US Boosting Defence After North Korea Threats

The US is beefing up its domestic missile defence systems with new interceptors after recent threats of a nuclear attack by North Korea.

Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel has announced the addition of 14 interceptors in Alaska, a nearly 50% increase in defence capability.

The new interceptors, added to the 30 already installed in California and Alaska, will improve the military's ability to shoot down missiles in flight before they reach the US.

Mr Hagel said the US is also working with Japan to deploy new radar systems that could better track and provide warning of any missile launched by the Communist regime.

Kim Jong-Un greets troops on a visit to a military installment

The Pentagon is also studying the feasibility of alternative missile defence system sites in other parts of the US, he said.

Officials do not believe North Korea is capable of carrying out a nuclear attack on the US, but the recent threat has added to tensions between the two countries.

The defence system has existed since 2004, when the George W Bush administration built it in response to threats from North Korea.

North Korean soldiers undergo military training

In the past year, under the regime of leader Kim Jong-Un, North Korea has conducted three nuclear tests and successfully launched a satellite into orbit using the same technology needed to launch a long-range missile.

Mr Hagel told reporters the decision was intended to help the US "stay ahead of the threat" posed by North Korea's missile technology advances.

"The United States has missile defence systems in place to protect us from limited ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) attacks, but North Korea in particular has recently made advances in its capabilities and is engaged in a series of irresponsible and reckless provocations," he said.

North Korea's ire has also been directed at neighbour South Korea, with it recently threatening to reduce the country's capital Seoul to "a sea of fire".

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India: Tourist Gang-Raped And Husband Beaten

A Swiss tourist has been gang-raped in India and she and her husband were reportedly beaten before being robbed.

The pair were on a cycling trip in the impoverished Madhya Pradesh state, when they were attacked by seven to eight men.

The perpetrators tied up the man and raped the woman in his presence, police official S M Afzal said.

He added they stole 10,000 rupees (£122) and a mobile phone from the woman.

The attack comes just a few days after the man accused of leading the fatal gang rape of a student on a New Delhi bus was found hanged in his prison cell.

Police say Ram Singh took his own life in the high-security Tihar jail where he had been on suicide watch in an isolated cell.

The case made headlines around the world and raised the issue of sexual violence against women in India.

The student's internal injuries were so horrific she died two weeks later in a hospital in Singapore despite surgery to try to save her.

The latest attack happened at a village near Datia where the 39-year-old woman and her husband were camping.

They had stopped there while on their way from Orchha to the tourist destination of Agra, home to the iconic Taj Mahal monument.

Local police superintendent C S Solanki told the Press Trust of India the couple were beaten and had their belongings stolen, and that the woman was gang-raped.

Mr Solanki said police were questioning 13 men in connection with the attack.

According to the woman's husband, a group of seven men with lathis (wooden sticks) in their hands overpowered him.

He said four of them gang-raped his wife and then beat him up.

The woman was taken to a hospital in Gwalior where a medical examination confirmed that she was gang-raped.

The couple will be asked to try to identify the accused, NDTV reported.

The chairman of India's national commission for women, Mamata Sharma, slammed the provincial government of Madhya Pradesh over its failure to curb violence against women.

She said: "The government should pay attention towards what is happening with the foreigners.

"I have said this for the past few days that the crime against women in Madhya Pradesh is increasing and the government should take stringent action to put an end to such incidents.

"Many incidents of violence against women have come into the limelight in Madhya Pradesh but the government is completely insensitive towards them.

"The accused should be punished and we should see what kind of image of India we are presenting to the outside world. The government should take strict action."

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Hugo Chavez Taken To Final Resting Place

Chavez: 'A Master Of The Spotlight'

Updated: 6:50am UK, Wednesday 06 March 2013

By Rachel Younger, Sky News Correspondent

Hugo Chavez was one of the most charismatic and controversial leaders of our time.

A master of the spotlight, his military fatigues and synthetic red tracksuits underlining his socialist credentials made him a photographer's dream.

Best of all were the shots that captured him with his pet parrot Simon Bolivar, named after a Venezuelan general, and sometimes sporting a tiny red beret to match his own.

