Suzanne Humphries, MD, speaking on Polio at the Association of Natural Health Conference

VacTruth | Feb 15, 2013 |  CHANNEL

Medical Doctor Susan Humphries speaks on Polio at the Association of Natural Health Conference.

http://drsuzanne.net
http://vaccinationcouncil.org
http://disolvingillusions.com
http://vactruth.com

8 killed, 18 missing in Washington state landslide

Officials survey a large mudslide in this handout photo
provided by the Washington State Police near Oso,
Washington March 22, 2014. (Reuters / Washington State
Police / Handout via Reuters)

RT | Mar 23, 2014

A devastating mudslide in the state of Washington has killed at least eight people. Eighteen others are missing as houses were buried under rubble. The incident prompted the evacuation of a nearby town in case of a “potentially catastrophic flood event.”

The 45-meter-long landslide in the northwest of Washington state has decimated the area, swallowing six houses, blocking a main road and damming a river.

The mudslide struck near the town of Oso, about 90km north of Seattle at 11:00 am local time (18:00 GMT) on Saturday. The first rescuers on the scene said they could hear people screaming for help under the wreckage.

Members of a swift water rescue team look on as an
ambulance drives past after a large mudslide blocked
Highway 530 near Oso, Washington March 22,
2014. (Reuters / Jason Redmond)

The local authorities initially reported that two people had been killed in the incident, but it later emerged that one man died in hospital of his injuries. Three more people, including a six-month-old boy are currently in critical condition at Harborview Medical Center. Rescuers continue to search for any sign of survivors.

The governor of Washington State, Jay Inslee, tweeted his condolences to the families affected by the landslide.

Such a tragedy in Oso. On behalf of all Washingtonians, my condolences to the families who lost loved ones in Snohomish Co. mudslide today.
— Governor Inslee (@GovInslee) March 22, 2014

"We have people who are yelling for our help, and we are going to take extreme risks," said Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots at a news briefing.

Debris from the mudslide has dammed the Stillaguamish River, which is threating to flood low-lying areas nearby. Authorities have told residents and businesses in the towns of Oso and Stanwood to seek higher ground until Sunday morning.

A spokesperson for Snohomish County told local newspaper, The Herald, that the landslide had created conditions for a “catastrophic flood event.”

State geologists are now working on finding the cause of the landslide. At present local authorities believe that the principle cause of the incident was the large amount of rainfall the region has received this month.

Officials survey a large mudslide in this handout photo provided by the
Washington State Police near Oso, Washington March 22, 2014. (Reuters / Washington
State Police / Handout via Reuters)

Fracking Alert: 14 earthquakes recorded in Oklahoma since Friday

© Leonard Observatory/Google Maps
Quakes this year in Oklahoma

Sott.net | Mar 22, 2014 | Source

The U.S. Geological Survey has recorded 14 earthquakes in Oklahoma since about 9:30 p.m. Friday, the largest being a magnitude 4.0.

The 4.0 magnitude quake was recorded at 10:05 p.m. Friday about seven miles south of Langston. Three other quakes of magnitude 2.9, 3.0 and 3.3 were recorded Saturday afternoon in the Medford area.

The other quakes ranged from magnitude 2.4 to 2.9. No injuries or damage are reported.

Geologists say earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 to 3.0 are generally the smallest felt by humans.

Scientists are studying why earthquake activity has increased in Oklahoma and whether it is connected to wastewater disposal related to oil and gas production -- but have found no answers.

The energy industry denies that the method is to blame for the increased seismic activity.

Top Science Advisor Warned In 1971 that a New Ice Age Was an Imminent Threat

© unknown

Washington's Blog | Mar 23, 2014

Obama’s Science Advisor Has Been “Catastrophizing” For 43 Years 

In the 1970s, many American scientists were terrified of an imminent ice age.   Obama’s top science advisor – John Holdren – was one of them.

Holdren and some other scientists proposed pouring soot over the arctic to melt the ice cap and so prevent the dreaded ice age.

Holdren warned of dire consequences if mankind did not rally on an emergency basis to stop the coming ice age.

