(UPDATED) UK's The Independent Reporter David McNeill Meets Atsufumi Yoshizawa: "I Am One of the Fukushima 50"

This is one of the very few times I've ever heard of the name of a worker who has worked at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant since the start of the accident on March 11, 2011.

Hardly anyone in Japan wants to know about them, for one reason ("We hate them because they work for TEPCO" kind of reason) or another ("I'm sure they want to be left alone" kind of PC reason). But that doesn't stop foreign journalists, and as has been the case since the start of the nuclear accident, they are good at bringing the personal stories out of the huge, inhuman mess of an accident.

I believe Mr. McNeill is based in Tokyo.

I'd love to read the article, but for some reason the Independent site seems to believe I have used up the free 5 page allowance for the month even though I never visited their site in a month until today and won't let me read.

You can try if you have better luck, here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/i-am-one-of-the-fukushima-fifty-one-of-the-men-who-risked-their-lives-to-prevent-a-catastrophe-shares-his-story-8517394.html

(H/T blog reader wren for the link)

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(UPDATE: The actual article)

'I am one of the Fukushima fifty': One of the men who risked their lives to prevent a catastrophe shares his story

They displayed a bravery few can comprehend, yet very little is known about the men who stayed behind to save Japan’s stricken nuclear plant. In a rare interview, David McNeill meets Atsufumi Yoshizawa, who was at work on 11 March 2011 when disaster struck

David McNeill, Saturday 02 March 2013

It was, recalls Atsufumi Yoshizawa, a suicide mission: volunteering to return to a dangerously radioactive nuclear power plant on the verge of tipping out of control.

As he said goodbye to his colleagues they saluted him, like soldiers in battle. The wartime analogies were hard to avoid: in the international media he was a kamikaze, a samurai or simply one of the heroic Fukushima 50. The descriptions still embarrass him. “I’m not a hero,” he says. “I was just trying to do my job.”

A stoic, soft-spoken man dressed in the blue utility suit of his embattled employer Tokyo Electric Power Co., (Tepco) Mr Yoshizawa still finds it hard to dredge up memories of fighting to stop catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Two years later, debate still rages about responsibility for the planet’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and its impact. Fish caught near the plant this month contained over 5,000 times safe radiation limits, according to state broadcaster NHK.

A report this week by the World Health Organisation says female infants affected by the worst of the fallout have a 70 per cent higher risk of developing thyroid cancer over their lifetimes, but concluded that overall risks for the rest of the population are “low”. Over 160,000 people have been displaced from their homes near the plant, perhaps permanently, and are fighting for proper compensation. Stress, divorce and suicides and plague the evacuees.

Mr Yoshizawa says he feels “deep responsibility” for the crisis his company triggered. His eyes brim with tears at points in his story, which begins with the magnitude-9 quake less than 100 miles away from the plant under the sea on 11 March 2011. “It was so strong I fell on my hands and knees,” says the 54-year-old engineer. “There was no place to hide.”

The quake’s shockwaves ripped pipes from walls, bounced parked cars like toys and buckled roads at the 864-acre plant. Initially, Mr Yoshizawa believed the Daiichi’s defensive engineering had worked. The instant the tremors struck, control rods were automatically inserted into the plant’s three working reactors to shut down nuclear fission, a process known as “scram.” But the shaking had cut power from the main electricity grid, probably damaged the cooling system to reactor one, and a destructive tsunami over twice as high as the plant’s defences was just 49 minutes away.

Mr Yoshizawa was in charge of reactors five and six, which at the time were shut down for maintenance. He ran to the plant’s seismic isolation building and took his post beside manager Masao Yoshida, who was trying to assess the damage. In the windowless bunker they couldn’t see the tsunami that hit the complex. Waves of 13 to 15 metres high washed over the 5.7m sea wall. Water flooded the basements of the turbine buildings, on the ocean side of the reactors, shorting out electric switching units and disabling 12 of the 13 emergency generators and then backup batteries, the last line of defence. There was no power to pump water to the nuclear core and carry off the heat, or even measure the radiation. The engineers had lost control over the complex. Meltdown had begun.

Mr Yoshiizawa recalls hearing the first reports inside the bunker of oil tanks and cars floating in water outside. “I just couldn’t imagine a tsunami that big,” he says. The crisis quickly deepened. Just over 15 hours after the power loss, uranium fuel melted through the pressure vessel of reactor number one. Units two and three were not far behind. Thousands fled from nearby towns and villages. There was no plan for what to do next because Tepco had never predicted total loss of power at a plant.

