The world's opinions
Monday’s earthquake off the Sea of Japan demonstrated anew the vulnerability of nuclear power plants when nature unleashes its fury. The temblor had an intensity of upper 6 on the Japanese seismic scale of 7.
Some reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) automatically shut down.
Although Tepco assured the nation that the radiation in the spilled water was too negligible to have any effect on the environment, it was nevertheless deeply disturbing that radiation leaked in such an unforeseen manner.
The site of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant has been the source of controversy because it may sit on a potentially dangerous active fault. Now, as matter of some urgency, this situation must be addressed. We also believe that this and other nuclear power plants again need to be checked for structural safety against temblors.
Winnipeg Free Press, Manitoba, Canada, on the Van Doos soldiers going to war:
Two hundred soldiers from the Royal 22nd Regiment left for Afghanistan this week. They will be deployed in Kandahar, the hot zone of that war. By summer’s end there will be 2,000 Van Doos, as they are famously known, in Afghanistan, forming the bulk of the Canadian combat group there. There is nothing unusual in this. Canadian soldiers have been going to the war in Afghanistan for years, as Manitobans know.
That contribution continues today, as the departure of the Van Doos attests. The conflict continues, too, with protests in the streets of Quebec and public opposition to the Afghan war higher than in any other province.
Quebec may be ahead of the march here. As the list of casualties from Afghanistan grows, the number of Canadians uncomfortable with this country’s role in the Afghan war increases. ... That Quebec would be uncomfortable with the war in Afghanistan is no surprise — it is not always at ease with Canadian wars.
That the rest of Canada is beginning to emulate Quebec is perhaps a signal of an unfortunate shift in the understanding of what this country’s role in the world should be. The Van Doos, the Patricias, all the other soldiers who have bravely done their job there, know what their role is and what their country’s should be. This is a time when Canadians should perhaps listen to their soldiers rather than political opportunists and pundits.
The Independent, London, on Zimbabwe:
The news that a mass exodus from Zimbabwe is under way should surprise no one. The political and economic crises in the country, once the bread-basket of southern Africa, are worsening at an alarming rate. More than 4 million people need food. Inflation is officially 4,500 per cent, but unofficially, it is double that. Some 85 per cent of the population are unemployed and 90 per cent are below the UN’s official poverty line. Foreign reserves are almost exhausted. Life expectancy, which was the age of 60 in 1990, has plummeted to 37, the lowest in the world.
There are various reasons for this, including drought and an HIV/AIDS epidemic which has infected one-third of people aged between 15 and 49. But the chief problem is economic mismanagement. President Robert Mugabe’s decision to evict more than 4,000 white farmers in his controversial land redistribution seven years ago has undermined Zimbabwe’s ability to feed itself.
Much of the land was redistributed to incompetent Mugabe cronies, producing a sharp decline in agricultural exports, previously the country’s leading source of income. Zimbabwe’s ill-conceived four-year war in the Congo drained hundreds of millions of dollars. Mugabe’s decision to print $230 million-worth of currency to pay international debts made matters worse.
President Mugabe has an answer for all this. Zimbabwe has been “sabotaged” by foreign governments and the sanctions imposed on the country by the EU and the USA. Britain, the former colonial power, is behind it all, he maintains. By playing this card — and exploiting the respect automatically due to him by other African leaders as a former hero of the independence struggle — Mugabe has managed to fool a lot of the people for a lot of the time. But it looks as though his days in office may be numbered.
