MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

“Athens, Greece (CNN) — Talks on restructuring Greek debt continued Saturday, with negotiators reporting some progress made toward reaching a deal with the nation’s private creditors.

The negotiations with Institute of International Finance (IIF), which represents the private sector investors who own Greek government bonds, began Wednesday.

IIF spokesman Frank Vogl said Saturday: ‘Progress was made late yesterday and we believe this is now a very important moment.’

The talks in Athens hinge on a plan that cuts the value of Greek government bonds in half.

The deal would result in significant losses for the private sector, which holds over €200 billion of Greece’s €350 billion debt load.” Read more.

Greek debt talks hit snag – “The chief negotiators for Greece’s private creditors have left Athens without securing a deal to write off some of the country’s debts. The Institute of International Finance (IIF), which represents the creditors, said a technical team would remain to work on the details and negotiations would continue on the phone. Greece had hoped an agreement would be in place by the end of the weekend. It needs a deal if it is to receive the next tranche of bailout funds.” Read more.

S&P expects Greece to default soon – “Greece will default shortly on its debt obligations, a senior Standard & Poor’s official told Bloomberg Television on Monday. ‘Greece will default very shortly. Whether there will be a solution at the end of the current rocky negotiations I cannot say,’ said Moritz Kraemer, the head of the agency’s European sovereign ratings unit. ‘There is a lot of brinksmanship on and a disorderly default will have ramifications on other countries but I believe policymakers will want to avoid that … The game is still on.'” Source – Reuters.

BY ALEX ROSLIN – “After the world’s worst nuclear accident in 25 years, authorities in Canada said people living here were safe and faced no health risks from the fallout from Fukushima.

They said most of the radiation from the crippled Japanese nuclear power plant would fall into the ocean, where it would be diluted and not pose any danger.

Dr. Dale Dewar wasn’t convinced. Dewar, a family physician in Wynyard, Sask., doesn’t eat a lot of seafood herself, but when her grandchildren come to visit, she carefully checks seafood labels.

She wants to make sure she isn’t serving them anything that might come from the western Pacific Ocean.

Dewar, the executive director of Physicians for Global Survival, a Canadian anti-nuclear group, says the Canadian government has downplayed the radiation risks from Fukushima and is doing little to monitor them.

‘We suspect we’re going to see more cancers, decreased fetal viability, decreased fertility, increased metabolic defects – and we expect them to be generational,’ she said.

And evidence has emerged that the impacts of the disaster on the Pacific Ocean are worse than expected.” Read more.

Canada: Public was in the dark about radioactive iodine in rainwater – “After the Fukushima nuclear accident, Canadian health officials assured a nervous public that virtually no radioactive fallout had drifted to Canada. But last March, a Health Canada monitoring station in Calgary detected an average of 8.18 becquerels per litre of radioactive iodine (an isotope released by the nuclear accident) in rainwater, the data shows. The level easily exceeded the Canadian guideline of six becquerels of iodine per litre for drinking water, acknowledged Eric Pellerin, chief of Health Canada’s radiation-surveillance division. ‘It’s above the recommended level (for drinking water),’ he said in an interview. ‘At any time you sample it, it should not exceed the guideline.’ Canadian authorities didn’t disclose the high radiation reading at the time. In contrast, the state of Virginia issued a don’t-drink-rainwater advisory in late March after iodine levels in rain in a nearby city spiked to 3.4 becquerels per litre on a single day.” Read more.

Flashback: Medical Journal: 14,000 US Infant Deaths Tied to Fukushima Reactor Disaster Fallout – “… Fukushima’s pernicious consequences have traveled across the Pacific… According to the researchers’ data, on 17 March after Fukushima was impacted, scientists detected the plume of toxic fallout had arrived over U.S. territory and subsequent measurements by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found levels of radiation in air, water, and milk hundreds of times above normal across the U.S. Janette Sherman, MD, said: ‘Based on our continuing research, the actual death count here may be as high as 18,000, with influenza and pneumonia, which were up five-fold in the period in question as a cause of death. Deaths are seen across all ages, but we continue to find that infants are hardest hit because their tissues are rapidly multiplying, they have undeveloped immune systems, and the doses of radioisotopes are proportionally greater than for adults.’” Read more.

