The system's first battery was positioned on the northern outskirts of Beer Sheva, a desert city hit by three Grad-type rockets fired by Gaza militants last week. A second battery is slated to be deployed later this week near the coastal city of Ashkelon.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Friday ordered the deployment of Iron Dome in the face of growing public pressure, saying the decision was approved "as a preliminary trial." buy Reebok EasyTone
Development of Iron Dome, which tracks and blows up projectiles in mid-air, began in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, during which an estimated 4,000 Katyusha rockets and mortars showered northern Israel.
The system, which intercepts rockets at ranges of 5 to 70 km, was developed in record-time: about three years from the drawing board to Sunday's deployment. A battery includes three launchers with 20 missiles each.buy Reebok ZigTech
In November last year, it succeeded in destroying a salvo of three Grad and two Qassam rockets in one of numerous field trials.
Once this road was thronged with traffic: nike running shoes an expressway, one of the arteries of a nation's economic life, as familiar and modern a sight as you would find anywhere in Japan. The only barriers on the route to Fukushima Daiichi were the other people heading in the same direction.
Today the journey is different. It is a journey to the heart of a catastrophe. About 10 kilometres beyond the half-deserted city of Iwaki, the coastal road is blocked not by commuters but by landslides; the satellite navigation system that might once have flashed up traffic jams shows clusters of red circles that denote barred roads. And when we reach the inland expressway itself, the only vehicles disturbing the silence are the rumbling military trucks of Japan's Self Defence Force. Twenty kilometres out from the nuclear plant, abandoned road blocks mutely signal our entry into the nuclear exclusion zone.
It is a scene of devastation. Underneath us the road cuts across rice fields strewn with cars, their wreckages seemingly tossed by the hand of an angry child: in one paddy an upturned Nissan Micra; in another a Toyota people carrier filled to its sunroof with mud. The second storey of a nearby house perches on a single pillar, like a boxy flamingo. The ground floor has been erased, splinters of wood pointing the way the wall of water had gone.
And yet after two weeks of minutely documented destruction, these scenes seem more familiar than eerie. The empty streets on the hillside of nearby Kumamachi, which escaped the tsunami, attest to a different kind of fear. Outside its abandoned houses a gentler tremor has shaken roof tiles to the floor and knocked over bicycles. But it feels as though the residents could return at any moment. Their doors are open.
The people here must have been able to hear the hydrogen explosions that rocked the power plant only three kilometres away. They can't have waited much longer to leave. No one will see the cherry blossom that's opening on the boughs of a tree in the school playground, or observe the custom to share a drink underneath it with friends. The children's umbrellas will stay in the rack outside their empty classroom.
Stray cats provide a flicker of movement as they wander in the newly emptied landscape. A few dogs have been left behind, one trailing its lead. In a village beneath one of the flyovers on Route 6, an elderly couple emerge from their car and run into a house. By the time we backtrack and climb down to find them they have gone.
Despite the hundreds of homes still standing they will be the only non-emergency workers we see. Their fleeting presence is a reminder of our own vulnerability, even inside a sealed car on a deliberately brief journey through the zone. We only venture outside the vehicle to remove heavy debris in our way. As we edge closer to our destination, we make our way over buckled tarmac where sand has been shovelled into yawning cracks and logs have been rolled into the broken steps carved by the earthquake.
The brooding presence of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is telegraphed by the crowds of transmission-tower pylons converging on their source. A stream of white vehicles manned by ghostly figures in protective overalls, all breathing through respirators, suggests no let-up in the fight against a meltdown. 2011 nike running shoes online
Finally we are seeing people on our journey. When we wave one of the vehicles down, the driver removes his respirator long enough to say that yes, he is working on the emergency at the plant. But his speech is flecked with panic. He insists he cannot speak to journalists and hurries away.
