Visual source: Newseum
Bloomberg:
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency lifted the rating level to 7, and will announce the decision at a news conference today, national broadcaster NHK reported on its website. The accident at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s station is currently rated 5 on the global scale, the same as the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
Guardian:
Japan is to raise the nuclear alert level at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to a maximum seven, putting the emergency on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Nuclear safety officials had insisted they had no plans to raise the severity of the crisis from five – the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 – according to the international nuclear and radiological event scale.
But the government came under pressure to raise the level at the plant after Japan's nuclear safety commission estimated the amount of radioactive material released from its stricken reactors reached 10,000 terabecquerels per hour for several hours following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country's northeast coast on 11 March. That level of radiation constitutes a major accident, according to the INES scale.
The scale, devised by the international atomic energy agency, ranks nuclear and radiological accidents and incidents by their severity from one to seven
Follow the Japan Nuclear Incident Liveblog for up to the minute coverage and comments.
Eugene Robinson:
Far-right Republicans are winning the budget wars because they understand something that nobody else in Washington seems to grasp: The old truism about politics being the art of the possible is no longer true...
Their inspired tactic — which has worked so well that they would be crazy to abandon it — has been to take a wildly extreme position and stick to it with the obstinacy of a mule. When Democrats offer to negotiate, Republicans increase their demands. The result is that they shift the battlefield and end up fighting on terrain so friendly that they literally can’t lose.
Just say no, or the inmates will run the asylum.
Nate Silver:
But Mr. Boehner may face just as much risk as Mr. Obama, if not more. He has promised his more conservative members that he will extract significant concessions from the Democrats before he agrees to an increase in the debt limit. A White House that was willing to play hardball could put him to the test, and perhaps cause a substantial loss of face.
I don’t know that this particular (and rather cautious) White House is likely to do that. But the equilibrium outcome is probably some fairly token concessions — enough to provide Mr. Boehner with some cover with the Tea Party but not much more.
That’s assuming, of course, that both sides play the “game” optimally, which is far from assured. If Mr. Obama is a good poker player, he’ll know not to disregard Mr. Boehner’s earlier rhetoric, which gave away the vulnerability of his hand. And he’ll recognize Mr. Boehner’s more recent and more confident rhetoric for what it is: the oldest “tell” in the poker book, a show of strength betraying the ultimate weakness of his position.
Science:
Melting Antarctic Ice Causing Penguins to Starve
Penguins, Fraser says, are a bellwether for how global warming will harm species across the globe. "If what we've seen in 35 years is just the precursor to what occurs across the planet, it's reason to be very concerned," he says. Although he still believes that sea ice loss is responsible for penguin decline in at least some areas, he calls the new study "one of the best papers I've read in quite a while so far as providing a description of the complexity and issues involved" in tracking food webs in the Antarctic.
Fraser calls the data set "formidable" evidence for long-term warming trends, adding that Antarctic research is the longest database in the world of population trends in large animals. "It's a great piece of work and I'm thankful for scientists like them who make such a commitment," adds oceanographer Oscar Schofield of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Stanley Fish:
When Elena Kagan was nominated by President Obama to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, some observers speculated that she might be the long-sought liberal counterweight to Antonin Scalia, noted for his intelligence, his wit and his prose style. Of course it’s too early to tell, but Kagan’s dissent (her first) in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn would seem to give those distressed by the Court’s current direction some hope. (Scalia honed his rhetorical skills as a dissenter earlier in his career.)