Four NYT Journalists Missing in Libya

Posted: March 16, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Afghanistan, Breaking News, Foreign Affairs, Libya | Tags: , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Anthony Shadid

This is very disturbing.

Four New York Times journalists disappeared while reporting on fighting in Libya, the newspaper said Wednesday.

Editors at the newspaper said they last heard from the journalists on Tuesday as they were covering the retreat of rebels from the town of Ajdabiya. Libyan officials told the newspaper they are trying to locate the four, executive editor Bill Keller said in a statement.

“We are grateful to the Libyan government for their assurance that if our journalists were captured they would be released promptly and unharmed,” Keller said.

The missing journalists are Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid, the newspaper’s Beirut bureau chief; Stephen Farrell, a reporter and videographer; and photographers Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario. In 2009, Farrell was kidnapped by the Taliban and later rescued by British commandos.

Anthony Shadid has won two Pulitzer Prizes, including one in 2010 for reporting on Iraq at the Washington Post.

Lynsey Addario

Lynsey Addario is a brilliant photographer who was a 2009 recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant. You can view some of her work here and here.

According to CNN,

Libyan government forces said Wednesday that they have no information about where the journalists may be and that, if they were picked up by the Libyan military, they would be returned to Tripoli.

CNN quotes from an e-mail Addario sent to CNN correspondent Ivan Watson on Monday:

Addario called the Libya story “one of the most dangerous” of her career.

The e-mail said, “qaddafi’s forces heading back east, and the rebels are surrendering along the way…so exhausted. this story has been one of the most dangerous i have ever covered. getting bombed from the air and by land, with no cover, and no flack and helmet.”

Of the other missing writer and photography, CNN says:

Farrell routinely reports from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Before joining The New York Times in 2007, he worked for the Times of London. In April 2004, he was kidnapped on assignment in Iraq.

Hicks, a staffer for the paper, is based in Istanbul and has served as an embed in Afghanistan.

Tyler Hicks

Here is a recent post at the NYT Lens blog, with photos by Tyler Hicks along with his reflections on covering the Libyan conflict.

Stephen Farrell was taken prisoner by the Taliban in 2009. The Guardian has a report about the British soldier who died rescuing Farrell in Afghanistan.

Stephen Farrell

There is some good news. Guardian UK journalist Abdul-Ahad has been freed.

Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi national, and Andrei Netto, a Brazilian journalist, were taken into custody on 2 March.

They were held in a prison outside Tripoli after being picked up in Sabratha, a coastal town.

Netto was released last week, but Abdul-Ahad, an award-winning correspondent was held until Wednesday.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has said that Abdul-Ahad “is safely out of Libya”.

The recent conflicts in the Middle East have been dangerous for journalists. I only hope that these four fine journalists will soon be found safe and unhurt.

Breaking: Second Explosion at Nuclear Plant in Japan

Posted: March 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Foreign Affairs, Japan, just because, Surreality | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

Al Jazeera just reported that there has been a hydrogen explosion at the third nuclear power plant that nuclear engineers have been working on in Japan. Several workers are reported to be injured or missing after the blast. Here is the first story I’ve seen about on Google: Fukushima Explosion: Japan Nuclear Plant Blast Believed To Be Hydrogen Explosion

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary says a hydrogen explosion has occurred at Unit 3 of Japan’s stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The blast was similar to an earlier one at a different unit of the facility.

Yukio Edano says people within a 12-mile (20-kilometer) radius were ordered inside following Monday’s. AP journalists felt the explosion 30 miles (50 kilometers) away.

BBC News has this:

A second explosion has hit the nuclear plant in Japan that was damaged in Friday’s earthquake, but officials said it had resisted the blast.

TV footage showed smoke rising from Fukushima plant’s reactor 3, a day after an explosion hit reactor 1.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency said the blast was believed to have been caused by the build-up of hydrogen.

Government officials said the reactor core was still intact as they tried allay fears of a radioactive leak.

3 injured, 7 missing after second explosion at Japan nuclear plant

A massive column of smoke was seen belching from the plant’s No. 3 unit Monday. The No. 3 Unit reactor had been under emergency watch for a possible explosion as pressure built up there following a hydrogen blast Saturday in the facility’s Unit 1.

Second Blast Rocks Japanese Nuclear Powerplant

A second explosion has rocked a nuclear power plant in Japan. The plant is in an area that was devastated by a massive earthquake and tsunami on Friday.

The explosion occurred mid-morning Monday, while workers were battling to bring down temperatures inside the Fukushima Number One nuclear power plant’s number three reactor.

Television images showed a strong explosion obliterating the upper walls of the reactor building and causing a huge plume of white smoke.

Japanese Quake Survivors Evacuated Amid Fears of Radiation Leaks

At least 170,000 Japanese earthquake and tsunami survivors have fled their homes, fearing the spread of radioactive contamination from damaged nuclear power plants.

Officials say dozens of people could have been exposed to radiation while being evacuated from a town near one of the damaged plants. They and hundreds of others were being scanned for radiation exposure.

