Pope Francis speaks as he leads a Pentecost vigil mass in Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican
Credit: Reuters

Pope Francis shared personal moments with 200,000 people on Saturday, telling them he sometimes nods off while praying at the end of a long day and that it “breaks my heart” that the death of a homeless person is not news.

Francis, who has made straight talk and simplicity a hallmark of his papacy, made his unscripted comments in answers to questions by four people at a huge international gathering of Catholic associations in St. Peter’s Square.

But he outdid himself in passionately discussing everything from the memory of his grandmother to his decision to become a priest, from political corruption to his worries about a Church that too often closes in on itself instead of looking outward.

“If we step outside of ourselves, we will find poverty,” he said, repeating his call for Catholics to do more to seek out those on the fringes of society who need help the most,” he said from the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica.

“Today, and it breaks my heart to say it, finding a homeless person who has died of cold, is not news. Today, the news is scandals, that is news, but the many children who don’t have food – that’s not news. This is grave. We can’t rest easy while things are this way.”

The crowd, most of whom are already involved in charity work, interrupted him often with applause.

“We cannot become starched Christians, too polite, who speak of theology calmly over tea. We have to become courageous Christians and seek out those (who need help most),” he said.

To laughter from the crowd, he described how he prays each day before an altar before going to bed.

“Sometimes I doze off, the fatigue of the day makes you fall asleep, but he (God) understands,” he said.

CRISIS OF VALUES

Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, said the world was going through not just an economic crisis but a crisis of values.

“This is happening today. If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy and people say ‘what are we going to do?’ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing. This is our crisis today. A Church that is poor and for the poor has to fight this mentality,” he said.

Many in the crowd planned to stay in the square overnight to pray and prepare for Francis’ Mass on Sunday, when the Catholic Church marks Pentecost, the day it teaches that the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles.

On Saturday morning, Francis met German Chancellor Angela Merkel and discussed Europe’s economic crisis.

Apparently responding to his criticism of a heartless “dictatorship of the economy” earlier in the week, Merkel, who is up for re-election in September, later called for stronger regulation of financial markets.

On Thursday, Francis appealed in a speech for world financial reform, saying the global economic crisis had made life worse for millions in rich and poor countries.

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North Korea fired three short-range missiles from its east coast on Saturday, South Korea’s Defence Ministry said, prompting Western powers to urge Pyongyang to exercise restraint.

Launches by the North of short-range missiles are not uncommon but, after recent warnings from the communist state of impending nuclear war, such actions raise concerns about the region’s security.

“North Korea fired short-range guided missiles twice in the morning and once in the afternoon off its east coast,” an official at the South Korean Defence Ministry spokesman’s office said by telephone.

The official declined to speculate on whether the missiles had been fired as part of a drill or training exercise.

“In case of any provocation, the ministry will keep monitoring the situation and remain on alert,” he said.

A Japanese government source noted the three launches, but said none of the missiles had landed in Japan’s territorial waters, the Kyodo news agency reported.

Tension on the Korean peninsula has subsided in the past month, having run high for several weeks after the United Nations Security Council imposed tougher sanctions against Pyongyang following its third nuclear test in February.

The North had for weeks issued nearly daily warnings of impending nuclear war with the South and the United States.

The United States declined to comment directly on the reported launches but said it was monitoring the situation.

“We continue to urge North Korea to exercise restraint and take steps to improve its relations with its neighbors,” the State Department and the Pentagon said in a statement.

Britain’s Foreign Office said: “We have been clear to North Korea that its long-term interests will not be served by threatening the international community and increasing regional tensions.”

North Korea conducts regular launches of its Scud short-range missiles, which can hit targets in South Korea.

It conducted a successful launch of a long-range missile last December, saying it had put a weather satellite into orbit. The United States and its allies denounced the launch as a test of technology that could one day deliver a nuclear warhead.

During the weeks of high tension, South Korea reported that the North had moved missile launchers into place on its east coast for the possible launch of a medium-range Musudan missile. The Musudan has a range of 3,500 km, putting Japan in range and possibly the U.S. South Pacific island of Guam.

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The euphoria was understandable when rescuers pulled 19-year-old Reshma Begum alive from the wreckage of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, last week. More than 1,127 were killed and thousands more injured when the factory fell on April 24. It had been 17 days since anyone had been found alive.

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  PHOTOS: Inside the lives of Bangladesh’s garment workers

Even in a country where life expectancy is low, the devastating collapse sparked protests, with rioters calling for the owner of the factory to be hanged. The outrage was worldwide — and had previously been missing among Western observers and consumers about the working conditions in factories in Bangladesh. They have been deplorable for years while churning out cheap clothes for some of the West’s best-known clothing brands. Despite its small size, Bangladesh is the second largest garment exporter in the world with the U.S. being its largest export market, with 19.4 percent of exports coming to the States. Wal-Mart alone does more than $1 billion worth of manufacturing in the severely impoverished country.

But while everyone is quick to point at the labels that produce their clothing there — J.C. Penney, Gap, Sears, Zara, among thousands of others — Chris Rhomberg, associate professor of sociology at Fordham University who specializes labor and labor movements, says it’s a very complex and multilayered situation. “These labels don’t actually own the factories in Bangladesh,” he notes. “They contract the work out to contractors. But this is how the garment industry works: The contractor then contracts them out to subcontractors that are even cheaper and creates this enormous pressure on all the labels to go even cheaper.” Rhomberg and others in his field call this continual outsourcing and downward push of cost “race to the bottom.”

“Bottom” is an apt term. Since there is little to no direct oversight by these western clothing brands, workers making these garments work in shockingly unsafe and unregulated factories. Many are forced to work seven days a week, are bullied into working overtime – and the youngest of them, mainly girls often as young as 10 — earn as little as $400 per year.

“No company is willing to spend the money for safety, adequate standards and wages if that makes their product more expensive than their competitors,” notes Rhomberg. “If you allow this race to the bottom to occur, there is pressure on each one to go cheaper.”

And who is cheap? Women and children. Estimates vary, but up to 30,000 children are said to toil away in the sweatshops. The average age of the children is 13, of whom 10 percent, according to the United States Department of Labor, are married by the age of 10. The USLD report supported the findings of the Institute of Global Labor and Human Rights. “In a recent visit to Bangladesh, a Department of Labor official spoke with children who … also reported that, like adult workers, they are often paid two to four weeks late, and rarely paid extra for overtime.”

Out of the 3.5 million people who work in Bangladesh factories, 85 per cent are women. Although the principle of women working in this predominantly Muslim country has been accepted – largely for economic reasons – they still face paternalism, at best, and outright discrimination at worst, according to the European Union, which noted high levels of forced, early marriage and domestic abuse.

But even with this global spotlight shining brightly on the working conditions in Bangladesh — and the international outcry almost overwhelming — change is still very hard to initiate. There is immense international pressure for brands to sign the binding Fire and Building Safety Agreement, which protects garment workers. This five-year accord, which H&M and Zara signed this week, promises that they will not hire manufacturers and contractors whose clothing factories fail to meet safety standards; it will also commit them to paying for necessary repairs and renovations. The Bangladeshi government is acting as well — they are raising the minimum wage for workers and will make it easier for them to unionize. Still, the Gap, J.C. Penny and most notably Wal-Mart, had refused to sign as of Wednesday afternoon. Wal-Mart believes that their own safety plans are enough. “Walmart believes its safety plan meets or exceeds the IndustriALL proposal, and will get results more quickly,” the company said in a statement.

A major U.S. retail trade group on Wednesday spoke out against a Bangladesh fire and building safety accord, saying that signing on would expose American companies to a legally questionable binding arbitration provision.

“While the proposal put forth by the labor unions addresses a number of shared concerns, the accord veers away from commonsense solutions and seeks to advance a narrow agenda driven by special interests,” Matthew Shay, chief executive of the National Retail Federation, said in a statement.

Unionizers and labor activists worry that if these garment behemoths don’t join the pact, the agreement will lack influence.

Still, H&M’s decision to sign the accord is crucial, said Scott Nova, executive director of Worker Rights Consortium, in Women’s Wear Daily. “They are the single largest producer of apparel in Bangladesh, ahead even of Wal-Mart. This accord now has tremendous momentum.

Rep. George Miller, the senior Democratic member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, who has been working in Congress to fight sweatshops and improve working conditions in factories, also stressed that the onus lies with major fashion brands, not just the Bangladeshi government.

“Right now, [these retailers] must join other brands, unions and civil society groups in [signing on to the Fire and Building Safety Agreement] and begin the very affordable process of making their supplier factories safer. If they fail to sign an enforceable agreement, they are declaring that they accept blood on their labels.”

Eyewitness account

The images that accompany this story were taken by Taslima Akhter, a Dhaka-based photojournalist and activist for the rights of women garment makers in Bangladesh. It shows two workers, a man and a woman, locked in a final embrace in death. Akhter took the image shortly after the collapse of the garment factory on April 24.

She told Metro: “Sometimes owners and the government try to say that activists and workers are trying to make a conspiracy against industrialization – a common tactic when it comes to undermining workers’ rights.

“But as an activist and photographer I want to say that I, other activists, trade union activists and workers support the development of industrialization. We believe that without improving the conditions of workers through proper wages and safety standards, it cannot be possible. And it’s not only our local issue, it’s an international issue too.

“Buyers get products from our country at a very cheap rate, and our labor has become the cheapest labor in the world. International buyers also do not really care about pay rates and safety standards. Through my photography for last five years I am trying to campaign against low wage of workers and insecure working condition of workers.”

Akhter, 39, works as a photography tutor at Pathsala University, Bangladesh. In 2011 she participated the summer course on human rights and photography at New York University.

Involved in student politics during her student life, she became the president of Bangladesh Student Federation. She continues her involvement with women’s and worker organization as an activist. Considering photography as a part of her activism, she chooses to work on gender-environmental-cultural issues and the issues of social discrimination.

Bangladesh by the numbers

Bangladesh’s economy has grown by nearly 6 percent per year since 1996, despite, according to the CIA’s summary of the country, “political instability, poor infrastructure, corruption, insufficient power supplies and slow implementation of economic reforms. Bangladesh remains a poor, overpopulated and inefficiently governed nation.”

The country’s population is 90 percent Bengali Muslim. Per capita income is $2,000 dollars per year – making Bangladesh the world’s 192nd poorest nation. As a comparison, the average wealth per head in the U.S. is nearly $50,000.

Dorothy Robinson and Tina Chadha contributed reporting.

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[UPDATED]

Twin car bombs killed around 43 people and wounded many more in a Turkish town near the Syrian border on Saturday and Turkey said it suspected Syrian involvement.

The bombing increased fears that Syria’s civil war was dragging in neighboring states despite renewed diplomatic moves towards ending fighting in which more than 70,000 people have been killed.

The bombs ripped into crowded streets in the early afternoon in Reyhanli, scattering cars and concrete blocks in the town in Turkey’s southern Hatay province, home to thousands of Syrian refugees.

President Bashar al-Assad’s administration was the “usual suspect” in the attacks, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said.

“We know that the people taking refuge in Hatay have become targets for the Syrian regime,” Arinc said in comments broadcast on Turkish television. “We think of them as the usual suspects when it comes to planning such a horrific attack.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Nor was there any comment from Damascus.

NATO member Turkey supports the uprising against Assad and violence has crossed the border before, but not on the same scale.

