bananas
bananas's JournalTepco can't yet be trusted to restart world's biggest nuclear plant: governor
Source: Reuters
Tokyo Electric Power Co must give a fuller account of the Fukushima disaster and address its "institutionalized lying" before it can expect to restart another nuclear station, the world's largest, said a local government official who holds an effective veto over the utility's revival plan.
"If they don't do what needs to be done, if they keep skimping on costs and manipulating information, they can never be trusted," Niigata Prefecture Governor Hirohiko Izumida told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
Izumida must approve the embattled utility's plans to restart the reactors at Kashiwazaki Kariwa, the world's biggest nuclear complex on the Japan Sea coast some 300 kms (180 miles) northwest of Tokyo.
A former economy and trade ministry bureaucrat who has emerged as a leading critic of Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, Izumida said he would launch his own commission to investigate the causes and handling of the Fukushima crisis and whether strengthened regulatory safeguards were sufficient to prevent a similar disaster.
<snip>
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/us-japan-nuclear-tepco-idUSBRE99R0KR20131028
The Kashiwazaki Kariwa plant was damaged in a 2007 earthquake.
Obama Aware Of Surveillance On Angela Merkel Since 2010: Report
Source: Agence France-Presse
US President Barack Obama was personally informed of mobile phone tapping against German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which may have begun as early as 2002, German media reported Sunday.
Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying that National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander had briefed Obama on the operation against Merkel in 2010.
"Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue," the newspaper quoted a high-ranking NSA official as saying.
Meanwhile newsweekly Der Spiegel reported ahead of its Monday issue that leaked NSA documents showed Merkel's phone had appeared on a list of spying targets since 2002, and was still under surveillance weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June.
<snip>
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/27/obama-angela-merkel_n_4167407.html
Computer Scientists 'Prove' God Exists
Source: Spiegel
Two scientists have formalized a theorem regarding the existence of God penned by mathematician Kurt Gödel. But the God angle is somewhat of a red herring -- the real step forward is the example it sets of how computers can make scientific progress simpler.
As headlines go, it's certainly an eye-catching one. "Scientists Prove Existence of God," German daily Die Welt wrote last week.
But unsurprisingly, there is a rather significant caveat to that claim. In fact, what the researchers in question say they have actually proven is a theorem put forward by renowned Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel -- and the real news isn't about a Supreme Being, but rather what can now be achieved in scientific fields using superior technology.
When Gödel died in 1978, he left behind a tantalizing theory based on principles of modal logic -- that a higher being must exist. The details of the mathematics involved in Gödel's ontological proof are complicated, but in essence the Austrian was arguing that, by definition, God is that for which no greater can be conceived. And while God exists in the understanding of the concept, we could conceive of him as greater if he existed in reality. Therefore, he must exist.
<snip>
Using an ordinary MacBook computer, they have shown that Gödel's proof was correct -- at least on a mathematical level -- by way of higher modal logic.
<snip>
Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/computer-scientists-prove-god-exists/story?id=20678984&singlePage=true
Reuters Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters
Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters
By Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito
IWAKI | Fri Oct 25, 2013 11:20am EDT
<snip>
Hayashi, 41, says he was recruited for a job monitoring the radiation exposure of workers leaving the plant in the summer of 2012. Instead, when he turned up for work, he was handed off through a web of contractors and assigned, to his surprise, to one of Fukushima's hottest radiation zones.
<snip>
Raising wages could draw more workers but that has not happened, the data shows. Tepco is under pressure to post a profit in the year to March 2014 under a turnaround plan Japan's top banks recently financed with $5.9 billion in new loans and refinancing. In 2011, in the wake of the disaster, Tepco cut pay for its own workers by 20 percent.
<snip>
Japan's nuclear industry has relied on cheap labor since the first plants, including Fukushima, opened in the 1970s. For years, the industry has rounded up itinerant workers known as "nuclear gypsies" from the Sanya neighborhood of Tokyo and Kamagasaki in Osaka, areas known for large numbers of homeless men.
<snip>
A Tepco survey from 2012 showed nearly half of the workers at Fukushima were employed by one contractor but managed by another. Japanese law prohibits such arrangements, in order to prevent brokers from skimming workers' wages.
<snip>
Yousuke Minaguchi, a lawyer who has represented Fukushima workers, says Japan's government has turned a blind eye to the problem of worker exploitation. "On the surface, they say it is illegal. But in reality they don't want to do anything. By not punishing anyone, they can keep using a lot of workers cheaply."
<snip>
Diane Roark warned that the U.S. was eavesdropping on its own citizens. Then it turned on her.
September 5th, 2012 AARON MESH | News Stories
Who’s Listening to Diane Roark?
An Oregon woman warned that the U.S. government was eavesdropping on its own citizens. Then it turned on her.
SPOOKED: Diane Roark says she no longer feels secure in her home. “Every time at night when I go around and lock the doors, I think, ‘Well, if they want to get in…’” - IMAGE: Tom Patterson
Warrantless wiretapping may have faded from the headlines with George W. Bush, but one Oregonian is determined to focus attention on the federal government’s spying on its own citizens.
