Six In The Morning

Japan battles to stave off possible nuclear meltdown

Japanese media say officials have detected caesium, one of the elements released when overheating causes core damage, around reactor at Fukushima No 1 plant in Futuba

Tania Branigan in Beijing

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 12 March 2011 07.11 GMT

Workers are battling to stave off a possible nuclear meltdown at a plant in north-eastern Japan as the country struggles with the aftermath of Friday’s enormous earthquake and tsunami.

Japanese media said officials had detected caesium, one of the elements released when overheating causes core damage, around the reactor at Fukushima No 1 plant in Futuba, 150 miles (240km) north of Tokyo.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said it did not believe a meltdown was under way, but Ryohei Shiomi, an official with Japan’s nuclear safety commission, said that it was possible.

Gaddafi’s iron fist won’t help him keep a grip on a divided nation

It has been a week of military reversals for the rebels, but their spirit remains unbroken,  

reports Donald Macintyre in Tripoli Saturday, 12 March 2011

The walls across the street from the Murad Aga mosque in Tajura were freshly whitewashed to cover up the anti-regime graffiti that has been repeatedly scrawled on them in the last three weeks.

Before the mid-morning Friday prayers, the streets of this easterly working class suburb 10 miles from the centre of the Libyan capital were eerily quiet, with just a few customers passing through the two general stores that were open. On the surface at least, there was hardly a sign that it had been here two weeks ago that residents were fired on – with an unknown number of deaths – when they tried to march towards the city centre to demand the end of the regime.

Resistance Builds to Planned Flight Paths at New Berlin Airport

Saying No to Noise

By Mary Beth Warner in Berlin

When Marietta Saerve and her husband moved to the Berlin area from central Germany three years ago, they wanted to buy their own house with a garden. Saerve spent time using the Internet to research a new airport under construction, Berlin Brandenburg International (BBI), which was planned more than a decade ago to replace the three airports that had existed in the once walled-in city.

She had lived in the shadows of an airport before, in Epstein near Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s largest. Saerve eventually moved from her apartment there, she said, because the noise got to be too much. The 50-year-old bookkeeper said she even called the Berlin airport to find out what towns would be affected by the noise before she and her husband bought their small, freestanding house with an arbor over the path leading to a large yard.

The new face of Europe’s far right

Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter has shed the extremist rhetoric in an attempt to become the next French president, writes Paola Totaro.

March 12, 2011

Thursday morning in Nanterre, a few kilometres west of the French capital’s historic heart. It is sunny but jaw-grindingly cold, smokers puffing hurriedly outside office blocks, walkers hunched against the breeze. On the horizon Paris’s skyscrapers sparkle like modern icebergs.

On the Rue Des Suisses in the suburb’s older, residential fringe looms the headquarters of the French National Front, a multi-storey concrete block guarded by a clutch of London-style security cameras and electronic gates. Inside the compound, an enormous, garish rendition of the Gallic rooster, unofficial national symbol of the French republic, stands guard. The two-metre fibreglass monster, it turns out, is a recent tongue-in-cheek acquisition, lugged back from an agricultural fair by Marine Le Pen, the ultra-nationalist party’s leader.

Côte d’Ivoire ‘on the brink of a bloodbath’



ABIDJAN, CôTE D’IVOIRE – Mar 12 2011 07:15  

The men wear roughly improvised balaclavas, some plain black, others patterned with skulls and crossbones. One is clad in a heavy-duty jacket that bears the circular logo of CND. They have fashioned a checkpoint out of battered car doors lined up across the road.

This is the gateway to the “autonomous republic of Abobo”, usually one of the most populated suburbs of Côte d’Ivoire’s commercial capital, Abidjan. It has in effect declared independence from the disputed presidency of Laurent Gbagbo. Now a lawless place of terror, bloodshed and desperation, it typifies the slow-motion implosion of a country into a failed state.

Stuff hipsters like: Bavarian folk music?

Most young Germans consider the Bavarian folk music known as “Blasmusi” a bit ridiculous, but a couple of musicians are mixing it with modern sounds to bring it back into vogue.

A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.

In addition to lederhosen and Octoberfest, Bavaria is also known for “Blasmusi,” or brass “oompah-pah” music. Still broadcast live on Bavarian public TV, “Musikantenstadl” includes a mostly elderly audience clapping and doing a lot of schunkeln, a kind of rhythmical swaying in unison. Most young and urban Germans see this tradition as more than faintly ridiculous.

But things may be changing with the arrival of LaBrassBanda, a five-member brass band from Chiemgau in Upper Bavaria that aims to bring Bavarian brass to the club scene and eventually to international audiences. LaBrassBanda adds youthful energy to tuba, trumpet, and trombone rhythms with drums and a bass guitar.