It must be very inconvenient for the public – taking showers or flushing toilets

“It must be very inconvenient for the public – taking showers or flushing toilets. But this is an emergency and it will only last a few days.” Schools cancelled classes until 30 November “for fear that catering and sanitation cannot be secured,” the official Xinhua News Agency said. There is no sign that benzene got into the city water system, said an employee of the Harbin Environmental Bureau who would give only his surname, Wang. Water service was reinstated for about 12 hours today after experts concluded the benzene wouldn’t reach the city until tomorrow afternoon, the city government said on its website. The announcement of the shutdown in Harbin in China’s frigid north-east set off panic-buying of bottled water, milk and soft drinks that left supermarket shelves bare.
The water system was shut down at midnight on Tuesday and probably will stay out of service for four days, said an official of its Municipal Water Supply Group Extra supplies are being brought in by lorries. The delegates agreed to call “for the withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable, through putting in place an immediate national programme to rebuild the armed forces .. control the borders and the security situation”..

A Chinese city of 3.8 million people closed schools and shut down its water system after a chemical plant explosion polluted a river with toxic benzene. Iraq’s rival political factions have for the first time called for a timetable for withdrawal of US-led foreign forces from their country. In a statement issued at the end of an Arab League-backed reconciliation conference in Cairo, political leaders declared that Iraqi forces should take over control of the country’s security as soon as possible. On the first day of Mr Sharon’s new breakaway party Eyal Arad, a senior strategic adviser, said he had substituted the idea of “security for independence” as his approach to future talks with the Palestinians.. The Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has rejected the “false” concept of “territory for peace”, which underpinned Israel’s negotiating strategy with the Palestinians up to and including the failed Camp David talks in 2000, one of his top strategists said. At the same time, two prominent Palestinian politicians said they believed the new Labour leader, Amir Peretz, neither should nor would form a post-election coalition with the Israeli Prime Minister’s new party..

The Italian journalist who launched the controversy over the American use of white phosphorus (WP) as a weapon of war in the Fallujah siege has accused the Americans of hypocrisy. Sigfrido Ranucci, who made the documentary for the RAI television channel aired two weeks ago, said that a US intelligence assessment had characterised WP after the first Gulf War as a “chemical weapon”.. Leading Palestinians guardedly welcomed the changed political landscape in Israel yesterday – while expressing deep scepticism about Ariel Sharon’s willingness to use his new party to establish a lasting peace. As a result, investigative reporting has been seen as a problem.”.

The race for dollars, he insists, has obscured the race for truth. “They’re being run as profit centres, and they’re trying to get pretty high profit margins. “No one is taking their job seriously there,” he recently remarked. “Now it could be that they could be under a directive to not do so We don’t know.