colonel Qaddafi withdraw his forces from embattled cities and cease all attacks against civilians.

Allies Target Qaddafi’s Ground Forces as Libyan Rebels Regroup



By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: March 20, 2011

TRIPOLI, Libya – American and European militaries intensified their barrage of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces by air and sea on Sunday, as the mission moved beyond taking away his ability to use Libyan airspace, to obliterating his hold on the ground as well, allied officials said.

Rebel forces, battered and routed by loyalist fighters just the day before, began to regroup in the east as allied warplanes destroyed dozens of government armored vehicles near the rebel capital, Benghazi, leaving a field of burned wreckage along the coastal road to the city. By nightfall, the rebels had pressed almost 40 miles back west toward the strategic crossroads city of Ajdabiya, witnesses and rebel forces said. And they seemed to consolidate control of Benghazi despite heavy fighting there against loyalist forces on Saturday.

Western warplanes, missiles hit Libyan targets



REUTERS | Mar 20, 2011, 10.08am IST

TRIPOLI: Western forces hit targets along the Libyan coast on Saturday, using strikes from air and sea to force Muammar Gaddafi’s troops to cease fire and end attacks on civilians.

Libyan state television said 48 people had been killed and 150 wounded in the allied air strikes. It also said there had been a fresh wave of strikes on Tripoli early on Sunday.

There was no way to independently verify the claims. French planes fired the first shots in what is the biggest international military intervention in the Arab world since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, destroying tanks and armoured vehicles in the region of the rebels’ eastern stronghold, Benghazi.

Emergency power cable reaches Japan nuclear plant

Hopes rise at Fukushima plant of restarting cooling systems for reactors and spent fuel pools

Agencies

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 19 March 2011 03.55 GMT

Engineers rolling out an emergency power cable have reached Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant and are preparing to try and restart water pumps to cool overheated fuel rods that are threatening to melt down.

Eight days after the tsunami, Japan’s police agency has said 7,197 are dead and 10,905 missing. Some of the missing may have been out of the region at the time of the disaster. The waters are likely to have sucked many people out to sea – after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami many such bodies were never found.

There are hopes the external power cable can be attached on Saturday or Sunday, the plant operator has said.

‘Everyone at the power plant is battling on, without running away’



Glenda Kwek

March 18, 2011 – 3:54PM

“Please dad come back alive,” the tweet read.

As foreigners boarded charter flights to leave Tokyo amid radiation fears from a troubled nuclear power plant in Japan’s north, 180 workers toiled tirelessly at the facility in a race to stop a full meltdown.

Messages from the Fukushima Fifty – named because they work in shifts of 50 people – are emerging a week after the massive earthquake and tsunami damaged cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The workers have been battling to keep fuel rods in the plant’s reactors from overheating and melting down by pumping seawater manually into the cores.

US charters planes to help its citizens leave Japan

State Department authorizes voluntary evacuations; meanwhile, Japanese official says ‘there is absolutely no reason to leave Tokyo’

NBC, msnbc.com and news services

Airlines scrambled to fly thousands of passengers out of Tokyo on Thursday as fears about Japan’s nuclear crisis mounted and the United States joined other nations urging their citizens to consider leaving.

The U.S. authorized the first evacuations of Americans out of Japan and warned U.S. citizens to defer all non-essential travel to any part of the country as unpredictable weather and wind conditions risked spreading radioactive contamination.

The State Department said the government had chartered aircraft to help Americans leave Japan and had authorized the voluntary departure of family members of diplomatic staff in Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokohama – about 600 people.