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Poughkeepsie Journal editorial: Extend hearings on Indian Point

Published
by
Jon
on March 16, 2008
in Entergy and nuclear power
. 0 Comments

The Poughkeepsie Journal on Friday published an editorial calling for the extension of hearing into the relicensing of Indian Point. Here’s an excerpt: We reproduce the editorial in its entirety, as it is so well-reasoned. The hearing process has been tainted - and if one is a proponent of nuclear power, all the more reason to want a transparent and thorough process. At present, it looks like the NRC is afraid of the hearing process. From The Poughkeepsie Journal:

Extend hearings on Indian Point

Question: When is a hearing not a hearing? Answer: When nobody can hear what’s being said.

That’s an accurate description of the ironic scene during the opening morning of testimony this week in White Plains on a possible 20-year extension of the license for Entergy’s aging Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant.

There weren’t enough microphones provided for witnesses giving testimony, and the hearing judge scolded members of the public who complained they couldn’t hear what was going on, though the judge later made sure witnesses were speaking more loudly and the situation was rectified in the following days. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose hearings in White Plains wrapped up Thursday, should schedule another day and have repeat testimony, and court officials should allow reporters to bring in cameras and recorders into the White Plains courtroom where the hearings are being held. Reporters were not allowed this week to bring in cameras or recorders because of a state court ban on these items, despite the fact the proceedings had nothing to do with a criminal matter.

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Service interruption

Published
by
Jon
on March 13, 2008
in Ultralocal
. 0 Comments

UPDATE: there was, in fact, a problem in at least one Verizon pair - but repaired the following morning. We’re back up.

Apparently having to do with Verizon - somewhere in the loop between Caton Avenue and the central office, or one of the switches, in Ditmas park.

Anyone else having service outages in the neighborhood? Perhaps related to all the digging on Church Avenue, and elsewhere in the nabe?

Blogroll: “Blogger Dog” added

Published
by
Jon
on March 11, 2008
in Brooklyn Blogs
. 0 Comments

We’re adding Blogger Dog to our blogroll. We like this blog for a number of reasons, but most because credit is given where due - unless some other human-dog teams we’re aware of, in which the dog does all the creative heavy lifting - but somebody else takes the credit. Just saying.

This is all very tough on dogs. When a kid doesn’t do his homework - the dog gets blamed. But when the dog does the homework for the kid - shouldn’t there at least be a little credit for the assist?

Indian Point relicensing hearings begin - very quietly

Published
by
Jon
on March 11, 2008
in Indian Point, evacuation and nuclear power
. 0 Comments

From Matthew Wald’s piece in The New York Times [emphasis supplied]:

Opponents of the Indian Point nuclear power plants, including New York State, got their day in court on Monday - sort of - to explain why they thought the two reactors should not be allowed to operate 20 more years. It signified the first time that a state had stepped forward to flatly oppose license renewals.

But like much about the tangled history of the plants in Westchester County, the hearing before a three-judge panel appointed by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission was not that simple.

The proceedings got off to a prickly start when a member of the audience seated in a courtroom at the Westchester County Courthouse here complained to the panel chairman, Lawrence G. McDade, that he could not hear what was being said. “The acoustics here are what the acoustics here are,” said Mr. McDade, a former military judge, who was himself using a microphone.

The difficulty was that about 20 lawyers seated at five tables and flanked by cartons of documents, as well as another 20 or so who spilled over into the jury box, did not have microphones.

When Michael B. Kaplowitz, vice chairman of the Westchester County Board of Legislators, rose and said he could not hear the lawyers representing him - and that he was not a member of the audience but a participant - Mr. McDade told Mr. Kaplowitz that he could read the transcript later.

After a lunch break, Mr. McDade relented and had more microphones brought in.

Acoustics were not the only setback for those opposed to relicensing the two plants in Buchanan, on the east bank of the Hudson River 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.

It was immediately clear that for the opponents - the state, Westchester County and several environmental groups - to win the day, they would have to persuade the panel and the regulatory agency itself to reconsider what arguments are admissible.

The commission has ruled that for an argument to be considered in license extension hearings, it must deal with problems that may arise because the license is extended. The state contends, however, that the region’s extraordinary population density, when considered together with the threat of terrorism or earthquake, makes the plants unsafe.

“The presence of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in our midst is untenable,” the state argued in a legal brief.

Joan Leary Matthews, a lawyer for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, said in an opening statement that “whatever the chances of a failure at Indian Point, the consequences could be catastrophic in ways that are almost too horrific to contemplate.”

Sherwin Turk, a lawyer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that questioning whether the site was a good idea in the first place was not within the scope of the proceeding.

Foes of Indian Point Begin Legal Battle, The New York Times, March 11, 2008.

Preliminary evidence, then, supports these propositions:

  1. The NRC is interested in limiting the scope of the public hearings;
  2. the NRC doesn’t mind if no one can hear what’s being said

Attempts by persons or groups to conceal their actions may be interpreted as circumstantial evidence of consciousness of guilt (Wigmore On Evidence, 2nd edition, 1915, § 178). We could probably find more citations, but the point is - what’s the NRC got to be afraid of?

Cross-posted at Popular Logistics. 

Spitzer: is resignation necessary?

Published
by
Jon
on March 11, 2008
in NY State Politics
. 0 Comments

I’m not happy about his behavior, particularly since Spitzer has never publicly discussed decriminalizing prostitution. On the other hand - it’s not corrupt, and has nothing to do with influence-peddling - it only matters if enough people care about it.

