- Pyongyang to 'permanently' shut border with South Korea
- Trumpet star Marsalis says jazz creates 'balance' in divided world
- No children left on Greece's famed but emptying island
- Nepali becomes youngest to climb world's 8,000m peaks
- Climate change made deadly Hurricane Helene more intense: study
- A US climate scientist sees hurricane Helene's devastation firsthand
- Padres edge Dodgers, Mets on the brink
- Can carbon credits help close coal plants?
- With EU funding, Tunisian farmer revives parched village
- Sega ninja game 'Shinobi' gets movie treatment
- Boeing suspends negotiations with striking workers
- 7-Eleven owner's shares spike on report of new buyout offer
- Your 'local everything': what 7-Eleven buyout battle means for Japan
- Three million UK children living below poverty line: study
- China's Jia brings film spanning love, change over decades to Busan
- Paying out disaster relief before climate catastrophe strikes
- Chinese shares drop on stimulus upset, Asia tracks Wall St higher
- SE Asian summit seeks progress on Myanmar civil war
- How climate funds helped Peru's women beekeepers stay afloat
- Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded as wars rage
- Pacific island nations swamped by global drug trade
- AI-aided research, new materials eyed for Nobel Chemistry Prize
- Mozambique elects new president in tense vote
- The US economy is solid: Why are voters gloomy?
- Balkan summit to rally support for struggling Ukraine
- New stadium gives Real Madrid a headache
- Alonso, Manaea shine as 'Miracle Mets' blitz Phillies
- Harris, Trump trade blows in US election media blitz
- Harry's Bar in Paris drinks to US straw-poll centenary
- Osama bin Laden's son Omar banned from returning to France
- Afghan man arrested for plotting US election day attack
- Brazil lifts ban on Musk's X, ending standoff over disinformation
- Harris holds slight edge nationally over Trump: poll
- Chelsea edge Real Madrid in Women's Champions League, Lyon win
- Japan PM to dissolve parliament for 'honeymoon' snap election
- 'Diego Lives': Immersive Maradona exhibit hits Barcelona
- Brazil Supreme Court lifts ban on Musk's X
- Scientists sound AI alarm after winning physics Nobel
- Six-year-old girl among missing after Brazil landslide
- Nobel-winning physicist 'unnerved' by AI technology he helped create
- Mexico president rules out new 'war on drugs'
- Israeli defense minister postpones trip to Washington: Pentagon
- Europe skipper Donald in talks with Garcia over Ryder return
- Kenya MPs vote to impeach deputy president in historic move
- Former US coach Berhalter named Chicago Fire head coach
- New York Jets fire head coach Saleh: team
- Australia crush New Zealand in Women's T20 World Cup
- US states accuse TikTok of harming young users
- 'Evacuate now, now, now': Florida braces for next hurricane
- US Supreme Court skeptical of challenge to 'ghost guns' regulation
Fukushima operator ex-bosses ordered to pay $95 bn: media
A Tokyo court Wednesday ordered former executives from the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant involved in the 2011 disaster to pay around 13 trillion yen ($94.8 billion) in damages, local media said.
Four ex-bosses of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) were ordered to pay the damages in a suit brought by shareholders over the nuclear disaster triggered by a massive tsunami.
Plaintiffs emerged from the Tokyo court holding banners reading "shareholders win" and "responsibility recognised."
Hiroyuki Kawai, a lawyer representing shareholders, said when the suit was filed that senior managers at TEPCO must be made to pay.
"Warnings have to be issued that, if you make wrong decisions or do wrong, you must compensate with your own money," he told a press conference in 2012.
"You may have to sell your house. You may have to spend your retirement years in misery. In Japan, nothing can be resolved and no progress can be made without assigning personal responsibility."
The shareholders argued that the disaster could have been prevented if TEPCO bosses had listened to research and carried out preventative measures like placing an emergency power source on higher ground.
But officials argued the studies they were presented were not credible and risks could not have been predicted.
In a statement read to AFP by a TEPCO spokesman, the firm said: "we again express our heartfelt apology to people in Fukushima and members of the society broadly for causing trouble and worry" with the disaster.
But it declined to comment on the ruling, including whether there would be any appeal.
Three of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant's six reactors were operating when a massive undersea quake triggered a devastating tsunami on March 11, 2011.
They went into meltdown after their cooling systems failed when waves flooded backup generators.
The accident was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl and prompted the declaration of an evacuation zone around the plant.
Tens of thousands of residents around the Fukushima plant were ordered to evacuate their homes, or chose to do so.
Around 12 percent of the Fukushima region was once declared unsafe but no-go zones now cover around two percent, although populations in many towns remain far lower than before.
TEPCO has been pursued in the courts by survivors of the disaster as well as shareholders, and six plaintiffs this year took the firm to court over claims they developed thyroid cancer because of radiation exposure.
In 2019, a court acquitted three former TEPCO officials in the only criminal trial to stem from the disaster.
They had faced up to five years in prison if convicted of professional negligence resulting in death and injury, but the court ruled that they could not have predicted the scale of the tsunami that triggered the disaster.
TEPCO is currently engaged in a decades-long effort to decommission the plant, a costly and difficult process.
No one was killed in the nuclear meltdown, but the tsunami left 18,500 dead or missing.
F.Dubois--AMWN