The myth of a successful nuclear power industry in France has melted into financial chaos.

With it dies the corporate-hyped poster child for a "nuclear renaissance" of new reactor construction that is drowning in red ink and radioactive waste.

Areva, France's nationally-owned corporate atomic façade, has plunged into a deep financial crisis led by a devastating shortage of cash.

Electricite de France, the French national utility, has been raided by European Union officials charging that its price-fixing may be undermining competition throughout the continent.

Delays and cost overruns continue to escalate at Areva's catastrophic Olkiluoto reactor construction project in Finland. Areva has admitted to a $2.2 billion, or 55%, cost increase in the Finnish building site after three and a half years. The Flamanville project---the only one now being built in France---is already over $1 billion more expensive than projected after a single year under construction.

In 2008, France's nuclear power output dropped 0.1%, while wind generation rose more than 37%.

I have yet to meet an environmental group that has not jumped on the band wagon where everyone’s mission is to achieve environmental protection to benefit economic growth. It escapes me how anyone in these times can actually pursue such an agenda when we are approaching with lightening speed the point where both goals are mutually exclusive. We have exploited, scarred, marred and wounded our environment to such degree that its recovery has slowed down if not stopped altogether.

Pretty soon anything deserving will depend on “charitable volunteering,” of which we currently don’t have enough to begin with. Add to this the lack of governmental regulations for the environment and we will find ourselves in a predatory world embroiled in a last-ditch effort to exploit nature’s remains for capital gains. As long as the underlying ethics on this continent measure in quantity only, including the educational system, that is, as long as the majority of the so-called developed countries turn a green buck into a golden calf, that which could sustain us will be lacking: true reverence for and our indebtedness to the natural world that surrounds us.

Tristan Anderson, 38, an American citizen, was critically injured on Friday by Israeli troops during protests against Israel's Wall in the West Bank village of Ni’lin. He was hit in his forehead by a new type of high velocity, extended range teargas projectile, and has been transferred to Tel Hashomer hospital, near Tel Aviv. Tristan is unconscious, anesthetized and artificially respirated, has sustained life-threatening injuries to his brain (as well as to his right eye), and is expected to undergo several operations in the coming days, in addition to the one he underwent today.

Since there was little appetite for my recent polemic in which I advocated including necro-cannibalism as an integral part of our strategy to combat ecocide and world hunger, because very few appeared to take note of the fact that it was not my intention to carefully craft an update of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (I was actually hurling a hunk of concrete into the placid waters of the indoctrinated readers’ minds in order to observe the resultant splash and subsequent ripples), and since despite the depth of Homo rapien moral depravity and their sheer indifference to the suffering, murder, mayhem, and destruction that the human collective causes in order to satiate our desires and perpetuate the disease we call civilization, reader response indicated that the thought of eating our “fellow man” was taking things a bit too far, I’m advancing yet another potential solution to the myriad and complex maladies we’ve inflicted upon nonhuman animals, the Earth and ourselves.

The preliminaries are over and what’s certain to be one of the fiercest political fights in many years is finally underway. It pits the nation’s labor unions and their Democratic allies against the pillars of corporate America and their Republican allies.

The stakes are huge. A union victory would give U.S. workers the unfettered right to unionization that would raise their economic and political status substantially. But that would come at the expense of employers, who have been able to block a large majority of them from exercising the union rights that the law has long promised all workers.

The union-employer fight began in earnest on March 10 with the re-introduction in Congress of the long-proposed Employee Free Choice Act. The bill would strengthen the National Labor Relations Act to make it easier for workers to form and join unions, the stated purpose of the NLRA.

The lack of solid legal protection is a primary reason that, despite the higher pay and benefits and other obvious advantages of union membership, only about 12 percent of the country’s workers belong to unions.