New York Times science columnist John Tierney noted in 2009:

In 1971, long before Dr. Holdren came President Obama’s science adviser, in an essay [titled] “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide,” Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, warned of a coming ice age.

They certainly weren’t the only scientists in the 1970s to warn of a coming ice age, but I can’t think of any others who were so creative in their catastrophizing. Although they noted that the greenhouse effect from rising emissions of carbon dioxide emissions could cause future warming of the planet, they concluded from the mid-century cooling trend that the consequences of human activities (like industrial soot, dust from farms, jet exhaust, urbanization and deforestation) were more likely to first cause an ice age. Dr. Holdren and Dr. Ehrlich wrote:

The effects of a new ice age on agriculture and the supportability of large human populations scarcely need elaboration here. Even more dramatic results are possible, however; for instance, a sudden outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap, induced by added weight, could generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.

Housing: One Chart Says it All

Counterpunch.org | Mar 21, 2014 | Mike Whitney

Get a load of this chart from DataQuick’s National Home Sales Snapshot. It’ll tell you everything need to know about housing.

(Note: MSA=metropolitan statistical area) As you can see, prices are flatlining or drifting lower while sales are sinking like a stone. That’s the whole ball of wax, isn’t it?

Sure, sales will increase in the spring (as they always do), but judging by the sharp dropoff in last year’s hottest markets, this could be the crappiest spring selling season since the crash.

Why?

Because prices are too high, rates are too high, “organic” demand is too weak, credit is too tight, and the pool of potential buyers has shrunk to the size of a walnut, that’s why.

The banks have reduced the percentage of distressed homes (foreclosures and short sales) on the market to roughly 11 percent from 59 percent in 2009. Fewer distressed homes mean higher prices, but higher prices mean fewer sales. It’s a trade-off. The banks get their money, but the market goes to hell. That’s how it works. According to most estimates, there are roughly 4.5 million homes in some stage of foreclosure. That means that –at the present pace–we should get through this Housing Depression a few weeks before Judgment Day. But don’t hold me to that.

Did you catch this gem on Bloomberg last week? It’s about the big private equity guys exiting the market. Take a look:

“Blackstone Group LP is slowing its purchases of houses to rent amid soaring prices after a buying binge made it the biggest U.S. single-family home landlord. Blackstone’s acquisition pace has declined 70 percent from its peak last year, when the private equity firm was spending more than $100 million a week on properties, said Jonathan Gray, global head of real estate for the New York-based firm…

“The institutional wave has passed,” Gray, who oversees almost $80 billion in property investments, said in a telephone interview. ‘It’s at a much lower level than it was 12 or 24 months ago.’

Private-equity firms, hedge funds, real estate investment trusts and other institutional investors have spent more than $20 billion to buy as many as 200,000 rental homes in the last two years. They snapped up properties after prices fell as much as 35 percent from the 2006 peak…
American Homes 4 Rent and Colony American Homes, the second- and third-largest single-family landlords, also have been scaling back as bargains dry up…

“We’re going to have to probably slow down a little bit on our acquisition pace until we have a better view or actual certainty of the capital being available,” (Chief Executive Officer David ) Singelyn said.

Colony Financial Inc. (CLNY), a REIT that invests in Colony American Homes, slowed its funding for acquisitions last year to focus on improving operations, CEO Richard Saltzman said in a November conference call…

American Residential Properties Inc. (ARPI), a landlord with 6,000 homes, slowed acquisitions by almost half in its latest quarter ending Dec. 31. It invested $104 million in 633 homes compared with $204 million on 1,251 homes in the previous quarter, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company said in a statement.” (Blackstone’s Home Buying Binge Ends as Prices Surge, Bloomberg)

Okay, so the speculators are getting out of housing. How’s that going to effect the market?

No one really knows yet, but it can’t be good, after all, all-cash deals amounted to nearly 50 percent of all homes sales in many of the hotter markets last year. That’s why prices went up even though the economy was still in the shitter, because the fatcats were loading up on cheap real estate. Now it looks like they’re headed for the hills. That’s NOT going to be good for sales.

