Today's twenty-seventh anniversary of the disaster at Three Mile Island finds the nuclear industry pushing yet another lunatic attempt to revive atomic energy.

This periodic outbreak of industry-financed insanity usually precedes a major disaster, and always reflects a cynical denial of basic economic, public health and ecological reality. This year it also indicates a complete unwillingness to face the fact that renewable energy---especially wind power---has long ago left atomic energy in the radioactive dust.

At 4am on March 28, 1979, an "impossible" series of errors at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island Unit Two---which had opened exactly three months earlier---turned a $900 million investment into a $2 billion liability. The plant's owners lied repeatedly about the seriousness of the accident and its emissions. Escaping radiation poured into the surrounding countryside, quickly killing thousands of birds and insects. A plague of death, disease, malformation, stillbirth and spontaneous abortion followed among a host of nearby farm animals.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Unable to topple Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra after weeks of street protests, opponents are venting their fury by portraying him as Adolf Hitler, sparking a denouncement by Israel's embassy.

Thailand's recently emboldened English language newspapers, meanwhile, have plastered their pages with anti-Thaksin stories, rhetoric and vitriol.

"Fuck Thaksin," read graffiti displayed in a front-page photo in the respected Bangkok Post on Thursday (March 23).

That hand-written demand appeared on one of the big, mass-produced "Wanted Dead or Alive" posters waved by protesters to needle Thaksin -- a close ally of U.S. President George W. Bush and a former police officer who received a PhD in Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

The popular poster's "reward" offers 73 billion baht (1.8 billion U.S. dollars), the amount Thaksin's family pocketed, tax-free, by selling their Shin Corp. telecommunications empire on February 24 to the Singapore government's investment wing, Temasek Holdings.

Top officials in the Bush administration have often complained that news coverage of Iraq focuses on negative events too much and fails to devote enough attention to positive developments. Yet the White House has rarely picked direct fights with U.S. media outlets during this war. For the most part, President Bush leaves it to others to scapegoat the media.

Karl Rove’s spin strategy is heavily reliant on surrogates. They’re likely to escalate blame-the-media efforts as this year goes on.

A revealing moment -- dramatizing the pro-war division of labor -- came on March 22, during Bush’s nationally televised appearance in Wheeling, West Virginia. On the surface, the format resembled a town hall, but the orchestration was closer to war rally. (According to White House spokesperson Scott McClellan, the local Chamber of Commerce had distributed 2,000 tickets while a newspaper in the community gave out 100.) It fell to a woman who identified herself as being from Columbus, Ohio, to give the Wheeling event an anti-media jolt.

Her husband -- who was an Army officer in Iraq, where “his job while

New York City--New York-based Filipinos, students and youth flooded Bronx streets on Sunday, March 19th to denounce the US war on Iraq, a war that has killed approximately 150,000 Iraqis and nearly 2,300 US soldiers. In a march and rally organized by the ANSWER Coalition, a large contingent of Filipino youth, workers and solidarity friends bore placards and banners calling for "Money for Youth and Education, Not for War and Occupation" and "No to HR 4437, Yes to Pro-Immigrant Comprehensive Immigration Program."

Sensenbrenner-King House Resolution 4437 is the bill currently in Congress that, if passed, will criminalize  almost 14 million undocumented immigrants, their families and any who assist them. "Anti-immigrant bills like HR 4437 are meant to scare and silence us," said Leah Obias, member of local Filipino youth organization Ugnayan ng mga Anak ng Bayan. "Meanwhile, military recruitment takes place in poor and immigrant neighborhoods where incentives like college tuition and faster immigration processes are dangled in front of us."