World Cancer Research Fund advises people to limit consumption of beef, pork and lamb and avoid processed meatThis article titled “Cut red meat intake and don’t eat ham, say cancer researchers” was written by Denis Campbell, health correspondent, for The Guardian on Sunday 22nd May 2011 23.06 UTCCancer experts have issued a fresh warning about eating red and processed meat after “the most authoritative report” on the subject blamed them for causing the disease.The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) is advising people to limit their intake of red meats such as beef, pork and lamb, and to avoid processed meat such as ham and salami altogether. “Convincing evidence” that both types of meat increase the risk of bowel cancer means people should think seriously about reducing how much they eat, it recommends.The charity kickstarted a global debate in 2007 when it published a study which identified meat as a risk factor for a number of different forms of cancer.WCRF-funded scientists at Imperial College London led by Dr Teresa Norat studied 263 research papers that have come out since then looking at the role of diet, weight and physical activity in bowel cancer. An independent panel of leading cancer experts then reviewed their conclusions. “For red and processed meat, findings of 10 new studies were added to the 14 analysed as part of the 2007 report. The panel confirmed that there is convincing evidence that both red and processed meat increase bowel cancer risk,” said the report .“WCRF recommends that people limit consumption to 500g (cooked weight) of red meat a week – roughly the equivalent of five or six medium portions of roast beef, lamb or pork – and avoid processed meat,” it added. About 36,000 Britons a develop bowel cancer every year, and some 16,500 die from it. It is the UK’s second biggest cancer killer after lung cancer.About 17,000 cases a year (43%) could be prevented if people ate less meat and more fibre, drank less, maintained a healthy weight and kept active, the WCRF says.Its 850-page report, releasedon Monday, is “the most authoritative ever report of bowel cancer risk”, cancer prevention experts claim.Professor Alan Jackson of Southampton University, the chair of the WCRF’s continuous update project expert panel, said: “On meat, the clear message that comes out of our report is that red and processed meat increase risk of bowel cancer and that people who want to reduce their risk should consider cutting down the amount they eat.”Growing concern about red and processed meat prompted the government in February to advise consumers for the first time to consider cutting down. That came after the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN), experts who advise the government, examined the evidence on the subject. It decided that those meats probably increase the risk of bowel cancer.People who eat 90g or more a day should cut down to the UK average of 70g, SACN recommended. It advised having smaller portions or eating those meats less often. A 70g serving could be three slices of ham, a lamb chop or two standard beef burgers.WCRF’s review has also firmed up from “probable” to “convincing” its view of the protection against bowel cancer afforded by eating foods containing fibre, such as wholegrains, pulses, fruit and vegetables.Milk, garlic and dietary supplements containing calcium also “probably” reduce the risk, the expert panel concluded.But farmers’ leaders denounced the WCRF’s new report and accused it of deliberately choosing the first day of National Vegetarian Week to publish it in order to maximise publicity for conclusions which the charity first reached years ago.Chris Lamb, a spokesman for BPEX and EBLEX, which represents England’s pig, beef and lamb farmers, said: “Average consumption has been in or around 500g a week for a few years. The vast majority of consumers aren’t exceeding this and don’t have to worry about [this]“, he said.The risks identified by the WCRF were unchanged, he stressed.Lamb argued it was unfair for the WCRF to highlight meat as a contributory cause of bowel cancer when the main risk was to people who are generally unhealthy, for example by consuming too much food, alcohol or fizzy drink.“They aren’t assisting consumers. Consumers eat and enjoy meat as part of a balanced diet, and meat plays a valuable part in that balanced diet”, said Lamb. “If you eat or drink anything in excess it’s a danger. Therefore, if you can pick on meat in order to get headlines, then you aren’t actually helping consumers.”Professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, said red meat can form part of a healthy, balanced diet. “It is a good source of protein and vitamins and minerals, such as iron, selenium, zinc and B vitamins,” she said, “but people who eat a lot of red and processed meat should consider cutting down. The occasional steak or extra few slices of lamb is fine but regularly eating a lot could increase your risk of bowel cancer.”Bowel Cancer UK chief executive Deborah Alsina said: “The report significantly adds to the available evidence into the increased risk of bowel cancer from eating too much red and processed meat; and strengthens the evidence of how eating food with fibre in it protects people against the disease.Hazel Nunn, a senior health information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: “With barbeque season just round the corner, this is a timely reminder that how much alcohol you drink, how active you are, your weight, and how much red and processed meat and fibre you eat can all have a bearing on your risk of bowel cancer.”• Growing numbers of lung cancer patients are having life-saving operations thanks to advances in surgical techniques. The proportion of patients with the disease who undergo surgery has risen from one in 11 in 2005 to one in seven last year, according to a study by the NHS Information Centre. Lung cancer kills more people than any other form of cancer. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogCut red meat intake and don’t eat ham, say cancer researchersRelated posts:Alcohol to blame for 13,000 cancer cases a year in UKTurkey Ham?World Development Report: Why no mention of Paris?
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Cut red meat intake and don’t eat ham, say cancer researchers
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May 23 2011, 4:36am | Comments »
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Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of power
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/09/karl-marx-part-6-the-economics-of-power
Karl Marxand Marxist economics are often accused of reducing humans to mere expendable specks of matter within the greater economic scheme of things
This article titled “Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of power” was written by Peter Thompson, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 9th May 2011 09.00 UTC Having so far concentrated on philosophy and politics we now turn to what was the major part of Marx’s output, namely the economics. But it is in the economics where his political philosophy begins to take on real form. There is not space enough here to cover the enormous range of his economics but there are a few basics which need to be dealt with in this slightly longer piece and which can be fought out below the line as usual. Alan Budd, who was an economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s once made an interesting point about Marxist economic theory and government policy on the fight against inflation at the time:
“[People] did see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes – if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”
Marx’s basic starting point was that in contrast to all previous historical epochs capitalism is a system of “generalised commodity production” in which the workers’ abstracted labour power itself became a commodity to be traded. In all previous epochs, human labour had been used to create a surplus product, usually subsistence farming and a surplus used for first bartering and then trading. Under the ancient mode and slavery through to feudalism, the product and the means of producing it was clear; food, clothing, the means of life. You worked for the master and you belonged to the master in one way or another. The German word for serf, for example, is Leibeigener; your body literally belongs to the master. Capitalism liberates you from that and turns you into a free agent, apparently able to enter into a free contract to sell your labour to whomsoever you see fit. You are cast out of your old existence and are set on the route to making your own. The second verse of All Things Bright and Beautiful – “the rich man in his castle/ the poor man at his gate/God made them high and lowly/ and ordered their estate” – no longer applies. Whereas before you were a bondsman, now you are a journeyman and you can set off to make your own fortune, as the fairy tales have it. In economic terms, what before was a tangible surplus product is now transformed into intangible surplus value. You enter into this apparently free contract with an employer but the wage you draw from that employment is only a part of the value you create. Just as before a portion of the cabbages and linen you made belonged to the master, now a proportion of the monetary value you make through the production process belongs to the employer and you will only be employed if a competitive rate of surplus value can be generated through your labour. This is at the root of Marx’s version of the labour theory of value. The employer will provide the machines or tools for the completion of the task (constant capital) while the worker provides the labour power (variable capital). The employer will always be trying to improve labour productivity and can do so in various ways, but all of them boil down to improving the gap between your wage and the amount of value created by your labour power. This means that for Marx the commodity labour power has a special character in that it is the only commodity which can be employed to increase value, while all the others are merely reified forms of dead human labour, useless without labour input. An advanced car-producing robot no more creates value than does a peasant’s shovel. In theory there is no difference here to previous epochs where we accept the labour theory of value because it is measured in tons of cabbages and yards of linen but now that it becomes a commodified and monetarised relationship it also becomes a quasi-mystical one, with value apparently emerging mysteriously out of all sorts of transactions and technologies and with market mechanisms and competition wiping out and obfuscating the distinction between what it costs to produce something and its price. On these threads, for example, a critique of Marx has emerged which posits a kind of paradoxical capitalist utopia in which we have reached 100% automation of production with no labour input at all anywhere by anyone. This reductio ad absurdum is of course as realistic as the world of Arnie’s Terminator or of Joh Fredersen’s Metropolis in which workers become surplus to requirements, but it does serve to illustrate a point because the further question then emerges as to how the goods produced are going to be purchased if no one is earning any wages through the productive process. Under capitalism labour productivity may improve massively, but it can never be reduced to zero because that would remove all demand for the goods produced. You would then have to distribute commodities or vouchers to the entire population based on some sort of criteria not linked to labour input and then where do we end up? Oh, of course, at communism, in which each gives according to their ability and receives according to their need. Capitalist competition over labour productivity thus not only produces its own gravediggers but also provides the shovels (or robots) to finish the job. Labour productivity can be increased in all sorts of traditional ways such as making workers work harder for less money, speeding up the production lines, extending the working day, getting people to work longer for the same or even less money, seeking out newer, cheaper labour sources through globalisation etc and, as Alan Budd points out, all of the above are regularly used, but for Marx they all only put off the dread day of collapse in which the workers realise that the harder and more productively they work, the smaller the proportion of the surplus value they create comes to them. Since the mid-1970s the common way to put this off has been through enormous levels of debt, either by the state or the private individual. It is that tendency which both brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union – which over-borrowed in order to maintain full employment as a political necessity without raising productivity – and the current crisis in the west where a debt-fuelled asset price bubble in order to artificially stimulate demand has created the greatest economic crisis in a century. But for Marx, at the root of it all is the question of how surplus value is created and distributed and, most of all, what this does to human relations and desires. The commodification of labour power also brings with it the commodification of humans and their alienation from both themselves and the products of their labour power. It is an accusation often aimed at Marx that he reduces human beings to mere expendable specks of matter within the greater economic scheme of things, but it could be argued that the opposite is the case and that the whole point of Marxist economic analysis is precisely about trying to bring about a recognition that it is generalised commodity production which has commodified people and that it doesn’t have to be like that. The final two columns in this series will go on to discuss how this process of economic alienation feeds through into religion and ideology and the means by which people manage to cope with being mere playthings of larger forces; how a sense of autonomy, faith and hope are maintained in an apparently constrained, rationalistic and futureless world. This will bring us right back to where we started: the land of Ideologiekritik.
