Nick: This is London and behind me are the Houses of Parliament. Parts of these buildings are more than nine hundred years old. This is where the laws of the UK are debated and created.
The United Kingdom is actually made up of four different countries; England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each nation has its own culture and heritage.
The population of England is around fifty million people. The English are known for drinking tea, The Queen and talking about the weather.
But what are we really like?
Priest: The English are a tolerant people.
Woman 1 : They’re just enchanting.
Woman 2 : The English people are very nice.
Woman 3 : They’re so polite and so friendly.
Nick: Scotland is in the North of Britain. Just over five million people live there.
It’s been part of the UK since 1707. Edinburgh is the capital city and home to the Scottish Parliament. The Parliament building is a work of art in itself!
Scotland has some unique customs: wearing tartan kilts…. playing the bag-pipes…. and tossing the caber; a very large post.
For over sixty years, The Edinburgh Festival has celebrated art, theatre and culture.
Wales is on the Western edge of Britain.
It also used to be a separate country but has been part of the UK for over four hundred years.
Nearly three million people live in Wales.
One of its symbols is a red dragon, found on the national flag. The Welsh parliament is in the capital city, Cardiff. The Welsh are proud to have their language and twenty per cent of the people speak Cymraeg. Most signs are in English and Welsh.
Singing is an important tradition in Wales. People working in coal mines in Wales originally formed male-only choirs, they are still popular today.
Old Welsh Man: Well I joined the choir because I met a couple of students – Welsh boys – they brought me here - love singing – I’m in the choir.
Young Welsh Man: The choir sings in Welsh so you have to be willing to try and pronounce the language but you definitely don’t have to be Welsh to be a member of the choir.
Nick: Northern Ireland is also part of the United Kingdom. The country is home to just under two million people. The capital is Belfast and for many years, Northern Ireland was a place of conflict.
This beautiful country was considered a dangerous place to visit. The troubles lasted until recent years when the peace process brought both sides together. Now, both sides share power in the Northern Ireland assembly.
The flag most often used for Northern Ireland shows the red hand; a symbol with a long history in this part of Ireland and a crown which shows links to the rest of the UK.
The culture in Northern Ireland is rich in myth and legend.
One story says that the rocks forming the Giant’s Causeway were thrown there by an Irish giant during a fight with a Scottish giant. Irish dancing is popular in Northern and Southern Ireland and has been exported around the world.
Irish Dancer: Irish dancing is special because you have to have good posture, arms by your side and crossed feet. I love Irish dancing because it’s great exercise and a lot of fun.
Nick: The four countries of the UK have different traditions. But those differences are also strengths and make the UK what it is today.
Setting foot onto the Antarctic continent can leave an indelible impression on your psyche as well as a lasting imprint on your boots.
On an eight-night Hurtigruten cruise aboard the MS Fram, roundtrip from Ushuaia, Argentina to the Antarctic Peninsula, we spent three and a half days making seven landings on the surrounding islands and the continent. Passengers divided up into groups aboard polar circle boats and motored from the cruise ship to land. The highlight is stepping off and visiting colonies of penguins. No, this itinerary didn't take us anywhere near the habitat of the Emperor Penguins made famous on the silver screen. But we did see three different types, all belonging to the Brush-tailed family: the Chinstraps, named so because of their permanent smile, the Gentoo penguins that have an orange bill and finally the Adelie's, which have black heads and white rings around their eyes.
The guides instructed us to keep 15 feet away from the penguins, making sure to avoid what is nicknamed the penguin highway, cordoned off by orange cones. It is okay though for the penguins to approach you, and what a thrill to have a probing penguin peck at your pants leg. It's easy to grow attached to the creatures with their comic little waddles and insistent squawks.
We were especially lucky to see baby chicks late in the summer season. The penguins eat krill and small fish, and their main predator is the Leopard Seal which can take them by surprise. One thing that takes some getting used to is the odour of the penguin poop. It can be so strong that it becomes hard to stomach and takes a long time to leave you. That's the main reason why everyone's boots get disinfected when stepping back onto the boat.
Hurtigruten's Antarctica cruises are discounted by 25 percent for select sailings next season.
It's Columbus Day, and CNN Student News commemorates the occasion by exploring the history of this holiday. We also consider how the U.S. economy might impact next year's presidential election. We offer some students' thoughts on how to stop bullying. And we meet a runner whose personal goal is more than 200,000 miles away.
