Six In The Morning Sunday April 13

13 April 2014 Last updated at 09:01

World must end 'dirty' fuel use - UN

By Matt McGrathEnvironment correspondent, BBC News, Berlin

A long-awaited UN report on how to curb climate change says the world must rapidly move away from carbon-intensive fuels.

There must be a "massive shift" to renewable energy, says the 33-page study released in Berlin.

It has been finalised after a week of negotiations between scientists and government officials.

Natural gas is seen as a key bridge to move energy production away from oil and coal.

But there have been battles between participants over who will pay for this energy transition.

The Summary for Policymakers on mitigation paints a picture of a world with carbon emissions rising rapidly.

The mystery of Lebanon's missing thousands

Relatives of those who disappeared during the civil war want answers and hope that a new commission will help

FERNANDE VAN TETS

 

 

SUNDAY 13 APRIL 2014

Wadad Halwani's husband was taken just as the family was about to eat lunch in September 1982. Secret police came to their house in Beirut and said they needed to question her husband, Adnan, about a traffic accident. She had no idea it would be the last time she saw him.

Nearly 32 years later, she is still fighting to know what happened. "It's not just about the disappearance of my husband. It's an issue that touches about 17,000 people and their relatives," she said, citing the estimated number of people who went missing during Lebanon's civil war. "It's a national cause."

Later that year, Mrs Halwani co-founded the Committee of the Families of the Missing and Disappeared in Lebanon and has constantly lobbyied the government for answers. Since 2005, a group of women have camped out in a park below Lebanon's parliament. The women carry pictures of their loved ones; their protest tent is a sea of missing faces.

Senior official from China's Sichuan under graft probe: Xinhua

SHANGHAI Sun Apr 13, 2014 3:52am EDT

(Reuters) - A senior government official in China's Sichuan province is under investigation for "severe discipline violations", which is often a euphemism for corruption, state media said.

Zhao Miao, a senior official in Chengdu, capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, was taken away on Thursday for questioning by anti-corruption investigators, the Xinhua news agency said late on Saturday.

President Xi Jinping has launched a sweeping crackdown on corruption since taking power, warning that the problem is a threat to the Communist Party's survival.

The most senior politician to be ensnared in a graft scandal since the Communist Party swept to power in 1949 is former domestic security chief Zhou Yongkang, whose power base was Sichuan.

Kenya faces uphill battle to revamp police force

13 APR 2014 07:39 REUBEN KYAMA

Kenyans are losing patience with their ill-equipped and notoriously corrupt police force.

Their capital tarred with the nickname "Nairobbery" and under almost constant threat of attack by Islamist militants, Kenyans are losing patience with the ill-equipped and notoriously corrupt police force.

A catalogue of security failures has exposed the inability of Nairobi's underpaid police to deal with the severe security problems, prompting President Uhuru Kenyatta to step in and promise a massive overhaul.

But analysts and security experts say it will be an uphill struggle to undo the broken relationship between public and police, given the ingrained stigma attached to the job and the fact that Kenyans have resorted to mob justice or now-ubiquitous private security firms.

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.

Mexico drug-cartel figure has been cooperating with U.S.

BY TIM JOHNSON

McClatchy Foreign Staff

WASHINGTON — In what appeared to be a new blow to Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, the imprisoned son of the cartel’s co-leader offered a secret guilty plea to narcotics trafficking charges last year and has been cooperating ever since with U.S. agents, prosecutors said Thursday.

The plea deal was made public in Chicago, where Vicente Zambada Niebla, 39, has been imprisoned since his extradition from Mexico in February 2010.

Zambada is the son of Ismael Zambada, a co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is based in the state of the same name in northwest Mexico but has tentacles that extend around the world and deeply into the United States.