Six In The Morning

Ukraine ‘bid to take back Sloviansk police HQ’

 13 April 2014 Last updated at 07:07

  The BBC

Ukrainian forces have launched an operation against pro-Russian activists who seized a police station on Saturday, the interior minister says.

Arsen Avakov announced on his Facebook page that “all security units” were involved in an “anti-terror operation” in the eastern city of Sloviansk.

Russia warned earlier that any use of force in eastern Ukraine could scupper crisis talks due later this week.

The US accuses Moscow of inciting the trouble. The Kremlin denies the charge.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Kiev government was “demonstrating its inability to take responsibility for the fate of the country”.

But the US said there had been a “concerted campaign” by forces with Russian support to undermine the authorities in Kiev.

Potential collapse of Kariba dam tests disaster preparedness in Zimbabwe

 Warnings of weaknesses in the ageing dam on the Zambezi river highlight the country’s lack of preparedness for disasters

IRIN, part of the Guardian Development Network

theguardian.com, Sunday 13 April 2014 07.00 BST

In early March, engineers at a conference organised by the Zambezi River Authority (ZRA, a Zambia-Zimbabwe organisation that manages the Kariba dam) warned that the 128-metre-high dam could collapse, threatening at least 3.5 million people, especially in Mozambique and Malawi.

Years of erosion had made the foundations of the dam weaker, engineers said. “Anything is possible, so there is a need to act to avoid risk and minimise panic,” Modibo Traoré, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) in Zimbabwe, told IRIN. The Kariba dam holds one of the largest man-made expanses of water in the world.

Bachelet declares Valparaiso catastrophe zone as wildfire burns Chilean port

A large forest fire has destroyed at least 500 homes in a Chilean port city. President Michelle Bachelet declared Valparaiso a catastrophe zone and put the military in charge of evacuations and maintaining order.

DW

Valparaiso Mayor Jorge Castro told Chile’s state television channel that though no one had so far died or sustained serious injuries as the fire of unknown origin continued to burn overnight, the resulting giant cloud of smoke had choked some people. Castro said that Chile had set up shelters for those forced to flee the fire in the city about 120 kilometers (70 miles) to the northwest of the capital, Santiago.

Late Saturday night local time, Castro said that “Valparaiso is without electricity at the moment and this means the flame column is creating a Dante-esque panorama and is advancing in an apparently uncontrollable manner.”

In Assad’s coastal heartland, Syria’s war creeps closer



LATAKIA, Syria Sun Apr 13, 2014 12:06am EDT

(Reuters) – For three years, residents of Syria’s Mediterranean provinces have watched from their coastal sanctuary as civil war raging further inland tore the country apart, killing tens of thousands of people and devastating historic cities.

But a three-week-old offensive by rebel fighters in the north of Latakia province, a bastion of President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority, has brought the battle ever closer and shattered that sense of relative security.

Rebels are now fighting in the hills overlooking the sea, bringing the country’s main port of Latakia within their range – rocket-fire killed eight people in one barrage on the city a month ago – and Syria’s coast feels under real threat.

A century on, World War I remains ‘the Great War’ for the Brits. Why?

The First World War occupies a singular place in Britain’s identity and imagination, in part because the precise reasons for the conflict are still so hard to fathom.

By Mian Ridge

On January 1, 1914, Arthur Linfoot, a blithe 24-year-old British clerk, began writing a diary. The following year, he went off to war, fighting in the trenches of the Western Front for two and a half years. Through the horrors of the trenches, he never missed an entry in his pocket notebook.

Exactly 100 years to the day of the first entry, his 85-year-old son, Denis Linfoot, began copying the diary entries in a blog. Followers of the blog currently read about a life of choir practices, soccer, and theater trips in Sunderland, a city in the north of England; next summer, they will learn about the private soldier’s courage on the Western front.

Though World War I started a century ago – and passed from memory into history with the death of its last surviving veteran, Harry Patch, aged 111, in 2009 – it remains the Great War in the common imagination of Britons.

The Briton teaching capitalism to North Korea

As North Korea slowly begins to build a market economy, a man from Wokingham is leading the way

By Malcolm Moore, Beijing

Girls rollerblading on Kim Il-sung Square, Porsche SUVs in the streets and a cluster of neon-lit skyscrapers nicknamed Pyonghattan – North Korea’s capital city is changing fast.

If these tentative signs of capitalism are a shock, here is another: the man teaching a new generation of North Korean entrepreneurs how to do business is a 36-year-old from Wokingham.

Andray Abrahamian went to school in Winnersh, studied video production in the United States and then became fascinated with North Korea while studying in Seoul.

After partnering up with Geoffrey See, a Singaporean management consultant, the pair started bringing Western businessmen to lecture North Koreans on everything from designing logos to managing inflation.