Goshi Hosono, an aide to Japanese Prime Minister nike cheap mens acg sandals blackNaoto Kan, visited the Korean Embassy in Tokyo on Monday and briefed Ambassador Kwon Chul-hyun on efforts by Tokyo Electric Power Company to bring the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant under control.
Hosono promised to share information nike cheap mens acg sandals blackwith Korea, saying, "If there is any major progress in efforts related to the nuclear crisis, I'll visit your embassy again in person to brief you on relevant information promptly."
Kwon expressed hope that the two countriesnike cheap mens acg sandals black "will continue discussing ways of cooperation, including dispatch of Korean experts to Japan."
Modern Japan simply cannot function without Tepco. That is precisely the problem. Like the big banks, the commercial lifeblood of any economy, Tepco is indispensable. If it has been negligent in its planning for,Find brand shoes and response to, last month’s disaster – and there is ample evidence to suggest that it has – Tepco’s status as a too-big-to-fail utility is largely to blame. Moral hazard is not restricted to banking.
It should be acknowledged that, for the customer, Tepco is not a bad company. True, Japan’s electricity prices are high. But Tepco has done wonders at maintaining a stable electricity supply. Blackouts per household have been kept to a remarkably low four minutes a year. That compares with 45 minutes in France, 69 minutes in the US and 73 in the UK, according to Paul Scalise, an energy expert at Temple University’s Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies.
But Tepco has been afflicted by moral hazard behind the scenes. The company has a shoddy history of cover-ups and sloppy safety standards. In 2002, it was found to have routinely lied about safety data relating to cracks in its reactors. Now we know it located back-up generators at Fukushima in the basement, below the level of what turned out to be a wholly inadequate sea defence wall. There are also suggestions – denied by the company – that it delayed cooling the reactors with sea water to avoid scrapping billions of yen worth of assets.
One explanation for Tepco’s track record is the amakudari (descend from heaven) system by which civil servants dropFind brand shoes into cushy jobs in the industries they once regulated. Toru Ishida, a former energy official with the ministry that regulates nuclear power, landed a senior position advising Tepco this year. Masataka Shimuzu, the president of Tepco who went awl after the Fukushima plant started spewing out radiation last month, is the vice-president of Keidanren, a sign of the power company’s huge clout.
The number of people moving between regulator and industry may not be that large. But the ties between regulator and regulated are too close. Structurally that is because the nuclear regulator is part of the trade ministry, which sees its job as promoting the use of nuclear energy as a way of weaning the country off foreign oil. More fundamentally, both Tepco and the government are on the same side. After the first oil shock, the public overcame its antipathy to nuclear power born of Japan’s experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have severely blunted public support. In response, the regulator and the nuclear industry have both played down risks, a state of affairs almost designed to encourage the sort of lax behaviour of which Tepco has been guilty.
Like the banks, Tepco has assumed that, if anything goes badly wrong, the government will stand behind it. The companFind brand shoes y is already furiously lobbying for favourable interpretation of a law that could exonerate it of liabilities incurred because of natural disaster. Without such largesse, Tepco looks doomed. It has a debt-to-equity ratio of nearly 300 per cent, three times the industry average.
Unless it can raise electricity prices sharply – something the public will not stand for – it is hard to see how it can generate sufficient cashflow to pay for the scrapping of old reactors, the building of new ones and, in the meantime, securing alternative sources of energy. That is even without the litigation from farmers and disgruntled users that are bound to follow.
From the shareholders’ point of view Tepco could either go the way of British Petroleum or Enron. Those who bought BP shares after the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last year are sitting on gains of 70 per cent. Enron, of course, went bankrupt, taking its shareholders with it. Unless Tepco is allowed to go the same way, Japan’s nuclear industry will join western banking as a case of private gains and socialised losses.
Witnesses say authorities opened fire with live ammunition and tear gas. The head doctor at the protesters' field hospital says at least 30 people were wounded, including two people hit by bullets.
Hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out in cities around the country today to denounce the president and remarks he'd made against women taking part in rallies. In a speech Friday, nike running shoes Ali Abdullah Saleh (AH'-lee ahb-DUH'-luh sah-LEH') said the mingling of men and women at protests violates Islamic law.
A youth movement leading the protests designated today as a day of "honor and dignity" that brought out a strong outpouring of women.
Saleh has ruled the impoverished nike running shoes nation in the southern corner of the Arabian peninsula for 32 years.
Yemeni rights groups say his crackdown on protests has killed more than 120 people.
