Japanese Worker’s Death Not Linked to Radiation

The operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the contract worker, who was in his 60s, died after carrying heavy equipment in a waste disposal building of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The company said that he was wearing radiation-protection clothing and a mask when he collapsed, and that his body did not show high levels of radioactive contamination.

Japanese news media reports later quoted a doctor at the plant as saying the man had apparently suffered a heart attack. The death is the first by one of the workers struggling to bring the Fukushima Daiichi plant under control since it lost power and cooling functions after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Contractors who work at nuclear power plants in Japan have traditionally labored in some of the most hazardous conditions, battling intense heat and braving radiation exposure to do such jobs as cleaning radioactive materials from surfaces in the plants.

The waste disposal building the contract worker had been in has been used to store radiation-contaminated runoff taken from the plant’s damaged reactor buildings, where the water is obstructing workers’ efforts to bring the reactors under better control.

On Saturday, nuclear officials said they had found more than 12 feet of water in the basement of Reactor No. 1.

Another power company announced on Saturday that it had completed the shutdown of a nuclear plant elsewhere in Japan, honoring a request by the prime minister to suspend operations at the plant for safety reasons.

The company, Chubu Electric Power, said it had halted operations of the last active reactor at the Hamaoka plant, which sits atop a major earthquake fault line.

 

Workers Enter Japan’s Crippled Reactor Building

TOKYO — Workers entered a damaged reactor building at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Thursday for the first time since explosions crippled the Japanese power plant two months ago.

The plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the workers were trying to install a ventilator to help lower radiation levels in the reactor building.

If all goes according to plan, the reduced radiation should allow workers to enter the plant for short periods to begin the critical task of installing a new cooling system. It will also reduce the chance that radiation will be released into the environment, said Michael Friedlander, a former senior nuclear power plant operator in the United States.

“In general, it’s all positive,” he said.

The power company said a dozen workers in antiradiation suits entered the outer rooms of Unit 1 to begin installing the system for filtering out radioactive particles in the air. Last month, robots found dangerously high radiation levels in the building, which was damaged by a hydrogen explosion after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan.

The filter will act like a vacuum cleaner, absorbing radioactive particles from the building’s air.

Tokyo Electric officials said the ventilator should lower radiation levels enough that workers would be able to enter the rest of the building within three days.

The company can then begin replacing the cooling system to regain control of the overheated reactor, which has partly melted down.

Tokyo Electric must install cooling systems at three of the Fukushima plant’s six reactors to stay on its current timetable of stabilizing the plant within six to nine months.

The cooling systems were knocked out, and storage pools for spent fuel rods compromised, by the earthquake and tsunami.

The workers were sent into the plant after robots found that radiation levels in the building had dropped from last month, though they are still high.

To limit exposure, the workers were split into four groups of three. Each group entered in 10-minute shifts, the company said. The workers also carried their own oxygen tanks to reduce risk, the company said.

The workers are installing large ducts that will be used to filter the air inside the building.

If the air purification system is properly set up and running, it is reasonable to assume that workers can move to the next step of installing a cooling system by early next week, Mr. Friedlander said.

Kevin Drew contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

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Bombs Strike Two Buses Carrying Navy Workers in Karachi

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Two bombs exploded on Tuesday next to two buses transporting employees of the Pakistan Navy in the southern port city of Karachi, killing at least four people, according to a senior Pakistani naval official. At least 56 other people were wounded.

A junior naval officer, one civilian doctor and two other naval civilian employees were killed in the early morning rush-hour attacks that targeted two buses, said Commodore Irfan ul Haq. He said it was too early to say why the naval buses were targeted.

No one claimed responsibility immediately, but Taliban insurgents and militant groups affiliated with the organization have repeatedly targeted civilians and military installations across the country. Karachi is the country’s largest city and considered the financial and commercial capital.

The first blast occurred in an upscale neighborhood, DHA Phase II, at 7:20 a.m. on Tuesday, police officials said.

The bomb was planted on a motorcycle that was idling by a main road and exploded as the naval bus passed, police said. The blast killed the junior naval officer and the doctor, injured 37 other passengers, destroyed the bus and shattered the window panes of nearby houses.

Minutes later, a second blast went off in Baldia Town, a relatively impoverished neighborhood in Karachi. The remote-controlled bomb was hidden in rubble alongside a road, according to police. This second blast killed the two other civilian naval employees and injured 19 others.

The blasts came just days after Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief, claimed to have broken the back of militants in the country. The army chief had made the claim on Saturday while addressing a ceremony of cadets at the Kakul military academy in the country’s north.

“It is a powerful message by the militants,” said Omar R. Quraishi, opinion pages editor of The Express Tribune, a Karachi-based, English-language daily newspaper. “The message is that we may be on the run, but we can strike at will and choose targets of our choosing.”

Analysts said that the commuter buses used by officers and staff of the navy were a relatively easy target as they travel on main thoroughfares with little or no security. Military installations, on the other hand, have become relatively difficult to attack because of stringent security measures.

 

Medical Workers Reported Missing in Bahrain

The group, Physicians for Human Rights, cited reports from Bahrain that “doctors are disappearing as part of a systematic attack on medical staff,” and that “many physicians are missing following interrogations by unknown security forces at Salmaniya Medical Complex” in Bahrain’s capital, Manama.

In a Web posting, the group published a list of more than 30 medical personnel, from ambulance drivers to consultants and surgeons, who it said had been held.

