UN members decry Israeli raid on Gaza aid flotilla

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My comment:

Yesterday, Israel has conducted a raid over a flotilla of ships carrying aid to Gaza. It is said that 9 activists and 7 soldiers has been killed but some NGO say there could be at least 15 activists dead.
It is not the first time that Israel is trying to prevent a flotilla from reaching Gaza strip, but several elements have provoked an international reaction. First, the flotilla was carrying about 10 000 tonnes of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Among the 700 pro-palestinian activists there were the Nobel Price 1976 Mairead Corrigan Maguire and serverals european representants. Second, the attack violated the law since it occured in international waters. And last, the attack was lead with great violence since at least 9 pro-palestian activists are dead.
Therefore, since yesterday, the crisis has begun. The UN have set an emergency meeting yesterday night and condemned the attack, the Arabian league will have a meeting today and many countries have called their Israelian ambassador in order to have more explanations.
I think this attack is really threatening the image of Israel over the world. For the moment, the country has set up an information blackout so it is very difficult to have more information. They said the activits have whith weapons and their goal was probably more a terrorist attempt to introduce weapons in Gaza than an emergency aid. We can be sure that there will be an international inquiry in order to discover the truth over this attack and take some measures.

US urges action to contain 'precarious' Korea situation

The US secretary of state says her country is working hard to avoid an escalation after a report blamed North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean warship.

After talks in China, Hillary Clinton urged countries in the region to contain "the highly precarious situation created by North Korea".

Earlier, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak froze trade with Pyongyang, vowing to punish those who carried out the attack, which killed 46 sailors.

North Korea says it will retaliate.

The country's main newspaper called the investigation an "intolerable, grave provocation".

President Lee addressed the nation on television to announce Seoul would no longer tolerate "any provocative act by the North and will maintain a principle of proactive deterrence".

The US administration endorsed the move.

"US support for South Korea's defence is unequivocal, and the president has directed his military commanders to co-ordinate closely with their Republic of Korea counterparts to ensure readiness and to deter future aggression," a White House statement said.

South Korea says it will refer the North to the UN Security Council in response to the sinking of the Cheonan in March.

China - North Korea's closest trading partner and a permanent member of the Security Council - has urged "calm and restraint". Japan said it was contemplating its own sanctions on Pyongyang.

The North depends on South Korea and China for up to 80% of its trade and 35% of its GDP. In 2009, inter-Korean trade stood at $1.68bn (£1.11bn) - 13% of the North's GDP.
Resolute?

The measures announced by South Korea included:

* Stopping inter-Korean trade
* Banning North Korean ships from using South Korean waterways or shortcuts
* Resuming "psychological warfare"
* Referring the case to the UN


The BBC's John Sudworth in Seoul says the measures are about as tough a response as the South could take, short of military action.

But South Korean Unification Minister Hyun In-taek said Seoul would still maintain the joint economic project in Kaesong, even though it would "respond with resolute measures" to possible attempts by the North to undermine the safety of its workers.

The measures came less than a week after experts from the US, the UK, Australia and Sweden said in a report that a torpedo had hit the Cheonan.

They reported that parts of the torpedo retrieved from the sea floor had lettering that matched a North Korean design.

North Korea denies any involvement in the sinking, calling the investigation results a "fabrication" and threatening war if sanctions are imposed.

The South's new measures included resuming "psychological warfare" against North Korea, which was stopped in 2004. The resumption prompted an angry response from Pyongyang.

"If [South Korea] sets up new tools for psychological warfare such as loudspeakers and leaves slogans for psychological warfare intact, ignoring our demands, we will directly aim and open fire to destroy them," a statement by the military said on Monday.

"More powerful physical strikes will be taken to eradicate the root of provocation if [South Korea] challenges to our fair response," said a commander, according to official news agency KCNA.

Last week, we have learnt the terrible conclusion of the international inquiry on the Cheonan sinking : there is no more doubts, it was caused by a North Korea torpedo. Therefore, the tension in the region is at its highest point. South Korea has stopped to trade with North-Korea and reestablished psychological warfare(which was stopped in 2004). The situation is really precarious and so far was the idea of a third world war, we now have the impression that it is not only a bad dream.

South Korea have received the support from the western countries but China is still hesitating.And, China's opinion is crucial since it is a permanent member of the United Nations. No sanction could be decided by the UN without China's consent. The United States is now trying to both convince China and maintain peace int he region. The only thing China's government has said is that they have "doubts" about the conclusion of the inquiry. Will China support a whim of North Korea and avoid sanctions on that country? In this case, what will happen if South Korea sink a North Korean warship in its water zone? That means North Korea will attack, and then will SOuth Korea and the United States accept that?

