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The New York Times - May 30, 2011

BERLIN — The German government on Monday announced plans to shut all of the nation’s nuclear power plants within the next 11 years, a sharp reversal for Chancellor Angela Merkel after the Japanese disaster at Fukushima caused an electoral backlash by voters opposed to reliance on nuclear energy.

The plan calls for phasing out all of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors — eight of which are offline — and expanding the use of renewable resources. The decision was based on recommendations of an expert commission appointed after the Japanese disaster to study an industry that generates 23 percent of Germany’s electricity.

“It’s definite — the latest end for the last three nuclear plants is 2022,” said Norbert Röttgen, the environment minister.

Reporting from Washington — The Obama administration on Tuesday lifted its moratorium on oil and gas drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, potentially blunting a serious political issue in the weeks before the midterm congressional election and signaling its confidence in newly tightened regulation. "There has been significant progress over the last few months in enhancing the safety of future drilling operations, and in addressing some of the weaknesses in spill containment and oil spill response," Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, said in announcing the moratorium's end. "More needs to be done," he said, "but we believe the risks of deepwater drilling have been reduced sufficiently to allow drilling under existing and new regulations." But the moratorium's end satisfied few players involved in offshore oil drilling issues. Some environmentalists criticized ending the drilling suspension while investigations and cleanup continued into the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which killed 11 people and unleashed the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your mobile phone. Text BREAKING to 52669.

Email|Link|Comments (0)Posted by Elizabeth Cooney July 20, 2009 08:53 PM As they prepare for a fall flu season that could bring two nasty strains, Boston health officials are studying whether school closings helped to stop the spread of swine flu during the spring. Dr. Anita Barry, director of the infectious disease bureau at the Boston Public Health Commission, said the agency is still analyzing case reports from private and public schools that closed after abseentism rates soared. They expect to have answers in a month that will tell them if closing schools broke the chain of transmission of swine flu, known by its scientific name H1N1. The Boston review continues even as an article appearing today in a special issue of the British medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases concludes that closing schools early in a pandemic can reduce the number of cases at its peak, but cases might rise later when they reopened, leading to the same totals had schools not been shuttered. This flattening in the number of cases was observed in epidemics dating from 1918 through 2008.