No wonder he caught the imagination of Hollywood film stars and directors - one day attending premieres with Oliver Stone, the next sharing jokes with Naomi Campbell.

Mr Chavez was a former soldier who was elected president in 1998, after being imprisoned for a failed coup seven years earlier.

His nineties brand of revolutionary socialism won him plenty of affection among the poor, with many of his supporters viewing him with almost religious reverence.

It was an emotional connection he was happy to milk on his weekly television show, Alo Presidente. The masses tuning in for his rambling poetry recitals and even stranger song and dance routines.

His country's vast oil reserves gave the president the money to tackle poverty, boosting spending on health and education. But corruption and mismanagement left the economy struggling and democracy withered under his rule.

An increasingly autocratic Mr Chavez changed the constitution to allow unlimited presidential terms, stamped hard on press freedom and nationalised many of the country's industries.

A natural firebrand, he didn't confine himself to Latin American politics. Instead he took on the West by courting fellow controversial figures like Cuba's Fidel Castro and  Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, forging a close alliance with Iran and offering Argentina support on the Falklands.

But Mr Chavez saved most of his wrath for the Americans, regularly referring to George W Bush as Mr Danger, and accusing Washington of "fighting terror with terror" in Afghanistan.

In one particularly bellicose statement in 2006 he appeared at the UN a day after the former American president and stated: "The Devil came here yesterday. It smells of sulphur still."

Even after four operations and intensive chemotherapy for his cancer, Mr Chavez maintained his grip on the country, anointing Vice President Nicholas Maduro as his preferred successor.

Too ill in January to travel back from Cuba for his inauguration, he managed to hang on to the presidency despite the constitution forbidding it.

For the three months before he died Mr Chavez wasn't seen or heard of publicly, yet the cult of his personality was enough to keep his leadership alive.

Without it, Venezuela may emerge a very different country.

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Pope Francis Wants 'Church For The Poor'

Profile: The Chemist Who Became A Pope

Updated: 1:17pm UK, Thursday 14 March 2013

Francis is the first ever pope from the Americas, an austere Jesuit intellectual who modernised Argentina's conservative Roman Catholic Church.

Known until Wednesday as Jorge Bergoglio, Pope Francis is respected as a humble man who denied himself the luxuries that previous Buenos Aires cardinals enjoyed.

In the past, the 76-year-old pontiff often rode the bus to work, cooked his own meals and regularly visited the slums that ring Argentina's capital.

He accused fellow church leaders of hypocrisy, and forgetting that Jesus Christ bathed lepers and ate with prostitutes.

"Jesus teaches us another way. Go out. Go out and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers, go out and share, go out and ask. Become the Word in body as well as spirit," the then-Cardinal Bergoglio told Argentina's priests last year.

He was born in Buenos Aires on December 17, 1936, one of five children of an Italian railway worker and his wife.

His legacy as a cardinal includes his efforts to repair the reputation of a church that lost many followers by failing to openly challenge Argentina's murderous 1976-83 dictatorship.

He also worked to recover the church's traditional political influence in society, but his outspoken criticism of President Cristina Kirchner could not stop her from imposing socially liberal measures, from gay marriage and adoption to free contraceptives.

He came close to becoming pope in 2005, reportedly gaining the second-highest total in several rounds of voting before bowing out in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI.

Initially trained as a chemist, Bergoglio taught literature, psychology, philosophy and theology before taking over as Buenos Aires archbishop in 1998.

He became cardinal in 2001, when the economy was collapsing, and won respect for blaming unrestrained capitalism for impoverishing millions of Argentines.

Sergio Rubin, Bergoglio's authorised biographer, said the new pope felt most comfortable taking a very low profile, and his personal style was the antithesis of Vatican splendour.

"It's a very curious thing. When bishops meet, he always wants to sit in the back rows. This sense of humility is very well seen in Rome," Mr Rubin said before the 2013 conclave to choose Benedict's successor.

Bergoglio has stood out for his austerity. Even after he became Argentina's top church official in 2001, he never lived in the ornate church mansion where Pope John Paul II stayed when visiting the country.

