【中廣新聞／劉剛】

澳洲昨天碰到上70年以來最大的沙塵暴，狂風把1200公里外的紅土吹上空中，隨後再散落在雪黎附近，使得雪黎昨天白天一片昏暗、宛如世界末日。

澳洲媒體報導，昨天這場沙塵暴，估計每小時有四千公噸的沙塵吹過雪梨。今天沙塵暴已經過去，雪梨居民開始清洗轎車、門前道路和家中小狗。

雖然雪黎市區民眾受到極大的震驚，但那些居住在澳洲野外地區的居民，對於沙塵暴早就習以為常。一名住在荒野地區的婦女，寫信給澳洲《每日電 訊報》，嘲笑雪黎人少見多怪。她說，城市居民嬌生慣養，根本不瞭接澳洲荒野居民生活。在荒野地區，沙塵暴是家常便飯，人們經常都必須配戴口罩才能出門。

Sydney dust storm 'like Mars'

Sydney residents woke up to an ethereal scene on Wednesday

A storm which blew in from the Australian outback blanketed Sydney in a layer of orange dust. Here, residents describe the bizarre and frightening scene.

Tanya Ferguson said the dust was the weirdest thing she had seen in her life, turning the city into a scene from another planet.

"It was like being on Mars," she told the BBC News website.

"I haven't been there, obviously, but I imagine that's what the sky would look like."

It was like being in the outback, but it was right here in the city Tanya Ferguson Your pictures: dust storm

She said she woke to a massive gust of wind blowing through her windows early in the morning.

"The whole room was completely orange. I couldn't believe my eyes," she said.

Ms Ferguson said she initially thought there was a bush fire. When she finally decided to venture outside, she said the entire city was covered in a film of orange dust.

"All the cars are just orange - and the orange was so intense," she said by phone from Sydney, where she has lived for the past six years.

"It was like being in the outback, but it was right here in the city."

Ms Ferguson said the sky was overcast and it was very dusty, making her sneeze a lot.

Public transport was disrupted and the roads were clogged as drivers struggled in the difficult conditions, but she said some people went to their jobs, and she saw a few residents wearing face masks.

By evening, Ms Ferguson said there were blue skies over Sydney and that it was returning to a normal day.

'Pink until noon'

Fellow Sydneysider Nick Beaugeard said his four young children were really frightened when they woke up on Wednesday morning.

"There was a really red glow inside the house, really crimson" he said. "It looked like the end of the world."

It was like driving through a pea soup of fog, except it was bright red Nick Beaugeard

After the initial shock, he said the children got really excited and went off to school where they said it was "pink until noon".

Mr Beaugeard - who moved to Australia from the UK in 1998 - had to drive to work from the Northern Beaches area because the ferries were closed.

"It was like driving through a pea soup of fog," he said, "except it was bright red".

He said the lights looked blue because it was so red outside.

Mr Beaugeard said his wife - who is an asthmatic - was fine despite the blanket of dust and fog.

"She went out with a scarf over her mouth and she came back without it," he said.

He said the dust left everyone with a dry mouth, and a really gritty taste, but caused no breathing problems for his wife.

'Armageddon'

Andrew Hawkins, who lives in Northmead, about 20km from the centre of Sydney, says he was scared at first because it looked like the end of the world.

"This morning's dust storm was unbelievable… It was like waking up to see that Armageddon is upon us," he wrote in.

Pictures fail to capture the eerie nature of the scene which surrounded us this morning Andrew Hawkins

Mr Hawkins said he thought his eyes were playing up, or that there had been a nuclear explosion or a bush fire.

He described an ethereal scene of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House as he rode the train to work.

"To see a city of such beauty shrouded in red, was a sight which cannot be described - even pictures fail to capture the eerie nature of the scene which surrounded us this morning," Mr Hawkins added.

Another Sydney resident, Kirsty Ainsworth, said it was like being in a film.

"It was really, really bizarre. It was actually like being in a movie - the Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon," she said.

Ms Ainsworth said there had been storm warnings on Monday and Tuesday, but the dust storm took everybody by surprise.

