Two thousand anti-missile shield protestors picketed government buildings in Prague on Monday (4 June) night as US president George Bush landed in the Czech republic to start a week long European tour, with Mr Bush set to chide Russia over democratic standards in a major speech on Tuesday.

Czech demonstrators held up signs saying "Bush number one terrorist" in what has become a familiar sight on his European visits since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with 1,500 Czech police - including counter-terrorist and sniper units - all-but shutting down central Prague in anticipation of larger protests today.

Opinion polls show two-thirds of Czechs do not want the US to build bits of a new missile shield in the country, amid fears of worsening relations with Russia and becoming a target for anti-US terrorist groups. The shield - to be operational by 2012 - will also see US missiles in Poland, despite similar fears in Polish society.

Mr Bush will spend Tuesday with Czech leaders in Prague before attending the G8 summit in Germany from Wednesday to Friday, where he is likely to face more jeers in the wider context of anti-globalisation protests. Anti-G8 riots in Germany continued to simmer away Monday night, with 66 fresh arrests in Rostock.

A US anti-missile defense system, pipeline politics, Polish meat, press freedom and Iran policy have all been issues in the disputes between the West and Russia ahead of the G8 summit. Statehood for Kosovo is the latest.

Climate change and aid to Africa have long been on the agenda for the G8 summit which kicks off on Wednesday in Heiligendamm on the north-eastern German coast. But the gathering of rich industrial nations that includes Russia threatens to be overshadowed by divisions within the club from an unexpected source: Kosovo.

 

The tiny autonomous province in Serbia, which is under UN administration, hasn't grabbed banner headlines since 1999, when US-led air strikes forced out Slobodan Milosevic's marauding army. But that's mainly because NATO's huge international contingent has kept the peace.

 

Territorial and ethnic tensions in the remains of the former Yugoslavia are still simmering below the surface, and now with the UN road map for Kosovo's independence from Serbia on the table, the Western powers want to finally put the last chapter of the Balkans saga to bed.

 

The Marshall Plan has long been heralded as the most successful foreign aid program in history. The speech that outlined the ambitious plan was made 60 years ago today.

The speech was without fanfare and lasted only 12 minutes, but it signaled a shift in the post-war era and heralded great changes to come.

 

On June 5, 1947, US Secretary of State George C. Marshall addressed the graduating class at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Within days, his recommendations became known as the Marshall Plan, which has gone down in history as the most successful civil-reconstruction project of the 20th century.

 

"The Marshall Plan served as the economic and political foundation for the Western alliance that waged the Cold War," said Diane Kunz, a professor of history at Yale University. "It allowed the United States gradually to engage itself in the bipolar confrontation by first committing money, not blood."

 

Historians, however, disagree on how large a role the Marshall Plan money played in Europe's economic recovery.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Brussels is set to kick off lengthy legislative efforts which could see EU states sharing the asylum seeker burden more equally, after 182,000 people sought refuge in the 27-nation bloc last year - with gulf wide differences in terms of pressure on individual EU countries.

On Wednesday (6 June) EU home affairs commissioner Franco Frattini will table a proposal, the goal of which is "to achieve a higher common standard of protection and greater equality in protection across the EU as well as to ensure a higher degree of solidarity between EU member states."

The paper - seen by EUobserver - indicates that a more balanced distribution is needed of those who are granted protected status.

"There is a pressing need for increased solidarity...so as to ensure that responsibility for processing asylum applications and granting protection in the EU is shared equitably," Mr Frattini argues, adding "intra-EU resettlement is an important path to pursue."

The overall number of asylum applications lodged on EU territory has halved since 2002, but some countries' facilities continue to face enormous pressure.

The UK, France, Sweden and Germany each annually deal with over 20,000 requests, although Sweden is the only one where granting refugee status or other protection actually outnumbers the amount of those rejected.

Europeans are paying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in China as part of the continent's efforts to tackle global warming.

Power generators and other polluting firms are buying "carbon credits" from countries such as China to offset their own emissions.

But where the Chinese gain by cleaning up their factories and selling the resulting credits, European consumers lose as the costs are often passed on in the form of higher energy bills.

Last year alone, European companies spent around $2.5bn (£1.25bn) on carbon credits from China.

