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Thursday, November 21, 2013

Wal-Mart labor group promises 1,500 Black Friday protests next week

The group behind the past year’s Wal-Mart strikes pledged Thursday to back an unprecedented 1,500 protests for “Black Friday” next week, but stopped short of predicting an increase in the number of Wal-Mart employees on strike compared to last year.

“Americans across the country are hearing us, and they are saying that they too want Wal-Mart to change,” Colorado Wal-Mart employee Barbara Gertz told reporters on a mid-day call. Gertz is an activist with the non-union worker group OUR Walmart, which is closely tied to the United Food & Commercial Workers union. As Salon first reported, OUR Walmart began mounting Wal-Mart work stoppages last fall, following five decades entirely free of coordinated Wal-Mart walkouts in the United States. Columbia political scientist Dorian Warren told reporters on OUR Walmart’s call that just as strikers after World War Two turned General Motors from “the embodiment of all that was wrong with our economy” into a corporation which “eventually represented the American dream of upward mobility,” Wal-Mart strikers were now facing down a company which “represents the death of the American dream.” Wal-Mart did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Like last year, OUR Walmart has backed a wave of one-day strikes in the weeks leading up to “Black Friday,” the high-profile, record-revenue shopping day that follows Thanksgiving. An employee who joined a walkout in Dallas yesterday told reporters that she and her husband “went on strike not only for ourselves and our family, but also for countless Wal-Mart workers who are afraid to speak out about poverty wages because of retaliation.” Wal-Mart has terminated at least twenty workers who joined a longer June strike, a move OUR Walmart charges violates federal law. The company maintains it did not illegally retaliate. The federal National Labor Relations Board announced this week that it had found enough evidence to issue a complaint against the company for labor law violations. A delegation of five fired workers is headed to Arkansas to seek a meeting with the company’s US CEO at which they would ask to be returned to their jobs.

Strikes against Walmart have anchored and amplified a comprehensive campaign targeting the company’s brand and ambitions, which received a major media boost this week with the report that an Ohio Wal-Mart took up an employee-to-employee charity collection to help workers get a Thanksgiving meal.

According to OUR Walmart, the 1,500 Black Friday protests will include major demonstrations in over a dozen cities including Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, and Washington DC. The campaign has said that last year’s Black Friday actions included tens of thousands of supporters and over four hundred striking Wal-Mart employees. Asked whether this year’s Black Friday will include strikes by a larger share of Wal-Mart’s 1.3 million employees, UFCW official and key OUR Walmart strangest Dan Schlademan told Salon that more announcements regarding strikes would be forthcoming. “The energy we’re seeing in support of Wal-Mart workers is growing,” said Schlademan, adding that strikes would take place “throughout the week of Black Friday, but we’ll make those announcements closer to that point.”

Read more about Wal-Mart labor group promises 1,500 Black Friday protests next week and other interesting subjects concerning Top Stories at TheDailyNewsReport.com

Friday, November 8, 2013

TEPCO to Begin Dangerous Removal of 1500 Nuclear Fuel Rods Soon

Staff Writer | November 8, 2013 | 12:24pm EST

TEPCO is getting ready to remove 1500 nuclear fuel rods at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, in hopes to control the radiation leakage once and for all.

Fukushima I nuclear power plant before the 2011 explosion. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

FUTABA DISTRICT, JAPAN (INTELLIHUB) — The damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, owned and operated by TEPCO, will be undergoing a dangerous clean-up procedure in the coming days causing concerns that another mishap may occur. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was ravaged after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck the facility back in March of 2011.

So far TEPCO decommissioned Fukushima’s 4 rector units, the last of which was decommissioned in April of 2013, however a 30km evacuation zone still exists around the facility as one can acquire 6 days worth of radiation in just a short few hour visit to the facility.

Checkpoints are rampant throughout the area, as only authorized vehicles and personnel are allowed in. The scene is reminisce of a martial law type scenario.

Recently journalists and camera crews from CNN were allowed inside the reactor #4 unit, where TEPCO approved them for a video report, although “strict rules” were imposed on the journalists reporting on the damage from the inside. The journalist were only allowed to tour pre-approved areas with escort.

TEPCO said recently that they think and hope most of the fuel rods are intact and remain undamaged, decreasing the chance of something going wrong during the procedure.

Over the coming weeks about 1500 radioactive nuclear fuel rods will be removed from the damaged cooling pool, then transported to a safer location 100 meters away in a massive effort to stop the radiation leaking into the environment. Most if not all of the debris was removed out of the pool with an underwater vacuum cleaner like device earlier on to minimize the chance of disaster during this highly dangerous procedure.

An entire new building structure has been built around the damaged fuel pool to minimize the byproduct if such a disaster were to arise from a failed clean-up attempt.

In other parts of the plant clean-up was moving along, but just not fast enough. The efforts were spotty as TEPCO has announced they are only focusing on critical and essential clean-up and repairs art this time.

New seawall barriers have been built to “prevent an estimated 300 tones of contaminated ground water from seeping into the ocean daily”, said Paula Hancocks with CNN. “The tips of yellow and pink ribbons sticking up from the earth indicate where an underground barrier has been constructed. Liquid cement has been injected into the ground to try to keep the water within the plant itself.

The coming days will be crucial to the efforts to stabilize the nuclear power plant. TEPCO rejected alarmist comments from some quarters that any mistake in removing the spent fuel rods could spark another nuclear disaster.”, reported CNN._[_1]

Sources:

[1] Journey to the heart of Fukushima’s crippled nuclear plant – CNN.com

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TEPCO to Begin Dangerous Removal of 1500 Nuclear Fuel Rods Soon