US and Italy target mafia suspects in joint raid

Drugs from South America transited through the container port of Gioia Tauro in Calabria, hidden in cans of fruit. Photograph: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images

Italian and US officers arrested dozens of people on Tuesday in a joint operation that exposed alleged drug trafficking links between New York's Cosa Nostra Gambino family and the 'Ndrangheta mafia in Italy.

Andrea Grassi, a police chief in charge of the two-year investigation, told the Italian news channel SkyTG24 that 26 people were arrested and 40 more placed under investigation in Italy and the US.

Eight of the people arrested are alleged members of the Gambinos, one of the "five families" that have traditionally controlled the mafia in New York.

Other arrests were carried out in the Calabria region in southern Italy, the bastion of the 'Ndrangheta mafia which plays a lynchpin role in the global cocaine trade.

"The charges range from mafia association to international drug trafficking to money laundering," Grassi said. "This investigation reveals a criminal relationship between a 'Ndrangheta family and the Gambino family in New York."

The investigation found that drugs from South America transited through the container port of Gioia Tauro in Calabria, hidden in cans of fruit.

FBI agents travelled to Italy to carry out arrests together with Italian police

Prostitution crackdown in China province after TV investigation

Suspected prostitutes and their customers squat on the floor at a Dongguan hotel during a crackdown. Photograph: Imaginechina/REX

Authorities in the southern province of Guangdong have announced an impending three month-long anti-prostitution campaign, days after atelevision exposé in Dongguan prompted a dramatic raid.

The exposé and heavy-handed response have proved surprisingly controversial in China, where prostitution is technically illegal but practically ubiquitous. Internet users and human rights groups have criticised authorities for shaming and intimidating female sex workers rather than offering them help.

The UN estimates that four to six million women work in the country's sex industry nationwide, many of them in brothels thinly disguised as hair salons, massage parlours and karaoke bars.

In the exposé, which the state broadcaster CCTV aired on Sunday night, undercover reporters visited a range of upscale hotels and karaoke bars in the city of Dongguan, known as a prostitution hot spot.

In one segment, a reporter enters a room divided by one-way glass; on the other side, two scantily-clad women dance provocatively to a Lady Gaga song. A venue employee identifies them by their numbers, prices, and hometowns. "After you choose the one you like, she will come out and provide a special service," he explains. Later, the reporter calls the police to report prostitution, but none show up.

According to state media, the city responded to the broadcast by dispatching 6,525 police officers in a raid. They arrested 67 people and closed 12 entertainment venues. Pictures posted online showed lines of men and women kneeling on the floor in the middle of a hotel lobby, their heads down and their hands cuffed, surrounded by scores of uniformed police.

According to the state-run China Daily newspaper, Guangdong authorities will soon launch a three-month, province-wide crackdown on prostitution. "Local police officers who are found protecting the sex industry or who organise sexual services will be severely punished," said Li Chunsheng, the province's vice-governor, according to the newspaper. Eight officers have already been suspended.

A spokesman at the Dongguan public security bureau refused to confirm the report or comment on the current condition of the detained sex workers. "All of the information that we're willing to release is already available online," he said. "We don't have any more information at this time."

The crackdown has elicited a surprising degree of sympathy online – on Monday, "Dongguan, hang in there," and "Dongguan, don't cry" were hot topics on Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblog. Many users debated whether China should legalise prostitution. Some speculated that the report and crackdown were the product of an internal power struggle.

"I asked a Dongguan friend what he thought about all of this, and he said: there's just too much demand from clients – it's not like guns or drugs, which are scarce resources," wrote one user. "Unless you return to the 1950s, [prostitution] will be impossible to eradicate. The crackdown is nothing but a show." The post has been deleted by censors.

"This is the first time in memory that you have a large public debate [about prostitution] in which a non-moralistic or punitive point of view dominates," said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher atHuman Rights Watch.

"These anti-prostitution, anti-pornography sweeps are causing more harm than good," he added. "They're ineffective in terms of reining in sex work in China (meaning reducing prostitution) but they nonetheless cause a lot of abuses".