"It came out of nowhere," she said, adding that visibility had improved enough for her to make it to work by around 0830 local time.

"Everybody's cars were caked in orange dust, and there's still sand everywhere," she said.

banning cars from the street for a day

Cologne clears its streets of cars

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The annual Car Free Day attracts large crowds onto the streets

Most inner city dwellers in Cologne have little use for a car. But what are the alternative options for travelling, once you get outside the city centre?

Germans are well known for their love of cars - especially the high performance variety. There are over 41 million private cars in Germany – that's one for every two residents. But last week, cities across Europe participated in an initiative aimed at getting people to consider other kinds of transport - by banning cars from the street for a day.

Report: Eva Wutke

Searching for Chopin, Finding Poland’s Past

The now almost-empty Pilsudski Square, where Chopin first lived when he moved to Warsaw. More Photos >

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: September 23, 2009

WARSAW — When President Obama announced last week that he was canceling plans to place missile interceptors in Poland, aggrieved Poles, who wanted them partly because Russians didn’t, noted the date, Sept. 17. It was the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland.

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About all that remains of Chopin in Warsaw is his heart, which is interred in the Holy Cross Church, above. More Photos »

As Roger Cohen wrote in The International Herald Tribune, it was “the rough equivalent for the Poles of their announcing concessions to a U.S. foe on 9/11.”

It’s nearly impossible not to run into some ghosts of the past here, even if you’re just a cultural tourist. The other day I went looking for what still exists of Chopin’s trail. Next year is the bicentennial of Chopin’s birth. Concerts, congresses and the famous Chopin piano competition, held here every five years, are all planned for the spring, along with the opening of a refurbished Chopin museum next to the Warsaw Conservatory, where he studied.

“Chopin is our symbol and tourist product but more than that,” said Albert Grudzinski, deputy director of the Chopin Institute, who oversees the competition, “even during Communist times culture was what kept people together here. It was our window to the world.”

And it’s of course the reverse too, a window onto Poland from the outside. Warsaw is where Chopin spent roughly half his life. He moved to the city from the countryside as an infant when his father, Nicolas, started teaching French at the Warsaw Lyceum, then established himself as a homegrown prodigy at the keyboard and as a composer.

But the Warsaw he knew turned to rubble and was only partly rebuilt. Paris has Chopin’s grave, where fans leave cough drops. In London a plaque marks the town house where he spent a few miserable weeks, ill and huddled in his overcoat in front of a fire, from which he briefly roused himself for what would be his last public performance, a benefit for the Friends of Poland in 1838. (He “played like an angel,” reported his best student, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska.)

Warsaw, on the other hand, has surprisingly little that is authentic left of its most famous artist. Looking for where he grew up reveals not many original sites from his past but, as in a W. G. Sebald novel and maybe more usefully, a palimpsest of ruin and memory.

Wojciech Mlotkowski, a young Polish tour guide, was standing in Pilsudski Square carrying a hand-held GPS program of Chopin landmarks around the city. Its virtualness turned out to be a nice metaphor.

“This is where Chopin first lived in Warsaw,” he said, sweeping his hand across a broad stone plaza, occupied only by a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Saxon Palace used to be here, Mr. Mlotkowski said. It housed the lyceum where Nicolas taught and a few apartments for teachers’ families, including Chopin’s. When the Nazis occupied Poland, they renamed this Adolf Hitler Platz, then blew up the palace and most of the rest of the city in response to the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The tomb is nearly all that survived from what had been the palace arcade.

In front of it, where the plaza now faces a new Norman Foster-designed office building, John Paul II, in 1979, just after his election as pope, exhorted thousands of his countrymen to stand up to Communism. On the very same spot, decades before, the huge onion-domed Alexander Nevsky Cathedral towered over the city. Built by the Russian imperial rulers of Poland, and finished in 1912, it was demolished less than 15 years later in an act of vengeance by newly independent Poles. There’s talk these days about rebuilding the Saxon Palace but not the cathedral, whose destruction is an embarrassment the Poles would evidently prefer to forget.

