Bridge collapse affects commute less than expected
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-freeway1may01,0,5617707.story?coll=la-home-local
Some Bay Area commuter rail lines were more crowded than usual this morning but freeway congestion appeared normal despite the partial collapse of a key interchange known as the MacArthur Maze over the weekend. A 170-foot stretch of the interchange warped and collapsed after a gasoline tanker truck crashed and exploded into flames early Sunday, leaving the truck driver of the truck with moderate burns. Riders on a train headed west into San Francisco from the East Bay said they did not notice many more passengers than usual but trains headed east were more crowded than usual, according to passengers. BART trains were free today to help alleviate highway traffic congestion.
Feelings mixed as marches near
City officials are bracing for thousands of marchers to converge Tuesday on Central Los Angeles in two separate May Day rallies for immigration reform and labor rights, gatherings that are stirring anticipation among immigrant-rights advocates but anxiety, even anger, among some business owners. Although organizers predict much smaller crowds than the roughly 650,000 who participated last year, city officials are nevertheless urging the public to avoid downtown, where one of the events will occur. They are warning that the downtown march will snarl traffic for hours, disrupt more than 60 bus lines and halt some public business, including the high-profile murder trial of music producer Phil Spector. City managers have been asked to allow employees to take vacation days or work from alternative sites. Organizers say much of the anger that motivated marchers nationwide last year was alleviated after congressional legislation that would have criminalized illegal immigrants and toughened border enforcement failed to win passage. Organizers have said on their official march permits this year that they expect crowds of about 100,000 downtown and 15,000 for the other event, a couple of miles to the west.
Sri Lankan army pounds north after Tamil airstrike
Tamil Tiger rebels bombed a fuel refinery and gasoline storage facility Sunday near the Sri Lankan capital, and authorities cut power to the city, officials said. Hours later, the military pounded rebel positions in the north. The predawn rebel attack was the third aerial assault by the Tamil Tigers. Last month, the separatist group carried out its first airstrike, bombing an air force base near Colombo and killing at least three airmen. On Tuesday, the group bombed military positions in the northern Jaffna peninsula, killing six soldiers. On Sunday, Tiger aircraft dropped four bombs that started a fire in an oil facility six miles north of Colombo, according to the Defense Ministry. More than 69,000 people have been killed since the separatist conflict flared in 1983. Rebels are fighting for an independent homeland for the country's 3.2 million ethnic Tamils.
U.S. force aims to secure Africa
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20070430-124131-8532r.htm
The United States hopes by year's end to establish an Africa Command that will anchor military operations across a continent seen to be of increasing strategic importance and threatened by transnational terrorists. The new force, known informally as AfriCom, will preside over all countries on the continent except Egypt and is expected to be operational by the fall, according to Pentagon officials. They say it is needed to secure vast, lawless areas where terrorists have sought safe haven to regroup and threaten U.S. interests. Plans for such a force were first disclosed in April 2004, but it was not until February this year that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates laid out the scope of the new command. AfriCom will initially operate as part of the Stuttgart, Germany-based European Command before becoming independent at the end of 2008. It will be a "unified combatant command" that includes branches of the military along with civilians from the departments of Defense, State and Agriculture, among others. The force will deal with peacekeeping, humanitarian aid missions, military training and support of African partner countries. A headquarters location has yet to be determined. The United States now maintains five military commands worldwide, with Africa divided among three of them: EuCom covers 43 countries across North and sub-Saharan Africa; Central Command oversees East Africa, including the restive Horn of Africa; and Pacific Command looks after Madagascar. In 2001, CentCom established a task force in the Horn to track down al Qaeda terrorists and monitor instability in Somalia. It has since expanded to conduct humanitarian missions in the region. EuCom directs a seven-year, $500 million counterterrorism initiative that provides military and developmental aid to nine Saharan countries deemed vulnerable to groups looking to establish Afghanistan-style training grounds and carry out other illicit activities.
PM Erdogan to address country after disputed presidential election
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18393031/
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said he would address the country Monday amid a crisis over a presidential election that has pitted secularists, including the army, against his Islamist-rooted government. Turkey’s financial markets tumbled as investors took fright at instability sparked by a court challenge to the presidential election process, a mass anti-government rally involving up to one million people and the specter of an army intervention.But Erdogan’s ruling AK Party, buoyed by strong economic growth and the support of the European Union it aims to join, has shown unprecedented defiance of the powerful military, which only 10 years ago ousted a cabinet it saw as too Islamist. AK Party’s presidential candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, architect of Turkey’s EU bid, has refused to stand aside. Parliament, where the AK Party has a big majority, elects the president in Turkey. Secularists suspect Erdogan and Gul, both ex-Islamists whose wives wears the Muslim headscarf banned from state institutions, of wanting to subvert Turkey’s strict separation of state and religion. Erdogan and Gul reject the claim and point to their pro-Western record in office. Turkey’s Constitutional Court began on Monday to examine an opposition request to suspend the presidential election, a move which would trigger early parliamentary polls and, in the view of many analysts, would help defuse tensions. The court has said it will try to issue its verdict by Wednesday..