China treats prostitution as an administrative violation rather than a criminal offence, and sex workers can face fines of up to £500 or 15 days' detention. Because the fines go directly into public security coffers, Bequelin said, police often force detained sex workers into confessing. Repeated crackdowns usually force sex workers to operate more clandestinely, making them more vulnerable to abuse

Syrian peace talks enter second round as Homs ceasefire extended

The Syrian deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad, makes a statement to the media at the second round of negotiation between the Syrian government and the opposition. Photograph: Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA

Syria's government and opposition began a second round of UN-mediated talks in Geneva on Monday but failed to meet face to face, as a fragile ceasefire and "humanitarian pause" in the central city of Homs was extended for three days to allow the evacuation of more vulnerable civilians from a besieged rebel-held area.

Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian diplomat chairing the conference, met each side separately to urge them to focus on the two main issues of stopping the fighting, which has killed an estimated 136,000 people, and working out how to set up a "transitional governing body" to replace the current government in Damascus.

In an eight-page document seen by Reuters news agency, Brahimi said: "The two issues are among the most complex and sensitive and both subjects need treatment over several sessions and long discussions."

It remains unclear how he intends to break the impasse over the future role of Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. Assad has insisted he will not step down, while the opposition says he must go.

Brahimi appeared to signal a more discreet approach by failing to hold a press conference at UN headquarters after Monday's talks, as he did following every session during the first week at the end of January. On Friday he is to meet senior US and Russian diplomats in the hope that Washington and Moscow will exercise their influence with the warring parties.

Outside the Palais des Nations the media war continued. Faisal Mekdad, Syria's deputy foreign minister, said: "We can't achieve a thing until massacres in Syria come to a stop." It would be a waste of time to discuss Assad's departure, he added. The official delegation also presented a document to Brahimi formulating the now familiar demand that "terrorism" – its blanket term for all opposition to the president – must be defeated before political issues can be discussed.

But the Syrian opposition coalition (SOC) issued a report showing that the government has killed more than 1,805 people since the start of the Geneva II process on 22 January. It said at least 834 people had been killed in Aleppo alone by more than 130 barrel bombs. It also referred to evidence released by international human rights groups about the large-scale demolition of entire neighbourhoods with explosives and bulldozers.

"These operations are a war crime," said Monzer Akbik, spokesman for the SOC president, Ahmed Jarba. "They are intended only to punish civilians, and are one more example of the terror which Bashar al-Assad sows across Syria. His time is up – he must leave power and allow us to rebuild what he has destroyed."

The first round of talks had aimed to build confidence between the warring parties by trying to agree a humanitarian ceasefire in Homs but the truce was not finalised until afterwards and was broken soon after it began. On Monday, when the first – repeatedly-violated – truce expired, it was extended for a further three days.

During the day about 300 more people were evacuated from besieged areas of the city, bringing to around 1,000 the number brought out since last Friday. Some food has also been delivered, said Khaled Erksoussi, of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

The SOC said it had expanded its presence in Geneva to include representatives of armed groups in a "military and security team" – an apparent reflection of the opposition's need to demonstrate support from fighters on the ground inside Syria who distrust diplomacy and fear it may be playing into Assad's hands.

In other developments, a third shipment of chemical weapons from the government's arsenal was reported to have left Syria, which could allay concerns that the Damascus government is not complying with obligations that were agreed with the US and Russia last September.

Fighters from the hardline rebel Islamist group Jund al-Aqsa have killed at least 21 civilians and 20 pro-government militiamen in Maan, a mainly Alawite village in Hama province, said the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). The government asked Brahimi to condemn those killings.

The jihadist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which is linked to al-Qaida, was reported to have withdrawn from the eastern province of Deir al-Zour after days of heavy fighting with rival rebel groups

Qatar introduces higher standards for welfare of World Cup migrant workers

An artist's impression of the Al Wakrah stadium complex, which is already under construction in Doha. Photograph: Getty Images

The organising committee for the Qatar 2022 World Cup has promised that contractors who build its stadiums will be held to high standards on the welfare of migrant workers, in the wake of trenchant and sustained criticism.

But the promises, made after demands for a progress update from football's governing body Fifa, do not deal with wider concerns about workers engaged in the £137bn construction boom underpinning World Cup infrastructure.

Faced with a public meeting on the issue in the European parliament on Thursday, the renamed Qatar 2022 supreme committee for delivery and legacy has insisted it is making "tangible progress" toward reform.

Qatari authorities have been heavily criticised by human rights groups and trade unions since a Guardian investigation revealed the scale of the abuse of migrant workers from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and elsewhere who are the backbone of the World Cup construction and the country's wider Qatar Vision 2030 building project.