Most of Daiichi’s employees had gone home to check on their families. Mr Yoshizawa says he thought of two things: “The safety of my workers, and the complete shutdown of the power plant.” His own wife and two daughters were safe in Yokohama, hundreds of miles south. There was no question of panic, or running back to see them, he insists. “It might seem strange to others, but it’s natural for us to put our company first. It’s part of the mind and spirit of Tepco workers to deal with emergencies.”

The engineer says he moved offsite for a few days to a disaster-response building in the town of Okuma, 5 km away. But on 15 and 16 March 2011 the situation at Daiichi reached its most critical phase. A series of hydrogen explosions had left much of the complex a tangled mess of radioactive concrete and steel. Unit three had exploded, three reactors were in meltdown and over 1000 fuel rods in the reactor four building, normally covered under 16 feet of water, had boiled dry, raising the spectre of a nuclear fission chain reaction. In his darkest moments, Mr Yoshizawa admits he shared the same fear as other experts – that the crisis could also trigger the evacuation of the Fukushima Daini plant 10 km away.

About 250 km south in Tokyo, the government feared a nightmare scenario: a vast toxic cloud heading toward the world’s most populated metropolis. Rumours swirled that Tepco was preparing to completely pull out its staff from the Daiichi plant, leaving it to spin out of control. Mr Yoshizawa denies this. “We never intended to abandon our jobs,” he insists. “At the time that rumour was circulating I was volunteering to go back.” He recalls despairing at the situation. “Most people thought we would not be coming back from the plant,” he says, on the verge of tears. In the media the Fukushima 50 was born, although Mr Yoshizawa says that in reality there were 70 of them, mostly in their middle age. “We had all resolved to stay till the end.”

Throughout the following weeks on the frontline of the crisis, the men endured brutal conditions. Deliveries stalled, food almost ran out and water was restricted to a single 500ml bottle every two days. Working in shifts, surviving on biscuits and sleeping when he could inside the radiation-proofed bunker, Mr Yoshizawa lost weight and grew a beard. As elite firefighters succeeded in getting water to the overheating reactors, the collective psyche inside the bunker lightened and the dreaded words “oshimai da” (it’s the end), were no longer heard. Exhausted and dishevelled on his first trip back to a sunny Tokyo a month after the quake, he was startled to find life going on as normal.

Public recognition or even gratitude for the ordeal endured by Mr Yoshizawa and his colleagues is scarce. Most are still employed by a company disgraced by revelations that it had repeatedly ignored pre-March 11 warnings about the risks of natural disaster. Taxpayers will have to bear the cost of cleaning up from the accident after Tepco was nationalised last year. Not a single manager has been held accountable for happened. The utility’s rehabilitation has been hampered by fresh stories that it had misled investigators before an on-site check of reactor one, lying that the reactor building was “too dark” for inspection. Some critics suspect the company was trying to conceal evidence of damage from the earthquake, an issue with potentially profound implications for restarting Japan’s 50 commercial reactors, most of which are shut down.

It took the government 18 months to publicly acknowledge Mr Yoshizawa and his comrades, when then Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda officially thanked them last October. Most were not identified or even named, testimony both to the trauma Fukushima has inflicted on Japan’s collective psyche, and a deep-seated cultural reluctance to grandstand while others suffer. Some of the men fear reprisals or bullying of their children in school. A police van is permanently parked out the company’s headquarters in Tokyo. Tepco itself is reluctant to wheel the Fukushima 50 out in front of the media, for fear of what they might reveal about what happened – Mr Yoshizawa is shadowed throughout his interviews by a PR minder.

But if he nurses any bitterness toward his employer, he never reveals it. He praises the company for providing counseling to the ex-Daiichi workers and regular health checks – a select list of employees who absorbed potentially harmful amounts of radiation are qualified for unlimited aftercare. His own final tally of internal exposure was 50 millisieverts – the upper annual limit in the US for nuclear plant workers.

Now dealing with waste and fuel management, and back at Tepco headquarters, he says the work at the plant has far from ended. “Nobody has any experience of trying to safely extract nuclear fuel after such an accident,” he says. British and US engineers are helping in a collective effort that will take many years. He gets uncomfortable when he returns to Fukushima and has to remember the crisis. His family never discusses what happened. “My wife and children have already seen so much on TV and they don’t want to see or hear anything more about it. Occasionally they will ask me if I’m OK and I tell them what I tell you: I don’t have any problems.”

