Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
More than a year after the triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor facility, residents forced to leave their homes in towns like Namie and Okuma in the mandatory evacuation zone expressed their frustration over lack of information about their futures by heckling and shouting down members of the Japanese Diet”s Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) as it convened a two-day hearing in Nihonmatsu. Then villagers’ frustration turned to anger when Environment Minister Hoshi Gosono acknowledged Sunday that more than 75,000 people who lived in communities like Futaba, Namie and Okuma will not be allowed to return home for more than 20 years. But that wasn’t all: Minister Gosono’s capper was his request that those same communities allow the government to store spent nuclear fuel in their hometowns temporarily, since there are already no people there anyway. Click on the image below to see the recorded USTREAM feed of the Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission meeting on April 22. 2012.
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[youtube]S2r2Eb_My1w[/youtube] Via Mika Ueno @mikamika59 a corporate communications specialist in Tokyo.
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Writes “Brain Pickings” blogger Maria Popova: “The illustrations that have accompanied Lewis Carroll’s classics over the ages have become iconic in their own right, from Leonard Weisgard’s stunning artwork for the first color edition of the book to Salvador Dali’s little-known but breathtaking version. Now, from Penguin UK and Yayoi Kusama, Japan’s most celebrated contemporary artist, comes a striking contender for the most visually captivating take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland yet.” Since childhood, Yayoi Kusama has been afflicted with a condition that makes her see spots, which means she sees the world in a surreal, almost hallucinogenic way that sits very well with the ‘Wonderland of Alice. She is fascinated by childhood and the way adults have the ability, at their most creative, to see things the way children do, a central concern of the Alice books. The classic book is colour illustrated with a clothbound jacket, and produced to very high specification. Kusama’s images are interspersed throughout the text. It is produced in collaboration with the Kusama Studio, Tokyo and Gagosian Gallery. [youtube]GqbVPfzwQlo[/youtube]
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EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS THROUGHOUT SOUTH KOREA held prayer services Sunday asking for the cancellation of Lady Gaga’s Seoul concert, accusing the US pop star of advocating homosexuality and pornography. “We will pray to God that the concert will not be realised so that homosexuality and pornography will not spread around the country,” Kang Ju-Hyun, a prayer organiser, said. The pop diva arrived in South Korea on Friday, a week before her Seoul performance, which kicks off her Born This Way global tour. (The Strait Times – Really! )
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Kanji characters scrawled on a soccer ball in indelible marker have linked it to a school near a region of northeastern Japan ravaged by the monster tsunami wave that devastated cities in three prefectures last March and may represent the first positively identified items to reach U.S. territory, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Response and Restoration reported April 19. A soccer ball and volleyball were found on the beach of Middleton Island by David Baxter, a technician at the radar site on the remote island in the Gulf of Alaska. Baxter’s wife translated the writing on the soccer ball and traced it to the name of a school. NOAA confirmed that the school was in the tsunami zone, though located uphill and not seriously damaged by the disaster. NOAA has been monitoring floating debris from the tsunami for the past year, and some very buoyant items have already made it across the Pacific. A derelict fishing vessel drifted at least 4,500 miles before it was spotted off the coast of Canada and sunk by the U.S. Coast Guard in early April. (Anchorage Daily News – Tsunami Debris) UPDATE (Monday, April 23, 2012) MORIOKA (Kyodo) — The owner of the soccer ball that apparently floated across the Pacific Ocean from northeastern Japan after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami was found Sunday to be a teenager who survived the disaster. He says he is surprised but thankful for the Alaskan who found it. “I have no doubt that it is mine,” Misaki Murakami, a 16-year-old high school student in the devastated city of Rikuzentakata, told Kyodo News after hearing the news that his name was written on the ball found in mid-March on the coast of Middleton Island off Alaska. The ball also bore a message of encouragement in Japanese to Murakami and a signature indicating it was written in March 2005 by third graders of an elementary school, Yumi Baxter, 44, the Japanese wife of David Baxter who found the ball, told Kyodo News by phone.
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