Thousands flee Los Alamos as wildfire advances - CBS News

Thousands flee Los Alamos as wildfire advances

(AP)

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - Thousands of residents calmly fled Monday from the mesa-top town that's home to the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, ahead of an approaching wildfire that sent up towering plumes of smoke, rained down ash and sparked a spot fire on lab property where scientists 50 years ago conducted underground tests of radioactive explosives.

Los Alamos National Laboratory officials said that the spot fire was soon contained and no contamination was released. They also assured that radioactive materials stored in various spots elsewhere on the sprawling lab were safe from flames.

The wildfire, which began Sunday, had destroyed 30 structures south and west of Los Alamos by early Monday and forced the closure of the lab while stirring memories of a devastating blaze in May 2000 that destroyed hundreds of homes and buildings.

"The hair on the back of your neck goes up," Los Alamos County fire chief Doug Tucker said of first seeing the fire in the Santa Fe National Forest on Sunday. "I saw that plume and I thought, `Oh my God here we go again."'

Tucker said the current blaze — which grew Monday to roughly 44,000 acres, or 68 square miles — was the most active fire he had seen in his career. By midafternoon, it had jumped a highway and burned an acre of land on the outskirts of the lab's 36-square mile complex.

The fire scorched a section of what is known as the Tech Area, 49, which was used in the early 1960s for a series of underground tests with high explosives and radioactive materials. Lab officials said the fire was safely extinguished.

Lab spokesman Kevin Roark said environmental specialists from the lab were mobilized and monitoring air quality on Monday, but that the main concern was smoke.

The anti-nuclear watchdog group Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, however, said the fire appeared to be about 3 1/2 miles from a dumpsite where as many as 30,000 55-gallon drums of plutonium-contaminated waste were stored in fabric tents above ground. The group said the drums were awaiting transport to a low-level radiation dump site in southern New Mexico.

Lab spokesman Steve Sandoval declined to confirm that there were any such drums currently on the property. He acknowledged that low-level waste is at times put in drums and regularly taken from the lab to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project site in Carlsbad.

Sandoval said the fire was "quite a bit away" from that storage area. But he could not say what would happen if drums containing such waste were to burn.

"Unfortunately, I cannot answer that question other than to say that the material is well protected. And the lab — knowing that it works with hazardous and nuclear materials — takes great pains to make sure it is protected and locked in concrete steel vaults. And the fire poses very little threat to them."

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., who was visiting evacuees at the Santa Claran Hotel Casino in Espanola, said "there's no doubt" the lab stores a variety of hazardous and radioactive materials that "you don't want to escape in the atmosphere." But he said he was confident lab and state environmental officials had monitoring systems in place to "evaluate exactly what we're seeing here."

Traffic on Trinity Drive, one of the main roads out of Los Alamos, was bumper-to-bumper Monday afternoon as residents followed orders to leave. Authorities said about 2,500 of the town's roughly 12,000 residents left under an earlier voluntary evacuation.

"We're just hoping for the best," Vivian Levy, a resident since the 1970s, said as she packed her car and her animals — again.

"Last time, I just walked out of my house and said goodbye, and that it was going to be OK," she said before breaking down in tears. "I'm doing the same thing this time. It's going to be OK. I'm prepared to say goodbye."

Sam Kendericks said he knew the blaze was going to be bad when he first saw the plume Sunday.

"I was going to the hardware store and I did a U-turn as soon as I saw the plume come over the mountain. I told my wife to start packing. We were here 10 years ago. We had 20 minutes last time. So this time we're ready," he said.

Thousands flee Los Alamos as wildfire advances - CBS News

Thousands flee Los Alamos as wildfire advances - CBS News

Red Dead Redemption’s First DLC Available June 22

Some of us still aren’t even finished with the single-player and haven’t even touched the multiplayer, but Rockstar is deciding to release Red Dead Redemption’s first DLC this month anyway. Both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners will be able to download and play “Outlaws to the End,” a set of six new co-op multiplayer missions, for a cool price of Free.99 on June 22.

You can also expect a patch next week for both 360 and PS3 versions next week, as many have reported problems regarding multiplayer and other glitches. Rockstar also urges players to try out other fixes that may solve their connection issues, such as setting your router to a NAT 2 connection type (for PS3 owners). Check out the second press release for more.