But nobody stops us. And so we move closer. Tell-tale wisps of grey smoke rise above the tree cover to point the way. Japan's newest heroes, the "Samurai 50", flash past, almost invisible in their white body-suits and hoods aboard a white bus, going towards the reactors. Before long we, too, are at the main entrance of Fukushima No 1.
In the midst of an all-consuming havoc, it appears to be the only place that has escaped intact. Only a spotless white sign in the stone wall tells us we are at the centre of the crisis. Next to the Japanese characters that give the plant's name is the playful red logo of Tepco, the now notorious Tokyo power giant that finds itself in the eye of a nuclear storm.
We would learn later that Tepco has belatedly admitted that the pressure containment vessel at reactor No 3 "may" have been breached – the last step before molten fuel pours onto the concrete base of the reactor triggering a massive release of radioactive material. Three workers inside the plant have been taken to hospital with burns after wading into water contaminated by 10,000 times the expected dose of radiation.
The half-dozen reactors where small teams of engineers have been battling in shifts to prevent a meltdown are only a few hundred metres away. But even if the risks are manageable on a brief visit, there is no mistaking that we are close to disaster.
A Tepco vehicle comes in the other direction but stops abruptly on seeing a car from the outside world inside the stricken power plant. It reverses noisily towards us, and the driver's door opens to show two men inside wearing heavy-duty protective overalls. Unable to make themselves heard over respirators, they make the Japanese gesture meaning "forbidden", crossing and uncrossing their arms and then pointing back the way they had come. It was the closest thing to a security barrier that we encountered. Reebok EasyTone
Our route away is just as unimpeded. But if the approach has been a powerful introduction to the destructive force of the tsunami, our journey towards Minamisoma, the nearest town to the ruined plant, does not offer a corresponding escape.
The town is trapped in what the government has called the "stay inside zone": a 10km-wide band not yet evacuated but too contaminated to go outside. As we escape the perimeter of the plant, the final stretch of Route 6 into Minamisoma breaks through the numbness. Remnants of boats and cars are scattered in unlikely poses for miles in all directions, while the pylons that flank the road have been twisted like the Spanish bearded trees of the bayou. Crows pick through the wreckage of a destroyed garden centre on the roadside.
The ghastly spell is broken by loudspeakers in the distance that are somehow still working. One of Japan's beloved town announcements echoes across the grey devastation, repeating the promise that petrol and kerosene rations will arrive that afternoon.
Picking our way through we find Haranomachi Tokusawa. An old man, he seems less terrified than others of the radiation and has taken his pickup down to the coastal stretch of Minamisoma to look for people lost in the maze of smashed junctions. "It's not safe for you here, you're still inside the exclusion zone," he warns, before leading us out to where everyone else is sheltering.
Only 20,000 of Minamisoma's population of 70,000 have stayed on here. In his office plastered with photographs of the aftermath, Sakurai Katsunobe, the town's lean and furious mayor, says residents have been left to fend for themselves. "Everyone here is angry with Tepco," he seethes. "They give us no information and no help."
Joking that he's a samurai, he vows to save his town with its crippled power plant, its poisoned rice paddies and terrified survivors. He is unlikely to get the chance. Late yesterday the government expanded the evacuation zone in response to the deepening emergency at Fukushima. Even the brave hangers-on will have to pack what they can and leave.
But until that order came, the few that remained were inhabitants of a kind of ghost world, removed entirely from the ordinary life they had once lived. Weighing that new reality in his office, Katsunobe stared at the images of devastation tacked to his wall. They were placed over the pictures that had decorated the room in more normal times. "We can't get supplies as drivers don't want to come here," he said. "We're like an island cut off from outside world."
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, DBE, 79, lost her fight for life yesterday in the same hospital where she was admittednike running shoes just over five weeks ago for symptoms of the congestive heart failure that took her life. In 2009, the star had heart surgery to repair a valve, and was quoted afterwards: “It’s like having a brand new ticker.” As we mourn this dear champions' passing, it's bittersweet comfort to know that Taylor has been quoted as saying, that she wanted her tombstone to read: "She lived." Literally, she did just that.