Although action to tackle global warming is generally welcomed, consumer groups worry that poor people are finding it increasingly difficult to pay this energy "tax".

In three weeks as France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy has persuaded Colombia to free a jailed guerrilla, won over several European Union leaders to his rescue plan for the EU's integration efforts and made Darfur a top diplomatic priority.

Heading to his first Group of Eight summit this week, Sarkozy is determined to make his mark - and fast - on the world stage.

He appears to be focusing on areas where quick progress is possible - not thorny issues like Middle East peace or Iran's nuclear program. The G-8 will be a key test of whether the appeal of Sarkozy's get-things-done verve will translate beyond French voters to a more global audience.

"He hasn't made any blunders so far," said Dominique Moisi of the French Institute for International Relations. At the G-8, Sarkozy's "presence will be felt. He will not be discreet but will be ... booming with energy and confidence."

Sarkozy scored one apparent victory Monday when Colombian authorities released the highest-ranking jailed guerrilla from the leftist rebel group FARC - at Sarkozy's request, according to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Rodrigo Granda was freed as part of a wider prisoner release intended to persuade guerrillas to give up 60 hostages, including three Americans and Colombian-French citizen Ingrid Betancourt, an anti-corruption presidential candidate abducted in 2002.

Gordon Brown yesterday promised his union backers for the leadership of the Labour Party that as Prime Minister he will ensure British people get first refusal on jobs in Britain.

His remarks were seen as a clear shift from Tony Blair's defence of cheap foreign workers as a means of boosting the British economy. Mr Blair has been accused by trade union leaders of trying to undercut British workers by opening the door to migrant workers from Eastern Europe.

But speaking yesterday at a conference of the general workers union, the GMB, Mr Brown said: "I want to ensure that by working with employers in all sectors we can make sure that people have the skills and are given the help so that the jobs, when they come available, can go to those people in Britain who are registered and looking for jobs at the moment."

In a further reassurance to the unions, he said he wanted to ensure that 200,000 jobs in construction, the hospitality industry and the financial services for the London Olympics also went to British workers. It follows growing concern that many of the jobs on the 2012 Olympics would go to lower paid migrant workers from Poland and other new entrants to the European Union from the former Warsaw Pact countries.

There's been a lot of bleating in the West lately about Putin stomping on the last-remnants of Russia's free press, but after witnessing Western coverage of last month's cyber-attacks on the websites of Estonian banks and government offices, it's hard to say how the Western press is superior or even much different from the sleaziest Kremlin mouthpieces.

By now everyone and their iGrandma is quaking in their workstations over reports of "the world's first massive cyberstrike by a superpower on a tiny and almost defenseless neighbor," as Newsweek delicately described the attacks. Most outlets' versions were slightly more subtle, emphasis on "slightly."

With the tale of Russia's cyberwarfare against Estonia, they struck PR gold: the riots, the disenfranchised Russian minority, the police brutality, all of it vanished overnight, replaced by a new story about tiny, defenseless e-Stonia getting cyber-attacked by giant menacing Russia, "the first ever attack of its kind," an attack which the West is not prepared for.

The parliament's environment committee rejected a bid to exclude barometers from the ban, which will also affect thermometers and blood pressure gauges.

The draft law is designed to phase out the use of a substance harmful to health and the environment.

It still has to be approved by the full parliament, and by EU ministers.

An amendment to the law supporting the continued manufacture of mercury barometers was passed in the European Parliament last November, but not supported by the member states.

The author of the amendment, British Conservative MEP Martin Callanan: "If you get rid of the companies they will then be forced to close, and that removes all of the expertise."

"So the many thousands of people up and down the country that have an existing barometer cannot get it repaired and will therefore throw it away which will result in more mercury entering the environment."

But Mr Callanan has acknowledged there is now no hope of more support to save barometers.

I say they're nasty. Get rid of the bunch of them. I've been telling customers for years that having a mercurial barometer is like living next to a toxic waste dump: Maybe nothing will happen, but why take the risk if you don't have to?

The qustion remains, why did the BBC, who presumably should know better, illustrate a story about mercurial barometers with a picture of an aneroid?

After losing a court battle, anti-G8 campaigners are planning more protests, including sit-down blockades, as world leaders arrive for the summit. US President Bush met protests when his plane touched down Wednesday.