Victoria Montenegro was abducted as a newborn by a military colonel. She testified last spring in the trial over baby thefts. This is a report taken from The New York Times on October 8, 2011 by Alexei Barrionuevo. The article makes reference to the Oscar-winning Argentine film "The Official Story," which we post after the article with subtitles in English (as released in the USA in 2004)
BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.
It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.
Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.
He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.
The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.
Jorge Rafael Videla, who led the military during Argentina’s dictatorship, stands accused of leading the effort to take babies from mothers in clandestine detention centers and give them to military or security officials, or even to third parties, on the condition that the new parents hide the true identities. Mr. Videla is one of 11 officials on trial for 35 acts of illegal appropriation of minors.
The trial is also revealing the complicity of civilians, including judges and officials of the Roman Catholic Church.
The abduction of an estimated 500 babies was one of the most traumatic chapters of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The frantic effort by mothers and grandmothers to locate their missing children has never let up. It was the one issue that civilian presidents elected after 1983 did not excuse the military for, even as amnesty was granted for other “dirty war” crimes.
“Even the many Argentines who considered the amnesty a necessary evil were unwilling to forgive the military for this,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch.
In Latin America, the baby thefts were largely unique to Argentina’s dictatorship, Mr. Vivanco said. There was no such effort in neighboring Chile’s 17-year dictatorship.
One notable difference was the role of the Catholic Church. In Argentina the church largely supported the military government, while in Chile it confronted the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and sought to expose its human rights crimes, Mr. Vivanco said.
Priests and bishops in Argentina justified their support of the government on national security concerns, and defended the taking of children as a way to ensure they were not “contaminated” by leftist enemies of the military, said Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights advocate who has investigated dozens of disappearances and testified at the trial last month.
Ms. Montenegro contended: “They thought they were doing something Christian to baptize us and give us the chance to be better people than our parents. They thought and felt they were saving our lives.”
Church officials in Argentina and at the Vatican declined to answer questions about their knowledge of or involvement in the covert adoptions.
For many years, the search for the missing children was largely futile. But that has changed in the past decade thanks to more government support, advanced forensic technology and a growing genetic data bank from years of testing. The latest adoptee to recover her real identity, Laura Reinhold Siver, brought the total number of recoveries to 105 in August.
Still, the process of accepting the truth can be long and tortuous. For years, Ms. Montenegro rejected efforts by officials and advocates to discover her true identity. From a young age, she received a “strong ideological education” from Colonel Tetzlaff, an army officer at a secret detention center.
If she picked up a flier from leftists on the street, “he would sit me down for hours to tell me what the subversives had done to Argentina,” she said.
He took her along to a detention center where he spent hours discussing military operations with his fellow officers, “how they had killed people, tortured them,” she said.
“I grew up thinking that in Argentina there had been a war, and that our soldiers had gone to war to guarantee the democracy,” she said. “And that there were no disappeared people, that it was all a lie.”
She said he did not allow her to see movies about the “dirty war,” including “The Official Story,” the 1985 film about an upper-middle-class couple raising a girl taken from a family that was disappeared.
In 1992, when she was 15, Colonel Tetzlaff was detained briefly on suspicion of baby stealing. Five years later, a court informed Ms. Montenegro that she was not the biological child of Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife, she said.
“I was still convinced it was all a lie,” she said.
By 2000, Ms. Montenegro still believed her mission was to keep Colonel Tetzlaff out of prison. But she relented and gave a DNA sample. A judge then delivered jarring news: the test confirmed that she was the biological child of Hilda and Roque Montenegro, who had been active in the resistance. She learned that she and the Montenegros had been kidnapped when she was 13 days old.
At a restaurant over dinner, Colonel Tetzlaff confessed to Ms. Montenegro and her husband: He had headed the operation in which the Montenegros were tortured and killed, and had taken her in May 1976, when she was 4 months old.
“I can’t bear to say any more,” she said, choking up at the memory of the dinner.
A court convicted Colonel Tetzlaff in 2001 of illegally appropriating Ms. Montenegro. He went to prison, and Ms. Montenegro, still believing his actions during the dictatorship had been justified, visited him weekly until his death in 2003.
Slowly, she got to know her biological parents’ family.
“This was a process; it wasn’t one moment or one day when you erase everything and begin again,” she said. “You are not a machine that can be reset and restarted.”