The Guardian revealed that at least 185 Nepalese workers died in Qatar in 2013, many from heart failure or workplace accidents. Official figures revealing the death tolls among workers from other countries have yet to emerge.

Migrant construction workers queue up for the bus back to their accommodation camp in Doha. Photograph: EPA

The fresh commitments have been published in a 50-page document that sets out detailed standards on payment of wages, accommodation and welfare and promises to introduce a tough new inspection regime. It says that it addresses "some of the most critical concerns highlighted in recent reports about working and living conditions of workers in Qatar's construction centre".

It is essentially an updated version of the worker's charter published last March , designed to underline the extent to which the World Cup organising committee is taking the issue seriously.

However, it only deals with the construction of the stadiums, which is due to begin in earnest this year. Early work has begun on Al Wakrah stadium and four other stadiums will be in various stages of construction throughout the year.

Just 38 workers, of the hundreds of thousands engaged on infrastructure projects, are currently working specifically on World Cup stadiums.

The charter does not deal with the wider issue of holding to account the myriad contractors and subcontractors working on Vision 2030 and the infrastructure that will underpin the World Cup.

"The supreme committee firmly believes that all workers engaged on its projects, and those of the other infrastructure developers in Qatar, have a right to be treated in a manner that ensures at all times their wellbeing, health, safety and security," says the document.

Human rights groups have called for more fundamental reform of thekafala system that ties workers to their employer and forbids them from leaving the country without permission. It has led to situations that have been compared to modern day slavery, where unscrupulous middlemen charge large sums to find employment for workers in Qatar and other Gulf states but leave them working long days in unsafe and insanitary conditions – and, in some cases, without pay.

Hassan al-Thawadi, the Sheffield University-educated secretary general of the organising committee, has consistently argued that hosting the World Cup can help raise standards. "We have always believed that Qatar's hosting of the Fifa World Cup would be a catalyst to accelerate positive initiatives already being undertaken by Qatar, which will leave a legacy of enhanced, sustainable and meaningful progress in regards to worker welfare across the country," he said.

"We already see this progress taking place across Qatar on a daily basis and will continue to work hard to make our vision become the ever-present reality on the ground."

The supreme committee hopes that it will encourage wider change by setting its own standards.

The ministry of labour and social affairs (Molsa) says it has increased the number of trained labour inspectors by 30% and carried out 11,500 spot checks in the past three months.

Dr Abdullah Saleh Mubarak Al Khulaifi, the labour minister, insisted it was determined to apply existing labour laws. "Qatar is a young, developing nation experiencing a period of economic growth unprecedented in history, anywhere in the world. We cannot achieve these plans without the help of migrant workers," he said.

"Molsa will continue to support in enforcing these standards, and Qatar's existing labour laws, and to work with other government bodies in Qatar in holding accountable employers who fail to uphold these laws."

Critics have continually argued that not enough is being done to hold subcontractors to existing labour laws. Fifa first promised to demand higher standards on workers' rights in 2011 and has been criticised for not doing more to force change.

Last month, it wrote to the Qatari organisers demanding a detailed report on the improvement of working conditions in the months since president Sepp Blatter visited the emir in November following the Guardian's revelations.

Fifa executive committee member Theo Zwanziger has been tasked with working with the International Trade Union Confederation to resolve concerns about Qatar. "What we need are clear rules and steps that will build trust and ensure that the situation, which is unacceptable at the moment, improves in a sustainable manner," he said last month.

Nicholas McGeehan, Gulf researcher at Human Rights Watch, said it was too soon to claim significant progress and called for wider reforms. "The standards are detailed and thorough and the supreme committee deserves credit for its efforts to improve standards on the projects within its control, but it is far too hasty to talk about tangible progress. These standards provide theoretical protection to a small fraction of Qatar's migrant workers," he said.

"They are not legally binding, they do not guarantee workers' rights to change employer,or their right to leave the country or their right to bargain collectively for decent pay and conditions if things go wrong. If the Qatari government is serious about reform, it should apply these standards to the whole migrant worker population, back them up with sanctions, and get to work on reform of the kafala system."

The European parliament's human rights subcommittee will hold a public hearing on Thursday to address the issues surrounding migrant workers.

A report from law firm DLA Piper into the deaths of migrant workers, commissioned after the Guardian's original report and allegations from organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, is also due to be completed in the coming weeks.