Protesters, who lost a last-ditch bid Tuesday for court permission to march close to this week's G8 summit, prepared in Germany to mount sit-down protest to block roads when the three-day event begins Wednesday.

 

Attac, a European group that believes globalization is dangerous and is leading the protests, said Tuesday it was not organizing sit-downs and did not belong to Block G8, a group overseeing a planned "blockade," but knew many Attac members would be taking part.

 

It said taking part in a sit-down was a misdemeanor, not a felony, and insisted German police only use "proportionate" force to clear sit-downs and avoid injuring anyone while doing so.

 

Road-block organizers promised Tuesday they would ask peaceful demonstrators to abandon any blockade if the Black Block, an informal network of violence-prone militants who don black clothing and masks and congregate in the marches, took over and the incident turned into a violent confrontation.

On the eve of his last G8 meeting, Tony Blair has made a last-ditch appeal to President Bush to repay Britain's loyalty over Iraq

Tony Blair will make a final appeal to George Bush to repay his loyal support over Iraq by signing up to a firm global target to cut carbon emissions at the G8 summit in Germany starting today.

Three weeks before he stands down as Prime Minister, Mr Blair will join forces with the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, in an attempt to secure a breakthrough in the battle against climate change. They will press a reluctant US president to agree that the world should cut carbon emissions by 50 per cent from 1990 levels by 2050.

Such an outcome from the last international gathering that Mr Blair will attend with President Bush would at last allow him to answer critics who claim he has got little in return for his "shoulder to shoulder" support for the US President, notably on Iraq and other issues related to the "war on terror".

At the summit in Heiligendamm, the Prime Minister will also try to cement another element of his much-vaunted "legacy" - the G8's commitment at the Gleneagles summit two years ago to boost aid to the developing world by $50bn (£26bn) a year by 2010, with half going to Africa. But there are growing fears that countries such as Italy and Canada are backsliding on their commitments. Frantic last-minute talks involving officials from the G8 leading industrial nations took place in Berlin yesterday but the final shape of the crucial decisions will probably go "up to the wire" at the leaders' meeting, which ends on Friday. UK officials said tough negotations lay ahead on global warming and Africa.

Since the G7/8 summits started at Rambouillet in France in 1975, the number of commitments has grown enormously. That first meeting had 14 while last years's had 317 ranging over more than 40 issues. The most comprehensive tracking of how well countries comply with promises is done by the G8 Research Group of the University of Toronto. The results can make gloomy reading with Italy, Japan, and especially Russia, often the worst offenders.

Article continues St Petersburg 2006

The summit concentrated on energy security, health and education. Analysis shows that G8 countries have done less work to put into practice what they preached in Russia than at any time since 2002. From 20 issues, ranging from the battle against polio to fighting transnational crime, the best performers were the UK, the US and Canada, all level pegging, followed by Germany, Russia, France, Japan and Italy. There was high compliance on renewable energy, African debt and terrorism but the annual developing world's gripe about trade seems justified: this comes third from the bottom of the list.

Gleneagles 2005

The summit in which Tony Blair showcased climate change and the predicament of Africa. Twenty-one priority commitments were made, and more than 65% were complied with. The UK came out with 95%, but the Toronto analysis points out that host countries tend to have higher marks. Seven of the 21 commitments at Gleneagles were assessed as having a perfect compliance score although the list shows how transitory progress in some areas can be: renewable energy, relief for Africa, Middle East reform, trans-national crime, terrorism, non-proliferation and assistance for tsunami relief efforts.

While leaders of rich nations gather for the G8 powwow in northeast Germany, a few miles away anti-G8 campaigners are staging their own parallel meeting -- an alternate G8 summit.

An alternative to the G8 summit of the world's leading industrial nations got under way Tuesday with debates on the environment, racism, war and social affairs.

 

Thousands of people are expected to attend the three-day gathering organized by advocacy groups, relief organizations, trade unions and anti-globalization activists, including the NGO Oxfam, the Attac movement and the powerful German trade union IG Metall.

