Bloomberg BusinessWeek is reporting: “The Fukushima nuclear disaster was the result of ‘man-made’ failures before and after last year’s earthquake, according to a report from an independent parliamentary investigation.” ARNIE GUNDERSEN, arnie at fairewinds.org Gundersen is a former nuclear industry insider and now an independent consultant, chief engineer with Fairewinds Consulting. He said today: “I…

NEIL deMAUSE, neil at demause.net, @neildemause Neil deMause is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written extensively about climate change coverage for FAIR’s magazine Extra! — including the article “The Fires This Time: In coverage of extreme weather, media downplay climate change.” He said today: “Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is causing dramatic changes in…

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu Stephany Griffith Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. With José Antonio Ocampo, and Joseph E. Stiglitz she co-edited Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis. Available for a limited number of interviews, she said today:…

JOHN MILL ACKERMAN, johnmill.ackerman at gmail.com Professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Ackerman said today: “Mexico apparently has decided to turn back the clock. Widespread frustration with twelve years of uneven political progress and stunted economic growth under the right-wing PAN [Party of National Action], has led…

Sites added today by UNESCO to its “List of World Heritage in Danger” include the Church of the Nativity, believed by Christians to be the birthplace of Jesus. UNESCO statement can be found here. The U.S. and Israeli governments attacked the move. Rev. MITRI RAHEB, mraheb at diyar.ps Currently at Yale University, Raheb is senior…

CLARK NEWHALL, clark.newhall at health-justice.org, @cnewhall Executive director of Health Justice, Newhall is a doctor and a lawyer. He said today: “Interestingly, it was Roberts who voted to save Obamacare from going down in flames. … The divide is not between liberal and conservative so much as it is between corporatists and everyone else. The…

The Guardian reports on “A letter signed by leading U.S. figures in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s application for political asylum in Ecuador has been delivered to the country’s London embassy.” Among those who signed the letter were Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky and Danny Glover. The letter, organized by Just Foreign Policy,…

Today, BBC reports: “Rwanda’s foreign minister has angrily denied reports that her country is backing an army mutiny in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.” Last week, Reuters reported: “U.N. experts have evidence Rwanda’s defense minister and two top military officials have been backing an army mutiny in the east of neighboring Congo…” Also last week…

MARGARET HU, mhu at law.duke.edu Hu is an assistant professor at Duke Law School. She just wrote a piece titled “Arizona v. U.S. & SB 1070: Baking Discrimination Into Immigration Policy” on the American Constitution Society blog, which states: “In Arizona v. U.S., the Supreme Court only upheld Section 2(B) of the highly controversial Arizona…

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively struck down Montana’s 100-year-old law that banned direct corporate political campaign spending in state and local elections. The court reversed a Montana Supreme Court ruling. See: Supreme Court Upholds Citizens United; Tightens Corporate Stranglehold on Campaign Finance. JEFF MILCHEN, jeff.milchen at gmail.com Milchen is the…