Danielle Demetriou - Signs of Possible Nuclear Fission at Fukushima Plant

Published on Wednesday, November 2, 2011 by The Telegraph/UK

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8863967/Japan-signs-of-possible-nuclear-fission-at-Fukushima-plant.html

Signs of a possible nuclear fission have been detected at Japan's damaged Fukushima power plant raising fears of further radiation leaks.

by Danielle Demetriou in Tokyo

The radioactive gas xenon, which is often the byproduct of unexpected nuclear fission, was detected at the Fukushima Daiichi plant during tests.

Officials were today injecting boric acid as an emergency precautionary measure to stem any accidental chain reactions which could result in further radiation leakages.

Hiroyuki Imari, a spokesman with the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said the quantity of gas detection was "very small" and did not indicate a major problem, with the reactor's temperature, pressure and radiation levels remaining stable.

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Steven Wishnia - Two Big Decisions Loom on the Fate of Drinking Water for 15 Million People Living Near the Marcellus Shale

By Steven Wishnia, AlterNet

Posted on November 1, 2011, Printed on November 2, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152934/two_big_decisions_loom_on_the_fate_of_drinking_water_for_15_million_people_living_near_the_marcellus_shale

The fate of fracking in the Northeast may be determined soon.

On Nov. 21, the Delaware River Basin Commission, comprising representatives from four states (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware) and the federal government, will vote on whether to allow the intensive method of natural-gas drilling in the river's watershed. The watershed, which supplies drinking water for more than 15 million people, overlaps the eastern end of the Marcellus Shale, an underground geological formation touted as the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas."

The commission's rules, which will apply in the Delaware watershed, will overlap with state regulations. Pennsylvania already allows fracking. New York is in the process of developing regulations about where it might be allowed and under what conditions. The state Department of Environmental Conservation will hold public hearings in November, and says it will decide sometime next year. Many environmental activists believe Gov. Andrew Cuomo is fast-tracking the issue.

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PRNewswire - Parent of Autistic Child in Wakefield Study Says Key Journalist Got Facts Wrong

PRESS RELEASE

Nov. 3, 2011, 5:53 p.m. EDT

FALLS CHURCH, Va., Nov. 3, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- When reporter Dan Olmsted met with the father of an autistic boy whose medical history is central to a British Medical Journal article refuting the vaccine/autism link, Olmsted never expected to be shown a letter written by the boy's father that would reveal the facts of the BMJ article to be flagrantly false. In contrast to the article, the letter clearly reveals the plausibility of the boy's autism being caused by his MMR (combined measles, mumps, rubella live virus vaccination) as well as the father's belief that the shot caused his son's autism.

Today in Age of Autism, Olmsted's interview with this father of a boy with autism known only as "child 11" appears in Part 7 of the Elaborate Fraud series by Olmsted and Mark Blaxill, Age of Autism's Editor-At-Large. The contents of the letter mark another revelation in the controversy over the British Medical Journal's published report by freelance journalist Brian Deer who has received support from MedicoLegal Investigations (MLI), a bureau affiliated with the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) which specializes in bringing doctors before the General Medical Council, the UK's disciplinary body.

The father's 1997 letter was written to Dr. Wakefield, who had led a team of researchers in the controversial case study of 12 children with autism. Contrary to Deer's January report in the British Medical Journal, the chronology of Child 11's MMR shot and his subsequent autism diagnosis was inaccurately reported. From Olmsted's article:

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D. Aram Donabedian & John Carey - Pirates and Librarians: Big Media, Technology, and the Role of Liberal Education

http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/

Library Philosophy and Practice 2011

ISSN 1522-0222

D. Aram Donabedian

Hunter College Library

Hunter College, City University of New York

New York, NY

John Carey

Hunter Health Professions Library

Hunter College, City University of New York

New York, NY

Because the new processes of domination to which people react are

embedded in information flows, the building of autonomy has to rely

on reverse information flows.

—Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity

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American Journal of Preventative Medicine - Attacks on federal air pollution regulations dangerous to Americans' health

Public release date: 1-Nov-2011
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/ehs-aof102711.php

American Journal of Preventative Medicine

Authors of AJPM article urge physicians and medical societies to advocate against efforts in Congress to weaken clean air laws

SAN DIEGO, CA -- Efforts by some in Congress to dismantle clean air laws are a threat to public health, experts warn in a "Current Issues" article published online today in theAmerican Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"It is well accepted that air pollution has a deleterious impact on personal and public health," write authors Joshua Lipsman, MD, JD, MPH, Immediate Past Chairman, Environmental Health Committee, American College of Preventive Medicine, and Arthur L. Frank, MD, PhD, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Drexel University School of Public Health.

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Lawrence Weschler - The Art of the Shakedown, from the Nile to the Potomac

Posted on November 1, 2011, Printed on November 1, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175461/

How Corruption in the U.S. Puts Everyday Corruption in Africa to Shame 
By Lawrence Weschler

A bit over an hour into the five-hour drive across the ferrous red plateau, heading south toward Uganda’s capital Kampala, suddenly, there’s the Nile, a boiling, roiling cataract at this time of year, rain-swollen and ropy and rabid below the bridge that vaults over it.  If Niagara Falls surged horizontally and a rickety bridge arced, shudderingly, over the torrent below, it might feel like the Nile at Karuma.