06. Juni 2007  Die Kritiker der Globalisierung haben prominente Unterstützung aus dem konservativen Lager bekommen: Der frühere CDU-Generalsekretär Heiner Geißler trat der Organisation ,,Attac" bei. Im F.A.Z.-Interview spricht er über Gewalt und Betonköpfe. Herr Geißler, freuen Sie sich, dass morgen der G-8-Gipfel beginnt? Das ist ein Grund zur Sorge, denn die wichtigen Tagesordnungspunkte der Kanzlerin werden wohl nicht zu Beschlüssen für politisches Handeln führen. Sie wollen Beschlüsse und fürchten also nicht, dass sich acht Staaten zur illegitimen Weltregierung aufschwingen? Nein. Unser Wirtschaftssystem ist überholt, die Kapitalinteressen dominieren einseitig die Welt. Wenn man wie Ludwig Erhard geordneten Wettbewerb will, braucht man, solange es keine Weltregierung gibt, multilaterale Abkommen. Sie sind kürzlich Attac beigetreten. Könnte das Netzwerk ohne G-8-Gipfel überhaupt auf seine Anliegen aufmerksam machen? Mehr als hundert Organisationen von Greenpeace bis Pax Christi, vor allem aber auch Attac haben die G-8-Treffen gegenüber 1975 gewaltig verändert. Die reichen Länder wurden durch die Proteste sensibilisiert. Die Bundesregierung oder wenigstens die Kanzlerin hat erkannt, dass die friedlichen Demonstranten ihre Bundesgenossen sind. [...] Sie glauben nicht, dass Sie Ihrer Parteivorsitzenden, der gastgebenden Bundeskanzlerin, in den Rücken fallen? Das Gegenteil ist der Fall. Die Demonstrationen können der Kanzlerin nützen, auch wenn einige Betonköpfe dies nicht kapieren.

06. June 2007  Critics of globalization have received prominent support from the conservative camp: former CDU secretary-general Heiner Geißler has joined Attac. In an F.A.Z.-Interview he talks about violence and die-hard reactionaries. Mr. Geißler, are you pleased that the G8 summit begins tomorrow? It is a reason for concern, because the chancellor's important agenda items will not lead to resolutions for political action. So you want resolutions and are not afraid that the eight nations could constitute themselves as an illegitimate world government? No. Our economic system is outmoded, the interests of capital exclusively dominate the world. If we want regulated competition, like Ludwig Erhard, we need multilateral agreements as long as there is no world government. You recently joined Attac. Could this network gain attention for its goals at all without the G8 summit? Over a hundred organizations, from Greenpeace to Pax Christi, but above all Attac, have changed the G8 meetings considerably compared to 1975. The rich nations have been sensitized by the protests. The German government, or at least the chancellor, recognizes that the peaceful demonstrators are their allies. [...] And you don't believe that you are stabbing your party chairwoman, the chancellor hosting this event, in the back? The opposite is true. The demonstrators can be useful for the chancellor, even if a few die-hard reactionaries don't get it.

By way of context, here is Germany's most staunchly pro-business conservative news outlet granting Helmut Kohl's pitbull a forum for criticizing global capitalism. The mind boggles.

"Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease." - Kurt Vonnegut

PANAMA CITY, Panama - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday assailed Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez for the closure of a key opposition television station that has prompted mass protests, calling it the "sharpest and most acute" of his moves against democracy.

"Everyone recognizes that when you start closing down television stations because they express opposition to the leadership, that that is, in fact, a strong move against democracy," she said.

"It is not the first in Venezuela, but it is perhaps the sharpest and most acute," Rice told reporters aboard her plane en route to a meeting of foreign ministers of the Organization of American States in Panama.

At the gathering, she called on the group to send its secretary-general, Jose Miguel Insulza, to Venzuela to look into the closing of Radio Caracas Television, RCTN, and to provide a full report on his findings.

"Freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of conscience are not a thorn in the side of government, they are the beginning of justice in every society," Rice told the ministers.

"Disagreeing with your government is not unpatriotic and most certainly should not be a crime in any country, especially a democracy," she said.

Four years into the war that opened with "shock and awe," U.S. warplanes have again stepped up attacks in Iraq, dropping bombs at more than twice the rate of a year ago.

The airpower escalation parallels a nearly four-month-old security crackdown that is bringing 30,000 additional U.S. troops into Baghdad and its surroundings _ an urban campaign aimed at restoring order to an area riven with sectarian violence.

It also reflects increased availability of planes from U.S. aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. And it appears to be accompanied by a rise in Iraqi civilian casualties.