The DLC will come with its own set of achievements and trophies as well, in case you really like to show off. Included below are four screenshots from “Outlaws to the End”.

[Source: Rockstar Games Press Releases 1 & 2]

Sarkozy pressured over Pakistan arms deal allegations

PARIS: French opposition lawmakers on Thursday called on President Nicolas Sarkozy to give all details of any links to suspected kickbacks on arms deals that were allegedly used to fund political campaigns.

Three deputies spoke out after a police report alleged that a company set up with Sarkozy’s approval channelled money from arms deal commissions to fund political activities in France.

A news website quoted a police report as saying that Sarkozy oversaw the establishment in Luxembourg of two companies, when he was budget minister under former prime minister Edouard Balladur.

In May 2002 a bomb in Karachi killed 11 French naval engineers who were in Pakistan to build the submarines.

A French judge investigating the attack suspects it may have been carried out in revenge for the cancelled bribes. 

A Socialist deputy who headed a parliamentary commission on the Karachi attack, was quoted by Le Parisien newspaper on Thursday as saying: “the government is doing everything to obstruct the truth.”

However, a government spokesman has dismissed the allegations as “a serial fairytale” and said the government is cooperating with an investigation by a French judge. afp

Geologists baffled by what to do with giant Guatemala sinkhole

A sinkhole covers a street intersection in downtown Guatemala City on Wednesday.

Moises Castillo/AP

Scientists say filling the giant Guatemala sinkhole isn't as simple as just dumping in gravel and dirt. First, geologists have to understand the conditions that caused it.

The giant sinkhole that opened up in Guatemala City Sunday has geologists scratching their heads and observers calling for better safety controls, but the more pressing issue: What do you do with a sinkhole?

Do you fill it? Will it get bigger? What caused it?

With smaller sinkholes often found in yards after rains, or as the result of digging, experts recommend dropping a concrete slab, gravel, or other solid material to the bottom of the hole, filling with clay-like soil, and finishing with topsoil. The material will usually settle, and it may be necessary to add more soil over time.

IN PICTURES: Guatemalan sinkhole

"You need to have some sort of mechanical structural support at the base of your fill material," says Jim Currens, an expert on sinkholes, caves, and springs with the Kentuck Geological Survey.

But Guatemala's sinkhole is on an exploded scale, and the geological makeup of the region makes predicting the cause and any effective remedies difficult.

The country has some experience with large sinkholes, as it turns out. In 2007, a 330-foot-deep sinkhole opened up in Barrio San Antonio, just 15 blocks away from the current one in Ciudad Nueva. That sinkhole is thought to have been caused by a broken storm drain pipe that over time weakened and washed away the ground above it.

The burst water pipe theory makes sense to Mr. Currens. "Any conduit carrying water is always an exasperative or causative factor," he says.

Some believe the two Guatemala City sinkholes are linked to government neglect of the area, and are calling for better accountability so that something like this doesn't happen again with worse results. “If there have now been two holes that have appeared along the same line, chances are there could be a third one developing elsewhere,” said Luis Figueroa, a journalist living in Guatemala.

But geological experts are cautious about assigning blame. Looking at photos of the most recent Guatemala sinkhole, it's clear that there were preexisting conditions – an underground cavity that may have been present for generations, says Mark Kasmarek, a groundwater hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS). "Once the roof of that cave becomes compromised through time, it can no longer support what's on top of it," he says.

Simply filling the hole won't help, says Mr. Kasmarek, without first studying the geological makeup of the surrounding area to determine the underlying factors that caused the collapse.

Shape-shifting islands defy sea-level rise

 

Not drowning but growing? (Image: George Steinmetz/Corbis)

by Wendy Zukerman

AGAINST all the odds, a number of shape-shifting islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean are standing up to the effects of climate change.

For years, people have warned that the smallest nations on the planet - island states that barely rise out of the ocean - face being wiped off the map by rising sea levels. Now the first analysis of the data broadly suggests the opposite: most have remained stable over the last 60 years, while some have even grown.

Paul Kench at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and Arthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji used historical aerial photos and high-resolution satellite images to study changes in the land surface of 27 Pacific islands over the last 60 years. During that time, local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres, or 2 millimetres per year on average.

