PM hopes to seal £215m in deals for UK but is urged by former foreign secretaries to raise corruption with Putin and Medvedev Downing Street intends for £215m worth of deals to be done between Russia and the UK when the prime minister visits the Kremlin, despite a warning to David Cameron from four former foreign secretaries that business people already operating in the country are “victims of an increasingly potent mix of corruption and lawlessness”. In advance of Cameron’s visit, the first face-to-face contact between a British prime minister and the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, since 2007, No
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Institute for Fiscal Studies says chancellor’s plan will cause 10% drop in family living standards George Osborne’s austerity programme will cut the living standards of Britain’s families by more than 10% over the next three years as those on the lowest incomes suffer most from the tax increases and spending cuts designed to reduce the budget deficit. A study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UK’s leading experts on the public finances, concludes that the chancellor’s strategy will result in greater inequality and rising child poverty, throwing into reverse progress made in the final years of the last Labour government. The bleak picture painted by the IFS will be used by opponents of the chancellor’s austerity measures to call for a plan B to generate faster economic growth. There is likely to be further pressure on Osborne on Monday as the head of his independent commission on banking, Sir John Vickers, outlines measures for banking reform. The IFS analysis, included in a new international study into the impact of the “Great Recession” of 2008-09 on 21 wealthy countries, says the most severe downturn since the interwar years will “cast a very long shadow in the UK”, with the poorest 30% of households especially hard hit. “Declines in living standards look set to continue until at least 2013-14. If realised, this would mean that average living standards had not grown in well over 10 years, making it one of the worst decades for changes in living standards since at least the second world war.” According to the IFS, the squeeze on living standards will be the result of earnings failing to keep pace with prices, as well as the tax and benefit changes announced by the government to tackle the UK’s record peacetime budget deficit. “Welfare cuts and tax rises will act to reduce household incomes, and those with the lowest incomes are clearly set to lose the most from these reforms as a percentage of income (with the important exception of those with the very highest incomes). This is likely to increase poverty, other things being equal, offsetting some of the falls in poverty over the past decade.” The IFS work divides households up into 10 groups (“deciles”) in order to assess the impact of tax changes and benefit reductions. “Taking all family types together, within the bottom nine income decile groups, those with the lowest incomes are set to lose the most from these reforms as a percentage of income … Given that the annual welfare budget is being cut by £18bn, this is perhaps not a surprise.” The IFS said the poorest families also lose more as a result of the squeeze on public spending. “Losses as a percentage of net income (plus the value of benefits in kind) are between 5% and 6% at the bottom of the distribution, which is similar to the magnitude of the losses for those on the lowest incomes from tax and benefit reforms.” Osborne has said that the pain caused by deficit reduction will be shared, but the IFS study found that the richest 10% of households will see income cut by just over 4% on average between 2011 and 2014 by tax and benefit changes. The thinktank said the losses among this decile would be concentrated among the highest 1% of earners, due to the increase in the top rate of income tax to 50% for those earning more than £150,000, and the withdrawal of the personal income tax allowance and less generous pension relief for those earning more than £100,000. “The percentage loss in the [richest] decile group is higher than in all but the bottom three decile groups, but in fact this is largely driven by tax rises for the very richest (approximately the top 1%). Therefore tax and benefit reforms seem likely to squeeze the living standards of the less well off by more than those on higher incomes, except for those on the very highest incomes. The impact of the upcoming tax and benefit reforms seems likely to be to reverse a substantial part (if not all) of the reductions in … inequality seen during the Great Recession.” The IFS analysis is included in The Great Recession and the Distribution of Income, published on Monday by the London School of Economics. Professor Stephen Jenkins of the LSE said: “We were surprised at how little household incomes changed in the years immediately after the Great Recession began. This has been the worst macroeconomic downturn in most OECD countries since the Great Depression of the 1930s when there were substantial increases in poverty rates and other significant changes to the income distribution.” Jenkins added that the outlook now was “more worrying”, and that big differences in income distribution would emerge across countries. “We’re moving from the Great Recession era with relatively broad consensus about what to do to a new era of sharp distributional conflicts between, for example, rich and poor, old and young.” Warning that pain had been delayed but not avoided, the IFS said families with children would be hit harder by Osborne’s tax and benefit changes than other family types on average, with the poorest 10th of households suffering income losses of more than 8% over the next three years. “Recent IFS modelling predicted that child poverty will rise in each of the three years between 2010-11 and 2013-14, and that it will be about two percentage points higher in 2013-14 as a result of the tax and benefit reforms planned by the current government.” Child poverty is measured by the percentage of children in households where income is less than 60% of the median for the UK. According to the IFS, it fell from 25% in 2000 to 20% a decade later. The pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, told BBC TV that the chancellor was sticking to plan A to cut the budget deficit, but was looking at other ways to bolster economic growth. “I know George is looking carefully at a whole new raft of things that we could be doing to actually give the economy another push, and another kickstart in the direction of greater growth”. Economics George Osborne Public sector cuts Tax and spending Equality Thinktanks Poverty Public services policy Public finance Social exclusion Recession Family finances Larry Elliott guardian.co.uk
