Like a decayed flotilla of rickety steamers, at least 27 of America's 104 aging atomic reactors are known to be leaking radioactive tritium, which is linked to cancer if inhaled or ingested through the throat or skin.

The fallout has been fiercest at Vermont Yankee, where a flood of cover-ups has infuriated and terrified near neighbors who say the reactor was never meant to operate more than 30 years, and must now shut.

In 2007 one of Yankee's 22 cooling towers simply collapsed due to rot.

Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has confirmed tritium levels in a monitoring well at Vernon to be 3.5 times the federal safety standard. The leaks apparently came from underground pipes whose very existence was recently denied by VY officials in under-oath testimony at a public hearing. Vermont's pro-nuclear Republican Governor Jim Douglas has termed the event "a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated."

Amber Nitchman,19, spent 9 days in a tree and did jail time as a part of Climate Ground Zero's most recent campaign of non-violent civil disobedience to stop mountain top removal mining.

As advice for anyone wanting to stop mountain top removal mining but not sure about whether to be a part of a tree-sit Nitchman said, “ Not everyone has to come down here (West Virginia) and be an activist that sits in a tree. But everyone can contribute in some way, whether it's through supporting our group itself, or doing some other mountain top removal resistance work.”

Nitchman said local campaigns are needed in which people in, for example, Central Ohio, can pressure their local utility companies to find ways to generate power without using coal mined by mountaintop removal. At ILoveMountains.org, we can find out about how our electricity connects to this issue simply by entering our zip codes.

Greetings to everyone,

34 years. It doesn't even sound like a real number to me. Not when one really thinks about being in a jail cell for that long. All these years and I swear, I still think sometimes I'll wake up from this nightmare in my own bed, in my own home, with my family in the next room. I would never have imagined such a thing. Surely the only place people are unjustly imprisoned for 34 years is in far away lands, books or fairy tales.

It's been that long since I woke up when I needed to, worked where I wanted to, loved who I was supposed to love, or did what I was compelled to do. It's been that long-long enough to see my children have grandchildren. Long enough to have many of my friends and loved ones die in the course of a normal life, while I was here unable to know them in their final days.

So often in my daily life, the thought creeps in-"I don't deserve this". It lingers like acid in my mouth. But I have to push those types of thoughts away. I made a commitment long ago, many of us did. Some didn't live up to their commitments, and some of us didn't have a choice. Joe Stuntz didn't have a choice. Neither did

“The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show…. 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.”

Global temperatures varied because of changes in ocean heating and cooling cycles. “When we average temperature over 5 or 10 years to minimize that variability,” said Dr. James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the world's leading climatologists, ‘we find global warming is continuing unabated.’"

-- John M. Broder NY Times Jan. 21

In the documentary “The Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore – remember him? – warned that greenhouse gasses and other sources of hydro carbons would increase, and threaten future planetary life. After issuing this filmic challenge, Gore advised citizens to recycle and buy gas-efficient cars.

The director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad.

Here are 10 problems with this:

1. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't cease to be crimes because you cross a border.

2. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't cease to be crimes because you engage in them frequently. Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.

3. Killing people has nothing whatsoever to do with gathering so-called intelligence.

4. Even in this age in which senators and house members petition and write public letters to the president imploring him to obey laws, rather than introducing legislation, issuing subpoenas, holding impeachment hearings, or defunding agencies, the fact remains that Congress, above all, IS the government, and it is just not the place of the director of national thuggery to come in and dictate what the law will or will not be.