Despite this, Kench and Webb found that just four islands have diminished in size since the 1950s. The area of the remaining 23 has either stayed the same or grown (Global and Planetary Change, DOI: 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2010.05.003).

Webb says the trend is explained by the islands' composition. Unlike the sandbars of the eastern US coast, low-lying Pacific islands are made of coral debris. This is eroded from the reefs that typically circle the islands and pushed up onto the islands by winds, waves and currents. Because the corals are alive, they provide a continuous supply of material. "Atolls are composed of once-living material," says Webb, "so you have a continual growth." Causeways and other structures linking islands can boost growth by trapping sediment that would otherwise get lost to the ocean.

All this means the islands respond to changing weather and climate. For instance, when hurricane Bebe hit Tuvalu in 1972 it deposited 140 hectares of sedimentary debris onto the eastern reef, increasing the area of the main island by 10 per cent.

Kench says that while the 27 islands in his study are just a small portion of the thousands of low-lying Pacific islands, it shows that they are naturally resilient to rising sea levels. "It has been thought that as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown," he says. "But they won't. The sea level will go up and the island will start responding."

John Hunter, an oceanographer at the University of Tasmania in Australia, says the study is solid, and good news for those preparing evacuations. The shifting shape of the islands presents a challenge, however. Even on islands where the total land mass is stable or grows, one area may be eroded while another is being added to. It's not possible to simply move people living in highly urbanised areas to new land, says Naomi Biribo of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia.

Webb and Kench warn that while the islands are coping for now, any acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise could overtake the sediment build up. Calculating how fast sea levels will rise over the coming decades is uncertain science, and no one knows how fast the islands can grow.

Barry Brook, a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide in Australia and a supporter of the 350 campaign - which calls for the most stringent global emissions targets in the hope of saving low-lying states from sea-level rise - points out that sea-level rise is already accelerating. But, while he was initially surprised by the findings, he agrees with Webb and Kench's analysis. "It does suggest that islands have been able to adapt to sea-level rises," he says. And Biribo, who lives on the Pacific island of Kiribati, says: "It gives me that sense that we can still live on this island."

Good news, but the warnings stand

At its highest point, Tuvalu stands just 4.5 metres out of the Pacific. It is widely predicted to be one of the first islands to drown in the rising seas caused by global warming. Yet Arthur Webb and Paul Kench found that seven islands in one of its nine atolls have spread by more than 3 per cent on average since the 1950s. One island, Funamanu, gained 0.44 hectares, or nearly 30 per cent of its previous area.

Similar trends were observed in the neighbouring Republic of Kiribati. The three major urbanised islands in the republic - Betio, Bairiki and Nanikai - increased by 30 per cent (36 hectares), 16.3 per cent (5.8 hectares) and 12.5 per cent (0.8 hectares), respectively.

Yet warnings about rising sea levels must still be taken seriously. Earlier this year, people living on the low-lying Carteret Islands, part of Papua New Guinea, had to relocate. Kench says anecdotal reports that the islands have been submerged are "incorrect", saying that instead erosion has changed the shape of the islands, forcing people to move.

When Israel Goes Rogue

Bernat Armangue / AP

The “ever sanctimonius” Israeli politician Shimon Peres is revealed, in Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s new book, to have criticized apartheid while making defense pacts with Pretoria’s white government.

The flotilla debacle left Israel more isolated than at any time since 1973. The last time this happened, its leaders gravitated to another pariah—the apartheid South African government.

It might be worth bearing in mind these days, as the international community launches yet another investigation against alleged Israeli war crimes, that in times of political isolation, Israel has occasionally resorted to desperate, even reckless measures. That’s one of the themes explored in The Unspoken Alliance (Pantheon), a hugely impressive book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, who probes in groundbreaking detail the illicit relationship Israel maintained with South Africa throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and concludes that military ties and nuclear cooperation ran much deeper than previously known.

In the background lurks Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur war. In the 1950s and ’60s, Polakow-Suransky reminds us, Israel didn’t just rely on special ties with Western countries like France (the intimate bond with the U.S. would evolve later); it also maintained relationships with many of Africa’s newly independent countries, having in common the shared experience of throwing out their colonial masters. Though it’s hard to imagine these days, for the first two decades of its existence Israel was largely embraced by the international left, including anti-imperialist movements and black American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. On the question of apartheid, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and other members of the founding generation did not equivocate. “A Jew can’t be for discrimination,” Ben-Gurion said on one occasion, after Israel supported a 1961 U.N. vote denouncing the white-only government in Pretoria.

