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More than a year after a massive tsunami caused a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the World Health Organization says that several areas near the facility had radiation above cancer-causing levels but most of the nation did not.

The UN health agency released its first global estimate Wednesday of radiation exposure from the nuclear disaster caused by the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011. The agency said the increases in radiation that resulted from the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima plant were below levels considered cancer-causing in nearly all of Japan.

The agency’s 124-page report also says neighbouring countries had levels similar to normal background radiation and people in some other countries had minor exposure through food.

The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency has previously confirmed that radiation levels in some Japanese milk and vegetables reached significantly higher levels than Japan allows for consumption.

A Canadian woman who was climbing Mount Everest the same weekend four others died provided a chilling description of her own perilous journey, saying the mountain seemed “like a morgue.”

The tweets from Sandra Leduc come as another 200 climbers attempt to scale the 8,850-metre peak between Friday and Sunday and Nepalese officials say there is small they can do to control the rush.

Leduc started to summit Everest by leaving the last base camp on the evening of May 19, the same day fellow Canadian climber Shriya Shah-Klorfine of Toronto and three others died during their descent, apparently from exhaustion and altitutde sickness.

Leduc said she could see lightning and estimated winds were gusting to 100 km/h.

In the early morning hours of May 20, and just a few hours from the summit, her Sherpa guide told her they needed to return immediately, adding it was the worst weather he had ever seen.

Sandra Leduc said Mount Everest seemed like “a morgue” after she was forced to turn back during her summit attempt last weekend. (www.sandraleduc.com)

Leduc said there were “lots of dead or dying bodies” in a Twitter post. “Thought I was in a morgue.”

Her regulator froze on the descent so she travelled for three hours to the camp immediatley below the summit without any oxygen, saying that she could barely stand during the last 30 minutes.

Leduc, who works as a lawyer for the Government of Canada, is contemplating a second summit attempt.

Two Vancouver-based climbers, meanwhile, successfully made a trek to the top of Everest on May 19. Steve Curtis and Sam Wyatt made the climb to help raise $150,000 for the Take a Hike Foundation, a charity devoted to helping at-risk youth through adventure-based learning, academics and community involvement.

‘Traffic jam’ on Everest

Approximately 200 climbers tried to reach the top of Everest last weekend as they rushed to use a brief window of excellent weather in an otherwise troubled climbing season. Many had been waiting at a staging camp for several days for their chance to head to the summit.

“There was a traffic jam on the mountain on Saturday. Climbers were still heading to the summit as late as 2:30 p.m., which is quite perilous,” Nepali mountaineering official Gyanendra Shrestha said. That meant climbers were staying too long at high altitudes and exhausting their oxygen supplies because they didn’t anticipate having to wait.

Torontonian Shriya Shah-Klorfine, 33, died on her descent from Mount Everest on May 19. (Myeverestexpedition.com)

Climbers normally are advised not to try for the summit after 11 a.m. The area above the last camp is nicknamed the “death zone” because of the steep icy slope, treacherous conditions and low oxygen level.

More than 3,000 people have climbed Everest since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first to do so in 1953. Some 225 climbers have died attempting it.

The deadliest day was May 10, 1996, when eight people were killed. The main reason was said to be that climbers who started their ascent late in the day were caught in a snowstorm in the afternoon and lost their way.

The climbing season normally runs from late March to the first week in June, but this year the first clear conditions came last weekend.

With files from The Associated Press

Facebook is facing a lawsuit from mad shareholders and multiple probes from regulators over the disappointing handling of its initial public offering last week.

In a suit filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan late Tuesday, a group of Facebook shareholders are suing the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, claiming insiders were selectively given secret information about the company’s right financial projections from underwriters, while retail investors and other investment houses were left in the dark.

“The revised figures were only passed along to some investors who were therefore able to make profits by selling their IPO shares Friday while shares were on the rise,” New York law firm Levi & Korsinsky alleges in the suit.

Facebook executives are shown ringing the bell to open Nasdaq trading on Friday. The shares have sunk since opening to the public last week. (Reuters)

Morgan Stanley, the investment bank that shepherded the company through its highly publicized initial stock offering last week, is also facing a regulatory probe from the self-policing Financial Industry Regulatory Authority over whether or not the bank selectively withheld information about a negative analyst report ahead of the IPO.