Turkey is far from alone in fearing the impact of Syria’s war, which is already helping inflame the Middle East’s tangle of sectarian, religious and nationalist struggles.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said it was no coincidence the bombings came as diplomatic moves to end the Syrian conflict intensify.

“There may be those who want to sabotage Turkey’s peace, but we will not allow that,” Davutoglu told reporters during a trip to Berlin. “No-one should attempt to test Turkey’s power.”

Prospects appeared to improve this week for diplomacy over the civil war, now in its third year, after Moscow and Washington announced a joint effort to bring government and rebels to an international conference.

But a Russian official said on Saturday that there was already disagreement over who would take part and he doubted whether a meeting could happen this month.

As well as disputes over who would represent the rebels and government at any talks, there have also been questions over possible participation by Assad’s Shi’ite ally Iran. The rebels are backed by the largely Sunni Gulf states.

Diplomats in New York said the Syria meeting would likely slip into June and it was unclear who would participate.

DEATH TOLL MAY RISE

In Reyhanli, smoke poured from charred ruins after the blasts outside administrative buildings.

“My children were so scared because it reminded them of the bombings when we were in Aleppo. God help us,” said one refugee, a mother of three who gave her name as Kolsum.

Arinc said around 40 people had been killed, while Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan warned the toll could rise with many more seriously injured.

Erdogan said the bombings might have been related to Turkey’s own peace process with Kurdish militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who began a withdrawal this week to end a three decade conflict.

But he said the blasts could also have been aimed at provoking sensitivities in the region that is home to so many Syrian refugees.

Turkey is sheltering more than 300,000 Syrians, most of them in camps along the 900-km (560-mile) frontier, and is struggling to keep up with the influx.

Erdogan said this week Turkey would support a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone in Syria and warned that Damascus crossed President Barack Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons use long ago.

A no-fly zone to prohibit Syrian military aircraft from hitting rebel targets has been mentioned by American lawmakers as one option the United States could use to pressure Assad.

Erdogan is due to meet Obama in Washington on May 16.

Violence also crossed the border in February, when a minibus blew up at a border crossing near Reyhanli, killing 14 people.

The Syrian opposition said one of its delegations appeared to have been the target of that attack, but there has been no confirmation of this from the Turkish authorities.

In October, five Turkish civilians were killed in Akcakale when a mortar bomb fired from Syria landed on their house, prompting Turkey to fire back across the frontier.

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CNN is reporting that Nigel Evans, the deputy speaker of Britain’s House of Commons, has been arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault, according to a source familiar with the arrest. Evans, 55, is a conservative member of parliament. Developing…

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Five U.S. soldiers were killed by a bomb in the southern Afghanistan province of Kandahar on Saturday, a U.S. authorities said, capping off one of the bloodiest weeks for international forces this year.

The attack underscored the dangers faced by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), even as they hand over much of the fighting to the Afghans before a planned departure next year.

Nineteen U.S. personnel have been killed in the last week in three air crashes and Saturday’s bombing. Three British soldiers were also killed on Tuesday by a roadside bomb in the southern province of Helmand.

ISAF said on its website that the five soldiers were killed by an improvised explosive device in southern Afghanistan. A U.S. forces spokesman in the region and a Pentagon official said the five dead were U.S. troops.

Kandahar authorities said the soldiers’ vehicle struck an IED in Maiwand district, which borders Helmand province to the west and is considered one of the most volatile of Kandahar’s districts.

Last month, nine Afghan men working for a mine clearance organization were taken captive by Taliban fighters there, though they were later released.

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Israel has carried out an air strike targeting a shipment of missiles in Syria bound for Hezbollah guerrillas in neighboring Lebanon, an Israeli official said on Saturday.

Israel had long made clear it is prepared to resort to force to prevent advanced Syrian weapons, including President Bashar al-Assad’s reputed chemical arsenal, reaching his Shi’ite Muslim Hezbollah allies or Islamist insurgents taking part in a more than two-year-old uprising against his government.

Hezbollah, allied with Israel’s arch-enemy Iran, waged an inconclusive war with the Jewish state in 2006 and remains a potent threat in Israeli eyes. Israelis also worry that if Assad is toppled, Islamist rebels could turn his guns on them after four decades of relative calm in the Golan Heights border area.

The target of Friday’s raid was not a Syrian chemical weapons facility, a regional security source earlier said.

A U.S. official, who also declined to be identified, had told Reuters on Friday the target was apparently a building.

The Israeli official who acknowledged the raid and described its target spoke on condition of anonymity. Israel’s government has not formally taken responsibility for the action or confirmed it happened.

The attack took place after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet approved it in a secret meeting on Thursday night, the regional security source said.

CNN quoted unnamed U.S. officials as saying Israel most likely conducted the strike “in the Thursday-Friday time frame” and its jets did not enter Syrian air space.

The Israeli air force has so-called “standoff” bombs that coast dozens of kilometers (miles) across ground to their targets once fired. That could, in theory, allow Israel to attack Syria from its own turf or from adjacent Lebanon.

Lebanese authorities reported unusual intensive Israeli air force activity over their territory on Thursday and Friday.

A Lebanese security source said his initial impression was that Israeli overflights were monitoring potential arms shipments between Syria and Lebanon, potentially to Hezbollah.

“We believe that it is linked to Israel’s concerns over the transfer of weapons, particularly chemical weapons, from Syria to its allies Lebanon,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

Syrian government sources denied having information of a strike. Bashar Ja’afari, the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, told Reuters: “I’m not aware of any attack right now.”

ANTI-AIRCRAFT MISSILES TARGETED?

But Qassim Saadedine, a commander and spokesman for the rebel Free Syrian Army, said: “Our information indicates there was an Israeli strike on a convoy that was transferring missiles to Hezbollah. We have still not confirmed the location.”

Rebel units were in disagreement about what type of weapons were in the convoy. A rebel from an information-gathering unit in Damascus that calls itself “The Syrian Islamic Masts Intelligence” said the convoy carried anti-aircraft missiles.

The rebel, who asked not to be named, said: “There were three strikes by Israeli F-16 jets that damaged a convoy carrying anti-aircraft missiles heading to the Shi’ite Lebanese party (Hezbollah) along the Damascus-Beirut military road.

“One strike hit a site near the (Syrian) Fourth Armoured Division in al-Saboura but we have been unable to determine what is in that location”.

Saadedine said he did not think the weapons were anti-aircraft. “We have nothing confirmed yet but we are assuming that it is some type of long-range missile that would be capable of carrying chemical materials,” he said.

In January this year, Israel bombed a convoy in Syria, apparently hitting weapons destined for Hezbollah, according to diplomats, Syrian rebels and security sources in the region.

Israel has not formally confirmed carrying out that strike.

Lebanese acting foreign minister Adnan Mansour was critical. “Attacks such as these will result in more tension and blow up the situation which it promoted,” he said.

“This will not give Israel the peace or security that it wants, in its own way, rather it will push the region into an inflamed struggle and into the unknown.”

Giora Eiland, a former Israeli army general and national security adviser, said the apparent deadlock in Syria’s civil war, now in its third year, meant the Netanyahu government had to be prudent in any military intervention.

“I don’t anticipate far-reaching consequences in Lebanon or Syria (from Israel’s actions),” Eiland told Israel Radio. “Israel appears to be conducting itself judiciously.”

Israel remains technically at war with neighboring Syria. It captured Syria’s Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war, built settlements and annexed the land. Yet belligerence was rare and the borderland has remained largely quiet for decades.

But Israeli security concerns have risen since Islamist fighters linked to al-Qaeda assumed a prominent role in the insurrection against Assad.

They have also worried that Hezbollah could eventually obtain his chemical arsenal and other advanced weaponry. But there is no risk of that happening for the time being, a senior Israeli official said on Saturday.

“Syria has large amounts of chemical weaponry and missiles. Everything there is under (Assad government) control,” Defence Ministry strategist Amos Gilad said in a speech.

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The Philadelphia abortion clinic that prosecutors called a “house of horrors” is now being cited as powerful evidence by both abortion and anti-abortion rights groups.

Advocates on both sides of the issue spoke out as the murder trial of Dr Kermit Gosnell, accused of killing a patient and four infants during late-term abortions at his clinic, headed for closing arguments on Monday in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia.

Gosnell, 72, who ran the now-shuttered Women’s Medical Society Clinic in urban West Philadelphia, could face the death penalty if convicted. The case focuses on whether or not the infants were born alive and then killed.

“Abortion is not safe, it never has been, and what happened in Kermit’s clinic is not that unusual,” said Joe Scheidler, national director of the Pro-Life Action League.

Rev. Frank Pavone, director of the anti-abortion group Priests for Life, said the often gory trial testimony “will change the conversation … It’ll help people engage and make them realize they’re not just talking about a theoretical idea.”

Abortion-rights activists said Gosnell is an outlier among predominantly safe and legal abortion providers.

“Gosnell ran a criminal enterprise, not a healthcare facility, and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” said Eric Ferrero, a spokesman for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Shoddy practices revealed in the Gosnell case are proof that safe abortions should be easily accessible to women of all income levels, said Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

“This is a peek into the back-alley days, the pre-Roe v. Wade days. It’s what too many women experienced when we didn’t provide access to safe and clean abortion services,” Hogue said, referring to the landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1973 that struck down state laws restricting abortion.

The charges against Gosnell and nine of his employees have added fresh fuel to the debate in the United States about late-term abortions.

It is legal in Pennsylvania to abort a fetus up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. It becomes murder if the infant is fully expelled from the mother alive and then killed, according to a lawyer familiar with Pennsylvania law, who declined to be named given the volatility of the case.

Gosnell is charged with first-degree murder for delivering live babies during late-term abortions and then deliberately severing their spinal cords, prosecutors said. He is also charged with third-degree murder in the death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, of Virginia, who died after the procedure from a drug overdose, prosecutors said.

The doctor has pleaded not guilty to all charges, contending there is no evidence the babies were alive when they were expelled and that Mongar failed to disclose her full medical history, which may have triggered drug complications.

Testimony in the six-week trial before a seven-woman, five-man jury has depicted a filthy, squalid clinic serving mostly low-income women in the largely black community.

Early in the trial, anti-abortion rights groups criticized the national media for largely ignoring the case.

Day Gardner, the head of the National Black Pro-life Union in Washington, tied the media’s initial avoidance of the trial to what she said was deeply ingrained racism in American society, noting that many of Gosnell’s patients were poor black women and the doctor himself is black.

The national spotlight would have shown brighter if the victim had been “a blonde, blue-eyed child … It’s very obvious that passion across America is not quite the same when it comes to black children,” Gardner said.

Gosnell, who has been in jail since his January 2011 arrest, is being tried along with Eileen O’Neill, a medical graduate student accused of billing patients and insurance companies as if she had been a licensed doctor. Eight other defendants have pleaded guilty to a variety of charges and are awaiting sentencing.

(Additional reporting by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Prudence Crowther)

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Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge that Syria’s use of chemical weapons is a “game changer” for the United States, he is unlikely to turn to military options quickly and would want allies joining him in any intervention.

Possible military choices range from limited one-off missile strikes from ships – one of the less complicated scenarios – to bolder operations like carving out no-fly safe zones.

One of the most politically unpalatable possibilities envisions sending tens of thousands of U.S. forces to help secure Syrian chemical weapons.