In my opinion, it is not so sure that China will accept to support North Korea. North Korea is just a satellite country and China is in a strong position. I think China will negociate very hard with the US to take advantage of the situation. Besides this geopolitical toughts, we cannot forget the human tragedy in North Korea. Indeed, North Korea rely on the South Korean for trading and the embargo could worsen the critical economic situation and brings more starving.

US says BP move to curb oil leak 'no solution'

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The success of a move by oil giant BP to curb a leak in the Gulf of Mexico is "not clear" and the technique provides "no solution", the US has said.

It was responding to BP's move to siphon oil from the leaking well head to a tanker on the surface.

A government statement said it would not rest until the leak was permanently sealed and the spill cleaned up.

BP executive Kent Wells earlier said that the siphoning process was "working extremely well".

This was the third attempt it had made to insert a long narrow tube into the leaking pipe, using underwater robots.

It is thought that BP's 6in-wide (15cm) tube and stopper could capture more than three-quarters of the leak, although a smaller spill nearby also has to be contained.

Mr Wells said on Sunday at the firm's US headquarters in Houston, Texas, that over the next few days the company planned to slowly increase the amount of oil and gas flowing through the pipe to the tanker.

Commitments

But a joint statement by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said the latest technique was "not a solution to the problem and it is not yet clear how successful it may be".

It added: "We will not rest until BP permanently seals the well head, the spill is cleaned up, and the communities and natural resources of the Gulf Coast are restored and made whole."

It was the second strong statement to BP by the government officials on the current crisis.

Earlier they sent a letter saying they wanted to be sure BP would honour commitments not to limit costs to a US statutory cap of $75m (£50m).

BP responded by saying it had already made clear its position on paying damages for the disaster.

It said last week the cap was irrelevant and it would settle all legitimate damages claims.

"What they are requesting in the letter is absolutely consistent with all our public statements on the matter," said BP spokesman David Nicholas on Sunday.

Lurking slicks

Earlier, scientists said they had found vast underwater plumes of oil, one 10 miles (16km) long and a mile wide.

Graphic

Researchers from the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology said they had detected the slicks lurking just beneath the surface of the sea and at depths of 4,000ft (1,200m).

Samantha Joye, a marine science professor at the University of Georgia, said: "It could take years, possibly decades, for the system to recover from an infusion of this quantity of oil and gas.

"We've never seen anything like this before. It's impossible to fathom the impact."

Chemical dispersants BP has been dumping underwater may be preventing the oil from rising to the top of the ocean, the scientists said.

The find suggests the scale of the potential environmental disaster is much worse than previously feared since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up on 20 April, killing 11 workers.

Some scientists cast doubt on BP's estimate of the oil flow rate, saying the widely repeated figure of 5,000 barrels per day dramatically understates the real amount.

A week ago, BP tried to cap the well with a 100-tonne box, but gave up after it became encrusted with ice crystals.

Mississippi has become the third US state to have traces of oil wash up on its coast, along with Louisiana and Alabama.

The spill is threatening to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez leak off Alaska as America's worst environmental disaster.

When the oil rig blew up on the 20th of April, killing 11 people, it was only the begining of what may be the worst oil disaster.
The consequences of the disaster cannot be assessed yet but they will affect three main fields.
Firstly, the wildlife offshore will suffer the most. Even if this life is not visible for us, the consequences on the ecosystem could be irreversible. Moreover, the use by BP of dispersal agent, in order to "hide the disaster" and avoid the oil to reach the cost could worsen the situation. Indeed, the dispersal agent is even more toxic than oil!
Secondly, as every oil slick, the oil will damage coastal areas and various birds and marine mammals along the Louisiana coast are threatened.
Lastly, the oil slick could affect a part of the economy of Louisiana: fishermen and the shrimpers.

