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Source: Mother Jones

The oceans around Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are beginning to show troubling signs of radioactivity. Recent tests by TEPCO found levels far surpassing legal limits, iodine by 7.5 million times and cesium by 1.1 million times. As MoJo environmental correspondent Julia Whitty has reported in several recent posts, radioactive material is now entering the marine food web, and will likely only continue to work its way up. And ocean currents are carrying the contaminants far and wide. As a result of the increased radiation levels, several countries, including Hong Kong, Russia, and India, have enacted temporary bans on Japanese seafood imports. But so far, there is no such ban in the US. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

In early March, while boisterous Carnival celebrations filled the streets of Rio de Janiero, bulldozers began clearing away Amazonian jungle for roads leading to the construction site of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam on the Xingu River in northeast Brazil.

The $10bn dam is planned to be the third largest dam in the world. Government officials say its construction will generate thousands of jobs and create electricity for 23 million homes.

Environmental groups and indigenous activists in the area, however, condemn the project, which they say will displace some 20,000 people, and destroy over 100,000 acres of land in an area full of ecological diversity and indigenous communities. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

In a nuclear crisis that is becoming increasingly serious, Japan’s Nuclear Safety Agency confirmed that radioactive iodine-131 in seawater samples taken near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex that was seriously damaged by the recent tsunami off the coast of Japan is 4,385 times the level permitted by law.

Airborne radiation near the plant has been measured at 4-times government limits.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, the company that operates the crippled plant, has begun releasing more than 11,000 tons of radioactive water that was used to cool the fuel rods into the ocean while it attempts to find the source of radioactive leaks. The water being released is about 100 times more radioactive than legal limits. read more

Source: New Statesman

In an exclusive essay for the New Statesman, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, argues that WikiLeaks is a return to the days of the once popular radical press. He also discusses why the New York Times dislikes the whistle-blowing website, and reveals the biggest threat to WikiLeaks today.

“WikiLeaks is part of an honourable tradition that expands the scope of freedom by trying to lay ‘all the mysteries and secrets of government’ before the public,” writes Assange, who compares WikiLeaks to the pamphleteers of the English Civil War and the radical press of the early twentieth century. “We are, in a sense, a pure expression of what the media should be: an intelligence agency of the people, casting pearls before swine.” read more

Source: The Independent

I hate being called a war reporter. Firstly, because there is an unhappy flavour of the junkie about it. Secondly, because you cannot report a war without knowing the politics behind it.

Could Ed Murrow or Richard Dimbleby have covered the Second World War without understanding Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement or Hitler’s Anschluss? Could James Cameron – whose reporting on Korea was spectacular – have recorded the live test-firing of an atom bomb without knowledge of the Cold War? read more