“Although families have tried to contact administration officials, the administration denies any knowledge of their whereabouts,” the posting said. “According to family members, the physicians are being held incommunicado in unknown locations.”

There was no immediate response to the allegation from authorities in Bahrain, which enlisted military help from more than 2,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to put down a pro-democracy uprising last month, and sent army and security forces to crush dissent.

The government forces have expelled protesters from Pearl Square, a traffic circle that had taken on symbolic importance for demonstrators, who likened it to Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the days before President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was toppled in February. The government forces also moved on to the grounds of the Salmaniya hospital after it became a hub of opposition activities.

The confrontation drew on Bahrain’s tense divide between majority Shiites and the Sunni monarchy that rules them. Most of Bahrain’s doctors are Shiites and the opposition is predominantly, though not exclusively, Shiite.

This month, it was estimated that at least a dozen doctors and nurses had been arrested and held prisoner since March, and more paramedics and ambulance drivers disappeared. Ambulances were blocked from aiding wounded patients, according to health care workers and human rights advocates.

“You have an assault on the health care system and the people who practice in it,” said Dan Williams, a senior researcher for the New York-based group Human Rights Watch, said this month. “Hospitals are supposed to be used for health care and not as arbitrary detention centers.”

At a news conference this month, the acting health minister, Fatima al-Balooshi, accused scores of doctors and health care workers at Salmaniya and elsewhere of joining “a conspiracy against Bahrain from the outside” — usually a code for Iran — to destabilize the government.

Richard Sollom, the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, denounced the apparent assault on medical personnel in the Web posting, writing: “Doctors, nurses and other medical professionals have an ethical duty to prevent and limit suffering of patients in their care and a duty to practice medicine in a neutral way without fear or favor.”

 

Temp Workers in Germany Dismay Unions

 

Originally from the area around Erfurt in eastern Germany, Mr. Hintermeier has spent 15 years as a temporary worker, going wherever the jobs are.

“You’re doing the same work for less pay,” said Mr. Hintermeier, who earns about 9 euros, or almost $13, an hour. That is about $2.86 an hour less than the average for eastern Germany, and $7.16 to $8.59 less than in wealthier regions of the country, where Mr. Hintermeier often works.

On top of that, “there aren’t many opportunities to develop,” he complained. And he said he often encountered resentment from co-workers who consider him low-cost competition.

Mr. Hintermeier is one of nearly a million temporary workers, almost 3 percent of the work force, who in recent years have given German companies much more flexibility than before. Temporary employment played a critical role in helping Germany weather the 2009 downturn, as employers were able to quickly respond to ebbing demand by reducing payrolls.

But an increasingly vocal group of critics say that the loosening of regulations in 2003 allowing companies to hire temporary workers has created a vast cohort of poorly paid, poorly treated employees with slim chances of obtaining permanent jobs. With the economy surging once again, unions are lobbying for legislative changes and raising the issue of temporary workers at contract talks.

“Temporary work has enabled a shadow labor market,” Berthold Huber, chairman of the IG Metall labor union, said at a news conference in Frankfurt last week. “That is intolerable.”

Temporary employment, already a boom industry in Europe, is about to get more support when the last restrictions on labor mobility among European Union countries fall away on May 1 — coincidentally the day when Europe celebrates the labor movement. Temporary-employment agencies will then be able to recruit workers in low-wage countries like Poland for jobs in Germany and elsewhere.

“That will certainly raise the pressure,” said Sandra Siebenhüter, who has studied temporary work for the Otto Brenner Foundation, a research organization in Frankfurt that is financially supported by IG Metall.

While there are plenty of anecdotes about temporary workers who are receiving worse deals than permanent employees, the loosening of Germany’s traditionally rigid labor market has been crucial in preventing at least some companies from shipping production abroad.

“Our global competitiveness would deteriorate if we were unable to use the instrument of temporary employment,” Bayerische Motoren Werke, the maker of BMW vehicles, said in a statement, noting that 75 percent of its work force was in Germany, while 80 percent of its car and motorcycle sales were abroad.

At the heart of the debate is the question of whether a temporary, lower-wage job is better than no job at all.

The rise of temporary labor has contributed to a plunge in German joblessness. The unemployment rate has fallen to just above 7 percent, or 3.2 million people, from nearly 12 percent in 2005, or almost 5 million people.

Temporary employment agencies have soaked up a large proportion of those jobless people, many of whom lack training. The industry draws two-thirds of its new employees from the ranks of the unemployed, according to a study by the German Federal Employment Agency.

Randstad Holding, a global temporary-employment agency based outside Amsterdam, has created 50,000 jobs in Germany over the last two years, said Ben Noteboom, Randstad’s chief executive. Most of the people hired had been jobless, he said.

“In the past, staffing was difficult legally,” Mr. Noteboom said. “The moment it changed, the market started to boom.”

He said that he was baffled by efforts to tighten restrictions on temporary hiring. Abuses by a few companies had turned public opinion against the industry, he said. “In Germany, we do see that there is more aggressive talk against our business,” Mr. Noteboom said. “I don’t know how many difficulties you want to create for your companies to stay in the country.”

In fact, Mr. Noteboom said, Germany still has some of the tightest protections anywhere for temporary workers. He said that he considered “temporary worker” a misnomer in the first place. In Germany, Randstad’s workers have the status of regular employees with full health and pension benefits. They are simply lent to other employers.