He almost never granted media interviews, limiting himself to speeches from the pulpit, and was reluctant to contradict his critics, even when he knew their allegations against him were false, said Mr Rubin.

That attitude was burnished as human rights activists tried to force him to answer uncomfortable questions about what church officials knew and did about the dictatorship's abuses after the 1976 coup.

Many Argentines remain angry over the church's acknowledged failure to openly confront a regime that was kidnapping and killing thousands of people as it sought to eliminate "subversive elements" in society.

It's one reason why more than two-thirds of Argentines describe themselves as Catholic, but fewer than 10% regularly attend mass.

Under Bergoglio's leadership, Argentina's bishops issued a collective apology in October 2012 for the church's failures to protect its flock. But the statement blamed the era's violence in roughly equal measure on both the junta and its enemies.

"Bergoglio has been very critical of human rights violations during the dictatorship, but he has always also criticised the leftist guerrillas; he doesn't forget that side," Mr Rubin said.

The bishops also said "we exhort those who have information about the location of stolen babies, or who know where bodies were secretly buried, that they realise they are morally obligated to inform the pertinent authorities".

But that statement came far too late for some activists, who accused Bergoglio of being more concerned about the church's image than about aiding the many human rights investigations.

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Shark Dies During Kmart Advert Filming In US

A white tip shark shipped from New York and placed into an outdoor pool in Los Angeles for a Kmart advertisement has died after showing signs of distress.

The American Humane Association (AHA), which monitored the production, said everything was done to try to save the 5ft-long shark but it died after being moved to an aquatic compound for care on March 6.

The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), which said it received details of the shark's death from two on-set whistleblowers, criticised the AHA.

In a letter to the group, Peta said: "Sharks are sensitive animals who, in captivity, require a highly specialised and controlled environment.

"Given the delicate nature of this species, why would the AHA approve the transport and use of this animal?"

Karen Rosa of the AHA said the shark was placed into a 60,000-gallon (227-litre) outdoor tank, adding that it was a good amount of water for the animal.

"We honestly don't know why the animal died. It was not being mistreated. It was not being harmed," Ms Rosa said.

Once the shark showed distress signs, oxygen was pumped into the tank and the shark was given a shot of adrenaline to try to stabilise it, Ms Rosa said.

"We take this matter seriously and safety is always our paramount concern," Howard Riefs, a spokesman for Kmart owner Sears Holdings, said in a statement.

The death follows longstanding criticism of the use of animals in Hollywood productions.

Last year, the horse-racing show Luck on HBO was axed after the deaths of three horses used in the drama series.

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Syria's Health System In Critical Condition

By Dr Natalie Roberts, Doctors Without Borders

I'm part of an MSF team based in the Aleppo region in the north of Syria. This area continues to see an enormous amount of conflict, and the health needs are massive.

Before I was in Aleppo I worked in Idlib region, where MSF runs a surgical trauma hospital with an operating theatre, an emergency department and a small in-patient department.

There are a number of expats there, including a surgeon and an anaesthetist along with about fifty Syrian staff. It's a small hospital, but it's actually very full and busy. We're currently providing support to other hospitals and health facilities in Aleppo.

Much of the healthcare infrastructure in this part of Syria has essentially collapsed, and although there are dedicated people working hard to keep facilities going, sometimes they don't have the training, the experience or the equipment to provide the medical care that people need. That's where we can help.

Not long after I arrived, I was working at an MSF hospital and a six-year-old girl was brought to us. She'd been with her family on the roof of her house, when a plane had flown over to bomb the village.

Understandably, children in Syria are now very scared of planes, so when this girl had seen the plane she ran across the roof. The family had a diesel heater because of the cold, and as the girl ran she knocked it over and splashed the burning fuel all over her legs.

She suffered serious burn injuries to her legs, and was rushed to a local health centre, but they really didn't have the equipment or even the proper pain relief to treat her.

This is a problem that we see a lot. Even when facilities are still open, often they don't have the medicines or the equipment to properly treat patients. Or if they do have the equipment, it's been damaged by bombing or by lack of maintenance. Hospitals are a target and many have been bombed.

