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Last week I watched ABC’s new show, “The Secret Millionaire,” which places millionaires in low-income communities, strips them of all their worldly possessions and asks them to covertly find worthy organizations with which to volunteer and eventually to make a sizable donation to. I cried.
I cried not for the organizations that received the surprise monetary gifts, but for the millionaire who comes to realize, in the end, that the power of generosity can make you giddy.
I then went online and watched all three episodes available. It was the same storyline every

This week as we have watched the nuclear and humanitarian crisis unfold in Japan, along with the democratic uprisings in the Middle East and Libya, it is increasingly evident just how important multi-lateral engagement has become. We are an interconnected world; no country can afford to practice “cowboy politics” and go it alone. Since 1945, the United Nations has been the vehicle through which we ensure that national sovereignty, democracy and human rights — the values on which the UN was founded — are respected and enforced throughout the world.
Yet, the Majority party seems determined to withdraw the

People around the world have marveled at the lack of mass-looting in Japan among the survivors of the recent earthquake and tsunami. Many people are still asking: Why was there no mass-looting?
People are undoubtedly comparing the incident in Japan with other natural disasters in the world when people under similar circumstances did loot. And they didn’t just loot food or necessities, but big screen TVs and other “must have” household appliances.
Some plausible reasons for looting are: panic, greed, and because everyone else is doing

With a nuclear crisis ongoing it Japan, it may comfort you to know that our government has plans to keep America’s nuclear waste safe for a million years.
What a relief! Good to know that, unlike in Japan, America’s rulers have thought this stuff through.
Yes, the Energy Department says that it can keep all the waste from the nation’s 104 nuclear power plans, plus all the waste from nuclear weapons, safely stored under Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for one million years. Within that window, they have it broken down into two parts. For the first 10,000 years, the dose limit to “the public” from the stored waste is not supposed to exceed 15millirem per year of radiation. Then from 10,000 to a million years out, the dose to “the public” can go up to 100millirem per

“Barn’s burnt down — now I can see the moon.”
This evocative Haiku written by Mizuta Masahide, a 17th century Japanese poet and samurai, has spoken to me deeply since I adopted my treasured son Neal, who has taught me the gifts of leading a purpose-driven life. I aspire each day to be of service to those, like my family, who live with autism and “special needs.” In fact, I founded The Miracle Project so others could come to “see the moon” each day by being Miracle Minded.
My heart is full as I witness the courage, grace, cooperation and compassion at the core of our Japanese brothers and sisters’ culture.
In this unimaginable moment of crisis, we hear nothing about looting food or material goods in order to survive, but rather, we learn one story after another about Japanese citizens’ instinct to share each bit of food, shelter and clothing with in those in their midst, be they family, stranger, elder or infirmed.
How extraordinary to witness sharing, compassion, generosity, connection, understanding, patience, grace and unconditional love in the most desperate of times. What a blessing to learn of the boundlessness of the human spirit in moments of scarcity as well as abundance.
When disaster strikes and we are brought to our knees, I believe we come to know who we are and what we are made

Recent events in Japan have touched a raw nerve across the world. Nuclear meltdowns. Collapsed buildings. Traumatic images of waves crashing through towns and flattening the hopes of thousands are seared into our collective

When the apocalyptic cloud erupted over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world woke up to the dawn of the nuclear age. Today, if we survey the landscape of nuclear development across the planet, we see that the destructive impacts of the technology are often paired with the dehumanizing impacts of environmental racism.
At every point in the nuclear production chain, the industry has sloughed a disproportionate share of the risk on marginalized communities, from native peoples in the Southwest United States to the Australian outback. While the rest of the world hums along with nuclear power, many of these communities have fought a losing battle against the standard corporate line that technological advancements have led to seamless safety.
Last week in South Africa, environmental activists recharged their anti-nuclear campaign in light of the metastasizing disaster in Japan.
Today, in the shadow of Fukushima, the African continent’s one nuclear power plant, near Cape Town, is no longer a symbol of South Africa’s relative industrial advancement. Rather, it is an emblem of a ruthless pursuit of new fuel at the public’s

Japan’s Fukushima disaster, stoking fears we’ve tried to bury since James Bridges’s 1971 epic “The China Syndrome,” is a sobering reminder of the fragility of our planet’s energy sources. As if on cue, 24-hour cable news studios were filled with experts who lamented our reliance on unsafe nuclear power and dirty fossil fuels. And we, the American people, wrung our hands, wondering why “they” aren’t doing anything to fix the problem.
The pattern repeats itself all too often: crisis, followed by a spike in consumer interest in renewable energy and a rapid return to normal, as we hop into our big cars and laze around our energy-guzzling

