The US is sending $25 million in nonlethal aid to Libyan rebels to cover “vehicles, fuel trucks and fuel bladders, ambulances, medical equipment, protective vests, binoculars, and non-secure radios.”
As “progressives” like George Monbiot pose nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, the big corporations that control both oil and uranium laugh all the way to the bank.
Tokyo Electric Power Company issued a plan for cooling down the reactors and reducing radiation leaks within six to nine months at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s Pacific coast.
The Center for Biological Diversity charges that the impacts on wildlife of last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe have been dramatically underestimated.
Syria’s government passed a draft decree to lift the emergency law and a bill to dismantle the Supreme State Security Court. But protesters took to the streets in large numbers again the next day in the central city of Homs,
Italy’s government announced it is indefinitely suspending plans to build the country’s first nuclear power plants—ahead of a June referendum on the atomic development plans, which the administration says is no longer necessary.
Radioactivity levels skyrocketed in the sea surrounding the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan late last week, raising fears that a new leak in the facility needs to be sealed.
Security forces in Yemen opened fire on protests led by women, many in full face veils, after President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to win support from Islamists by attacking the “mixing of sexes” at demonstrations.
Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who became the hero of the Egyptian revolution, spoke before an International Monetary Fund paenl in Washington DC, chiding the organization for its long support of strongman Hosni Mubarak.
More protesters were killed by security forces in Syria, despite a pledge by President Bashar al-Assad to end emergency rule—in force since 1963 when the Ba’ath party took power—within a week.
At least one was killed as officers fired on protesters who overran a police station near Jaitapur, site of a proposed nuclear plant in Ratnagiri district of India’s Maharashtra state.
The Mexican state of Tamaulipas has dismissed its security chief while federal police arrested 16 municipal officers in the town of San Fernando following the discovery of more than 145 bodies in mass graves over the past weeks.