Rebels control much of Aleppo but the fighting has battered the city

And then there's the lack of electricity, which is a huge problem. Equipment in hospitals is dependent on electricity but most places now don't have a supply so everything is run from generators, but that requires diesel which is very expensive and not always available. Vaccines and blood need to be kept in fridges, but if you don't have power, those things are useless.

At one of the emergency rooms I go to, they don't have a means of sterilising equipment. So when they get patients from a bomb blast, they'll do procedures like suturing, but they can't really sterilise the equipment so they just have to reuse. And that obviously causes problems down the line.

By the time the girl came to us, she was really traumatised and even walking into the hospital left her screaming and in tears. It took a long time for her to trust us, but eventually we were able to change her dressings and give her the beginnings of the care that she needed.

For me, that really summed up the horror of the situation in Syria. Yes, there are acute injuries from the bombings and from the violence, but there is also the psychological trauma caused by the whole situation. This poor girl has seen and experienced things that nobody - let alone a six-year-old girl - should have to experience.

When I visit different hospitals in Syria, often the casualties are children. Bombings will hit residential areas and whole families are injured or killed.

Alongside the acute injuries, children are suffering from a range of medical problems. Vaccination has essentially stopped in some areas. Whole families are living in tents or in houses with no heating or clean water, often all together in one room. Infectious diseases are starting to spread. I've seen a lot of children with basic disease like pneumonia and Hepatitis A.

There's no school. They're coping, but that doesn't mean they're behaving normally.

Rubble is cleared from in front of a hospital in Aleppo

Sometimes the children will be playing on the streets when planes fly over, and they just accept it and keep playing, even when the plane is bombing their town.

There's a man I know who has a four-year-old son, and sometimes this man helps in a local field hospital. One night he was going to help after a bombing and his four-year-old son asked him not to go, saying that if a bomb hits the house, he wanted the family to all be together so none of them would feel lonely. That's not a normal thing for a four year old to say.

You know, MSF is very good at being efficient, at knowing how to provide a good medical service with not many facilities. We're used to working in these types of conflict areas and we're one of the rare aid organisations I've seen working in the region.

The health system in Syria was very sophisticated before, and now that the infrastructure has broken down, they're struggling to optimise how they work. That's how we can help. But building that trust takes time. These people have been doing this for two years and doing an amazing job, and it does take time to build up trust. I have to tell them what I've seen and done before, and tell them what MSF does.

I remember I was visiting an emergency department at one hospital in Aleppo. It was the first time I'd been there, and we were discussing with the staff how we could help them when news came that a mortar bomb had hit a nearby market. Very quickly we started to receive casualties, brought to us in private cars, the back of pick-up trucks and on motorbikes. Ten fatalities arrived almost immediately, then four more, two who had sustained massive head injuries.

In situations like that, it's vital you triage and prioritise patients that can be helped, and it was very clear that these two patients were beyond help. But it was equally clear that there were other patients - particularly two eight-year-old girls with shrapnel wounds - who could be saved.

My role in the midst of all the panic and crisis was to point out that these girls were our priority and that we needed to focus our attention on them. Pointing that out, though, requires that the team trust me.

Fighting for Syria's largest city has been brutal

I think one of my main roles at the moment in these hospitals is to use my experience to train people and demonstrate what should be done in terms of prioritising patients during a mass casualty event. To that end, I've been delivering a training programme in different hospitals.

We teach them about triage, about managing war wounded patients, about blood transfusion, and how to do all that with reduced facilities and equipment.

It's a scary situation in Syria. This is the second period of time I've spent there, and over the last weeks I've really noticed the escalation of violence. But you do get used to it. Incidents that initially made me very frightened, I now take for granted.

The first time I was really scared was when a very large missile landed not too far away where we were staying. We could feel the windows of our house shaking. There were two of us in the house and we were both afraid.

But within a month, we  were getting missiles every night - some very near - and we'd get out of bed and go to our safe room but be complaining that it was cold and our sleep was being interrupted. You even start making jokes about it, but it's just a way of coping. In reality, you never really lose the fear.

People are grateful that we're there. But we can't do everything. We can help with what we can, but the needs are huge. We set up a blood bank. We provide vaccinations. We helped with supplies for dialysis machines.