Elizabeth Taylor was born on February 27th, 1932 in London, the second child of Francis Lenn Taylor (1897–1968) an art dealer and Sara Viola Warmbrodt (1895–1994), an actress whose stage name was "Sara Sothern". At the time, they were Americans residing in England.
According to Wichita NBC affiliate, KSN News, several years before baby Elizabeth's arrival, Francis and Sara hailed from Arkansas City, Kansas, where they met. Sara retired from the acting stage when she and Francis moved to New York City to be married in 1926. Within a few years of their marriage, Mr.Taylor was transferred to Howard Young's art gallery in London, England, where he and Sara began their family, living there until the outbreak of Britain's involvement in World War II.
They then returned to the United States, living for a short time with Elizabeth's grandparents at 310 N. A Street in Arkansas City allowing Elizabeth and her brother, Howard, to briefly attend school at Roosevelt Elementary. Her parents and all of her grandparents were from Ark City. According to Heather Ferguson, 2011 nike running shoes the director of the Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum in Arkansas City, "That's about all we know...", adding, "This is a little known fact to most of Taylor's fans".
Following the brief layover in Ark City, Kansas in 1939, after Taylor's father wrapped up matters in the art business in London, seven months later the family of four settled in Los Angeles, California, where Sara's family, the Warmbrodts, were then living.
A dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States, Elizabeth Taylor was born a British subject through her birth on British soil and an American citizen through her parents. She reportedly sought, in 1965, to renounce her United States citizenship, to wit: "Though never accepted by the State Department, Liz renounced in 1965. Attempting to shield much of her European income from U.S. taxes, Liz wished to become solely a British citizen.
“We don’t have pictures or anything like that because at the time they didn’t have yearbooks like we do today", says Ferguson. She suspects Taylor never spoke much about her Kansas roots because it wasn’t as glamorous as being from
London. The big screen star was invited back to Arkansas City several times by local leaders but always refused the invites.
Elizabeth Taylor was a British-born American actress. She was a dynamic child star that eventually evolved out of old Hollywood glamour and beauty to continue her silver screen status as one of the most beautiful actresses to date. To her fans, her much publicized private life seemed like an extention of their own, not caring that she weathered countless health scares and eight marriages. Her public saw throughshipping. buy Reebok EasyTone the Hollywood enigma and found a true champion who stood up and was an advocate for AIDS awareness, hoping to garner some attention to prevention and eventually a cure. All of this social activism, when it was taboo! She won two Academy Awards for Best Actress and was considered, by most, as one of the greatest screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. On the American Film Institute "Female Legends List", Elizabeth Taylor is number seven!
Even Dame Elizabeth understood the need for having a relationship with her creator, making these statements, "I'm not worried about dying. I consult with God, My Maker. And, I don't have a lot problems to work out. I'm pretty squared away. It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance".
Buy nike running shoes Residents cleared store shelves of bottled water after Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara said that levels of radioactive iodine in tap water were more than twice what is considered safe for babies. Officials begged those in the city to buy only what they need, saying hoarding could hurt the thousands of people without any water in areas devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
"I've never seen anything like this," clerk Toru Kikutaka said, surveying the downtown Tokyo supermarket where the entire stock of bottled water sold out almost immediately after the news broke Wednesday, despite a limit of two, two-liter bottles per customer.
The unsettling new development affecting Japan's largest city, home to around 13 million people, added to growing fears over the nation's food supply.
