Five Men Arrested Near Plant In Britain

LONDON — Five men have been arrested near the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the north of England under antiterrorism laws, the police said.

The men were stopped in a vehicle “close to the site” on the Irish Sea coast on Monday afternoon, according to a statement from the West Cumbria police. All were in their 20s and from London, it said.

They were arrested under a provision of Britain’s terrorism laws that allows suspects to be questioned without charge, the police said, and they were handed over to the North West Counter Terrorism Unit in Manchester.

A BBC report suggested that the men were of Bangladeshi origin and that they were thought to have been filming near the site.

A spokeswoman for the terrorism unit, which works closely with Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, declined to offer details, saying that “the investigation is at an early stage” and that questioning was under way.

The spokeswoman said there was no apparent link between the arrests and the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan early Monday. Some Islamic extremists had warned that Britain would be a target for attacks in retaliation for the killing of Bin Laden by American special forces.

Britain’s national terror alert level remains at “severe,” meaning a terrorist strike is “highly likely,” though no specific threats have been detected.

Such is the reach of those concerns that the fee-paying British School of Paris told parents on Tuesday that students should not wear school uniform to avoid being identified by their nationality. The school also said that "all students who are traveling to and from school by themselves or on public transport or while they are on school trips, have been discouraged from displaying 'Britishness' in public."

The Sellafield plant, the largest in Europe, is still “operating as normal,” a spokesman said.

The large complex includes a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant that has long raised concerns in Britain about the costs and hazards of nuclear waste. The closely guarded site is one of few major employers in the region, providing some 10,000 jobs.

The plant was the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, operating from 1956 to 2003. Britain’s worst nuclear accident took place there in 1957, when the core of a reactor caught fire, releasing radioactive contamination.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.

 

Florence Journal: Britain to Close a Consulate With a View

Once a haven for traveling aristocrats and dreamy Britons escaping the strictures of home for the looser ways of Italy, in recent years the consulate has dealt more with lost passports than lost morals. But it holds a central place in the history of British-Italian relations, and news of its closing has been taken as an affront here.

The mayor of Florence has expressed regrets, one Florentine aristocrat says she hopes to raise the issue at the royal wedding, and a leading British historian here has questioned Britain’s diplomatic priorities.

As the sun streamed through the windows of his office overlooking the Arno River on a recent morning, David Broomfield, the man who will most likely be the last British consul of Florence, treated the news wistfully. “It’s not like I’m the last governor leaving the old colony with a feather in his hat,” Mr. Broomfield said. “But it’s the end of an important tradition here for 500 years.” There was an English diplomatic presence in Florence as far back as the 1450s.

Across the room, lists of his predecessors hung framed on the wall in neat calligraphy. They begin in 1698 with Sir Lambert Blackwell, “consul at Leghorn,” as the port city of Livorno was then known, and continue through Sir Horace Mann, who as consul in Florence from 1760 to 1786 turned the consulate into a salon, receiving all Britons of rank who passed through the city.

On one panel, a line of devastating understatement reads, “No British representation in Florence 11 June 1940 to 1 Feb. 1945.” Every year, the city holds a memorial service for the first British soldier killed in the Allied liberation of Florence.

In his autobiographical 1999 film “Tea With Mussolini,” Franco Zeffirelli captured the world of well-heeled, slightly batty English women who had come to Florence seeking beauty and who took their tea in the Uffizi — until Mussolini declared them and all Britons enemy aliens.

When the Arno flooded in 1966, sending all of Florence scrambling to save both its citizens and its priceless art, the consulate opened its doors as a temporary clinic.

With so much intertwined history, it is not surprising that the city is upset that the consulate will close at the end of the year.

“Obviously, I’m very sorry and sad, because the British Consulate in Florence has a very unique and beautiful history,” said the mayor, Matteo Renzi. But, he added, “The world changes, and it’s clear that in the era of EasyJet and Ryanair there’s no more Grand Tour.”