Living in limbo: refugees’ grievances

Two years on, thousands of people forced to leave their homes in the wake of the Fukushima disaster are living in limbo, yet to receive compensation and unable to move back owing to dangerous radiation.

More than 160,000 people were forcibly evacuated from the area when an earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on 11 March 2011, and tens of thousands left voluntarily.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company that owns the plant, has paid compensation to some nuclear refugees, including what it calls “temporary” compensation for living costs, but it has paid no money for assets damaged by the meltdown.

A recent report by Greenpeace documented a litany of complaints about complicated forms, insufficient living costs and low valuations on property. Greenpeace said the plan was drawn up by Tepco in July last year and is based on a “complex and disputed” government system.

(H/T blog readers NYUltraBuddha, prestant)

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(UPDATE 3/4/2013) There is absolutely no coverage in Japan that Mr. Yoshizawa, TEPCO's senior manager, was interviewed by foreign press (The Independent, The Guardian).

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The Independent: Fukushima - Return to the disaster zone

Unlike the Japanese MSM who posted perfunctory reports on their press tour of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant on February 20, 2012, David McNeill writing for UK's The Independent filed a more detailed, personal report on his return to Fukushima I Nuke Plant, as follows:

The Independent (2/21/2012)

Fukushima: Return to the disaster zone

By David McNeill

The journey to Fukushima Daiichi begins at the border of the 12-mile exclusion zone that surrounds the ruined nuclear complex, beyond which life has frozen in time. Weeds reclaim the gardens of empty homes along a route that emptied on a bitterly cold night almost a year ago. Shop signs hang unrepaired from the huge quake that rattled this area on 11 March, triggering the meltdown of three reactors and a series of explosions that showered the area with contamination. Cars wait outside supermarkets where their owners left them in Tomioka, Okuma and Futaba – once neat, bustling towns. Even birds have deserted this area, if recent research is to be believed.

The reason is signalled by a symphony of beeping noises from dosimeters on our bus. As we drive through a police checkpoint and into the town of Tomioka, about 15km from the plant, the radioactivity climbs steadily, hitting 15 microsieverts per hour at the main gate to the nuclear complex. At the other end of the plant, where the gaping buildings of its three most damaged reactors face the Pacific Ocean, the radiation level is 100 times this high, making it still too dangerous to work there.

Inside the plant's emergency co-ordination building, the air is filled with the sound of humming filters labouring to keep the contamination out. Hundreds of people work here, many sleeping in makeshift beds. Workers in radiation suits and full-face masks wander in and out. A large digital clock showing the current radiation reading inside the building dominates the wall of the central control room, where officials from operator Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) huddle around computers.

"Our main challenge now is to remove the nuclear fuel from the reactors," explains Takeshi Takahashi in his first interview since he took over as plant manager two months ago. "It's a technically very difficult problem, but we cannot hurry." His predecessor Masao Yoshida was forced to quit in December after being diagnosed with cancer – unrelated to his work, insists Tepco.

Mr Takahashi looks exhausted but says he is satisfied with the progress being made in bringing the plant to "a state of cold shutdown", meaning radiation releases are under control and the temperature of its nuclear fuel is consistently below boiling point.

The term is considered controversial. Engineers have only a rough idea of where exactly the melted fuel lies inside the damaged reactors, or of its exact state. The fuel is being kept cool by thousands of gallons of water that Tepco pumps on to it every day and which it is struggling to decontaminate. Engineers are frantically working to build more water tanks – on a ridge about 65ft from the reactors is a field of 1,000-ton water tanks. A crew is levelling land to make way for more.

We are told to wear our full-face masks for the climax of the visit – a tour of the six reactors. Every inch of our bodies is covered and even in the sub-zero temperatures of Fukushima in February, it is unbearably hot. Thousands of men worked through last year's summer heat of over 30C in this protective gear, struggling to clear debris and bring water to the reactors. "They were dropping like files in the heat," said one worker. "But they just had to keep going."

"The worst time was when the radiation was 250 milisieverts [per year – the maximum, temporary government limit] and we couldn't find people to do the work," explains Kazuhiro Sakamoto, an onsite subcontractor. "We could only work in two-minute bursts, when we were extracting caesium from contaminated water."