It fell to her to tell her three sons that Colonel Tetzlaff was not the man they thought he was.
“He told them that their grandfather was a brave soldier, and I had to tell them that their grandfather was a murderer,” she said.
When she testified at the trial, she used her original name, Victoria, for the first time. “It was very liberating,” she said.
She says she still does not hate the Tetzlaffs. But “the heart doesn’t kidnap you, it doesn’t hide you, it doesn’t hurt you, it doesn’t lie to you all of your life,” she said. “Love is something else.”
From airlines to buses, trains and cruise ships, one of the biggest changes in the wake of September 11th was the the way we travel. Transcription downloadable here!
In the 10 years since the World Trade Center attacks, artists of every medium have tried to make sense of the tragedy in their own ways, including film.
NY1 takes a look back at how the September 11th attacks have been portrayed on film.
From the Middle East to the Midwest, and from Fukushima, Japan to Fairfax, Virginia, CNN Student News brings you stories from around the globe. Catch up on events in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt. Find out how the 2012 U.S. presidential election field is shaping up. And discover how the U.S. State Department is using sports to connect with some Japanese youth.
Are you after value for money when you're shopping for fashion; or fashion that's made with values? Listen and find out more.
Hello and welcome to Trend UK, your shortcut to popular culture from the British Council. In the next few minutes we’re going to be asking whether you’re after value for money when you’re shopping for fashion; or fashion that’s made with values. We’re all after a bargain on the high street. But how often do you stop to consider how some stores seem to stock low-cost/high fashion items quicker and more cheaply than others? Fulfilling our needs for fast fashion means increased production and competition in clothing made in countries with low-wage economies. Our reporter Mark has been to the high street to find out more.
Here in a typical British high street there are plenty of bargains to be had. Handbags at £3.99, T-shirts for a fiver and shoes for under a tenner - all roughly equivalent to the price of an everyday meal. But how many of the people shopping in this high street have stopped to think about how it’s possible to sell clothes so cheaply? Is it because some companies are turning a blind eye to the exploitation in the countries where these items are made? Ruth Rothelson is an expert on ethical shopping from the Ethical Consumer Research Association, who amongst other things produced the magazine ‘Ethical Consumer’.
Ruth, just tell us what the Ethical Consumer Research Association is.
OK, well the Ethical Consumer Research Association exists to provide information for shoppers, letting them know what the companies are doing behind the brands that they see on the shelves.
So what makes an ethical shopper?
Very broadly speaking, people who are concerned about ethical issues want to know that the product they’re buying hasn’t been made at the expense of the people who are producing it, whether it’s in this country or abroad. They might also be concerned with other kinds of issues: whether the company is involved in armaments, or whether they’re donating money to certain political parties. And that as a shopper, you might not want to give your money to that party so therefore you might not want to buy a product from a company who is supporting a political party that you don’t agree with.
And is there any kind of rule of thumb? Is something that’s more expensive, for example, likely to be more ethical?
Unfortunately it isn’t always the case that the more expensive something is, the more ethical it is. We can buy very cheap products and it’s very likely that when products are cheap, something has suffered in order to get it to us. Whether it’s the person making it or the animals or the environment. Quality however, is often a good indicator whether something, especially with clothes, has been made well. And unfortunately a lot of ethical products will cost more because they reflect the real cost of bringing that thing into the shops. So something that has been made in a factory where the workers have been paid a proper wage will cost you more to buy, simply because the people making it are getting paid enough to live on.
Do you have to be well off then to be an ethical shopper?
It really depends. You don’t have to be rich to be an ethical shopper. One way of thinking about ethical shopping is thinking about buying less. Sometimes we buy an awful lot more than we need. We buy more items of clothing than we need. So being an ethical shopper really means thinking a bit before you go and spend your money in the shops. Some things may cost a little bit more in the short-run, but be worth it in the long-run. If you are paying for quality, something will last you longer and then save you money. And sometimes you can buy things second-hand. There’s a lot of charity shops on the high street to buy good clothes. Sometimes you can look a lot better than someone who’s just bought off the high street because you can have quite a unique look, and the quality that you find in most second-hand shops is really very good these days. So it’s about thinking before you shop.
Thanks Ruth. Now among the shoppers here I’ve got Lauren and Bella. Starting with you Bella, would you consider shopping ethically?
