Never ending danger
Soil radiation in a city 60 kilometers (40 miles) from Japan’s stricken nuclear plant is above levels that prompted resettlement after the Chernobyl disaster, citizens’ groups said Tuesday.
The survey of four locations in Fukushima city, outside the nuclear evacuation zone, showed that all soil samples contained caesium exceeding Japan’s legal limit of 10,000 becquerels per kilogram (4,500 per pound), they said. The highest level was 46,540 becquerels per kilogram, and the three other readings were between 16,290 and 19,220 becquerels per kilogram, they said.
The highest reading in the city of 290,000 people far exceeded the level that triggered compulsory resettlement ordered by Soviet authorities following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, they said.
The citizens’ groups — the Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and five other non-governmental organizations — have called for the evacuation of pregnant women and children from the town.
U.S. Returns Small Number of Stolen Iraqi Artifacts
The United States has returned a few dozen national artifacts stolen from Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. Thousands of priceless items were smuggled out of Iraq by U.S. military personnel and contractors after the U.S. seized Baghdad. On Thursday, U.S. officials handed over around 30 items to Iraq’s U.S. Ambassador at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
Brazilian government signs up to develop OpenOffice and LibreOffice
The Brazilian government has signed a letter of intent to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the Office Suite platforms maintained by both communities. The letter asserts that the ODF standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the government. As Brazil is one of the biggest users of both LibreOffice and OpenOffice with an estimated million public computers running the free/open source office suites, the govenment aims to make the national contribution to the projects more effective.