Check It Out on a bright, pleasant Sunday contains these excerpts

Will Hutton at The Observor interviews Paul Krugman about his anxiety for the future - and how Gordon Brown might have saved Britain from the blight that hangs over the West.

Will Hutton: You are warning that what happened to Japan could happen to the whole world. Japan's GDP at the end of this year will be no higher than it was in 1992 - 17 lost years. You are saying that this is an ongoing risk, certainly for the North Atlantic economy - maybe the world economy.

Paul Krugman: Yes. It's not that the risk of the Japan syndrome has receded very much. The risk of a full, all-out Great Depression - utter collapse of everything - has receded a lot in the past few months. But this first year of crisis has been far worse than anything that happened in Japan during the last decade, so in some sense we already have much worse than anything the Japanese went through. The risk for long stagnation is really high.

WH: So, one way to think about it is that self-reinforcing financial crises rooted in overstretched, overborrowed companies and governments in less developed countries - like those in Argentina and Indonesia, which were amazingly destructive in the 1990s and 2000s, but localised - are now playing out in the developed world?

PK: There are really two stories. One is the Japan-type story where you run out of room to cut interest rates. And the other is the Indonesia- and Argentina-type story where everything falls apart because of balance-sheet problems.

WH: So in a nutshell your story is ...

PK: The "Nipponisation" of the world economy with a bunch of "Argentinafications" playing a role in the acute crisis. But even after those are over, we have the Nipponisation of the world economy. And that's really something.

Daphne Eviatar at The Washington Independent writes that DOJ abortion violence lawsuits cratered under Bush.

"The fatal shooting allegedly by a known white supremacist at the Holocaust Memorial Museum Wednesday in Washington is the second murder apparently motivated by a hateful ideology that’s come to national attention in the last two weeks. James W. von Brunn, the 88-year-old suspect and convicted felon, was well-known for sending mass e-mail messages such as “It’s time to kill all the Jews” and promoting elaborate conspiracy theories on his Website. Similarly, Scott Roeder, the 51-year-old accused of murdering abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in his Wichita, Kans. church, had a long history of ties to a violent right-wing extremist group, had previously threatened another abortion provider, and had just that week vandalized Tiller’s clinic.

"Just as federal law specifically penalizes hate crimes, the law also makes it a federal crime to threaten or commit violence against abortion providers, or to vandalize their clinics. Yet as TWI revealed last week, the criminal law was not being enforced. The day after Dr. George Tiller was murdered, TWI obtained data revealing that under the Bush administration, criminal enforcement of the federal law designed to protect abortion providers and clinics had declined by more than 75 percent over the last eight years.

"But there’s also a civil component to that federal law, known as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act. That part of the law allows the attorney general to seek an injunction and compensatory damages for anyone who’s been harmed by any activity that violates the law. And it turns out that the Department of Justice over the last eight years didn’t use that part of the law to protect abortion providers, either.

"Under the FACE Act, in addition to criminal charges, the Justice Department can obtain damages and an injunction against anyone who “by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with” anyone who provides or receives reproductive health services. It also allows the government to prosecute and sue anyone who “intentionally damages or destroys the property” of an abortion clinic, because they are frequently vandalized as part of protesters’ intimidation tactics. The clinic where Dr. Tiller worked, for example, was repeatedly vandalized, including just days before his murder.

"Yet despite these broad powers that Congress granted the attorney general in 1994 to prevent and combat violence against abortion clinics and providers, the Bush administration almost never used them. From 2000 until 2008, during the eight years of the Bush administration, the Justice Department filed only one civil case under the FACE Act. From 1994 until 1999, in contrast, in just five years of the Clinton administration, the Department filed 17 civil cases under the FACE Act — in addition to its much heavier load of criminal cases that we’ve reported before."

Joshua Holland at AlterNet on right wing radicals and the eliminationist mind set.

"In April, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report (PDF) warning that the shifting political climate and tanking economy were spurring a resurgence of violent right-wing extremism (known as "terrorism" when applied to those holding other political views) in the United States.

"At the time, a number of right-wing commentators lambasted the report as a politically motivated attack on mainstream conservatism rather than what it was: an early warning on the dangers posed by a violent, fringe minority within their movement. Under pressure from GOP lawmakers, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano apologized for the report.

"But in the short weeks since, the department's warnings have proved prescient. An abortion provider who had been a frequent target of Fox News' bloviator Bill O'Reilly was gunned down during a church service in Kansas; a mentally disturbed man who believed the "tea-bagging" movement's contention that the Obama administration is destroying the American economy -- and who reportedly owned a number of firearms -- withdrew $85,000 from his bank account, said he was part of a plot to assassinate the president and disappeared (he was later captured in Las Vegas); and this week, a white supremacist who was deeply steeped in far-right conspiracism entered the U.S. Holocaust Museum and opened fire, killing a guard before being shot and wounded by security personnel.

"The three incidents share a common feature: All of these men thought they were serving a higher moral purpose, that is, defending their country from an insidious "enemy within" as defined by the far right -- a "baby-killer," the Jews who secretly control the world and a president who's been accused of being a Manchurian Candidate-style foreign agent bent on nothing less than the destruction of the American Way.

"David Neiwert, a veteran journalist who has covered violent right-wing groups for years, calls the worldview that informs this twisted sense of moral purpose "eliminationism." It's the belief that one's political opponents are not just wrongheaded, misinformed or even acting in bad faith. Eliminationism holds that they are a cancer on the body politic that must be excised -- either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination -- in order to protect the purity of the nation.