We need to set up more MSF clinics and structures. There is a need for more acute trauma surgery, but there's also a need to continue basic healthcare, treating chronic diseases and providing outpatient services. We need to continue helping with equipment and advice and support.

Take our blood bank. We've set one up in the Aleppo region in a secret location which supplies all hospitals in that area. People have been coming from 50km (30 miles) away to access it. It required a bit of work, a lot of training and equipment, but it's now up and running.

Before people were getting unsafe blood, blood that hadn't been tested and stored correctly, but now they are. Something like that is really easy to do, but it's cost effective and it saves lives.

But this is just a drop in the ocean. The suffering that people are experiencing in that country is incredible and it's frustrating and upsetting to see so many problems and know that because of security or for other reasons you can't solve it all.

But as MSF we do what we can, and it's vital we continue to help. This is a massive humanitarian emergency and the Syrian people need our help. It's as simple as that.

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Dreamliner 'Safe' Despite Battery Mystery

Aircraft maker Boeing has insisted its grounded Dreamliner is "absolutely" safe, despite the exact cause behind a series of battery faults apparently still a mystery.

The company said it expected the hi-tech 787 plane to be back in the air within weeks, as it sought to reassure airlines and passengers about the aircraft.

The 50 planes grounded around the world in mid-January since two lithium-ion battery malfunctions will undergo fixes to their systems and be operational again soon, senior executives said.

A burnt out battery power pack taken from a Boeing 787

The company said despite the efforts of a 500-strong team of engineers from different disciplines, the fundamental problem has still eluded them.

But teams identified 80 potential scenarios that could cause a battery failure and worked to provide solutions and preventative measures.

These included boosting insulation inside the battery pack and adding vent lines so any escaping vapour is discharged outside the aircraft.

"I get often asked if I think the airplane is still safe. My answer is simple: absolutely," Mike Sinnett, the chief project engineer on the 787, said at a news conference in Tokyo.

Transport official in the US examines battery cell plates

Japan Airlines (JAL) and All Nippon Airways (ANA) are the main operators of Dreamliners and a third of the composite construction componentry is sourced from the Asian country.

"We design so that no single failure can place flight landing at risk," Mr Sinnett said.

"Every critical system on an airplane has multiple layers of redundancy."

Mr Sinnett said the probe into the two incidents had proved that the aircraft's safety measures had worked.

Ray Connor, president of Boeing's commercial division, said measures the company had put in place and which were now undergoing flight testing would put the aircraft back in the skies.

"We are going to be dependent upon (moving) through the certification process. We will determine when we actually get back in the air in terms of flights," Mr Connor said.

An air safety inspector examined an ANA plane's damaged fuselage in Japan

"Previously as I have been anticipating that in months, we are talking more along the line of weeks," he said.

The Dreamliner has been lauded for its use of next-generation materials that have cut weight and slashed fuel costs.

Boeing opted to use lithium-ion batteries for the plane, which engineers say are lighter than other batteries, provide a higher power output and retain their charge when not in use.

But the batteries have come under scrutiny after a small fire on a parked 787 at Boston's Logan Airport in January. Days later, what appeared to be smoke from a battery on an ANA flight forced an emergency landing in Japan.

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Syria Anniversary: EU Rethinks Arms Embargo

Health Needs Critical In Aleppo

Updated: 9:04am UK, Friday 15 March 2013

By Dr Natalie Roberts, Doctors Without Borders

I'm part of an MSF team based in the Aleppo region in the north of Syria. This area continues to see an enormous amount of conflict, and the health needs are massive.

Before I was in Aleppo I worked in Idlib region, where MSF runs a surgical trauma hospital with an operating theatre, an emergency department and a small in-patient department.

There are a number of expats there, including a surgeon and an anaesthetist along with about fifty Syrian staff. It's a small hospital, but it's actually very full and busy. We're currently providing support to other hospitals and health facilities in Aleppo.

Much of the healthcare infrastructure in this part of Syria has essentially collapsed, and although there are dedicated people working hard to keep facilities going, sometimes they don't have the training, the experience or the equipment to provide the medical care that people need. That's where we can help.