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May 9 2011, 5:15am | Comments »
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Portuguese learn price of €78bn debt bailout
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/04/portuguese-learn-price-of-e78bn-debt-bailout
Health and education spending in Portugal to be cut by €745m, state pensions reduced and major building projects axed
This article titled “Portuguese learn price of €78bn debt bailout” was written by Giles Tremlett, for The Guardian on Wednesday 4th May 2011 15.20 UTC
Portugal woke up to the price of its €78bn (£70bn) bailout on Wednesday as new airports and high-speed rail lines were sacrificed in a package of austerity measures and the government pledged to freeze pensions and shrink the civil service. Lisbon’s new international airport, already on hold, and the building of a high-speed rail link between Lisbon and Oporto will now be put back until after 2013, according to state news agency Lusa. Health and education spending will be cut by €745m, civil service pay and pensions will be frozen, and people on state pensions above €1,500 a month will have them reduced. Civil service staffing is to be squeezed by 1% a year in central government, while regional administrations and town halls will be told to shed 2% of their employees annually. Portugal’s banks will take up to €12bn of the bailout funds to rebuild their capital ratios, according to reports. The banks would have to raise their core tier one capital ratio – a gauge of higher quality capital that mainly comprises equity and retained earnings – to 9% at the end of this year and to 10% by the end of 2012, Reuters said. The country will also carry out a fire sale of the nationalised Banco Português de Negócios (BPN) bank. “The authorities are launching a process to sell BPN on an accelerated schedule and without a minimum price,” according to a memorandum of understanding seen by the Guardian, which added that the sale should be finished in July. Portugal is expected to reduce public spending by 3.4% of its GDP this year and raise an extra 1.7% of GDP by raising taxes on cars, tobacco and electricity and getting rid of income and corporation tax loopholes. A detailed investigation of public-private partnerships (PPPs), which have been used for building hospitals, roads and rail lines, will be carried out to see if they are hiding extra government debt. New PPP projects will be suspended. José Sócrates, Portugal’s caretaker prime minister, announced the areas that would remain untouched when he explained the bailout during a television address to the nation on Tuesday night. These included pensions for the worse-off and the retirement age. But he failed to reveal what austerity measures came with the bailout package, beyond saying they would be similar to those rejected by parliament in March. The March defeat brought down his minority socialist government and a snap election was called for 5 June. Polls show the opposition Social Democrat Party (PSD), which rejected the March austerity package, may win that vote. Representatives of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank met Social Democrat leaders on Wednesday morning to seek their backing for the plan. “The PSD will give its opinion on what it has read and heard late today or early tomorrow,” said Carlos Moedas, the party’s economics advisor, after the meeting. Social Democrat leaders had already indicated they might change elements of any bailout-related austerity package if they were elected to government, although always with the aim of hitting this year’s target of reducing the budget deficit to 5.9% of GDP. The IMF said: “We have said from the start that it is important that any agreement have multi-party support and we shall continue in our efforts with opposition parties to show that this is the case.” Portugal managed to raise €1.12bn euros in three-month treasury bills today with demand almost doubling the offer, but investors insisted on a 4.65% interest rate – up from 4.05% two weeks ago. Jonathan Loynes, chief European economist at Capital Economics in London, said the bailout might not be enough to stave off restructuring: “It won’t put an end to speculation that – along with Greece and perhaps others – it will sooner or later need to undertake some form of debt restructuring.”
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May 4 2011, 10:30am | Comments »
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A misplaced May Day dream for the masses
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/29/a-misplaced-may-day-dream-for-the-masses
May Day by John Sommerfield describes a society on the edge. The parallels with today are obvious – but it’s the differences that make it worth reading.
This article titled “A misplaced May Day dream for the masses” was written by Sam Jordison, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 29th April 2011 14.15 UTC It might have associations with people in funny clothes performing arcane rites and with Oxford students getting smashed off their gourds, but most us don’t think about Tories when we think about May Day. As several union leaders have already pointed out, the party’s current desire to replace May Day with Trafalgar Day (supposedly to “lengthen the holiday season”) is not practical so much as ideological. May Day might feel like a natural part of the calendar – but it has only been marked by a bank holiday since 1978, introduced by a Labour government to mark international workers’ day. And that, of course, is why the rightwingers don’t like it. They’d like it even less if they picked up the book that I’ve just been reading: May Day by John Sommerfield. This was written in 1936, but has just been reissued, with excellent timing, by London Books. It describes a society on the edge. The rich are getting richer and the poor are paying for it. The authorities clamp down on protest with the cynical use of force. Someone on a march is killed in an “accident”. The success of a march leads someone to comment: “I don’t think there’ll be so much damned squeamish argument against arming the police.” The parallels with our current troubles are obvious – but it’s the differences that make May Day worth reading. Sommerfield describes a few days in the lives of dozens of different characters across London, showing them at work, at play, down the pub, in bed, making love, feeling regret the day after, giving birth, dying, plotting to overthrow the bosses, plotting to undermine the workers. It’s a broad, ambitious sweep, but it’s all heading in the same direction: the inevitability of a general strike and the exultant victory of the Communist point of view. By the time Sommerfield was writing, Stalin had embarked on one of the biggest murder sprees in human history, but Sommerfield pants for Soviet Britain. So much so that he frequently loses all restraint:
“Then into this sudden pool of quiet splintered an alien voice, a hoarse shout of ‘Workers, all out on May Day. Demonstrate for a free Soviet Britain!’ … This rang in a million ears. Eyes remembered the chalked slogans on walls and pavements. The slogans, the rain of leaflets, the shouts and songs of demonstrators echoed in a million minds.” He also gushes:
“The printing presses were spinning themselves dizzy. There had never been so many leaflets before. They fell like rain, they were scattered like machine gun bullets.” Sommerfield loved his leaflets. He was also absolute in his convictions. For him there are two races in the world – rich and poor and that is where all conflict will lie. “Soon a lot more people will be having to take sides,” he wrote. They did indeed – but not in the way he thought. They would be fighting against fascism, not for “Soviet Britain”. There are plenty of things to be said in the book’s favour, particularly in the ambitious way he looks into so many lives around London, explores their living conditions, and lays bare their pleasures and pains. There’s also plenty more to be said against his writing which veers from the ridiculous to the not-too-bad and never really gets close to the sublime. Yet it’s as an attempt at social realism that it is most fascinating – and most flawed. In 1984 Sommerfield wrote a new forward for the book acknowledging how few favours time had done for his “1930s Communist romanticism”, but also said he hoped the book could be read as “an historical novel – worth reading, now, I hope, in relation to our own times.” To an extent it can. But I read it more as a reflection on a lost past and an exercise in folly. Possibly, it is harsh to judge Sommerfield’s May Day, for getting things so spectacularly wrong. It’s a novel, after all. It deals in fiction, not fact. But then again, while I was reading May Day, I couldn’t help thinking of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novella with the same title. It’s just one mark of Fitzgerald’s genius that his reflections on the day – although written in 1920 – still apply. The protests he describes seem hopeless, futile, distorted by absurd mobs on both sides: “all crowds have to howl”. The rich are oblivious at best, unforgiving and condescending the rest of the time. The tragedies he depicts are universal – but also painfully personal. His lead, Gordon Sterett, is a penniless, struggling artist who has never found his feet since returning from the First World War, but who has found booze and bad company. He is drowning in the tide of history, but his problems are more individual than any Sommerfield manages to describe. He is more real. So too is the world around him. The clothes are smarter, the dancing is more formal and the drinks sound more exotic. No one has a smart phone and radicals print their views on paper. Otherwise, Fitzgerald could be writing about today – or forever. His despair and defeat for the small man rings far more true than Sommerfield’s misplaced dream for the masses. May Day is a crushed dream. It makes the Tory vendetta against the holiday seem even more than usually petty.
