Latoyia notes

Slovak parliament gears up for new vote on EFSF

The vote will end a standoff over the fund, designed to stop the spread of its sovereign debt crisis, which came to a head on Tuesday when a fourth ruling party abstained from a confidence motion Radicova had tied to the EFSF’s expansion and toppled her cabinet.Slovakia’s 5.4 million people, who account for less than 2 percent of the currency bloc’s population and 1 percent of its total output, are the only members not to ratify the plan to increase the EFSF’s powers and fight the spreading debt crisis.Ratification by all 17 euro zone states is needed for the package to go live, and tiny Bratislava’s delay comes even as other leaders wrangle over further steps to protect euro zone banks if Greece defaults on its debts. [ID : nL5E7LC0L7]The governing parties were scheduled to meet in a cabinet session at 0900 GMT to agree on a law that will move a general election originally planned for 2014 to March 10 next year and meet the main demand Smer has made for its support of the issue.They plan to approve that measure when parliament resumes a session at 1300 GMT on Thursday and will later vote either later on Thursday or Friday morning on widening the powers of the EFSF package that euro zone leaders agreed in July.The agreement on Wednesday between Smer and the three governing parties — Radicova’s SDKU, the Christian Democrats, and the centrist Most-Hid — caused the euro and global stocks to rally, reversing a selloff that had gained speed on fears that the measure might not go through.The fourth coalition member, Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), caused the cabinet to collapse by opposing Tuesday’s confidence motion. Its leader, free-marketeer Richard Sulik, argued that as the euro zone’s second poorest member, Slovakia should not have to bail out richer countries like Greece.The package will boost the EFSF to 440 billion euros and give it the ability to buy sovereign bonds to give country’s relief from deteriorating markets, extend emergency lending to countries, and recapitalise banks.Slovakia’s portion in guarantees backing up the EFSF is 7.7 billion — about 11 percent of its annual output. Sulik says that is too much considering Slovak living standards are just 74 percent of EU average, below Greece’s 89 percent.Radicova’s cabinet will remain in office until a new administration is formed. Fico said he would stay in opposition until the March election, but none of the coalition officials have given any details on how they may proceed.Fico, whose Smer party is Slovakia’s most popular party by far with over 40 percent support, has long pledged support for the rescue fund but stayed out of Tuesday’s ratification as a tactical move to topple the government.President Ivan Gasparovic, responsible for appointing the next prime minister — if there is one by the election — has cut short a visit to Asia to deal with the government collapse and was due to return on Thursday. Radicova was due to meet Gasparovic on Friday.Slovaks have been split over the EFSF but latest opinion polls showed more people backed the plan to expand it rather than not.”This coin has two sides — when we are members of the euro zone, we need to take measures the way other countries adopted them, and not distance ourselves,” said Michal Sklenar, 28, a clerk.

Japan mayor wants reactor near Tokyo decommissioned

Only 10 of Japan’s 54 commercial reactors remain operating seven months after the March disaster triggered a crisis at Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, as safety fears have left local authorities wary of restarting reactors once they go offline for routine maintenance.But Tokaimura Mayor Tatsuya Murakami was the first local official to call for scrapping a reactor altogether, warning that, if the wave that struck his village on March 11 had been slightly higher, the Tokai Daini reactor could have posed far graver danger than the Fukushima plant, as 1 million people live within a 30-km radius and it is much closer to Tokyo.A Tokaimura official said Wednesday that Murakami made his plea at a meeting the day before with nuclear disaster minister Goshi Hosono.”Shouldn’t the plant be decommissioned?” he was quoted as telling the meeting.The 33-year old reactor still has seven years before its operating license expires and Tokyo Electric Power Co had been counting on the 1,100-megawatt facility to help it make up for the 4,700 megawatts of lost power from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant.Prime Minister Noda has said that offline reactors under maintenance should restart once local authorities confirm they are safe, taking a softer line than his predecessor Naoto Kan, who concluded in March that nuclear power was no longer worth the risk after the world’s worst nuclear accident in 25 years.Japan’s nuclear plant operators are preparing to report the results of reactor stress tests to the country’s nuclear watchdog, the first step in a lengthy process that would ultimately require local authorities’ approval for restarts.Since the onset of the Fukushima crisis, Murakami has called on Japan to better care for residents who were forced to leave Fukushima prefecture because of the crisis and to stop operating old reactors given lax safety rules and a lack of contingency plans.Murakami was Tokaimura’s mayor in 1999 when a criticality accident at a Tokaimura uranium reprocessing facility resulted in two deaths, the worst nuclear accident in Japan until the Fukushima crisis.Japan Atomic Power, in which Fukushima plant operator Tokyo Electric Power is a major shareholder, brought its sole reactor at the Tokai Daini plant in Ibaraki prefecture to a state of cold shutdown on March 15.