Source: The Mainichi Daily News
Date: April 26, 2011
Kazuhiko Sato, left, carrying a portrait of his deceased father Kyugo, is pictured with his family members at a Tokyo home where they are taking shelter. (Mainichi)
OKUMA, Fukushima -- Nearly 45 people out of some 440 patients and workers at a hospital here are estimated to have died while or after being evacuated following the accident at the tsunami-hit Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.
... Read full article here
A blast of heavy rain sent landslides barrelling through South Korea's capital and a northern town on Wednesday, killing at least 32 people, including 10 college students doing volunteer work. The heavy rain also left about 620 people homeless and flooded 720 houses and about 100 vehicles throughout South Korea, the National Emergency Management Agency said in a statement.
RT on Twitter: http://twitter.com/RT_com
RT on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RTnews
Tokyo Electric Power Co. estimated in spring that about 1,600 workers at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant would be exposed to radiation exceeding 50 millisieverts during the course of the crisis, an industrial accident prevention body revealed.
... Read full article here
This footage, from a recent meeting of indignant Japanese citizens and feckless Japanese government types should be a little shocking. Sadly, it's just more of the same—ineptitude and inaction. Buy denying the right to avoiding radiation? OK, shocking.
The Tokyo meeting was meant to broach the push to expand the evacuation zone around Fukushima—a zone that's proven inadequately and dangerously narrow. One Fukushima resident asks, "As other people do, people in Fukushima have the right to avoid the radiation exposure and live a healthy life, too. Don't you think so?"
A Nuclear Safety Commission Of Japan rep, when pushed to go beyond his canned non-answer, deadpans "I don't know if they have that right." The crowd reacts as you would expect when told they nuclear-threatened welfare isn't a concern. After being jeered at by the understandably outraged audience, and ignoring requests to test the radioactive content of young residents' urine, the government panel packed up and left.
If you could compress the past four months' anxiety, tension, crisis, inaction, confusion, and stifled anger into one meeting room, you'd produce the above, this smoldering radioactive diamond of national failure. [via Boing Boing]
Editor's Note: Here is a plea from parents in Fukushima City for an official evacuation order from the Japanese government. A must read if you have not already.
