‪Last Sunday [20 September] a serving General in the British Army publicly threatened mutiny and a possible coup if Jeremy Corbyn were to be elected Prime Minister and attempted to carry through his policies. He was mildly rebuked by the Ministry of Defence.

‪The General is being effectively backed by Hilary Benn, reappointed Shadow Foreign Secretary by Corbyn. Benn junior is threatening to vote for bombing Syria and is strongly opposed to ditching nuclear weapons. He said thgis on a Sunday morning TV show. (poor Tony who, in the course of a discussion on the Miliband sons, confessed: 'I have a similar problem'. He wasn't referring to his radical daughter Melissa). As if this was not bad enough, on that same day, Sadiq Khan, Labour's venal candidate for Mayor of London has accused Corbyn/ McDonnell of inciting anti-semitism and racism. According to the Daily Mail:' "New Labour Party leaders Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were last night sensationally accused of risking inciting terrorist and anti-Semitic attacks in London. More

After spending some $1.5 million and more than five years on developing strategies to answer the question of increases of cancer near nuclear facilities, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) last week reported that they would not continue with the process. They would knock it on the head [1].

This poisoned chalice has been passed between the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the NRC since 2009 when public and political pressure was brought to bear on the USNRC to update a 1990 study of the issue, a study which was widely seen by the public to be a whitewash. More

Last week the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) published their annual census of the nation’s prison population. After over three decades of uninterrupted yearly increases, 2014 was the fourth year in the last five in which the total number of people in Federal and state prisons fell. The figure declined from 1,576,950 to 1,561,525, a drop of about 1%. The some 700,000 people held in local jails were not included in these stats.

This news from the BJS will please those who see opportunity in the increasing acknowledgement of mass incarceration in the political sphere. Proclamations by the President, Hillary Clinton as well as statements by arch-conservative forces as diverse as Rand Paul, Newt Gingrich and the Koch brothers have placed criminal justice on the electoral agenda. In 2012 no candidate made even passing mention of the two million people in the US behind bars. For anyone seeking to reverse the debacle of the US’ incarceration obsession, any decrease in the number of people behind bars is welcome. Yet a closer look at the BJS stats shows that reform remains miniscule. The overall landscape reflects the ongoing tension between the continuity of mass incarceration and the need for change. The data actually remind us that the fate of the criminal justice system has yet to be decided. More