France has today accused Japan of losing control over their exploding nuclear plant, and of covering up the true scale of the disaster. No Shit Sherlock. It’s seems like a fair pop if you look at the evidence. The Japanese have tried cooling down the reactors by pumping them with seawater, which didn’t work. Shooting them with police water canons? No joy either. Dumping water via helicopters? Water, water, water. No, no, no. They have now resorted to sending in emergency teams who have claimed “they are not afraid to die” as they enter the radiation-filled plant in a last ditch ‘suicide’ effort to fix things.
Stocks in Japan, and all around the world, have been spiraling downwards. Yesterday I promised I’d provide a quick explanation on how the stock markets work, for those of you who need it (i.e. most women and plenty of men too).
A share is a tiny part of a company. If the company is doing well, the shares will be worth more. The stock market (of which there are many around the world, often with highly confusing names) is where these shares are bought and sold. Let’s compare it to eBay. You’ve got a share. Imagine it’s in a Nokia phone. Nokia are doing well at the moment, so your phone would fetch high bids. But let’s say you’ve heard rumours than apple are about to release a phone. You are savvy, and suspect this phone is going to be awesome. So you sell your Nokia on eBay while Nokia is still hot, and you get a good price for it. A week later, the apple iPhone comes out and you buy it immediately. It’s amazing. Everyone suddenly wants an iPhone and everyone rushes to sell their Nokia’s. The price of a Nokia goes down on eBay and the price of an iPhone goes up.
No one is feeling too confident about Japan at the moment, so investors are scrambling to sell their Japanese shares. Brave ‘bulls’ (market optimists) will buy them now while they are cheap and hope they go up again soon. You get the picture.
Over in Libya, Saif Gaddafi has said that “everything will be over in 48 hours.” Which is grim for the rebels. The West has still done very little to help and quite frankly it looks like it’s too late now anyway.
And some new rules for Britain are in the pipeline. Under proposed NHS reforms, GPs could soon double their incomes in return for rationing patient care. In effect, GPs would be rewarded for saving taxpayer money; so there will be no more referring patients willy nilly to acupuncturists, homeopaths and other specialists when they can’t think of anything else to do. Good thing? Bad thing? You decide.
Additionally, very-rich-immigrants will now be offered a fast-track-opportunity to stay in Britain indefinitely. On the condition that they keep at least £5m in their UK bank accounts. Less bureaucracy, more money. I vote Good.
Until tomorrow…
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