TOKYO — Japan’s top government spokesman says radiation levels in spinach and milk exceed safety limits following nuclear accidents at a tsunami-stricken nuclear plant. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said checks of milk from Fukushima prefecture, where the plant is located, and of spinach grown in Ibaraki, a neighboring prefecture, surpassed limits set by the government. It was the government’s first report of food being contaminated by radiation since the March 11 quake and tsunami unleashed the nuclear crisis. Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

PressTV: 18,000 dead or missing in Japan quake

Veteran US reporter Helen Thomas has once again lashed out at Israeli policies on suppression of Palestinians and said Israeli lobbies are controlling the White House. Thomas, the 90-year-old former dean of the White House Press Corps, talking to an American magazine on Friday, pointed out that Jews have power in America, from the White House and Congress to Hollywood and financial markets. The Jewish lobbies have power across the United States, she said, and added that everybody is “in the pocket of the Israeli lobbies” which are funded by wealthy supporters and the financial markets. Thomas, the longest serving White House journalist, was fired from her post last June after she publicly made anti-Israeli comments a month earlier, telling the Jews that they should “get the hell out of Palestine.” They can go back to their previous homes in Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else, rather than stay on land stolen from the Palestinians, she had said.

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Seven years after he was ousted in rebellion, former president arrives on election eve talking of Haitians' plight. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the pastor-turned-president last seen in his native Haiti making a rapid, undignified exit seven years ago, has returned home to a rapturous welcome, injecting another variable into a febrile election atmosphere 48 hours before a drawn-out presidential race climaxes. Aristide, the only Haitian leader to have been forced from office twice, offered an exotic mix of poetry and gratitude to the hundreds of supporters who feted him at the airport – and took a sideswipe at the troubled electoral process.

Stephen Lendman: Aristide Heading Home

A plane has been shot down over the main rebel-held city in eastern Libya. An Associated Press reporter saw the plane go down in flames outside Benghazi early Saturday after the area came under shelling. A black cloud went up over the city's southern outskirts. Moammar Gadhafi's government declared a cease-fire Friday in an attempt to outmaneuver Western military intervention. But the opposition has been saying shells rained down well after the announcement and accused the Libyan leader of lying.

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We do not know their names, their faces, their families or their personal stories. Nobody really does. They are strangers, in a faraway land, doing the unthinkable. In Japan they have a name: The Fukushima 50. A coterie of nuclear plant employees - some reports indicate 50, others suggest four working rotations of 50 - who stayed behind while 700 of their co-workers were evacuated from the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi facility on the Japanese coast. Five have been killed. Two are missing. Twenty-one have been injured in a struggle where, in the words of Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan, "retreat is unthinkable." The men understand the stakes. They know there is no turning back. One worker told a departing colleague he was prepared to die - that it was his job. Another informed his wife he wouldn't be coming home anytime soon.

And so they battle on, a weary bunch of managers, operators, technicians, soldiers, firemen, amid rumours, worst-case scenarios and startling television footage. They are mid- and low-level employees. They are men with no names, cast into extraordinary circumstances, battling fires, explosions, the threat of explosion and the invisible menace: dangerously high levels of radiation no protective suit can deflect, and one that threatens to seep into the atmosphere if they fail.

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner shocked global markets by revealing that Washington is "quite open" to Chinese proposals for the gradual development of a global reserve currency run by the International Monetary Fund. The dollar plunged instantly against the euro, yen, and sterling as the comments flashed across trading screens. David Bloom, currency chief at HSBC, said the apparent policy shift amounts to an earthquake in geo-finance. "The mere fact that the US Treasury Secretary is even entertaining thoughts that the dollar may cease being the anchor of the global monetary system has caused consternation," he said. Mr Geithner later qualified his remarks, insisting that the dollar would remain the "world's dominant reserve currency ... for a long period of time" but the seeds of doubt have been sown. The markets appear baffled by the confused statements emanating from Washington. President Barack Obama told a new conference hours earlier that there was no threat to the reserve status of the dollar.

Former president slams banning of party from presidential runoff. Jean-Bertrand Aristide's plane touched down in Haiti on Friday, ending the former president's seven-year exile. "There's a real excitement because people have been talking about Aristide coming back for years now," the CBC's Connie Watson reported from Port-au-Prince. Aristide was exiled to South Africa in 2004 after fleeing a rebellion. He was Haiti's first democratically elected president, but was ousted in a coup, then restored to power in a U.S. military intervention in 1994. He remains wildly popular among the country's majority poor. Aristide has pledged to live as a private citizen in Haiti, though many are concerned he may try to influence the country's political landscape. Shortly after arriving Friday, he slammed the barring of his political party, Lavalas, from Sunday's presidential runoff election, calling it "the exclusion of the majority."

Stephen Lendman: Aristide Heading Home