Some of that work is clear on site. The concrete building housing Reactor One, blown apart in the first explosion on 12 March, is now completely covered with a tarpaulin to contain its radioactivity. As our bus drives past the building, the beeping dosimeters climb to 100 microsieverts an hour. But as the most badly damaged Reactor Three looms into sight, its mess of tangled metal and steel gives off a startling reading of 1,500 microsieverts. Its cargo of lethal fuel includes plutonium and the roof of the building housing the reactor was blown off in the second explosion. "It's still too dangerous for workers to enter Reactor Three," says engineer Yasuki Hibi.

The state of Reactor Two, meanwhile, sparked some panic last week after Tepco reported that the heat of the fuel inside was climbing and apparently resisting efforts to bring it down. The nightmare scenario of another out-of-control reactor was briefly conjured up by the media before Tepco banished it by claiming faulty equipment. "We've identified the problem as a broken thermometer," says Mr Takahashi, adding: "I'm terribly sorry to everyone for causing so much concern."

Tepco officials constantly apologise. The apologies have become perfunctory and ritualised, failing to douse public anger over the scale of the disaster, or some of the company's sharp-elbowed tactics since it began. Compensation has dribbled into the pockets of over 100,000 evacuees who have lost everything and are stuck in legal limbo, without homes or clear futures. In one now infamous incident, the utility argued against a compensation claim by a golf course operator, saying radioactive materials from the nuclear plant belong to individual landowners, and are not the company's responsibility. Lawyers for the Sunfield Nihonmatsu Golf Club, 28 miles west of the plant, said they were "flabbergasted" by the argument.

But here at the Daiichi complex at least, the apologies seem genuine. Work here is hard, unrelenting and, in the long term, possibly fatal. The depth of feeling about this catastrophe is etched on the faces of hollow-eyed managers like Mr Takahashi, who live day and night in one of the world's least hospitable workplaces. He says he is motivated above all by one thing: "We will try to allow people to return to their homes as early as possible."

It is a mammoth task. Japan's government has admitted that dismantling the reactors and its 260-ton payload of nuclear fuel will take up to 40 years. Many people believe the government and Tepco will eventually be forced to recognise that the people who fled from this plant a year ago may not return for decades. In the meantime, the work at Fukushima Daiichi goes on. And on.

I think McNeill may be wrong in stating in square brackets that "250 millisieverts" the onsite subcontractor mentioned was "per year". I think the subcontractor may have meant "per hour"; thus work in 2-minute burst so that the exposure could be limited to less than 10 millisieverts for the workers. In the first 10 days or so of the accident, the radiation levels in some locations in the plant were extremely high, measured in millisievert/hour instead of microsievert/hour.

On March 16, for example, the radiation level was 400 millisieverts/hour on the 4th floor of Reactor 4. TEPCO actually send one of the employees up the reactor building to measure the level. I hope he ran back down as fast as he could.

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UK Independent: A young man sacrificing his future to shut down Fukushima

The article by David McNeill of UK's The Independent about a young Fukushima I Nuke Plant worker "who sees it as his duty to save the stricken plant – even if it means an early grave", with what seems like a meager pay considering what he has to do.

The "pen" and the "towel" that the worker, Atsushi Watanabe, mentions at the end of the article are two of the typical items that are given in Japan as a token reward or souvenir to people who participate in an event.

The Independent (7/26/2011):

Atsushi Watanabe (not his real name) is an ordinary Japanese man in his 20s, about average height and solidly built, with the slightly bemused expression of the natural sceptic. Among the crowds in Tokyo, in his casual all-black clothes, he could be an off-duty postman or a construction worker. But he does one of the more extraordinary jobs on the planet: helping to shut down the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

That job, in a complex that experienced the first triple-reactor meltdown after Japan's 11 March earthquake and tsunami, means he will never marry or raise a family for fear of health problems down the line, and may not even live to see old age. But he accepts that price. "There are only some of us who can do this job," he says. "I'm single and young and I feel it's my duty to help settle this problem."

Mr Watanabe has been employed as a maintenance worker at Daiichi since he left school more than a decade ago. By the time he was growing up in the 1990s, the intense discussions and protests sparked by the decision to build the plant in 1971 had faded. When he graduated high school, there was little debate in his family about where he would work. "It was seen as a perfectly natural choice," recalls Mr Watanabe, who is using a pseudonym because his employer does not permit its staff to give media interviews. "The plant was like the local air. I wasn't afraid of it at all."

His job was to check the pressure inside pipes, opening and closing the valves. He liked the work, which he felt was important. "I thought we were on a mission to provide safe power for Japan, for Tokyo. I was proud of that."