By Antonia van de Velde – “Standard & Poor’s ratings agency has downgraded France’s credit rating, French television channels reported on Friday, citing a government source.

The channels did not provide further details.

S&P warned in December that it could downgrade the credit ratings of several euro zone nations if European leaders failed to find a lasting solution to the debt crisis at a meeting of EU leaders that month.

Several euro zone countries including France face an ‘imminent’ downgrade by ratings agency S&P, Reuters and Dow Jones news agencies reported, sending the euro to a session low against the dollar and European stocks down. US stocks also tumbled.

The reports said Germany and the Netherlands were not among the countries facing a downgrade later on Friday, but gave no further details.

According to Dow Jones sources, France was among the countries set to be downgraded.

‘Remain alert tonight when U.S. markets close,’ Reuters cited a source as saying.” Read more.

Eurozone nations face S&P downgrade – “Eurozone governments are bracing for new debt-crisis turbulence after Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, told them it would downgrade two of the eurozone’s six triple A nations. One official told the Financial Times that France and Austria were due to be downgraded but this was not confirmed by either the agencies or the governments… In Athens, talks over restructuring Greece’s debt broke down, raising the prospect that Greece could become the first developed country in more than 60 years to undergo a full-scale default on its debt.” Read more.

Banks say no deal on Greek debt – “THE group of major banks negotiating on a write-down of Greek sovereign debt say they have not reached a deal on its debt, including any new write-down. ‘There has been no agreement on any Greek deal or a specific ‘haircut’,’ said Charles Dallara, the head of the Institute of International Finance which is representing the banks in EU negotiations. ‘We remain open to a dialogue in search of a voluntary agreement. There is no agreement on any element of a deal.'” Source – The Australian.

“The European Central Bank should ramp up its buying of troubled euro zone debt to support Italy and prevent a ‘cataclysmic’ collapse of the euro, David Riley, the head of sovereign ratings for Fitch, has warned.

Speaking to investors as part of a European roadshow, Mr Riley said a collapse of the euro would be disastrous for the global economy, and while it is not Fitch’s baseline scenario, it could happen if Italy did not find a way out of its debt problems.

‘The end of the euro would be cataclysmic. The euro is a reserve currency,’ Mr Riley said overnight. ‘What would that do in terms of financial and political stability?’

‘It is hard to believe the euro will survive if Italy does not make it through,’ he said, adding that while many saw Italy as too politically and economically important to be allowed to fail, ‘one might also argue that it is too big to rescue.’

The warning pushed the euro down towards a 16-month low versus the US dollar.” Read more.

Global financial crisis threatens to drag the world back to the 1930s – “The financial crisis threatens to drag the world back to the dark days of the 1930s and wipe out the gains of globalisation, a hard-hitting report said tonight. In its annual assessment of the global economy, the World Economic Forum warned of a rising tide of protectionism, nationalism and protests as seen during the Great Depression. It blamed the ‘chronic’ state of government finances and the widening gap between the rich and poor as the world lurches from one crisis to another. The WEF, which holds its yearly meeting for leading politicians, economists, businessmen and academics in the Swiss ski resort of Davos later this month, said the ‘seeds of dystopia’ have been sown.” Read more.

How bad is plutonium?  Considering that one pound of plutonium evenly distributed into everyone’s lungs would kill every man, woman and child on Earth, I’d say it’s pretty bad.  And there have been literally tons of radioactive plutonium and other radioactive elements released into the air and ocean environments since 3/11/2011 …

By Sayer Ji – “A recently published study in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity confirms that the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster reached Europe (Lithuania), and included plutonium, the most deadly manmade element (nanogram for nanogram) in existence.

According to the study’s authors the radionuclide concentrations measured indicate there was ‘long-range air mass transport from Japan across the Pacific, the North America and the Atlantic Ocean to Central Europe as indicated by modelling.’ What this means is that every region under the jet stream — which includes half of the planet north of its equator — could have been exposed to some degree of plutonium fall-out; a fact that is all the more disturbing when we consider there is no such thing as a safe level, and that the harm (on the human scale of time) does not dissipate: the half life of plutonium-239 is 24,200 years, and that of uranium-238 is 4,460,000,000 years, which is older than our planet.