Radiation from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant has seeped into raw milk, seawater and 11 kinds of vegetables, including broccoli, cauliflower and turnips, from areas around the plant.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it was halting imports of Japanese dairy and produce from the region near the facility. Hong Kong said it would require that Japan perform safety checks on meat, eggs and seafood before accepting those products, and Canada said it would upgrade controls on imports of Japanese food products by requiring documents verifying their safety.fashion 2011 nike running shoes
Concerns also spread to Europe. In Iceland, officials said they measured trace amounts of radioactive iodine in the air but assured residents it was "less than a millionth" of what was found in European countries in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The crisis already is emerging as the world's most expensive natural disaster on record, likely to cost up to $309 billion, according to a new government estimate. Police estimate that more than 18,000 people were killed.
The overall situation at the Fukushima plant 140 miles (220 kilometers) north of Tokyo remains of serious concern, the International Atomic Energy Agency said. The deposition of radioactive iodine and cesium varies across 10 prefectures on a day to day basis but "the trend is generally upward," said Graham Andrew, senior adviser to IAEA chief Yukiya Amano.
The Fukushimi Dai-ichi plant has been leaking radiation since the tsunami engulfed its crucial cooling systems, leading to explosions and fires in four of the facility's six reactors in the ensuing days.buy Reebok EasyTone
Nuclear workers have struggled to stabilize and cool down the overheated plant.
Unit 3 has stopped belching black smoke, an official at Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Thursday, a day after a plume forced an evacuation of nuclear workers. However, white smoke was rising intermittently from two other units, spokesman Masateru Araki said.
The U.S. has said it wants to hand over leadership of the military operation but that negotiations between coalition partners is delaying the transfer of power, according to a defense official, Buy nike running shoes who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of negotiations.
A NATO-led operation has powerful backers, including the British Prime Minister David Cameron, who in a recent speech to British lawmakers in Westminster said he wanted to see the "transfer to a NATO command, using NATO machinery. It's tried and tested."
In addition, there are also differing opinions among coalition countries about the best way of dealing with the Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi himself, say analysts.
So, why does the U.S. want to hand over control?
The potential financial burden and the fears of negative public opinion at home, especially if the operation extends over a long period of time and is expensive, say experts.
"From the beginning it was always on the cards that the U.S. would come in early with its (military) specialty and then hand over control. Uncle Sam is quite entitled to step back," says Charles Heyman, senior defense analyst at ArmedForces.co.uk.
"Libya is on the fringes of Europe and the reality is that you can't expect the U.S. to pay for Europe's defense. The U.S. is under all kinds of pressure... the U.S. defense budget is sucking $712 billion from the economy every year. It is also facing pressure over its presence in Afghanistan."
Barak Seener, a Middle East research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, says: "The Obama administration may seek to back out of the no-fly zone, placing the onus on Britain and France... domestically there will be increased condemnations for the open-ended costly nature of the no-fly zone."
Why is the Arab League protesting?
Some analysts believe that the Arab League is back-peddling in its opposition to some of the air strikes and NATO leadership of the campaign.
"Amr Moussa (Arab League Secretary-General) was at the meetings in Paris so it is a bit disingenuous of him to say that this is not what was expected," says David Hartwell, senior Middle East and North Africa expert at London-based defense analyst Jane's.fashion 2011 nike running shoes online
"The Arab League, having approved the U.N. Security Council resolution, then suddenly goes wobbly."
Some Arab nations are hesitant to fly under a NATO banner, the U.S. defense official told CNN. "NATO has the capability to do a rapid switchover," the official said. "The problem is, they have to do everything by consensus."
Seener says: "The Arab League is acting disingenuously by claiming their opposition to the
weekend's military strikes is due to the fact that they oppose the shelling of civilians. The Obama administration's worship of 'consensus' to include the Arab League, is at the expense of protecting the civilians by embracing a narrow definition of Resolution 1973 and in turn keeping in power Gadhafi."
Moussa now publically again backing the no-fly zone and there are moves to get Arab nations to help militarily with the campaign.
Turkey is a member of NATO, so why is it objecting?
"The man in the street in Turkey distrusts operations against Muslim countries, so the (Turkish) government has to listen to the man on the street. If the mission was not led by NATO it would take the Turkey problem out of the equation. I think Turkish government would be quite happy with that," says Heyman.