It paid 180,000 yen (£1,400) a month. Since April, when he agreed to go back inside the Daiichi plant's gates, he has been paid the same amount – plus Y1,000 a day that he calls "lunch money".

On 11 March, when the quake disabled the plant, he watched in terror as pipes hissed and buckled around him. He spent a week in a refugee centre, waiting for the inevitable call from his boss to come back to work. When the call came, he said yes immediately. Everyone was given a choice, although there was, inevitably, unspoken sympathy for the married men with children.

As subcontractors to the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), he and his colleagues are well down the plant's employment food chain. Full-time Tepco employees are at the top, mostly white-collar university graduates with better pay and conditions. Tepco managers, including its president, Masataka Shimizu, who disappeared and became a national laughing stock during the nuclear crisis, are considered desk-bound eggheads; too much head and no heart, unlike the blue-collar workers who kept the plant running.

"[Mr Shimizu] had never worked onsite before or experienced any problems, so when trouble hit his instinct was to run away," Mr Watanabe says. He says he feels no contempt for the disgraced company boss, only sympathy. "If you pushed a guy like that too hard, he might commit suicide."

Initially, he says, some day labourers got big money for braving the lethally poisoned air at the plant. "At 100 millisieverts a day you could only work for a few days, so if you didn't get a month's pay a day, it wasn't worth your while. The companies paid enough to shut them up, in case they got leukaemia or other cancers later down the line. But I have health insurance because I'm not a contract worker, I'm an employee."

Mr Watanabe says it is too early yet to draw a line under the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The government last week announced that its January timetable for bringing the Fukushima plant back under control is on target, but the plant is still leaking one billion becquerels of radiation an hour, according to Tepco, and the state of the uranium fuel inside its three crippled reactors remains a mystery.

"The fuel has melted, but melted through or not – we don't know," Mr Watanabe says. "It's at the bottom of the reactor. If it melts out, and meets water, it would be a major crisis. The engineers are working very hard to get it under control."

Researchers have already started arriving in Fukushima Prefecture, home to two million people, to measure the impact of this radiation on local life. Tim Mousseau, a University of South Carolina biological scientist who spent more than a decade researching inside the irradiated zone around the ruined Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, was there last week. "What we can say is that there are very likely to be very significant long-term health impacts from prolonged exposure," he says.

Whatever happens, Mr Watanabe has abandoned any hope of getting married. "I could never ask a woman to spend her life with me," he says. "If I told her about my work, of course she will worry about my future health or what might happen to our children. And I couldn't hide what I do."

Why do people do dangerous, potentially fatal jobs? Some, as Mr Watanabe does, might consider it a duty to "nation" or "society". No doubt there is an element of bravado too – he compares himself to the young wartime kamikaze pilots who saw themselves as the last line of defence against invasion and disaster.

Whatever his reasons, Mr Watanabe displays infinitely more humility, concern for humanity and humour than the men who run his industry. For roughly the same take-home pay as a young office clerk, he and his workmates have sacrificed any hope of normal lives. He has never met the Prime Minister, the local prefecture Governor or even the boss of Tepco. He will never have children and may die young. In another world, he might be paid as much as a Wall Street trader, an idea that makes him laugh.

"I'll probably get a pen and a towel when I retire," he says. "That's the price of my job."

(h/t sailzazen)

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Newspaper Front Page That Cheered the Japanese

Thank you, The Independent. Japanese people were so grateful for your gesture.

The print version of the UK paper The Independent on Sunday March 13, 2011 featured a large "Hinomaru" (Japanese national flag) with the Japanese words,

がんばれ日本、がんばれ東北

日本 (Nippon) is Japan.　東北 (Tohoku) is the name of the region of northern Japan most affected by the earthquake and tsunami.

がんばれ is pronounced "gan-bah-reh". It's all of these, I think:

Cheer up!
Don't give up!
You can do it!
We know you can do it!

It's particularly the last element that touched many Japanese: that someone believes the Japanese can bounce back and is cheering for them.

Thank you again, The Independent. All my friends and family members in Japan saw your paper's front page, and they told me they were in tears.

Japanese people will persevere, despite their government and petty bureaucrats, I hope.

