Hair-raising! Japan bullet train staff made to sit by tracks
Tokyo: A Japanese rail company has defended a safety exercise that requires employees to sit beside tracks in tunnels as bullet trains speed by at 300 kilometres an hour.
JR West told AFP it has no plans to alter the exercise despite complaints from some employees. About 190 staff working on safety maintenance for Japan’s famed shinkansen bullet train have undergone the training, a company spokesman said.
“The training aims to teach our maintenance staff the importance of every part of their jobs,” he told AFP. “We pay close attention to safety while doing the training,” he added, while acknowledging complaints from some staff members. “We will continue this training while ensuring it serves a purpose and is done safely.”
JR West introduced the training in 2016 after an accident in August 2015 in which part of the bullet train’s exterior fell off, the spokesman said.
The purpose of the drill was reportedly to impress on the staff how fast the train moved and therefore how seriously they needed to take their jobs. But it has proved unpopular with some employees, local media reported.
“It was a horrible experience,” the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper quoted one employee as saying. Another described the experience as “just like a public flogging,” the Mainichi daily reported. Japan’s ultra-efficient shinkansen train network connects cities along the length and breadth of the country.
Despite the huge volume of passengers it serves, the network operates with an enviable punctuality rate. It also has an unparalleled safety record, with no one ever having been killed in a crash in its half-century of service. (AFP)
Women, men in US march topless for gender equality
Washington: Hundreds of women, and some men, marched on Sunday through numerous cities in the US to show their breasts, demanding gender equality and to protest against the “commercialization and the double standards” which affects their lives and jobs.
In its eleventh edition, the mobilization known as International Go Topless Day held 20 marches across the US, to which must be added another 40 in cities in Germany, Canada, Chile, Colombia and France.
In New York, the first state in the US to pass a law allowing breastfeeding in public, and in other cities women were also joined by a group of topless men, Efe reported.
Some 1,000 people, many of them with their families and children, marched with their breasts covered or uncovered down the pedestrian mall that runs through downtown Denver.
“This is a way to show that men and women can go topless in the streets and still set respectful and healthy boundaries,” one participant in the Denver march said, providing only her first name, Sandra.
“This is a way to promote gender equality and a reminder that nudity and sex are not the same,” she said, adding that “to appreciate the female body does not mean to stop respecting women, because #NoMeansNo.”
Some of the demonstrators carried posters with phrases like “Free the nipple”, “Your body is not a mistake” or “Let’s make the body normal again”.
The marches, held annually on the Sunday before Women’s Equality Day, which was established by the US Congress in 1971 in memory of August 26, 1920, when American women established the right to vote.
Topless is not prohibited in Denver and, although rarely practiced, is not considered “indecent exposure” by law.
In New York, women going topless was legalized in 1992, but in other cities such as Phoenix, Arizona, Corpus Christi, Texas or Madison, Wisconsin, it is not.
Because some of these local laws which prohibit going topless are not consistent with state legislation, there are a number of unresolved court cases regarding their constitutionality.
Only three states prohibit women to go topless: Indiana, Tennessee and Utah. And in another 14 states, including Arizona, Florida and Nevada, the laws are “ambiguous,” meaning that while they don’t prohibit going topless for women, they include it among the acts that are “disturbing the peace,” which can lead to an arrest. (IANS)