Because Tepco has not been given approval to release the water recovered from the reactor buildings into the sea, workers at the Fukushima plant have been spraying about 70 tons of it around the grounds of the compound each day since early October.
Cranes and forklifts stood still from Seattle to San Diego, and ships were stalled at sea as workers held rallies up and down the coast to blame the war for distracting public attention and money from domestic needs like health care and education.
Weavers sung in their cottages, sailors at sea and railway workers laying tracks," says Beronius Haake.
Cape Town, however, provides a rare window into the lives of migrant workers at sea, even if the team is tiny and support minimal.
But the real solution requires a different politics, one that rebalances power and restates the importance of the interests of the collective over the individual and the corporate – one that not only rescues workers enslaved at sea because they are victims but also gives them a stake so that they can unionise, as they have done elsewhere in the fishing industry, in order to tackle abuse.
Because of long shift times and lengthy spells at sea, employers pay well to entice workers.
A survivor of the blast and fire later told of how he and other rig workers were kept at sea for 40 hours after they were rescued.
The US media dutifully used it as a perception management exercise of demonizing Israel's critics and boostering the heroism of the IDF's pirates at sea while keeping the humanitarian aid workers from the media and seizing/suppressing their videos -- which are just getting out a bit late, perhaps too late to change the media frame.
Some boats sought refuge at a navy base in nearby Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State, but others remain at sea, according to the Muslim relief worker, who asked that his name not be used.
He was aboard the Seabed Worker as it spent three weeks at sea off Cape Canaveral, recovering engines that had come to rest nearly three miles from the surface.
