Thursday, April 25th, 2013
, - Government Accountability Project
Stephan: Here is further evidence of the point I have been making about the ongoing nature of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and the consequences. Like the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion these disasters resulted from lack of proper oversight by corrupted, and consequently incompetent, regulatory agencies. This is what happens when profit becomes the only real priority, and government and corporate interests are intertwined.
Click through to download the actual report.
WASHINGTON — Today, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) released Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups? The report details the devastating long-term effects on human health and the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem stemming from BP and the federal government’s widespread use of the dispersant Corexit, in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
GAP, the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization, launched this effort in August 2011 after repeatedly hearing from Gulf residents and cleanup workers that official statements from representatives of BP and the federal government were false and misleading in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Over the next 20 months, GAP collected data and evidence from over two dozen employee and citizen whistleblowers who experienced the cleanup’s effects firsthand, and GAP studied data from extensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Taken together, the documents and the witnesses’ testimony belie repeated corporate and government rhetoric that Corexit is not dangerous. Worse than this, evidence suggests that the cleanup effort has been more destructive to human health and the environment than the spill itself.
Conclusions from the report strongly suggest that the dispersant Corexit was widely […]
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Thursday, April 25th, 2013
MARI YAMAGUCHI, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: The great media spotlight moved on from Fukushima just as it moved on from BP's Deepwater Horizon Gulf disaster, but as with the Gulf that does not mean that catastrophic consequences of Fukushima have ended. As this report makes clear we could well be more than half way through the 21st century before this issue is resolved. And that is the optimistic view. This is why the nuclear industry should have been shut down years ago as a left over fossil of the Cold War.
TOKYO — A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant and urged its operator to improve plant stability.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.
‘As for the duration of the decommissioning project, this is something that you can define in your plans. But in my view, it will be nearly impossible to ensure the time for decommissioning such a complex facility in less than 30-40 years as it is currently established in the roadmap,’ Lentijo said.
The government and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. have predicted the cleanup would take up to 40 years. They still have to develop technology and equipment that can operate under fatally high radiation levels to locate and remove melted fuel. The reactors must be kept cool and the plant must stay safe and stable, and those efforts to ensure safety could slow the process down.
‘You have to adopt a very cautious position to ensure that you always are working on the safe side,’ […]
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Wednesday, April 24th, 2013
PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate - Op-Ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: I teach a workshop each year at the Omega Insitute in Rhinebeck, New York. This year it will be 30 June to 6 July. Fifteen people have written me this time to say they would like to come, had planned to come, but just didn't have the money to do it. Their husbands, or wives, or they, themselves, are out of work, and have been for months. One woman wrote and said, 'I am 59 years old, I have gone through my savings, and I wonder if I will ever work again.' Two weeks ago the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest report saying, 'Both the number of unemployed persons, at 11.7 million, and the unemployment rate, at 7.6 percent, were little changed in March.'
If we put the money we put into war into making the transition from carbon to noncarbon energy this economy would bloom like the tulips in Ronlyn's garden. The middle class in America is dying because debt is more important than work.
F.D.R. told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. But when future historians look back at our monstrously failed response to economic depression, they probably won’t blame fear, per se. Instead, they’ll castigate our leaders for fearing the wrong things.
For the overriding fear driving economic policy has been debt hysteria, fear that unless we slash spending we’ll turn into Greece any day now. After all, haven’t economists proved that economic growth collapses once public debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P.?
Well, the famous red line on debt, it turns out, was an artifact of dubious statistics, reinforced by bad arithmetic. And America isn’t and can’t be Greece, because countries that borrow in their own currencies operate under very different rules from those that rely on someone else’s money. After years of repeated warnings that fiscal crisis is just around the corner, the U.S. government can still borrow at incredibly low interest rates.
But while debt fears were and are misguided, there’s a real danger we’ve ignored: the corrosive effect, social and economic, of persistent high unemployment. And even as the case for debt hysteria is collapsing, our worst fears about the damage from long-term unemployment are […]
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Wednesday, April 24th, 2013
JASON KOEBLER, - US News & World Report
Stephan: This is the latest on stem cell research, one of the fastest and most important trends in medicine. The potential this line of research has for the neurologically damaged is very good news.
Scientists have discovered an antibody that can turn stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow directly into brain cells, a potential breakthrough in the treatment of neurological diseases and injuries.
Richard Lerner, of the Scripps Research Institute in California, says that when a specific antibody is injected into stem cells from bone marrow-which normally turn into white blood cells-the cells can be triggered to turn into brain cells.
‘There’s been a lot of research activity where people would like to repair brain and spinal cord injuries,’ Lerner says. ‘With this method, you can go to a person’s own stem cells and turn them into brain cells that can repair nerve injuries.’
Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that the immune system uses to help identify foreign threats to the body. They bind to foreign invaders in the body in order to alert white blood cells to attack harmful bacteria and viruses. There are millions of known antibodies.
[PHOTOS: The 2013 White House Science Fair]
Lerner and his team were working to find an antibody that would activate what is known as the GCSF receptor in bone marrow stem cells, in order to stimulate their growth. When they found one that worked, the researchers were surprised: Instead of […]
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Wednesday, April 24th, 2013
MAUREEN NANDINI MITRA, Managing Editor - Earth Island Journal
Stephan: The story has passed from the media's attention. If you listen to the mainstream media, and look at all those cozy, 'come on down y'all' ads BP has put up on television, things have returned as if the oil spill never happened. As this story makes clear, it is all an Orwellian propaganda lie. I ran this story because a reader on the Gulf Coast wrote to tell me that whatever I thought was going on, human lives, the coast, and the ecosystem were still devastated. This carbon energy crisis may not really be over for years; indeed, things may never be as they once were.
Three years after an explosion at British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers, injured dozens, and set off the worst oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, the waters along Gulf Coast seem almost back to normal. Much of the oil is gone. New Orleans-based photographer Julie Dermansky says there’s still a lot left. The oil, she says, is often hard to locate because it has a tendency to play hide and seek. Dermansky, who photographed the spill in 2010 ‘pretty much non-stop for four months,’ has been doggedly following the story for the past three years – reading up all the research she can lay her hands on, making trips out to the worst impacted areas in Louisiana every few months, and talking to people from affected communities.
In the early days of the spill she was hired by several major publications, including The Times, London, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel. But these days she travels without assignment, covering expenses on her own, since few publications hire photographers or reporters to cover what’s now an old news story. Last week, Dermansky again visited the beaches and marshes along the Louisiana […]
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