"As eliminationist rhetoric becomes increasingly mainstream within the American right -- fueled in large part by the wildly overheated discourse found on conservative blogs and talk radio -- Neiwert's new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, could not have come at a more important time. In it, Neiwert painstakingly details how the rise in eliminationism is a very real threat and points to the dangers of dismissing extreme rhetoric as merely a form of "entertainment."

"AlterNet recently caught up with Neiwert in Washington to discuss this troubling trend."

Dale Kieger, associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine writes about "Farmacology" or John Hopkins researchers investigating a troubling potential source of resistant pathogens in American industrial farming with its use of antibiotics in the animals' food supply.

"Ellen Silbergeld, Eng '72 (PhD), recalls that she did not want to go to the seminar. She was a professor of epidemiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1999 when her department's chairman needed an audience for the seminar's presenter, a candidate for a faculty position. Silbergeld recalls the chairman saying, "Please, just sit in the room. You can come to lunch." So she sat in the room, and something caught her attention. The seminar was on hospital-acquired infections, but the presenter mentioned in passing that some drug-resistant infections came from food. That seemed odd. Silbergeld knew you could pick up Salmonella from, say, tainted chicken salad. But how would that Salmonella have become resistant to antibiotics? She turned to a colleague and asked. Because, he said, factory chicken farms routinely feed antibiotics to their flocks, to accelerate growth, and the drugs generate resistance.

"Ten years later, Silbergeld, now a professor of environmental health sciences at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, is one of several researchers at Johns Hopkins and around the world assembling evidence that the industrial farming of chickens, pigs, and cattle is cultivating more than poultry and livestock — it's cultivating bacteria that medicine is losing the ability to fight. Antimicrobial drugs, including antibiotics like penicillin, ciprofloxacin, and methicillin, kill pathogenic bacteria. But they simultaneously drive the resistance that is bacteria's defense, especially when administered in low, subtherapeutic doses. Scientists estimate that 50 percent to 80 percent of all antimicrobials in the United States are not used by doctors to treat sick people or animals but are added to farm animal feed, mostly in such subtherapeutic dosages. Public health researchers like Silbergeld are convinced that this nontherapeutic use of antimicrobials is building dangerous genetic reservoirs of resistance. If they are right, industrial agriculture is fostering and dispersing drug-resistant bacteria that impair medicine's ability to protect the public from them.

"We have this practice of permitting the addition of almost any antibiotic that you can think of to animal feed, for no therapeutic purpose, under conditions that absolutely favor the rise of resistance. We have no controls or management of the wastes. Our food safety system is a shambles. This is a situation that is widely recognized by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and by others, and nothing happens! It's astounding to me!"

"Silbergeld...support(s) the use of drugs to treat sick animals but believe(s) all antibiotics should be banned from animal feeds. They have followed the debate over cefquinome, a fourth-generation cephalosporin antibiotic. A Delaware company, InterVet Inc., wants FDA approval to use cefquinome to treat bovine respiratory disease. But the antibiotic is chemically related to cefepime, one of the few remaining options for treating deadly infections in cancer patients. Scientists fear that if pathogens develop resistance to cefquinome, that resistance could quickly ruin cefepime for human use. The American Medical Association, several other health groups, and the FDA's own advisory group have all urged the agency to reject the drug for use on farm animals, but it has yet to do so. Silbergeld is appalled.

" 'Sometimes I think we're such a dumb species, we don't deserve to survive on this planet,' she says. 'I mean, how many times do we have to do this?' "

William John Cox writes at Consortium News about computer piloting and the Air France crash.

"How the Air France Flight 447’s Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean remains a mystery, but what is known is that Airbus’ heavy reliance on computerized piloting has a history of some bizarre or unexplained crashes when the technology failed, misread the circumstances, or complicated efforts by human pilots to react to an emergency.

"Underwritten by the governments of England, France and Germany, the Airbus was intended to be the first mass-produced “fly-by-wire” (FBW) airliner.

"Both Boeing and Airbus depend upon FBW technology in aircraft design; however, there are fundamental differences. Basically, a pilot can override the computer in a Boeing aircraft, while Airbus pilots are not allowed to second guess the flight control computer.

"Boeing pilots also receive greater visual feedback from control surfaces by relying upon a conventional control yoke, while Airbus pilots use a small joystick.

"A Boeing pilot can turn the airplane upside down, release the controls and the plane will right itself. If an Airbus pilot wants to lose lift and stall to avoid a midair crash and the computer decides that acceleration and a climb is better, the pilot simply hangs on for the ride.

"Only if all electronic systems fail does the Airbus default into a “manual backup” mode allowing limited use of basic mechanical systems while the pilots attempt to determine the cause of the electrical and computer failure.

"The flight crew of US Airways Flight 1549 displayed amazing professional competence after the engines of their Airbus A320 automatically shut down after striking a flock of birds shortly after takeoff on Jan. 15, 2009. The crew was able to maintain control of the aircraft and land in the Hudson River without loss of life.

"Pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III has become a national hero; however, there remains a question whether the Airbus flight control system unnecessarily shut down both engines, whereas a Boeing aircraft engines might have chewed up the birds and kept flying.

"When the copilot, Jeffrey B. Skiles was asked by National Transportation Safety Board investigators how he liked the Airbus, he replied that he liked it “right up until the accident.”

"Nonetheless, as we jet into a future that will increasingly rely on flight control computers to fly commercial airplanes, I believe it is safe to say that most of us would prefer to have a “Sully” in the captain’s seat instead of a robot."