Obama has so far opposed limited steps, like arming anti-government rebels, but pressure to deepen U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war has grown since Thursday’s White House announcement that President Bashar al-Assad likely used chemical weapons.

After fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon is wary of U.S. involvement in Syria. The president’s top uniformed military adviser, General Martin Dempsey, said last month he could not see a U.S. military option with an “understandable outcome” there.

“There’s a lot of analysis to be done before reaching any major decisions that would push U.S. policy more in the direction of military options,” a senior U.S. official told Reuters.

That caution is understandable, given the experience of Iraq where the United States went to war based on bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon has made repeated warnings of the enormous risks and limitations of using American military might in Syria’s civil war.

STRIKES, NO-FLY ZONE

One form of military intervention that could to some extent limit U.S. and allied involvement in Syria’s war would be one-off strikes on pro-Assad forces or infrastructure tied to chemical weapons use. Given Syria’s air defenses, planners may choose to fire missiles from ships at sea.

“The most proportional response (to limited chemical weapons use) would be a strike on the units responsible, whether artillery or airfields,” said Jeffrey White, a former senior official at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency and a Middle East expert who is now a defense fellow at the Washington Institute For Near East Policy.

“It would demonstrate to Assad that there is a cost to using these weapons – the problem so far is that there’s been no cost to the regime from their actions.”

It is not clear how the Syrian government would respond and if it would try to retaliate militarily against the U.S. forces in the region. U.S. military involvement would also upset Russia which has a naval facility on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

Another option that the Pentagon has examined involves the creation, ostensibly in support of Turkey and Jordan, of humanitarian safe areas that would also be no-fly zones off limits to the Syrian air force – an option favored by lawmakers including Senator John McCain of Arizona.

This would involve taking down Syrian air defenses and destroying Syrian artillery from a certain distance beyond those zones, to protect them from incoming fire.

Advocates, including in Congress, say a safe zone inside Syria along the Turkish border, for example, would give needed space for rebels and allow the West to increase support for those anti-Assad forces it can vet.

Still, as officials, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, have warned, once established, a safe zone would tie the United States more closely to Syria’s messy conflict. Assad would almost certainly react.

“Once you set up a military no-fly zone or safe zone, you’re on a slippery slope, mission creep and before you know it, you have boots on the ground,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution.

“Or you end up like Libya where you don’t really have a control mechanism for the end-game, should you end up with chaos.”

The U.S. military has also completed planning for going into Syria and securing its chemical weapons under different scenarios, including one in which Assad falls from power and his forces disintegrate, leaving weapons sites vulnerable to pillaging.

The U.S. fears anti-Assad Islamist rebels affiliated to al Qaeda could grab the chemical weapons but a U.S. intervention into Syria to get the arms would require tens of thousands of American troops.

Asked if he was confident the U.S. military could secure Syria’s chemical weapons stock, Dempsey told Congress: “Not as I sit here today simply because they have been moving it and the number of sites is quite numerous.”

IS THERE A WILLING COALITION?

Obama said on Friday that he would seek to mobilize the international community around Syria, as he attempts to determine whether pro-Assad forces used chemical weapons.

British and French officials have long made it clear their countries might be willing to join in any U.S.-led action under the right circumstances.

But Hagel warned last week that “no international or regional consensus on supporting armed intervention now exists.” Once a fervent advocate of foreign intervention in Syria, Turkey has grown frustrated with the fractured opposition to Assad and with international disunity.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen has ruled out Western military intervention and U.S. Admiral James Stavridis, NATO’s supreme allied commander, cautioned last month that the alliance would need agreement in the region and among NATO members as well as a U.N. Security Council resolution – something that looks unlikely given probable opposition from Russia and China.

The Pentagon has focused over the past year on synchronizing defense planning on Syria, including with Britain, France and Canada.

It is also enhancing its military presence in Jordan by ordering some 200 Army planners into Jordan to focus on Syria scenarios. That would be a better group to coordinate any military or humanitarian action than the ad-hoc U.S. military team previously in Jordan.

Obama met Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House on Friday and Hagel traveled to Jordan this week, as well as to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

“It seems increasingly clear that the Obama administration is feeling pressure to act,” said Mona Yacoubian, a former State Department official and now a Syria expert at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“But they will likely seek two things: conclusive evidence and multilateral support/participation in whatever action (they) choose, which I think would be limited, targeted air strike.”

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Two factory bosses and two engineers were arrested in Bangladesh on Saturday, three days after the collapse of a building where low-cost garments were made for Western brands, as the death toll rose to 352 but many were still being found alive.

As many as 900 people could still be missing, police said.

The owner of the eight-storey building that fell like a pack of cards around more than 3,000 workers was still on the run.

Police said several of his relatives were detained to compel him to hand himself in, and an alert had gone out to airport and border authorities to prevent him from fleeing the country.

Officials said Rana Plaza, on the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka, had been built without the correct permits, and the workers were allowed in on Wednesday despite warnings the previous day that it was structurally unsafe.

Two engineers involved in building the complex were also arrested at their homes early on Saturday, Dhaka district police chief Habibur Rahman said. He said they were arrested for dismissing a warning not to open the building after a jolt was felt and cracks were noticed on some pillars the previous day.

The owner and managing director of the largest of the five factories in the complex, New Wave Style, surrendered to the country’s garment industry association during the night and they were handed over to police.

The factory, which listed many European and North American retailers as its customers, occupied upper floors of the building that officials said had been added illegally.

“PEOPLE ARE ASKING FOR HIS HEAD”

“Everyone involved – including the designer, engineer, and builders – will be arrested for putting up this defective building,” said junior internal affairs minister Shamsul Huq.

An alliance of leftist parties which is part of the ruling coalition said it would call a national strike on May 2 if all those responsible for the disaster were not arrested by Sunday.

Rahman identified the owner of the building as Mohammed Sohel Rana, a leader of the ruling Awami League’s youth front.

“People are asking for his head, which is quite natural,” said H.T. Imam, an adviser to the prime minister.

Wednesday’s collapse was the third major industrial incident in five months in Bangladesh, the second-largest exporter of garments in the world. In November, a fire at the Tazreen Fashion factory nearby the latest disaster killed 112 people.

Such incidents have raised serious questions about worker safety and low wages, and could taint the reputation of the poor South Asian country, which relies on garments for 80 percent of its exports.

Anger over the working conditions of Bangladesh’s 3.6 million garment workers – most of whom are women – has grown since the disaster, triggering protests.

Hundreds were on the streets again on Saturday, smashing and burning cars and sparking more battles with police, who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. Eyewitnesses said dozens of people were injured in the latest clashes.

Remarkably, people were still being pulled alive from the precarious mound of rubble – 21 in all since dawn on Saturday.

“We must salute the common people who dared to enter the wreckage to rescue them, as even our professionals didn’t dare to take the risk,” Mizanur Rahman, deputy director of the fire service, told Reuters.

Marina Begum, 22, spoke from a hospital bed of her ordeal inside the broken building for three days.

“It felt like I was in hell,” she told reporters. “It was so hot, I could hardly breathe, there was no food and water. When I regained my senses I found myself in this hospital bed.”

Frantic efforts were under way to save 15 people trapped under the concrete who were being supplied with dried food, bottled water and oxygen.

About 2,500 people have been rescued from the remains of the building in the commercial suburb of Savar, about 30 km (20 miles) from Dhaka.

WRONG PERMIT, ILLEGAL FLOORS

Emdadul Islam, chief engineer of the state-run Capital Development Authority (CDA), said the owner of the building had not received the proper building consent, obtaining a permit for a five-storey building from the local municipality, which did not have the authority to grant it.

“Only CDA can give such approval,” he said. “We are trying to get the original design from the municipality, but since the concerned official is in hiding we cannot get it readily.”

Furthermore, another three storeys had been added illegally, he said. “Savar is not an industrial zone, and for that reason no factory can be housed in Rana Plaza,” Islam told Reuters.

Islam said the building had been erected on the site of a pond filled in with sand and earth, which meant its foundations were too weak.

“There were three big and very heavy generators that shook the whole building when they were operating. On that day the generators were being used and within seconds the building collapsed,” Islam said.

Sixty percent of Bangladesh’s garment exports go to Europe. The United States takes 23 percent and Canada takes 5 percent.

North American and European chains, including British retailer Primark and Canada’s Loblaw, a unit of George Weston Ltd, said they were supplied by factories in the Rana Plaza building.

Loblaw, which had a small number of “Joe Fresh” apparel items made at one of the factories, said on Saturday that it was working with other retailers to provide aid and support.

It said it was sending representatives to Bangladesh and was also joining what it described as an urgent meeting with other retailers and the Retail Council of Canada.

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One trail in the search for clues about why two ethnic Chechen brothers may have carried out the Boston Marathon bombings leads to a sleepy town in Kyrgyzstan where former neighbors recall a quiet family that was never in trouble.

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  VIDEO: Boston celebrates capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are remembered as decent and obedient boys from their time in the 1990s in the small community of Chechens in Tokmok, a leafy town under the snow-capped Tien Shan mountains outside the capital Bishkek.

Tamerlan, the elder of the two, studied well. His father, Anzor, made a living selling used cars and was welcomed with open arms when he visited the town again two years ago, 10 years after the family left for Russia and then the United States.

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  PHOTOS: Boston residents celebrate capture of second suspect

The news that Tamerlan had been shot dead by police and Dzhokhar captured after a day-long manhunt on suspicion of carrying out Monday’s bombing, in which three people were killed, was greeted with shock and disbelief.

“The Tsarnaevs were such a good family. They yearned to be well-educated. None of them were rowdy. It was a very cultured family,” said former neighbor Raisa Kaayeva, a middle-aged housewife who is also an ethnic Chechen.

“I feel it with my heart – these boys were framed. Why did they go to this America? They should have stayed in Russia to lead a quiet life. Now they have been made scapegoats. I pity these boys. I was weeping when I saw it on TV – their lives were broken, as well as the lives of their mother and father.”

Badrudi Tsokayev, a friend of the father, waved his hands repeatedly as he described his shock at hearing the news. Like others who recalled the family, he saw no signs of radicalism.

“I wouldn’t imagine seeing this even in a nightmare,” Tsokayev, 60, said on a quiet street in Tokmok, 60 km (38 miles) from Bishkek. “As a child, Tamerlan was such a quiet boy. Today everyone is calling me with just one question – is this true?”

He said Anzor Tsarnaev had been fiercely proud of Tamerlan’s prowess in the boxing ring and said his son had been looking forward to going to the Russian city of Sochi to watch the 2014 Winter Olympics next February.

CHECHEN DIASPORA

It is in this town of 53,000 that the boys would have become aware of their Chechen roots. Dzhokhar, now 19, years later posted links to Islamic websites and others calling for Chechen independence on what appears to be his page on a Russian language social networking site.

They would have learnt about the difficult fate suffered by their predecessors in Soviet times that has fostered a sense of injustice among some Chechens and helped fuel an independence drive in the Chechnya region of Russia’s North Caucasus that led to two wars with Moscow in the 1990s.

Kyrgyzstan, a mainly Muslim nation of 5.5 million which hosts U.S. and Russian military air bases, had a huge influx of ethnic Chechens in 1944.

