NEW ORLEANS – BP says oil has stopped leaking into the Gulf for the first time since April.
BP has been slowly dialing down the flow as part of a test on a new cap. Engineers are now monitoring the pressure to see if the busted well holds.
Musicians of all stripes are coming out to support the new film “Countdown to Zero,” which documents the rise of nuclear weapons and advocates the urgent need to to secure loose nukes and eventually eliminate all weapons of mass destruction.
Macy Gray, Ok Go, and Weezer are just a few of the bands urging their fans to see the movie and rally support for it across the nation.
Directed by Lucy Walker, the creators of the film described it in a press release as
trac[ing] the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs: nine nations possessing nuclear weapons capabilities with others racing to join them, with the world held in a delicate balance that could be shattered by an act of terrorism, failed diplomacy, or a simple accident. Written and directed by acclaimed documentarian Lucy Walker (The Devil’s Playground, Blindsight), the film features an array of important international figures, including President Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pervez Musharraf and Tony Blair. It makes a compelling case for eliminating all nuclear weapons worldwide, an issue more topical than ever with world leaders working to achieve this goal today.
Watch a preview below.
For more information and to buy tickets, visit GlobalZero.org
(CNN) — Six months after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, most governments that promised money to help rebuild the country have not delivered any funds at all, a CNN investigation has found.
Donors promised $5.3 billion at an aid conference in March, about two months after the earthquake — but less than 2 percent of that money has been handed over so far to the United Nations-backed body set up to handle it.
Only four countries have paid anything at all: Brazil, Norway, Estonia and Australia.
The United States pledged $1.15 billion. It has paid nothing, with the money tied up in the congressional appropriations process.
Venezuela promised even more — $1.32 billion. It has also paid nothing, although it has written off some of Haiti’s debt.
Former President Bill Clinton, a U.N. special envoy for Haiti, said he plans to put pressure on governments that have been slow to deliver on their promises.
“I’m going to call all those governments and say, the ones who said they’ll give money to support the Haitian government, I want to try to get them to give the money, and I’m trying to get the others to give me a schedule for when they’ll release it,” Clinton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this week.
He said the worldwide economic crisis was at least partly to blame.
“I think that they’re all having economic trouble, and they want to hold their money as long as possible,” Clinton said.
Altogether, about $506 million has been disbursed to Haiti since the donors’ conference in March, said Jehane Sedky of the U.N. Development Program.
That’s about 9 percent of the money that was pledged. But about $200 million was money that had been in the pipeline for aid work before the earthquake, and about another $200 million went directly to the government of Haiti to help it get back on its feet, Sedky explained.
That has left the commission with about $90 million in donations since the conference, Sedky said.
There is some dispute about the World Bank’s contribution
The bank says it has made available $479 million dollars, and of that $56.6 million has “already been used” for different government-led projects. The World Bank says that this money was provided directly to the Haitian government and did not go into the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission.
The Icelandic volcano whose recent eruption created air travel chaos across Europe has been giving news anchors as much trouble as travelers.
Now Eliza Geirsdottir Newman, an Icelandic singer songwriter, has appeared on Al Jazeera to give a run down on how to pronounce the name – via song.
Here’s the song, ‘Eyjafjallajokull’. Sing along!
Thousands of homeless people are being forced off the streets of South Africa to hide the scale of poverty there from World Cup fans.
More than 800 tramps, beggars and street children have already been removed from Johannesburg and sent to remote settlements hundreds of miles away.
And in Cape Town, where England face Algeria on June 18, up to 300 have been moved to Blikkiesdorp camp where 1,450 families are crammed in a settlement of tin huts designed for just 650 people.
Johannesburg councillor Sipho Masigo was unrepentant. “Homelessness and begging are big problems in the city,” he said. “You have to clean your house before you have guests. There is nothing wrong with that.
“The numbers of homeless are in the hundreds, leading up to thousands.” Other host cities – like Rustenburg where England kick off their campaign against the USA on June 12 – are believed to be drawing up similar plans to move homeless people away from tourist areas near town centres and stadiums. South Africans are desperate to cast their country in a positive light despite soaring crime, drug use and the HIV crisis. Campaigners have slammed the removals policy as a sham and a temporary solution.
Bill Rogers, who works with the homeless in Johannesburg, said: “Rather than help people permanently, the government’s obvious intention is to release them back on the streets after the World Cup.”
Warren Whitfield, of homeless charity Addiction Action, added: “It’s a cosmetic fix to create an impression of South Africa for football fans which is not real.
“We have huge problems with homelessness and that is what the world should see.”
