Epicenter 日本 in the info wars

TEPCO executives bow to apologize for continuing to lie to Fukushima area refugees. (Al Jazeera English, which cable t.v. in the US refuses to carry. Get it online, while you still can.)

Japan is kind of off the radar now that weeks have passed; beautiful people are having lavish weddings, the Arab spring shows no sign of peaking, we're bogged down in Afghanistan, and the clowns representing the false dichotomy are up to their usual antics.

But I'm still paying attention.

I'm not very knowledgable about science, but I know people who are. They tell me about what radiation dangers really exist and continue to loom over all of us as the result of the earthquake-tsunami-Fukushima disaster.

Information is my thing. So here is some for you all.

The Japanese Prime Minister's expert on radiation quit in protest over the government ignoring his advice by raising acceptable levels for children to unacceptable levels for scientists.

You may remember Yoichi Shimatsu's article a few weeks back suggesting that some of the contradictions and omissions in TEPCO's public statements could be explained if there were a secret nuclear weapons facility concealed within Fukushima's plant. He untangles some of the specific statements and contradictions he's talking about in a subsequent article on the website Global Researcher.

Japanese are crowd sourcing radiation data because they can't get good information from either TEPCO or the government. There is a website where you can join in contributing financially to support the effort.

Meanwhile I am just about through co-teaching the book Hiroshima to 9th graders. It was purely coincidental that their regular English teacher had planned this spring to guide them through John Hersey's historic account of the first mass radiation sickness event. She knew I'd lived in Japan and invited me to infuse some history and some literacy support into a unit she's taught before.

Barefoot Gen, a manga about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Image from Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

The students' excellent big question as they near the end of the book: Why was an atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima?

They already know about WWII and Pearl Harbor, but that doesn't seem to them sufficient to explain the level of suffering inflicted on civilians.

What's the best answer -- so the U.S. could colonize and permanently militarize a nifty archipelago just off China's eastern coast?

The students most likely don't know about the suspicions around what's really going on at the Fukushima plant, because they really have no news sources. And, even if they did, the ones they would be almost certain to encounter would NEVER cover a critically interesting investigative story like that.

A parent told me the other night that she was amazed that she, herself, had never heard of Rachel Corrie being killed by an Israeli bulldozer until her daughter came home talking about it. The mom is sure that if she had ever seen this news on t.v. or in the newspaper, she would have remembered.

Why isn't information allowed to be free? Because information is power. (Radiation data site here.)

And the Forces of Greed want to make sure the youth of the U.S., and the people of Japan, and the world, don't get their hands on it.

postscript: !Bravo! to Peru for passing legislation that Internet access is a fundamental human right.

Night Raids in Occupied Palestine

Move Over AIPAC needs you in DC May 21-24!

Latest report from CODEPINK Greater Boston's Ridgely Fuller in the West Bank right now:

Back in the Awarta area for the past four days I continue to feel so helpless and outraged by the daily army and settler violence inflicted on its residents constituting nothing less than unending collective punishment on the community. Every night  since I have returned either the settlers/ army or both have entered the town, broken into peoples homes, firebombed the mosque. dropped flares to terrify the population and keep it off balance. The girls report at school that the soldiers simply tell them during the breakins that they will be back night after night.As I mentioned earlier the women have been gathered in 'sweeps' ..called via sound systems to come into the the streets, walk to the army base, have a number  ( in Hebrew) secured to their shoulder, wait outside for questioning. One mother with no one to look after her 2.4 month old, stood outside the interrogation center with her baby in the cold for the entire night.

There is little we, as internationals can do..many residents are afraid to putting internationals in danger by letting them sleep in their homes and suffering even more consequences.The Palestinian Authority is seen as complicit with the Israeli army in that they have not visited, responded to calls from the community for an international investigation. So the plan is to carefully get peoples' stories and then go after media attention, both with in Palestine as well as abroad....I have been working on this and also on getting official permission for internationals to have an ongoing presence in the schools.

In addition to Awarta, time is spent trying to help a poor small farming community Izbet a Tabib where 32 of their 45 homes are under Israeli demolition orders for being located in an' agricultural zone'...Even more pressing is the Israeli army's imminent plan to take 15 dunums( around 4 acres) of their BEST land , heavily planted with old olive trees which runs along a' settler only' road. The Army has already taken 45 dunums of the land, for one farmer this additional confiscation would wipe out all his land. The Israelis say that stones have been thrown at settler cars from this area although  there has never been questioning or an arrest of anyone in the village for stone-throwing during the past ten years...if there has been (highly skeptical) any problem the solution would be to provide security to the cars..perhaps a patrol.. not confiscate private property. I got in touch with ..hope you know these miracle workers by now..Awad and our own Mazin.. .like calling on the cavalry in my estimation.
 Awad immediately took the head farmer to the lawyers and they will submit a 'stay' of the proposed fence in the superior court today....the reasoning is, at best, delay -delay- delay..cost the Israeli occupation (US tax payer) big bucks..as Mazin reminds us the Wall begun in 2002 was supposed to be completed in 2 years at a cost of around $ 2 billion and now,2011, 70% completed for a price tag of about $8 billion.

Also, potentially significant for the community: apparently, as an indication of how strong the Palestinian legal case is, the Israeli civil administration felt compelled to alert the farmers' lawyer as to when the start of the fence building....of course we will use this time table to the Palestinian advantage...more as it unfolds!

Take care,
Ridgely