mosha comments

You can count about 6 women in this picture. Anything wrong with that?

According to this article in the Japan Times (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nb20120608a1.html)

Households pay about 90 percent of the utility's income but use only about 40 percent of the total supply.

Mind-boggling.

This is basically a confession:

“We must admit that our tsunami anticipation was too optimistic, and our insufficient preparations for a tsunami were the fundamental cause of the accident,” Yamazaki told a news conference.

And therefore, the fate of any "future operations" referred to below should be decided by the victims of TEPCO's negligence, that is the people of Japan. What presumption!!

“We hope to implement the findings of our investigation in our future operations of the plants,” Yamazaki said.

Extremely patronizing attitude from the responsible authorities - in such a stressful and dangerous situation people had the right to know all the relevant facts. Lack of information and conflicting information added to all the stress that people experienced. The authorities' job was to collect, synthesize and distribute widely all the relevant information, not to censor and hide it.

Having said that, it would be really hard to prove that the authorities did not release the information with malicious intent - certainly, nobody wanted to have the people exposed to radiation. However, it is a fact that the authorities did end up withholding this information, so at the very least, this is a case of negligence in an extremely grave situation, with grave consequences.

Someone must be held responsible, or else this attitude from the authorities is very likely to persist. Not only the people who were directly affected, but everyone else should demand a criminal investigation and appropriate charges, so that we do not see similar usurping of power to "cleanse" information. People are not children, but they should fight for their right to know, in court.

Composition inspired by Escher?

Letting people work longer is fine, but the calculations are wrong. When we talk about "working people" in Japan, it is tacitly understood these are mostly men; very roughly, about 50% of Japan's working age population - that is, Japanese women - do not work (full time). That is the real issue at hand. Get these 50% into the workforce.

Perhaps people who would like to be parents need to go through some kind of training programme using robots, or even pet animals, so that they can learn how to take care of creatures who are weaker than themselves. For a people with collectivistic culture, centred on being self-conscious all the time, the Japanese can be surprisingly unwilling to put themselves in someone else's shoes under some circumstances.

And thank God (and everyone who has contributed) for Linux distributions.

Serbia is not in the EU, not to speak of the Euro zone, and Armenia is not even in the picture. What IS this article about?

Going by the poll results in six countries—France, Greece, Serbia, Germany, Italy, Armenia – it is very much clear that voters have punished the incumbent leadership which had been pushing for the region-wide austerity measures.

In Bulgaria, some people eat watermelon with feta cheese.

The government should subsidise an RFID tag system for those farmers whose produce has been inspected, so that consumers can trace and verify the origin and analysis results of the rice harvest for themselves. In Malaysia they have started using RFID tags to authenticate bird nest products. It seems to be a good way to help restore trust in the food supply system.

This!

The rest he will sell to a local farming cooperative that distributes to corporate buyers, such as restaurants, that are more willing to buy Fukushima rice.

I.e., "Please stop acting like babies."

There are a lot of comments here calling this woman "monster", "pure evil", "psycho". All these imply that she did what she did because she is inherently bad - such knee-jerk assumptions don't really help, though.

Yes, what she did is horrible and reprehensible, and I do not imagine any mother/parent would find it in his/her heart to forgive. However, attributing her acts to an underlying evil nature does not really solve the problem of her inflicting pain on people around her. She needs extensive psychiatric help, prison time, and a social group to belong to, not a beating.

I do not advocate no punishment for her, but I am saying that locking up people on the grounds of them being evil is a short-sighted solution. By providing them in addition with mental health care and social support, societies stand a chance of reducing the number of such criminal acts in the long term.

I do not believe there is a unavoidable number of evil people in society who are born that way. Granted, some people may be more impulsive than other genetically, but how they direct such temperament is largely determined by external factors and cannot be entirely blamed on them.

I would say that a lot of people would become "monsters" under the right conditions; commendable if they don't, but not uncommon if they do (cf. a lot of experimental studies in psychology, such as Milgram's and Zimbardo's experiments).