I just read the Yomiuri Shinbun article (in Japanese, 3/16/2011) that says there are plenty of food, water, heating oil, fuel and other necessities already delivered to the affected area, but they are stopped at - guess where... - depots officially designated before the earthquake by the local governments, who are responsible for distributing to the evacuees and refugees. The local bureaucrats, who themselves are the survivors of the earthquake and tsunami, say they will have to draw up a plan to distribute the goods to people who are not in the officially designated shelters.

It's snowing up there today and cold. They are without food, water and heat, even though they are not very far away from them.

People will die from cold and hunger, after having survived the earthquake and tsunami. All thanks to their own government, national and local.

OK that's enough depression for the night. I will believe in the belief of The Independent in the Japanese.

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The Independent Faux Pas Over LSE Scandal

The Independent ran an article by Jonathan Owens about how Saif al-Islam Gadaffi used ghostwriters for his doctoral thesis. What caught my eyes was the last third of the article, about how a niece of Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton's crony, got accepted at LSE despite her sub-par academic records:

Among the people who will feature in the inquiry is Professor David Held, the co-director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance and one of Saif Gaddafi's mentors. He had argued in favour of the grant for his centre being accepted and was appointed a trustee of GICDF in June 2009, but was forced to quit several months later by the LSE's council over concerns of a potential conflict of interests. He denies any impropriety.

But questions about Professor Held were raised over claims that he pressured an admissions tutor to accept the niece of former Clinton aide Sydney Blumenthal on a master's course.

Erik Ringmar, a professor in international relations at Shanghai Jiaotong University, said: "I was David Held's colleague from 2001 until 2007. For the first two years we worked closely together as fellow members of the MSc in comparative politics." He described an incident in late 2002, when Professor Held "insisted I accept a student to our MSc programme who was a relative of Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton crony. Unusually, I was sent an applicant's file not from the admissions office, as always was the case, but straight from the office of the LSE director – at that time Anthony Giddens. In the [applicant's] file was a handwritten note from 'Sid' to 'Tony,' making the case that accepting his niece to do a degree at the LSE would be a wonderful opportunity to 'continue to deepen our trans-Atlantic ties'."

Professor Ringmar claimed that Professor Held telephoned him and said: "You should consider it very carefully, just read the name again. It's Blumenthal, OK? That Blumenthal'."

He added: "In the end, I accepted her, although her grades were substantially lower than what we usually required. I'm not proud of this but I felt intimidated by all the pressure from Giddens, the LSE director, and from David Held. I was a mere lecturer at the time – and easily intimidated."

The LSE dismissed the claim as that of "a disgruntled member of staff who no longer works at LSE".

Reading this section, I assumed the writer of this article, Jonathan Owens, spoke to Professor Ringmar for the article and got that information from him. There is no indication in the article that it is not the case, as the writer doesn't quote any source for Professor Ringmar's comment.

Owens simply wrote "Professor Ringmar,..., said".

I googled the professor's name, as I wanted to find out more about him, and if he'd written more about the Blumenthal case. I typed "Erik Ringmar LSE Blumenthal". Then up popped the professor's own website , with his post from April 25, 2008.

April 25, 2008.

And there it was, Mr. Owen's source from almost 3 years ago, almost verbatim:

I have personal experiences of how Blumenthal operates. His niece applied to do a Master’s degree in the program I was in charge of in London. Unusually, I was sent an applicant’s file not from the Admissions Office, as always was the case, but instead straight from the Office of the LSE Director — at that time Anthony Giddens. In the file was a handwritten note from “Sid” to “Tony,” making the case that accepting his niece to do a degree at the LSE would be a wonderful opportunity to “continue to deepen our trans-Atlantic ties.”

I was just trying to figure out why the file came from Giddens and why that mysterious note was included, when the phone rang. It was David Held, notorious important-person wanna-be. “Did you see the application from Blumentahl’s niece?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied, “it’s right here on my desk.” “Well, you should consider it very carefully,” Held continued, “Just read the name again. It’s BLUMENTHAL, OK? That Blumenthal.”

Is this a form of plagiarism?

Mr. Owens could have said honestly that Professor Ringmar had written about his encounter with Blumenthal in 2008, and linked to the post. Or he could have taken a few minutes and shot an email to the professor for quick update, if any, that he could quote. It's sad but fitting that the article discussing the plagiarism by the Libyan dictator's son plagiarized someone else's work. (He also could have spelled Blumenthal's name correctly - it's "Sidney", not "Sydney".)

There I was, thinking The Independent was a conscientious liberal paper. Liberal alright (sloppy one at that), but conscientious? Maybe not.

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