Mr. Renzi said he understood the budget cuts, part of Britain’s austerity plan, but would like to invite Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and his wife to visit Florence before the consulate closes: to show, he said, “that relations between our city and that nation remain strong.”

The Marchesa Bona Frescobaldi, from the Tuscan wine-producing dynasty, was quoted widely in the Italian press as saying that she would try to raise the issue with Prince Charles at the wedding this week of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Miss Middleton lived in Florence for several months in 2000 and studied at the private British Institute, which has offered Italian- and English-language courses — and an extensive lending library — since it was founded in 1917 to foster better British-Italian relations during the First World War.

Paul Ginsborg, a professor of European history at the University of Florence who has written extensively on Italy, questioned the timing of the closing. “How come we could afford the consulate for five centuries, and we no longer can now? How come they didn’t need to close it in 1820, in 1910 or even in the 1930s, during the Great Depression?” he asked.

“It’s a political decision that will affect the British image abroad precisely in a moment when culture and communications count so much,” Mr. Ginsborg said. “I believe that they should reconsider it.”

For its part, the British Foreign Office “keeps the future shape of its network under constant review,” a spokeswoman said in an e-mail. “We are looking both to broaden and deepen our overseas network, particularly to increase our presence in emerging powers.”

Indeed, since 2007, the Foreign Office has opened consulates in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo; Antananarivo, Madagascar; and Juba, Sudan; and closed them in Durban, South Africa; Geneva; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Nagoya, Japan; and Aleppo, Syria; among other places.

Britain is also closing its consulate in Venice, meaning that Britons who need help or lose passports will have to travel to Rome, Milan or Naples for assistance.

“From a symbolic point of view, I’m very, very sad,” Mr. Broomfield said. “From a practical point of view, I understand putting consular resources in three posts, not five.”

In a dark chapter, Mr. Broomfield assisted the family of Meredith Kercher, a British student who was killed in Perugia in 2007. Her American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Ms. Knox’s boyfriend and another man were convicted of the murder in 2009.

In the mid-19th century, Florence was one of the first destinations for Thomas Cook package tours. Today, visitors to Florence include scores of college students who often seem as interested in pub crawls as in the church of Santa Croce.

But Florence has long been a haven for those seeking to shake off the confines of England. They include the fictional Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s 1908 novel “A Room With a View,” who breaks off her engagement to a stuffy man she does not love after finding aesthetic and emotional freedom in Florence. The novelist D. H. Lawrence first published “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” privately in Florence in 1928 after British censors banned the vivid account of adulterous love.

The poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning eloped to Florence and lived at Casa Guidi, where Elizabeth died in 1861, “worn out by illness, addiction and arguments with Robert,” according to the Penguin Classics edition of her poetry, co-edited by Julia Bolton Holloway.

On a recent sunny afternoon here, Ms. Bolton Holloway showed Elizabeth Browning’s elaborate tomb at the Protestant Cemetery. Ms. Bolton Holloway, who has labored to bring the cemetery back from disrepair, said she was sorry the consulate would be closing.

“It’s sad,” she said. “The English community isn’t as strong as it has been in the past.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

 

France Joins Britain in Sending Military Advisers to Libya Rebels, Reports Say

PARIS — The French government said Wednesday it would join Britain in sending a small number of military liaison officers to support the ragtag rebel army in Libya, news reports said, offering a diplomatic boost for the insurgent leader Mustafa Abdel-Jalil who planned to meet with President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris.

The French and British decisions to send advisers marked the latest development in the international community’s search for a means to break a bloody battlefield deadlock that has killed hundreds in the contested cities of Misurata and Ajdabiya and left the rebels in tenuous control of a few major coastal cities in their campaign against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi

But the moves, likened by some critics to America’s decision to send military advisers to Vietnam, raised worries in both countries that their military establishments were being drawn closer into the conflict. The French government spokesman, Fran?ois Baroin, told reporters on Wednesday that the number of military liaison officers would be small, but did not give details. French government ministers stressed that they do not plan to send ground troops to support the rebels.