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April 29 2011, 9:47am | Comments »
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Seasonal water metering is seen as a con by consumers, study finds
Public anger grows over proposed seasonal water tariffs, as utility companies look for ways to save the UK’s supply
This article titled “Seasonal water metering is seen as a con by consumers, study finds” was written by Jamie Doward and Mario Ledwith, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.06 UTC The race to provide Britain with a sustainable water supply is already generating the first of what is likely to be a long list of controversies. As the UK basks in temperatures that put Athens in the shade and with rivers already running low, utility companies are under increasing pressure to preserve water. But the most comprehensive study of its kind suggests the leading option for ensuring the UK enjoys a sustainable water supply – metering – is hitting the poorest hardest and is viewed with suspicion by consumers who believe it is a ruse by utility companies to increase their profits. The study by Wessex Water, which supplies water to more than one million households in the west country, found the introduction of meters reduced customer demand by 17%, higher than previous estimates. The reduction was even greater if the meters were tied to a tariff system that saw the price of water rise in the summer, an increasingly popular option being considered by the utility companies, but one which has caused widespread anger among consumers. The Wessex study, the largest since metering was introduced 20 years ago, found 15% of customers saw their annual bills rise by more than £100 after flat-rate metered systems were installed. A quarter of the poorest customers saw their bills increase by more than £50. Phil Wickens, tariffs manager at Wessex Water, acknowledged his company had one of the highest water rates in the UK, but said that it was vital the industry introduced a new charging system if the UK was to have a sustainable supply. “We want a charging system that gives us the ability to meet future challenges in the long term,” Wickens said. “Climate change and population growth are going to place pressure on the need for increased investment. In order for us to secure that investment we really need all of our customers to be willing and able to pay their bills. There is a commercial incentive for raising these issues now.” Household water bills have increased by more than 50% in real terms since 1989, partly due to investment costs. But the financial burden on customers is becoming a key issue, with an increasing number refusing to pay their bills. Wessex estimates its underlying bad debt has doubled over the past decade, with the figure expected to rise further given economic conditions. It is estimated that the average customer now pays an extra £12 a year to cover unpaid water bills. Experts suggest establishing a fair charging system is vital if more schemes, such as the new £270m Thames Water desalination plant that filters salt from water in the Thames estuary, are to get the go-ahead. A failure to address water sustainability could have serious repercussions for the UK. The current spell of hot weather has already triggered warnings that farmers in some regions will have to limit their use of water. Several rivers in England and Wales are reportedly at “exceptionally low” levels, raising fears there will be a need for hosepipe bans. The Environment Agency said two months of unusually dry weather has left 11 rivers at extremely low levels of the kind seen only once every 20 years. The government is currently consulting on water sustainability, and environment minister Caroline Spelman is reportedly in favour of metering as a key part of its response. All new homes built since 1989 have had to be fitted with water meters, and an increasing number of people opt for them. Just under half of all UK customers now have a water meter, and it is predicted that all households will have one fitted in the future. But the shift to metering has prompted concern among charities. The Fairness on Tap (FoT) coalition – made up of 12 leading environmental organisations, including the WWF and the National Trust – is calling for a national switch to water metering. The coalition claims the current system of water charging is outdated, unfair and encourages wastage, with many households paying a flat “all you can use” charge, giving them no incentive to be water-efficient. However, the previous charging system, with water bills linked to the rateable values of homes, protected the poorest in society from excessively high bills. “The industry has been moving from a system based on rateable values that were set as part of local authority charging back in the late 80s,” Wickens said. “Lower income customers were paying less than higher income customers, but as we are gradually moving towards metered charging that social protection is winding out.” Creating a fairer charging system has seen some water companies experiment with higher charges in the summer. The option, being tested in more than 1,000 homes by Wessex, has resulted in a “step change” in consumer behaviour, says the company. Wickens said: “Higher income customers with bigger gardens end up paying a fairer chunk than lower income customers.” The new form of charging is likely to trigger animosity among households in the “squeezed middle”, who may fear they will be hit disproportionately. However, the Wessex study found almost all customers opposed to seasonal tariffs. “Customers are cynical about companies changing the way they are charged; they assume it’s about making money, like travel companies charging more on holidays, but in our case it isn’t,” Wickens said. “Even if we had a dry summer and generated more income, the regulator takes that money off us.”
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April 26 2011, 11:01am | Comments »
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Defra delays: why are so many key environment policies overdue?
From protecting the natural environment to badger culling to water bills, key policies are being postponed. Have cuts bitten too deep?
This article titled “Defra delays: why are so many key environment policies overdue?” was written by Damian Carrington, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 13th April 2011 10.49 UTC Cutting a 30% of an organisation’s budget before working out how that organisation will actually run on the reduced funds isn’t very clever. But that’s what appears to have happened under Caroline Spelman’s stewardship of the department of the environment, food and rural affairs. How else can we explain the long list of delays which span right across the work of the department, from water bills to badger culls? Not forgetting the humiliating U-turn on the forestry sell-off, the deep cuts to flood defences across the nation and a feeble sustainability vision, here’s a list: Natural environment white paperDue: April 2011Expected: Officially, later this year – before the summer, I’m toldThis flagship policy will, Defra says, protect and enhance the natural environment that “underpins our economic prosperity, our health and our wellbeing” and will be the department’s first environment white paper for 20 years. It is eagerly anticipated by greens across the spectrum – but it will miss its April deadline, as set out in Defra’s business plan. Badger cull consultation: government’s responseDue: Feb 2011Expected: Possibly late MayBovine tuberculosis takes a terrible toll on cattle farmers, but effective culling of badgers in complex and costly and many animal lovers oppose any cull. The proposals – that farmers do the culling themselves – has many flaws, not least being dismissed as “among the worst options” by scientists and likely to cost more than doing nothing. In February, announcing a delay, agriculture minister Jim Paice said: “we need to make sure we get it right.” With emotions running high on both sides, it’s a tough one, but how many more months must we wait? Waste policy reviewReview announced: June 2010Expected: May 2011The government announced their review of waste policies in June 2010 to “ensure we are taking the right steps towards creating a ‘zero waste’ economy.” But, according to stakeholders, its results have been repeatedly delayed. In its absence, the government has said it will ban fines for misuse of dustbins, but is unable to say how refuse will be better dealt with than now, especially ending the UK’s addiction to landfill. Water white paperDue: June 2011Expected: Autumn 2011The white paper will “reform the water industry to ensure more efficient use of water and the protection of poorer households”. It follows the Cave review of competition in the water industry and Walker review of water charging, published in April 2009 and June 2009 respectively. Food policyDue: UnknownThis is not strictly late as there’s no such policy being developed, despite criticism of the government’s plans for feeding a growing population sustainably and healthily being ‘insubstantial”. Banning wild animals from circuses consultation: government’s responseConsultation ended: March 2010Due: UnknownThis issue raise huge passion among animal rights campaigners, but a year on, there’s still no response, though the first moves were made by Labour in 2006, who must share some of the blame for the delay. Dangerous dogs consultation: government’s responseConsultation ended: June 2010Expected: “Later in the year”, I’m toldThis consultation on increasing the protection of the public was launched by the last government after a campaign by post men and women. Parliamentary answers:Thanks to work by Thomas Docherty MP, we can see that Defra has failed to answer 42% of written questions from MPs on time, making them the third worst of the 13 departments Docherty challenged. By contrast, the department of energy and climate change answered 77% of questions on time. Defra refutes my suggestion that the deep budget cuts are taking their toll. “Defra is playing its part in reducing the deficit, but this has no impact on policy development,” said a spokesman. “It is important to address all likely practical issues and ensure the department has properly consulted stakeholders before final decisions are made – which will mean less red tape and more opportunities for business and communities.” Unsurprisingly, Mary Creagh, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for environment, has a different view: “This is a department in special measures. The government’s ideologically driven belief in the small state is sending environmental policy into reverse. Defra’s stop-go approach to policy is creating uncertainty for businesses and communities that want to invest in green jobs and improve the environment.” Perhaps the Defra delays stem from the forestry sell-off fiasco, meaning every policy now has to be examined over and over in order to avoid another disaster. I’d be interested to hear more about that. Whatever the reason for the delays, while we wait, biodiversity continues to decline, cattle continue to contract TB and rubbish continues to be dumped.
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Related posts:Wild Badgers to be Culled in England Population of wild birds 1970 – 2007 What the frack? US natural gas drilling method contaminates water
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April 13 2011, 6:06am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Sleep in or work from home: minister’s plans to ease rush hour
I’ve been doing this for 3 or 4 years now. Transport minister says ‘it is crazy these days for people to go to work when work can come to people’ But once people get the taste for working from home, they may well also realise that it isn’t necessary to work for corporations any more either, and so the pyjama nation disruption of old work patterns continues apace.
This article titled “Sleep in or work from home: minister’s plans to ease rush hour” was written by Polly Curtis, Whitehall correspondent, for The Guardian on Wednesday 6th April 2011 23.07 UTC The transport minister, Norman Baker, wants to dramatically reduce rush hour in the capital and across the country by convincing companies to let people work from home, come in late, or set up satellite offices that will create commuting routes which go against existing traffic. Ministers are investigating tactics to “nudge” people into abandoning the rush hour, such as convincing train, tube and bus companies to offer bigger discounts for travelling outside the busiest hours. Instead of just peak and off-peak fares, the price of a journey could be staggered incrementally, with the most expensive fares around the times of 9am and 5pm. The system could be organised so that a 6.30am fare is cheaper than a 7.30am fare, for instance. “It is crazy these days for people to go to work when work can come to people. It is even crazier that we all travel on the same train on the same day at the same time. We should be able to spread the peak across different times,” Baker said. The plan would reduce carbon emissions, but ministers are also warning that there is urgency to fast-track changes to the rush hour because of the Olympics, warning that it would be “impossible” for the capital to accommodate the visitors anticipated for the games as well as going about its business as usual. Baker said: “We are going to have a gigantic influx of people all wanting to travel to see their events and it is simply not possible for everything to keep running if every one carries on as normal, so you have got to work differently to do this.” “This is not just the Olympics. It is winter too. Should business shut down when it snows? No. Should government spend taxpayers’ money investing in hundreds of snow ploughs? No. We should make sure we can carry on in business and government without everyone needing to travel in that period.” Options being considered include new “office hubs” in rural areas which would allow people to hotdesk closer to home. Some might have childcare facilities attached in “co-working” zones. Flexi-working, late or early starts, could stagger the rush hour and give people a greater work-life balance. More video-conferencing might mean people don’t have to leave home at all. The Trades Union Congress is backing the consultation. A TUC spokesman said they were pleased the minister was taking an interest. Staggering payments to encourage people to travel outside rush hour have been most stringently applied in Singapore, which also began the first road-pricing scheme in 1975. The system adjusts the price according to how busy the roads are at the time of driving. Singapore also has some of the world’s highest car taxes, and new cars are rationed in a bid to keep the state, the size of the Isle of Wight and having 4 million residents, congestion free.