Top Guns’ guard on the teams ENGLAND’S football stars will be escorted by two fighter jets every time they fly during the World Cup.
Defence chiefs in South Africa have drawn up the plan to protect Fabio Capello’s squad from terror atrocities.
The 31 other competing nations will also be protected by the same airborne “ring of steel” amid fears extremists could target high-profile players as they fly between matches.
A source said: “FIFA and the South Africans are taking no chances with the security.”
By Gary Anderson
After more than a year of virulent debate, Democrats marched through a throng of jeering protesters, whose slurs recalled a Washington of the 1960s — when the party forced civil rights legislation and Medicare through a fiercely divided Congress. Against unified Republican opposition, they built on that foundation Sunday with the passage of a health care reform bill that extends coverage to 32 million Americans and tightly regulates the insurance industry.
“It is with great humility and with great pride that we tonight will make history for our country and progress for the American people,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) before the vote to a standing ovation on one side of the aisle and silence on the other. “Just think–we will be joining those who established Social Security, Medicare, and now tonight, health care for all Americans.”
Oscars 2010 heroine Kathryn Bigelow couldn’t have timed her historic first-female-director win better, because today the world is celebrating International Women’s Day 2010.
The 100th anniversary of the occasion, marked with the slogan ‘Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All’, will see rallies, seminars and assemblies take place around the globe.
by Gord Hill
There are many reasons to protest the Olympic Games. It is a multi-billion dollar industry run by an elite clique who sell the five rings to the highest bidder, using sports as a commodity and a platform for corporate advertising. Their main goal is profit, in collaboration with their partners: government, local organizing committees, and corporations (construction, real estate, tourism, TV, and media, as well as sponsors).
The Olympics have a long history of association with fascists, colonialists, and authoritarian regimes (i.e., the 1936 Hitler Olympics, the 1968 Mexico City Olympic massacre, and the 2008 Beijing Summer Games). Since the 1980s, they have displaced over three million people and contributed to massive increases in homelessness (as we’ve seen in Vancouver). Read the rest of this entry »
WASHINGTON — More than $8 billion in new federal loan guarantees to build two nuclear reactors in Georgia could be the first step toward a nuclear renaissance in the United States, three decades after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident halted all new reactor orders.
With the nuclear industry poised to begin construction of at least a half dozen plants over the next decade, President Barack Obama announced the first loan guarantees Tuesday, casting them as both economically essential and politically attractive. He called nuclear power a key part of comprehensive energy legislation that assigns a cost to the carbon pollution of fossil fuels, giving utility companies more incentive to turn to cleaner nuclear fuel.
“This is only the beginning,” Obama said in designating the new federal financial backing for a pair of reactors in Burke County, Ga., to be built by Atlanta-based Southern Co. Obama’s budget would triple – to $54.5 billion – loan guarantees available for new nuclear construction.
The federal guarantees, authorized by Congress in 2005, are seen as essential for construction of any new reactor because of the huge expense involved. Critics call the guarantees a form of subsidy and say taxpayers will assume a huge risk, given the industry’s record of cost overruns and loan defaults. Reports by Congressional Budget Office and Government Accountability Office have estimated that the risk of default for new nuclear reactors could be as high as 50 percent.
“This is a pre-emptive bailout where the government has already guaranteed to saddle taxpayers with any failure that the (nuclear) industry might run into,” said Allison Fisher, an energy organizer at Public Citizen, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group.
Critics also note that the loan guarantees come at the same time Obama has proposed eliminating a long-planned nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Obama has appointed a commission to find a safe solution for dealing with nuclear waste, but in the meantime the government has no long-term plan to store commercial radioactive waste.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate committee this month that for the foreseeable future nuclear plants likely will store spent fuel rods on site.
Environmentalists say renewable energy such as wind and solar are more cost-effective than nuclear power and do not come with side effects such as radioactive waste.
But Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a policy organization for the nuclear industry, said the loan guarantees will spur construction of nuclear plants all over the country, reducing greenhouse gases blamed for global warming and creating thousands of high-paying jobs.
The Georgia project is expected to create about 3,500 construction jobs and permanently employ 850 people, and Obama coupled the loan guarantee announcement with a visit to a job training center in Lanham, Md., at the headquarters of Local 26 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The union represents electrical and telecommunications workers, and it offers training for energy jobs, including the construction of nuclear power plants.
Obama said the new reactors would reduce carbon pollution by 16 million tons a year, compared with a similar coal-fired power plant.