Most worring fact is that we don't know when the leak could be fixed. In order to solve these problems, cooperation is crucial. However, there is a huge conflict of interest between BP (the oil company) and the government of the United States. In the fields, we have the impression that BP has taken over the control of the situation. Control on the communication, on the authorization to go to damaged areas...And Rick Steiner, a well-know scientist on oil slick (the author of a book on oil slick for the United nations) has not even been invited to dicuss the situation. According to him, we are facing the "Tchernobyl of the oil industry".
I think, the United States should created a sort of Petroleum safety Authority, like in Norway or Australia, in order to avoid these conflict of interest and to deal these kind of disasters. In addition to that, the safety and the location of oil rig offshore could be questionned. Nowadays, Arctic become a promised territory for petroleum production (could contain 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil) but it is also among the most fragile environments on Earth. If there is an accident it could be worse than a disaster.

Sweet to tweet Twitter makes politicians seem more accessible. To matter, it needs to change their behaviour

SINCE feudal days, subjects have hoped that petitioning the sovereign can have great effects. E-mail made writing to politicians easy. Now a new technology is making those missives public. Twitter messages (“tweets” in the jargon) are like public telegrams. No more than 140 characters in length, they can be sent from any computer or mobile phone. Anyone with an account (there are 100m and rising) can send a public message to anyone else by placing the @ sign before a username or a # sign before a topic.

That makes it much easier for voters to reach politicians and for politicians to react to them (or at least to pretend to). It helps election organisers too. At its height Barack Obama’s campaign (@barackobama) employed 100 staff working on social media such as Twitter. But now it is catching on elsewhere. In July just four of the world’s top 20 cities for Twitter use were outside America, according to HubSpot, a marketing firm. By January it had grown to eight.

Sebastián Piñera, the newly elected president of Chile, has asked all cabinet members to start tweeting. His own account is now the most-followed in the country. Venezuala’s Hugo Chávez tweets too (@chavezcandanga). In June only three Japanese politicians had accounts; now Politter, a site dedicated to Twitter and Japanese politics, lists 485. An analysis of last year’s German elections by the University of St Gallen discovered that 577 politicians had opened Twitter accounts, three-quarters of them in 2009. Greece’s prime minister George Papandreou uses Twitter. But @primeministergr is the office, not the man. His staff tweet for him, sometimes using a code to signal who wrote what.

Twitter, says Mr Piñera’s spokeswoman, Ena von Baer, means assessing reactions to announcements before presenting them in a press conference. But the scale of response makes it hard for office-holders to tweet themselves. Mr Obama reads just a select ten of the messages (20,000 of all kinds) he receives daily. During the presidential election campaign, Ms von Baer answered every message to @enavonbaer herself, but now her staff respond, or pass questions on to other ministries.

Twitter works well for extrovert and conscientious individual politicians. Denis Coderre (@deniscoderre) started using it for relief and rescue messages after the Haitian earthquake in January (his electoral district in Montreal has a big Haitian population). He writes social messages, such as commentaries on ice-hockey matches (he was a sportscaster before he became a politician). A second category is service messages for his constituents. A third is purely political. To benefit, a politician must do all of them himself, he says. But few match his talent or output. Twitter may feel personal but it is all too public. The risk is asymmetric. An ill-judged tweet can do severe, instant damage. Kerry McCarthy, a Labour candidate in Britain’s election, revealed early postal-vote counts in a tweet that ended “#gameON!”. That may have seriously breached electoral law.

As well as boosting the profile of individual politicians, Twitter may be better designed for campaigning and opposition than for governing. “We’ll change Washington” is easy to fit into 140 characters. Explaining the messy and inevitable compromises of power is a lot harder. In January of this year a study by Fleishman Hillard, a Washington PR firm, discovered that Republicans in the House twittered more than five times as often as Democrats. Ms von Baer says that the Chilean opposition uses Twitter to make up for its poor coverage in the mainstream media.
Not really real life

The days when tweets involved a sweaty-thumbed real-life politician giving candid thoughts on the day’s events may be passing. Risk-averse politicians are likely to make their tweets bland, and bland tweeters may be less likely to be followed. Once politicians understand that everything is public, they are much less likely to offer the unadorned truth, at least to ordinary voters. William Hague, a top Tory politician, amused his followers by responding to a tweeted inquiry about the menu at a recent fast-food supper (Chicken Royale and a Fanta)—but his interrogator was not just anyone, but Bryony Gordon, a hotshot columnist for a national daily. Few subjects will ever come truly close to their sovereigns. But the impression of doing so remains tantalising.



