Six In The Morning

Osama bin Laden killed in US raid on Pakistan hideout

‘Justice done’ and body buried at sea, says US, after al-Qaida leader is killed by special forces at Abbottabad compound

Declan Walsh in Abbottabad, Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Jason Burke in New Delhi

guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 May 2011 10.15 BST

Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks and the world’s most wanted man, has been killed in a US operation in north-western Pakistan, Barack Obama has announced.

“Justice has been done,” the US president said in a statement that America has been waiting a decade to hear. A US official said Bin Laden had already been buried at sea.

US special forces launched a helicopter-borne assault on a closely guarded compound in Abbottabad, 30 miles north-east of Islamabad, on Sunday night, Obama and US officials said.

Robert Fisk: ‘We will never cease our struggle until we bring down Assad’

Robert Fisk hears the defiance of Syrian refugees

Monday, 2 May 2011

Something terrible happened in the small Syrian town of Tel Kalakh. At the most it was a massacre of 40 civilians; at the least a day of live-firing into unarmed protesters, torture, arrests and panic. Almost half the Sunni Muslim population fled over the river frontier into Lebanon, babes in arms, old people in wheelchairs, pushed through the shallow waters of the Nahr el-Kbir.

Perhaps 4,000 of the Syrian Sunnis made it to the safety of Lebanon to be given food, shelter and blankets by relatives and by strangers and they were there yesterday – 80 living in one house alone scarcely 20m from Syria, desperate to praise the kindness of the Lebanese, fearful of the things they had seen, ferocious in their anger against their president.

May Day protests take place globally

Demonstrators in France, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Germany and Iraq were among those protesting on a range of issues

Damien Pearse The Guardian, Monday 2 May 2011  

 Hundreds of thousands of people in countries across the world have taken part in global street protests to mark May Day.

Demonstrators in France, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Germany and Iraq were among those protesting on a range of issues including unemployment, women’s rights and immigration.

In France up to 120,000 people turned out for marches in 200 locations. The protesters voiced anger over high unemployment – measured at 9.6% – and job cuts in the public sector, while showing support for popular uprising across the Arab world.

Tsunami barrier plan to protect nuclear plant

 

Yuji Okada May 2, 2011

Plans are well under way to build a tsunami barrier near the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power said.

Satoshi Watanabe said yesterday that the company was taking steps to protect the plant against sea surges caused by possible aftershocks and that the barrier should be in place by the middle of next month.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, has pleaded for public understanding after an opinion poll showed three-quarters of people questioned his leadership and handling of the post-disaster crisis.

Will the Muslim Brotherhood soon control Egypt’s parliament?

The Muslim Brotherhood’s new plans to contest 50 percent of Egypt’s parliamentary seats in upcoming elections are sparking concern that it will impose its Islamist ideas on the population.

By Kristen Chick, Correspondent  

The Muslim Brotherhood’s new political party will field candidates in about half the parliamentary seats in Egypt’s first post-revolution elections, leaders announced Saturday.

After years of being banned from politics and persecuted by former President Hosni Mubarak, the official launch of the group’s Freedom and Justice Party was a historic moment.

Leaders portrayed the party as inclusive, saying Christians and women can join. In accordance with Egyptian law, the party is officially civil, not religious, and is independent from the group. Leaders also repeated an earlier pledge not to run a candidate in presidential elections

China’s new indoor smoking ban takes effec  

Smoking is one of the greatest health threats the country faces, government statistics show

Associated Press    

BEIJING – China’s latest push to ban smoking in indoor public venues came into effect Sunday, but the vaguely defined rules were not expected to dramatically reduce the country’s heavy tobacco addiction.

Smoking, which is linked to the deaths of at least 1 million people in China every year, is one of the greatest health threats the country faces, government statistics show. Nearly 30 percent of adults in China smoke – about 300 million people, a number roughly equal to the entire U.S. population.