In the first 4 1/2 months of 2007, American aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of ground forces in Iraq, already surpassing the 229 expended in all of 2006, according to U.S. Air Force figures obtained by The Associated Press.

"Air operations over Iraq have ratcheted up significantly, in the number of sorties, the number of hours (in the air)," said Col. Joe Guastella, Air Force operations chief for the region. "It has a lot to do with increased pressure on the enemy by MNC-I" _ the Multinational Corps-Iraq _ "combined with more carriers."

The Air Force report did not break down the specific locations in Iraq where bombings have been stepped up. But U.S.-led forces also are locked in new and dangerous fronts against insurgents outside Baghdad in such places as Diyala, a province northeast of the capital.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a former leading official in the Bush administration, was sentenced to two and a half years in jail yesterday for perjury and obstruction of justice in relation to the Iraq war.

Libby, 56, was chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice-president, Dick Cheney, one of the leading advocates of the invasion. He is the highest-level US official to be sentenced to jail since the Iran-Contra affair 20 years ago.

Article continues In a statement issued by the White House, Mr Cheney stood by his former employee as "a man of the highest intellect, judgment and personal integrity".

The verdict could further damage the already diminished reputation of the Bush administration, especially if George Bush pardons him.

Ominously for Libby, the judge, Reggie Walton, indicated he was not going to allow the defence to string out an appeal to keep him from jail. Judge Walton is to rule next week on whether Libby should be in jail while awaiting an appeal hearing. Libby could be swapping a business suit for orangeoveralls within 45-60 days.

BEIRA, Mozambique -- Four years ago, the region surrounding this somnolent seaport, Mozambique's second largest city, offered hardly any AIDS-prevention advice to pregnant women. Today, two dozen health clinics give mothers-to-be H.I.V. counseling, tests and medicine to protect their newborns from catching the virus.

Clinic workers persuade four in five women to be tested, and one in six tests comes back positive. Last year alone, the clinics identified 5,018 women who were poised to pass H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, to their babies.

Beira might be regarded as a beachhead in Africa's effort to halt the spread of AIDS, but for one hitch: more than half of those women never returned to the clinics for medicine to limit the risk of transmitting H.I.V. to their children.

"After the test, the problems start," said Alberto Baptista, the provincial health director. "We lose a lot of women."

There is a bright side to sub-Saharan Africa's war on AIDS: hundreds of thousands of infected people once doomed to die are now receiving life-saving treatment. Fully 28 percent of those who need drug treatment get it, compared with just 2 percent in 2003.

But Beira also represents the less noticed, stubborn umbra -- the pandemic's continued spread. For each sub-Saharan African who was placed on anti-AIDS drugs last year, experts say, five more were newly infected. The region's rate of new infections has not budged since the late 1990s, experts say.

If current trends persist, sub-Saharan Africa, already reeling under the burden of nearly 25 million infected people and in the midst of a population boom, will face 36 million additional new infections by 2015, according to a report to be released this June by the Global H.I.V. Prevention Working Group. Treatment clinics will confront an ever-growing clientele and countless millions will die, said the panel of experts, which was convened by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A major new particle accelerator is to be built at Hamburg, Germany, that is capable of producing super-brilliant, ultra-short flashes of X-ray light.

The intense beam made in the 3.4km-long (2.1 miles) machine will probe how matter is pieced together atom by atom.

The properties of the X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) should make it possible, for example, to film the very moment a chemical reaction occurs.

Construction of the 986m euro (£668m) facility will begin later this year.

It will be placed underground. The XFEL will begin on the DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) site in Hamburg and then run north-west, fanning out to experimental stations beneath the neighbouring town of Schenefeld.

While uncollected rubbish piles up on Naples' streets because of a waste management crisis, a suburb can boast of a rare success story based on recycling. By Peter Popham Published: 06 June 2007

For 13 years now, Naples has been at war over its rubbish. In the past few weeks that war taken a severe turn for the worse, with huge mounds of uncollected, undifferentiated garbage rotting in the streets, prompting infuriated residents to pour petrol on them and set them on fire - sending clouds of poisonous fumes into the air.

Yet here at the heart of the region there is a town where they are doing everything right by their rubbish: a town of 20,000 souls that has done exactly what the rest of Naples (not to mention the UK) should have done years ago, and is beginning to reap the rewards.

