Six In The Morning

Nato takes over Libya no-fly zone

Nato says it has agreed to take over responsibility from the US for enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya.
The BBC 25 March 2011
Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said talks would continue on giving Nato a "broader responsibility", with a decision possible in the coming days.

There have been differences of opinion about whether attacks on ground troops should form part of the action.

British jets have launched missiles at Libyan armoured vehicles near Ajdabiya during a sixth night of allied raids.

The UK government said Tornado aircraft fired missiles at Libyan military units close to the town, where there has been fierce fighting between rebels and forces loyal to Col Muammar Gaddafi.

Gov't asks people within 20-30 km of nuke plant to leave voluntarily
Friday, March 25, 2011
Kyodo News
The Japanese government has encouraged people living within 20 to 30 kilometers of the troubled nuclear plant in Fukushima Prefecture to leave voluntarily, with concerns over access to daily necessities rather than resident safety prompting the advice, top government spokesman Yukio Edano said Friday.
The chief Cabinet secretary told a news conference that the government told heads of affected municipalities within 20 to 30 km of the plant that it is encouraging people to voluntarily move farther away and will give its full support in helping them relocate.

Portuguese turmoil looms over European summit

By Sean Farrell Friday, 25 March 2011
Portugal was left hanging in financial limbo yesterday as an international bail-out loomed ahead of a meeting of European leaders intended to draw a line under the eurozone's debt crisis.

An international bail-out looked inevitable as markets battered the value of Portugal's debt. José Sócrates offered his resignation as prime minister on Wednesday after the parliament rejected his latest programme of austerity measures designed to help the country's fiscal crisis. The yield on Portugal's two-year government bonds surged to 6.89 per cent during yesterday's trading, the highest since the euro's launch. The cost of insuring the country's sovereign debt also came close to January's record high.

Bin Laden sets alarm bells ringing

By Syed Saleem Shahzad
ISLAMABAD - After a prolonged lull, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has launched a series of covert operations in the rugged Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan following strong tip-offs that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been criss-crossing the area in the past few weeks for high-profile meetings in militant redoubts.

The US has been on Bin Laden's trail ever since he fled Afghanistan when the US invaded the country in 2001 to oust the Taliban, but the 54-year-old with a US$50 million reward on his head has always remained several steps in front.

Canadian TV producers: We don't really hate America
US diplomatic cables suggested Canadian TV seeks to “twist current events to feed long-standing negative images of the US." Not really, say Canadian producers and officials.
By Colin Woodard, Correspondent / March 24, 2011
Montreal
Watching state-run television here, you might get the feeling that Canadians seriously loath their big southern neighbor. At least, that's the impression that some US diplomats got.
Sitcoms and dramas aired by the taxpayer-financed Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) show “insidious negative popular stereotyping” and “anti-American melodrama,” the US embassy in Ottawa warned in a 2008 diplomatic cable published in December by WikiLeaks. Washington should boost its public diplomacy programs in Canada “at all levels and in all parts of the country … to make it more difficult for Canadians to fall into the trap of seeing all US policies as the result of nefarious faceless US bureaucrats anxious to squeeze their northern neighbor.”

Hanford Nuclear Waste Still Poses Serious Risks
America's Atomic Time Bomb
By Marc Pitzke in New York
The lambs were born without eyes or mouths. Some had legs that had grotesquely grown together; others had no legs at all. Many were stillborn. Thirty-one were lost in a single night.

On a pasture nearby, a cow was found dead, stiff and with its hooves bizarrely stretched up into the whispering wind. Down by the river, men of the Yakama tribe pulled three-eyed salmon from the Columbia. Trout were covered in cancerous ulcers.
And then the babies started getting sick.

It was in the spring of 1962 that farmer Nels Allison first noticed something was ominously wrong.