Six In The Morning

The two views on India’s Narendra Modi

　　

By Simon Denyer, Thursday, April 5
GANDHINAGAR, India — He is widely touted as a possible future prime minister of India, but he is a pariah in much of the Western world. Some in India call him a role model, their country’s most competent leader. Others accuse him of being complicit in the mass murder of Muslims. Narendra Modi is probably India’s most complex and divisive figure, a man whose rise could kick-start the economy but whose Hindu nationalist leanings would polarize the country along religious lines and potentially, critics say, undermine the long-cherished secular identity of the world’s largest democracy and a key American strategic ally.

What do North Korea's buildings and landmarks tell us about the totalitarian state?
The country has some of the world's biggest – and most bizarre – buildings and landmarks.

Tim Walker Thursday 05 April 2012
When Kim Jong-Il died in December 2011, a window was fleetingly opened on to the notoriously insular North Korea. Now, a new book kicks open the back door of the country's capital, Pyongyang. German architect and publisher Philipp Meuser's two-volume Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang is ostensibly an overview of the city's buildings, but it reveals much more of the world's most closed society, not to mention the hypocrisy of its ruling dynasty.

Women Excluded from Germany's Opinion Pages
German newspapers are full of clever commentaries, artful rhetoric and ideas. But an evaluation of national papers shows that editorials are almost always written by men. As the business gender quota debate rages on in the country, the female half of the population is being denied an influential platform.

By Barbara Hans
Those who care to learn about the situation for women in Germany can turn to the country's highest authority. The Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth has devoted an entire brochure to its clientele. On page 51, in a chapter entitled "Women and Career," it says there are a growing number of women in the media working as game show hosts and presenters. Congratulations chromosome comrades, we did it, one might say. The stage lights are blinking happily, full of expectation, now that the question of female emancipation has nearly been solved.

Cities hit despite Syria ceasefire vow


Flavia Krause-Jackson, Dahlia Kholaif April 5, 2012
　FIERCE clashes erupted after Syria's regime sent reinforcements into rebel areas yesterday despite a truce pledge, as the UN said it was rushing a team to Damascus to pave the way for unarmed peacekeepers. The surge in violence killed at least 38 people, including 25 civilians, mostly in north and central Syria, and brought a string of arson attacks on homes, activists and monitors said. The activists reported heavy shelling in the cities of Hama and Homs, as well as large deployments of security forces sweeping through those cities, the northern city of Idlib and the southern city of Daraa, the birthplace of the Syrian uprising, now in its second year.

Refugees bear brunt of Tuareg rebels' fight in Mali


WILLIAM LLOYD-GEORGE IN NIGER Apr 05 2012 00:00
It was the middle of the day when Tabisou (72) suddenly saw people from her town, Anderamboukane, fleeing for their lives. Her family had no time to pack their things: the fighting had already begun. "Everything I worked for over my whole life was lost just like that," said Tabisou, sitting in a United Nations High Commission for Refugees tent at Abala refugee camp, 85km from the Mali-Niger border. "We had to leave all our animals and food."

Giant feathered dinosaur found in China was too big to fly
The dinosaur Yutyrannus huali – 'beautiful feathered tyrant' – either used its feathers to keep warm or attract a mate

Madeleine Cuff The Guardian, Thursday 5 April 2012
The discovery of the largest known feathered dinosaur was announced by scientists in China on Wednesday. Similar in size and shape to Tyrannosaurus rex, palaeontologists at the Chinese academy of sciences in Beijing have named the new species Yutyrannus huali, meaning "beautiful feathered tyrant". At nine metres long and weighing more than 1.4 tonnes, it is also the largest feathered animal ever discovered – either alive or extinct. Local farmers found three specimens in a small quarry in the Liaoning province of north-east China. Palaeontologists estimate that they are 125m years old, dating from the early Cretaceous period, and they believe that, like Tyrannosaurus rex, the animals hunted in packs. The three were found alongside the remains of a sauropod dinosaur that the researchers think they may have been hunting when they died.