Long castigated by locals and environmental groups for its flawed approach to nuclear safety, Japan’s slack attitude towards this most dangerous of energies has caused yet another incident. Four died and seven were injured when a cooling pipe burst at the Kansai Electric Power facility in Mihama, Fukui prefecture.

Quite remarkably the pipe had not been thoroughly checked since the power station came on stream back in 1976. It emerges that the pipe’s thickness was just 1.6mm, far below the suggested 10mm.

“Police are investigating the company on suspicion of corporate negligence resulting in death,” said police spokesman Fuminaga Miyamoto in the wake of the accident.

The four deaths represents the worst death toll in Japan caused by nuclear power stations though there have been too many other close shaves among its 52 nuclear plants which produce 34% of the nation’s electricity. Japan is the second largest economy in the world after the US. This February eight nuclear workers were exposed to low-level radiation when they were accidentally sprayed with contaminated water. In 1999 two died at a nuclear-fuel reprocessing facility in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture. Six months later a fire started in the cooling water area of Onagawara nuclear power plant. The firemen called in were not told of the radioactive danger they faced and some were contaminated.

At the time, residents in the vicinity were ordered to evacuate to avoid possible exposure to radiation. The nation’s largest power provider, Tokyo Electric, temporarily closed its 17 nuclear facilities two years ago as it admitted it had hidden cracks for the past 15 years, falsifying reports. In 1995 a serious accident at the Monju fast breeder reactor led to its shut down.

In 1991, a broken steam-generator at the same Mihama facility as this week’s accident resulted in 55 tonnes of radioactive water leaking.

Much to the ire of vast swathes of the population the government wants to build another five nuclear plants by 2010 and moreover it wants to introduce the controversial mixed oxide fuel to 18 or 19 plants by the same date. The plutonium-uranium mixed fuel can be used to make nuclear weapons.

The public have long been skeptical of the safety standards at nuclear facilities. And with good reason, many of them are creaking. Of the 52 currently in operation 20 started operating in the 1970s. Cracks have been reported in numerous pipes and reactor walls too.

Both the state and the power companies are looking to extend the reactor serviced life of nuclear plants from the standard 30/40 years to 60. Surely, Monday’s nasty accident should serve as a warning that such prolonging tactics will only make another ‘Chernobyl’ only a matter of time.

“Japan is heavily reliant on dangerous nuclear power for its electricity. While the government recklessly backs the nuclear industry come what may, public opposition to nuclear power is growing due the appalling safety record of the industry,” Greenpeace noted in a statement this week. The statement concluded: “A suitable response to these deaths would be the ditching of the dangerous, expensive and polluting menace of nuclear power in favour of alternative energy sources.”

North America is close to finally having its first unionized Wal-Mart store. A provincial labour board granted employees at a store in Quebec, Canada a union certification this week. Wal-Mart will no doubt try and contest the ruling but employees are looking to table collective-agreement proposals by next month.

“My God, I’m very happy and very proud of those workers. They’re trailblazers,” said Marie-Josée Lemieux, president of Local 503 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. “There was a lot of pressure on their shoulders.“

Ms Lemieux said employees at present don’t have standard, formal wage scales, need better benefits and don’t have set schedules so they are too often required to work with little notice.

Another outlet in Ontario did manage to get certification briefly back in 1997 but was unable to take it further before big, bad Wal-Mart quashed the movement. Quebec’s legal set up is deemed more favourable to employees and the retail giant will struggle to overturn the movement.

A breakthrough would have a significant impact on some of the 1.3 million employees working in 4,500 Wal-Mart stores worldwide, none of which are unionized. Wal-Mart is the US’ largest private employer. However, the canny Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, could eradicate the problem by simply shutting this one outlet — a classic Machine move.

Regardless, of what happens in Canada, there is still no hope for the thousands of factory workers in China, paid peanuts and working up to 100 hours a week for the mighty retail chain which sources more than $16 billion of products a year from the mainland. There is a notional minimum wage in China of around 30 cents an hour, which is barely enough to subsist on. However Wal-Mart only pays around 13 cents an hour.

Working for Wal-Mart spreads poverty. At the end of the day Chinese workers often return “home” to a cramped dorm room sharing metal bunk beds with 16 other people. At most, workers are allowed outside of certain factories for just one and one half hours a day. Otherwise they are locked in.

Before entering certain factories, management confiscates the identification documents of each worker. Workers needing the toilet have to hurry. If they are way from their workstation for more than eight minutes they receive a punitive fine. Still, at least the avaricious US consumer gets those “low, low prices”. The little red email promises to identify as many of the secret Wal-Mart factories on the mainland as possible in the coming months.

