BRAD JACOBSON, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Fukushima has largely vanished from the outlets of corporate media. But coverage, or its lack, is not the same as reality. This situation, as the headline says, is a ticking time bomb, for which no good solution is known. It could affect the entire world, but particularly the American West Coast. In the U.S. we have something like 40 reactors of the same type as those at Fukushima, quietly aging and leaking, each with its own containment pools filled with spent fuel rods.
The next story in today's edition explains why it is probable you won't be hearing about the presence of dangerous radiation, until it is too late.
More than a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) present similar assurances of the site’s current state: challenges remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.
But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite, especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel — 10 times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S., which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.
Reactor 4: The Most Imminent Threat
The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core’s reinforced containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean — just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored — but it’s also open to the elements because […]
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ASHLEY PORTERO, - International Business Times
Stephan: This documents how the big industrial agriculture corporations game the system through disinformation and false flag operations. This is how GMO and its related poisons are being forced down our throats.
As the U.S. Department of Agriculture readies its decision on whether to approve for widespread use Dow Chemical Co.’s (NYSE: DOW) new genetically engineered corn, the chemical company is touting a broad coalition of support among farmers to increase the likelihood that the agency approves the product.
Dow is taking this step to counter claims that the new corn, called Enlist, could encourage the use of a powerful herbicide found in the Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange, because Enlist is designed to be resistant to this chemical. Enlist’s opponents say that if this herbicide is more widely employed, the environment and public health would be endangered. More than 140 agricultural, consumer, environmental and public-health groups sent USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack a letter, which was signed by 365,000 people last month urging him to reject the crop.
In response to an article we ran in late April about this campaign, Dow dismissed as ‘hyperbole’ criticism surrounding Enlist. The company said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined 2, 4-D (the Agent Orange herbicide) poses ‘a reasonable certainty of no harm,’ and that, in fact, a different chemical, 2,4,5-T, is the principal contaminant in Agent Orange.
‘The surest way to increase per acre herbicide volume is […]
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ERIC W. DOLAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This is just the first fledgling effort of what I think will be a growing trend, particularly if Obama is re-elected. Getting rid of Citizen's United would be immeasurably helped if the Democrats controlled both houses, and the White House. It will never happen in a Republican administration because it favors the wealthy and gives them vast power to command the political process.
It should be clear to the meanest intelligence that Citizens United has fundamentally changed our country -- for the worse. The effect has been horrific. Just stop and think that something like 80 per cent of the Republican primaries were funded by 196 individuals. There are three hundred and eleven million people in the United States. Is that your idea of democracy in action?
The Senate Constitution Subcommittee will hold a hearing on constitutional amendments aimed at overturning the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision on July 17, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced on Thursday.
‘The devastating effects of the Court’s divisive decision in Citizens United are already being felt in states and communities across the country,
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Stephan: Sir Richard Branson is a very smart and insight man as his extraordinary accomplishments make clear. This idea is not as inconceivable in Spain as it would be in the U.S. -- yet. In bordering Portugal decriminalization of all drugs has caused almost no increase in social damage, in fact giving considerable social benefit. As a result drugs have become a non-issue in that country. The Spanish know this of their neighbor. I would give this a small probability of occurring, but not zero, given Spain's financial situation. It is interesting that the media in the U.S. hardly discusses this. On a fact basis Portugal shows that all the hysteria over legalization is just that -- hysteria. Profitable to cartels, corporations, and government agencies, but destructive of millions of lives, and of little positive social utility.
The official opening of Barcelona’s Cannabis Museum yesterday proved to be the perfect opportunity for experts to renew calls for the legalisation of the drug, with Richard Branson saying that Spain could solve its deficit problem by legalising cannabis alone.
The multi-millionaire founder of the Virgin emporium is also a member of a global commission on drugs policy which includes five ex-presidents and Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, and which concluded last year that the war on drugs had failed and called for experiments in decriminalisation.
Branson said that if Spain were to legalise cannabis use and collect taxes on its consumption, marijuana could go a long way towards solving its current economic problems: ‘it would help get the country back on its feet’, he said.
Branson was in Barcelona to receive an award from the promotors of the new Cannabis Museum – the biggest in the world at 900 square metres – in recognition of the work the commission has done since 2004 to promote the acceptance of the plant in all its forms and the reintroduction of cannabis for medicinal purposes.
The British multimillionaire took the opportunity to praise the initiative taken by the village of Rasquera (Tarragona), whose […]
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Stephan: A fascinating update to the Mayan Calendar; the discovery occurring synchronistically at exactly the right moment in the story.
Click through to see the images of the archaeological site.
The earliest known Mayan calendar has been found in an ancient house in Guatemala and it offers no hint that the world’s end is imminent, researchers said Thursday.
The walls reveal the oldest known astronomical tables from the Maya. Scientists already knew they must have been keeping such records at that time, but until now the oldest known examples dated from about 600 years later.
Astronomical records were key to the Mayan calendar, which has gotten some attention recently because of doomsday warnings that it predicts the end of the world this December. Experts say it makes no such prediction. The new finding provides a bit of backup: The calculations include a time span longer than 6,000 years, meaning it could extend well beyond 2012.
Trees grow on top of a recently excavated mound built by the Maya that contains the rendering of an ancient figure, possibly the town’s scribe.
‘Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?’ observed Anthony Aveni of Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, an expert on Mayan astronomy. ‘You could say a number that big at least suggests that time marches on.’
Aveni, along with William Saturno of Boston […]
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