Related: Finishing Friday With Fukushima
Must be the Japanese version....
"More radioactive water leaks in Japan" by Martin Fackler | New York Times, February 21, 2014
TOKYO — About 100 tons of highly radioactive water leaked from one of the hundreds of storage tanks at the devastated Fukushima nuclear plant, its operator said Thursday, calling it the worst spill at the plant in six months....
The leak was discovered and stopped, says the operator who has lied from the start of this disaster.
The company said it happened far enough from the plant’s waterfront that none of the radioactive water was likely to reach the Pacific, as has happened during previous spills.
Still, the episode was an uncomfortable reminder of the many mishaps that have plagued the containment and cleanup efforts at the plant, as well as the hundreds of tons of contaminated groundwater that still flows unchecked into the Pacific every day.
Tokyo Electric said it had traced the latest leak to a pair of valves that were left open by mistake.
Ooops! Shitting me.
The leaked water was among the most severely contaminated that Tokyo Electric has reported at the Fukushima Daiichi plant since March 2011, when damage caused by an earthquake and a tsunami led to meltdowns in three of the plant’s reactors.
Each liter of the water contained, on average, 230 million becquerels of particles giving off beta radiation, the company said. About half of the particles were likely to be strontium-90, which is readily taken up by the human body in the same way as calcium, and can cause bone cancer and leukemia.
That means the water was about 3.8 million times as contaminated with strontium-90 as the maximum allowed under Japan’s safety standards for drinking water. It also showed levels much more radioactive than a worrisome groundwater reading that Tokyo Electric announced earlier this month....
Tokyo Electric has struggled to deal with the hundreds of tons of groundwater that seeps each day into the plant’s damaged reactor buildings.
And then it seeps out to sea.
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Also see: Globe Finally Covers Fukushima Again
Maybe this will help cool things down:
"In Yamanashi, in central Japan, a record 45 inches of snow fell. About 10 inches of snow was enough to paralyze Tokyo, which usually sees only a few light dustings each winter."
Now on to more important things:
"Data show leniency on military sex crimes; Prison time rare in cases at bases in Japan" by Yuri Kageyama | Associated Press, February 10, 2014
TOKYO — At US military bases in Japan, most servicemembers found culpable in sex crimes in recent years did not go to prison, according to internal Department of Defense documents.
Instead, in a review of hundreds of cases filed in America’s largest overseas military installation, offenders were fined, demoted, restricted to their bases or removed from the military.
In about 30 cases, a letter of reprimand was the only punishment.
More than 1,000 records, obtained by the Associated Press using the Freedom of Information Act, give a disturbing view of how senior US officers prosecute and punish troops accused of sex crimes. Seemingly strong cases were reduced to lesser charges. In two rape cases, commanders overruled recommendations to court-martial and dropped charges instead.
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In two cases, both adjudicated by the First Marine Aircraft Wing, the accusers said they were sexually abused after nights of heavy drinking, and both had some evidence to support their cases. One suspect was sentenced to six years in prison, but the other was confined to his base for 30 days instead of getting jail time.
Taken together, the cases illustrate how far military leaders have to go to reverse a spiraling number of sexual assault reports. The records also may buttress the argument of members of Congress who are pushing to strip senior officers of their authority to decide whether serious crimes, including sexual assault cases, go to trial.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who leads the Senate Armed Services’ personnel subcommittee, said the records are ‘‘disturbing evidence’’ that there are commanders who refuse to prosecute sexual assault cases.
Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, and other lawmakers from both political parties are pressing for further changes in the military’s legal system.
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It may be surprising that the Marines were far more likely than other branches to send offenders to prison, The Air Force was the most lenient. Pentagon's next war?
See: The Pentagon's Next War
Caroline Kennedy has plenty to say about dolphins and AmeriKan militarism, though. What a disappointment she turned out to be. Maybe the Amerikan media has gone deaf, huh?
A new face of Yankees excess
I can't say I blame the Japanese. I would want to get out from under the protective embrace of empire myself if I were them.
"Ghosts of World War II" by Farah Stockman | Globe Staff, February 04, 2014
How long should it take a country to be forgiven for horrific crimes? White Southerners in the wake of slavery, and Germans after the Holocaust might ask the same question. Good people in those places wrestle with how to be proud of their past, without glorifying the evil in it. They grow weary of being the bad guy.
AmeriKa has a long way to go.
“When every day in the media this past is presented to me, I notice that something inside me is opposing this permanent show of our shame,” German novelist Martin Walser said during a debate about a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. “I start looking away.”
Me not buying a Globe?
We shouldn’t look away from Japan’s war crimes. They happened. Between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military killed millions of civilians.
Not to minimize those deaths, but I want the current crop of western world leaders dealt with, Thanks.
In the name of Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Japanese soldiers murdered, raped, and looted China’s then capital, Nanking. Japanese military units conducted experiments on living prisoners of war in China, freezing and sawing off limbs to research frostbite. Women were forced into sexual slavery to service Japanese soldiers.
These were not forgettable crimes, and it is wrong for anyone to deny them.
But....
Had America lost World War II, Charles Donald Albury, who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, and Curtis LeMay, architect of a devastating bomb campaign in Asia, might have been convicted of war crimes instead.
Yes, it is only the losers that face war crimes charges.
All too often, in the heat of struggle, we ask our soldiers to do unspeakable things.
Who is we, because I never was for sending them anywhere.
We deny, downplay, and justify those acts, until the evidence becomes impossible to refute. Then we call those soldiers “rogues” and erase them from our national memory.
But how do you erase an entire generation of military and political leaders? Among the “Class A War criminals”
You wait until they die?
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Chairman Mao killed far more Chinese than the Japanese army did.
Yeah, turns out Communists were the worst mass murderers in all history.
Yet, mourners still line up in Beijing outside his tomb to pay respects to his embalmed body.
AmeriKa honors its mass murdering leaders.
If we are paying attention, we’ll notice that China’s outrage is as much about the present as it is about the past....
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We are all going to fry because of Fukushima....
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
Anne Frank books trashed in Japan
Another self-inflicted hoax and false flag, huh?
Also see: Marbles that belonged to Anne Frank re-discovered
The Diary of Anne Fraud