Authorities say a new hydrogen explosion occurred Monday morning at the Fukushima power plant north of Tokyo, sending a plume of white smoke into the air. Officials said at a news conference covered by NHK Television that the building is still safe and that there is little risk of a mass radiation leak.

Why am I not buying that?

I will continue to update as I get more information.

Disaster in Japan

Posted: March 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Foreign Affairs | Tags: , , | 36 Comments

Last night, a 8.9 quake and tsunami hit Japan. Tsunami waves have hit Hawaii and are now hitting Washington state.  The worst damage is in the northern sections of Japan.  There is a worse danger looming that I wanted to mention here if you haven’t heard.  The Japan earthquake has shut down two nuclear plants and the core is not cooling in one.  This is a potentially dangerous situation. The U.S. is now rushing coolant to Japan at the request of the Japanese government.

Yet even light was on short supply, with nuclear power plants shutting down after fires broke out at some of the facilities and raised concerns of potential radiation leaks. Millions of buildings around Tokyo were reported without power.

The 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck northeast Japan at 2:45 p.m. local time, collapsing buildings 240 miles away in Tokyo, triggering a 30-foot tsunami that swept away everything in its path, and killing at least 300 people already. Hundreds more remain missing, including 100 crew on a lost fishing boat.

The plant experienced a fire.  People in the area are being evacuated. No leaks have been reported so far but again, CNN said that the core is not cooling so they are preparing for the worst.

About 5,800 residents near a Tokyo Electric Power Co. atomic plant were ordered to evacuate because of a possible radiation leak and the failure of the cooling system after Japan was struck by a powerful earthquake.

People within 3 kilometers (2 miles) of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were told to evacuate, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said in Tokyo today. Residents within 10 kilometers were told to stay indoors, said Ryohei Shiomi, a spokesman at the Emergency Information Center of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Emergency power supply at the 4,696-megawatt plant 210 kilometers north of Tokyo failed after the quake triggered automatic shutdowns of the reactors, officials at the trade ministry’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told reporters without identifying themselves. Power is needed to keep cooling the reactor to prevent rising pressure and damage, they said.

A battery, which can last about eight hours, is being used to cool the reactor for now, the agency officials said. Another six batteries have been secured, and the government may use military helicopters to fly them in, they said.

CNN has just reported that radiation is rising in the Fukushima Daiichi plant. A refinery has also exploded.

Natural Gas prices are already on the rise in UK.

U.K. natural gas prices soared Friday after a major earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, shutting down nuclear plants and raising expectations that the country will import more liquefied natural gas as a replacement power source.

But with the global gas market so well-supplied, and the length of the nuclear plant outages unknown, the gains could prove short-lived, traders said.

Winter gas contract prices had risen to 68.8 pence per therm by 1420 GMT, around 4% higher from Thursday.

At least two nuclear power plants on Japan’s Pacific coast shut down following the 8.9 magnitude quake that hit the country Friday morning, leaving market watchers wondering as to the extent of the damage.

“The problem is there are a whole bunch of nuclear outages, which I’d think would be out for at least three to four weeks,” said a London-based trader.

Japan’s last major earthquake in 2007 caused an extended shutdown of the country’s largest nuclear power plant, sending the country scrabbling for LNG suplies as it sought alternative means of power generation.

However, the current rally in the natural gas market may be premature. The extent of the damage to nuclear facilities is still unknown and the market is better-supplied than it was a few years ago.

Unlike in 2007, the market today is oversupplied, said Noel Tomnay, head of global gas at Wood Mackenzie.

Japan quake area map from the BBC

Casualties from this quake/tsunami now number in the hundreds and may rise.  Japan has requested help from the US.  The navy is sending ships there now.

There are some amazing images at The Atlantic.  Videotapes of the moments during the quake and tsunami can be found at the NYT at the Lede Blog.

High Noon in Madison: Wisconsin Open Thread

Posted: March 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News | Tags: , | 51 Comments

Graphic credit: Detlef.Schrempf via Flickr

This is an open thread to post on what’s happening in Wisconsin during the day.

UPDATE 2, 11 am — BREAKING:

***Senate Dems returning from Illinois***

UPDATE 1: this is Breaking news out of WI via madison.com

Capitol access denied, protesters dragged away; huge crowd outside

10:15 a.m. — Reporters are being denied access to the Capitol. The State Patrol told a State Journal reporter the building is shut down and they’re not letting anyone else in.

Four or five protesters sitting in front of the Assembly doors were dragged away, but not put under arrest, by State Patrol troopers and other officers.

Other protesters who were in the hallway leading to the doors of the Assembly left voluntarily.

(there appears to be a running live blog via The Cap Times, so check back for more updates.)