US relaxes strict rules on potential immigrants with limited terrorist links

Immigration regulations had imposed restrictions that 'no rational person' would find reasonable. Photograph: David Franklin/Getty Images

The Obama administration has eased the rules for would-be asylum-seekers, refugees and others who hope to come to or stay in the US and who gave “limited” support to terrorists or terrorist groups. The change is one of President Barack Obama’s first actions on immigration since he pledged during his State of the Union address last month to use more executive directives.

The Department of Homeland Security and the State Department now say that people considered to have provided “limited material support” to terrorists or terrorist groups are no longer automatically barred from the US.

A post-September 11 provision in immigrant law, known as “terrorism related inadmissibility grounds”, had affected anyone considered to have given support. With little exception, the provision has been applied rigidly to those trying to enter the US and those already here but wanting to change their immigration status.

The Homeland Security Department said in a statement that the rule change, which was announced last week and not made in concert with Congress, gives the government more discretion, but will not open the country to terrorists or their sympathisers. People seeking refugee status, asylum and visas, including those already in the United States, will still be checked to make sure they do not pose a threat to national security or public safety, the department said.

In the past, the provision has been criticised for allowing few exemptions beyond providing medical care or acting under duress. The change now allows officials to consider whether the support was not only limited but potentially part of “routine commercial transactions or routine social transactions”.

The change does not specifically address “freedom fighters” who may have fought against an established government, including members of rebel groups who have led revolts in Arab Spring uprisings.

In late 2011, Citizenship and Immigration Services said about 4,400 affected cases were on hold as the government reviewed possible exemptions to the rule. It is unclear how many of those cases are still pending.

Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said the rule change will help people he described as deserving refugees and asylum-seekers.

“The existing interpretation was so broad as to be unworkable,” Leahy said in a statement. He said the previous rule barred applicants for reasons “that no rational person would consider”.

Republican lawmakers argued that the administration is relaxing rules designed by Congress to protect the country from terrorists. Representative Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House judiciary committee, called the change naive, given today’s global terrorist threats.

“President Obama should be protecting US citizens rather than taking a chance on those who are aiding and abetting terrorist activity and putting Americans at greater risk,” Goodlatte said.

Meanwhile, on the prospects of broader immigration reform legislation this year, Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and one of chief architects of the Senate’s bipartisan immigration plan, offered what he said was a simple solution to address concerns expressed by the House leader, John Boehner, that Obama would not fully enforce any laws that might be approved.

“Let’s enact the law this year but simply not let it actually start until 2017 after President Obama’s term is over,” Schumer said on NBC’s Meet the Press programme.

“Now, I think the rap against him that he won’t enforce the law is false. He’s deported more people than any president but you could actually have the law start in 2017 without doing much violence to it.”

Schumer said it would be difficult to pass immigration reform in 2015 or 2016 when the next presidential election season opens because Republican candidates would be staking out conservative positions on immigration in order to differentiate themselves from Democrats. 

Shirley Temple silenced critics with successful roles in US diplomacy

Shirley Temple-Black represents the United States at a 1972 United Nations conference in Stockholm. Photograph: Alain Nogues/Sygma/Corbis

Appearing on film as a safari-suited missionary being boiled in a cauldron by savages during a “cannibal-taming expedition” to Africa was not the most diplomatic debut for a future American ambassador to the region.

“Fortunately for her and the United States,” Shirley Temple-Black’s biographer Robert Windeler wrote later, the then-five-year-old’s 1933 short Kid In Africa was never shown in Ghana, where some 40 years later she would arrive as President Gerald Ford’s envoy to Accra.

It was an unexpected new role for the former child star, even after she had become active in Republican politics, run unsuccessfully for Congress in California in 1967 as a Vietnam hawk, and served as a delegate to the UN general assembly for President Richard Nixon.

She attributed the African appointment to her impressing Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser, with expertise on Namibia – which she claimed to have pointed out to him on a map – during a discussion at the White House in 1969. “I know you will do well over there,” he told her.

Professor David Apter, a Ghana specialist at Yale University, described the nomination as “a slap in the face” and “an insult to Ghana”. In the New York Times, WV Shannon accused Ford of turning the field of American ambassadorships into a “dumping ground” for political allies.

Yet soon after her December 1974 arrival in the west African state, which was led at the time by Colonel Ignatius Acheampong following a military coup, Temple-Black was dazzling her hosts and silencing her critics at home.