Hundreds of thousands of Chechens and ethnically close Ingush were evicted from their homes in the North Caucasus and moved to Central Asia in cattle wagons after being accused by dictator Josef Stalin of collaborating with Nazi Germany.

About 99,000 of the Chechens and Ingush ended up in what was then the Kyrgyz Soviet republic.

In Tokmok, the Tsarnaev clan alone inhabited a whole street before most of them moved back to their native village of Chiri-Yurt in Chechnya in the 1960s, residents said. About 20 Chechen families still live in a district popularly known as the Glass Factory, after the building that dominates it.

SCHOOL REGISTRY

The brothers would have become more familiar with Islamist militancy when they moved in 2001 to Dagestan, the southern Russian province which lies at the heart of an Islamist insurgency and sees daily violence, and where their parents still live.

In Tokmok, they lived in a modest brick house before moving to a more spacious, two-story house opposite School No. 1 in the town center, where Tamerlan and his two sisters studied.

A school register shows Tamerlan’s date of birth – October 21, 1986 – and the date when he entered the fifth grade, January 18, 1999. He studied here for a year.

Dzhokhar, born in 1993, was too young to go to school at the time.

“Yes, the Tsarnaevs studied here. I wouldn’t say they were anti-social or anything like that. No, I can’t say so,” said school headmistress Lyubov Shulzhenko.

“The Chechen community here is so closely-knit and decent. We have never had problems with their children,” said Natalia Ryabovol, a physics teacher.

In the Soviet era, Tokmok hosted a busy base which trained military pilots for pro-Soviet countries stretching from eastern Europe to Africa. A Soviet-made jet fighter is perched on a pedestal at the town’s entrance.

Many of the townspeople today make a living by growing fruit and vegetables and tending cattle. The attack in Boston seems part of another world.

Kyrgyzstan, which borders China, is politically fragile after the toppling of two presidents since 2005. It says it cannot be held responsible for the brothers’ actions.

“Taking into account the fact that the suspects left the republic when they were eight and 15 years old, the State Committee for National Security considers it inappropriate to link them to Kyrgyzstan,” the Kyrgyz security service said.

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A strong 6.6 magnitude earthquake hit a remote, mostly rural and mountainous area of southwestern China’s Sichuan province on Saturday, killing at least 156 people and injuring about 5,500 close to where a big quake killed almost 70,000 people in 2008.

The earthquake, China’s worst in three years, occurred at 8.02 a.m. (0002 GMT) in Lushan county near Ya’an city and the epicenter had a depth of 12 km (7.5 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The quake was felt by residents in neighboring provinces and in the provincial capital of Chengdu, causing many people to rush out of buildings, according to accounts on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service.

State media said 156 people had been confirmed dead with more than 5,500 injured.

President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang said all efforts must be put into rescuing victims to limit the death toll.

After arriving at the disaster zone by helicopter, Li directed earthquake relief efforts from a plaza in Longmen township in Lushan, Xinhua said.

Li asked that a road be opened to Baoxing county, one of the most affected by the earthquake, and that rescuers “act quickly” in their efforts, Xinhua quoted Li as saying.

“The current most urgent issue is grasping the first 24 hours since the quake’s occurrence, the golden time for saving lives,” Xinhua news agency quoted Li as saying earlier.

Xinhua said 6,000 troops were heading to the area to help with rescue efforts. State television CCTV said only emergency vehicles were being allowed into Ya’an, though Chengdu airport had reopened.

Most of the deaths were concentrated in Lushan, where water and electricity were cut off. Pictures on Chinese news sites showed toppled buildings and people in bloodied bandages being treated in tents outside the hospital, which appeared only lightly damaged.

Rescuers in Lushan had pulled 32 survivors out of rubble, Xinhua said. In villages closest to the epicenter, almost all low rise houses and buildings had collapsed, according to footage broadcast on state television.

“We are very busy right now, there are about eight or nine injured people, the doctors are handling the cases,” said a doctor at a Ya’an hospital who gave her family name as Liu.

The hospital was seeing head and leg injuries, she added.

“SHAKES AND TREMORS”

The China Meteorological Association warned of a possibility of landslides occurring in Lushan county on Saturday and Sunday, the agency said in a statement on its website.

A resident in Chengdu, 140 km (85 miles) from Ya’an city, told Xinhua he was on the 13th floor of a building when he felt the quake. The building shook for about 20 seconds and he saw tiles fall from nearby buildings.

Ya’an is a city of 1.5 million people and is considered one of the birthplaces of Chinese tea culture. It is also the home to one of China’s main centers for protecting the giant panda.

“There are still shakes and tremors and our area is safe. The pandas are safe,” said a spokesman with Ya’an’s Bifengxia nature park, a tourism park that houses more than 100 pandas.

Shouts and screams were heard in the background while Reuters was on the telephone with the spokesman.

“There was just an aftershock, an aftershock, our office is safe,” he said.

Numerous aftershocks jolted the area, the largest of which was magnitude 5.1.

Sichuan is one of the four major natural-gas-producing provinces in China, and its output accounts for about 14 percent of the nation’s total.

Sinopec Group, Asia’s largest oil refiner, said its huge Puguang gas field was unaffected.

The U.S. Geological Survey initially put the magnitude at 7, but later revised it down.

The devastating May 2008 quake was 7.9 magnitude.

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Several hundred people turned up for a “party” in central London on Saturday to celebrate the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a mass protest predicted by some failed to materialize.

The British capital’s mayor had warned of potential rioting as organizers promised thousands of opponents of Thatcher, who died aged 87 on Monday, would descend on London’s Trafalgar Square to mark the passing of a leader who was loved and loathed in equal measure.

Current British politicians and world leaders past and present have paid tributes to the former premier, Britain’s longest serving prime minister in over a century, but she continues to divide Britons over policies which saw her crush trade unions and privatize swathes of industry.

The event, which had been planned by left-wing activists in the event of her death decades ago, had been billed as “the party of a lifetime”.

But in cold and rainy conditions, it attracted only several hundred jovial and noisy supporters, chanting “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, dead, dead, dead”. Some danced to drums and loud dance music, waving banners bearing messages such as “Rot in hell Thatcher”.

Others held up an effigy of Thatcher, complete with light blue suit and handbag, cracked open bottles of champagne which were passed around the small crowd and burnt a mannequin head, shouting “burn Maggie burn”.

“I’ve been waiting to celebrate this for 30 years. Best day of my life,” said Simon Gardner, a wildlife photographer from central England who was wearing a top saying “Rejoice, Rejoice, Thatcher is dead”.

“She was hated by at least half the population.”

There were almost as many police and security personnel visibly present, and a police officer at the scene told Reuters they had expected a far bigger turnout.

SCUFFLES

Some protesters burned flares and threw beer cans at police lines but apart from a few brief and minor scuffles, the protest was largely peaceful with nine arrests mainly for drunk and disorderly behavior.

Since her death, many of the divisions which characterized her time in office from 1979 to 1990 have resurfaced as was demonstrated in a ComRes poll for two Sunday newspapers.

It found 41 percent of those surveyed disagreed with Prime Minister David Cameron’s description of her as the “greatest British peacetime prime minister”, with 33 percent agreeing with the sentiment.

Some 59 percent agreed she was the most divisive premier the country had had, while 60 percent thought that Wednesday’s ceremonial funeral with military honors, which commentators have estimated will cost about 10 million pounds, should not be funded by taxpayers.

Codenamed “Operation True Blue”, the streets will be cleared as Thatcher’s coffin is taken on a procession through central London to a service at Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Opponents have denounced the plans, some suggesting it should be privatized and put out to tender, and there are concerns anti-capitalist activists and anarchists with a long record of violent protest may try to cause disruption.

Meanwhile on Sunday, the song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead”, from the from the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz”, is expected to enter the pop charts following a campaign by those celebrating Thatcher’s death.

“My mother once said to me ‘Carol I think my place in history is assured’,” her daughter Carol Thatcher told reporters outside her late mother’s former home in central London.

“The magnificent tributes this week, the wonderful words of (U.S.) President (Barack) Obama, to others from colleagues who once worked alongside her, have proved her right.

“These have given me strength. But I know that this is going to be a tough and tearful week even for the daughter of the ‘Iron Lady’.”

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All 108 passengers and crew miraculously survived when a Lion Air Boeing 737 missed the runway on the balmy Indonesian resort island of Bali on Saturday and landed in the sea.

Forty people were treated for injuries including broken legs, head wounds and shock, though only four were admitted to hospital, hospital officials said.

The brand new aircraft had flown from Bandung, in West Java, and was about to land at Bali airport. “But it probably failed to reach the runway and fell into the sea,” said Lion Air spokesman Edward Sirait.

He said there were 101 passengers and seven crew on board but would not comment on the cause of the crash. An investigation is under way.

Bali’s police chief told local television that there were two foreign passengers.

“There was no sign at all it would fall but then suddenly it dropped into the water,” passenger Tantri Widiastuti, 60, told Metro TV. “I saw holes in the floor of the plane … we were evacuated quickly.”

She said she had been treated for minor cuts.

Budget carrier Lion Air is Indonesia’s largest airline and is rapidly expanding.

The plane was delivered last month. The company has signed two record contracts with two world’s top plane makers, Boeing and Airbus. Last month, it signed a deal with Airbus for 234 passenger jets worth a $24 billion. Two years ago, it signed a deal with Boeing for 230 planes.

Indonesia has been struggling to improve its civil air safety after a string of deadly accidents. In 2007, Lion Air was among a number of Indonesian airlines banned by the EU for lax safety standards. The ban was progressively lifted, starting in 2009.

The runway at Bali international airport starts next to the sea. The island is Indonesia’s main tourist destination, especially popular with Australians for its surfing.

TV footage showed the jet floating in shallow waters with a fractured fuselage and passengers in the water with life jackets.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, Lion Air planes have been involved in six accidents since 2002, four of them involving Boeing 737s. Only one of them, according to the site, resulted in fatalities.

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The United States and China agreed on Saturday to make a joint effort to push for the peaceful denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, following weeks of bellicose rhetoric from North Korea and rising tensions in northeast Asia.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met China’s top leaders in a bid to persuade them to exert pressure on North Korea, whose main diplomatic supporter is Beijing, to scale back its belligerence and, eventually, return to nuclear talks.

Before travelling to Beijing for the first time as secretary of state, Kerry had made no secret of his desire to see China take a more active stance towards North Korea, which in recent weeks has threatened nuclear war against the United States and South Korea.

Kerry and China’s top diplomat, State Councillor Yang Jiechi, said both countries supported the goal of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

“We are able, the United States and China, to underscore our joint commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in a peaceful manner,” Kerry told reporters, standing next to Yang at a state guesthouse in western Beijing.

“We agreed that this is critically important for the stability of the region and indeed for the world and for all of our nonproliferation efforts.”

But North Korea has repeatedly said it will not abandon nuclear weapons which it described on Friday as its “treasured” guarantor of security.

Yang said China’s stance on maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula was clear and consistent.

“We maintain that the issue should be handled and resolved peacefully through dialogue and consultation. To properly address the Korea nuclear issue serves the common interests of all parties. It is also the shared responsibility of all parties,” he said, speaking through an interpreter.

“China will work with other relevant parties, including the United States, to play a constructive role in promoting the six-party talks and balanced implementation of the goals set out in the September 19 joint statement of 2005.”