Recently has appeared a new way to communicate on the Internet: the concept of Twitter. This is simple, you can send a message to people with no more than 140 characters. In addition to its general sucess among the Internet users, Twitter has been quickly adopted by the politicians. Indeed, it is a very rapid and simple way to make little annoucements, to express opinion or to respond to others. We know Obama skills to communicate and the important role if it in his election campaign, but we may not imagine that many politicians around the world are using Twitter. Besides the South American politicians given in the article, we can also add for instance ex-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
A politician, by sending Twit and responding to it, seems closer to the common people. Thus, we can imagine him behind is computer, exactly like us. Moreover, we don’t need to write a formal letter or a well written e-mail to be understood, with a twit, we can go straight to the point. Therefore, we could have the impression Twitter is trying to fill the gap between the elistist world of politic and the common internet user. However, appearances can be deceiving. Behind a simple twit, there are often many employed in communication. For example, Obama has around 100 employers to deal with his twits. It is not surprising but still disppointing to understand that Twitter is just one part of the communication instrument.
In addition to that, with a Twit, a politician can broadcast an infomration without the need of the mass media. It is thus very useful to say something more informal that could not be one the media. Sometimes it can sucess to create a buzz: an amazing sentence on Twiter is thereafter relayed by the media. Therefore, Twitter can be a way for the politicians to draw the attention and it is particularly usefull for the opposition or during campaigns.
However, like every communication tool, Twitter, if it is mismanaged, it can hurt your reputation instead of help it, by creating scandals. Indeed, the opposite party can, every time and just with a phone, ruin your reputation by reaveling secrets. Moreover, with the increasing of the Twits by politicians, for telling that or that things, citizen could just be exahausted and the feeling of being close to the politician could be weakened by saturation.

China opens World Expo 2010 in Shanghai

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The 2010 World Expo has opened in the city of Shanghai in what China hopes will be further proof of its rising global influence.

Almost 250 countries and international organisations are showcasing their culture in an event themed around sustainable development.

Many are doing so in pavilions with radical architecture.

World leaders, including France's President Sarkozy, are attending the lavish opening ceremony.

"Expo 2010 Shanghai is now open!" Chinese President Hu Jintao declared during the gala opening, in which 2,300 performers and musicians from all over the world took part.

They were celebrating the Expo slogan: "Better city, better life in music and dance".

Tens of thousands of fireworks and lasers then lit up the city's riverfront - in what organisers promised would be the biggest-ever multimedia event, the BBC's Chris Hogg in Shanghai says.

Some 70 million visitors - mostly Chinese - are expected to visit the Expo, which will be open for the next six months.

Chinese local media report that the cost of staging the event could be as much as $58bn (£38bn) - more than was spent on the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Some estimates say this figure could eventually be even higher.

Shanghai has increased security measures drastically in preparation for the event.

An additional 8,000 police officers have been brought in to help Shanghai's 46,000-strong police force to patrol the city, Chinese state media says.

'Oppressive' security

Residents living near the Expo site have complained about oppressive security measures.

"It's just not convenient to get in and out any more," Dong, a local resident, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

Markets have been closed down to build Expo car parks, he added.

Six people who protested about having their homes destroyed to make room for the Expo have been sent to labour camps, the Hong-Kong based Chinese Human Rights Defenders were quoted as saying by AP.

Last week police seized four computers belonging to activist Feng Zhenghu, who had been trying to set up an alternative online Expo, highlighting alleged miscarriages of justice, our correspondent says.

The Expo is seen as an opportunity for countries to try to win favour with the Chinese, he adds.

Speaking at a press conference in Beijing on Thursday, President Sarkozy - whose relationship with China has been testy after he criticized a Chinese security crackdown in Tibet in 2008 - said France and China would "think and work together".


After the Beijing Olympic games, China can demonstrate again to the world its power and influence. We could have the impression that, according to China, world's recognition has no price. Indeed, even if it is the first Expo in a developping country, it is also the most expensive and exuberant one. 70 million visitors expected, 192 countries and 50 organisations on show, 20,000 cultural performances. Moreover, the place of the Expo is twice the size of Monaco. China says it will eventually cost is $4.2bn but others say costs could reach $58bn. On the other side, different countries (especially the French president) are expecting, from this exhibition, a chance to increase their relationship with this new economic giant called China.

It is quite a paradox that one of the most polluting country in the world hold an exhibition of which main theme is sustainable developement : "better city, better life". In order to make up with that and save face, Chinese authorities have only removed factories in Shanghai, from the city center to surburb areas. However, the location of the exhibition in China is also relevant since this country has many "millionaire" towns (more than one million inhabitants) and would have to solve seriously, one day or another, the problems linked to urban life, pollution and "harmonious" relashionship with nature.