Naturally, I take out my iPhone and begin snapping pics.

On the other side of the bridge, three soldiers standing in wait in the middle of the road, rifles slung over their shoulders, direct my Kampalan driver Godfrey and me to pull over.

“You were photographing the bridge,” one of them announces, coming up to my open window.  “We saw you.”

“Taking photos of the bridge is expressly forbidden,” the second offers by way of clarification, as the first reaches in and grabs the iPhone out of my hand.  “National security.  Terrorists could use such photos to help in planning to blow up the bridge.”

“Do I look like a terrorist to you?” I ask.  “And anyway,” I shout as Soldiers One and Two walk off with their prize, oblivious, “I wasn’t photographing the bridge.  I was photographing the rapids.  The bridge was precisely the one thing I wasn’t photographing!” 

To no avail.  I open my car door and begin to get out -- but the third soldier pushes me gently back and then leans into the window, peering amiably. “And besides,” I continue, “there were no signs forbidding such photographs.  Anyway, if it’s such a big deal just give me back the phone and I’ll delete the photos.  You can watch.”

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Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III - The "Tea Party" Movement, More Hype Than Reality

Monday 31 October 2011

by: Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III, Truthout | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/tea-party-movement-more-hype-reality/1319826556

The validity of a political movement or party should be judged by the issues and policies that it champions as well as the candidates that it supports. Since 2009, the Tea Party has held sway over the Republican Party, moving its politics farther to the right and contributing to House Majority Leader John Boehner's (R-Ohio) inability to find common ground with the Obama administration.

A recent Pew Center poll [3] shows that the Tea Party is popular within the Republican Party, but losing support within the general electorate. "... more [people polled] say they oppose the Tea Party movement than support it (44% vs. 32%) ... the balance of opinion among independents toward the Tea Party is much more negative: Just 30 percent support the Tea Party movement while 49 percent are opposed."

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Tariq Ali - How do the 99% compare with mass protests of the past – and can they succeed?

Counterpunch,  October 31, 2011

by TARIQ ALI

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

The spirit of that 19th century socialist is alive among the idealistic young people who have come out in protest against the turbo-charged global capitalism that has dominated the world ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters who have taken up residence at the heart of New York’s financial distract, are demonstrating against a system of despotic finance-capital: a greed-infected vampire that must suck the blood of the non-rich in order to survive. The protesters are showing their contempt for bankers, for financial speculators and for their media hirelings who continue to insist that there is no alternative. Since the Wall Street system dominates Europe, local versions of that model exist here too. (Interestingly it was the Wall Street occupiers rather than the indignados of Spain or the striking workers of Greece who had an impact in Britain, revealing once again that the real affinities of this country are Atlanticist rather than European.) The young people being pepper-sprayed by the NYPD may not have worked out what they want, but they sure as hell know what they’re against and that’s an important start.

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Mike Whitney - Is Goldman Sachs Poised to Takeover Europe?

Counterpunch.org  October 31, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/31/is-goldman-sachs-poised-to-takeover-europe/

by MIKE WHITNEY

Goldman Sachs is about to take over Europe, but you wouldn’t know it by reading the papers.

On Tuesday, G-Sax alum, Mario Draghi, will take the helm at the European Central Bank replacing retiring ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet. The appointment has slipped by the media virtually unnoticed even though the ECB is the most powerful institution in the EU and is likely to play a critical role in solving the debt crisis.

Draghi was formally a Managing Director at Goldman. He also served as an advisor to the Bank of Italy in 1990, chairman of the Italian Committee for Privatisations, and was an Executive Director of The World Bank from 1984 to 1990. His bio. affirms his globalist pedigree which makes him the perfect candidate to replace the curmudgeonly Trichet who failed to comply with all of Big Finance’s demands. That’s not likely to be the case with Draghi.

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Joshua Frank - Nuclear Disaster in the US: How Bechtel Is Botching the World's Costliest Environmental Cleanup

Nuclear Disaster in the US: How Bechtel Is Botching the World's Costliest Environmental Cleanup

By Joshua Frank, Seattle Weekly
Posted on October 21, 2011, Printed on November 1, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152816/nuclear_disaster_in_the_us%3A_how_bechtel_is_botching_the_world%27s_costliest_environmental_cleanup

Razor wire surrounds Hanford’s makeshift borders while tattered signs warn of potential contamination and fines for those daring enough to trespass. This vast stretch of eastern Washington, covering more than 580 square miles of high desert plains, is rural Washington at its most serene. But it’s inaccessible for good reason: It is, by all accounts, a nuclear wasteland.

During World War II, the Hanford Reservation was chosen by the federal government as a location to carry out the covert Manhattan Project. Later, plutonium produced at Hanford provided fuel for the "Fat Man" bomb that President Truman ordered to be dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, killing upward of 80,000 Japanese. In all, nine nuclear reactors were built at Hanford, the last of which ceased operation in 1987. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now estimates that as a result of the nuclear work done at Hanford's facilities, 43 million cubic yards of radioactive waste were produced and more than 130 million cubic yards of soil ultimately were contaminated.

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