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Update on Japan’s nuke crisis: Tap water warning lifted for Tokyo infants, but spreading elsewhere; Workers at stricken plant hospitalized for radiation exposure; Nukes now less popular in the US (for some reason); King crab invasion at the South Pole; PLUS: Japanese villages struggle to maintain tradition amidst disaster… All that and more in today’s Green News Report!…
Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.
IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): Head exploder: GOPer wants creationism taught in school; WorldWaterDay: Which nations are most at risk?; BP Oil Disaster: Pipe piece caused blowout preventer failure; Google Maps now displaying EV charging stations; GA tree farm re-establishing American Chestnut; USDA gives GM crops boost over organics; Road salt killing Twin Cities’ lakes; EU Chief: French GM maize ban illegal; HUGE lease sale for WY coal; Lead, chemicals taint some urban gardens; EPA, DOJ sue MI’s largest coal plant; Canada is getting warmer: study …

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

We live in a small, media-connected world, where any disastrous event happening anywhere may affect us all, at least psychologically. On the one hand, we need to be informed, so that we can help wherever possible and learn lessons that may prevent subsequent disasters. On the other hand, we need to be careful not to end up with internal emotional disasters stemming from empathy.
Coping well with disaster stress helps us all stay emotionally afloat in the anxiety-provoking sea of uncertainty generated by tragic events. We need to learn skills for coping with our feelings of sadness, anger and terror evoked by tragedies like those in Fukushima, Katrina and Haiti, so that we rise to these occasions rather than collapse into them.
Most importantly, we need to take some kind of action, no matter how small, in response to these

I’ve always been someone who looks for the underlying message in just about anything and everything that happens in my life. I keep all the wonderful quotes and sayings passed down from family and friends because on some level, I believe they make my ordinary life feel a little more meaningful and special.
Last week I was getting ready to go to Los Angeles for several meetings the next day when a friend called and said she was passing through Montecito on her way home to Carmel. I went and met her for a quick hello in the lower village, and as I was driving back to get my things for LA, I found myself reading a bumper sticker on the car in front of me.
It said, “The best things in life aren’t things.”
I remember thinking in that moment, “Isn’t that the truth!” and I was rather surprised that I had never heard that quote

Anxiously reading the headlines about Japan’s unfolding nuclear crisis in the wake of last week’s earthquake and tsunami, I’ve been looking around for effective ways to help the relief effort.
A benefit auction starting March 24th offers a great way to send much-needed funds to Global Giving’s Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund, a grassroots organization that is well-equipped to deploy supplies and aid across the country. Handmade for Japan, which was organized just one day after the earthquake on March 12th by Ayumi Horie, Kathryn Pombriant Manzella and Ai Kanazawa, will raise money for Global Giving with an eBay auction featuring the work of artists from the US and Japan. Fittingly, the emphasis is on ceramics. The auction begins Thursday, March 24th, 8pm and runs through Sunday, March 27th, 8

People! Beloveds! Glenn Beck is absolutely right.
There is indeed manifest glory all around! There is divine meaning, electric significance, cosmic text messaging blasting forth this very instant from all over the world, nay the universe, both negative and positive, radiant and dangerous, Shiva and Shakti, all whirling in a great cosmic dance, from parking space to porn star, Libyan uprising to nuclear meltdown, Wisconsin insult to Indian holi festival to the very first gasping, sputtering breath of Spring.
I am delighted to share this wisdom, this sacred thrust and thrum, with the infamous Glenn Beck! I had no idea the renowned right-wing fudgeball was, like me, also a burgeoning neo-pagan tantrika with a mystical, metaorgasmic, well-caffeinated alchemist edge, studying and practicing and soaking in the universal Spanda, the eternal vibrational wisdom of the ancients.
Is it not amazing? I had no idea the so-called “King of All Semicoherence,” the same portly n’ pungent pundit who recently claimed on his radio show, in some sort of semi-garbled nonsensical half-statement, that the Japan earthquake/tsunami and subsequent nuke meltdown are very likely “a message from God,” and we’d best “buckle up” because we’re in for “a very bumpy ride” because of — well, I’m not sure what. The Clean Air Act? Abortion? George Soros? Our dependence on Japan for some vital iPad 2 components?
Doesn’t

The massive tremors and ensuing tsunami that devastated Japan earlier this month was an order of magnitude more destructive than anything that has hit the continental Unites States in historical times. But seismologists say that a similar event could well strike here. In fact, it’s only a matter of time. And compared to Japan, we’re far less prepared to deal with the consequences.
The danger zone is not