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April 8 2011, 6:07am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Nuclear’s green cheerleaders forget Chernobyl at our peril
Pundits who downplay the risks of nuclear radiation are ignoring the casualties of the past such as Chernobyl. Fukushima‘s core meltdown may be worse due to the plutonium in the mixed oxide fuel rods.
This article titled “Nuclear’s green cheerleaders forget Chernobyl at our peril” was written by John Vidal, for The Guardian on Friday 1st April 2011 19.00 UTC Every day there are more setbacks to solving the Japanese nuclear crisis and it’s pretty clear that the industry and governments are telling us little; have no idea how long it will take to control; or what the real risk of cumulative contamination may be. The authorities reassure us by saying there is no immediate danger and a few absolutist environmentalists obsessed with nuclear power because of the urgency to limit emissions repeat the industry mantra that only a few people died at Chernobyl – the worst nuclear accident in history. Those who disagree are smeared and put in the same camp as climate change deniers. I prefer the words of Alexey Yablokov, member of the Russian academy of sciences, and adviser to President Gorbachev at the time of Chernobyl: “When you hear ‘no immediate danger’ [from nuclear radiation] then you should run away as far and as fast as you can.” Five years ago I visited the still highly contaminated areas of Ukraine and the Belarus border where much of the radioactive plume from Chernobyl descended on 26 April 1986. I challenge chief scientist John Beddington and environmentalists like George Monbiot or any of the pundits now downplaying the risks of radiation to talk to the doctors, the scientists, the mothers, children and villagers who have been left with the consequences of a major nuclear accident. It was grim. We went from hospital to hospital and from one contaminated village to another. We found deformed and genetically mutated babies in the wards; pitifully sick children in the homes; adolescents with stunted growth and dwarf torsos; foetuses without thighs or fingers and villagers who told us every member of their family was sick. This was 20 years after the accident but we heard of many unusual clusters of people with rare bone cancers. One doctor, in tears, told us that one in three pregnancies in some places was malformed and that she was overwhelmed by people with immune and endocrine system disorders. Others said they still saw caesium and strontium in the breast milk of mothers living far from the areas thought to be most affected, and significant radiation still in the food chain. Villages testified that “the Chernobyl necklace” – thyroid cancer – was so common as to be unremarkable; many showed signs of accelerated ageing. The doctors and scientists who have dealt directly with the catastrophe said that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency’s “official” toll, through its Chernobyl Forum, of 50 dead and perhaps 4,000 eventual fatalities was insulting and grossly simplistic. The Ukrainian Scientific Centre for Radiation, which estimated that infant mortality increased 20 to 30% after the accident, said their data had not been accepted by the UN because it had not been published in a major scientific journal. Konstantin Tatuyan, one of the “liquidators” who had helped clean up the plant, told us that nearly all his colleagues had died or had cancers of one sort or another, but that no one had ever asked him for evidence. There was burning resentment at the way the UN, the industry and ill-informed pundits had played down the catastrophe. While there have been thousands of east European studies into the health effects of radiation from Chernobyl, only a very few have been accepted by the UN, and there have been just a handful of international studies trying to gauge an overall figure. They range from the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation study (57 direct deaths and 4,000 cancers expected) to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), who estimated that more than 10,000 people had been affected by thyroid cancer alone and a further 50,000 cases could be expected. Moving up the scale, a 2006 report for Green MEPs suggested up to 60,000 possible deaths; Greenpeace took the evidence of 52 scientists and estimated the deaths and illnesses to be 93,000 terminal cancers already and perhaps 140,000 more in time. Using other data, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences declared in 2006 that 212,000 people had died as a direct consequence of Chernobyl. At the end of 2006, Yablokov and two colleagues, factoring in the worldwide drop in births and increase in cancers seen after the accident, estimated in a study published in the annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that 985,000 people had so far died and the environment had been devastated. Their findings were met with almost complete silence by the World Health Organisation and the industry. So who can we trust when the estimates swing so wildly? Should we believe the empirical evidence of the doctors; or governments and industrialists backed by their PR companies? So politicised has nuclear energy become, that you can now pick and choose your data, rubbish your opponents, and ignore anything you do not like. The fact is we may never know the truth about Chernobyl because the records are lost, thousands of people from 24 countries who cleaned up the site have dispersed across the vast former Soviet Union, and many people have died. Fukushima is not Chernobyl, but it is potentially worse. It is a multiple reactor catastrophe happening within 150 miles of a metropolis of 30 million people. If it happened at Sellafield, there would be panic in every major city in Britain. We still don’t know the final outcome but to hear experts claiming that nuclear radiation is not that serious, or that this accident proves the need for nuclear power, is nothing short of disgraceful.
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April 2 2011, 8:30am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Libyan rebels advance on Muammar Gaddafi’s home town
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/28/libyan-rebels-advance-on-muammar-gaddafis-home-town
Revolutionaries move further west along Libya‘s coastal road, seizing several towns without resistance, and reach Sirte.
This article titled “Libyan rebels advance on Muammar Gaddafi’s home town” was written by Chris McGreal in Bin Jawad and Ian Black in Sirte, for The Guardian on Monday 28th March 2011 06.52 UTC Libyan rebels are advancing on Muammar Gaddafi’s home city, Sirte, after retaking all the ground lost in earlier fighting as government forces broke up and fled under western air strikes. Revolutionary forces rapidly moved more than 150 miles west along Libya’s coastal road, seizing several towns without resistance, as the first witness accounts emerged of the devastating effect on Gaddafi’s army and militia of the aerial bombardment that broke their resistance at Ajdabiya on Saturday. A Libyan rebel spokesman said Sirte had been captured by the rebels on Monday morning, but there is no sign the city has fallen. Sirte marks the boundary between the east and west of Libya and has great symbolic importance as Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown. The area was quiet after heavy bombardment from the pre-dawn hours and there was no sign it had been taken by the Benghazi-based rebels advancing from the east. It is rumoured that the outskirts have been planted with landmines. Rebels retook the important oil towns of Brega, Ras Lanuf and Ben Jawad, and continued on the open desert road towards Sirte, about 95 miles away. A doctor treating wounded government soldiers described hundreds of deaths, terrible injuries and collapsing morale. Two loud explosions were heard on Sunday night near Sirte. It was not immediately clear what had been hit but local people said a military installation in the city was bombed on Saturday night – one of many targeted across the country in a week of coalition strikes. Soldiers manning a mobile radar station on the outskirts of the city looked nervous as night fell and aircraft were heard overhead. Large numbers of armed men, militiamen as well as regular soldiers, were on the streets and there was less of the exuberant defiance and loyal pro-Gaddafi slogans of the sort heard constantly in Tripoli. Travelling eastwards from the capital, the war feels closer. In Bani Walid, south of Tripoli, tank transporters carrying dirty armoured fighting vehicles drew a small crowd, and an appreciative volley of machine gun fire. Other Libyan army vehicles moved west along the main road, including some heavy tanks – Soviet-made T-72s – but there were no signs of large-scale movement. Everywhere, there are long queues at petrol stations, sometimes with hundreds of vehicles stretching down the road as they wait. At one queue, drivers were relieved when a tanker finally delivered a load of fuel, but then reacted with frustration when there was no electricity to operate the pumps. As well as its political significance as Gaddafi’s birthplace, Sirte is seen as important to his defence of Tripoli, the capital, which is now less than 300 miles from the rebels’ frontline. Control of the oil terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf is in itself a major gain because it could bring the rebel administration significant revenue from exports if production resumes. Rebels moved unchallenged along a road littered with evidence of the air campaign and the speed of their enemies’ retreat. The blackened carcasses of tanks, armoured vehicles and military trucks were pushed to the side of the road. In their hurried retreat from Ras Lanuf, government forces abandoned piles of ammunition. They included grey wooden boxes containing rockets but stamped as holding “parts of bulldozer”, manufactured in North Korea. In Bin Jawad, residents said a destroyed municipal building had been hit by an air strike. The rebels forced captured Gaddafi fighters on to buses and drove them to Benghazi. Witnesses described the bombing’s devastating effects on his forces. A doctor at the hospital in Ras Lanuf, which treated most of the government soldiers wounded in the coalition air raids on Ajdabiya and the road from Benghazi, described hundreds of casualties, breaking morale and many soldiers faking injuries to escape the assault. The doctor – who wished to be identified only by his first name, Abdullah – had responded to a call from Gaddafi’s government for medical personnel to go to the front two weeks ago. Today, he accidentally found himself on the rebel side of the line. “The first days, Gaddafi’s forces had very high morale and they came in large numbers, thousands. There were the army soldiers and then the volunteers in the militia,” he said. “They were fighting the rebels, no problem, and winning. But then came the bombing [by coalition air strikes]. The first day we had 56 seriously wounded. To the head, the brain, lost arms and legs. Soldiers with a lot of shrapnel in them. It was like that every day after.” Abdullah said all the wounded were on the Gaddafi side, with about two-thirds being those injured in the bombing of Ajdabiya where there were days of fighting as government forces blocked the rebel advance. The doctor said he did not know how many soldiers were killed in the air strikes, because the bodies were taken from the battlefield for burial. “The soldiers who came to the hospital told me there were 150 dead just on the first day of the bombing. After that, there were fewer because they hid,” he said. “It started to have a big effect on their morale. They said they could fight the rebels but not the planes. In recent days, many of the soldiers were trying to find excuses to leave the front. Ten to 20 a day came to the hospital pretending they were injured, asking for a medical certificate. They didn’t have any physical injuries, but I gave it [a certificate] to them.” Abdullah was sceptical about rebel accusations that many were foreign mercenaries. He said he had not see anyadded it was possible that some of the soldiers were not Libyan. But he did say that Gaddafi’s forces had systematically maltreated the civilian population, particularly those suspected of coming from the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi and other towns in the east under the revolutionaries’ control. “There was bad treatment of the civilians. One patient came here who had been trying to escape Ajdabiya with his family. The government army shot him in the leg,” he added. “The idea I got from civilians who came to the hospital is that things were very bad for them. They were beaten. Some said their family members had disappeared. They didn’t know if they were killed.” Some of Gaddafi’s forces were billeted in the el-Adeel hotel, in Ras Lanuf, which they looted as they fled, taking mattresses and televisions and levering open cash machines in the lobby. On walls across the town they sprayed in green paint three words: “God, Gaddafi, Libya.” Beyond Sirte lies the large town of Misrata, most of which is in rebel hands after an attempt by Gaddafi to retake it was driven off by air strikes. Government forces kept up their shelling at the weekend, although residents said it was considerably less intense than a week ago, after 12 hours of aerial bombardment by western planes destroyed more than 20 tanks and drove Gaddafi’s forces to the edge of the town.One rebel, Sami, told Reuters by telephone that pro-Gaddafi forces had fought with rebels in Misrata. “All day long we heard clashes between rebels and Gaddafi forces in the area of Tripoli Street, in the city centre,” he said. “We heard tanks, mortars and light weapons being used.” Misrata is the only big rebel stronghold left in the west of Libya and is cut off from the main rebel force fighting Gaddafi’s troops in the east.