***

Robert Schlesinger has a nice wrap-up of yesterday’s developments over at US News & World Report — “Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and His Allies Drop All Pretenses“:

To review: Walker–having created a budget crisis by enacting a huge tax cut–proposed a bill to “fix” the “crisis” by not only sharply cutting the compensation of public employees, but also by stripping public unions of their collective bargaining rights. This was, Walker claimed, what he campaigned on, a declaration which PolitiFact termed “false.” It was not, Walker insisted, about breaking Wisconsin’s public unions but rather about fixing the budget. This lie was made transparent when the public unions’ offer to accept the compensation cuts in exchange for keeping their collective bargaining rights and Walker refused to budge. And a stalemate descended upon Madison as all the state senate Democrats fled to Illinois, leaving the legislature’s upper chamber without the minimum number of members required to pass a budget-related bill.

How to break the impasse? Simple: Drop the pretense that this was about the budget. They stripped out all the actual fiscal items from the law and hastily passed a bill that simply went after the unions.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the legality of what the GOP did and lawsuits, but by Schlesinger’s account, there may be only so much that can be accomplished via the legal route:

The state house Democratic leader loudly proclaimed that the passage of the law was illegal because it violated the state’s open meeting laws. The courts will decide that, but even if it so, it seems like a process issue–the GOP can presumably run the same play but correctly dot the I’s and cross the T’s.

And if the GOP was trying to trick the Wisconsin 14 into coming back to protest and be forced into providing a quorum for the whole bill, so far that doesn’t seem to be working:

“We’re not going to go back because there are still a lot of games they can play,” State Sen. Jon Erpenbach told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “We’re going to sit tight here for a while.”

Schlesinger closes with this:

There is talk in Madison of a general strike to protest the bill. And more broadly, the Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman warned on Lawrence O’Donnell’s Last Word that this could be a broader ploy to try to incite an overreaction among progressives that could be used against Democrats in swing states in 2012. Stay tuned.

Fineman is such a putz. SOLIDARITY FOREVER!

And get this —even the rightwing thinktank Cato Institute says Karl Rove’s Crossroad GPS anti-union ad is a misleading use of the Cato study the ad cites! For more info, see Greg Sergent and Talking Points Memo.

When even the Cato Institute points out that the GOP’s anti-union push is making a misleading charge “that seems intended to turn non-unionized workers of all kinds against unionized public employees,” you know you’ve gone way down the rabbithole.

Also, yesterday on Fox we heard straight from one of the horses’ mouths what this is about. This is not about any budget crisis. It’s electoral politics plain and simple.

Think Progress (video at the link):

In an interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly moments ago, State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), one of Walker’s closest allies in the legislature, confirmed the true political motive of Walker’s anti-union push. Fitzgerald explained that “this battle” is about eliminating unions so that “the money is not there” for the labor movement. Specifically, he said that the destruction of unions will make it “much more difficult” for President Obama to win reelection in Wisconsin:

FITZGERALD: Well if they flip the state senate, which is obviously their goal with eight recalls going on right now, they can take control of the labor unions. If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.

So that’s a little bit of what happened yesterday.

This is from the facebook page of one of the Wisconsin 14 just this morning. Chris Larson:

3 weeks ago, we stepped away from the Capitol & family so that thousands could step up and be heard in Wisconsin. Neighbors spoke up in a way we never could have anticipated. Whatever happens next, I hope each person stays engaged by speaking against injustice, by encouraging friends to vote, by helping campaigns they believe in and by running for office themselves. Democracy is YOURS and it is what you make of it.

I listened to Michael Moore’s reaction to the GOP’s crazymaking from yesterday on Democracy Now, and he thinks Saturday is going to be big:

“This is a turning point. I feel it deep in my heart right now. […] This is our moment. Everybody up off the couch now.”

Below is the song that came to mind when I heard the news… it’s cheesy, and I figure that’s appropriate for a cheddar revolution.

What song are you thinking of right now?

First Signs of DOJ stopping its defense of the indefensible?

Posted: February 23, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Feminists, GLBT Rights, Marriage Equality | Tags: , , , | 15 Comments

Just a short breaking news item here via the Wonk Room.  I’m personally hoping this is the first sign the DOJ will stop defending indefensible  policies.

Moments ago, in a sharp reversal of policy, the Obama administration announced that it believes that Section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) — which prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages — is unconstitutional and will ask the Justice Department to stop defending the law. In a press release announcing the change, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder also argues that laws regarding sexual orientation should be subject to a higher level of review:

Section 3 of DOMA has now been challenged in the Second Circuit, however, which has no established or binding standard for how laws concerning sexual orientation should be treated. In these cases, the Administration faces for the first time the question of whether laws regarding sexual orientation are subject to the more permissive standard of review or whether a more rigorous standard, under which laws targeting minority groups with a history of discrimination are viewed with suspicion by the courts, should apply.

After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the President has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny. The President has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the President has instructed the Department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the President’s determination.

Consequently, the Department will not defend the constitutionality of Section 3 of DOMA as applied to same-sex married couples in the two cases filed in the Second Circuit. We will, however, remain parties to the cases and continue to represent the interests of the United States throughout the litigation.

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