The mutant butterflies of Fukushima

From Fox News via DProgram:

(AJC) – One legacy of the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year has already become apparent through a study of butterflies in Japan: Their rate of genetic mutations and deformities has increased with succeeding generations.

“Nature in the Fukushima area has been damaged,” said Joji Otaki, a professor at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, who is the senior author of the new study.

The abnormalities, which the researchers traced to the radiation released from the nuclear power plant, include infertility,deformed wings, dented eyes, aberrant spot patterns, malformed antennas and legs, and the inability to fight their way out of their cocoons. The butterflies from the sites with the most radiation in the environment have the most physical abnormalities, the researchers found.

“Insects have been considered to be highly resistant to radiation, but this butterfly was not,” said Otaki.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/15/mutant-butterflies-found-near-fukus…

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From the Alexander Higgins blog:

NY Times won a Pulitzer prize for Hiroshima coverup

“The NY Times ran a Pulitzer winning article with the headline ‘NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN’ to support US claims dismissing radioactive fallout as Japanese propaganda.

After dropping nuclear bombs on Japan the US dismissed claims atomic bombs caused lingering radioactivity as Japanese propaganda.

As part of the cover up the military order a blackout banning reporters from going to Japan and required government censors to approved articles going as far as killing journalists who learned to much about the cover up.

Nearly a month after the bombing one journalist defied orders and went into Japan to get the truth only to be devastated by what the destruction he saw and what he described as invisible ‘atomic plague’ that was mysteriously killing people and people with skin literally falling off their bodies.

After the story broke The New York Times did their own ‘investigation’ writing an article with the headline “NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN” which cited only military sources and ignored eyewitness accounts of radiation sickness.

The NY Times author won a Pulitzer prize for his government planted story that ‘debunked’ the Japanese propaganda.

Many years later it was learned that he was secretly been on the payroll of the US government simply for the purposes of planting government propaganda stories.

The Timesman was part of one of the largest conspiracies ever – known as the Manhattan Project – which is now known to have involved at least 130,000 people across over 30 sites in the United States, Canada and The United Kingdom.

Here’s Amy Goodman with the full story and an appeal for something that is long overdue – to rescind the Pulitzer.

Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

Governments lie.
– I. F. Stone, Journalist

At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.

Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur’s orders.

Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts. He saw people’s shadows seared into walls and sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss. Burchett was among the first to witness and describe radiation sickness.

Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”

Burchett’s article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation. Burchett’s candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. “In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

“When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.”

Burchett’s searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists’ access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even killing dispatches that described the horror. The official narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation. Reporters whose dispatches convicted with this version of events found themselves silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there. Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”…”

Read more, on the Alexander Higgins blog.