“She has proved herself to be a capable, wonderful person who is determined to work for the good of others,” wrote the Ghanaian Times. “Mrs Temple-Black is a charming lady, a family woman and an astute diplomat and … entirely deserves her appointment,” said the Echo, another newspaper.

She eschewed the stuffy protocol of the State Department, wandering around markets in Accra wearing traditional African prints, shouting greetings in local languages and even dancing with stall-holders. Babies were named after her by local women, according to reports at the time.

And she proved herself to be a tireless advocate for increased American aid to the country. “I am trying to assist Ghana to receive some things that it needs very badly and that I think we can manage to provide,” she told an interviewer in 1976.

Returning to Washington later that year, she became the first woman to serve as White House chief of protocol. Despite her roots in the glamorous world of Hollywood, the job was not a good fit. “A lot of parties for one who doesn’t like parties,” she recalled later.

Shirley Temple-Black, US delegate to the United Nations general assembly, outside the UN in 1969. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The election of Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, at the end of that year gave her the perfect opportunity to escape. But four years later she returned to government service, working for the administration of her fellow Republican and former actor Ronald Reagan as a teacher to ambassadors and their spouses.

She longed for one more diplomatic posting, and angled publicly for South Africa, then still locked in apartheid. “I like to solve problems, and this is probably one of the biggest ones we’ve got in the world right now,” she told CNN’s Larry King in 1989, at the age of 61.

It was not to be. But while promoting her memoir later that year, she received a call from President George Bush, asking her to be his ambassador to Czechoslovakia. While other Bush nominees struggled to win confirmation by the Democrat-controlled Senate, she sailed through.

Arriving at a time of great tumult in central and eastern Europe, she watched as protesters were beaten by riot police during a 10,000-strong rally against Milos Jakes’s Communist regime in Prague’s Wenceslas Square that October, and the playwright Vaclav Havel was arrested.

By then, Temple-Black had already made a provocative intervention, channeling the country’s founders by declaring in a speech that “individual freedom could lead to a new Czechoslovakia and a more prosperous and happy existence for every one of its citizens”.

In December, the pro-democratic “velvet revolution” was complete, and Temple-Black had shown herself to be on the right side of history. Her bosses were delighted. “She’s doing a wonderful job,” said James Baker, the secretary of state. His deputy, Lawrence Eagleburger jokingly credited her with heralding “the end of the ship of state and the beginning of the Good Ship Lollipop”. She stayed on in Prague until July 1992, before finally retiring from government.

Despite her achievements in an age of male-dominated diplomacy, Temple-Black dismissed the notion that she was a feminist role model. While her appointments might have been “a manifestation of the growing recognition that women have a creative, constructive role to play”, as she said in 1976, she preferred “the strong arms of my husband around me to any women’s lib”.

US envoy visits Okinawa amid long-running row over military bases

The US ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, arrives in Okinawa. Photograph: AP

The azure waters lapping at the sandy beaches of the city of Nago could have leapt straight out of a brochure. But the yells coming from a nearby football field at Camp Schwab, overlooking the north-east coast of Okinawa, offer a clue to the area's envisioned future, not as a holiday destination but as a bedrock of the region's security with thousands of US troops at its core.

Here, groups of marines are being put through their paces during an exercise in armed, non-lethal, combat. "Open your eyes!" barks an officer as his charges brave a faceful of pepper spray before trying to pacify "enemy" soldiers.

The US troops are at the heart of a political battle that will have far reaching consequences for the security of an increasingly unstable Asia-Pacific: if the Japanese and US get their way a decade from now the picturesque coastline below Camp Schwab will reverberate to the roar of military aircraft taking off and landing on an offshore runway whose fate has pitted Okinawa against the government in Tokyo, and which threatens to sour Japan's relations with the US.

Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Japan, will find herself at the centre of this dispute when she arrives on a brief visit to Okinawa on Wednesday. Her welcoming party may well include hundreds of people who on Tuesday attended a rally ahead of her arrival, holding signs calling for the closure of all military bases on Okinawa.

Kennedy will visit a peace park, dedicated to the estimated 230,000 soldiers and civilians who died in Okinawa in the final months of the second world war, before meeting the island's governor. Local media reports said she would also view the proposed site of the new runway from a helicopter.

Successive US and Japanese administrations have said the troop presence on Okinawa has contributed to peace in the Asia-Pacific for the past 70 years, and must stay put amid modern-day threats to stability from Chinese naval aggression and the looming presence of an unpredictable, and nuclear-armed, North Korea.