Did you know that existing home sales have dropped for six months straight, dipping below trend to the same level they were at in 1998?

But how can that be, you ask, when everyone’s blabbing about the recovery? How can that be when the Fed has purchased more than $1.4 trillion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and rates are a measly 4.5%? How can that be prices have been climbing higher for more than a year?

Sales are dropping because millions of people are underwater on their mortgages and can’t afford to move. Millions more are stuck in their homes and aren’t paying anything at all. Millions more have student debt up to their eyeballs and will probably never own a home. And millions more still can’t find a job. That’s why home sales are plunging, because the economy stinks. It’s that simple. Sure, the market got a nice little bump from Bernanke’s $4 trillion liquidity-surge. Big whoop. Besides, that was 2012-2013. Today things are different. Today the Fed is winding down QE and there’s even talk of rate-hike. How do you think that’s going to impact sales?

Now get a load of this from Redfin:

“Home sales continued to be sluggish in February, and decreasing affordability is holding back would-be buyers, according to Redfin…. Slow sales have been largely attributed to low inventory for months, but many markets have now seen inventory rise while sales continue to fall. Several markets along the West Coast have seen sharp increases in inventory, yet home sales in the West fell 13.4 percent year over year, hitting their lowest point in five years in the first two months of 2014, while prices rose 19.1 percent year over year…

West Coast Sales Hit Lowest Point in Five Years

– In Redfin’s West Coast markets, sales fell 13.4% from February 2013, and hit a five-year low in the first two months of 2014. Sales fell most dramatically in Las Vegas (-22.7%), Sacramento (-21.8%) and Ventura (-20.8%). Across 19 markets, sales fell 10.3%, with markets east of the Rockies taking a less dramatic hit and a few even seeing modest increases.” (Redfin)

Did you catch that part about “inventory rising while sales continue to fall”?

For months, the media has been using the “low inventory” excuse for the rotten sales figures. Now they’ve moved onto “bad weather” to pull the wool over people’s eyes. Talk about a lame excuse. It’s been in the 70 and 80s in California for most of the winter and sales are down by a whopping 13 percent. Are potential buyers staying at home because they’re afraid of getting skin cancer? Is that it? (That’ll probably be the next excuse.)

So why ARE home sales tanking?

It’s because you can’t buy a house if you’re working graveyard at Freddie’s Burger Bar for $8.50 an hour. It’s because you can’t put together a 20% down-payment if you’re camped out on Mom’s sofa in the attic along with Uncle Murray’s trombone and your Dad’s photo collection of soup cans. It’s because you can’t qualify for a mortgage when 100 percent of your weekly paycheck goes to paying the VISA, filling the gas-tank, and buying a few groceries at Danny’s Discount Foodmart. It can’t be done.

That’s what’s really going on. That’s why the share of firsttime homebuyers is currently at its lowest level ever. That’s why purchase applications are at an 18-year low. That’s why the homeownership rate has slipped to levels not seen since 1995. And that’s why mortgage originations were down almost 60 percent year-over-year. It’s because the economy sucks. Everyone knows it.

Now take a look at one last chart. It’s by Logan Mohtashami at dshort.com. from an article titled, Mortgage Purchase Applications Running Out Of Time.

As you can see, there’s a pretty close connection between incomes (the green line) and the mortgage purchase applications index. (The people who can afford to buy homes.)
Surprised?

Of course not, because most people assume there’s a relationship between ‘what a person earns’ and his ‘ability to buy a home’. After all, we haven’t always lived in this bizarro credit-addled world where anyone who can sit upright in a chair and sign his name on the dotted line can buy a $450,000 rambler in Orchard Hills. That’s a fairly new development.

And that brings us to the point of this article, which is to show that all the monetary hocus pocus has achieved nothing. The Fed’s Koolaid infusions have been a dead-loss. The market is still flat on its back. Kaput. Which shows, that if you want to fix housing, you have to fix the economy. And if you want to fix the economy; you have to put people back to work and pay them a fair wage. It’s that simple.

So why can’t anyone in Washington figure it out?

(Note: As this article was going to press, the latest “existing home sales” data was released.) According to USA Today:

“Existing home sales slowed again in February, falling to the lowest pace in 19 months.”