Definitely for food. And clothing, well, when I buy clothes I wouldn’t want to think of them being made in a sweat shop.
Lauren you do shop ethically. But you’ve got a slightly different take on it haven’t you.
Yeah I suppose I shop ethically but my original thing for that was that I like to wear clothes that are different from everyone else. So I would start shopping for vintage clothes. So ethically, obviously they’re second-hand so…also I buy a lot of clothes from market stalls, from fashion students maybe. So they’re all made here, so they would be made ethically as well.
Thanks Lauren, thanks Bella. Well it’s an interesting debate, and I’ll certainly be doing my clothes shopping with a little bit more care in future.
Did you know that manners are all about a reduction of violence between people? If you don't believe it , have a listen to this.
In the next few minutes we’re going to be talking about modern manners. It’s an argument that, on the face of it, has been going on between the generations, for hundreds of generations. Older people can often be heard saying the youth of today lack the basics in good behaviour and with newspapers and the media focusing on the anti-social activities of a minority of young people, it’s easy for them to be branded with a negative stereotype. So are British manners really getting worse? Our reporter Mark went to find out.Listen to the report by clicking here (you can download it)
Well, I’ve come to a typical UK high street on a weekday to talk to the young mums and dads, business people, elderly people and students that are out doing their shopping. So we should get an interesting mix of views. Let’s go see what people think.
-Excuse me, sir, would you say that manners are getting better or worse in the UK?
"I actually think they’re getting worse. I think that the standards are declining generally. " "I think they are getting worse but not terribly so." "Generally in buses and trains I think that people’s manners have improved in many ways." "There are cultural differences, so you might meet someone from a different culture and your set of manners will quite be different to theirs."
-----
Well, is it all a question of individual taste or is there some common ground? With me here is Simon Fanshawe, author of a book called ‘The Done Thing’, all about modern British manners.
-Simon, what are the basic dos and don’ts?
-I think one of the things that’s confusing for people is when they come here is there appear to be hundreds and hundreds of rules, hundreds of things you should and shouldn’t do. And the truth of it is that most of them are about class. And lots of them are trip-wires actually for people who don’t know them.
So what I tried to do in my book was take it back to some sort of first principle and say look – there are anthropological reasons why we have certain kinds of manners. So I’ll give you a very good example, in Britain there are sort of two ways of holding a knife, very broadly. And broadly speaking the middle-classes hold it with the index finger on the top, gripped in the hand. And working-class people hold it like a pen. Entirely a class distinction and people mercilessly exploit it if they want to. The truth of it is, the one way not to hold a knife at the table, is clasped in your fist, raised as if to kill your guest. And what does that tell us about eating? Well, what it tells us about eating is two things: it's never confuse your guests with either the food or the enemy. Don’t eat them and don’t kill them!That’s about how you should hold your knife, because actually manners are really about the reduction of violence. There’s a lot in there about reducing violence. So that’s just an illustration of what one tries to do so actually when you look at real table manners they’re about people feeling comfortable with each other, sharing food around a table. Very important human thing.
-And are things actually getting worse?
-Very broadly speaking, we all rub along together pretty well, actually, we don’t do so badly. The trouble with bad manners is that when you experience it, it completely occupies your field of vision. So you feel completely knocked back and rather hurt by somebody.
-Should foreigners, say, comply with British manners when in Britain or should they just be themselves?
-Well I think, one, they should be very gentle with us because we’re not terribly good at understanding that there are lots of different customs from round the world, so you know, be gentle. But I think the thing what I would say to anybody going to any other culture, any other country in the world: Number one – be curious, ask yourself. The other thing is don’t think there’s a right and a wrong way to do things in terms of little funny details. Always remember that fundamentals matter more than anything else. ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’ is a gift and a grace in any language so treat people in the fundamental purpose of manners which is to make life easier. If I can give you a definition of manners, it is it the reduction of actual or potential violence between strangers. So always seek to defuse conflict, always seek to reach out and offer yourself to other people, always seek to open the door and let them through. Do those kind of things because actually you’ll find people love it and they’ll respond to you.
-Simon Fanshawe, it would be very bad manners of me not to say, ‘thank you’ for coming to talk to us.
A British man, born on the Falkland Islands has become the first person from there to chose Argentine citizenship.
James Peck was handed his national identity card by Argentine President Cristina Fernandez, during a ceremony to mark the 29th anniversary of the end of the Falklands War.