But in 1995, both countries were forced to confront Okinawa's military burden after public outrage over the abduction and rape that year of a 12-year-old girl by three US servicemen. The incident brought hundreds of thousands of Okinawans on to the streets.

Years of negotiations led to a compromise plan of moving Futenma, a marine corps base in a densely populated city, to an offshore site at the eastern outskirts of Nago.

As an additional sweetener about 8,000 marines and their families are to be transferred out of Okinawa to Guam and Hawaii.

But 18 years after the allies agreed to move Futenma, not a single marine or piece of military hardware has been moved, amid fierce opposition from voters in Nago and their anti-base mayor, Susumu Inamine.

"Without the mayor's approval and consent, this process cannot go forward," said Inamine, who was re-elected last month. "In order to protect the future for our children I will not allow a new base to be built here."

The stage is now set for a long and potentially bitter battle between Okinawa, the Japanese government and the US. The stakes are high: failure to build the new facility, which is expected to cost at least $8.6bn (£5.3bn), would pose the most serious challenge yet to the Obama administration's planned strategic "pivot" towards the Asia-Pacific.

The relocation plan received a boost late last year when the governor of Okinawa prefecture, Hirokazu Nakaima, who once opposed the base move, approved permits for land reclamation at the new site. Admiral Samuel Locklear, head of the US Pacific command, welcomed Nakaima's about-turn, calling the argument for relocating to Nago compelling. But opponents have since filed a lawsuit in an attempt to invalidate the governor's approval.

Locklear told a briefing he was aware of local opposition to the move, but added: "From a military perspective, having the base [there] as soon as possible will allow the [security] alliance to move forward."

Nakaima, who faces an election later this year, has been accused of being bought off by Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who had earlier promised 300bn yen in annual investment for Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, through to 2021.

"Our opposition to the relocation will continue for as long as necessary," said Jun Asato, chief of military base countermeasures at Nago city hall. "The people made their voices heard in the election. We want Futenma out of Okinawa. Its replacement should be built somewhere else in Japan, or overseas. Ideally, all of the military bases here should be shut down."

US military officials in Okinawa insist the relocation goes ahead as planned. To retain their ability to respond quickly, for instance to an emergency in the East China sea, their logistical, air and ground forces must be close together, they say. Removing one or more would compromise their ability to safeguard the region's security, they maintain.

Noah Rappahahn, a first lieutenant, said: "The most important thing is that all three of those elements are in place. That's what makes the marines so different. They all need to train together to be effective. After all, the marines are a war fighting organisation.

"That's why the relocation plan is a step in the right direction. The Futenma base will move away from a populated area, land can be returned [to its civilian owners] and the new facility will have less of an impact on the local population. We care about the local community and the need to return land and ensure their safety."

For the anti-base activists who have continued a non-violent protest from a beachside tent near Camp Schwab for the past 17 years, the relocation is a test of Japan's democratic health.

"Voters in Nago have had their say, but the Japanese government is ignoring the result, just as it has always ignored the people of Okinawa," said Akira Yoshikawa, of the Citizens' Network for Biodiversity in Okinawa. "That, and the environmental destruction that would come with the new runway, is what angers us most."

Yoshikawa said the planned construction of the offshore, V-shaped, runway on reclaimed land would destroy the bay's delicate ecosystem,which includes one of the few remaining habitats for the dugong, and threaten the safety of 2,000 residents living closest to the site.

"My advice to ambassador Kennedy would be to not trust the Japanese government," he said. "It says the new base will have no environmental impact, and that building a new base will reduce the burden on the people of Okinawa, but how can anyone seriously believe that?"

Eager to prevent creating more friction with Washington, government officials in Tokyo insisted the relocation would go ahead as planned, despite Inamine's recent election victory.

But activists say the project can expect even fiercer opposition, with many protesters expected to take to canoes and fishing boats to obstruct offshore surveying work.

"As a last resort we will occupy the site," said Hiroyuki Tanaka, a regular at the protest tent.

Local authorities, meanwhile, can call on an armoury of procedural hurdles, such as denying construction firms the use of local ports and roads. "It is going to get nasty," said a source familiar with the relocation plans, who did not wish to be named. "There are lots of older residents opposed to the base who say they don't have that long to live and will do anything to stop construction. That is a very scary prospect."