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Related posts:Turkey offers to broker Libya ceasefire as rebels advance on Sirte Libya rebels on the defensive as Gaddafi forces enter Benghazi Benghazi rebels plead for Libya air strikes as Gaddafi forces advance
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March 28 2011, 5:09pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Tapping into online communities can help councils engage with citizens
Be it on Twitter, Facebook or Linked In, online communities are dominating the conversation and government just needs to get out of the way.
This article titled “Tapping into online communities can help councils engage with citizens” was written by Louise Kidney, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 28th March 2011 08.00 UTC Of all the rumours floating around local government this year, my favourite is that the localism bill introduction in the House of Commons was delayed because nobody could agree on the definition of “community”. A lot of people are interested in defining community at the moment, not just the coalition. The RSA is currently running a project examining the notion of a connected community in real space within the New Cross Gate area – mapping how people interrelate in their everyday lives whether through membership of special interest groups or in gyms. Facebook recently mapped their entire user base and how they interrelate – creating an image that reveals humanity’s need both to connect but also to migrate in all its global glory. We are fascinated with community. Mapping existing connections within a community might seem pointless, until you consider that this might be where the proof of the pudding is for a multicultural society. The truth is, until you ask the question and map a community, how it exists currently and came to be that way, you cannot find the reason or motivation for the cohesion that exists within it, nor transfer that anywhere else. Until you identify who goes to which mosque but also the gym next to it, and identify that that person who attends both is a hub and an influencer, how can you know who the people are who you should be targeting to attend your local neighbourhood meetings? If you engage with the influencers, your message will be passed by word of mouth – but you must identify them first. Even Facebook, a community in a digital space – or rather a collision of a series of friendship circles and communities all interacting and merging – has influencers. Most people, according to research, have about 150 people listed as friends on Facebook – but some have more, and they are the people who we assume cross over groups – the people who link groups, the people who work a room with ease at parties who transfer those networking skills across to the digital world. Again, if you want to get a digital community on board, get them behind your message, or, for example, behind your community clean up – identify the digital influencer in the geographical location you are targeting. Communities can be enormously useful, and these are just a few examples of how. But how do you identify a community that you can’t see – one which exists in a space which allegedly has no borders? And how do you quantify the value of a digital community, surely it’s just a load of people sitting around chatting? Not quite. Wikipedia defines a virtual community as ‘a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographic and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals.’ Sometimes it’s obvious that these communities exist online – take a look at any Facebook page on a common interest issue, be that a local issue or a band, and you will see there is a community – a collection of individuals with a commonality. But those links are not always so defined – local government has a community but that community sprawls across many digital networks, from the Communities of Practice to Twitter on the #localgov tag. There is a small article buried as a reference in the Wikipedia article on virtual community. PBS Teachers, an educators’ community over in the US, published a report on understanding the impact of online communities on civic engagement. The figures speak for themselves. 65% of online community members have involvement in civic affairs since becoming members, 44% are more involved in social activism. Instead of frantic typing and little else, it seems that becoming part of a community empowers and motivates people to transfer the feeling of belonging to a community into the real world to effect real, tangible community driven change. The lesson here, perhaps, is that just because something is digital does not mean it has no value in real world. It appears to act as an enabler, and for the RSA and others as an identifier, not an inhibitor. Louise Kidney works in the communications team at Blackburn with Darwen borough council and blogs at ashinyworld.blogspot.com This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the local government network for more like this direct to your inbox.
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March 28 2011, 4:08pm | Comments »
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Fukushima crisis: radiation fears grow for low-paid heroes battling disaster
Safeguards at the Fukushima nuclear power plant have failed emergency crews, and trust in the Japanese authorities is fading.)
This article titled “Fukushima crisis: radiation fears grow for low-paid heroes battling disaster” was written by Suzanne Goldenberg, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2011 00.06 UTC The last time Tomotake Watanabe turned up for his shift at the No 1 reactor of the Fukushima nuclear plant, he was thrown to the ground by Japan’s powerful earthquake and showered with broken glass and ceiling plaster. Now he awaits a call to join a mission to regain control of the plant whose danger is terrifyingly evident. “I feel under pressure that I might be called back,” he said. “I don’t feel I need to volunteer, but I worry about what I will do when I get called.” Seventeen workers have been exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation, including three last week who stood for 40 minutes in pools of water with radiation 10,000 times above safety limits. The accident raised fears of a leak in one of the six reactor cores and deepened criticism of the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s safeguards for workers. It also reinforced Watanabe’s conviction that he will not go back to work, if called. “I wouldn’t go back because I have a family and it is a very dangerous time. I would refuse,” he said. “At the moment there is a very high level of radiation, so even if they are calling people to return now, I don’t think that it is possible to go in safely.” The best Japan’s top government spokesman, Yukio Edano, could offer reporters was: “We are preventing it from worsening.” Sea water near the plant is now contaminated; Japan’s nuclear safety agency said that levels of radiation 1,250 times the legal limit were detected in sea water near drain outlets from the plant. High levels of radiation have already been detected in milk and leafy vegetables. The nerve centre of the operations to contain the crisis is a heavily shielded building on the reactor site, manned by about 50 top engineers. But the rest of the workforce, from firefighters to welders to electricians, are drawn from a pool of semi-skilled labour who work for low wages. Many work for associated companies such as Hitachi, Watanabe’s employer, Toshiba, and Toden Kogyo. Between shifts they are housed in a football stadium, J-Village, within the expanded 30km evacuation zone and brought in by bus. A number were seasonal workers, using a job at the plant to supplement livelihoods as small farmers. Some, like Watanabe, have been hopping between jobs at nuclear plants for years. Like much of Japan, Watanabe is in awe of their bravery. “Of course, someone has to go and do the job and maybe the people who went wanted to do the right thing,” he said. He does not want to be asked to make the same sacrifice. The 35-year-old had been working as a caretaker at an old people’s home when he got his first job at another nuclear plant three years ago. Since then, he has bounced from job to job in the industry, working for below the average monthly wage. At the outset he had few concerns about his safety at Fukushima – he says that he was never issued with protective gear. “They were always bragging about safety. They would say the plant was strong, that it could withstand an earthquake.” Watanabe started his current stint at Fukushima on 4 January, when he replaced worn and contaminated equipment on the spent atomic fuel pool at reactor No 4. But he was also called to service the other reactors and was in the turbine room next to reactor No 1 when the earthquake hit. “I couldn’t stand,” he said. “The window above my head shattered and parts of the ceiling fell in.” The three workers injured last week were trying to reconnect a pump in a turbine building next to reactor No 3 when they stepped into water 10,000 times more radioactive than normal.Press reports said that the three had ignored alarms from radiation dosimeters because they assumed there had been a malfunction. They were exposed to between two and six sieverts of radiation, or up to 24 times the annual exposure limit of 250 millisieverts set for workers at the plant in the wake of the disaster. “Now I have no trust in that place,” said Watanabe. The only way he thinks he will return to work at Fukushima is once the authorities declare radiation levels are low enough to demolish it. “They said they would close the plant. If that happens, there could be work again, tearing it down,” he said.