Peck's father fought for the British during the conflict.
We all may well remember the now-classic movie starring Whoopi Goldberg, "Sister Act". The movie has become a musical show starring the very Whoopi Goldberg. This is the review presented on television a couple of days ago. Enjoy! And if you are planning a trip to New York or the UK, just do not miss it!
Here we go again. Another film to stage adaptation, but this one's switched it up a bit. "Sister Act," the 1992 movie starring Whoopi Goldberg featured a jukebox songbook of disco era tunes. On Broadway, the music is all original and Whoopi is now the producer. How does it rate? Let's just say it's hard to resist when the sisters and a few brothers make such a joyful noise. NY1 Theater Review: "Sister Act"
The story is innocuous. Set in the 70's, Deloris Van Cartier is an aspiring singer who happens to witness her thug boyfriend commit a murder. With her life in danger, she's sent by a cop to a convent where she's disguised as a nun. The devout Mother Superior is willing to go along with the plan until Deloris injects some soul into the pious choir. Of course Deloris' musical makeover is a big hit and, well, you know the rest.
Tongue-in-cheek nun stories are certainly nothing new, but this show's salvation is some very savvy producing. The songs by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater are clever variations on recognizable disco tunes from the era. They also help to quicken the show's pace by advancing the familiar plot.
The book by Cheri and Bill Steinkellner with additional material credited to Douglas Carter Beane features what sounded like a lot of Beane's trademark humor and brilliant zingers.
Veteran director Jerry Zaks is the perfect choice to helm this silly confection, balancing the fluff with sentiment. And he's got a great space in that giant stain-glassed church setting.
Casting is spot on as well. Everyone delivers. But best of all Patina Miller and Victoria Clark -- a delicious blend of sweet and sour. In Miller a star is born. She's Whoopi with a golden voice. And Clark's virtuosity keeps this lighter-than-air show happily down to earth.
As frothy entertainment, "Sister Act" gets our blessing. Just don't expect a religious experience.
"South Of The Border," a road trip movie directed by and starring director Oliver Stone, recently premiered at Cinema 2 on the Upper East Side.
In this documentary, Stone interviews seven leaders of seven countries south of the border, including Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro of Cuba.
Stone has strong and favorable views about the leaders.
"They want to keep the resources of the country inside the country, and then take the profits from their own natural resources and they're putting them back into the people's causes, making better education, health, welfare. And that's quite a difference from before," said Stone.
Journalist Ashleigh Banfield doesn't think the mainstream U.S. media does a very good job of covering South America.
"When it comes to South American politics and South American issues, we just don't cover it as much as other places," she said. "I think we don't feel the threat that we do in other places of the world."
Foreign correspondent Bob Simon is shocked at the lack of coverage of South America.
"I don't think there is any news organization I know of that has a bureau south of Miami," Simon said.
"In their own countries, the press is after them. The press is owned by very small rich families that control the countries. In Brazil, they are after [President Luiz "Lula" da Silva] and Ecuador they are after [President Rafael] Correa, they are after [President Evo] Morales in Bolivia. These are rich, big countries. In Argentina they certainly want [President Cristina Fernandez de] Kirchner out and the U.S. does too. We're working behind the scene to get them out," said Stone. "But they are all democratically-elected, so we have to get them out the old-fashioned way, which is we have to by votes."
There was a small protest outside of the theater about the film.
"Why doesn't [Stone] make a movie about the people that have been killed or incarcerated by the Chavez regime," said one protester.
Stone, however, did not pay much attention to naysayers.
George Whipple: How about the protesting out here tonight? Did that affect you?
Stone: I would say if this were Miami, they'd probably get me.
The last time I spoke to Stone, he was premiering another documentary, "Comandante," at the Sundance Film Festival. That movie was a series of interviews with former Cuban leader Fidel Castro in a movie called "Comandante." Now, Stone has spoken with Fidel's brother, Raul.
"South Of The Border" will be at the Angelika Film Center this weekend.
Japan hit again, power knocked out in 3 million homes
Hayden Cooper reported this story on Friday April 8, 2011
This report is brought to you courtesy of ABC Radio Australia.
As you listen, you may read the transcription. Ideally, it would be great not to do so. We post it here for you to check some words that may be difficult to understand because of their pronunciation.
MARK COLVIN: As if the main Japanese island of Honshu didn't have enough to deal with, another 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit today.