William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said on Tuesday that the British advisers would help the makeshift rebel forces “improve their military organizational structures, communications and logistics.”

Britain and France — the European nations at the forefront of the diplomatic drive against Colonel Qaddafi — have strived to maintain a united front since they promoted a United Nations Security Council resolution almost five weeks ago authorizing NATO air strikes to protect civilians from loyalist forces.

France’s foreign minister, Alain Juppé, told reporters in Paris on Tuesday that he remained “absolutely opposed to a deployment of troops on the ground, “ words echoed on Wednesday by the defense minister, Gérard Longuet, who said the Security Council resolution permitting air strikes did not authorize the use of foreign ground forces.

On Wednesday, nonetheless, the satirical and investigative French weekly, Canard Encha?né, reported that, along with Britain and the United States, France dispatched covert special forces to Libya three weeks to assess the impact of allied airstrikes.

The Libyan government criticized the British decision to send advisers , saying the move would prolong conflict. Instead, Libya’s foreign minister, Abdul Ati al-Obeidi, used a BBC interview broadcast on Wednesday to renew the Tripoli authorities’ frequent call for a cease-fire and a suspension of NATO bombing to permit a settlement negotiated by Libyans themselves without foreign interference.

“We think any military presence is a step backwards,” Mr. Obeidi said, “and we are sure that if this bombing stopped and there is a real cease-fire we could have a dialogue among all Libyans about what they want — democracy, political reform, constitution, election. This could not be done with what is going on now.”

President Sarkozy of France met Mr. Abdel-Jalil, formerly Colonel Qaddafi’s justice minister, to try to find a means to break the deadlock and, according to a statement from the French presidency, to debate “the process of democratic transition.

The French prime minister, Fran?ois Fillon, who also planned to meet Mr. Abdel-Jalil, was quoted in news reports as saying France would intensify air strikes “to prevent Qaddafi forces from pursuing their attacks on civilian populations.”

“But at the same time, we will need to find a political solution, that is, conditions for a dialogue so that the Libyan crisis can be resolved,” he said in Kiev, Ukraine, according to Agence France-Presse.

Libya’s state television reported on Wednesday that NATO warplanes had struck telecommunications and broadcasting infrastructure. But it did not say where or when the reported attacks took place.

The Libyan rebel leader held talks on Tuesday in Rome with Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, and urged NATO to increase its airstrikes against Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. But, publicly at least, he appeared to have secured no firm commitment of increased military aid similar to Britain’s offer.

Italy, France and Qatar are the only countries to formally recognize the rebel administration in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Britain had previously been providing what Mr. Hague described as “nonlethal assistance,” in the form of telecommunications equipment and body armor. He maintained that the new deployment fell within the United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the international community to protect Libyan civilians but ruling out an occupation force. The military team will work with British diplomats who are already in Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital, he said.

The officers will be deployed “quickly,” said Britain’s Defense Ministry, but it declined to provide further details on the timeline or the number of soldiers. The Associated Press reported that there could be as many as 20.

A government official, who did not want to be named as he was not authorized to discuss operational matters, said that though some of the soldiers had special forces backgrounds, they were not directly drawn from Britain’s elite Special Air Service and Special Boat Service teams.

The move was cause for concern among some current and former politicians. Sir Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, which is now part of a governing coalition with the Conservatives, said Tuesday that the advisers “must not be seen as a first installment of further military deployment.” He added, “Vietnam began with an American president sending military advisers.”

Current members of Parliament have also called for a fresh debate. “This is clear evidence of mission creep,” said John Baron, a Conservative member. “Now we are beginning to put military personnel on the ground, something that wasn’t even discussed when we debated this issue.”

Allied bombing sorties and Tomahawk missiles have failed to tip the balance decisively in favor of a rebel group with disjointed leadership, limited weapons and many inexperienced fighters. And civilian casualties have continued to mount. On Tuesday, the United Nations said that at least 20 children had been killed in the siege of Misurata.

Alan Cowell reported from Paris, and Ravi Somaiya from London. Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.