The economic dip in Asia has delivered a near-fatal blow to the nuclear power industry. Southeast Asia was the last great "boom" market in the world for nuclear energy plants, but now that's all in the past. South Korea has canceled plans for 15 new plants that were to be built by 2010, and Thailand, Indonesia, and Taiwan are also having second thoughts about the most expensive form of energy generation in the world (if you count the cleanup costs). Meanwhile, in France, there's a debate heating up over how to do something that's never been done before: dismantle a large fast-breeder reactor. The Super Phoenix near Lyons poses a special problem: instead of radioactive water in its cooling towers, it uses liquid sodium, a highly flammable, explosive substance. Hey, someone over at Hanford is probably kicking themselves that they never used liquid sodium.--Maria Tomchick

Remember how hard unions fought against NAFTA, arguing that multinational corporations would close up shop and relocate to maquiladoras in Mexico? Well, the United Nations' International Labor Organization has studied the effects of NAFTA and concluded that, yes, jobs have flown south. As reported in the Toronto Star, companies such as General Motors, Ford, Allied Signal, and General Electric have cut 18,462 jobs in Canada since 1988, but they've also hired 47,045 people in Mexico during the same time period, to take advantage of a lower minimum wage and lax labor standards. While Canadian workers who used to make nearly $20 per hour have been forced to take a pay cut in their new jobs, executives and shareholders have seen their incomes skyrocket. The CEO of GM Canada, for example, saw his "compensation" rise 247 percent.--M.T.

It's the casual stories that get to me. A blurb in the 3-20 P-I (Dateline Northwest): "The U.S. Forest Service's proposed moratorium on road building in roadless areas is unnecessary and amounts to a land grab, timber industry advocates said..." The feds exercising power over public land-- that is, preventing Big Timber from taking everything they want--is a "land grab." The public, grabbing roadless land from its rightful owners, Plum Creek et al. Geez.--Geov Parrish

A pre-inquest hearing will have been held by the time you read this into the jailhouse death of Robert Wayne Guy, Jr., in Seattle last December. The cop spin is that lethal force was necessary to subdue Guy because he went haywire from ingested cocaine--the speculation being that he'd eaten packets of the stuff two days previous to avoid arrest, and one of the baggies broke, the toxicity causing him to go berserk. (Translation: his death was his fault.) But why do they hafta speculate? Unless Guy took care to wrap his cache in eco-friendly, biodegradable plastic, such an assertion should be easily provable upon autopsy. Something doesn't add up.-- G.P.

The always-cheerful "Group Health Member News"--the agitprop of Seattle's very own anti-union, anti-health care access "cooperative" that has utterly betrayed its progressive roots--unwittingly gave a nice synopsis of what's wrong in both the health care industry and media coverage of it, in its March/April edition. In "Group Health in the News" (p.5), we find our heroes tallying the stories they've planted in local media: "the Co-op was in the media spotlight 733 times in 1997...Half of the stories were proactively placed, meaning that they were suggested to the press by Group Health...94% of the stories were positive or informational about Group Health; 6% were negative." (That 6% would probably include my blistering column in The Stranger.) "The topics most often covered? Patient care and programs, healthcare leadership, the Kaiser Permanente affiliation, personel [sic] issues such as smoking policies, business issues, research, state ballot initiatives, the Co-op's 50th anniversary, managed care, and labor issues." The last of these would, perhaps, include GHC's encouragment of scab labor last year. Oddly, no mention whatsoever of coverage of GHC's impact on health care access and cost--issues dear to most peoples' lives, even though they've utterly vanished from media and political agendas since the Hillary Fiasco. And issues that a "cooperative" like GHC should be on the front lines championing. Instead, GHC actively allies itself with the forces of evil.--G.P.