Harvey Wasserman

Unused fuel bundle from Unit 4 packaged for trans-
port to the Common Spent Fuel Pool (iaea.org)

We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focussed on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.

Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own. Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.

The one thing certain about this crisis is that Tepco does not have the scientific, engineering or financial resources to handle it. Nor does the Japanese government. The situation demands a coordinated worldwide effort of the best scientists and engineers our species can muster.

Why is this so serious? We already know that thousands of tons of heavily contaminated water are pouring through the Fukushima site, carrying a devil’s brew of long-lived poisonous isotopes into the Pacific. Tuna irradiated with fallout traceable to Fukushima have already been caught off the coast of California. We can expect far worse.

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Anthony Torres

Members of the Roma community react after being forced out of
their camp in Saint Denis, north of Paris, on July 6. The French
government faces possible legal action from the European Union
over its treatment of them. (Photo: Paul Szajner, AFP / Getty)

French Interior Minister Manuel Valls has once again turned on the Roma, demanding their expulsion to Eastern Europe. His comments, attacking the Roma ethnicity as a whole, illustrate the reactionary nature of the Socialist Party (PS), which is reacting to the unpopularity of its policies of austerity and war by fomenting racism and moving towards the positions of the neo-fascist National Front (FN).

On September 24, Manuel Valls stated: “The Roma should go back to Romania or Bulgaria and stay there.” The following day, he confirmed his words asserting: “I have no correction to make, my words only shock those who are ignorant of the issue.”

Valls’ comments, suggesting that he would support the forcible deportation of an entire ethnic group, show how far the decay of democracy has gone in France. Sections of the PS, obsessed with racial prejudices and dismayed at the rise of the FN in the opinion polls, have arranged for the deportation of Roma from several French towns, notably Marseille.

Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for justice, responded to Valls’ statements on radio France-Info: “We have European rules which have been signed by France, rules on the right to travel freely for three months. These people are not Roma, but individuals. It’s the responsibility of a judge to rule if they can be evicted if they’ve broken the laws of the state concerned.”

Reding said that she suspected the French government of electioneering prior to the March 2014 municipal elections, accusing it of raising the issue in order to divert attention from its unpopular policies. She said: “If I’m not mistaken, elections are in the air in France. Whenever people don’t want to talk about important things such as the budget, debts, they yet again discover the Roma.”

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Philip Giraldi

The Edward Snowden March 2009 memo which reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) is illegally spying on American citizens and then passing the raw information it obtains on to Israel is particularly shocking because it demonstrates with documentary evidence just how Washington’s inside the beltway crowd places its relationship with Israel above its responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States. But equally interesting is the tale of the dog that did not bark in the night. The crowds of angry Americans concerned about their loss of privacy gathering in front of the White House failed to materialize because the story, unreported in most of the media, quickly disappeared down the memory hole. The Washington Post placed it on a back page while The New York Times did not report it at all, Managing Editor Dean Baquet calling it a story that was neither "significant" nor "surprising" as determined by his "news judgment." The Times' own Public Editor Margaret Sullivan disagreed, however, as did most of the readers’ comments on the failure to include it in the paper. Some commenters noted that the Times is frequently inclined to avoid stories that are critical of Israel.

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