M K BHADRAKUMAR, - Asia Times
Stephan: This is a highly significant geopolitical shift, not least because it is part of the trend away from the Atlantic -- read Caucasian -- culture nexus that has run the world for half a millennium.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) marked its 10th anniversary at the summit meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Wednesday. Anniversaries divisible by five or 10 are almost sacrosanct occasions in international politics – especially for Central Asian countries and the adjacent capitals of Moscow and Beijing that have been weaned on the formalism of Marxism-Leninism. Much expectation was placed on the occasion at Astana.
In the event, it turned out to be a sober, introspective occasion for charting out a course rather than an excuse for grandstanding. No tall claims were made. There was sombre stocktaking that security threats remained and economic cooperation could be a lot better.
There is quiet satisfaction that the organization – comprising China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – is becoming increasingly influential and its multi-tiered consultative mechanisms have become operational, especially the Tashkent-based regional anti-terrorism center, which has succeeded in foiling over 500 terrorist plots.
Several new trends stand out as the SCO steps out of its infancy and adolescence. From a regional organization limited to Central Asia and its environs, SCO may well become the leading integration process over the entire Eurasian landmass, of which 40% still stands outside the ambit of the organization. Prior to […]
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MIKE McINTIRE, - The New York Times
Stephan: Yet another ethical controversy involving Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. This man, in my view should not be sitting on the Supreme Court.
PIN POINT, Ga. — Clarence Thomas was here promoting his memoir a few years ago when he bumped into Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery that employed Justice Thomas’s mother as a crab picker.
Mr. Varn lived at the old cannery site, a collection of crumbling buildings on a salt marsh just down the road from a sign heralding this remote coastal community outside Savannah as Justice Thomas’s birthplace. The justice asked about plans for the property, and Mr. Varn said he hoped it could be preserved.
‘And Clarence said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with,’
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, - Yale University Project on Climate Change Communications
Stephan: This well-conducted Yale University poll I read as very good news. It suggests that while corporate special interests, their corporate media surrogates, and their purchased legislators are peddling one story the truth about climate change is actually being worked out by the population at large.
You can click through and download the report .pdf.
Highlights of the report:
Priority
* 71 percent of Americans say global warming should be a very high (13%), high (27%), or medium (31%) priority for the president and Congress, including 50 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of Independents, and 88 percent of Democrats.
* 91 percent of Americans say developing sources of clean energy should be a very high (32%), high (35%), or medium (24%) priority for the president and Congress, including 85 percent of Republicans, 89 percent of Independents, and 97 percent of Democrats.
Action
* Majorities of Americans want more action to address global warming from corporations (65%), citizens themselves (63%), the U.S. Congress (57%), President Obama (54%), as well as their own state and local officials.
* Despite ongoing concerns about the economy, 67 percent of Americans say the U.S. should undertake a large (29%) or medium-scale effort (38%) to reduce global warming, even if it has large or moderate economic costs.
* 82 percent of Americans (including 76% of Republicans, 74% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats) say that protecting the environment either improves economic growth and provides […]
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DANIEL STONE, - Daily Beast
Stephan: Does this surprise you? It certainly doesn't surprise me. I have been looking for several weeks for the story beneath the public story. This is at least part of it. Increasingly behind most legislation that are special interest benefits accruing to the legislators proposing it.
When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan unveiled the GOP blueprint for cutting government spending, he asked Americans to make sacrifices on everything from Medicare to education, while preserving lucrative tax subsidies for the booming oil, mining and energy industries.
It turns out a constituency within his own personal investments stood to benefit from those tax breaks, Newsweek and The Daily Beast have learned.
The financial disclosure report Ryan filed with Congress last month and made public this week shows he and his wife, Janna, own stakes in four family companies that lease land in Texas and Oklahoma to the very energy companies that benefit from the tax subsidies in Ryan’s budget plan.
Ryan’s father-in-law, Daniel Little, who runs the companies, told Newsweek and The Daily Beast that the family companies are currently leasing the land for mining and drilling to energy giants such as Chesapeake Energy, Devon, and XTO Energy, a recently acquired subsidiary of ExxonMobil.
Some of these firms would be eligible for portions of the $45 billion in energy tax breaks and subsidies over 10 years protected in the Wisconsin lawmaker’s proposed budget. ‘Those [energy developing companies] benefit a lot from these subsidies,
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DAHR JAMAIL, - Al Jazeera
Stephan: Here is the latest on Fukushima, featuring the current views of Arnie Gundersen who, in my opinion, and the opinion of most of the scientists following this story, is the most authoritative voice on this crisis.
It is worth noting that this story came out originally in Al Jazeera, while the American mainstream media is largely silent on this subject. Increasingly American corporate media is beginning to look like the old Soviet Union media.
I am also afraid the Obama Administration is in the bag, having been bought by the nuclear power industry
‘Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,’ Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
‘Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,’ he said, ‘You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.’
TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water – as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons […]
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