At a news conference in Seoul on Friday and in a U.S.-South Korean joint statement issued on Saturday, Kerry signaled the U.S. preference for diplomacy to end the tension, but stressed North Korea must take “meaningful” steps on denuclearization.

The United States and its allies believe the North violated the 2005 aid-for-denuclearization deal by conducting a nuclear test in 2006 and pursuing a uranium enrichment program that would give it a second path to a nuclear weapon in addition to its plutonium-based program.

“CONSTRUCTIVE” TALKS

As the North’s main trading partner, financial backer and the closest thing it has to a diplomatic ally, China has a unique ability to use its leverage against the impoverished, isolated state, Kerry said in Seoul before leaving for Beijing.

Kerry earlier in the day characterized his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping as “constructive and forward-leaning”, though he did not elaborate.

Beijing, which sided with North Korea in the 1950-53 civil war against the U.S.-backed South, has been reluctant to apply pressure on Pyongyang, fearing the instability that could result if the North were to implode and send floods of refugees into China.

It has also looked askance at U.S. military drills in South Korea.

Xinhua said in a commentary that Washington had itself been “fanning the flames” on the Korean peninsula with its shows of force.

“It keeps sending more fighters, bombers and missile-defense ships to the waters of East Asia and carrying out massive military drills with Asian allies in a dramatic display of preemptive power,” it said.

Chinese state television quoted Premier Li Keqiang as telling Kerry that rising tensions on the Korean peninsula were in nobody’s interests, in apparent reference to both Washington and Pyongyang to dial down the war of words.

“All sides must bear responsibility for maintaining regional peace and stability and be responsible for the consequences,” the television report paraphrased Li as saying.

“Disturbances and provocation on the peninsula and regionally will harm the interests of all sides, which is like lifting a rock only to drop it on one’s feet.”

Still, U.S. officials believe China’s rhetoric on North Korea has begun to shift, pointing to a recent speech by China’s Xi in which – without referring explicitly to Pyongyang – he said no country “should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gain”.

Kerry’s visit to Asia, which will include a stop in Tokyo on Sunday, takes place after weeks of shrill North Korean threats of war since the imposition of new U.N. sanctions in response to its third nuclear test in February.

North Korean television made no mention of Kerry’s visit and devoted most of its reports to preparations for Monday’s celebrations marking the birth date of state founder Kim Il-Sung.

These included a numerous floral tributes and grandiose flower show, foreign visitors seeing the sights of the capital ahead of the festivities and the unveiling of a monument in a provincial town.

But Rodong Sinmun, the ruling Workers’ Party’s newspaper, issued a fresh denunciation of joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises, saying: “The outbreak of nuclear war has now become a fait accompli, owing to the U.S. and the South Korean puppet forces.

“If the enemies dare provoke (North Korea) while going reckless, it will immediately blow them up with an annihilating strike with the use of powerful nuclear means.”

However, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, quoting a government source, said North Korea had not moved any of its mobile missile launchers for the past two days after media reports that as many as five missiles had been moved into place on the country’s east coast.

Yonhap said there had been no signs of any movement by the mobile launchers since Thursday, “or that missile launches are imminent”.

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The Smiths will create exclusive content in honor of Earth Day and the duo’s action film “After Earth.” Their film is set on Earth 1,000 years after humanity has fled, with Jaden on a mission to find help for his injured father, battling animals and an alien.

In their roles as Metro’s special guests, Jaden and Will Smith will imagine what the world will look like hundreds of years from now when it comes to environmental impact, advances in technology and transport, and media. The pair will also sit for an exclusive Q&A with Metro. All content will run in Metro’s print and digital editions around the world.

“There are some things only the world’s largest newspaper can do,” says Metro’s Global Editor-in-Chief Margaret Samways. “And given our global reach, we’re thrilled Jaden and Will can contribute to an issue pegged to Earth Day. Especially before the aliens arrive.”

Will Smith’s coming to Metro! How big a fan are you?

How big is your Willie Style? In anticipation of special guests Will and Jaden Smith, who will appear in our April 22 Earth Day issue, we want you to…

MATCH THE SONGS TO THE LYRICS:

THE SONGS

“Men in Black”
“Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It”
“Miami”
“Parents Just Don’t Understand”
“Boom! Shake the Room”

THE LYRICS

A. Women used to tease me
Give it to me now nice and easy
Since I moved up like George and Weezie

B. Pay attention, here’s the thick of the plot
I pulled up to the corner at the end of my block
That’s when I saw this beautiful girlie who was just walking
I picked up my car phone to perpetrate like I was talking

C. Smooth and individual
Rhymes always original
Like the Dr. Jekyl man and this is my Hyde side
I am the driver and you’re on a rap ride

D. So I’m thinking I’m a scoot me something hot
In this south-sea meringue melting pot
Hottest club in the city and it’s right on the beach
Temperature get to ya it’s about to reach
Five-hundred degrees

E. Let me see ya take a walk with me, just walk it with me
Take a walk with me c’mon
And make your neck work
Now freeze…

Scroll down for the answers….

CORRECT ANSWERS:

A. “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It”
B. “Parents Just Don’t Understand”
C. “Boom! Shake the Room”
D. “Miami”
E. “Men in Black”

The post Two Smiths, One Big Issue: Will Smith & Jaden Smith to curate Metro appeared first on Metro.us.

To say Margaret Thatcher was a divisive figure is perhaps the understatement of the year.

She transformed the fortunes and global standing of my native U.K. But the social damage caused, in some parts of the country, by her policies remains to this day.

In the late 1970s, when she became prime minister, Britain was sick. Unions dictated policy to government.

The pre-Thatcher government had to limit the working week to three days because of power cuts caused by nationwide strikes. Many of my teenage years were spent in darkness as electricity was cut off with Third World frequency.

We had a choice of two TV stations; if you wanted a telephone installed, you had to wait for weeks before the nationalized service would respond.

Britain had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout.

Then Maggie arrived.

A bonfire of regulation ensued and, amid much violence, she smashed the unions. The economy boomed, we became a nation of shareholders and property owners.

We got national pride back when we kicked the Argentinians out of the Falkland Islands and for the first time in decades the world listened to Britain.

She terrified and inspired fellow heads of government in equal measure. Europe was no match for her. Ronald Reagan found a soulmate in her. Thanks to Maggie, Britain was back.

But there was a dark side. Heavy industries — nationalized and subsidized — were closed by the Thatcher government with ruthless determination.

The resulting unemployment was a national tragedy. Those working class areas suffer to this day.

Generational unemployment has resulted. Crime, drug use and poor standards of aspiration and education followed.

Britain needed Thatcher’s surgery, but the cure was almost as bad as the disease.

What is indisputable is that few modern politicians, anywhere in the world, will ever match her legacy. She was a woman of strength and conviction, for good or ill; and the gray men and women of today’s politics are pygmies by comparison.

The post Opinion: Margaret Thatcher reinvented Britain appeared first on Metro.us.

A strain of bird flu that has been found in humans for the first time in eastern China is no cause for panic, the World Health Organization said Monday, as the number of people infected rose to 24, with seven deaths.

WHO praised China for mobilising resources nationwide to combat the H7N9 flu strain by culling tens of thousands of birds and monitoring hundreds of people close to those infected.

On Sunday the head of China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, Li Bin, said she was confident authorities could contain the virus. [ID:nL3N0CU0AF]

“These are a relatively small number of serious cases with personal health, medical implications, but not at this stage known public health implications,” O’Leary told reporters.

But he warned that information on the virus was still incomplete.

“We really can’t rely on information from other viruses. H7N9 is a new virus in humans and the pattern that it follows cannot be predicted by the patterns that we have from other influenza viruses,” O’Leary said.

No cases have yet been reported outside of China, he said.

The Shanghai government said on its official microblog Monday that a 64-year-old man had become the latest victim as the number of infected has risen daily.

In total, 621 close contacts of the people known to have been infected were being monitored and had yet to show symptoms of infection, according to the director of China’s H7N9 prevention and control office, Liang Wannian.

Authorities have said there is no evidence of transmission between humans.

The bird flu outbreak has caused global concern and some Chinese internet users and newspapers have questioned why it took so long for the government to announce the new cases, especially as two of the victims fell ill in February.

Airline shares have fallen in Europe and Hong Kong over fears that the new virus could be lead to an epidemic like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in China in 2002 and killed about 10 percent of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

Chinese authorities initially tried to cover up the SARS outbreak.

In the H7N9 case, it had said it needed time to identify the virus, with cases spread between eastern Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces.

Chinese authorities have countered speculation that the H7N9 outbreak is related to more than 16,000 pig carcasses found dumped in rivers around Shanghai and the WHO has said some dead pigs from the rivers tested negative for influenza infection.

Other strains of bird flu, such as H5N1, have been circulating for many years and can be transmitted from bird to bird and bird to human, but not generally from human to human.

Bangladesh on Monday reported its first H5N1 death, that of a baby, in February. It had taken that long to identify the strain.

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Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died this morning aged 87.

She had been ill for some time, but died following a stroke, according to a spokesman.

Thatcher was Britain’s first and only female prime minister and served in that capacity for 11 years.

She was dubbed The Iron Lady by diplomats in Russia and Europe over her tough, uncompromising stance in negotiations over the European Union and arms control in the Cold War.

She was also a staunch ally of the United States and had a close personal relationship with former President Ronald Reagan.

At home she was a divisive figure. Her tenure saw the U.K. develop from one of the economic “sick men of Europe” into a powerhouse of the European Union. She destroyed once-powerful unions, but her time in office also saw record unemployment in former industrial areas. 

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  PHOTOS: Remembering Margaret Thatcher

She came to office in 1979 and by 1982 was riding at historic lows in polls due to the tough economic measures she delivered to transform Britain.

The turning point in her fortunes came in May 1982 when Argentinian military forces invaded the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.

Many observers, including the Argentinian forces and American diplomats, forecast that Britain would do nothing. Instead, Thatcher ordered Britain’s military to send a task force to retake the islands. The task force set sail within three days of being ordered to do so and within weeks had pulled off  a stunning military victory to eject Argentina from the Falklands.

The wave of patriotic fervor that followed fueled a general election victory in 1983.

Michael Howard, a successor of Thatcher as leader of the center-right Conservative Party said she “was a titan of British politics. I believe she saved our country.”

Five things we’ll remember about Thatcher

Britain’s First Female Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, when elected in 1979, became Britain’s first and so far only female prime minister and the West’s first female head of government. Her political dominance and leadership helped power on for three consecutive terms in office, and inspired countless women worldwide to break the glass ceiling of male-dominated politics.

Maggie clad in iron
She wasn’t called Iron Lady for nothing. Shaped by a hard-line political and economic stance, Thatcher shut down national coal mines, slashed social spending, refused to recognize Northern Irish political prisoners and introduced a widely unpopular poll tax.

The Queen of the 1980s
With her fondness for the private sector, deregulation and big missiles, Maggie embodied the zeitgeist of the 1980s – bellicose, ultra-aggressive capitalism – and she was loved for it. The 1982 Falklands War boosted her popularity, while herself and US President Ronald Reagan looked quite the (super) power couple in the era’s anti-communist chic.

No sleep, no problem
Tireless Thatcher famously said while in power she could get by on just four hours a night. She joins the genetically blessed Sleepless Elite, a band of top historical figures and leaders (Napoleon, Da Vinci, Churchill and Florence Nightingale) that needed five hours or less of shut-eye.

