blamed armed gangs and outsiders for
trying to destabilise Syria.
World News from the BBC
Israel has
activate
d a new anti-missile defence system to
shoot down
rockets fired from Gaza. The system called Iron Dome is operating near the city of Beersheba in the south of the country. Palestinian militants have fired more than 80 rockets into southern Israel in recent days. Israel says its aircraft attacked Gaza on Sunday, killing two members of the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, who were preparing an attack.
The German Chancellor Angela Merkel has suffered a
humiliating
result in a key regional election in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Results so far indicate her Christian Democrat Party will lose power in the state, which it's held for six decades. The German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle of the liberal FDP expressed his disappointment.
'It's a bad day for us liberals. We've lost the vote today. The nuclear energy issue seems to have been the deciding theme that concerned everyone. It was a vote on the future of nuclear energy. The frightful events in Japan, the nuclear mishap in Fukushima, and their consequences for us in Germany, those were the deciding factors in this local election.'
The operators of the Japanese nuclear power plant crippled by the earthquake and tsunami more than two weeks ago have reported the highest levels of radiation so far. Workers fled the reactor at the Fukushima complex when a reading showed water 10 million times more radioactive than normal. A spokesman later said that figure might have been wrong. But he confirmed that any workers near the contaminated water were to receive four times their annual maximum radiation dose in just one hour.