The shift began in 1967, with the start of Israel’s long and destructive rule over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But it was really the 1973 war that left Israelis feeling alone and vulnerable. Though a coalition of Arab countries had launched the campaign to retake territory lost in the 1967 Six-Day War, surprising Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, more than 20 countries severed ties with Israel when it was over, including most of sub-Saharan Africa. The United States had rallied to Israel’s side with airlifts and economic aid. But in the aftermath of the war, Washington decided to rethink the special relationship between the two countries over Israel’s refusal to sign an armistice with Egypt. The Arab oil embargo, blamed on Israel, heightened the feeling of besiegement, as did the 1975 U.N. resolution equating Zionism with racism. Financially, Israel was struggling to bear the cost of the war, which equaled the country’s gross national product over a full year.

It’s in this context that Israel’s ties with South Africa, which Polakow-Suransky describes as a “shared bond of minority survivalism,” burgeoned and bloomed. Over the next 20 years, Israel would supply the apartheid regime billions in defense gear and help develop its nuclear program and train its military in, among other things, intelligence gathering and riot control. In return, South Africa would provide Israel much-craved funds and friendship. Throughout, the two countries would keep the relationship largely secret, defying an international embargo and even Israel’s own law against new deals with South Africa. “To the Israeli defense ministry, South Africa seemed the ideal customer: a developing country with a defense-conscious, right-wing government that did not have close ties to the Arab-Muslim bloc,” writes Polakow-Suransky. “It was a perfect match.”

The book is much more than a knee-jerk indictment of the relationship between the two countries—one a full-fledged pariah, the other an occasional outcast. Polakow-Suransky, an editor at Foreign Affairs and an American Jew whose parents emigrated to the United States from South Africa, managed to unearth thousands of pages of documents in Pretoria, where the government today has no vested interest in keeping the secrets of apartheid locked up. Among other things, he deduces from the documents that the total military trade between the two countries was at least 10 times higher than most estimates, reaching about $10 billion over two decades. Polakow-Suransky provides details of a secret security pact signed by then–Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and then–South African defense minister P. W. Botha; discloses an Israeli offer to sell Pretoria nuclear missiles (which Botha eventually turned down); and describes what could only have been an Israeli nuclear test in cooperation with South Africa.

But the most interesting sections are the ones in which Israeli actions and motives are carefully and compellingly elucidated: the way Ben-Gurion’s principled stand against apartheid gives way to the realist politics of Peres and Yitzhak Rabin; the effect of Likud’s rise in 1977, helping transform the relationship with South Africa from an alliance of convenience to a true kinship; the manner in which Israelis rationalized their embrace of political figures who not only subjugated blacks but had historical ties to Nazi Germany; the case made by younger pols like Yossi Beilin for breaking ties with South Africa, not so much on ideological grounds (which they knew would not get a hearing), but on the practical argument that the relationship was harming Israel’s stature in the world. Though there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around, Polakow-Suransky singles out “the ever sanctimonious” Peres. As foreign minister and later prime minister, Peres regularly denounced apartheid even as he led Israel deeper and deeper into Pretoria’s embrace. In a 1975 memo to South African officials quoted in the book, Peres describes the relationship between the two countries as underpinned by, among other things, the “unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and our refusal to submit to it.”

Is there a lesson in the book that can help peace-seekers formulate a constructive policy toward Israel today? Polakow-Suransky spends his epilogue examining the accusation that Israeli measures against Palestinians amount to apartheid. He concludes there are both similarities and differences (among them the way in which black servitude allowed “a minority white population to live in ostentatious luxury with swimming pools, servants and gardeners amid millions of blacks in abject poverty”). But he also argues that the longer Israel’s occupation of the West Bank lasts, the fuzzier the differences become. A sound approach, no doubt, would be to prod Israel to dismantle Jewish settlements in the West Bank and allow the creation of a Palestinian state while avoiding a campaign of isolation. In the 1970s, that kind of campaign helped push Israel into a reckless alliance with a rogue regime. In our time, with Israel worried about a nuclear Iran, the consequences could be far worse.