‘Power dressing’ personified
Her sense of style was as powerful as her politics. Sporting a helmet of deep strawberry hair, broad Royal blue skirt suits, and the briefcase-esque handbag, Thatcher pioneered the bold “I’m shoulder to shoulder with men” look. Her taste for proud Britishness was reflected in her choice of classic heritage labels Asprey and Aquascutum.

Credit: Anthony Johnston, Metro World News in London

… And 5 facts you ought to know about Thatcher

Keen chemist: Before becoming an MP, Thatcher worked as a research chemist for British chemical companies Xylonite and Lyons & Company, where she helped develop methods for preserving ice cream.

Infamous monikers: Worldwide people know the Iron Lady, but lesser-known nicknames include The Milk Snatcher (after she removed free school milk for over-7s), Attila the Hen, The She-Elephant and Brigitte Bardot with Caligula’s eyes (thank French president Francois Mitterand for that one.)

Lowering the tone: King George VI (from movie “The King’s Speech”) wasn’t the only British ruler to get voice therapy. Thatcher had her voice changed to sound more authoritative. After intensive training with a National Theatre tutor, Thatcher’s voice was lowered by 46 hertz and has became a cross between a typical male and female voice.

A perfect wife: Despite being Britain’s prime minister for 11 and a half years, Thatcher insisted on cooking for her husband every night and never had a personal chef while in office.

Troublesome children: Her son Mark received a four-year suspended jail sentence after funding mercenaries in a 2004 coup d’état attempt in Equatorial Guinea (British backers were allegedly keen on tapping into that country’s oil and gas reserves.) Mark’s twin sister Carol made some headlines when she won a British celeb reality show in 2005 but made many more in 2009 after uttering an off-air racist comment about Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.

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Five Egyptians were killed and eight wounded in clashes between Christians and Muslims in a town near Cairo, security sources said on Saturday, in the latest sectarian violence in the most populous Arab state.

Christian-Muslim confrontations have increased in Muslim-majority Egypt since the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 gave freer rein to hardline Islamists repressed under his rule.

Four Christian Copts and one Muslim were killed when members of both communities started fighting and shooting at each other in El Khusus north of the Egyptian capital, the sources said. State news agency MENA put the death toll at four.

An angry crowd smashed shops belonging to Christians, residents said. A Reuters reporter saw a burned-out Coptic day care center and several damaged shops belonging to Christian traders. An apartment inhabited by Muslims was also burned.

Residents said the violence broke out on Friday when a group of Christian children were drawing on a wall of a Muslim religious institute.

A Reuters reporter saw what looked like a swastika drawn on the wall, which Muslim residents said had offended them because it looked like a cross.

“I saw the kids drawing on the wall after afternoon prayers so I grabbed them and told them to remove what they’d just written,” said Mahmoud Mahmoud al-Alfi, a Muslim resident.

Then another man arrived and started beating the children, drawing a large crowd, he said. The situation escalated when someone drew a gun and fired into the air, killing one boy with a stray bullet.

“Suddenly the area was full of weapons,” Alfi said, while weeping Muslim women sat nearby in front of a house, showing pictures of a man they said had been killed during the clashes.

The president’s office expressed condolences to the victims and vowed to fight any sectarian violence.

“The presidency … totally rejects any attempt against the unity and cohesiveness of Egyptian society and will decisively confront any attempt to spark sectarian strife among Egyptian people, Muslim and Christian,” according to a statement.

Muslim leaders were also quick to condemn the sectarian violence which comes as Egypt struggles with a severe economic crisis and high inflation after two years of political upheaval.

Grand Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, of Egypt’s leading Islamic authority Al-Azhar, urged measures to prevent the situation from escalating and to “preserve the national character which characterises the Egyptian people, Muslims and Christians,” MENA said.

“The sectarian riots which happened in El Khusus are unacceptable and grave,” Saad al-Katatni, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood political party, said on his Facebook website. “There are some who want to set Egypt ablaze and create crises.”

President Mohamed Mursi, a Brotherhood leader elected in June, has promised to protect the rights of Copts, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 84 million people.

TIGHT SECURITY

On Saturday the situation was calm but tense in the small town where Muslims and Christians live close to each other but in separate streets. Security was tight with police vehicles parked in the main streets.

Police detained 15 people, a security source said.

In a Christian neighborhood dozens of angry young men gathered at noon on Saturday, chanting “with our blood and soul we sacrifice ourselves for the cross”. The crowds left after a priest came and asked them to leave to calm tensions.

“There are people who want to cause sectarian strife between Muslims and Christians,” said a Christian man who gave his name as Kameel. “I’ve been here longer than 30 years and I have never seen any violence or extremism in our area.”

Sectarian tensions have often flared into violence, particularly in rural areas where rivalries between clans or families sometimes add to friction. Love affairs between Muslims and Christians have also sparked clashed in the past.

Since Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising, Christians have complained of several attacks on churches by radical Islamists, incidents that have sharpened longstanding Christian complaints about being sidelined in the workplace and in law.

As an example, they point to rules that make it harder to obtain official permission to build a church than a mosque.

Last month, a court sentenced a Muslim to death for killing two people in a dispute with Christians in a southern town.

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World powers and Iran failed again to ease their decade-old dispute over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program in talks that ended on Saturday, prolonging a stand-off that risks spiraling into a new Middle East war.

The lack of a breakthrough in the two-day meeting in Kazakhstan aimed at easing international concern over Iran’s contested nuclear activity marked a further setback for diplomatic efforts to resolve the row peacefully.

It is also likely to strengthen suspicions in Israel – which threatens air strikes, if necessary, to stop its arch-enemy from getting the bomb – that Iran is using diplomacy as a stalling tactic.

“Over two days of talks, we had long and intensive discussions,” European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said.

“It became clear that our positions remain far apart,” Ashton, who represents the six powers – the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany – in dealings with Iran, told a news conference.

Underlining the lack of substantial progress during the negotiations in the Kazakh commercial center of Almaty – the second meeting there this year – no new talks between the two sides were scheduled.

But a senior U.S. official said there had been no breakdown in the negotiations with Iran.

“There was no breakthrough but also no breakdown,” the official, who declined to be identified, said. “Our intention is to proceed,” he said, referring to a U.S. commitment to further diplomatic efforts.

Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili acknowledged differences between the two sides.

“We proposed our plan of action and the other party was not ready and they asked for some time to study the idea,” he told a separate news conference.

Russia’s negotiator sounded more upbeat, saying the talks were a “step forward” although no compromise had been reached.

“Certainly, these talks were a step forward,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said. But he added that it was premature to name a date and venue for further talks.

Iran’s critics accuse it of covertly seeking the means to produce nuclear bombs. Israel, widely believed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal, sees Iran’s nuclear program as a potential threat to its existence.

Iran says its nuclear energy program is entirely peaceful but U.N. inspectors suspect it has worked illicitly on designing a nuclear weapon.

KEEP DIPLOMACY ALIVE

With all sides aware that a breakdown in diplomacy could shunt the protracted stalemate a step closer to war, no one in Almaty was talking about abandoning diplomatic efforts.

Ashton said that for the first time there had been a “real back and forth between us when were able to discuss details, to pose questions, and to get answers directly … To that extent, that has been a very important element”

But, she added: “What matters in the end is substance.”

With a presidential election due in Iran in June, scope for a breakthrough was slim in Almaty. Iran declined to accept or reject an offer of modest relief from economic sanctions in exchange for curbing its most sensitive nuclear activity.

“I do not think the risk of war has substantially increased,” said Shashank Joshi, a senior fellow and Middle East specialist at the Royal United Services Institute,

“The priority for both sides is to keep the diplomatic track alive until after the Iranian presidential elections.”

But without substantial progress in coming months, Western governments are likely to increase economic sanctions on Iran.

The talks were held against a backdrop of flaring tension between big powers and North Korea, which like Iran is defying international demands to curb its nuclear program. [ID:nL3N0CT022] But unlike North Korea, which has carried out three nuclear tests since 2006, Iran says its nuclear energy activity is entirely peaceful.

The six powers tried to persuade Iran to abandon its higher-grade uranium enrichment, as a first step to a broader deal. Refined uranium can be used to power atomic reactors, Iran’s stated aim, or provide material for weapons if processed more.

Iran, which denies seeking nuclear weapons, wants major economic sanctions – including on its oil exports and banks – lifted and its right to enrich uranium publicly recognized.

“We regard enrichment as an inalienable right of the Iranian nation,” Jalili said.

The six nations, however, say this right only applies when nuclear work is carried out under extensive oversight by U.N. inspectors, something Iran has refused to grant. Since 2006, the U.N. Security Council has demanded that Iran suspend the work.

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Former South African president Nelson Mandela was discharged on Saturday after spending more than a week in hospital for treatment of pneumonia, raising global concern about the health of the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader.

“(He) has been discharged from hospital today, 6 April, following a sustained and gradual improvement in his general condition,” the South African presidency said on Saturday.

It was the third health scare in four months for the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who became South Africa’s first black president in 1994 and became a global symbol of tolerance and the struggle for equality.

He was in hospital briefly in early March for a check-up and was hospitalized in December for nearly three weeks with a lung infection and after surgery to remove gallstones.

Mandela stepped down as president in 1999 and has not been politically active for a decade. But he is still revered at home and abroad for leading the long campaign against apartheid and then championing racial reconciliation while in office.

Mandela has a history of lung problems dating from when he contracted tuberculosis as a political prisoner. He spent 27 years on Robben Island and in other jails for his attempts to overthrow the white-minority government.

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Former South African President Nelson Mandela is making “steady improvement” under treatment for pneumonia and doctors say he is much better now than when he was admitted to hospital a week ago, the government said this morning.

The three-sentence statement from President Jacob Zuma’s office was the most upbeat since the 94-year-old anti-apartheid hero was admitted to hospital with a recurrence of a lung infection.

“His doctors say he continues to respond satisfactorily to treatment and is much better now than when he was admitted to hospital on the 27th of March 2013,” the statement said.

Doctors had drained excess fluid from Mandela’s lungs and he was breathing without difficulty, the government said in an earlier bulletin on Saturday.

It is the third health scare in four months for Mandela, who became South Africa’s first black president in 1994 and was hailed as a global symbol of tolerance and harmony.

He was in hospital briefly in early March for a check-up and was hospitalized in December for nearly three weeks with a lung infection and after surgery to remove gallstones.

Mandela stepped down as president in 1999 and has not been politically active for a decade. But he is still revered at home and abroad for leading the struggle against apartheid rule and then championing racial reconciliation while in office.

Global figures such as U.S. President Barack Obama have sent get-well messages, and South Africans included him in Easter prayers at the weekend.

Mandela has a history of lung problems dating back to when he contracted tuberculosis as a political prisoner. He spent 27 years in prison on Robben Island and in other jails for his attempts to overthrow the white-minority government.

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North Korea closed access to a joint factory zone with South Korea this morning, officials said, putting at risk $2 billion a year in trade that is vital for an impoverished state with a huge army, nuclear ambitions and a hungry population.

The move marked an escalation in North Korea’s months-long standoff with South Korea and its ally Washington. On Tuesday, Pyongyang said it would restart a mothballed nuclear reactor, drawing criticism from the international community, including China, its major benefactor and diplomatic friend.