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The Northwest Passage was, again, free of ice this summer and the polar region could be unfrozen in just 30 years Arctic sea ice has melted to a level not recorded since satellite observations started in 1972 – and almost certainly not experienced for at least 8,000 years, say polar scientists. Daily satellite sea-ice maps released by Bremen university physicists show that with a week’s more melt expected this year, the floating ice in the Arctic covered an area of 4.24 million square kilometres on 8 September. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27m sq km on 17 September 2007. The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, which also tracks the extent of sea ice , has not posted data for a week but is expected to announce similar results in the next few days. The German researchers said the record melt was undoubtedly because of human-induced global warming. “The sea-ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next, caused by weather influence,” said Georg Heygster, head of the Institute of Environmental Physics at Bremen. “It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences. Climate models show that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming, which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic,” he said. The albedo effect is related to a surface’s reflecting power – whiter sea ice reflects more of the sun’s heat back into space than darker seawater, which absorbs the sun’s heat and gets warmer. Floating Arctic sea ice naturally melts and re-freezes annually, but the speed of change in a generation has shocked scientists – it is now twice as great as it was in 1972, according to the NSIDC, with a decline of about 10% per decade. Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past half century. Separate, less reliable, research suggests that Arctic ice is in a downward spiral, declining in area but also thinning. Using records of air, wind and sea temperature, scientists from the Polar Science Centre of the University of Washington , Seattle, announced last week that the Arctic sea-ice volume reached its lowest ever level in 2010 and was on course to set more records this year. The new data suggests that the volume of sea ice last month appeared to be about 2,135 cubic miles – just half the average volume and 62% lower than the maximum volume of ice that covered the Arctic in 1979. The research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research . “Ice volume is now plunging faster than it did at the same time last year when the record was set,” said Axel Schweiger. If current trends continue, a largely ice-free Arctic in the summer months is likely within 30 years –that is up to 40 years earlier than was anticipated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report. The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian. ” This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects around the world,” Shaye Wolf , climate science director at the Centre for Biological Diversity in San Francisco told journalists. Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth’s climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool. Retreating summer sea ice is widely described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale. This year, both the North-west and North-east passages were mostly ice free, as they have been twice since 2008. Last month, the 74,000-tonne STI Heritage tanker passed through the North-east Passage with the assistance of ice breakers in just eight days on its way from Houston, Texas, to Thailand . The north-east sea route, which links the Atlantic to the Pacific, is likely to become a commercial ship operator’s favourite, saving thousands of miles and avoiding tolls on the Suez Canal tolls. Further evidence of dramatic change in the Arctic came last week from Alan Hubbard, a Welsh glaciologist at Aberystwyth University, who has been studying the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland for several years. The glacier, which covers about 6% of the icecap, is 186 miles (300km) long and up to 3,280ft (1km) high. In August last year, a 100 square-mile (260 sq km) block of ice calved from the glacier. Photographs show that by July this year it had melted and disappeared. “I was gobsmacked. It [was] like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it full of water,” said Hubbard. Last year (2010) tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record. Climate change Arctic Glaciers Greenland Climate change Sea level Water transport John Vidal guardian.co.uk