In a 43-minute speech that mixed appeals for a united sense of purpose with sharply partisan jabs, the president laid out his vision of a country strengthened bothcheap nike mens acg sandals 2011 by fewer debts and a greater diligence to solving the problems of Medicaid and Medicare. In promising to preserve those programs, he enlists his administration in the beginning of what is expected to be an epic battle with Republicans over their fate.
“We are a better country because of these commitments,’’ he said in an impassioned defense of Medicaid and Medicare against Republicans’ push for sweeping changes. “I’ll go further — we would not be a great country without those commitments.’’
Obama also sought cuts in defense spending and renewed his pitch for a simpler tax code. His call for the end of the Bush tax cuts for incomes above $250,000 for couples reignites a ferocious debate from the fall midterm elections.
That element of the speech triggered the most vociferous and immediate opposition from Republicans.cheap nike mens acg sandals 2011 “Any plan that starts with job-destroying tax hikes is a nonstarter,’’ House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement.
The Medicaid and Medicare over haul is key to the Republicans’ plan, which aims for deeper cuts to the deficit over a shorter time.
Their plan, put forth by US Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin last week, would transfer much of the responsibility for those programs from the federal government to state government, individuals, and insurers.
As part of an overall bid to cut almost $6 trillion in spending over 10 years, Ryan’s proposal would convert Medicaid, the health program for the poor, into a block grant paid to state governments, and in 10 years replace Medicare, the health care program for seniors, with a system to provide money to seniors to buy private insurance.
Because the GOP plan also seeks various tax cuts along with the spending plan, about $4.4 trillioncheap nike mens acg sandals 2011 would be cut from the projected deficit. The nation’s current debt is $14 trillion. Neither Republicans’ nor Obama’s plans would decrease the overall debt. Both instead address the annual spending deficit so the overall debt wouldn’t grow as quickly.
The president had asked Ryan to attend the speech at George Washington University. But at the end of the address, the chairman of the House Budget Committee left frustrated by the details of Obama’s plan and the tone of his words.
“When the president reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch,’’ Ryan said in a statement. “Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis.’’
“He just basically got out that the car went in the water with his mom and some kids,’’ said Michael Vatter, buy Reebok ZigTech the fire chief.
It took a moment for the meaning of the boy’s halting words to register: His mother, Lashanda Armstrong, 25, had driven her minivan off a boat ramp into the Hudson River. He had been inside. He had crawled over her and scrambled out after pushing a button and lowering the driver’s side window.
He swam about 25 feet through 45-degree water. When he reached the shore, a passerby picked him up and drove three blocks to the firehouse, where they walked in at 7:50 p.m.
His mother’s minivan sat submerged in 8 feet of water. She was still inside, as were her three other children, identified by the police as Landen Pierre, 5; Lance Pierre, 2; and Lainaina Pierre, 11 months old.
At first, Vatter said, the firefighters and police officers believed they were engaged in a rescue.
But it took divers an hour, fighting the same fast current that had carried the minivan away from the riverbank, to find it in the darkness. By then, the four people inside were dead, and officials buy Reebok ZigTech were trying to make sense of why the distraught woman at the wheel could have decided to drive to the river and step on the accelerator.
What is known is that soon after the minivan plunged into the water, the 10-year-old-boy, La’Shaun Armstrong, was apparently able to save himself.
Lashanda Armstrong’s neighbors said she had loaded the children into the van after a vicious argument with the father of the three youngest children, identified by the police as Jean Pierre, 26. He had been her high school prom date and had worked in a fast-food restaurant, neighbors said.
Pierre, by some accounts, had helped Armstrong with the responsibilities of caring for four young children on limited means. But outward appearances belied tension between the two: Pierre did not live with Armstrong.
“From the outside, it looked perfect,’’ said Sharon Ramirez, 22, a neighbor and friend of Armstrong’s. “But there buy Reebok ZigTech were a lot of things going on. They had a rocky relationship.’’
Ramirez was certain of that because, she said, she had carried on a three-month affair with Pierre last year, when Armstrong was pregnant with Lainaina.
The first sign of the tragedy involved the argument at Armstrong’s apartment on a hardscrabble block in the center of Newburgh, about 60 miles from Manhattan.
The police chief, Michael Ferrara, said that a relative of Armstrong’s had called 911 around 7:30 p.m., saying that Armstrong was involved in a domestic dispute.
Ferrara said the caller described hearing “tussling in the background’’ during a call from Armstrong.
She and Armstrong’s father were so concerned that they drove to the apartment, arriving there to find the police officers who had been sent in response to her call, but no one else.