Not long after I arrived, I was working at an MSF hospital and a six-year-old girl was brought to us. She'd been with her family on the roof of her house, when a plane had flown over to bomb the village.

Understandably, children in Syria are now very scared of planes, so when this girl had seen the plane she ran across the roof. The family had a diesel heater because of the cold, and as the girl ran she knocked it over and splashed the burning fuel all over her legs.

She suffered serious burn injuries to her legs, and was rushed to a local health centre, but they really didn't have the equipment or even the proper pain relief to treat her.

This is a problem that we see a lot. Even when facilities are still open, often they don't have the medicines or the equipment to properly treat patients. Or if they do have the equipment, it's been damaged by bombing or by lack of maintenance. Hospitals are a target and many have been bombed.

And then there's the lack of electricity, which is a huge problem. Equipment in hospitals is dependent on electricity but most places now don't have a supply so everything is run from generators, but that requires diesel which is very expensive and not always available. Vaccines and blood need to be kept in fridges, but if you don't have power, those things are useless.

At one of the emergency rooms I go to, they don't have a means of sterilising equipment. So when they get patients from a bomb blast, they'll do procedures like suturing, but they can't really sterilise the equipment so they just have to reuse. And that obviously causes problems down the line.

By the time the girl came to us, she was really traumatised and even walking into the hospital left her screaming and in tears. It took a long time for her to trust us, but eventually we were able to change her dressings and give her the beginnings of the care that she needed.

For me, that really summed up the horror of the situation in Syria. Yes, there are acute injuries from the bombings and from the violence, but there is also the psychological trauma caused by the whole situation. This poor girl has seen and experienced things that nobody - let alone a six-year-old girl - should have to experience.

When I visit different hospitals in Syria, often the casualties are children. Bombings will hit residential areas and whole families are injured or killed.

Alongside the acute injuries, children are suffering from a range of medical problems. Vaccination has essentially stopped in some areas. Whole families are living in tents or in houses with no heating or clean water, often all together in one room. Infectious diseases are starting to spread. I've seen a lot of children with basic disease like pneumonia and Hepatitis A.

There's no school. They're coping, but that doesn't mean they're behaving normally.

Sometimes the children will be playing on the streets when planes fly over, and they just accept it and keep playing, even when the plane is bombing their town.

There's a man I know who has a four-year-old son, and sometimes this man helps in a local field hospital. One night he was going to help after a bombing and his four-year-old son asked him not to go, saying that if a bomb hits the house, he wanted the family to all be together so none of them would feel lonely. That's not a normal thing for a four year old to say.

You know, MSF is very good at being efficient, at knowing how to provide a good medical service with not many facilities. We're used to working in these types of conflict areas and we're one of the rare aid organisations I've seen working in the region.

The health system in Syria was very sophisticated before, and now that the infrastructure has broken down, they're struggling to optimise how they work. That's how we can help. But building that trust takes time. These people have been doing this for two years and doing an amazing job, and it does take time to build up trust. I have to tell them what I've seen and done before, and tell them what MSF does.

I remember I was visiting an emergency department at one hospital in Aleppo. It was the first time I'd been there, and we were discussing with the staff how we could help them when news came that a mortar bomb had hit a nearby market. Very quickly we started to receive casualties, brought to us in private cars, the back of pick-up trucks and on motorbikes. Ten fatalities arrived almost immediately, then four more, two who had sustained massive head injuries.

In situations like that, it's vital you triage and prioritise patients that can be helped, and it was very clear that these two patients were beyond help. But it was equally clear that there were other patients - particularly two eight-year-old girls with shrapnel wounds - who could be saved.

My role in the midst of all the panic and crisis was to point out that these girls were our priority and that we needed to focus our attention on them. Pointing that out, though, requires that the team trust me.

I think one of my main roles at the moment in these hospitals is to use my experience to train people and demonstrate what should be done in terms of prioritising patients during a mass casualty event. To that end, I've been delivering a training programme in different hospitals.

We teach them about triage, about managing war wounded patients, about blood transfusion, and how to do all that with reduced facilities and equipment.

