D. Parvaz

Japan's volunteers fill radiation monitoring void

In Iitate village, a farming community roughly 40km from the damaged Daiichi nuclear plant, volunteers have been heading out every week to sample soil from rice paddies in order to test the soil.

They want to gauge how badly it remains contaminated from the radioactive steam that shot out after explosions at three of the damaged plants. Here, the government has not yet started any sort of decontamination effort, and the local community - which has been evacuated into temporary housing - has become frustrated and is taking matters into its own hands.

We headed out in the snowy, idyllic - and evacuated - village with a team lead by Hiroshi Iwase, an expert in the field of the medical applications of radiation and currently an assistant professor in radiation protection at the High Energy Institute.

Meanwhile in Egypt, a simmering anger

CAIRO, Egypt - There's virtually nothing on the streets of the country's capital that might give you an indication that Egypt is just weeks away from its parliamentary election - the first one since former president Hosni Mubarak's ousting.

Ridding Fukushima of radiation contamination

FUKUSHIMA PREFECTURE – Nestled among the rice paddies and country roads is a workshop where engineers work with a singular focus on a vital project: A process to decontaminate soil from radiation leaking from the Daiichi nuclear power plant roughly 50km away.

There, a large, blue, monster of a machine carries out a four-part process to decontaminate soil, isolating the Caesium-137 particles spewing from the plant, which has been experiencing a meltdown since the March 11 earthquake.

Heading up the project is engineer/inventor Junichi Iwamura, who until the earthquake six month ago, was a professor of business management at Kinki University in Osaka.

Within days after the earthquake and tsunami, it became c

Reports of violence in Ahvaz

There are reports of violence in the western city of Ahvaz in Iran's Khuzestan province, where according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, 15 people have been killed and dozens have been injured and detained.

Al-Arabiya TV also has a brief report.

Friday's crackdowns by Iranian security forces came during a protest (dubbed the "Ahvaz Day of Rage") meant to mark incidents that took place in Ahvaz in 2005, when the ethnic Arab population staged rallies against the Iranian government over what they said were systematic injustices and discrimination.

On the April 15, 2005 protest, 360 people were reported to have been arrested.