A few people died and more were injured in the aftershock, but it was also another huge psychological setback for the hundreds of thousands already displaced by the original massive quake.
The aftershock also took a number of nuclear reactor plants off line.
I asked Hayden Cooper in Tokyo about today's quake.
HAYDEN COOPER: Yes, it was a large one. Just before midnight last night when it struck, the shaking here in Tokyo at least went for something like a minute but the worst of it was up near Sendai, off the coast of Sendai, about 60 kilometres. It gave the buildings up there quite a decent shake and actually killed a few people as well.
Three people died in this earthquake, something like 100, or up to 130 people were injured. So this in fact was the biggest aftershock if you can call it that since the earthquake and tsunami struck four weeks ago today.
MARK COLVIN: It's just extraordinary to think about those people who've lived through the big earthquake and then a series of aftershocks and then this should come when already many of their homes have been just blown away.
HAYDEN COOPER: Yes they have. There's still something like 160,000 people living in evacuation centres right across the north of the country. The big problem now, after this latest earthquake, is that it has absolutely devastated some of the power supply systems right across the north of Honshu.
So there are now something like three million households which lost power after last night's earthquake. So it's quite a staggering figure and the race is on now to try and restore some of the power but the last figure I saw was to suggest that still something like 2.6 million are without electricity.
MARK COLVIN: And it can't have done a lot of good for the people who are still battling the nuclear crisis at Fukushima.
HAYDEN COOPER: No, it can't have at all and not only there but several other nuclear power plants across the north of Japan were affected by the earthquake last night. For example, there's a reprocessing plant in our Aomori Prefecture. It lost power after the earthquake but managed to keep its cooling systems running on basically an emergency diesel backup.
The same thing happened at another plant; Higashidori, but it too kept going on an emergency power system. And Onagawa as well in Miyagi Prefecture, it lost some of its grid power as well. So look in all of those cases the authorities say that there's not a major threat, that there hasn't been any significant change in radiation readings but there are some reports of some water leakages, particularly at Onagawa as a result of the earthquake. But again, they seem fairly confident that it's not going to cause any major problems.
MARK COLVIN: And speaking of water leakages, that's been the one good bit of news in the last couple of days, that they have managed to stop the major leak at Fukushima. Any other good news?
HAYDEN COOPER: They plugged that but there's still since then been trying to get nitrogen into reactor one. Now they say that that is going as well as it can be expected but it's still part of an ongoing effort.
They might have to do the same to reactors two and three at Fukushima Daiichi and all the while they're still pumping water into all three of them and they're still, this is in the area of bad news, they're still discharging radioactive water into the ocean, although they maintain that it is relatively low levels of radiation.
MARK COLVIN: And the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation now classify Fukushima as the second worst nuclear accident in history, only topped by Chernobyl. But I don't think this is really dented the enthusiasm of Tepco, the company that runs Fukushima.
HAYDEN COOPER: It seems to be quite an extraordinary report that's come out suggesting that even in the past couple of weeks, Tepco has been lobbying to build another two reactors at Fukushima which seems pretty hard to believe given the way a report like that might go down in Fukushima itself.
But this report suggests that even last Thursday, Tepco had submitted plans to the Government in Tokyo for another two reactors to be built at Fukushima. One can only imagine that it's not an idea that the locals around there would be too pleased with and I daresay the Government might not agree to it either.
MARK COLVIN: Well it certainly does macabre but I suppose the one thing that it does underline is that with all these nuclear plants offline, Japan still has a big power problem, doesn't it?
HAYDEN COOPER: It does. There's a whole lot of them offline. The several that I mentioned earlier which were under threat from last night's earthquake were already in shutdown mode. So when you consider that that's two or three nuclear reactors, then there's Fukushima and several others which weren't really under threat last night.
They're all offline, all of this is leading to a summer coming up which could be extraordinarily difficult for people in Japan and people in Tokyo and in fact the Government today has been saying that it wants some targets set for electricity cutbacks, that it's telling big business that it wants it to cut its electricity use by a quarter, smaller businesses by 20 per cent and even householders by 15 to 20 per cent.
So these power shortages are going to be around for a long time.
MARK COLVIN: Hayden Cooper in Tokyo. And in diplomatic news China's foreign ministry tonight expressed concern over Japan's move to discharge waste water from the crippled Fukushima plant.