So February was even slower than the coldest month of the year, January?

Unbelievable.
 
MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

After Several Near Misses, Experts Warn The Next Carrington Event Will Plunge Us Back Into The Dark Ages

The Truth | Mar 20, 2014 | Michael Snyder

Most people have absolutely no idea that the Earth barely missed being fried by a massive EMP burst from the sun in 2012, in 2013 and just last month.  If any of those storms would have directly hit us, the result would have been catastrophic.  Electrical transformers would have burst into flames, power grids would have gone down and much of our technology would have been fried.  In essence, life as we know it would have ceased to exist – at least for a time.  These kinds of solar storms have hit the Earth many times before, and experts tell us that it is inevitable that it will happen again.  The most famous one happened in 1859, and was known as the Carrington Event.  But other than the telegraph, humanity had very little dependence on technology at the time.  If another Carrington Event happened today, it would be a complete and utter nightmare.  A study by Lloyd’s of London has concluded that it would have taken a $2,600,000,000,000 chunk out of the global economy, and it would take up to a decade to repair the damage.  Unfortunately, scientists insist that it is going to happen at some point.  The only question is when.


Just this week, the near miss of 2012 is suddenly making headlines all over the globe.  The following is from a recent Reuters report…

Fierce solar blasts that could have badly damaged electrical grids and disabled satellites in space narrowly missed Earth in 2012, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

The bursts would have wreaked havoc on the Earth’s magnetic field, matching the severity of the 1859 Carrington event, the largest solar magnetic storm ever reported on the planet. That blast knocked out the telegraph system across the United States, according to University of California, Berkeley research physicist Janet Luhmann.

The two bursts that the Reuters article is referring to happened very closely to one another, and the scientists that study these things say that it could have taken a decade to recover from such a catastrophe…

“Had [the latest storm] hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous,” said Janet Luhmann, who is part of the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Observatory) team and based at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.

Luhmann and physicist Ying Liu of China’s State Key Laboratory of Space Weather led a team in analysing the magnetic storm, which was detected by NASA’s STEREO A spacecraft and published their results in Nature Communications.

“An extreme space weather storm – a solar superstorm – is a low-probability, high-consequence event that poses severe threats to critical infrastructures of the modern society,” warned Liu.

“The cost of an extreme space weather event, if it hits Earth, could reach trillions of dollars with a potential recovery time of 4-10 years. Therefore, it is paramount to the security and economic interest of the modern society to understand solar superstorms.”

You can see video of this massive coronal mass ejection event on YouTube…


But this is not the only near miss that we have had in recent years.

In fact, there was another harrowing near miss in 2013…

The earth barely missed taking a massive solar punch in the teeth two weeks ago, an “electromagnetic pulse” so big that it could have knocked out power, cars and iPhones throughout the United States.

Two EMP experts told Secrets that the EMP flashed through earth’s typical orbit around the sun about two weeks before the planet got there.

“The world escaped an EMP catastrophe,” said Henry Cooper, who led strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and who now heads High Frontier, a group pushing for missile defense.

“There had been a near miss about two weeks ago, a Carrington-class coronal mass ejection crossed the orbit of the Earth and basically just missed us,” said Peter Vincent Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Threat Commission from 2001-2008.

And very few people have heard of it, but we had another one just last month…

A huge magnetic filament shot out of the sun Monday, sending shockwaves racing at 1.7 million miles per hour and a brief roar of static through shortwave radios across the planet. And with a geomagnetic storm causing Northern Lights to dance across the Canadian border and into North America, the sun is clearly acting up.

According to a report on Spaceweather.com, Monday’s massive blast shot off the sun and into space, away from our planet, so it didn’t have the same effect on radio signals, power grids and communication satellites that an Earth-facing eruption would have.

So what is going to happen when one of these things finally hits us?