In a past exposé, where we identified the likelihood of the occurrence we are now reporting on, we published Jet Stream radiation dispersion projections from Germany’s EURAD system which showed that Radioiodine-131 and Cesium-137 were within detectable concentrations thousands of miles away from Fukushima within days after the event. This was, after all, a nuclear explosion (as occurred also at Chernobyl) producing extremely small particles moving at extremely high velocity, and not a hydrogen-based conflagration, which was erroneously reported to be the case in the first days following the disaster.” Source – GreenMedInfo.com.

Reactor 4: Spent fuel pool was boiling without water after 1/1/2012 – “Following up this article about the decreasing of water level at reactor 4… The blogger woman in Minamisoma leaked information from an actual Fukushima worker. According to her post, after the earthquake of 1/1/2012, the pipe of spent fuel pool for reactor 4 was broken, the pool completely lost its water. The worker stated, Sooner or later, the truth will have to to be widely known. Believe it or not, you will only regret. Wear a mask at least. The pool was boiling without water.” Source – Fukushima Diary.

Fukushima citizens: Series of recent earthquakes are not normal quakes – “Fukushima citizens tweet that recent series of the earthquake feel different from usual ones. mainakata311: ‘I think everyone has noticed it if they live in Fukushima since 311, and paid attention to earthquakes. Suddenly, the way of shaking has changed, isn’t it ? feels like something is exploding underground, like a bomb.’ … Butyoo1488: ‘I live in Ibaraki, but my family, and people around me feel the same way too. It’s not a normal earthquake, but a short quake as if something was exploding underground. I haven’t felt that quake for 40 years. It happens everyday.’  The only reason to deny the possibility of hydrovolcanic explosion underground is because the radiation level is not spiking up after the earthquake, but I doubt if the steam comes right above the epicenter.” Read more.

By John Daly – “Almost nothing to see here, move along.

Eight months after Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s six reactor Daichi Fuskuhima complex was rocked by an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale and subsequent tsunami, both Tokyo and TEPCO maintain that the effects of the disaster have been contained.

Not so, according to a just published peer reviewed medical paper appearing in the U.S., which indicates that Fukushima’s pernicious consequences have traveled across the Pacific.

The figures come from a recently published article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services, a peer reviewed scientific journal, authored by Joseph J. Mangano and Janette D. Sherman, ‘An Unexpected Mortality Increase in the United States Follows Arrival of the Radioactive Plume from Fukushima: is There a Correlation?’

The study is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of the Fukushima disaster.

In earlier research published five months ago on counterpunch.org the authors noted, ‘The recent CDC (Center for Disease Control) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age: 4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 – 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week) 10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 – 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week.)This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant. Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster.’

According to the researchers’ data, on 17 March after Fukushima was impacted, scientists detected the plume of toxic fallout had arrived over U.S. territory and subsequent measurements by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found levels of radiation in air, water, and milk hundreds of times above normal across the U.S.

Janette Sherman, MD, said: ‘Based on our continuing research, the actual death count here may be as high as 18,000, with influenza and pneumonia, which were up five-fold in the period in question as a cause of death. Deaths are seen across all ages, but we continue to find that infants are hardest hit because their tissues are rapidly multiplying, they have undeveloped immune systems, and the doses of radioisotopes are proportionally greater than for adults.’ Dr. Sherman is an adjunct professor, Western Michigan University and Joseph Mangano is an epidemiologist, and Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project research group.” Read more.

Flashback: US: Doctors Say 35% Spike in Infant Mortality in Northwest Cities Since Meltdown May Be the Result of Fukushima Fallout – “As I’ve previously noted, infants are much more vulnerable to radiation than adults. And see this. However, radiation safety standards are set based on the assumption that everyone exposed is a healthy man in his 20s. Now, a physician (Janette D. Sherman, M. D.) and epidemiologist (Joseph Mangano) have penned a short but horrifying essay asking whether a spike in infant deaths in the Northwest are due to Fukushima” Read more.