Six In The Morning

Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows

　Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to what it called President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”

The BBC 27 May 2012  

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.

The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.

The Syrian government blamed the deaths on “armed terrorist gangs”.

Houla, in the central province of Homs, came under sustained bombardment by the Syrian army after demonstrations on Friday.

Activists say some of the victims died by shelling, while others were summarily executed by the regime militia known as the “shabiha”.

 Gorilla areas bombed by Congo rebels

Fighting in the central African state has reached the national park where a dwindling population of primates lives

Sunday 27 May 2012

One-quarter of the world’s entire mountain gorilla population is under threat from sustained fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Just over 800 gorillas remain in the world, with 210 living in the Virunga National Park, a Unesco World Heritage site. A rebel army calling itself M23 entered the gorillas’ habitat in the early hours of 8 May, and set up an operating base at Runyoni, a strategic peak in the Rutshuru territory, close to the border of Uganda. For more than two weeks, the rebels have been under siege as FARDC, the Congolese national army, fires rockets, mortars and anti-aircraft guns towards Virunga, Africa’s oldest national park.

 Fight goes on, without athletes

The rebel runner John Carlos doesn’t expect to see anything like his Black Power salute at the London Olympic Games, writes Gary Younge

May 27, 2012

You almost certainly know this image featuring John Carlos. It’s 1968 at the Mexico City Olympics and the medals are being hung round the necks of Tommie Smith (US, gold), Peter Norman (Australia, silver) and Carlos (US, bronze).

As The Star-Spangled Banner begins to play, Smith and Carlos, two black Americans wearing black gloves, raise their fists in the Black Power salute. It is a symbol of resistance and defiance, seared into 20th-century history, that Carlos feels he was put on Earth to perform

 In Brazil, a showdown over rainforest deforestation

Brazil’s president is scheduled to sign a reform package today that could retroactively legalize the deforestation of millions of acres in the Amazon.

 By Taylor Barnes, Correspondent

A throng of students, young professionals, and activists gathered on the lawn as dusk took over the towering parliament and Planalto, Brazil’s executive branch. They took their tambourines and whistles, promising to camp out until midnight and serenaded the president: “Oh Dilma! You can veto it! Brazil will support you!

Theirs was the latest in a series of nationwide protests in recent months over a proposed reform of the 1965 “Forest Code” that will, as currently written, effectively legalize the deforestation of tens of millions of Amazon jungle after the fact and reduce requirements on landowners to reforest protected areas.

Later today, President Dilma Roussef is expected to sign part of the “amnesty” bill into law, though she’s signaled that some amendments will be made in response to environmental concerns. But whether they go far enough to mollify an angry movement of citizens and environmental activists remains to be seen.

In Mexicali, a haven for broken lives

The once-grand El Hotel Centenario is now the decrepit El Hotel del Migrante Deportado – the Hotel of the Deported Migrant. It hosts a procession of lost souls.

 By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times

Mario Ramos stirs a pot of beans with a bent spatula as the men crowd into the kitchen, the ragged line stretching out the splintered doorway.

Years ago, Ramos, 45, grilled up pricey seafood in a tiki-themed restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach. Now, he’s serving starchy meals on plastic plates. One of his busboys worked at the Shanghai Grill in Beverly Hills; another is a 28-year-old U.S. Marines veteran.

India’s Hampi heritage site families face eviction from historic ruins

Hampi’s 2,000 temples and ancient stones attract half a million pilgrims and tourists each year. Conservationists want the site in Karnataka restored to its medieval glory – but the price is the eviction of those who live in its old bazaar

Gethin Chamberlain

The Observer, Sunday 27 May 2012  

The men came in the middle of the night and painted red crosses on the houses chosen for demolition. In the morning the people who had lived and traded in the ruins of the old Hampi bazaar stood by helplessly as the bulldozers moved in. The past, they were to discover, had come back to haunt them.

Hampi is India’s Pompeii. Once home to half a million people, it was sacked in 1565 by the armies of the Bahamani sultanates. For hundreds of years, the City of Victory lay abandoned until it was rediscovered by the British in the 19th century. Now it is a place of sprawling beauty, a world heritage site of 2,000 monuments scattered across a landscape of enormous granite boulders, pulling in nearly half a million visitors a year from around the world.