It's a scary situation in Syria. This is the second period of time I've spent there, and over the last weeks I've really noticed the escalation of violence. But you do get used to it. Incidents that initially made me very frightened, I now take for granted.

The first time I was really scared was when a very large missile landed not too far away where we were staying. We could feel the windows of our house shaking. There were two of us in the house and we were both afraid.

But within a month, we  were getting missiles every night - some very near - and we'd get out of bed and go to our safe room but be complaining that it was cold and our sleep was being interrupted. You even start making jokes about it, but it's just a way of coping. In reality, you never really lose the fear.

People are grateful that we're there. But we can't do everything. We can help with what we can, but the needs are huge. We set up a blood bank. We provide vaccinations. We helped with supplies for dialysis machines.

We need to set up more MSF clinics and structures. There is a need for more acute trauma surgery, but there's also a need to continue basic healthcare, treating chronic diseases and providing outpatient services. We need to continue helping with equipment and advice and support.

Take our blood bank. We've set one up in the Aleppo region in a secret location which supplies all hospitals in that area. People have been coming from 50km (30 miles) away to access it. It required a bit of work, a lot of training and equipment, but it's now up and running.

Before people were getting unsafe blood, blood that hadn't been tested and stored correctly, but now they are. Something like that is really easy to do, but it's cost effective and it saves lives.

But this is just a drop in the ocean. The suffering that people are experiencing in that country is incredible and it's frustrating and upsetting to see so many problems and know that because of security or for other reasons you can't solve it all.

But as MSF we do what we can, and it's vital we continue to help. This is a massive humanitarian emergency and the Syrian people need our help. It's as simple as that.

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Xi Jinping Confirmed As New Chinese President

China: The Key Challenges Ahead

Updated: 3:47am UK, Thursday 14 March 2013

By Mark Stone, Asia Correspondent

What are China's key challenges and how will incoming President Xi Jinping tackle them?

:: The Environment

Even from behind the walls of Zhongnanhai,  the vast Presidential compound in the heart of Beijing, it will be impossible to escape what's become known as "airmaggedon" - the sight of a city shrouded in smog. January and February were two of the worst months on record. Levels of pollution reached more than 30 times the safe limit.

Shanghai's 23 million residents have spent the past week wondering if their water is safe to drink after the discovery of 6000 dead pigs floating down the river. The term "Cancer Village" is now part of the Chinese vocabulary, referring to villages where toxic soil is killing people. There are scores of other jaw-dropping food scandals.

China's record on waste disposal - both sewage and household waste - is abysmal. A recent study claimed that one third of the industrial waste water and more than 90 percent of household sewage in China is released into rivers and lakes without being treated.

:: The Economy

In his farewell speech, outgoing president Hu Jintao made the point (several times) that his government had successfully avoided a direct hit by the global economic crisis. There was no Chinese "hard-landing" last year as many had predicted.

However, the knock-on effects of the problems in the Eurozone and America are impacting in China. The country still relies heavily on being the world's factory floor. But if the world isn't buying, then China has a problem.

The challenge for the incoming government is to broaden its domestic consumer base so that it can rely less on the rest of the world. But to achieve that it must pull more people out of poverty and that, in turn, requires workers, in factories, making and selling to the world.

Now add one other dimension to that: south-east Asia is quickly overtaking China as the preferable factory floor for western manufacturers: labour is significantly cheaper than in China.

It all presents a tricky conundrum.

:: Foreign Policy

President Xi said recently that the "great renewal of the Chinese nation is the Chinese nation's greatest dream in modern history." The location he chose to speak those words is seen as significant: a military base.

There is no doubt China has been flexing its military muscle recently. It is engaged in territorial disputes with Japan, Vietnam, The Philippines and of course, Taiwan. A military clash with Japan over a tiny set of islands in the East China Sea is conceivable.

China's footprint now spreads across much of the world. It's presence across Africa and South America is causing unease in some western capitals.

China is now used to being accused of hacking into the world's computers. It angrily denies the charge, pointing out that it too is the victim of cyber-crime. Still, tit-for-tat cyber strikes present both a military and commercial threat and therefore a big diplomatic challenge.