“All very interesting,” I said. I was gazing at nothing. “But what about Chopin?”

Mr. Mlotkowski shrugged, as if to say, What did I expect?

A few blocks away a small sign advertised Chopin’s salon in the Czapski Palace. Like the rest of this part of the city, the palace is a postwar reconstruction. The building Chopin knew was flattened by the Germans. The composer wrote his two piano concertos and first mazurkas in a room in the original palace that hasn’t been reconstructed.

Instead what’s supposed to be the Chopin family’s second floor drawing room, based on a sketch made a dozen years after Chopin left town, passes for an ersatz shrine to the composer. Empire chairs and gilt-framed mirrors, none his, face a Pleyel piano, also not his. A wood chest, according to a label, comes from the estate of the great-great-granddaughter of Chopin’s sister Ludwika. The whole room has the faded, musty air of a bygone Soviet hotel.

At least Chopin left his heart in Warsaw. Sheila Cleary, a tourist from Wicklow, Ireland, was looking for it at the Holy Cross Church the other morning. After Chopin died in Paris, his sister brought his heart back here, as he wished. It was interred in the church. A music-loving German general — a notorious war criminal, as it happened — helped save it when the Nazis leveled the church after the uprising.

“I wanted to find something,” Ms. Cleary said, her voice trailing off. She had spent a couple of baffled days, apparently, looking for but more or less not finding Chopin.

He was a die-hard nationalist. He even declined to arrange a return to Poland so long as Russia occupied the country, which meant that having left in 1830, at 20, he never saw his homeland again. Maybe he would have appreciated how his absence now speaks volumes about what happened here later.

Then again, he’s ubiquitous anyway. A pair of Russian pianists, Nikolai Lugansky and Vadim Rudenko, gave a recital in the Warsaw Philharmonic Chamber Hall as part of an annual Chopin festival the other evening. They played the Rondo in C before a packed house full of young people.

The piece is pure fluff, utterly forgettable, but everybody listened in rapt silence. Even what you might call, substance-wise, the musical version of Chopin’s ghost stirs Polish pride.

Warsaw might have suffered plenty since he died. But at nearly 200, he’s doing just fine.

Tucson

Tucson
　　（注1） 图森：Tucson 美国亚利桑那州南部城市。

Dharamshala

面見達賴 美特使轉交歐巴瑪親筆信

〔編 譯陳成良、記者謝文華／綜合報導〕美國白宮資深顧問及國務院西藏事務官員等一行，十三日在印度達蘭薩拉西藏流亡政府會見西藏精神領袖達賴喇嘛，並轉交一封 歐巴瑪總統的親筆信函。這是歐巴瑪就任以來首度派出最高層級官員，與達賴針對西藏議題交換意見。達賴辦公室十四日也發表聲明，達賴喇嘛希望能在歐巴瑪十一 月訪問中國後與他會面。達賴喇嘛預定十月再次訪問美國。

據稱代表團團長、白宮資深顧問賈芮特與達賴討論到，在解決西藏問題方面，華府能提供 何種協助，並向達賴重申歐巴瑪的承諾，支持西藏人民保護其獨特的宗教、語言和文化遺產，並確保藏人的人權與公民自由受到尊重。外界認為，賈芮特等人此行目 的，應是歐巴瑪希望在訪問中國前，先了解達賴喇嘛想法，並顯示歐巴瑪對達賴的重視與尊重。專家認為，此舉可能有利於達賴特使與中國當局恢復會談。

Dharamshala
Dharamsala, town (2001 est. pop. 19,200), Himachal Pradesh, N India. Located on the slopes of the Kangra valley at the edge of Dhauladhar range in the outer Himalayas. Dharamsala is noted as the residence of the Dalai Lama. The lower section is a largely Indian market town; the upper section, also known as McLeod Ganj, is a former British hill station and site of the Tibetan government in exile since 1960. The 8th earl of Elgin is buried in the churchyard of St. John in the Wilderness in Upper Dharamsala.