By now it is useless to look for survivors only victims

“By now it is useless to look for survivors, only victims.” He said that some of the people were so badly charred by the fire that they could not be recognised.The national news agency Belga said earlier that a motorway near the Flemish town of Courtrai in northwest Belgium was closed because of fears that a bomb had been placed in a Royal Dutch/Shell petrol station in protest against the planned dumping of the Brent Spar in the Atlantic A bomb warning later proved to be false.. ANDREW GUMBEL

Rome
Anyone used to the wearisome business of air travel in Italy will not be surprised to learn that Alitalia pilots have been staging a wildcat strike in the past few days, creating chaos at airports up and down the country.What may be more of a surprise is that the Italian government chose to take spectacular and unprecedented action this weekend to force them back to work and that the whole country cheered as it did so.The Ministers for Transport and Labour, Giovanni Caravale and Tiziano Treu, invoked a special law to end strikes that affect public services, declaring a ban on industrial action for a week.At the same time, judicial authorities opened investigations on 340 pilots to challenge their story that they all fell ill with headaches at the same time – and sent doctors to check their medical condition. Tax inspectors also began checking pilots’ records for irregularities.The most severe response to a transport strike in the West since Ronald Reagan fired air traffic controllers in 1981 was effective, and by yesterday, Italy’s airports were functioning normally.What was remarkable was the public response in this most union-conscious of countries. Even left-wing newspapers accused the pilots of “sedition” and of damaging Italy’s image abroad, as they did not follow strike procedure and announce their action 10 days in advance.The pilots’ side of the story was barely told at all: that they are working harder and harder, sometimes with unfamiliar crews and cabin staff sub- contracted from an Australian company, as part of a restructuring package.. Madrid – Colonel Juan Alberto Perote, the former chief of the most clandestine section of the Spanish intelligence service, Cesid, was taken into preventive detention yesterday accused in connection with leaking illegally taped telephone conversations, including those of the King, writes Liz Nash.

The newspaper El Pais reported yesterday that Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister, Narcis Serra, who was defence minister when the buggings took place, offered his resignation last Tuesday when the story broke, but that the Prime Minister, Felipe Gonzalez, had asked him to remain until an investigation into the affair was concluded.. If I had known how to steal a car, I would have been sorely tempted yesterday. In blazing sunshine and almost 30C heat, I found myself facing the same dilemma that confronts hundreds of young French people every weekend – how to get out of Vitrolles. The city of almost 36,000 people looks on the map as though it ought to be the focal point of every route out of Marseilles, but it turns out to be universally by-passed. Eventually I found a minicab and was able to pay my way out Most young Vitrollois can’t.

Ask any one of the dozens of young men standing around in the sunshine. They feel neglected – and stuck.
One-third of the way between Marseilles and Avignon, with neither the bustle and opportunity of the former nor the dignity and elegance of the latter, Vitrolles is an almost completely new city – a cross between Harlow in Essex and a lesser Los Angeles. Built as a series of landscaped estates, with a complex of central squares and a shopping precinct in the middle, it was supposed to be people-friendly.In practice, the A7 motorway cuts Vitrolles in two. It is too extended to walk around, and there is nowhere particular to walk to. It was built to accommodate workers serving the vast new industrial complexes that spilt out of northern Marseilles. But then the local (Socialist) authorities upped employers’ taxes, and the factories and warehouses started closing down.There are some smart Provencal villas near the remnants of the old village Most of the inhabitants, though, live in council flats. They are predominantly young: many are the children of immigrant parents, and they have nothing much to do.Last week, 43 per cent of Vitrolles’ electors who bothered to turn out voted for the extreme right National Front candidate, Bruno Magret, to be their next mayor.

The result shocked France, and yesterday all the main national television stations were in Vitrolles, preparing for the eventuality it would become the first 30,000-plus city to elect a National Front mayor.There were no shortage of people to explain the situation “Ask any of us, the French,” went a typical comment. “There’s too many of them, the North Africans, the Arabs, and they have a different idea of the law.” All the talk among the elderly French people in the cafe at lunch-time was of crime and drugs and how nothing was being done about it.Mr Magret, it has to be said, is not your average National Front thug. His academic qualifications rival those of France’s mainstream politicians. He is articulate and presentable, and would make a plausible candidate for any party.

Given the plight of Vitrolles, you can understand its voters thinking he might do a better job of representing their cause than others in the field, including the outgoing Socialist, Jean-Jacques Anglade.Equally understandably, the “foreigners” – many of whom are French citizens by birth – are worried. In one of the squares yesterday, with the town hall behind them and a steady trickle of people going in to vote, clusters of young men, mostly black and brown, stood watching the market pack up. Police vans cruised the estates; there were more police on motorbikes. And as I left in the late afternoon, a dozen busloads of riot police were coming off the motorway Just in case.. It was surely coincidence, nothing more. Shortly before President Jacques Chirac announced France intended to conduct a new series of underground nuclear tests – the first since 1992 – Dominique Prieur published her account of one of France’s least glorious hours: the sinking of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in Auckland harbour, New Zealand. A Greenpeace photographer was killed in the operation, two French secret agents were captured and the affair caused a huge scandal in France that cost two senior officials their jobs.
Dominique Prieur? Ten years ago next month Ms Prieur, then 29 and France’s first woman secret agent, arrived in New Zealand from Corsica as Sophie Turenge, with her designated partner, Alain Mafart, otherwise known as Alain Turenge.