In Beijing, China’s deputy foreign minister met ambassadors from the United States and both Koreas to express “serious concern” about the Korean peninsula, China’s Foreign Ministry said, in a sign China is increasingly worried about events spinning out of control. The ministry said the meetings with Deputy Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui took place on Tuesday.

South Korea demanded Pyongyang allow access to the Kaesong Industrial Park, which lies just inside North Korea.

It said North Korea would allow the roughly 800 South Korean factory managers and workers in the zone to return home, but added that only 36 had opted to do so on Wednesday, indicating factories were still operating.

Those remaining in the zone were there by choice but could run out of food because all supplies needed to be trucked in from South Korea, said the Unification Ministry, which handles Seoul’s matters with North Korea.

“If this issue is prolonged, the government is aware of such a situation materializing,” ministry spokesman Kim Hyung-suk told reporters when asked about food shortages.

The industrial park has not formally stopped operations since it was inaugurated in 2000 as part of efforts to improve ties between the two Koreas. It houses 123 companies and employs 50,000 North Koreans making cheap goods such as clothing.

Some South Korean experts said the North’s move might be temporary given the park is a financial lifeline to Pyongyang.

At the South Korean border city of Paju, there was a sense of foreboding that Kaesong would be closed permanently, dealing a death blow to the one remaining example of cooperation between the two Koreas.

“Trust between North and South will fall apart, as well as the trust we have with our buyers. We’re going to end up taking the damage from this,” Lee Eun-haeng, who runs an apparel firm in Kaesong, told Reuters on the southern side of the border.

Lee’s business employs 600 North Koreans who earn $130 on average a month.

The zone has major symbolic value for both North and South Korea. It generates cash for the North and acts as beacon for the economic prosperity of the South inside the grim, centrally planned North Korean economy where jobs are scarce.

“The North Korean workers there are said to have 300,000 family members,” said Ahn Chan-il, a former North Korean military official who defected to the South in 1979.

“Does electricity go off in the Kaesong factories at any time? No. But North Korean factories see that happen to their facilities all the time.”

WAR OF WORDS

North Korea’s latest war of words with Seoul and Washington ratcheted up when the United Nations imposed fresh sanctions on the country for its February 12 nuclear test. At the same time, South Korea and the United States have been staging annual war games, which Pyongyang claims are a prelude to an invasion. Those exercises run throughout April.

Despite the rhetoric and the cutting of telephone hot lines to the South, Pyongyang has not taken any military action and shows no sign of preparing its 1.2 million strong armed forces for war, Washington says.

That would indicate much of the vitriol is intended for domestic consumption to bolster young leader Kim Jong-un ahead of celebrations marking the anniversary of the birthday of Kim Il-sung, the state’s founder and the younger Kim’s grandfather, on April 15.

Kim has also used the rising tensions to cement his grip on power by appointing a key ally of his uncle and aunt as the country’s prime minister.

“At least until the end of April, when drills end, the North is likely to keep up the tensions as it had done in previous years,” said Cheong Seong-chang of the Sejong Institute think tank in Seoul.

The 30-year old Kim was showing the North could stand up to the United States and to South Korea’s new President Park Geun-hye, who took office just a week after the nuclear test, the country’s third, said the defector Ahn.

“North Korea doesn’t have the economic power that South Korea has but it’s stressing its nuclear abilities to show that it can pull equal weight,” he said.

News of the Kaesong closure initially hurt South Korean financial markets. The won currency was trading at a six and a half-month low in early trade but later recovered.

North Korea is heavily reliant on Kaesong and China. Its powerful neighbor accounts for almost $6 billion in trade, according to estimates from Seoul.

One South Korean worker who travels in and out of the zone each day said North Koreans there had become less friendly as tensions had risen in the past month.

“They used to smile at my jokes or the soldiers at customs liked to chit chat. They really liked South Korean duty-free cigarettes but this week it all looks different,” said Jang Sun-woo.

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With its rare apology, Apple went from pariah to praiseworthy in the eyes of China’s state-controlled media, a lesson for other foreign firms not to underestimate the speed and power of the government press.

After coming under near-daily media assault for the past two weeks and facing the threat of penalties from two Chinese government bureaus, Apple apologized to Chinese consumers on Monday for poor communication over its warranty policy and said it will change the terms for some of its iPhones sold in China.

Greater China is Apple’s second-biggest and fastest-growing market, with sales up almost 40 percent to $6.8 billion in the final quarter of 2012.

The Chinese newspapers that threw brickbats at Apple a few days ago have since changed their tune.

“The company’s apology letter has eased the situation, softening the tense relationship between Apple and the Chinese market … Its reaction is worth respect compared with other American companies,” wrote popular tabloid the Global Times, published by Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily.

The Foreign Ministry praised Apple for “conscientiously” responding to consumers’ demands.

“We approve of what Apple said,” spokesman Hong Lei told a daily news briefing this morning.

Only last week, the People’s Daily issued a scathing editorial on Apple’s return policy saying the popular smartphone maker was filled with “unparalleled arrogance”.

Apple was first targeted in mid-March by state broadcaster CCTV during its annual consumer day segment. Volkswagen AG, which was also criticized on the same show, plans to recall vehicles to fix a gearbox problem.

“That Timothy Cook had to step up and respond from the CEO’s chair shows the importance of China and how critical it is as a market not just for Apple but for every multinational company here,” said Kent Kedl, Shanghai-based head of Greater China and North Asia for risk consultancy firm Control Risks.

Foreign companies who are adept at managing media crises at home find it much tougher to navigate China where state media outlets, pandering to different audiences, often have opaque agendas and intentions. Analysts also said that foreign companies need to remember that the bigger the brand, the bigger a target it will be, especially in China.

“What foreign companies need to pay attention to, is that nobody operates in a vacuum, nobody operates only on the good graces of a brand name … Five to ten years ago a report on CCTV would have rippled a little bit, now it goes viral and has a life of its own,” Kedl said.

Apple’s acquiescence in this setting, where the world’s largest technology company by market value was ironically the David going up against China’s Goliath state media machinations, shows its wisdom in not challenging a more powerful enemy.

Although popular opinion on the Internet swayed in Apple’s favor, against state media and the reported threats of penalties from China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce as well as its quality and inspection bureau, it was not Apple’s fight to win, experts said.

Other foreign companies targeted by CCTV, such as fast food chain operator Yum Brands Inc, have also apologized and faced scrutiny from government agencies. Last December CCTV reported that two of Yum’s suppliers purchased chickens from farmers who used excessive levels of antibiotics in their animals. The report and subsequent investigations hurt sales at Yum’s KFC chain.

But Apple’s situation is somewhat different because CCTV’s claim was not completely new. Last July, a Chinese consumer rights group also slammed Apple for its after-sales policies. That time, however, Apple held its ground.

With the apology and warranty change, Apple’s mea culpa is significant not just because it comes from a tech firm that rarely apologizes, but also because Apple may be realizing that in China, it needs to be proactive.

“They’re out of the woods and into the weeds. Things will rarely be smooth for Apple in China – even if consumers love it there will always be factions in and out of government that are trying to take it down,” said Michael Clendenin, managing director of technology consultancy RedTech Advisors.

“Apple made it easy this time, but they have learned to be more proactive. The next time they stumble, it will be easier to recover,” he said.

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North Korea announced plans this morning to restart a mothballed nuclear reactor that has been closed since 2007, but emphasized it was seeking a deterrent capacity, rather than repeating recent threats to attack South Korea and the United States.

The state-owned KCNA news agency said North Korea would restart all nuclear facilities for both electricity and military uses.

The announcement came amid soaring tensions on the Korean Peninsula as the United States bolstered its forces in the region after a series of threats by Pyongyang to attack U.S. bases in the Pacific and to invade South Korea.

North Korea, one of the most isolated and unpredictable states in the world, conducted its third nuclear test in February but is believed to be some years away from developing nuclear weapons, although it claims to have a deterrent.

A speech by the North’s young leader Kim Jong-un, delivered on Sunday but published in full by KCNA on Tuesday, appeared to dial down the prospects of a direct confrontation with the United States as he stressed that nuclear weapons would ensure the country’s safety as a deterrent.

“Our nuclear strength is a reliable war deterrent and a guarantee to protect our sovereignty,” Kim said. “It is on the basis of a strong nuclear strength that peace and prosperity can exist and so can the happiness of people’s lives.”

Kim’s speech, delivered to the central committee meeting of the ruling Workers Party of Korea, appeared to signal a small shift from threats against South Korea and the United States, but it was some distance from any kind of end to the crisis.

“The fact that this (speech) was made at the party central committee meeting, which is the highest policy-setting organ, indicates an attempt to highlight economic problems and shift the focus from security to the economy,” said Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

But if Pyongyang follows through with its plan to restart the nuclear facilities, it will have longer-term security implications for the region.

Reactivating the aged Soviet-era reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear plant will produce plutonium, a tested path to acquire more fissile material than a uranium enrichment program.

It was unclear how quickly the Yongbyon plant, whose cooling tower was destroyed as part of a de-nuclearization deal, would take to restart and it was impossible to verify whether it was still connected to North Korea’s antiquated electricity grid at all.

“It was a reactor that was nearing obsolescence with a cooling tower that wasn’t functioning properly when it was blown up. It could mean they’ve been rebuilding quite a few things,” said Yoo Ho-yeol, North Korea specialist at Korea University in Seoul.

ENRICHMENT

The move to restart the reactor comes as a big blow to China’s stated aim of restarting de-nuclearization talks on the Korean peninsula, prompting a foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing to express regret at the decision.

As well as restarting the 5MW reactor at Yongbyon, the North’s only known source of plutonium for its nuclear weapons program, KCNA said a uranium enrichment plant would also be put back into operation.

The nuclear plant’s output would be used to solve what KCNA termed an “acute shortage of electricity” and to bolster “the nuclear armed force”.

After being hit with U.S. sanctions for conducting the February nuclear test and what it has viewed as “hostile” military drills being staged by Seoul and Washington in the South, Pyongyang had threatened a nuclear strike on the United States, missile strikes on its Pacific bases and war with South Korea.

Washington, which has said it has not seen any evidence of hostile North Korean troop moves, deployed a warship off the Korean coast overnight.

The United States earlier bolstered forces staging joint drills with South Korea with Stealth fighters and has made bomber overflights in a rare show of strength.

Much of the rhetoric that has come from Pyongyang in recent weeks has been a repeat of previous bouts of anger, but the length and intensity has been new, leading to concerns that the tensions could spiral into clashes.

In Washington, the White House has said the United States takes North Korea’s war threats seriously. But White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Monday: “I would note that despite the harsh rhetoric we are hearing from Pyongyang, we are not seeing changes to the North Korean military posture, such as large-scale mobilizations and positioning of forces.”

A U.S. defense official said on Monday the USS McCain, an Aegis-class guided-missile destroyer used for ballistic missile defense, was positioned off the peninsula’s southwestern coast.

It was not immediately clear where the ship was on Tuesday.

In Pyongyang, the party congress meeting and a subsequent assembly of the country’s rubber-stamp parliament reiterated the usual anti-American rhetoric and criticized South Korea, but the mood appeared to have changed.

The pariah state has once again started emphasizing economic development as it shifts to the major April 15 celebration of the birth of its founder, Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of the current ruler.