Nearly 40 years ago, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing. It was the first step in an effort to establish diplomatic relations between communist China and capitalist America. It eventually led to an historic meeting between President Carter and Chairman Mao.

On his visit Kissinger called China "'a land of mystery". Decades on, little seems to have changed.

President Xi said last month: "China needs to know more about the world, and the world needs to know more about China."

And so, despite the country's remarkable growth, reforms and indisputable position of global strength, China is to many still a mystery.

Perhaps that represents the biggest barrier between China and the rest of the world, because a mysterious country is, correctly or not, seen as a threatening one.

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Pope Francis: Profile Of New Catholic Leader

Francis is the first ever pope from the Americas, an austere Jesuit intellectual who modernised Argentina's conservative Roman Catholic Church.

Known until Wednesday as Jorge Bergoglio, Pope Francis is respected as a humble man who denied himself the luxuries that previous Buenos Aires cardinals enjoyed.

In the past, the 76-year-old pontiff often rode the bus to work, cooked his own meals and regularly visited the slums that ring Argentina's capital.

He accused fellow church leaders of hypocrisy, and forgetting that Jesus Christ bathed lepers and ate with prostitutes.

The Archbishop of Buenos Aires kissing the hand of late Pope John Paul II

"Jesus teaches us another way. Go out. Go out and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers, go out and share, go out and ask. Become the Word in body as well as spirit," the then-Cardinal Bergoglio told Argentina's priests last year.

His legacy as a cardinal includes his efforts to repair the reputation of a church that lost many followers by failing to openly challenge Argentina's murderous 1976-83 dictatorship.

He also worked to recover the church's traditional political influence in society, but his outspoken criticism of President Cristina Kirchner could not stop her from imposing socially liberal measures, from gay marriage and adoption to free contraceptives.

The new pope on the streets of Buenos Aires earlier this month

He came close to becoming pope in 2005, reportedly gaining the second-highest total in several rounds of voting before bowing out in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI.

Initially trained as a chemist, Bergoglio taught literature, psychology, philosophy and theology before taking over as Buenos Aires archbishop in 1998.

He became cardinal in 2001, when the economy was collapsing, and won respect for blaming unrestrained capitalism for impoverishing millions of Argentines.

Sergio Rubin, Bergoglio's authorised biographer, said the new pope felt most comfortable taking a very low profile, and his personal style was the antithesis of Vatican splendour.

Bergoglio talks with a man as he rides the subway in Buenos Aires

"It's a very curious thing. When bishops meet, he always wants to sit in the back rows. This sense of humility is very well seen in Rome," Mr Rubin said before the 2013 conclave to choose Benedict's successor.

Bergoglio has stood out for his austerity. Even after he became Argentina's top church official in 2001, he never lived in the ornate church mansion where Pope John Paul II stayed when visiting the country.

For years, he took public transportation around the city.

Bergoglio almost never granted media interviews, limiting himself to speeches from the pulpit, and was reluctant to contradict his critics, even when he knew their allegations against him were false, said Mr Rubin.

Cardinal Bergoglio with his family members

That attitude was burnished as human rights activists tried to force him to answer uncomfortable questions about what church officials knew and did about the dictatorship's abuses after the 1976 coup.

Many Argentines remain angry over the church's acknowledged failure to openly confront a regime that was kidnapping and killing thousands of people as it sought to eliminate "subversive elements" in society.

It's one reason why more than two-thirds of Argentines describe themselves as Catholic, but fewer than 10% regularly attend mass.

Under Bergoglio's leadership, Argentina's bishops issued a collective apology in October 2012 for the church's failures to protect its flock. But the statement blamed the era's violence in roughly equal measure on both the junta and its enemies.

"Bergoglio has been very critical of human rights violations during the dictatorship, but he has always also criticised the leftist guerrillas; he doesn't forget that side," Mr Rubin said.

The bishops also said "we exhort those who have information about the location of stolen babies, or who know where bodies were secretly buried, that they realise they are morally obligated to inform the pertinent authorities".

But that statement came far too late for some activists, who accused Bergoglio of being more concerned about the church's image than about aiding the many human rights investigations.

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