Mercato San Severino is beyond the medieval tenements and pompous Bourbon relics of Naples, and beyond its catastrophic modern suburbs too. It is cradled in the steep green hills of Salerno, where there are vines and fields of aubergines not far from the middle of town and the scent in the air is more the jasmine and honeysuckle of the Amalfi coast than the stink of a big town. Yet we are only a few miles from the chaos of Naples.

The local twang is, to this foreigner's ears, indistinguishable. The old residential streets of the town have the same cramped, squashed-in look, narrow pavements and high facades as other towns in the region. There are more churches than you can shake a stick at.

Fat may be a feminist issue, but it's also one communists have to deal with. Enter the waltz, which is seen as a quick-quick-slow solution to an alarming rise in obesity among Chinese schoolchildren and is about to make its way on to the school curriculum.

Obesity is a new problem for China. Chinese children are traditionally slim and active, raised on diets of rice, fish and vegetables. The only sweets on offer were White Rabbits, small chewy sweets dispensed rarely to reward good behaviour.

These days, China's waistbands are being stretched as the country's economy grows by double-digit percentages every year, translating into poor dietary habits. The China Daily quoted a Ministry of Education notice saying that seven sets of dance steps had been designed to "suit the physical and psychological characteristics of students at different ages". One of the measures involves boys and girls in senior high schools learning the waltz.

"Each dance set lasts four to five minutes, and will be performed during class breaks or in extra-curricular time. They will not replace the physical exercise course," said the China Daily. Videos of the first routine will be sent to provincial education departments, and teachers will be required to learn the dances. To keep things varied, the ministry plans to bring out new sets every two years.

More than 2 million people have been moved from their homes over the past 20 years, many of them forcibly, to clear space for the Olympic Games, a human rights group reported yesterday.

Three quarters of the displaced people are in China, where the authorities are clearing large swaths of residential districts ahead of next year's Olympics, according to a new report by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE).

Article continues The report said that 1.25 million had already been moved from their homes due to "Olympics-related redevelopment" with an another quarter million evictions expected before the games start.

The Chinese foreign ministry rejected the statistics as "groundless". It said that just over 6,000 households had been demolished and that the homeowners had been compensated and resettled.

However, the COHRE report insists that its statistics are conservative, and do not include rural migrants living in the overcrowded central districts of Beijing who the group says will be forced out.

ROME -- Some Holy See buildings will start using solar energy, reflecting Pope Benedict XVI's concern about conserving the Earth's resources, a Vatican engineer said Tuesday. The roof of the Paul VI auditorium will be redone next year, with its cement panels replaced with photovoltaic cells to convert sunlight into electricity, engineer Pier Carlo Cuscianna said.

The 6,300-seat auditorium is used for the pontiff's general audiences on Wednesdays in winter and in bad weather during the rest of the year. Concerts in honor of pontiffs are also staged in the hall, with its sweeping stage.

The cells will produce enough electricity to illuminate, heat or cool the building, Cuscianna said.

"Since the auditorium isn't used every day, the (excess) energy will feed into the network providing (the Vatican) with power, so other Vatican offices can use the energy," he said.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Although it has been almost a month since fires swept through Griffith Park in Los Angeles, officials still are not permitting film and television shoots as crews continue to clean up the damage. In fact, the park is closed for shooting indefinitely.

(...)Cedar Grove, a miniforest that has been used for everything from "The Last Boy Scout" to "Van Helsing," suffered about 30 percent damage but eventually will be usable. The Griffith Park Clubhouse, where Clint Eastwood shot a flashback scene for "Letters From Iwo Jima," also was spared. The historic merry-go-round -- where "The Prestige" shot and which was the scene of James Dean's first acting gig by way of a 1950 Pepsi commercial -- was unaffected, but the areas around it have been closed. The old zoo picnic grounds also remain closed.

The closures, officials said, are for safety reasons. Trees hollowed out by a blaze, for example, might not seem damaged but could topple over. Rocks might remain superheated long after a fire has been vanquished.

The park, with its varied natural landscapes and proximity to the studios, is a magnet for production. According to nonprofit production service organization FilmL.A., the park saw 217 production days for features in 2006 and 318 for television projects. The organization said the park's closure displaces two productions per day.