Well, basically it will be a technological Armageddon.  The following is a brief excerpt from one of my previous articles…

An electromagnetic pulse can range from a minor inconvenience to a civilization-killing event.  It just depends on how powerful it is.  But in the worst case scenario, we could be facing a situation where our electrical grids have been fried, there is no heat for our homes, our computers don’t work, the Internet does not work, our cell phones do not work, there are no more banking records, nobody can use credit cards anymore, hospitals are unable to function, nobody can pump gas, and supermarkets cannot operate because there is no power and no refrigeration.  Basically, we would witness the complete and total collapse of the economy.  According to a government commission that looked into these things, approximately two-thirds of the U.S. population would die from starvation, disease and societal chaos within one year of a massive EMP attack.  It would be a disaster unlike anything we have ever seen before in U.S. history.

Without any electrical power, our society would descend into a state of chaos very rapidly.  The following is an excerpt from an article by Mac Slavo that explains some of the things that we would be likely to see in the immediate aftermath of such an event…

The first 24 – 48 hours after such an occurrence will lead to confusion among the general population as traditional news acquisition sources like television, radio and cell phone networks will be non-functional.

Within a matter of days, once people realize the power might not be coming back on and grocery store shelves start emptying, the entire system will begin to delve into chaos.

Within 30 days a mass die off will have begun as food supplies dwindle, looters and gangs turn to violent extremes, medicine can’t be restocked and water pump stations fail.

Today, our lives have been made very comfortable by technology.

But that technology could be stripped away from us in a single moment.

We should be thankful for the good things that we have, and we should not take for granted that we will always have them.

All it would take is one giant burst from the sun, and everything would change.

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

Idaho Lawmakers Green-Light Legislation to 'Wipe Out' Wolves

A gray wolf. (Photo: Tracy Brooks/USFWS)

Common Dreams | Mar 21, 2014 | Andrea Germanos

Legislation "has put a black eye on decades of tireless work to return wolves to the American landscape."

Wildlife advocates are decrying legislation they say will "wipe out as many wolves as legally possible in Idaho."

Signed by state lawmakers on Thursday, it is expected to get the signature of Governor C. L. "Butch" Otter, who in 2007 said he would "bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself," if gray wolves lost Endangered Species Act protection.

The legislation sets aside $400,000 for a board "to provide funds for the management and control of depredating wolves in Idaho."

In the words of Amaroq Weiss, West Coast wolf organizer at the Center for Biological Diversity, the legislation's goal is "to wipe out as many wolves as legally possible in Idaho," and said the state "has put a black eye on decades of tireless work to return wolves to the American landscape."

"Political leaders in Idaho would love nothing more than to eradicate Idaho’s wolves and return to a century-old mindset where big predators are viewed as evil and expendable," Weiss's statement continued. "The new state wolf board, sadly, reflects that attitude."

Meanwhile, a group of over 70 congressmen sent a letter this week to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, asking that a proposal to delist the gray wolf from the federal endangered species list be rescinded because it is not based on the best available science.

* * *

Weiss offers more background on the plight of the wolves in this video from the Center for Biological Diversity:

US, Canada to witness rare astronomical phenomenon

Voice of Russia | Mar 20, 2014

New York dwellers will observe a rare eclipse tonight. An asteroid will black out one of the brightest stars.The asteroid's name is 163 Erigone. This is a huge 45-mile (73-kilometer) wide asteroid of the star belt between Mars and Jupiter. It will black out Regulus, the brightest star of the Constellation Leo. The eclipse begins at 06:00 GMT and will last for only 14 seconds.

The event is unusual due to a large audience of some 20 million people and the fact that Regulus is extremely bright star.

Due to weather conditions, the eclipse will be visible with a naked eye from New York and other cities, and towns in the north-east of the US and the east of Canada.

The star will vanish from sight for up to 14 seconds for New Yorkers, and a minute or two later further north.

"Regulus shines right through moonlight and light pollution that's in the sky - even the light pollution over a city like New York," says Alan MacRobert, a senior editor at Sky & Telescope magazine.

A special term for this event is "occultation" that derives from the Latin word "to hid". Many astronomer have observed asteroid occultations through their telescopes dozens of times, but this case is unusual. This is the first time in history that an occultation of such a bright star by an asteroid has been predicted to cross such a heavily populated area.

