Author: Yoichi Shimatsu, former associate editor of Pacific and editor of the Japan Times Weeky, has reported on the rise of Islamic militancy in North Africa since the early 1990s. If there’s ever been a…
Category: Global Issues
A “humanitarian war” would be “good for business”. It serves the interests of the institutional speculators, it contributes to a further process of appropriation of money wealth.
Financial institutions which had prior knowledge or intelligence of events in Egypt and Libya have already made billions of dollars in speculative gains in the futures and options markets for crude oil.
The international community is well aware of the double standard in policy. The US quietly applauded Israeli air strikes against Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear-energy plant in 1981 and has since demanded ever-stricter sanctions against Tehran and Pyongyang. Yet Washington refuses to lead by example, shrugging off the anti-nuclear movement’s pleas to stop plans for new reactors and shunning calls from the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for total nuclear disarmament. America’s campaign for an atomic monopoly, or at least nuclear dominance, is driving smaller powers toward obtaining a deterrence capability. These nations aren’t some “axis of evil”; they’re just playing the survival game by the rules – not the words – set by Washington.
By Finian Cunningham: Manama. They turned over the limp, lifeless body of the young man,. His back was riddled with bullet wounds. His skull flopped open revealing a bloody mess and a gaping hole where…
USA stands for United Steel (Workers) of America. The meltdown of a single core reactor would make any human presence impossible on site. Without the maintenance work of water injection, the other reactors would sooner than later also undergo meltdown. When one goes, the others will soon follow. The Japanese government now openly accepts the possibility of a core meltdown of Unit 2, which completely lost all its water content for a short time yesterday when a portable generator ran out of diesel fuel. Human error is becoming an understandable problem with the high casualty toll among plant workers, exhaustion and lack of equipment on the tsunami-swept site.
During a recent meeting the African Union’s Peace and Security Council decided to back Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in his efforts to keep the situation in the country under control in spite of the decisions…
European energy ministers, and nuclear experts, are meeting to coordinate EU’s policy, in the light, of Japan’s nuclear crisis. The EU Energy commissioner, questioned, what future role nuclear power should have. Shocked into action by…
But the type of containment vessel and pressure suppression system used in the failing reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant is physically less robust, and it has long been thought to be more susceptible to failure in an emergency than competing designs. In the United States, 23 reactors at 16 locations use the Mark 1 design, including the Oyster Creek plant in central New Jersey, the Dresden plant near Chicago and the Monticello plant near Minneapolis.
But the problems of the revolutionaries will not be solved by the counter-revolutionaries, those who are nostalgic for absolute monarchy; the terrorists and religious fundamentalists of al-Qaida; and even less, by imperialist powers, which have always regarded Libya as a territory to conquer.
Most people assume that the meticulous Japanese are among the world’s most responsible citizens. As an investigative journalist who has covered the Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake and the Tokyo subway gassing , I beg to differ. Japan is just better than elsewhere in organizing official cover-ups.