Torture gets results. Torture works. Torture rocks! That is the message from both sides of the Atlantic this week. The British appeal court judges approved a measure permitting torture derived evidence in court so long as the torture is not carried out by British citizens.

10 terror suspects held without charge in what some have dubbed “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay” had their appeals turned down by the court.

The court said the home secretary was right to hold the men in prisons and psychiatric hospital and the body that suggested the internments, the special immigration appeal commission acted correctly, the court ruled. Those behind bars are now contemplating taking their case to the House of Lords.

Amnesty International blasted the decision saying the judges had given a“green light for torture". It said:“The rule of law and human rights have become casualties of the measures taken in the aftermath of September 11. This judgment is an aberration, morally and legally.”

The court’s verdict follows hot on the heels of the description by three British men recently released from Guantanamo Bay who after being tortured admitted to having met Osama bin Laden, even though they had cast iron alibis, backed up by the British security services, that they were in the UK at the alleged time of the meeting with America’s most wanted individual.

Ellie Smith, a human rights lawyer at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, said:“It is really dangerous and very worrying that any court is willing to use any evidence that has been obtained through use of torture or ill treatment.”

The decision to allow evidence from foreign torture was tantamount to contracting out the torture.“We have seen recent instances where the US forces have sent people to other countries for the purpose of extracting evidence,” she added.

Gareth Peirce, solicitor for eight of the condemned men, said:“This is a terrifying judgment. It shows we have completely lost our way in this country, morally and legally.”

The men are all basically screwed under that pernicious veil of ‘national security’ — detained indefinitely under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 with most of the evidence against them kept secret ‘in the interests of national security’.

The accused went to court claiming that any evidence gathered by means of torture of “morally repugnant”. The judges threw it out though saying that torture evidence could be used in a British court so long as the state had not itself“procured” it or“connived” at it.

Meanwhile across the Pond, a Hollywood blockbuster starring Denzel Washington seeks to justify the use of terrorism for this age of lies that we live in. It goes without saying that the film comes from Rupert ‘Fair and Balanced’ Murdoch’s Fox stable.

Denzel Washington is ‘Man on Fire’ – a former military man who messes up guarding a kid who is kidnapped and then seemingly bumped off. Enraged Denzel, our hero, hits the warpath in this Tony Scott film torturing and killing his way across Mexico and lo and behold his brutal method pays off as the girl is found alive

Along the way Mr Washington, in a bid to get information on the main kidnapper, chops off someone’s fingers, blows someone else up by inserting plastic explosives up the unfortunate’s anus and shoots off another guy’s hand with a shotgun, having blindfolded and duct-taped them all. However, throughout he is portrayed as the American hero whose torture methods serve a meaningful purpose: the end justifies the means "a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do". This is the messed up world we live in. Geneva Convention, Smeneva Convention.

Much of the mainstream media has been musing on just who Osama would like to see win this November’s US presidential election. At the little red email we are sure that Enemy Number One would like nothing better than another four years of Dubya to galvanise massive support from Muslims everywhere. The more Bush kills in the Middle East, the more converts there are to al Qaeda. We refer you back to that rather excellent game, September 12th, on converting locals to terrorists.

Agence France Presse quoted a Pakistani intelligence source this week saying a series of attacks are planned to rally the US around the president in time for the elections.

“The network was looking to strike a major blow ahead of the elections. Al-Qaeda was looking to strike in the United States or its chief allies Great Britain and Pakistan,” said the official. “The period before the US presidential elections was very critical.”

Meanwhile Time quoted someone from the Department of Fear … errm Homeland Security explaining how intelligence agencies have “a number of times picked up information that Al Qaeda wants to attack us before the election, and some of the communications attribute that desire to Osama Bin Laden.”

The well read CIA officer Michael Scheuer who writes under the pseudonym “Anonymous” told the Guardian that Al Qaeda couldn’t be happier with the Bush administration which is“taking the US in exactly the direction Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy.”

’I’m very sure they can’t have a better administration for them than the one they have now,’ he said. ’One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president.’

Asia Times reporter and commentator Pepe Escobar argued earlier this year that Al Qaeda wants President Bush to remain in office because he has become such a lightning rod for many Muslims that his reelection would help the terror group continue to raise funds and new recruits.

The ‘infidel’ US military machine now rules over more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq – something that infuriates many, as much as the US’ continual overt support of Israel.

“Al-Qaeda wants the Iraq occupation to be prolonged, with or without a puppet government: there could not be a better advertisement for rallying Muslims against the arrogance of the West,” noted Escobar. “Al-Qaeda’s and the Bush administration’s future are interlocked anyway.”