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March 27 2011, 1:19pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
London 2012 tickets, Japan appeal and census targeted by scammers
Warnings issued over phoney doorstop callers, fake emails asking for money and too-good-to-be-true London 2012 Olympic tickets
This article titled “London 2012 tickets, Japan appeal and census targeted by scammers” was written by Jill Insley, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2011 00.05 UTC Bogus doorstep callers have been posing as census collectors to try to get into people’s homes – and householders are being warned to be on their guard for fraudsters after today’s deadline for filling in the form. Following an attempt by a fraudster purporting to be a census official from the county council to get into an elderly man’s home in Leicestershire, the Local Government Association has urged people to be vigilant. Paul Bettison, the chairman of local government regulation, said: “Fraudsters are known to take advantage of any situation. If they can make money from it, then they will give it a go. “People visiting a household for official business should be able to provide photographic identification and unless that is the case, nobody should allow anyone access to their property.” Official census collectors will, from 6 April, visit a small number of households that have failed to complete the census – which can be returned in a pre-paid envelope or filled in online – but they will provide identification. Anyone who thinks they have been targeted by a bogus caller should call the census helpline on 0300 0201 101. Fraudsters have also been trying to scam money out of people wanting to donate cash to the Japan Tsunami Appeal. A spokesman for the Red Cross said: “There are some fraudulent emails circulating claiming to be raising money for the Japan Tsunami Appeal. These may request that you donate through companies like Western Union or Money Bookers, which we would never do. If you suspect an email is fraudulent, do not open attachments or click on links. “In addition to this we have also received reports of people requesting money over the phone, or cash on the doorstep. Although the British Red Cross does undertake both street and telephone fundraising, our calls are for regular commitment by direct debit and not for donations by cash or credit card.” An email forwarded to the Observer includes a donation form requesting details that including the donor’s credit card details, their mother’s maiden name, driver’s licence or passport details, and Verified by Visa password. Mark South, a spokesman for the Red Cross, confirmed the email was fake and added that people wanting to donate money to Japan should ensure they never divulge their personal details to an unknown source. Donors should only give through trusted channels, such as the Red Cross website or via the British Red Cross hotline on 08450 53 53 53. All British Red Cross marketing email addresses end @mail.redcross.org.uk, and the charity does not use general email providers such as BT Internet or Gmail to solicit donations. Anyone suspicious of an email they have received should contact the British Red Cross supporter care team on 0844 87 100 87 or at supportercare@redcross.org.uk. The 2012 Olympics have also proved a temptation for fraudsters who have set up websites to act as fake or unauthorised ticket outlets for the games. The official Olympic website – http://www.london2012.com – includes a tool that will check if a website is a genuine outlet, plus a list of known unauthorised websites claiming to offer London 2012 tickets. These include genuine-sounding names like http://www.london-olympics-tickets.org.uk and http://www.london-2012-games.com/2012-olympics-tickets – two sites that are defunct or look like they have been abandoned. However, other fake or unauthorised sites are still live, including http://www.londonolympicstickets.com and http://www.2010olympictickets.net. Real tickets will carry the name of the purchaser, and it is illegal to sell them on through auction sites such as eBay or to ticket resale sites. Those who buy legitimate tickets but can’t go to the event will be able to resell through an official resale exchange: this will launch early in 2012 before tickets are sent out, and will set prices at the tickets’ face value. But, a spokesman for London 2012 admitted, many people will have had tickets bought on their behalf and while spot checks may be carried out, only those with cancelled or fake tickets are likely to be turned away from events. He said it would be impossible to check whether all tickets are being used by the original purchasers and their friends and families as 8.8m tickets will be issued for events at 34 venues over 16 days. “We’re more interested in protecting people from losing their money through the purchase of fake tickets,” he added. Michael Norton, the managing director of PayPoint.net, said: “We expect fraud levels to increase dramatically following the passing of the ticket application deadline on 26 April. Opportunistic fraudsters will be looking to take advantage of those unlucky consumers not able to get tickets for some of the most oversubscribed events.” Tickets may only be bought using a Visa debit, credit or pre-paid card, which enable consumers to claim all their money back if they do fall into the trap of buying fake tickets. Norton said ticketholders should check the London 2012 site for a list of the official sales channels, research the true cost of tickets and not be lulled into a false sense of security by a well-designed site – some of the fake ones look very legitimate. He added that they should print out or take a copy of all sellers’ details, including the terms of the ticket purchase, full contact information for the ticket seller, and any published criteria about ticket location and likely delivery date. This will let them pursue any issue with the order even if the seller website changes and will support any future credit card chargeback.
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March 27 2011, 10:00am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Thousands march in London against spending cuts
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/26/thousands-march-in-london-against-spending-cuts
Turnout for the anti-cuts demo and march to Trafalgar Square has been revised upwards to around 400,000 as people take to the streets in London to protest against the government’s planned public service cuts.
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March 26 2011, 10:10am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
March for the alternative – live updates
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/26/march-for-the-alternative-%E2%80%93%C2%A0live-updates
More than 250,000 people are expected to march against the governing coalition’s cuts. Protesters gather in London in the biggest demo for eight years. Organisers warn against infiltration by police provacateurs.
This article titled “March for the alternative – live updates” was written by David Batty and Rowenna Davis, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 26th March 2011 10.01 UTC
1.15pm: Tom Wills, a student journalist based in Brighton, has posted a set of photos from the march on Flickr, which give a sense of the mass turnout.
1.10pm: EastLondonLines, a news website run by the journalism department of Goldsmiths, has posted this Twitpic, which shows the protesters marching past police lines near Parliament.
1.04pm: Paul Lewis has sent through an update, describing the wide range of groups who have joined today’s protest. “Standing here watching hundreds of thousands of people stream past, you get a real sense of the broad coalition against the government. I noted down every banner that past through over a couple of minutes. “Somerset Teachers Association, Vulnerable Chinese Migrants Association, Society of Radiographers, Prison Officers Association, Don’t Cut Out The Disabled, Southend On Sea Unison Branch, Ipswich Labour Party, Cut Trident, Nurses Uncut, Met Police Group PCS Union, Calderdale Division of the NUT, Chelsea Anti Cuts Alliance, Colchester NHS SOS, South Ribble Children, The Bohemian Storm is Rising, Parents Alliance of Community Schools, Isle of Wight Uncut.”
1.02pm: Matthew Taylor says thousands of people are still joining the march, with the total number estimated at around 400,000. “I am now on a footbridge overlooking the Embankment and people have been streaming underneath us for about an hour. People are queuing as far back as I a can see and tens of thousands more are still arriving from side streets. Organisers are suggesting there could be as many as 400,000 here today. That is impossible to verify at this stage. But it is clear that this is a very big demo.”
1.00pm: While this photo from Mary shows crowds gathering at Embankment.
12.58pm: This photo by Mary Hamilton pokes fun at undercover police officers – whose activities have recently been investigated by the Guardian.
12.45pm: Journalist Mary Hamilton – aka newsmary – has been posting photos of the march on Twitpic.
12.35pm: The Public and Commercial Services Union has set up its own live blog of the march.
12.30pm: Here’s a map of the march route
12.20pm: PA news agency has been speaking to some of the protesters: Peter Keats, 54, from Lowestoft, Suffolk, who works for Jobcentre Plus, said: “We’re toasting the success as so many people have turned out. The press were saying 100,000 people but I think we have far exceeded that. I’m hoping for half a million. I’m hoping the government will start to listen with this many out. “Personally, I think it’s wrong the way we are hitting the poor. I’m not so much worried about myself but the customers I deal with are vulnerable and I’m worried about them and I’m worried about the kids of this country.” Alan Dowling, 40, who works for the UK Border Agency in Sheffield, said: “The other day the immigration minister was on TV saying we need to do more. How are we going to do more enforcement when we are cutting enforcement officers?”
12.17pm: Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite, estimates there are half a million people taking part in the protest. He told PA: “This is an absolutely incredible turnout and display of anger which the government will have to take notice of.” Hundreds of police officers lined up outside parliament behind metal barriers as the marchers passed by and moved down Whitehall.
12.09pm: Matthew Taylor, who has been following the education feeder march, has now joined the main protest. In this audio report, he says the main march dwarfs the scale of the education protest: “The student block has suddenly become much quieter than it was now they see the scale of the TUC march.”
11.58am: Paul Lewis is on the Golden Jubilee Bridge near the Embankment, overlooking the march. He says the turnout is huge, stretching from the Houses of Parliament to St Paul’s Cathedral. He says the atmosphere is good natured. The only scuffle he’s seen was a protester heckling the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls.
10.49am: My colleague Matthew Taylor is with the education feeder march, which set off from the University of London in Mallet Street, Bloomsbury, around 20 minutes ago. Groups of Scottish students who set off at 11pm last night are leading the chanting. Student organisers had said ‘more than 10000′ people would meet here but so far there are probably month more than 2000 – although more are arriving all the time. Students and lecturers are being joined by various activist groups and so far the mood is vocal but pretty good natured. We’re at Russell Square now. There’s a small police presence. The police and the organisers don’t seem clear on the route but we’re on our way down to join the main march.
