'Unseen' News and Views
Almost 400 people have been rescued so far from a vessel which sank off the coast of Libya while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea with an estimated 600 refugees and migrants on board, the United Nations refugee agency 6 August 2015 reported.
Italian Navy rescues boat filled with refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean last year. More than 2,100 people have died so far this year attempting to cross to Europe in over-crowded, flimsy vessels. | Source: UNHCR
By Peter Symonds*
6 August 2015 (WSWS)* – Seventy years ago today, an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The massive blast, equivalent to about 13,000 tonnes of TNT, killed 80,000 people, or 30 percent of the population, immediately or within hours and laid waste to much of the city. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the US unleashed another atomic weapon on the city of Nagasaki, killing another 40,000 people outright.
**Image: Aircraft of the 509th Composite Group that took part in the Hiroshima bombing. Left to right: Big Stink, The Great Artiste, Enola Gay | Photo taken by Harold Agnew on Tinian Island in 1945 | Source: private collection of Harold Agnew | Wikimedia Commons
Many more people died subsequently of their injuries, including from radiation sickness.
Estimates of the total number of men, women and children killed by the two bombs ranged from 200,000 to 350,000, just in the first four months.
**Left picture : At the time this photo was made, smoke billowed 20,000 feet above Hiroshima while smoke from the burst of the first atomic bomb had spread over 10,000 feet on the target at the base of the rising column. Six planes of the 509th Composite Group, participated in this mission; one to carry the bomb Enola Gay, one to take scientific measurements of the blast The Great Artiste, the third to take photographs Necessary Evil the others flew approximately an hour ahead to act as weather scouts, 08/06/1945. Bad weather would disqualify a target as the scientists insisted on a visual delivery, the primary target was Hiroshima, secondary was Kokura, and tertiary was Nagasaki. | Right picture : Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy. | Author: Nagasakibomb.jpg: The picture was taken by Charles Levy from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack. | Atomic_cloud_over_Hiroshima.jpg: Personel aboard Necessary Evil | derivative work: Binksternet (talk) | Wikimedia Commons
By Junichi Sato*
6 August 2015 – The fight against nuclear is steeped in Greenpeace history. On the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombings we’re reminded of the consequences of nuclear energy and the people’s movement to campaign for nuclear disarmament to create a safer and sustainable future for the people of Japan and the world.
Greenpeace volunteer at the 60th Anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing in Japan, 2005. | Greenpeace/Jeremy Sutton-Hobbert
Seventy years ago, the world’s first atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, creating a “mushroom cloud” and killing more than 450,000 people.
The horror of these bombings has been an eternal memory for survivors, imprinted on the consciousness of people around the world, and a reminder of holding the further use of nuclear weapons in warfare at bay.
Fast-forward to 2011 when a tsunami, triggered by a magnitude earthquake measuring 9.0 rocked the northern part of Japan, resulting in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
By Jean Shaoul*
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5 August 2015 (WSWS)* – A joint US-European mission to Libya involving soldiers from six countries is being hatched under the pretext of combating Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and with the aim of establishing a pliant pro-Western government and “stabilizing” the country.
**Oil is the major natural resource of Libya, with estimated reserves of 43.6 billion barrels | Libyan oil fields and pipelines, 2011. | Author: NordNordWest, Yug | Wikimedia Commons
On August 1, the London Times reported, “Hundreds of British troops are being lined up to go to Libya as part of a major new international mission.”
It stated that the UK soldiers would join “Military personnel from Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the United States…in an operation that looks set to be activated once the rival warring factions inside Libya agree to form a single government of national unity.”
Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane and indiscriminate weapons ever created. Both in the scale of the devastation they cause, and in their uniquely persistent, spreading, genetically damaging radioactive fallout, they are unlike any other weapons. | Source: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
The US was the first nation to use nuclear weapons against an enemy target when they dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II on August 6 and 9, 1945.
More than 80,000 civilians died immediately as a result of the Hiroshima bomb – a device nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ by the US Air Force – and other 80,000 were believed killed in the Nagasaki attack by ‘Fat Man’.
Thousands died from radiation sickness in the months and years following the blasts.
As of August 2014 the memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki list the names of more than 450,000 people who died in the tragedy: 292,325 in Hiroshima and 165,409 in Nagasaki.
By Amy Goodman and David Goodman – Common Dreams*
3 August 2015
“Governments lie.”
— I. F. Stone, Journalist
August 10, 2004 – At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press.
An allied correspondent stands in a sea of rubble before the shell of a building in Hiroshima September 8, 1945, a month after the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare was dropped by the US. (AP Photo/Stanley Troutman) | Source: CommonDreams
Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story.
The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.
By ICAN*
“I turned around and saw the outside world. Although it was morning, it looked like twilight because of the dust and smoke in the air. People at a distance saw the mushroom cloud and heard a thunderous roar. But I did not see the cloud because I was in it. I did not hear the roar, just the deadly silence broken only by the groans of the injured.
Streams of stunned people were slowly shuffling from the city centre toward nearby hills. They were naked or tattered, burned, blackened and swollen.
Eyes were swollen shut and some had eyeballs hanging out of their sockets.
They were bleeding, ghostly figures like a slow-motion image from an old silent movie. Many held their hands above the level of their hearts to lessen the throbbing pain of their burns.
Strips of skin and flesh hung like ribbons from their bones.
Often these ghostly figures would collapse in heaps never to rise again.
With a few surviving classmates I joined the procession carefully stepping over the dead and dying.”
By ICAN*
By Gary G. Kohls, MD*
4 August 2015
70 years ago (August 9, 1945) an all-Christian bomber crew dropped a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki City,
“An irradiated crucifix lies in the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral Following the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki” | Source of photo: Dr Gary G. Kohls
Japan, instantly vaporizing, incinerating or otherwise annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionately large number of them Japanese Christians.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 