For the young Kim, it appears that cementing control of the party and state had now taken top priority as well as improving living standards in a country whose economy is smaller than it was 20 years ago, according to external assessments.

Kim appointed a handful of personal confidants to the party’s politburo, further consolidating his grip on power in the second full year of his reign.

Former premier Pak Pong-ju, a key ally of the leadership dynasty, was re-appointed to the post from which he was fired in 2007 for failing to implement economic reforms.

Pak, believed to be in his 70s, is viewed as a key confidant of Jang Song-thaek, the young Kim’s uncle and also a protege of Kim’s aunt. Pak is viewed as a pawn in a power game that has seen Jang and his wife re-assert power over military leaders.

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South Korean soldiers keep watch on the north at the “Truce Village” of Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone, which separates the two Koreas, in Paju, north of Seoul February 27, 2013. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji

South Korea will strike back quickly if the North stages any attack on its territory, the new president in Seoul warned this morning, as tensions ratcheted higher on the Korean peninsula amid shrill rhetoric from Pyongyang and the U.S. deployment of radar-evading fighter planes.

North Korea says the region is on the brink of a nuclear war in the wake of United Nations sanctions imposed for its February nuclear test and a series of joint U.S. and South Korean military drills that have included a rare U.S. show of aerial power.

North Korea said on Saturday it was entering a “state of war” with South Korea in response to what it termed the “hostile” military drills being staged in the South. But there have been no signs of unusual activity in the North’s military to suggest an imminent aggression, a South Korean defense ministry official said last week.

“If there is any provocation against South Korea and its people, there should be a strong response in initial combat without any political considerations,” President Park Geun-hye told the defense minister and senior officials at a meeting on Monday.

The South has changed its rules of engagement to allow local units to respond immediately to attacks, rather than waiting for permission from Seoul.

Stung by criticism that its response to the shelling of a South Korean island in 2010 was tardy and weak, Seoul has also threatened to target North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and to destroy statues of the ruling Kim dynasty in the event of any new attack, a plan that has outraged Pyongyang.

Seoul and its ally the United States played down Saturday’s statement from the official KCNA news agency as the latest in a stream of tough talk from Pyongyang.

North Korea stepped up its rhetoric in early March, when U.S. and South Korean forces began annual military drills that involved the flights of U.S. B-2 stealth bombers in a practice run, prompting the North to puts its missile units on standby to fire at U.S. military bases in the South and in the Pacific.

The United States also deployed F-22 stealth fighter jets on Sunday to take part in the drills. The F-22s were deployed in South Korea before, in 2010.

On its part, North Korea has cancelled an armistice agreement with the United States that ended the Korean War and cut all hotlines with U.S. forces, the United Nations and South Korea.

Park’s intervention came on the heels of a meeting of the North’s ruling Workers Party Central Committee where leader Kim Jong-un rejected the notion that Pyongyang was going to use its nuclear arms development as a bargaining chip.

“The nuclear weapons of Songun Korea are not goods for getting U.S. dollars and they are … (not) to be put on the table of negotiations aimed at forcing the (North) to disarm itself,” KCNA news agency quoted him as saying.

At the meeting, Kim appointed a handful of personal confidants to the party’s politburo, further consolidating his grip on power in the second full year of his reign.

Pyongyang took part in nuclear disarmament talks for five years aimed at paying it off in return for abandoning its atomic weapons program. Those talks fell apart in 2008. Some experts say the talks gave the North grounds to pursue a highly enriched uranium program that took it closer to owning a working arsenal.

Songun is the Korean word for the “Military First” policy preached by Kim’s father who used it to justify the use of the impoverished state’s scare resources to build a 1.2-million strong army and a weapons of mass destruction program.

White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said North Korea’s announcement that it was in a state of war followed a “familiar pattern” of rhetoric.

China has repeatedly called for restraint on the peninsula.

However, many in South Korea have regarded the North’s willingness to keep open the Kaesong industrial zone, located just a few miles (km) north of the heavily-militarized border and operated jointly by both sides, as a sign that Pyongyang will not risk losing a lucrative source of foreign currency by mounting a real act of aggression.

The Kaesong zone is a vital source of hard currency for the North and hundreds of South Korean workers and vehicles enter daily after crossing the armed border. It was still open on Monday despite threats by Pyongyang to shut it down. Closure could also trap hundreds of South Korean workers and managers of the more than 100 firms that have factories there.

The North has previously suspended operations at the factory zone at the height of political tensions with the South, only to let it resume operations later.

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Pope Francis, appearing before more than 250,000 people for his first Easter Sunday address, called for world peace, respect for the environment and a diplomatic solution to the crisis on the Korean peninsula.

In his “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world) message, he also appealed for a resumption of peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, an end to the civil war in Syria and political solutions to conflicts in several African countries.

The former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina, who has made defense of nature an early hallmark of his pontificate, also condemned the “iniquitous exploitation of natural resources” and urged everyone to be “guardians” of creation.

Francis delivered his message from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica – the same spot from where he first appeared to the world as pope after his election on March 13 – to a crowd estimated by the Vatican at more than 250,000.

“Peace in Asia, above all on the Korean peninsula: may disagreements be overcome and a renewed spirit of reconciliation grow,” he said, speaking in Italian.

North Korea said on Saturday it was entering a “state of war” with South Korea. Tensions have been high since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ordered a third nuclear weapons test in February, breaching U.N. sanctions and ignoring warnings from North Korea’s sole major ally, China, not to do so.

People thronged the open jeep that carried Pope Francis around at the end of a Mass. He stopped to accept a jersey with his “Bergoglio” name on it from fans of an Argentine football club and to comfort a handicapped man.

Francis, who has brought a more simple and personal style to the papacy, said the message of Easter is that faith can help people transform their lives by letting “those desert places in our hearts bloom”.

GUARDIANS OF CREATION

“How many deserts, even today, do human beings need to cross?! Above all, the desert within, when we have no love for God or neighbor, when we fail to realize that we are guardians of all that the creator has given us and continues to give us,” he said.

Earlier, at a Mass in a square bedecked by more than 40,000 plants and flowers, he wore relatively simple white vestments, as opposed to his predecessor Benedict, who preferred elaborate robes.

The huge crowd spilled out of St. Peter’s Square and into surrounding streets. They included many who had come to see a pope counted on to rehabilitate a Church marred by scandals to do with sexual abuse of children and allegations of corruption.

“It’s a new pope and new beginning,” said Tina Hughes, 67, who came to Rome with her family from Nottingham, England to see the pope. “I think he brings something special. He connects with people. I feel good about him.”

Francis, who took his name in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, who is revered as a symbol of austerity and the importance of respecting nature, said the world was “divided by greed looking for easy gain”. He condemned human trafficking and violence linked to drug trafficking.

Easter Sunday, the day Christians believe Jesus was resurrected from the dead three days after his crucifixion, was the culmination of four hectic days of activity for the pope, during which he instituted several novelties.

On Holy Thursday, two women were included among the 12 people whose feet he washed and kissed during a traditional ceremony that had previously been open only to men.

Francis again showed on Sunday that he would carry out his papal duties his own way. The Vatican had prepared a list of brief Easter greetings for him in 65 languages – identical to those read by his predecessors – but he decided not read them, and spoke only in Italian.

Instead of moving into regal papal apartments, he is still living in the Vatican guesthouse where he stayed during the conclave that elected him as the first non-European pope in 1,300 years.

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North Korea said on Saturday it was entering a “state of war” with South Korea, its latest bout of angry rhetoric directed at Seoul and Washington, but the South brushed off the statement as little more than tough talk.

The North also threatened to shut down an industrial zone it operates jointly with the South near the heavily armed border between the two sides if Seoul continued to say the complex was being kept running for money.

The two Koreas have been technically in a state of war for six decades under a truce that ended their 1950-53 conflict. Despite its threats, few people see any indication Pyongyang will risk a near-certain defeat by re-starting full-scale war.

“From this time on, the North-South relations will be entering the state of war and all issues raised between the North and the South will be handled accordingly,” a statement carried by the North’s official KCNA news agency said.

KCNA said the statement was issued jointly by the North’s government, ruling party and other organizations.

There was no sign of unusual activity in the North’s military to suggest an imminent aggression, a South Korean defense ministry official said.

The North has been threatening to attack the South and U.S. military bases almost on a daily basis since the beginning of March, when U.S. and South Korean militaries started routine drills that have been conducted for decades without incident.

Many in the South have regarded the North’s willingness to keep open the Kaesong industrial zone, located just a few miles (km) north of the border, as a sign that Pyongyang will not risk losing a lucrative source of foreign currency by mounting a real act of aggression.

The Kaesong zone is a vital source of hard currency for the impoverished state and hundreds of South Korean workers and vehicles enter daily after crossing the armed border.

“If the puppet traitor group continues to mention the Kaesong industrial zone is being kept operating and damages our dignity, it will be mercilessly shut off and shut down,” KCNA quoted an agency that operates Kaesong as saying in a statement.

The threat to shut it down could sharply escalate tensions because it would suspend a symbolic joint project run by the rivals. It could also trap hundreds of South Korean workers and managers of the 123 firms that have factories there.

The North has previously suspended operations at the factory zone at the height of political tensions with the South, only to let it resume operations later.

The project has been kept running despite the North’s move on Wednesday to cut off a military hotline used to process the hundreds of workers and vehicles that cross the Demilitarized Zone border.

“We have been exercising extreme restraint considering the plight of medium and small companies whose livelihood depends on the Kaesong industrial project as an immediate shutdown will drive them to bankruptcy and people jobless,” KCNA quoted the agency as saying.

The South’s Unification Ministry, which handles political ties with the North, said earlier in the day that the Kaesong industrial park was operating as normal with workers and vehicles crossing the border both says.

“North Korea’s statement today (on entering a state of war) … is not a new threat but is the continuation of provocative threats,” a ministry statement said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Friday signed off on an order putting its missile units on standby to attack U.S. military bases in the South and the Pacific, after the United States flew two nuclear-capable stealth bombers over the Korean peninsula in a rare show of force.

U.S. officials said the B-2 bombers were on a diplomatic sortie aimed at reassuring allies South Korea and Japan and were also aimed at trying to nudge Pyongyang back to dialogue, although there was no guarantee Kim would get the message as intended.

The South Korean government brushed off the North’s latest statement on entering a state of war, saying there was nothing fresh in it to cause greater alarm. South Koreans went about with daily lives as they have done through March under the North’s constant threat of attack.

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Harry Potter actor Richard Griffiths has died at age 65.

Richard Griffiths, the actor who played Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter series of movies, has died aged 65.

Mr Griffiths died Thursday from complications following heart surgery, according to friends who announced the news Friday morning.

The British actor had a long and successful career in TV but was also a Tony award winner.

He featured in all of the mega-successful movie adaptions of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, lead tributes to Mr Griffiths on Friday morning.

“Richard was by my side during two of the most important moments of my career,” he said.

“In August 2000, before official production had even begun on ‘Potter,’ we filmed a shot outside the Dursleys’, which was my first ever shot as Harry. I was nervous and he made me feel at ease.

“Seven years later, we embarked on ‘Equus’ together. It was my first time doing a play but, terrified as I was, his encouragement, tutelage and humour made it a joy.

‘In fact, any room he walked into was made twice as funny and twice as clever just by his presence. I am proud to say I knew him.”

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