10.34am: My colleague Paul Lewis has just sent in his thoughts about the potential for trouble between protesters and the police. “I don’t think anyone doubts that the main march will be in large part good natured and peaceful. Most protesters will spend several hours marching through London, seeing little more than the placards in front of them, and finish with sandwiches in Hyde Park. But that isn’t to say there won’t be pockets of trouble, and if past experiences are anything to go by they could flare into some quite nasty confrontations with police. “Flashpoints could come when a handful of unofficial feeder marches, coming from across the capital, plan to join the main march. Will police let them? Many of the seasoned activists – those police like to call ‘trouble-makers’ – are likely to be on these fringe processions (watch out for delegations gathering right now in Kennington Park, Camden and Mallet Street) and the instinct of police, who at times exhibit an almost medieval vision of crowd psychology, is often to prevent groups mixing. That would spell trouble. “The other likely hotspots will be Oxford Street at 2pm, where UK Uncuts plan to close down shops, and Trafalgar Square late in the afternoon, which there are plans to occupy. Both of these locations, and others we don’t yet know about, are likely to be magnets for those intending to peel off from the slow procession through London in search of “direct action”. Coping sensibly with all these splinters from the main march will be a policing nightmare for Scotland Yard. It all comes down to how much coercion police use. Stop people from walking where they want and sparks fly.”
10.29am: Here’s some more comments from union leaders ahead of the march. Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, will tell the demonstrators that every time the government votes through more cuts, they should hear the “angry voices” of public sector workers losing their jobs. He also warned it faced being wiped out in May’s elections. “Every day when they discuss squeezing NHS budgets I want them to remember the nurses here on the march, the paramedics – workers who keep our NHS going. Workers who see every day the effect of the cuts on patients who are having vital pain-relieving operations cut or delayed. “Workers who worry about patient care suffering, because job cuts mean there are not enough staff on the ward. NHS workers and the public fearful that the Health and Social Care Bill will mean the break-up of the NHS – the end of our much loved health service as we know it. A new dawn of privatisation for the Tories’ friends in big business. “Every month when a library closes, a care home shuts its doors, or services for struggling young people are withdrawn, I want them to feel the fear, and anger of the people who have come here today from every part of the UK to vent their frustration and to stand up for a fairer future.” Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, said: “Cameron and Clegg have launched a war on working people and today’s demonstration is the start of the fightback. They expect us to suffer tax increases, pay cuts, unemployment and devastation of our pensions to pay for the crisis their friends in the City caused. They should expect the fight of their lives.” Len McCluskey, leader of Unite, said those taking part in the march were the “tip of the iceberg” because millions were opposed to the cuts. “There is growing anger, which will build and build as the impact of the cuts take effect.”
10.13am: Labour politicians will join the march and party leader Ed Miliband will address the rally in Hyde Park. He will use the speech to set out Labour’s alternative to the cuts and to accuse the coalition of fomenting the “politics of division” not seen since the “rotten” Thatcher era. Labour is calling the demonstration the “march of the mainstream”. But Gove told the Today programme there were “really big dangers” for Miliband in addressing the rally at the end of the march. “One is that people will say ‘You are calling for a plan B from the government, you don’t even have a plan A. More than that, you are associating yourself with a march which could, I’m afraid, move from being family event into being something darker.”
10.10am: Education secretary Michael Gove said today that he recognised the public concerns about the planned cuts. But he insisted that the government would not be deflected from its strategy. He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “Of course people will feel a sense of disquiet, in some cases anger, at what they see happening, but the difficulty we have as the government inheriting a terrible economic mess, is that we have to take steps to bring the public finances back into balance.”
10.02am: Barber will tell today’s rally that there is an alternative to the “brutal” spending cuts. Ahead of the march, he accused the coalition government of threatening the NHS and destroying communities with the scale of the job cuts. “No part of our public realm is to be protected. And don’t believe it when ministers say that the NHS is safe in their hands. With over 50,000 job cuts already in the pipeline – nurses, doctors, physios, midwives – in the name of so-called efficiency savings of £20 billion, the NHS as we know it, is already in intensive care. “With David Cameron talking about selling it off to any willing provider out to make a profit, the NHS is facing the gravest threat in its history. “Today let us say to him: we will not let you destroy what has taken generations to build. Let’s be brutally clear about these brutal cuts. They’re going to cost jobs on a huge scale – adding to the misery of the 2.5 million people already on the dole. “They’re going to hammer crucial services that bind our communities together, and they’re going to hit the poorest and the most vulnerable hardest. Anyone who tells you different is a bare-faced liar. “The government claims there is no alternative, but there is. Let’s keep people in work and get our economy growing. Let’s get tax revenues flowing and tackle the tax cheats, and let’s have a Robin Hood Tax on the banks, so they pay us back for the mess they caused.”
9.45am: A Guardian/ICM poll published today shows that the public are divided over the cuts, while two other polls last night put the balance more strongly against cuts. The Guardian/ICM poll of 1,014 found that 35% believe the cuts go too far, 28% think they strike the right balance and 29% think they don’t go far enough; 8% don’t know. A YouGov survey for Unison found that 56% believe the cuts are too harsh and a ComRes poll for ITV showed that two-thirds think the government should reconsider its planned spending cuts programme. Just one in five disagreed with that view. Speaking ahead of the march, TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said of the Unison survey: “I’m sure that many of our critics will try to write us off today as a minority, vested interest. This poll nails that lie. “The thousands coming to London from across the country will be speaking for their communities when they call for a plan B that saves vital services, gets the jobless back to work and tackles the deficit through growth and fair tax.”
9.15am: Good morning and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the mass protest in London against the coalition government’s public sector cuts. Around 300,000 people are expected to join the March for the Alternative organised by the TUC, the biggest union-organised event for over 20 years and the largest in the country since the protest against the Iraq war in 2003. More than 800 coaches and 10 trains have been chartered to bring people to the capital from as far afield as Cornwall and Inverness. Union members are expected to be joined by a broad coalition, from pensioners to doctors, families and first-time protesters, to football supporters and anarchists. My colleague Matthew Taylor has written a guide to all the organisations – both official and unofficial – who will be taking part. The Metropolitan Police believe a small minority will try to hijack the anti-cuts march to stage violent attacks on property and the police. The TUC organisers of the event say they have organised a family-friendly demonstration with brass, jazz and Bollywood bands. But there are concerns that unofficial feeder marches, sit-down protests and a takeover of Trafalgar Square could turn from peaceful civil disobedience into stand-offs with the police. The march assembles on the Embankment from 11am but it will still be leaving at 2pm and possibly even later. The TUC has drawn up a set of tips for those planning to join the march. The protest will culminate in a rally in Hyde Park. Guardian reporters Matthew Taylor and Paul Lewis will be out on the streets covering the protest as it happens. If you’re at the demo and want to send me any comments – or share any pictures, audio clips and videos – you can contact me either on david.batty@guardian.co.uk or on Twitter – @David_Batty
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March 26 2011, 8:38am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Japan’s nuclear emergency prompts panic buying in Tokyo
Tokyo is 150 miles away from Fukushima but residents are right to be worried about the unfolding nuclear disaster since the authorites have been failing to communicate truthfully. Tokyo citizens are prepared for a possible lockdown as foreign embassies advise citizens to leave the city.
This article titled “Japan’s nuclear emergency prompts panic buying in Tokyo” was written by Justin McCurry in Osaka, for The Guardian on Tuesday 15th March 2011 08.52 UTC News of a serious radiation leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant has sparked panic buying in Tokyo, as some residents started to leave the capital to escape potential contamination. Several embassies advised their citizens to leave affected areas, including Tokyo, and some multinational companies either told staff to leave or were considering relocating outside the city. As officials urged people living near the stricken plant to stay indoors, residents in the capital, 150 miles to the south, began preparing for the possibility of a similar lockdown. Experts were keen to stress, however, that only “minute” levels of radiation had been detected in Tokyo. Weather forecasters said winds near the atomic plant, which experienced a third explosion on Tuesday morning, were blowing in a south-westerly direction – towards Tokyo – but would move in a westerly direction later in the day. People in the capital, home to 12 million, snapped up radios, torches, candles, fuel containers and sleeping bags, while for the fourth day there was a run on bread, canned goods, instant noodles, bottled water and other foodstuffs at supermarkets. Retailers said the panic buying was reminiscent of the oil crisis in the 1970s. The electronics firm Panasonic said it was increasing production of batteries, which were being bought in large quantities as far away as Hiroshima in the south-west. Fears are rising that if the hoarding frenzy continues it will affect the ability to deliver emergency supplies to the disaster zone. “The situation is hysterical,” said Tomonao Matsuo, a spokesman for the instant noodle maker Nissin Foods. “People feel safer just by buying Cup Noodles.” Foreign journalists covering the nuclear crisis, including reporters from the BBC and CNN, withdrew from the Fukushima area. On Monday, the German magazine Der Spiegel said its veteran war correspondent was being pulled out of Tokyo. Tourists cut short holidays and descended on international airports in Tokyo and Osaka, seeking flights home. They included about 200 South Koreans who have now arrived back in Seoul. Liezel Strauss, a South African, said on Twitter on Tuesday morning: “I just woke up to several calls & emails, family & husband freaking out, it’s time to go, flight booked to singapore this pm.” She added: “Realised no use staying stressing + freaking my family out if i’m not helping and physically contributing, I want to but reality is I’m not.” The number of people stranded at Narita airport, near Tokyo, rose after airlines cancelled flights but officials said there had been no surge in passenger numbers. Air China cancelled flights to Tokyo from Beijing and Shanghai. Other airlines in the region said they were monitoring the situation but had no immediate plans to cancel services. South Korea has urged its nationals in Japan to stay away from the quake zone while Germany advised its citizens to consider leaving the country. The French embassy warned in an advisory that a radioactive wind could reach Tokyo on Tuesday evening and advised its citizens to leave. Britain’s Foreign Office advised against all non-essential travel to Tokyo and north-eastern Japan. “Our advice is people should take their lead from the Japanese authorities,” the Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne told Sky News. The US state department urged its citizens to avoid tourism and non-essential travel to Japan. “[Our] travel advice is not to go to that part of Japan in any case unless you have an extremely compelling reason for doing so,” it said. Japan’s government has ordered people within 12 miles of the Fukushima No 1 plant, about 150 miles north-east of Tokyo, to evacuate. Those living between 12 and 19 miles from the plant were told to stay indoors due to fears of exposure to radiation. In Saitama, a prefecture north of Tokyo where safe but higher radiation levels have been detected, residents struggled to secure food. Yoshiyuki Sakuma was one of many who could not find a single bag of rice. “I couldn’t find any anywhere,” he said, adding he was now searching for bread. “If you lose electricity, water and gas, at least you can still eat bread.”