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The Northwest Passage was, again, free of ice this summer and the polar region could be unfrozen in just 30 years Arctic sea ice has melted to a level not recorded since satellite observations started in 1972 – and almost certainly not experienced for at least 8,000 years, say polar scientists. Daily satellite sea-ice maps released by Bremen university physicists show that with a week’s more melt expected this year, the floating ice in the Arctic covered an area of 4.24 million square kilometres on 8 September. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27m sq km on 17 September 2007. The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, which also tracks the extent of sea ice , has not posted data for a week but is expected to announce similar results in the next few days. The German researchers said the record melt was undoubtedly because of human-induced global warming. “The sea-ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next, caused by weather influence,” said Georg Heygster, head of the Institute of Environmental Physics at Bremen. “It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences. Climate models show that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming, which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic,” he said. The albedo effect is related to a surface’s reflecting power – whiter sea ice reflects more of the sun’s heat back into space than darker seawater, which absorbs the sun’s heat and gets warmer. Floating Arctic sea ice naturally melts and re-freezes annually, but the speed of change in a generation has shocked scientists – it is now twice as great as it was in 1972, according to the NSIDC, with a decline of about 10% per decade. Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past half century. Separate, less reliable, research suggests that Arctic ice is in a downward spiral, declining in area but also thinning. Using records of air, wind and sea temperature, scientists from the Polar Science Centre of the University of Washington , Seattle, announced last week that the Arctic sea-ice volume reached its lowest ever level in 2010 and was on course to set more records this year. The new data suggests that the volume of sea ice last month appeared to be about 2,135 cubic miles – just half the average volume and 62% lower than the maximum volume of ice that covered the Arctic in 1979. The research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research . “Ice volume is now plunging faster than it did at the same time last year when the record was set,” said Axel Schweiger. If current trends continue, a largely ice-free Arctic in the summer months is likely within 30 years –that is up to 40 years earlier than was anticipated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report. The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian. ” This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects around the world,” Shaye Wolf , climate science director at the Centre for Biological Diversity in San Francisco told journalists. Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth’s climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool. Retreating summer sea ice is widely described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale. This year, both the North-west and North-east passages were mostly ice free, as they have been twice since 2008. Last month, the 74,000-tonne STI Heritage tanker passed through the North-east Passage with the assistance of ice breakers in just eight days on its way from Houston, Texas, to Thailand . The north-east sea route, which links the Atlantic to the Pacific, is likely to become a commercial ship operator’s favourite, saving thousands of miles and avoiding tolls on the Suez Canal tolls. Further evidence of dramatic change in the Arctic came last week from Alan Hubbard, a Welsh glaciologist at Aberystwyth University, who has been studying the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland for several years. The glacier, which covers about 6% of the icecap, is 186 miles (300km) long and up to 3,280ft (1km) high. In August last year, a 100 square-mile (260 sq km) block of ice calved from the glacier. Photographs show that by July this year it had melted and disappeared. “I was gobsmacked. It [was] like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it full of water,” said Hubbard. Last year (2010) tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record. Climate change Arctic Glaciers Greenland Climate change Sea level Water transport John Vidal guardian.co.uk
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The Northwest Passage was, again, free of ice this summer and the polar region could be unfrozen in just 30 years Arctic sea ice has melted to a level not recorded since satellite observations started in 1972 – and almost certainly not experienced for at least 8,000 years, say polar scientists. Daily satellite sea-ice maps released by Bremen university physicists show that with a week’s more melt expected this year, the floating ice in the Arctic covered an area of 4.24 million square kilometres on 8 September. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27m sq km on 17 September 2007. The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, which also tracks the extent of sea ice , has not posted data for a week but is expected to announce similar results in the next few days. The German researchers said the record melt was undoubtedly because of human-induced global warming. “The sea-ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next, caused by weather influence,” said Georg Heygster, head of the Institute of Environmental Physics at Bremen. “It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences. Climate models show that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming, which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic,” he said. The albedo effect is related to a surface’s reflecting power – whiter sea ice reflects more of the sun’s heat back into space than darker seawater, which absorbs the sun’s heat and gets warmer. Floating Arctic sea ice naturally melts and re-freezes annually, but the speed of change in a generation has shocked scientists – it is now twice as great as it was in 1972, according to the NSIDC, with a decline of about 10% per decade. Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past half century. Separate, less reliable, research suggests that Arctic ice is in a downward spiral, declining in area but also thinning. Using records of air, wind and sea temperature, scientists from the Polar Science Centre of the University of Washington , Seattle, announced last week that the Arctic sea-ice volume reached its lowest ever level in 2010 and was on course to set more records this year. The new data suggests that the volume of sea ice last month appeared to be about 2,135 cubic miles – just half the average volume and 62% lower than the maximum volume of ice that covered the Arctic in 1979. The research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research . “Ice volume is now plunging faster than it did at the same time last year when the record was set,” said Axel Schweiger. If current trends continue, a largely ice-free Arctic in the summer months is likely within 30 years –that is up to 40 years earlier than was anticipated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report. The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian. ” This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects around the world,” Shaye Wolf , climate science director at the Centre for Biological Diversity in San Francisco told journalists. Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth’s climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool. Retreating summer sea ice is widely described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale. This year, both the North-west and North-east passages were mostly ice free, as they have been twice since 2008. Last month, the 74,000-tonne STI Heritage tanker passed through the North-east Passage with the assistance of ice breakers in just eight days on its way from Houston, Texas, to Thailand . The north-east sea route, which links the Atlantic to the Pacific, is likely to become a commercial ship operator’s favourite, saving thousands of miles and avoiding tolls on the Suez Canal tolls. Further evidence of dramatic change in the Arctic came last week from Alan Hubbard, a Welsh glaciologist at Aberystwyth University, who has been studying the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland for several years. The glacier, which covers about 6% of the icecap, is 186 miles (300km) long and up to 3,280ft (1km) high. In August last year, a 100 square-mile (260 sq km) block of ice calved from the glacier. Photographs show that by July this year it had melted and disappeared. “I was gobsmacked. It [was] like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it full of water,” said Hubbard. Last year (2010) tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record. Climate change Arctic Glaciers Greenland Climate change Sea level Water transport John Vidal guardian.co.uk
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The Northwest Passage was, again, free of ice this summer and the polar region could be unfrozen in just 30 years Arctic sea ice has melted to a level not recorded since satellite observations started in 1972 – and almost certainly not experienced for at least 8,000 years, say polar scientists. Daily satellite sea-ice maps released by Bremen university physicists show that with a week’s more melt expected this year, the floating ice in the Arctic covered an area of 4.24 million square kilometres on 8 September. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27m sq km on 17 September 2007. The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, which also tracks the extent of sea ice , has not posted data for a week but is expected to announce similar results in the next few days. The German researchers said the record melt was undoubtedly because of human-induced global warming. “The sea-ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next, caused by weather influence,” said Georg Heygster, head of the Institute of Environmental Physics at Bremen. “It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences. Climate models show that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming, which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic,” he said. The albedo effect is related to a surface’s reflecting power – whiter sea ice reflects more of the sun’s heat back into space than darker seawater, which absorbs the sun’s heat and gets warmer. Floating Arctic sea ice naturally melts and re-freezes annually, but the speed of change in a generation has shocked scientists – it is now twice as great as it was in 1972, according to the NSIDC, with a decline of about 10% per decade. Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past half century. Separate, less reliable, research suggests that Arctic ice is in a downward spiral, declining in area but also thinning. Using records of air, wind and sea temperature, scientists from the Polar Science Centre of the University of Washington , Seattle, announced last week that the Arctic sea-ice volume reached its lowest ever level in 2010 and was on course to set more records this year. The new data suggests that the volume of sea ice last month appeared to be about 2,135 cubic miles – just half the average volume and 62% lower than the maximum volume of ice that covered the Arctic in 1979. The research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research . “Ice volume is now plunging faster than it did at the same time last year when the record was set,” said Axel Schweiger. If current trends continue, a largely ice-free Arctic in the summer months is likely within 30 years –that is up to 40 years earlier than was anticipated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report. The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian. ” This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects around the world,” Shaye Wolf , climate science director at the Centre for Biological Diversity in San Francisco told journalists. Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth’s climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool. Retreating summer sea ice is widely described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale. This year, both the North-west and North-east passages were mostly ice free, as they have been twice since 2008. Last month, the 74,000-tonne STI Heritage tanker passed through the North-east Passage with the assistance of ice breakers in just eight days on its way from Houston, Texas, to Thailand . The north-east sea route, which links the Atlantic to the Pacific, is likely to become a commercial ship operator’s favourite, saving thousands of miles and avoiding tolls on the Suez Canal tolls. Further evidence of dramatic change in the Arctic came last week from Alan Hubbard, a Welsh glaciologist at Aberystwyth University, who has been studying the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland for several years. The glacier, which covers about 6% of the icecap, is 186 miles (300km) long and up to 3,280ft (1km) high. In August last year, a 100 square-mile (260 sq km) block of ice calved from the glacier. Photographs show that by July this year it had melted and disappeared. “I was gobsmacked. It [was] like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it full of water,” said Hubbard. Last year (2010) tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record. Climate change Arctic Glaciers Greenland Climate change Sea level Water transport John Vidal guardian.co.uk
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Silent tribute to 20,000 dead and missing as pessimism over recovery and anxiety over radiation remain Japan on Sunday marked six months since an earthquake and tsunami devastated its north-east coast, amid pessimism about the recovery effort and anxiety over radiation leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Across the region hit by the disaster, people bowed their heads in silence at 2:46 pm, the moment a magnitude-9 earthquake – the biggest in Japan’s recorded history – struck, setting off a tsunami that would leave about 20,000 people dead or missing, and trigger the world’s worst nuclear accident for 25 years. The tsunami damaged or destroyed 80,000 homes and disrupted supply lines to key industries, while the nuclear crisis spread radiation over large areas and forced the evacuation of about 100,000 people living in or near a 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the plant. The recovery effort is expected to take years to complete at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. So far, only four of the 31 communities worst affected by the disaster have completed draft reconstruction plans. On Saturday, Japan’s new prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, made his first visit to the tsunami disaster zone, promising local leaders he would speed up the reconstruction effort. Despite progress in rehousing an estimated 400,000 displaced people and clearing millions of tonnes of debris, many survivors say they face a bleak future. According to a survey by the public broadcaster NHK, 158,000 people lost their jobs in the three hardest-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima. Half of those surveyed said they had no prospect of finding work or would lose their incomes within a year. The Red Cross said Japanese bureaucracy had delayed the provision of assistance to victims. “The speed and scope of implementing the response during the emergency phase was not as swift and comprehensive as [we] wished, partly due to the structure of disaster management in Japan, partly because of insufficient preparedness,” it said in a report. Noda, Japan’s seventh prime minister in five years , is dealing with the first crisis of his administration with the resignation of his trade and industry minister, who described the area near Fukushima Daiichi as “towns of death”. Yoshio Hachiro, who had been in the post for just over a week, apologised for the remark, made after a visit to areas near Fukushima Daiichi that have been declared no-go zones. He added: “You can’t find a place like that anywhere. I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it.” Hachiro’s fate was sealed on Saturday after newspaper reports that he had also pretended to rub his sleeve against a journalist while joking that he might be contaminated with radiation. Noda, who took office vowing to bring stability to Japanese politics, said: “I apologise deeply to the people of Fukushima, who have had their feelings badly hurt. I continue to believe that without a revival in Fukushima, there will be no revival of Japan.” Last month the government warned that dangerously high radiation levels could make areas near the plant unfit for human habitation for years , possibly decades. On Sunday, thousands demonstrated against nuclear power in Tokyo and several other cities. In one of the biggest protests, 2,500 people marched past the headquarters of Fukushima Daiichi’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, and formed a human chain around the trade ministry, which oversees the nuclear power industry. Japan Japan disaster Nuclear power Justin McCurry guardian.co.uk
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Silent tribute to 20,000 dead and missing as pessimism over recovery and anxiety over radiation remain Japan on Sunday marked six months since an earthquake and tsunami devastated its north-east coast, amid pessimism about the recovery effort and anxiety over radiation leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Across the region hit by the disaster, people bowed their heads in silence at 2:46 pm, the moment a magnitude-9 earthquake – the biggest in Japan’s recorded history – struck, setting off a tsunami that would leave about 20,000 people dead or missing, and trigger the world’s worst nuclear accident for 25 years. The tsunami damaged or destroyed 80,000 homes and disrupted supply lines to key industries, while the nuclear crisis spread radiation over large areas and forced the evacuation of about 100,000 people living in or near a 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the plant. The recovery effort is expected to take years to complete at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. So far, only four of the 31 communities worst affected by the disaster have completed draft reconstruction plans. On Saturday, Japan’s new prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, made his first visit to the tsunami disaster zone, promising local leaders