Tim Wade's Blog

Starting this month GreenPeace’s new weblog Nuclear Reaction will be cataloguing the day by day failings of the nuclear industry. If you want to meet the politicians and their apologists with the 10,000-year radioactive legacies? See through their false promises? Maybe find out how easy it is to build a ‘quick and dirty’ reprocessing plant capable of turning black market nuclear waste into a bomb’s worth of plutonium every day?

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Two Greenpeace activists who exposed a whale meat embezzlement fraud in Japan — Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki — have been themselves arrested — for allegedly stealing the whale meat that they turned over to police as evidence.

Demand the Japanese government free the activists
This is the backlash. We’ve uncovered a scandal involving powerful forces in the Japanese government that benefit from whaling, and it’s not surprising they are striking back.

What is surprising is that these activists, who are innocent of any crime, would be arrested for returning whale meat that was stolen from Japanese taxpayers. Theirs are, to date, the only arrests that have been made in the Tokyo public prosecutor’s investigation into the embezzlement we documented of millions of yen worth of whale meat.

This was not a police action — it was an intimidation tactic by the government agencies responsible for whaling — and the kind of harassment of whistleblowers that a modern democracy should not allow. Our first news that an arrest was imminent came from Japanese television stations. Someone leaked the information to ensure images of Greenpeace activists in handcuffs appeared on news reports in Japan.

More than 40 police officer raided our offices and the homes of the activists, and spent 10 hours seizing cell phones, documents, and computers, despite the fact that we had documented every step of how we obtained the whale meat, turned the full dossier over with the evidence, and made ourselves available to police to help with the investigation at any time. A simple phone call could have brought Junichi and Toru to the police station. Instead, the government made a public spectacle of shutting Greenpeace down.

Don’t let Japan shut down the truth. Demand the release of Junichi and Toru and demand an end to the whaling programme in Japan. The corruption of a few bureaucrats who profit from whaling should not be an excuse for harassing those who have exposed it. The domestic and international shame which this scandal is bringing on the Japanese agencies responsible for whaling is just one more reason that Japan should stop its sham scientific whaling programme in the Southern Ocean forever.

Please, take action now and pass this message along to your friends. Let’s get Junichi and Toru back with their families, and demand the real criminals go to jail.

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The gestapo tactics of the British government have even finally sprouted wings and flown into the sacred city of Turin, famous for the shroud of Jesus and the Grand Madre, amongst various other tourist attractions.

Having my parked my ‘motorhome’ (with English registration plates and advertising ‘tourist’ all over it) some gestapo member of the Torino Polizia Municipale, didn’t have the common sense to appreciate that my ticket (that had been purchased to the maximum accepted by the automated ticket machine) had just expired less than an hour before, or the fact that it was bucketing down with rain, and I hadn’t returned to replace it. He obviously was short of parking spaces in the park full of people that day, for the zero people in the park, and the zero other cars in the parking bays.

At least in Italy it is only 22€ plus the 1.50€ commission you pay to the tabacchi (tabacconist) where they make it easy for you to pay the fine. As a respectful and law abiding citizen I paid it!

I hope the small penis’ed officer number 99231 dies a painful death and is served with many other similar cold and rainy Saturday’s getting totally soaked in empty car parks, and would like to ask him if he likes cowardly victimizing innocent citizens so much, why didn’t he join the UK police force or government? Instead of being a proper Italian policeman in the Carabinieri or Polizia, you are just doing parking and traffic in the Polizia Municipale. You are simply making money for your local authorities to waste devising other similar stupid systems to persecute their own citizens!

You must be stupid?

Please leave your comments on Local Authorities, Parking and Parking Wardens below:

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Living outside the system is relatively easy, even in foreign countries and speaking a different language. As long as you have a ‘sellable and marketable’ skill you should always find work, and of course living outside the system, you don’t have to charge for any tax and most employers are happy to pay you this lesser amount from their own pocket. As long as you do a good job, you are required again and again.

No matter how much governments try to clamp down on it, they of course have overstretched and underpaid resources. We all know just how lazy government officials and civil servants are too. And with the amount of ‘gypsies’ I have come across I my travels, I see that there are much more important people to go after than me. I’m not hiding or running after all. I’m simply enjoying meeting new people and experiencing new places, and not locked to a house where I have to pay all this money to the British government in Income Tax, NI and Council Tax etc. Why should I? After all I have been to Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda to ‘keep Britian a free country’ – now I am simply enjoying the ‘free’ bit they advertised.

And as for tax? I pay as much as the next man – fuel tax, cigarette tax and beer tax, the list goes on. If asked by the British government why I’m not contributing to them the answer is very simple. I’d rather pay the French or Spanish their tax in their 1.50€ bottle of wine, than pay Britain their tax on a £4.99 same bottle of wine. They are the greedy bastards that tax everything so much. And if I haven’t lived in the UK (and haven’t), why should I pay them anything?

I love my free life; and am willing to fight to preserve it….

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The UK is bloody ridiculous for parking tickets. Everywhere that can possibly have lines painted on the road to stop or charge you for parking has had, and private companies are employed to search and persecute the innocent motorist that can no longer park near his local shops, facilities or the beach.

Parking wardens employed by these private companies (that are also sufferers of ‘little big mans syndrome’ with very small penis’s) are paid on a performance related pay scheme, ie the more tickets and fines they hand out, the more they get paid.

Well, fuck you. In Fort William I put my ticket in the slot of the machine, jamming it up so it required fixing, and no further person could pay either.

And (fuck you twice) in York after driving round the ring road not finding any space or car park accepting a 10.5 metre motor home, I parked in the coach park. Imagine my disgust when after returning from an hours shopping I not only had a ticket, they had locked me into the coach park with a chain on the gate. I wouldn’t mind, but it was midweek, chucking it down with rain and there were no coaches anyway, let alone tourists – I was the only one. Needless to say I got out my angle grinder and generator to cut their lock of the gate. After closing it behind me, it only then dawned on me – sacrifice the expensive security lock on my bicycle, and locked them out of their own car park.

Sort the parking out Britian – nowhere else in Europe uses parking to generate revenues. If you wisely spent the money you had instead of fighting stupid wars and giving it away in Public Private Partnership schemes, you wouldn’t need it.

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