Depleted uranium could prove a hazard to people living near the site of the crash last month of a Korean cargo

Depleted uranium could prove a hazard to people living near the site of the crash last month of a Korean cargo jet, a health specialist warned yesterday. Depleted uranium could prove a hazard to people living near the site of the crash last month of a Korean cargo jet, a health specialist warned yesterday. The Essex fire brigade insisted that the material, part of the aircraft's tailplane, remained intact after the plane came down just after taking off from Stansted airport. He would only do it if, like the Dalai Lama, he was really worried about being detained."In Dharamsala, a leading figure in the Tibetan community said: "We didn't know anything about the Karmapa coming before he arrived."The Karmapa's arrival in India was greeted with a total news blackout. It is believed the Indian government may be embarrassed by the Karmapa's sudden epiphany and awaits with some trepidation the Chinese reaction.. But to leave like this in the middle of winter is one of the most bizarre aspects of the story. "The Karmapas have a tradition of being autocratic and purposeful, though also pragmatic when necessary.

A young lama must have regular instruction from particular teachers, and undergo elaborate rites at specified times. The Karmapa last year urged the Chinese authorities to give him permission to visit his guru, Tai Situ Rinpoche, who lives in exile, but they refused. "There has always been a belief among the Tibetans that some day the Karmapa would go," Mr Barnett said. He had an audience with the Dalai Lama later that day.The perilous journey seems to have been prompted by the demands of his spiritual role. When they arrived in Dharamsala, the hill station in Himachal Pradesh, northern India, that is home to the Dalai Lama and a community of monks and other Tibetans, he was exhausted. This has been an exceptionally harsh winter, and the Lama and his four attendants travelled through the worst of it.

Tibetans always say the Chinese lie, and this will be taken as a vivid example of that."Mr Barnett calls it an "action replay" of the flight of the Dalai Lama from Lhasa in 1959 when in a week he travelled 900 miles, crossing 16,000ft-high passes, indisguise on donkeys and carts through a landscape of frozen mountains. By the time the Dalai Lama arrived at the Indian border, he was running a high fever.No details have yet emerged about the Karmapa's journey, but it must have been even more testing. He was also kept under surveillance.But with his dramatic overland flight in the middle of the Himalayan winter, that prop of Chinese power has fallen apart."This explodes the myth which is fundamental to China's operation in Tibet," says Robbie Barnett, an expert on Tibet doing research at Columbia University in the US "The Chinese claimed they had done a deal with the Karmapa. He is from a nomad family in the village of Bakor in the east of Tibet.But this young lama's unique significance is that for the Chinese authorities in Lhasa, he was the best symbol of Tibetan acquiescence in their rule.Unlike the present Panchen Lama, another potent spiritual figurehead who was selected with Chinese approval but greeted with a universal thumbs down by Tibetans, the 17th Karmapa is recognised as the legitimate head of his school, both by the Chinese and by the Dalai Lama himself.The fact that this holy lama, not much inferior in spiritual status to the Dalai Lama, chose to remain at his monastery 30 miles north-west of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, instead of fleeing the country, gave the Chinese precious legitimacy among the six million Tibetans who have been their unwilling and brutalised subjects since the Chinese invasion of 1950.Like other members of Tibet's traditional élite who stayed in the country, he was rewarded: he retained control of his monastery and received money and cars in return for his compliance. He is only 14 years old: in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, he was "discovered" as the school's new Karmapa while a small child, and is regarded as the reincarnation of the 16th Karmapa, who died four years before he was born.

Tibetans at home and in exile are digesting the most dramatic event in the struggle against Chinese rule since the flight of the Dalai Lama nearly 41 years ago. Tibetans at home and in exile are digesting the most dramatic event in the struggle against Chinese rule since the flight of the Dalai Lama nearly 41 years ago. "His Holiness the Karmapa", read the laconic message on the website of the Kagyu, one of Tibet's four ancient schools of Buddhism, "has left Tibet and arrived safely in Dharamsala, India, at 10.30am on 5 January".Urgyen Trinley Dorje is the 17th Karmapa, as the master of the Kagyu school is known, and can trace his lineage back more than 700 years. The most likely result - perhaps at the beginning of next week - is a framework agreement, with details to be filled in by negotiators later. That could then perhaps be signed and sealed at the time of the international Middle East summit in Moscow at the beginning of February.The White House issued a statement for Eid last night."We pray that the new moon will bring a new era of peace between nations - in the Middle East and all across the world - so people can emerge from the shadows of violence and make better lives for their children," Mr Clinton said.There are no official plans for Mr Clinton to return to the site over the weekend, although the White House spokesman Joe Lockhart did not rule out another visit this weekend, possibly late today or tomorrow..