he would speed up the reconstruction effort. Despite progress in rehousing an estimated 400,000 displaced people and clearing millions of tonnes of debris, many survivors say they face a bleak future. According to a survey by the public broadcaster NHK, 158,000 people lost their jobs in the three hardest-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima. Half of those surveyed said they had no prospect of finding work or would lose their incomes within a year. The Red Cross said Japanese bureaucracy had delayed the provision of assistance to victims. “The speed and scope of implementing the response during the emergency phase was not as swift and comprehensive as [we] wished, partly due to the structure of disaster management in Japan, partly because of insufficient preparedness,” it said in a report. Noda, Japan’s seventh prime minister in five years , is dealing with the first crisis of his administration with the resignation of his trade and industry minister, who described the area near Fukushima Daiichi as “towns of death”. Yoshio Hachiro, who had been in the post for just over a week, apologised for the remark, made after a visit to areas near Fukushima Daiichi that have been declared no-go zones. He added: “You can’t find a place like that anywhere. I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it.” Hachiro’s fate was sealed on Saturday after newspaper reports that he had also pretended to rub his sleeve against a journalist while joking that he might be contaminated with radiation. Noda, who took office vowing to bring stability to Japanese politics, said: “I apologise deeply to the people of Fukushima, who have had their feelings badly hurt. I continue to believe that without a revival in Fukushima, there will be no revival of Japan.” Last month the government warned that dangerously high radiation levels could make areas near the plant unfit for human habitation for years , possibly decades. On Sunday, thousands demonstrated against nuclear power in Tokyo and several other cities. In one of the biggest protests, 2,500 people marched past the headquarters of Fukushima Daiichi’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, and formed a human chain around the trade ministry, which oversees the nuclear power industry. Japan Japan disaster Nuclear power Justin McCurry guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Silent tribute to 20,000 dead and missing as pessimism over recovery and anxiety over radiation remain Japan on Sunday marked six months since an earthquake and tsunami devastated its north-east coast, amid pessimism about the recovery effort and anxiety over radiation leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Across the region hit by the disaster, people bowed their heads in silence at 2:46 pm, the moment a magnitude-9 earthquake – the biggest in Japan’s recorded history – struck, setting off a tsunami that would leave about 20,000 people dead or missing, and trigger the world’s worst nuclear accident for 25 years. The tsunami damaged or destroyed 80,000 homes and disrupted supply lines to key industries, while the nuclear crisis spread radiation over large areas and forced the evacuation of about 100,000 people living in or near a 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the plant. The recovery effort is expected to take years to complete at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. So far, only four of the 31 communities worst affected by the disaster have completed draft reconstruction plans. On Saturday, Japan’s new prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, made his first visit to the tsunami disaster zone, promising local leaders he would speed up the reconstruction effort. Despite progress in rehousing an estimated 400,000 displaced people and clearing millions of tonnes of debris, many survivors say they face a bleak future. According to a survey by the public broadcaster NHK, 158,000 people lost their jobs in the three hardest-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima. Half of those surveyed said they had no prospect of finding work or would lose their incomes within a year. The Red Cross said Japanese bureaucracy had delayed the provision of assistance to victims. “The speed and scope of implementing the response during the emergency phase was not as swift and comprehensive as [we] wished, partly due to the structure of disaster management in Japan, partly because of insufficient preparedness,” it said in a report. Noda, Japan’s seventh prime minister in five years , is dealing with the first crisis of his administration with the resignation of his trade and industry minister, who described the area near Fukushima Daiichi as “towns of death”. Yoshio Hachiro, who had been in the post for just over a week, apologised for the remark, made after a visit to areas near Fukushima Daiichi that have been declared no-go zones. He added: “You can’t find a place like that anywhere. I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it.” Hachiro’s fate was sealed on Saturday after newspaper reports that he had also pretended to rub his sleeve against a journalist while joking that he might be contaminated with radiation. Noda, who took office vowing to bring stability to Japanese politics, said: “I apologise deeply to the people of Fukushima, who have had their feelings badly hurt. I continue to believe that without a revival in Fukushima, there will be no revival of Japan.” Last month the government warned that dangerously high radiation levels could make areas near the plant unfit for human habitation for years , possibly decades. On Sunday, thousands demonstrated against nuclear power in Tokyo and several other cities. In one of the biggest protests, 2,500 people marched past the headquarters of Fukushima Daiichi’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, and formed a human chain around the trade ministry, which oversees the nuclear power industry. Japan Japan disaster Nuclear power Justin McCurry guardian.co.uk
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