Two Japanese cities outside the current evacuation zone, now have radiation levels above safe limits.
Date and Minamisoma cities show increasing radiation levels, prompting calls for evacuation by the residents. Government officials say they are working quickly on the possible expansion of the evacuation zone.
First Germany blamed Spanish cucumbers; wrong! Then Germany blamed locally grown sprouts; wrong! Now Germany is facing a lawsuit by Spain, and German vegetable growers are tossing tons of fresh produce in the trash. On top of that people are still dying!
By June 8, 25 people in Germany, and one person in Sweden had died. More than 2,600 people in Germany are sick.
A new twist; back to cucumbers. This time German health officials say they’ve found traces of the new strain (similar to 0104:H4) on cucumber leftovers belonging to a family that was among the first to get sick.
Here’s an issue: E. Coli (Escherichia coli) does not originate on vegetables! It comes from the intestines of animals (humans included). Vegetables would only get infected if they came into contact with infected fecal matter (i.e. crap).
Some possibilities: Vegetables were for some reason being shipped along side products containing infected fecal matter? Some Fertilizers used on crops contained infected fecal matter? How about someone infected didn’t do a good job of cleaning themselves up after taking care of business, and, didn’t wash their hands thus spreading their particular strain of E-Coli to others, by handling produce being eaten by a lot of people (a modern day Typhoid Mary)? Maybe German officials should be looking at people who handle fresh produce prior to it being sold to consumers (specifically someone who handled cucumbers)?
“I was optimistic we’d have a better month, but it looks now like the recovery ended last summer, which means we’re just idling.”-Ed Leamer, University California Los Angeles economist
If you use diesel fuel you might have noticed that the price has been slowly going down. That’s good for those of use who pay at the pump, but for the economy as a whole it’s a Canary in the Coal Mine of worse to come for our economy.
Diesel fuel prices are dropping because of a huge drop in demand. That drop has been ongoing since last year, and in the past four months has been picking up speed.
Most users of diesel are transportation industries. They ship products all over the country, but shipments of new products have dropped so much in eight of the past 12 months, that trucks, ships and aircraft are sitting idle.
According to the Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index, the drop in diesel fuel demand is proof any economic recovery that might have been, is over.
Ed Leamer says the two main reasons demand is down: Low wages/lack of jobs and high debt. Notice they’re the two things our elected officials, across the board from local leaders to the White House, can’t seem to deal with.
Leamer also says such a drop in demand, in the U.S., is a first in world history: “U.S. demand has been such a key for the rest of the world for so long. This is sort of uncharted territory.”
China and Cuba have signed 13 agreements to increase economic cooperation in the next five years. China will provide interest free loans, and other economic aid to boost Cuba’s various industries.
The deals also include development of Cuba’s oil and natural gas industry.
The insolvent government of Greece has just discovered that 4,500 dead people have been receiving government retirement pay, for years.
The government is now investigating whether there was a slip up on their side, or the families never filed notifications of death. At least $23 million was paid out to dead people.
The Greek government is also investigating another 9,000 possible dead recipients of retirement money.
The nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi has resulted in hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive water being spilled into the Pacific Ocean, and it hasn’t stopped.
Greenpeace says they’ve found ocean species with unsafe levels of radiation, 50 km (31 miles) from the nuke plant.
The International Atomic Energy Agency announced they will begin monitoring the Pacific Ocean for radiation contamination. Australia, South Korea and Indonesia will make up a team that will sample water from the Pacific Ocean, and the East China Sea. They expect the process to take four years.
The contamination of the Pacific Ocean would not have reached this level, if Tokyo Electric Power Company, and the Japanese government, took the nuclear disaster more seriously at the beginning. Chernobyl was handled in a matter of weeks, not ongoing after many months like Fukishima Daiichi.
As proof that the Japanese government, and Tokyo Electric Power Company, were just wild ass guessing about the radiation levels being released from Fukushima Daiichi, a new report says the levels are more than double.
The governmental Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency is now saying the initial radiation release from the damaged nuke plant was 770,000 terabecquerels. The independent Nuclear Safety Commission said they put the amount of radiation released, in the first month, at 630,000 terabecquerels.
The level of radiation being spewed from the plant has not let up. On Saturday, 04 June 2011, radiation emitted from Reactor 1 hit 4,000 millisieverts per hour!
The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Ministry maintains ‘off site centers’ near nuclear plants. The centers are government run emergency response units based ‘off site’ of the privately run nuclear plants.
The public news station, NHK, got hold of a NISA report that admitted that almost all of their off site centers were dysfunctional at the beginning of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
NISA operates 22 nuclear emergency response centers throughout Japan. On 11 March 2011, seven hours after the 9.0 quake, only three of those centers were staffed. The off site response unit for Fukushima Daiichi had been shut down by the earthquake. NISA claims all power generating capabilities, communications and other critical functions had been lost, making the off site response unit ineffective.
But, surprisingly, after it became clear there was a problem at the Fukushima Daiichi nuke plant, NISA decided to move the emergency response unit away from the stricken plant. Hello, what’s the purpose of the ‘off site centers’ emergency response units then? NISA officials said they were afraid their off site center building was not radiation proof! More proof of lack of planning and foresight by government officials.
The official U.S. unemployment rate is currently 9.1%, but that does not count those unemployed who dropped off the official lists, or those who are discouraged job seekers.
Fadhel Kaboub, an economics professor at Denison University in Ohio, says when you take into account people who are no longer counted by official sources, the actual unemployment rate is 17%.
The U.S. Department of Labor said 14 million people are officially unemployed, but Kaboub believes it’s actually 20-23 million.
He said the reason the stock markets reacted badly to the May job creation numbers, is because the only way there can be a recovery is if Corporate America creates 500,000 new jobs every month. That has yet to happen, and as demonstrated by the May numbers, jobs creation is actually going down.
According to NHK(Nippon Housou Kyoukai/Japan Broadcasting Corporation), there has not been any official soil sampling since the nuclear disasters following the 11 March 2011 quake/tsunami. Tokyo Electric Power Company has done periodic samples, but only within the area of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear compound.
The Japanese Science Ministry is now taking actual soil samples outside the nuclear facility. What I mean by ‘actual’ is that up ’till now they’ve been conducting soil samples from the air! NHK didn’t explain how you do soil sampling from the air, but it’s clear the government has realized they need to actually get down on the ground to properly test the soil.
The Science Ministry will join with universities and private laboratories around Japan, to do the soil sampling. Samples will be taken every 4 square km (2.4 miles) in areas within 80 km (49.7 miles) of the nuclear plant and every 100 square km (62 miles) in areas further away.