FINRA head Rick Ketchum that the question is “a matter of regulatory concern” for his organization and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Similarly, the top securities regulator for Massachusetts, William Galvin, said his office will subpoena the company to pursue its own investigation of whether Morgan Stanley divulged to only some clients that one of its analysts had cut his revenue estimates for the social media giant.

The bank said late Tuesday that it “followed the same procedures for the Facebook offering that it follows for all IPOs,” referring to initial public offerings of stock. It said that its procedures complied with regulations.

The questions about the role played by Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter for the deal, add to the confusion surrounding Facebook’s IPO. In the most hotly anticipated stock debut in years, the offering raised $16 billion for the social networking company, valuing it at $104 billion.

Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld told shareholders of the exchange’s parent company that “clearly we had mistakes within the Facebook listing.”

Shares in the Nasdaq itself have dropped more than $2, or 10 per cent, from where they were before Facebook’s IPO on Friday, as negative fallout from the underwhelming debut — and a lengthy trading delay on Friday while the exchange struggled to process an order backlog — is dragging on shares.

After briefly trading above $42, the IPO plummeted through the trading day on Friday, closing at the IPO price of $38 after a furious defence of the level by lead underwriter Morgan Stanley. Trading Monday and Tuesday saw the shares fall below the $31 level before a slight rebound Wednesday had the stock trading just north of $32.

Some brokerages were still sorting out the aftermath of the trading delay on Tuesday.

‘There are issues that we need to look at specifically with respect to Facebook.’—SEC chair Mary Schapiro

“Unfortunately, our clients continue to feel the effects of this in some cases,” said Stephen Austin, a spokesman for Fidelity Investments, one of the country’s largest brokerages. Fidelity was still waiting for some Facebook stock orders that it placed on Friday to be executed. Fidelity’s systems had performed normally, Austin said.

Reuters reported Tuesday that a Morgan Stanley analyst, Scott Devitt, cut his estimate for Facebook’s revenue this year to $4.85 billion from more than $5 billion earlier. The news agency reported it was unclear whether Morgan Stanley had told only select clients about the reduced estimate.

Reuters reported that the analyst cut his figures for Facebook while the company’s executives, including founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were shopping the stock to potential investors in the weeks ahead of the IPO, a process known in investing as a road show.

Filing said shift to mobile might limit revenue growth

Morgan Stanley, in its statement, did not specifically address which clients might have been told about a reduced estimate from one of its analysts. It said that “a significant number” of analysts, including those from other firms underwriting the stock issue, had reduced their estimates for Facebook to reflect publicly available information about the company.

That was a reference to a May 9 regulatory filing in which Facebook said a shift by many Facebook users toward mobile devices might limit its revenue growth. Social media companies have struggled to make as much money as they would like from mobile advertising. Advertising accounts for more than 80 per cent of Facebook’s overall revenue.

Morgan Stanley also said that revised analyst views were taken into account in setting the stock offering price at $38 per share. Facebook, working with Morgan Stanley, first set a range of $28 to $35 for the offering price, then raised the range to $34 to $38 before setting it at $38 on the night before the IPO.

Reports suggest Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Ebersman, along with Morgan Stanley chose to increase the size of the offering by 25 per cent early last week. Selling too many shares at too high a price has the appearance or trying to let insiders cash out at the public’s expense. That perception is what has led to the heightened regulatory scrutiny.

When the stock started trading Friday, it jumped several dollars, but quickly fell back toward $38. It never crossed below that level on its first day, and outside analysts said that was probably because Morgan Stanley, keen to avoid the embarrassment of a first-day decline in the stock price, had rushed in with thousands of buy orders at $38.

A spokesman for Facebook Inc., which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., said late Tuesday that the company had no comment.

The SEC had already said on Friday that it was looking into problems surrounding the IPO. On Tuesday, the agency’s chairman, Mary Schapiro, said: “I reckon there is a lot of reason to have confidence in our markets and in the integrity of how they operate, but there are issues that we need to look at specifically with respect to Facebook.”

With files from The Associated Press