Friday, 18 March 2011

Not so fast...



Yesterday I promised you a new website. It is still coming, but it turns out to be VERY fiddly to set up, so it might take longer than planned. That sounds just like a sentence a newly elected prime minister would say. Sorry about that. In the meantime, here is today’s news:

Japan has admitted that the radiation leak at their Fukushima plant is really bad after all. Bad enough to give people cancer and kill them. The boss of the company broke down in tears at a press conference today, which is not a good sign. It is now officially the second biggest nuclear accident of all time – the first being Chernobyl. The number of people who died as a result of the Chernobyl explosion is hard to know. Over 50 rescue workers died from radiation poisoning at the time, and hundreds of thousands have died since from cancer. This all happened in what is now Ukraine, in 1986, and there are still areas all the way over here in Britain where farms struggle with the environmental hangover. It’s worth pointing out that Chernobyl is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, so people who lived nearby simply packed up and moved far away after it happened. If things got this bad in Japan, which is a relatively small island, the entire country would be ruined and the casualties would be almost unimaginable.

The West has finally stepped in to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. David Cameron is expected to make a ‘full and clear’ statement on the matter soon. Gaddafi, meanwhile, has responded in typical style: “If the world gets crazy with us we will get crazy too,” he ranted, “We will make their lives hell. They will never have peace.”

The rulers of Bahrain are doing everything they can to keep their own pro-democracy protesters quiet. Officials have torn down a statue in Pearl Square merely because it was being used as a meeting place by demonstrators, and have issued a strict curfew to keep them off the streets. After all that has been happening in Libya, you’d think Britain would have something disapproving to say about this. Far from it. The King of Bahrain is on the guest list for the royal wedding.

In other news; the US military is currently developing software that will allow secret agents to infiltrate web sites like facebook and twitter, in order to spread pro-American propaganda. Lame. And NASA has managed to get a probe to reach Mercury for the first time. Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and is therefore extremely hot, so this achievement is quite impressive and exciting. Which is more than can be said of the rest of today’s news. 

See you tomorrow for more of the same.

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