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport.
The ‘GNR’ is also now available on your cell phone via Stitcher Radio’s mobile app!.
IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Not out of the woods yet: Japan’s nuclear and humanitarian crisis continues as electricity returns to the Fukushima nuclear plant which remains precariously on edge while radiation poisoning is found in milk, vegetables and sea water — but Japan’s wind farms come to the rescue and new nuke reviews are set for US plants; PLUS: Surprise! A new 100-mile oil slick spotted in the Gulf of Mexico … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.
IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): New tech could make desalination portable, cheaper; Delay in coal plant rules cost thousands of lives; Record rains hit Philipines, cause more flooding in Australia; German town where recycling really pays; US Chamber of Commerce: “The gang that couldn’t lobby straight”; New UK plastic recycling plant takes all sorts; How not to change a climate skeptic’s mind; Shipwreck threatens island’s penguins; Wolves could be de-listed; King Crabs Invade Antarctica for First Time in 40 Million Years …

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

Nuclear power is not evil; it’s the devil. Evil of our own making can be overcome. The devil cannot be overcome, not even if we ourselves conjure him into being. This is why staking our future on nuclear power is a pact with the devil.
Spokesmen for the nuclear lobby claim nuclear reactors are

In this special blog, I’ll share with you what my 30-year survey of the most powerful, little known and guaranteed health interventions has revealed.
There is no pill you can swallow, food you can buy, nor gizmo that confers complete protection from pervasive toxicity, skewed societal consensus or invisible radiation. There’s no place you can go, nowhere you can hide and no authority — scientific, medical or spiritual — who can help you to escape what we’ve all created (or allowed to happen) here on planet Earth. Whether you are rich, poor, young, old, sick, healthy, right or left, no health manna, rural organic garden, island dwelling, nor spiritual belief can give you, me or us an out if we keep on screwing up.
Unless we turn around and heal the disconnect that allows us to misguidedly pursue personal goals, without sufficient care for the health of our society and the earth, than it’s likely our health problems will go from bad to

Faith gives no straight answer to the question of why. Should we keep asking anyway?
Amid the first raw shock of the catastrophe in Japan, why has come forth as a cry from the heart. Many people of faith struggle to respond. Some Christians may trot out

The tragic remains of the Japanese coastal towns devastated by the recent earthquake and tsunami seem to offer themselves up to augurs for reading, like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup once the liquid is drained. Some see a vengeful God, punishing mankind for various sins. Others see the hubris of man believing that he can build nuclear reactors to withstand nature, the ultimate big bad wolf. I believe these readings are much like a Rorschach test of the reader’s

It is natural, when faced with great suffering, to ask the question, “Why?” As we do, even those who are only nominally religious wonder if the tragedy is not an act of God, a punishment for our sins.
On Monday, Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, was quoted as saying, “I think (the disaster in Japan) is tembatsu.” Tembatsu is a Japanese term that means “divine punishment.” His remarks are reminiscent of the 2005 comments of the then New Orleans’ mayor Ray Nagin, following Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of his city. At the time he noted, “Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane.” Both governor Ishihara’s and Mayor Nagin’s saw the disaster as punishment for human sin.
We often suggest the same when we’re dealing with our own individual suffering. A woman in the church I serve

Speaking as an energetic/spiritual analogy, the idea of trying to get power by harnessing a very dangerous source can be problematic. Right now there’s a meltdown going on at the nuclear facility in Japan. The top of one of the buildings that houses the reactor blew off the structure. I sometimes imagine how a world event might be allegorical in my life or the lives of

As Japan has now raised its nuclear alert level to 5 over on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, the Japanese government is surely assessing the range of scenarios that could develop as a result of its and TEPCO’s attempts to prevent a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant. Information is unreliable and the situation remains fluid. This article examines three potential scenarios and their implications.
1. A meltdown is avoided and radiation leaks stay at acceptable levels.
This looked increasingly unlikely last week, however attempts to begin to cool the fuel rods and connect the plant to the power grid appear to have been

Much has been written about the Japanese earthquake and the killing tsunami. Nuclear crisis has become a permanent fixture on global headline news given the magnanimity of the situation. There is, however, little mention of things that other nations can learn from this tragedy. It is important to learn lessons as disasters can strike any nation and at any time.

Normally, I begin these articles with a few words on the most amusing idiocies of the week, served up by both the political world and the media universe. This week, however, we have two very serious subjects to tackle (although I will slip a little media-bashing in at the end, I promise) — our next war, and the nuclear crisis in Japan.
It looks like we’re about to enter our next war, which could begin literally at any moment (the bombs have not yet begun to fall, as I write this). We’re already militarily involved with Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, so Libya will actually be the fifth country America’s military will be engaged with. Whether this will turn out to be a good idea or not is an open question, but within the next day or so we’ll be patrolling the “no-fly” zone, with United Nations