Is NATO control inevitable?
Some experts believe only NATO could effectively take over from the U.S., while others say that keeping the Arab League and Turkey in the coalition is crucial, so an alternative will have to be found.
"Perhaps one way around it is to use EU (European Union) military staff and EU military headquarters in Brussels. It is very much an air operation so it is not as complicated as when you have many different services involved. I am sure NATO will remain peripheral to the operation," says Heyman.buy Reebok EasyTone
Other analysts say that a handover to NATO is only days away.
"There definitely needs to be streamlining, it is hard to imagine any other organization taking control, there is really no alternative (to NATO) in the absence of the U.S.," says Hartwell.
Is Gadhafi a target?
No major political leader has yet openly called for the assassination of Gadhafi, although Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama have said they want Gadhafi to go.
There are divisions about the nature of the military operation in Libya because the U.N. Security Council resolution is too ambiguous, say experts.
"I think the fact that there is some flexibility, some ambiguity in the resolution has created the impression that it can mean many things to many people... tensions remain," says Hartwell.
After heated exchanges between NATO ambassadors in Brussels, the alliance announced Tuesday an operation to enforce the arms embargo against Libya. But it went no further on deciding if or when NATO would take command of the mission already under way, in which several allies are participating.nike running shoes online
In a statement, NATO only said that it had plans on the table to enforce the no-fly zone "if needed."
The backdrop was a simmering feud between France and Italy that turned more cynical by the hour. Italy is demanding that NATO take a lead role in the military and political decision-making during the remainder of the Libyan mission.
But resistance within the alliance mounted even as the United States expressed its desire to take a back seat in the operation and hand over any command role to European allies. France seemed most reluctant to submit to NATO command, but Germany and Turkey also voiced objections.
These countries also argue that Arab League nations would be shut out of any decision-making if NATO took control.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said he continues to believe it was right not to participate in the United Nations-sanctioned mission. He noted that Germany is not alone in its skeptical view of military action, pointing to the fact that other European nations are not taking part either.
Westerwelle also refused to comment on whether NATO should take a leading role in enforcing U.N. resolution 1973.
"That is for the coalition of the willing to debate," Westerwelle said.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told French media that NATO would play a role in the mission in coming days but that France, Britain and a council of2011 nike running shoes online other coalition partners would make political decisions. One NATO official described this to CNN as putting the alliance's assets at the disposal of the coalition, but NATO would have no formal political role.
The squabbling continued as Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini again threatened to take back complete control of Italian airbases if NATO did not take the reins of the mission.
"Who, if not NATO, can take on this task?" said Frattini in comments to Italian media.
Some Italian politicians sought to settle old colonial scores by cynically noting that if France was allowed to lead this mission, it would get all the Libyan oil contracts and Italy would get all the Libyan refugees.
On a busy day at the Gioia Del Colle Air Base in southern Italy, RAF Typhoons executed a number of sorties to enforce the no-fly zone in Libya.
"The Italian support is crucial," said Royal Air Force Commander, Group Captain Sammy Sampson, but added that his fighters could operate from other locations. "It's a decision for our headquarters and our political masters."
Discussions between NATO allies will continue this week as the alliance continues to disagree over the parameters and scope of the U.N. resolution that authorized all means necessary to protect civilians in Libya, as well as imposing a no-fly zone over the country.nike running shoes online
As well as disagreeing over whether Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is a legitimate target, there is the question of whether Libya will split along tribal lines or whether a united Libya is even a possibility. There is no appetite among coalition allies to get involved in a tribal grudge match or civil war. buy Reebok EasyTone
Turkey, also a NATO member, also voiced its opposition to a political role for the alliance and has forcefully suggested that the mission so far has already gone beyond the intention of the U.N. resolution to protect civilians. However, one NATO source told CNN that they did not see Turkey's objections so far as a major stumbling block to a further role for NATO.