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March 15 2011, 4:01am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Tsunami alert sparks evacuations from Hawaii to Easter Island
Luckily the tsunami didn’t wreak as much destruction over the entire pacific ocean as the earthquake that affected the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004
This article titled “Tsunami alert sparks evacuations from Hawaii to Easter Island” was written by Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, for The Guardian on Friday 11th March 2011 19.39 UTC Visions of a seven-metre wall of water travelling at jet speeds generated evacuation orders across the vast expanse of the Pacific. From the low-lying atolls of Kiribati to Hawaii’s Waikiki beach, Chile’s Easter Island and even inland areas such as California’s Napa Valley, authorities on Friday scrambled to get their citizens out of harm’s way. Low-lying islands that were the first in the tsunami’s path – Kiribati, Tonga, Guam – ordered people to move 30 metres inland and look for refuge well above sea level. By the time the great wave roared past those islands, communities on the west coast of America were engaged in their own disaster preparations. Authorities warned that even though the first waves brought less destruction than feared to Guam and other areas, the Pacific rim was not out of danger. “Stay off the beach,” said US National Weather Service forecaster Diana Henderson. “It’s not just one wave, it’s a series that could last up to 12 hours.” The president reinforced the warning. “If people are told to evacuate, do as you are told,” Barack Obama told a press conference. Hawaii sounded warning sirens within an hour of the quake hitting Japan, sending people running from their homes in the dark to stock up with food and petrol. Pumps ran dry within hours. The US navy ordered all warships in Pearl Harbor to remain in port and ready to support rescue missions. People living in beach areas on Oahu and Kauai were ordered to leave their homes. In the Oahu resort area of Waikiki, tourists were moved to hotel rooms above the fourth floor. The authorities in Maui shut down water and sewage plants to prevent their contamination. Schools and government offices were closed. In coastal areas of Oregon, tsunami sirens went off at about 4am local time. Police and firefighters went door to door to warn residents to move to higher ground after an automated warning failed. Northern counties of California also ordered evacuations. Schools were closed, and police patrolled to keep surfers off the beach. In Crescent City, 35 boats were reported to have been crushed and the harbour area significantly damaged. In the San Francisco Bay area, roads were closed and trains and ferries cancelled, as well as flights to Japan. Officials told curiosity seekers to stay home, and went through parks moving homeless people away. The first landfall on the US Pacific coast on Friday morning left relatively limited damage. The tsunami hit at low tide – with waves of about a metre – and the authorities in Oregon initially compared the effect to a winter storm. “We’re looking at 4½ to 5ft [1.5 metres] so far,” said Don Kendall, the emergency co-ordinator for Oregon’s Curry County. “We’re in the middle of a low tide so it’s not hitting us as bad as it would have had we had high.” But there were sporadic reports of damaged piers and boats breaking free from their moorings. Authorities were also on alert for inland flooding as far away as California’s Napa Valley wine country. Canada, though officially outside the main danger zone, evacuated marinas, beaches and parks in British Columbia that lie below the high-tide mark. Mexico shuttered shops and closed roads in tourist resorts on the Baja California peninsula. Off Oaxaca, empty oil tankers were ordered out to sea. Chile, which was forecast to be hit on Friday evening, ordered residents on Easter Island to make for the island’s airport, which is on higher ground. Port officials in Valparaiso ordered ships to move out to sea. “This is a preventative alert,” said Chile’s president, Sebastian Pinera. “If there are any consequences from the earthquake and tsunamis that hit Japan, they would occur in the last hours of the day.” Ecuador enacted emergency powers, giving the police and military control of the coast. On the Galápagos Islands, tourist ships set off for deeper waters and residents were told to head for higher ground. The Peruvian authorities were waiting until later in the day to issue evacuation orders for low-lying areas of Lima. But the potential dangers left some undaunted. Gabriel Aramburu, a professional surfer in Lima, told Reuters: “For there to be a tsunami the sea water has to suck out and pull back first. If that happens, we’ll paddle into shore and leave. But I’ve never seen the sea recede like that.”
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Related posts:Earthquake in Japan triggers Tsunami – Video After the earthquake, a tsunami of death and destruction in Japan Britons tell of devastation as Japan quake closes Tokyo’s Narita airport
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March 11 2011, 7:02pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
May Day matters both for solidarity and our souls
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/05/may-day-matters-both-for-solidarity-and-our-souls
By all means celebrate St George’s Day as well but keep May Day as a bank holiday
Bluebells on May Day
This article titled “May Day matters both for solidarity and our souls” was written by Cole Moreton, for The Guardian on Saturday 5th March 2011 06.00 UTC Workers of Britain, unite! Rise and dance at dawn, or charm a worm out of the ground – or do anything, really, as long as it’s daft. May Day madness is under threat, and it is our patriotic duty to save it. The government wants to move the holiday, to celebrate St George in April or the battle of Trafalgar in October. Business leaders want to extend the tourist season, which is fair enough – but some also say that it would be more patriotic. That’s nonsense. English people don’t feel much affinity for their patron saint, who’s from Palestine anyway. And even the finest tourist officer would struggle to sell Parisians on the idea of coming over in the gloom of autumn for a day that marks the crushing of the French. In contrast, there is no day in the calendar more wonderfully British than May Day. This is the moment when May madness hits and our unique passion for doing eccentric things is seen once more in all its glory. Worms will be charmed, maypoles plaited and the sinister Obby Oss will stalk Padstow. Men and women will dance at daybreak in Dorset, re-enacting imagined fertility rites in or near the dominant part – so to speak – of the hugely well-endowed chalk figure at Cerne Abbas. The May Ball revellers of Oxford will risk their privileged necks jumping from the Magdalen Bridge in evening dress, even as a choir sings. And those are just the headline-making events. Right across the country, May Day is when the British people exercise their right to get outside and do something really silly. “We are eccentric,” I was told by Lesley Prince, a social psychologist and lifelong participant in civil war re-enactments. “It is part of the British national identity.” Of course, most of these “traditional” events are not nearly as long-standing as people claim. The crab apple fair at Egremont in Cumbria goes back to 1267, but the world gurning championships held there – apparently inspired by the sourness of the fruit – is a relatively modern invention. Worm charming in Blackawton, south Devon, appears beguilingly ancient and rustic but actually only started in 1984, when a bored local at the Normandy Arms wondered what happened to grass when you peed on it. He rose from his pint to find out, saw the ground come alive with worms, and a tradition was born. But whether these events are old or new, people love them. The numbers of participants and spectators have soared over the last decade or so. They generate income – people have got to eat hog roast and drink real ale while they do this stuff, obviously – but that’s not really what it’s all about. The point is to celebrate just being alive. Just being us. People on the left tend to be as embarrassed by morris dancing and maypoles as they are by the flag of St George. They would prefer to keep May Day for the workers, and for international solidarity. Which is fair enough, we need as much of that as we can get. But such squeamishness misses the similarity between the two strands of May Day. Both share the same spirit – a desire to resist being ordered about and told what to do. The British people can be a rowdy, bawdy, rebellious, fun-loving, mischief-making lot – when we’re at our best. That spirit has got stronger again in recent years, so that even our old Etonian prime minister must appear to be a man of the people. But moving the May Day bank holiday would be a big blow to that independent spirit, not least because many of the things we like to do just can’t be done in bad weather, which is more likely earlier or later in the year. Those rituals need to stay where they are, and we need to learn to love them, because there is a serious point here. Britishness is changing before our eyes, as ideas and cultures from all over the world remake us. Rather than lament the loss of our old certainties, we can – and must – choose to celebrate the possibilities of new Britishness. That means being open to the new – but it also means being proud of who we really are, which is a daft bunch of eejits. Let the tourism chiefs go charm a few worms, open their eyes and see May Day for what it is: a fabulous – and highly marketable – festival of Great British Eccentricity. We need it, for our souls. And anyway, who’d want to go cheese-rolling in the snow?
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Related posts:St George’s Day Weather Photography Competition
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March 5 2011, 4:30am | Comments »
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