Inside the struggle for Iran
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2068649,00.html
A grand coalition of anti-government forces is planning a second Iranian revolution via the ballot box to deny President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad another term in office and break the grip of what they call the "militia state" on public life and personal freedom. Encouraged by recent successes in local elections, opposition factions, democracy activists, and pro-reform clerics say they will bring together progressive parties loyal to former president Mohammad Khatami with so-called pragmatic conservatives led by Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani. The alliance aims to exploit the president's deepening unpopularity, borne of high unemployment, rising inflation and a looming crisis over petrol prices and possible rationing to win control of the Majlis in general elections which are due within 10 months. Parliament last week voted to curtail Mr Ahmadinejad's term by holding presidential and parliamentary elections simultaneously next year. Though the move is likely to be vetoed by the hardline Guardian Council, it served notice of mounting disaffection in parliament. But opposition spokesmen say their broader objective is to bring down the fundamentalist regime by democratic means, transform Iran into a "normal country", and obviate the need for any military or other US and western intervention
Climate change hits Mars
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece
Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period. Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena. The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds. In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature. Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker. When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, eventually radiating that heat back to warm the thin Martian atmosphere: lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. The temperature differences between the two are thought to be stirring up more winds, and dust, creating a cycle that is warming the planet.
Gore Calls Canada Climate Plan a 'Fraud'
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070430/D8OQM6MO0.html
Al Gore condemned Canada's new plan to reduce greenhouse gases, saying it was "a complete and total fraud" because it lacks specifics and gives industry a way to actually increase emissions. Under the initiative announced Thursday, Canada aims to reduce the current level of greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020. But the government acknowledged it would not meet its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 35 industrialized countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The country's emissions are now 30 percent above 1990 levels. The conservative government's strategy focuses both on reducing emissions of gases blamed for global warming and improving air quality. But the plan failed to spell out what many of its regulations will look like. Gore said the plan did not make clear how Canada would reach its 2020 emissions goal. He also criticized the plan for allowing industries to pollute more if they use emissions-cutting technologies while increasing production. He said "intensity reduction" - which allow industries to increase their greenhouse gas outputs as they raise production - was a poll-tested phrase developed by think tanks financed by Exxon Mobil and other large polluters. Canadian Environment Minister John Baird rejected Gore's criticisms.
Nuclear power will save the world, UN scientists claim
More than 2,000 scientists have contributed to the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) report and 400 of them met today in Bangkok to finalise it before publication on Friday. The report is the biggest to study the practical actions that could reduce emissions and its findings will play a key role in Kyoto negotiations which will take place in December. The new report is the third this year by the UN climate panel. An IPCC report in February said it was at least 90 per cent certain that mankind was to blame for global warming and on 6 April it warned of more hunger, droughts and rising seas. As well as plans for more nuclear power, genetically modified biofuels and carbon storage, the report sets out a vision of the future that is a mixture of existing policies, such as energy efficiency and renewable energy from wind and wave farms, and more futuristic ideas for hydrogen car fleets and "intelligent" buildings which can control energy use. In addition, the report makes it clear that both developed countries, including the United States, and developing nations, in particular India and China, will have to play major roles. However, the scientists in Bangkok have already voiced fears that some countries, including China and the US, will say the proposed measures are unrealistic. Michel Petit, a member of the French delegation, said: "Some countries may challenge these figures." The report has also angered environmentalists. Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth said: "Nuclear reactors are dangerous and land clearance and chemical pesticides and fertilisers used to grow fuel crops can cause huge environmental damage."
India-U.S. nuclear pact remains stalled
Officials on both sides are expressing growing frustration over each other's seeming intransigence in overcoming the final obstacles to sealing the agreement, which would reverse years of U.S. policy and allow American companies to sell and share civilian nuclear technology with India even though it has refused to join the global nuclear nonproliferation regime. When proposed nearly two years ago, the nuclear pact made headlines as proof that the world's most populous democracy had joined hands with the most powerful to create a new balance of power, especially as a counter to a rising China. But negotiators have been unable to reach agreement on issues concerning India's right to conduct nuclear tests, its desire to reprocess spent fuel and its demand for assurances of uninterrupted nuclear fuel supplies. India exploded its first atomic device in 1974 and became a declared nuclear-weapons state nine years ago, after a nuclear test in the Rajasthani desert that prompted archrival Pakistan to follow suit, sparking fears of an arms race in South Asia.
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