And - whatever people say - the facts speak for themselves - lots of people, overwhelmingly men, every day spend money on commercial sex in almost every country one can name. (I don’t actuallly know of a country which doesn’t have some form of commercial sex - including Islamic countries).

On the other hand, we need to get this over with.

James McKinley in the Times: memory sticks are Samizdat technology in Cuba

Published
by
Jon
on March 9, 2008
in Freedom of Expression
. 0 Comments

From Popular Logistics: James  McKinley on the issue flash drives and memory sticks as tools of the Cuban equivalent of Samizdat: See post on Popular Logistics.

David Gonzales/NYT: Ruth Ford and Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center

Published
by
Jon
on March 9, 2008
in Job training and NGOs
. 0 Comments

We missed David Gonzalez’s , For Helper of Immigrants, a Tale of Loss and Destiny, when it appeared in the Times on New Year’s Eve. Gen-Xers may not know that in early December of 1980, four women associated with the Maryknoll order were raped and murdered by Salvadoran government forces. President Carter ordered that all transfer of military goods to Salvador, only to quietly reverse the order on the morning of President Reagan’s inauguration.

There’s much more to it than that, of course. Years of less-than-honest responses to the women’s families and their religious order, and the public, about the killings, including the indictment of four low-level soldiers -but no efforts to see with whom - above the level of enlisted personnel  - responsility resided. This was true of most instances of misconduct by the American-subsidized and sponsored government, and incidents like the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, earlier in 1980. As an example, the Salvadoran judicial system was deep uninterested in pursuing the case.

Three New York lawyers, one of them the brother of a Maryknoll nun who was killed here two years ago, learned firsthand today that El Salvador’s legal system is not like the one they are used to.

The purpose of the visit of William P. Ford, one of the lawyers, was to make a formal declaration that he had been personally injured by the death of his sister, Ita Ford, a Roman Catholic nun who was killed with two other nuns and a fourth churchwomen near here on Dec. 2, 1980.

Mr. Ford’s lawyers, Michael H. Posner and R. Scott Greathead of the Lawyers Committee for Internatioal Human Rights, said they had been told almost accidentally this weekend that such a statement was necessary.

”We were talking to one of the prosecutors and asking throwaway questions,” Mr. Posner recalled, ”and he said, ‘Oh, by the way, we need a statement from one of the family members.’ ”

The case has made little progress since five national guardsmen were charged with murder last November in this town 35 miles southeast of the capital. At that time, the judge here appointed defense attorneys - some weeks after the legally prescribed three-day period - but did not put the appointments in writing.

This was discovered only after the attorneys for the guardsmen appealed the charges. The appeals judge in the neighboring province of San Vicente ruled that without the paperwork, the defendants did not officially have lawyers, so he sent the case back here. The original judge must now take the action he was to have taken in November.

Richard J. Meislin, Special To The New York Times, “U.S. Lawyers Taste Salvador’s System,” published: January 12, 1983.

But we digress. Back to David Gonzalez’s , For Helper of Immigrants, a Tale of Loss and Destiny.

It was August when Ruth Ford realized her resistance was no match for a nun’s persistence. For weeks, Sister Mary Burns had been after her to take over the Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center in Brooklyn, where immigrant women learn English, finish high school and develop job skills. Ms. Ford was looking for a job in journalism, but Sister Mary wanted her to lead the center she had founded in 1993.

The Clarke-Ford Center teaches community organizing, ESL, citizenship application, and maintains an industrial kitchen principally for use by start-ups and product development. And a whole bunch of other stuff.

And they need help doing all of this: volunteers, donors, customers for their culinary and clothing poeucs.

New York City receives larger DHS grant for subway security

Published
by
Jon
on March 7, 2008
in NYPD, Uncategorized, transportation and underground systems
. 0 Comments

Jen Chung at Gothamist and Al Baker of the Times have good coverage of the new, much-increased Department of Homeland Security grant to provide security for New York City subways, including the 16 underwater tunnels that link the boroughs to each other, and to the mainland (the Bronx, of course, is actually on the mainland). From Gothamist:

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced New York City will receive $153 million - up from last year’s $61 million - in transit security grants. Wow - all we can do is remember Chertoff’s 2005 remark, when trying discussing how security funding would be allocated, “The truth of the matter is, a fully loaded airplane with jet fuel, a commercial airliner, has the capacity to kill 3,000 people. A bomb in a subway car may kill 30 people. When you start to think about your priorities, you’re going to think about making sure you don’t have a catastrophic thing first.”

- snip -

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New York courts beginning to recognize Canadian marriages

Published
by
Jon
on March 7, 2008
in equal rights, justice and marriage
. 0 Comments

An excellent account of what’s going on From Professor Arthur Leonard of New York Law School:

For the second time in just a few weeks, a New York State trial judge cited the upstate appellate ruling mandating recognition of Canadian same-sex marriages, Martinez v. County of Monroe, 2008 N.Y. Slip Op. 909, in support of its decision in Lewis v. New York State Department of Civil Services, No. 4078-07 (March 3, 2008), that the agency administering health benefits for state employees can recognize such marriages.

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Herbert questions NYPD arrests, Hynes prosecutions as meritless

Published
by
Jon
on March 4, 2008
in Crime and Justice/Injustice
. 0 Comments

Bob Herbert sometimes behaves like a very clever hunting dog, alternately flushing his prey and waiting quietly. Of late, he’s been hunting a canard - in this case, a riot which seems not to have occurred.  He makes a compelling case that the Kings County District Attorney’s office seems to be persisting in an unjustified prosecution for no reason other than to save face.  See Herbert’s column Cruel and Gratuitous (Times, February 15, 2008) for details.

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