Asteroid occultation timers, who are distinguished members of astronomer's society, want to enlist thousands of ordinary citizens in their citizen-science project in order to describe the event more thoroughly.

The project is launched by the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA).

The goal is to see whether the star disappears as seen from your location, and for how long — especially if you can time the event to high precision.

Astronomers are eager to use this data in order to obtain precise information about Erigone's size and shape. There is no other way to do this procedure, besides sending a spacecraft there. This has been done for many asteroids in the past that have occulted fainter stars.

Regulus is the brightest star in the constellation Leo and one of the brightest stars in the night sky, lying approximately 79 light years from Earth. Regulus is a multiple star system composed of four stars that are organized into two pairs.

Voice of Russia, the Daily Mail 

More Than Three-Quarters of Soybeans, Corn and Cotton Grown in U.S. are Genetically Engineered

Rootworms on corn
(photo: Marlin E. Rice,
Iowa State University)

ALLGOV | Mar 20, 2014 | Noel Brinkerhoff

New agricultural figures out of Washington show that genetically engineered crops now overwhelmingly dominate the yields of America’s production of soybeans, corn and cotton. But the industry’s embrace of what critics call “frankencrops” has already started to backfire for at least one of these staples.

First the numbers: crops modified by scientists to be herbicide-tolerant (HT) are now just about everywhere on U.S. farms.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says that 93% of all soybeans in the country were the HT variety as of last year. HT cotton comprised 82% of that crop in 2013, while HT corn dominated 85% of that crop’s acreage last year.

Another type of modified corn contains the gene from the soil bacterium Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), which makes the plant toxic to certain pests, like the rootworm. Going with Bt corn allowed farmers to use less insecticide, reduce costs and curtail environmental pollution. That’s why Bt corn became so popular, making up 76% of all corn acreage in 2013.

But many scientists warned after the Bt modification was introduced that insects weren’t going to just go away and not munch on these plants anymore. Nature, after all, is big on adaptation, and that’s what the rootworm has done.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says rootworms have developed a resistance to the Bt gene—which means they can go back to eating modified corn.

“Unless management practices change, it’s only going to get worse,” Aaron Gassmann, an Iowa State University entomologist and coauthor of the study, told Wired. “There needs to be a fundamental change in how the technology is used.”

In the meantime, farmers confronted with Bt-resistance rootworms will have only one choice to protect their corn crop—spray more pesticides, which Bt corn was supposed to mitigate.

Second radiation leak detected at New Mexico nuclear waste site

AFP Photo / John Macdougall

RT | Mar 19, 2014 |

About one month after radiation leaks were reported at the United States’ first nuclear waste repository, a second release has been detected in the air by Department of Energy officials.

According to the Associated Press, air-monitoring stations near the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, have picked up elevated radiation readings, suggesting another small batch of radiation has been released into the air.

Officials said these types of small releases are to be expected, but that they should fall below the safety standards outlined by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The WIPP – one of the world’s three deep nuclear repositories – has been shut down since February, when a sharp rise in radiation levels was linked to a leak in one of the underground tunnels storing radioactive waste about 600 meters underground. This radiation eventually made it into the plant’s surrounding area and was detected in the air by nearby monitoring stations.

Although plant officials said that all employees were also cleared up external contamination before they left the premises the day of the leak, biological samples analyzed last month found at least 13 workers tested positive for radiation.

Despite the news, plant and government officials have maintained that the amount of radiation released does not constitute a threat to the public’s health.

This is the first time the WIPP has been known to release any radioactive material since its construction in 1999, though what it means for the future of waste storage in the US remains unclear. As RT reported previously, the Energy Department spends roughly $5 billion a year in order to clean up waste in connection with nuclear development, but plans to expand WIPP’s intake of waste are on hold until a concrete cause for the leak is determined.

One watchdog group, Southwest Research and Information Center, said plans to expand the plant’s operations could have led to lax security measures, and has labeled the WIPP a failure in terms of safety.

The plant’s operators at the Nuclear Waste Partnership, meanwhile, have rejected the accusation, saying the safety systems are working as planned, and that the WIPP will only become safer in the future as a result.