Here's a rather perverse irony. Amid all the war hysteria over Iran's nuclear ambitions, a US utility has ordered a new nuclear plant for the first time since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. Of course this time they are promising that "innovations" will avoid the cost overruns that plagued the industry in its last big thrust of development in the '70s. (They are not even particularly talking about the health and safety concerns, alarmingly.) But note that this time it is a utility in New Jersey which wants to build the reactors in Texas—a fruit of the deregulation regime imposed in the last 20 years, which effectively bars utilities from generating electricity for local consumption. As we argued after the 2006 Queens blackout, this new regime exaggerates the dangers of the system by eroding public accountability. And with all the horrors in the headlines these days, this summer's radiation leak at a commercial reactor in Niigata, Japan, barely registered a blip—although reporter Matthew Wald does, to his credit, at least work in a parenthetical reference to the Niigata accident in this New York Times account, Sept. 25:

Not for the first time. From AFP, Sept. 24:

UNITED NATIONS — Iranian pro-democracy activists strongly oppose any military attack on their country but want the world to condemn Tehran's human rights violations, Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji said in a petition seen Monday.

On Sept. 14, dozens of immigrant workers from Haiti marched through several localities in the northwest of the Dominican Republic to demand their basic rights. The protesters, most of them undocumented agricultural workers, held signs showing newspaper articles about oppressive working conditions in the plantations. The protest was intended to be part of international observances of the Week of the Immigrant, according to the Jesuit Regino Martinez, coordinator of the organization Border Solidarity. After the march, the workers, accompanied by their wives and children, gathered in the Catholic church in Ranchadero, Montecristi province, where Martinez celebrated a mass. (El Universal, Mexico, Sept. 14 from EFE; AlterPresse, Sept. 18 from EFE)

On Sept. 21 the Mexican government's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) urged President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa to start "the gradual withdrawal" of the military from a high-profile anti-crime campaign he launched at the beginning of the year. The CNDH based its recommendations on its finding that 78 soldiers, including a colonel and a general, had been involved in human rights violations during the campaign; the abuses included rape, torture, arbitrary detention and murder.

Employment and wages declined in Mexican maquiladoras (tax-exempt assembly plants producing for export) during the 2000-2006 administration of former president Vicente Fox Quesada, according to a report by Huberto Juarez Nunez, an economics analyst at the Distinguished Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP). Employment in the sector is now at about 1.21 million, down some 135,000 from the number in 2000. The assembly plants are weak even in comparison to the rest of Mexican manufacturing, which grew only 0.6% in the first three months of this year; the maquiladoras declined by 0.1% in the same period.

Although the group says it disavows violence, more than one criminal case related to the San Diego Minutemen is now pending in the California courts. In one case now coming to trial, John Monti of Bellflower, a Los Angeles suburb, is charged with seven misdemeanors, including three counts each of battery and interfering with a person's civil rights, stemming from an incident linked to the Minutemen. Monti, who drove down to San Diego from the LA area for a Minutemen protest in November 2006, reportedly harassed, threatened and provoked a physical confrontation with a group of day laborers lined up at the intersection of Rancho Penasquitos Boulevard and Carmel Mountain Road. Monti told police the laborers threatened him when he started taking their photo with a digital camera. Jeff Schwilk, founder of the San Diego Minutemen, issued a statement saying Monti is not a member of any Minutemen groups. (KGTV, San Diego, Sept. 19)

On Sept. 15, some 100 people rallied outside the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, a privately-run immigration prison, to protest the treatment of immigration detainees. The rally culminated a week-long 105-mile march through six counties, organized by the Prison & Jail Project, a 15-year-old civil rights and prisoner rights advocacy group based in Americus, Georgia. The group's annual "Freedom Walk"—now in its 12th year—highlights racial and social inequities in the criminal justice system in rural southwest Georgia.

From the New York Times, Sept. 19:

World's Languages Dying Off Rapidly
Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks.

Some endangered languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.