Although Chu called Tuesday’s announcement a significant step to restart the domestic nuclear industry, actual construction of the first reactor is still years away. Southern Co.’s application for a license to build and operate the reactors is pending with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, one of 13 such applications the agency is considering. The earliest any could be approved would be late 2011 or early 2012, the NRC said.
Southern Chief Executive David Ratcliffe and Chu both said the new generation of nuclear reactors will be significantly safer than those built during the 1970s because of improvements in technology. This time around, the industry and regulators have streamlined licensing and are planning to use a standard design. The Three Mile Island accident in 1979 forced numerous power plants to be redesigned during construction.
“I have a lot of confidence that our approach this time will yield much better results,” Ratcliffe said.
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Source
Associated Press writers Julie Pace and Tim Huber in Charleston, W.Va., contributed to this report.
By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers
AMMAN, Jordan — Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was nearing the end of a 25-minute question and answer session with troops serving here when he raised a topic of his own: “No one’s asked me about ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’” he said.
As it turned out, none of the two dozen or so men or women who met with Mullen at Marine House in the Jordanian capital Tuesday had any questions on the 17-year-old policy that bars gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military — or Mullen’s public advocacy of its repeal.
Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Darryl E. Robinson, who’s the operations coordinator for defense attache’s office at the U.S. Embassy here, explained why after the session. “The U.S. military was always at the forefront of social change,” he said. “We didn’t wait for laws to change.”
Some Republicans in Congress have expressed outrage at repealing the ban in wartime and the Pentagon has embarked on a year-long study on what impact the repeal might have.
At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Sen. John McCain R-Ariz., urged Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to “keep the impact it will have on our forces firmly in mind.”
Yet those gathered at Marine House made it clear they’ve already accepted the idea of gays and lesbians serving among them.
Of far more interest to them were other areas, they told Mullen, such as allowing women to serve in infantry units. They also asked about relations between the military and the State Department and, more narrowly, when a key Defense Department official would be assigned to Amman permanently.
Indeed, since Mullen appeared on Capitol Hill earlier this month and told a stunned Congress that in his personal view, gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve, the response among members of the military has been little more than a shrug.
After Tuesday’s question-and-answer session, Mullen told McClatchy that although he’s held three town hall sessions with troops since his testimony, not a single service member has asked him about the issue.
At Tuesday’s session, which included not only Marines, but members of the Army and the Air Force, both male and female service members explained why they were nonplussed by the issue: They’d already served with gays and lesbians, they accepted that some kind of change was imminent, and, they said, the nation was too engulfed in two wars for a prolonged debate about it.
That there’s been so little reaction raises questions about how much study the issue needs and whether the Pentagon study is meant to pacify its concerns — or Congress’.
Next week, the top commander of each service branch will testify on Capitol Hill about changing the policy and their views are likely to differ from Mullen’s. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway has said he objects to it. Gen. George Casey, the Army Chief of Staff, has said he believes the military should not change the policy in the midst of fighting two wars.
No such division was evident among the service members here, however.
Army Staff Sgt. Peppur Alexander, 33, a 14-year veteran now serving at the U.S. Embassy, told Mullen that she’s served with gays and lesbians. More than 13,000 troops have left the military since Congress enacted the policy.
“We have lost good soldiers because of that because they wanted to be who they are,” Alexander said. “It’s sad.”
After more troops told him the same, Mullen ended the discussion and explained why he broached the subject.
“You will find as you get older and more senior, finding out what’s really going on at the deck plates becomes much more elusive than it used to be when you were sort of living there,” he said.
Afterward, Mullen said that any caution he might feel over how to implement repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, if Congress changes the law, comes from when the current policy went into effect in 1993.
Mullen was a captain of a ship and the debate was polarizing, with the troops caught in the middle.
“We put the force in the middle of the circuit breaker and threw the switch,” he told the group around him. “We can’t afford to let that happen.”
The troops, at least on Tuesday, did not appear to find the topic discomfiting.
“Sir, I would say that 70 years ago you can I couldn’t serve in the same Navy, the same Air Force, same Army because of the color of my skin and because of the social conditions of the day,” Robinson told Mullen. “It took leadership, it took a lot of time to get people to change their views, and a lot of social change to make it possible for us today. It goes beyond scientific evidence. I think it’s purely a social issue.”
Since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” went into effect, roughly 13,000 servicemen and women have left the military because of the rule, reaching a peak of 1,273 in 2001.
The number has fallen as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increased the demand for troops. Last year, 428 gay men and women left the military, according to Defense Department statistics.
About 80 percent of those came forward themselves and acknowledged they were gay. The remaining 20 percent were brought to the attention of commanders by a third party.