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U.S. Dollar’s Dizzying Drop Wreaks Economic Havoc

04/29/2011 Leave a comment

By KEVIN CARMICHAEL – “The U.S. dollar’s long decline has turned into a sudden plunge, throwing currency markets into a frenzy that is complicating life for policy makers and executives the world over.

An index that measures the value of the dollar against six major peers declined for the eighth consecutive day Thursday, the longest slump in two years.

The U.S. dollar is in the midst of what Nomura Securities International analyst Jens Nordvig called a ‘violent … weakening move,’ as a confluence of factors drive investors to seek short-term gains outside the United States.

Gross domestic product in the U.S. slowed to an annual rate of 1.8 per cent in the first quarter, compared with 3.1 per cent over the final three months of 2010, according to the first of three estimates from the Commerce Department, released Thursday.”  Read more.

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Chief Nuclear Engineer Postulates that Fukushima Reactor 3 Explosion was Nuclear

04/28/2011 Leave a comment

Chief nuclear engineer A. Gundersen postulates that the Fukushima Reactor No. 3 explosion may have been nuclear and not just a hydrogen explosion.  Pieces of nuclear fuel rods were discovered as far away as 2 miles from the plant, which would have happened with a detonation, but unlikely with a deflagration.

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Don’t Like a Weak Dollar? Might as Well Get Used to It

04/25/2011 Leave a comment

By Jeff Cox – “Weakness in the US dollar, which is causing everything to go up—including gas prices, food and stocks—is unlikely to go away soon as a selling frenzy hits the currency market.

The greenback is approaching pre-financial crisis lows and threatening to smash through its all-time low when measured against the world’s predominant national currencies.

A combination of factors accounts for the weakness, with the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies, huge national debts and deficits and the consequential possibility of a debt downgrade because of the financial mess in Washington leading the way.

In short, as trader Dennis Gartman noted Thursday, ‘the rout of the US dollar’ is in full effect.”  Read more.

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Japan Scientist: Fukushima is ‘Graver than Chernobyl … No One Can Predict How the Situation Will Develop’

04/25/2011 Leave a comment

“TOKYO, April 25 (UPI) — Radiation leaks remain a health threat for areas around Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, officials said.

The crisis at the plant resulted from an earthquake and tsunami March 11.

Some experts believe the Fukushima crisis is more serious than that resulting from an explosion at Ukraine’s Chernobyl power plant 25 years ago, the Mainichi Daily News reported Monday.

‘It’s graver than Chernobyl in that no one can predict how the situation will develop,’ said Atsushi Kasai, a former senior researcher with the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute.

In addition to danger from leaking radioactivity, Japanese citizens are also at risk of psychological illnesses, officials said.”  Read more.

Categories: Man-Made Disasters

Gulf Oil Disaster Still Puzzles Scientists

04/21/2011 Leave a comment

By John D. Sutter, CNN – “One year after the chocolaty crude started spewing out of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, leading to the largest accidental oil spill in history, scientists say they’re still trying to piece together what’s happening to the environment.

Some potential clues about the impact of the spill have made themselves known: dead baby dolphins and sea turtles; oiled brown pelicans; fish with strange sores; sticky marsh grasses; tar balls on beaches.

But the big picture hasn’t come into focus yet.

Did the oil spill shatter the Gulf’s food chain? Will fish have trouble reproducing because of exposure to hydrocarbons? What did those dispersants, which were supposed to break up the oil, do to the ecosystem on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? Or did the Earth already heal itself?” Read more.

Categories: Man-Made Disasters, Mass Animal Deaths Tags:

Spread of Antimicrobial Resistance Causes WHO to Declare: “The World is on the Brink…”

04/21/2011 Leave a comment

By Peter Murray – “Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The widespread misuse of antibiotics is rapidly rendering them powerless against infection. Common infections that are easily cured today are going to become deadly, and it’s going to happen sooner than you think.

The World Health Organization reports:

* Each year there are about 440,000 new cases of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, resulting in at least 150,000 deaths.

* Resistance to antimalarial drugs chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine is now widespread in most malaria-endemic countries, leading to the resurgence of malaria in areas where the disease had previously been eradicated.”  Read more.

Categories: Man-Made Disasters, Natural Disasters, Pestilence Tags: , , ,

Texas Wildfires Scorch 1.6 Million Acres in Drought-Stricken Texas

04/20/2011 Leave a comment

By April Castro and Lindsay Wilcox – “Wildfires have spread across about 1.6 million acres in drought-stricken Texas, including a massive fire in North Texas that is still burning out of control.

Four wildfires around and south of Possum Kingdom Reservoir have burned about 150,000 acres as of Tuesday and destroyed as many as 50 homes and three churches.

The Possum Kingdom fire is the fifth of at least 100,000 acres around Texas reported in the past two weeks. Most of the state is in extreme drought, and wildfires in the past week alone have burned more than 1,000 square miles of parched Texas ranchland — an area that combined would be the size of Rhode Island.”  Read more.

