15 iii 11, 1:25 AM GMT—Japan’s nuclear crisis is intensifying not allaying, despite remote rhetoric from panicked US industrialists premised on pure denial. The third unit at Fukushima experienced an explosion early Monday morning, with suggestions that this one represented a disabling of cooling capabilities. Keep Reading »
March 14, 12:02 AM GMT—Update and Health Advice
Since my last report, the situation at the two crippled reactors has worsened and cooling system problems are reported at two additional reactors at separate sites. Residents near the meltdown location are already being treated for radiation exposure at hospitals. The severity of the problem at the two new sites is unclear and may be limited to pipe ruptures that can be fixed by temporary shutdowns.
Yesterday, I hoped to be able to post Geoffrey Sea’s excellent analyses and updates of the Fukushima disaster. I’m particularly pleased, with the announcement that the scale of the disaster has been retroactively raised to its highest rating, that Geoffrey has agreed to let me post them here. These updates were written for and edited by the Retort Collective, and the first of the updates carried this short description of Geoffrey’s credentials:
LA VIA CAMPESINA
BALI SEED DECLARATION
Peasant Seeds: Dignity, Culture and Life
Farmers in Resistance to Defend their Right to Peasant Seeds
George Monbiot and Helen Caldicott had at it on DemocracyNow! this week, in part because of Monbiot’s take-down of Caldicott’s claims. Monbiot himself seems to have become a convert to nuclear power. Having laid out these very sensible criteria – to which I also subscribe – he has recently decided to ignore much of the evidence showing that nuclear power violates them. In order to support nuclear power, he needed to be convinced that Keep Reading »
The Environmental Working Group and ActionAid have put together a ‘hotspot’ map of the emerging global food crisis. In the teeth of the Cold War, policymakers exercised themselves over whether common hunger would lead to uncommon violence against the state. It’s a question the OECD tried to answer in 2003. It’s clear that while large parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are lit by hunger, far fewer places have street protests that make the news. In part, that’s because Indian and Chinese protests just don’t make the news in Europe and North America. But since the Indian and Chinese governments show little sign of being brought down by such protests, policy makers worry about other places. At the OECD, they hazarded that it wasn’t hunger per se that brought people to the streets, but hunger and inequality. But even here, the jury’s out. Some analysts find a correlation between inequality and protest, others don’t. In the end, the OECD reports an expert at its consultative seminar saying “We intervene at a certain point of history without being properly informed of the complexity of the issues. We need more in-depth needs assessments and political analyses.”
Jun Borras, editor of The Journal of Peasant Studies, Canada Research Chair in Development Studies, Professor at Saint Mary’s University, activist and author, has convened a massive conference on land grabs. You can find out more here, and you can download the dozens of incredibly thoughtful papers from the same site, as well as finding Jun’s own contribution among these free articles here. No idea how he manages to do it all, but I want what he’s on.
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