News headlines in March 2011, page 26

Anti-nuclear campaigners in India see the earthquake that hit Japan last week, which threatens the meltdown of the Fukushima atomic power facility there, as a wakeup call for this country’s ambitious nuclear power programme.

A Saudi military force of about 1,000 troops has entered Bahrain to help protect government facilities there, according to witnesses and reports citing Saudi sources.

Caribbean officials gathered in Brussels for the region's annual tourism summit, the first to be held in Europe, are urging their biggest development partner to draft policies supporting the lifeblood sector and ease restrictions such as Britain's Air Passenger Duty (APD), which they say are holding back its growth.

A second explosion has rocked Japan's stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex, sending a plume of smoke into the air and touching off fresh concerns of a radioactive leak in the quake and tsunami-hit country.

Abdul Ilah al-Khatib, appointed Monday as the Secretary General’s special envoy to Libya, will focus on humanitarian concerns and ending the violence against and suffering of civilians in Libya when he travels there this week.

Central America's security problems will be front and centre at a summit meeting between United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and leaders of seven countries, to be held Mar. 16 in the Guatemalan capital. Ban is set to arrive in Guatemala Mar. 15 and stay until Mar. 17. During his visit he will also sign an agreement for a two-year extension of the work of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), created in 2006 and due to conclude its mandate in September.

The Kenyatta International Conference Centre resembled one big nursery with parents and their crying babies. One wondered whether it was tears of pain or joy. Hundreds of parents with their infants thronged the Centre where they received their first shot against pneumonia, and not even their tears as the shot broke through their skin could dampen the smiling faces of their mothers.

The red, green and black flag-waving Libyans calling for the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi are staging a show of force in Benghazi. The support for the three-week-old revolution comes at the rebels' lowest military moment.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi claims Al-Qaeda and other Muslim extremists are behind the recent rebellion to oust him from power. Salem Geber, the most well-known cleric in Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city, says this explanation is not only wrong, but a vintage Gaddafi tactic to inspire fear.

The momentous political events in North Africa have been accompanied by increasingly apocalyptic warnings from the Italian government of a mass influx of unwanted immigration from Tunisia and Libya.