‘Texas is burning from border to border’ – “Wildfires raging for more than a week in Texas have so far burned through a million acres of land and show no signs of dying down.

Firefighters continue to battle some 22 separate blazes throughout the state, with some dangerously close to the Oklahoma border. Homes have been gutted, animals killed and hundreds of residents have been forced to leave their homes because of the advancing flames.

One of the wildfires in PK West, Stephens County, increased in size by a staggering 87,238 acres in just one day – a 144 per cent increase.”  Read more.

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Categories: Man-Made Disasters, Natural Disasters

Nuclear Engineer Analyzes Current Condition of Fukushima Reactors 1-3, Unit 4 Pool and Monitoring of Fish

04/19/2011 2 comments

A. Gundersen, Chief Nuclear Engineer:  “… What they’re measuring in Unit 2 is not water or steam at all.  It’s hot air, or hot hydrogen.  And that’s a problem.  It tells me that Unit 2 is not being cooled … we should be very concerned that we’re exhausting hot gases out the top of that reactor …

… If we take TEPCO at its word … the iodine deposition on a square meter [Unit 4] was 30,000 MBq.  That’s pushing the numbers at Chernobyl … If we take TEPCO at its word, they had Chernobyl-level releases on the other units which caused the iodine to fall on Unit 4 …

Over the weekend the FDA announced it would not be monitoring fish on the west coast, and I don’t think that’s a good idea … I don’t think we’ll find anything initially, but over the next year as the little fish get eaten by bigger fish get eaten by bigger fish and the plume spreads, we might …”

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Stocks Plunge as Ratings Agency Cuts U.S. Outlook to Negative for First Time Since Pearl Harbor 70 Years Ago

04/19/2011 2 comments

“Fears over the U.S. recovery reached a new high as the country was slapped with an unprecedented warning that its debt rating could be downgraded because of an inability to tackle its massive budget deficit.

In a major blow to President Obama and the U.S. economy, leading ratings agency Standard & Poor’s revised its long-term outlook from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’. It is the first time S&P has done this since it was formed in 1941 – the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The ratings giant also said there is a one in three chance that in the next two years it will downgrade the coveted gold-plated AAA rating that the U.S. has enjoyed for the past 70 years.

Stocks continued to tumble around the world today as the impact of the announcement spread. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index slid 1.5 per cent to 9,413.99; Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was down 1.4 per cent to 23,502.29 and South Korea’s Kospi gave up 0.4 per cent to 2,129.42.”  Read more.

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Radiation Near Japan Reactors Too High for Workers

04/18/2011 Leave a comment

MARI YAMAGUCHI – “TOKYO (AP) — A pair of thin robots on treads sent to explore buildings inside Japan’s crippled nuclear reactor came back Monday with disheartening news: Radiation levels are far too high for repair crews to go inside.

Nevertheless, officials remained hopeful they can stick to their freshly minted ‘roadmap’ for cleaning up the radiation leak and stabilizing the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant by year’s end so they can begin returning tens of thousands of evacuees to their homes.

‘Even I had expected high radioactivity in those areas. I’m sure (plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.) and other experts have factored in those figures when they compiled the roadmap,’ Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.

Officials said Monday that radiation had spiked in a water tank in Unit 2 and contaminated water was discovered in other areas of the plant. They also described in detail for the first time the damage to fuel in three troubled reactors, saying pellets had melted.”  Read more.

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Gasoline Spill Likely Killed Thousands of Goldstream River Salmon

04/18/2011 Leave a comment

By Kim Westad – “Thousands of salmon are expected to have been killed by a large gasoline spill that poured into Goldstream River during the weekend.

A Columbia Fuels truck smashed into the rock face and rolled, damaging the cab and one of the two tanks the engine was pulling.

About 40,000 litres of gasoline are estimated to have been spilled and much of that flowed into the river at the side of the highway. The truck hit the rock wall beside a small waterfall that flows across the road to the river, and that helped move the gas.” Read more.

Categories: Man-Made Disasters, Mass Animal Deaths

Gulf of Mexico Anglers Pulling in Red Snappers That Don’t Look Like Anything They’ve Seen Before

04/17/2011 4 comments

By Craig Pittman – “A year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida beaches are relatively clean, the surf seems clear and the tourists are returning. But there are signs that the disaster is continuing to affect marine life in the gulf far from where humans can observe it.

Over the winter, anglers who had been working the gulf for decades began hauling in red snapper that didn’t look like anything they had seen before.

The fish had dark lesions on their skin, some the size of a 50-cent piece. On some of them, the lesions had eaten a hole straight through to the muscle tissue. Many had fins that were rotting away and discolored or even striped skin. Inside, they had enlarged livers, gallbladders, and bile ducts.

‘The fish have a bacterial infection and a parasite infection that’s consistent with a compromised immune system,’ said Jim Cowan, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University, who has been examining them. ‘There’s no doubt it’s associated with a chronic exposure to a toxin.'”  Read more.

Categories: Man-Made Disasters, Pestilence Tags: ,