July 2007

After the conflicting reports about last week's earthquake in Japan, a Greenpeace team of nuclear and radiation experts headed over to Japan to check radiation levels on the ground.

Happily, most places the team checked around the plant didn't show signs of increased radioactivity, but they had a couple of bizarre moments along the way. Their diaries are on our international site.

Memories of the giant chickens that invaded branches of McDonald's last year might be fading fast, but it's one year since a moratorium was agreed on buying soya from the Amazon rainforest. It was our chicken-led campaign that helped spur McDonald's and UK supermarkets into putting pressure on the soya traders in Brazil, who were trading in beans grown in newly deforested areas of the rainforest.

The Red Cross is stretched to their limits, in Tewkesbury. Thousands of people previously living in Gloucestershire’s rolling hills suddenly find themselves homeless. A third of a million people have no drinking water.

For me one of the coolest things about our new-look site is that we're carrying a lot more streaming video courtesy of the good folks at YouTube. But did you know that we now have our own YouTube Greenpeace UK Video Channel?

On Monday, an earthquake hit Kashiwazaki in north-western Japan, killing nine people and injuring hundreds more. Already a disaster for the citizens of Kashiwazaki, thousands of whom are now living in shelters, things could have been much, much worse.

Kawashaki is the location of the world’s biggest nuclear power plant – the site of seven nuclear reactors. At first it was thought that the 6.8 magnitude earthquake had just caused a fire at the plant and Tepco – the nuclear company - initially said no radioactivity was released. "No harm" was done, said a spokesperson.

Then we were told that in fact there had been a leak, but it was only 1.5 gallons of radioactive water. On Tuesday, it emerged that just a smidgen more radioactive water might have leaked than 1.5 gallons. About 243 times more. And the water was 50 times more radioactive than had been stated.

I was just about to write a piece slating Woolworths (as, after all the fuss we caused on Saturday, we still hadn't heard from them) when I got a call from Laura, one of our campaigners, to say she had a letter from them explaining what they're going to do about energy-guzzling light bulbs. I'm looking at it now and I'm sorry, but I'm still going to slate them.

It's from CEO Trevor Bish-Jones who begins by not asking for us not to stage in-store protests in future but to communicate directly with himself. So he'll be pleased about all the emails he's been getting from you (if you haven't emailed him, do it now, or you can call your local branch of Woolies and speak to the manager).

He goes on to use some well-worn arguments which I thought it would be useful to air here. Take it away, Trevor.

This from the BBC News website about the judgment against Ryanair by the Advertising Standards Authority:

Ryanair has been ordered not to repeat an advertisement that played down the impact of aviation on the environment.

In a press campaign the airline claimed the airline industry "accounts for just 2% of carbon dioxide emissions".