Diane Roark, 63, is an unlikely activist. More comfortable with Dick Cheney than Noam Chomsky, the Stayton mother of two spent over 20 years inside Washington, D.C.’s, intelligence bureaucracy—not exactly an anarchist breeding ground.
But since the summer day five years ago when a dozen FBI agents banged on her front door, Roark has been a different person.
<snip>
She says she went to her congressional leaders and the NSA’s director, Gen. Michael Hayden, and asked why the protections against warrantless domestic wiretapping had been abandoned.
“We had the power,” Roark recalls Hayden saying. “We didn’t need them.”
<snip>
Just came across this on a climate blog http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2013/10/whos-listening-to-diane-roark.html
Human rights experts criticize U.N. report on Fukushima radiation
Source: Kyodo
Human rights experts including a U.N. special rapporteur on Thursday criticized a U.N. scientific report dismissing concerns about the effect of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster on the general public in Japan.
Speaking at an event organized by U.S. and Japanese nongovernmental groups, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to health Anand Grover took issue with the report's conclusion that "there is nothing to worry about" for members of the public exposed to radiation after Fukushima.
<snip>
Mari Inoue, a representative of Tokyo-based Human Rights Now, meanwhile called for the UNSCEAR report to be revised.
<snip>
Also on Thursday, Human Rights Now released a statement signed by 64 community organizations in Japan calling for revisions to the report.
<snip>
Read more: http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20131025p2g00m0dm028000c.html
Moniz: Energy world different since '73 oil embargo, and more changes will come
Moniz: Energy world different since '73 oil embargo, and more changes will come
Posted by Kendall Helblig on October 24, 2013
Forty years after the Arab oil embargo, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told an audience at a Washington think tank that there have been profound changes in how the United States views and addresses the energy world – and that more change is coming.
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday, Moniz said American households spent 20 percent more of their income on energy in 1973 than they do today.
<snip>
Although it is well known that there has been an increase in oil and gas production, Moniz said it deserves more focus. Last year, he said, the U.S. saw its greatest increase in oil production in history: up by 1 million barrels per day. It was largely driven, according to Moniz, by two hydraulic fracturing formations: Bakken, in North Dakota, and Eagle Ford, in Texas.
Those two regions alone accounted for about 75 percent of monthly oil production growth across the six major domestic regions, according to a drilling productivity report released this week by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
<snip>
Iran could make enough HEU for warhead in as little as 1 month: report
Source: McClatchy
Iran has been expanding its uranium enrichment capability and now requires as little as one month to just over one-and-a-half months to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon, according to a new report.
The finding by the Institute for Science and International Security and the University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science compares to a 2-4 month time frame that the organizations assessed a year ago. Their assessments are based on reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran's nuclear facilities.
"As in the October 2012 iteration, the estimates in this report do not include the additional time that Iran would need to convert WGU (weapons grade uranium) into weapons components and manufacture a nuclear weapon," the ISIS-UV assessment said. "This extra time could be substantial, particularly if Iran wanted to build a reliable warhead for a ballistic missile."
<snip>
Iran insists that its enrichment program, which it kept secret for 18 years and is based on technology and knowhow acquired from a smuggling ring led by the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, is strictly for peaceful purposes. The United States believes Iran is putting in place the ability to produce a nuclear weapon if it decides to do so.
<snip>
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/24/206359/iran-could-make-enough-heu-for.html
Japan secrecy act stirs fears about press freedom, right to know
Source: Reuters
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government is planning a state secrets act that critics say could curtail public access to information on a wide range of issues, including tensions with China and the Fukushima nuclear crisis.
The new law would dramatically expand the definition of official secrets and journalists convicted under it could be jailed for up to five years.
Japan's harsh state secrecy regime before and during World War Two has long made such legislation taboo, but the new law looks certain to be enacted since Abe's Liberal Democratic Party-led bloc has a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament and the opposition has been in disarray since he came to power last December.
Critics see parallels between the new law and Abe's drive to revise Japan's U.S.-drafted, post-war constitution to stress citizen's duties over civil rights, part of a conservative agenda that includes a stronger military and recasting Japan's wartime history with a less apologetic tone.
<snip>
"This may very well be Abe's true intention - cover-up of mistaken state actions regarding the Fukushima disaster and/or the necessity of nuclear power," said Sophia University political science professor Koichi Nakano.
<snip>
Read more: http://www.newsdaily.com/world/e466e4755f527f25d331e851132684ce/japan-secrecy-act-stirs-fears-about-press-freedom-right-to-know
Did you know that Kate Sessions is considered the "Mother of Balboa Park"?
Did you know that Kate Sessions is considered the "Mother of Balboa Park"?
This forward-thinking woman pioneered much of the vegetation now seen in the Park and surrounding areas....travelling around the world to find plants and trees that would thrive in San Diego's arid climate.
Kate Sessions love of the Park began in 1892 when she leased land for a nursery and agreed to plant 100 trees a year in the Park in exchange.
A statue was erected in her honor in 1998.
Profile Information
Member since: Wed Nov 10, 2004, 12:55 AMNumber of posts: 27,509
