The trucks are made by a German company, Putzmeister, for building skyscrapers. The Soviets also used eleven of them to help dump concrete on the failed Chernobyl nuclear plant about 25 years ago.
The 26 wheeled trucks can be operated by remote control. You know the situation at Fukushima Daiichi is bad when so many other countries get directly involved to help control the crisis.
Thanks to a WikiLeaks release, tensions between the United States and Ecuador are heating up.
The WikiLeaks document showed that the U.S. ambassador to Ecuador, Heather M. Hodges, made some not so nice comments about their President. Apparently President Rafael Correa gave her a chance to retract, or explain, her statements, and she allegedly refused. She was then declared persona non grata (unwelcome) in Ecuador, but not officially kicked out.
Now the United States has actually kicked out the ambassador from Ecuador. The U.S. State Department says it’s in retaliation for Ecuador ordering Hodges out of the country, which President Correa disputes. Correa says they simply said she was no longer welcome, but they were not “kicking her out”.
This continues a long list of problems between Ecuador and the U.S. In the past few years the United States was pushing Ecuador to allow U.S. military bases to be set up on their soil. The official reason was to fight drugs in Columbia, but many people believe it was to encircle Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. President Correa responded, in 2009, by saying that the only way the U.S. could build bases in Ecuador, was if Ecuador was allowed to build bases in the United States.
Now we have the WikiLeaks/ambassador fiasco. What’s next, oil? Maybe!
Ecuador has oil! They have been fighting international legal battles to prevent oil companies from coming in and drilling. That’s right, they do NOT want anymore oil pumped out of their ground. Ecuador does have active oil fields, but they don’t want anymore. The oil corporations, backed by governments (Chevron/United States), are saying to bad so sad, you just a piddly country, what you gonna do about it?
So far Ecuador has been petitioning United Nations members, but not getting much support. There’s estimated to be hundreds of millions of barrels of oil still to be drilled and pumped out in Ecuador. And with the price of oil making it more tempting, could President Obama (or any other future U.S. president) be planning some kinda humanitarian military intervention in Ecuador?
“I want them to answer for my son, please, we’re a humble family, I need my son alive, I want justice, how can they just murder my innocent son?”-victim’s father
Bolivian anti-drug police shot and killed a 13 year old boy, and wounded five others, including the boy’s brother.
The father of the killed boy said he sons were going on a fishing trip with relatives.
Witnesses say the police drove along side the victim’s vehicle and started shooting with M16s. No warning was given, and no attempt to pull them over was made. At least 27 rounds were fired into the vehicle.
Angry residents protested by blocking off the highway where the shooting took place.
Police say they thought the family were drug dealers. The Official Bolivian government statement is that the police claimed the family shot at them first. Typical.
So far nearly 43 thousand hectares (106,255 acres) of Coahuila, Mexico has burned. The fire still rages.
“This is an unprecedented display. Surely we have not had so much equipment and so many people working in a fire.”-Juan Manuel Torres Rojo, CEO of the National Forestry Commission (Conafor)
Rojo says wildlife is being killed by the fire. They found a black bear that died from smoke inhalation. So far mostly wild grasses and similar plants have burned, but now the fire is getting close to Arizona Pine forest.
Thanks to the nuclear crisis, rice planting has been banned in Japan.
The problem is that the areas directly affected by the 11 March 2011 quake, actually sunk. Add to that the tsunami destroyed the sea walls. Now high tides have been flooding the land with ocean water contaminated with cesium-137 (as I warned in an earlier posting). There is also airborne cesium being detected, falling onto the ground.
The Japanese government will now test farm soils for cesium contamination. Any farm found to have cesium will be banned from planting. Cesium contamination is why Chernobyl city is still uninhabitable almost 30 years after that nuclear accident in Soviet Ukraine.
Rice planting normally begins by May. Rice is important to Japan: 8.5 million tons of rice were produced in 2010, and almost all of it stayed in Japan. The current situation will now make Japan dependent on foreign sources of rice.
Cesium is still found in soil in Germany, Austria and France 25 years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Chernobyl is 1,160 kilometers (720 miles) from Germany.
Tokyo Electric Power Company says workers are now building a steel fence around the water inlets and outlets of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
They are attempting to block highly radioactive isotopes from getting out into the currents of the Pacific Ocean. They are also using silt fences.
One report says the steel fences are seven steel sheets thick, and the fence will cover an area 120 meters (393 feet) wide.
Recently officials admitted that radiation reports were faulty because the radiation levels are so high that monitoring devices are basically wigging out, and unable to give accurate readings. They stopped short of saying the levels are so high that they peg their meters.
They are hoping to use a UAV (drone) to monitor levels over the plant. It depends on the weather, unmanned aerial vehicles need good weather to fly.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Iraq today. He gave a speech to U.S. troops, but it wasn’t about leaving Iraq, it was about staying.
U.S. forces are scheduled to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011, under a 2008 deal negotiated by George Bush Jr.
But Gates told troops that the Iraqi government now wants the U.S. to stay longer, and Gates said: “We’re open to that.”
About 10,000 Iraqis protested Gate’s visit, demanding that U.S. “get out”.
Iraq invaded the base of the Pro-United States People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran. The base is located inside Iraq, and has been there for 25 years (even during Saddam Hussein’s time, more proof how much the U.S. was involved with Saddam).
The U.S. has been supporting, covertly, the People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran for decades, in their attacks against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even though the U.S. supports the Iranian rebels, the U.S. also lists them as terrorists.
Iraqi forces claim they attacked the Iranian rebels because they rioted, and started throwing rocks at them. There’s no explanation of why they rioted.
The Iranian rebels say the Iraqi government was acting on the behalf of the Iranian government.
Iraqi forces say they killed at least 25 Iranian rebels, and wounded 320.
In an interview on al Jazeera NATO secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the solution to the civil war in Libya will come only through political discussions.
For some reason al Jazeera (who supports the UNSCR 1973) did not mention the statement in the text of their posting. You have to watch the video of the interview. It’s about 1:50 into the interview.
“I hope to see a political solution, sooner rather than later. Obviously there’s no military solution, solely.”-Anders Fogh Rasmussen
Al Jazeera then pointed out that despite the arms embargo, which is part of the UNSCR 1973, Libyan rebel leaders openly state they are getting weapons from the UN coalition (which includes NATO). Rasmussen was asked why, seemingly, NATO was not enforcing the UN arms embargo when it came to the rebels.
“We participate in the arms embargo, and to my knowledge there has been no bridge to the arms embargo.”-Rasmussen
Al Jazeera pressed the NATO leader about the arms embargo, while showing video of rebels receiving new weapons. They also pointed out that UN coalition member Qatar (which is Wahhabi Arab, same as al Qaeda), is openly providing weapons to the rebels. They tried to get a simple yes or no answer, this is what they got: “We participate in the enforcement of the arms embargo in strict conformity with the text of UNSCR 1973.”-Rasmussen
“There are problems with parts supply. But each day, we are doing our utmost to improve the conditions so that we can deliver cars to many customers.”-Akio Toyoda, Toyota President
Toyota is having trouble getting around 150 components, but that’s down from 500 components after the March 11 quake.