The recent power plant accident in Japan, like the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago, calls for "...deep reflection..." on the future of nuclear energy, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today (19 April 2011), as he outlined a five-step plan to enhance nuclear safety.

Speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC in the week of the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that the recovery from the global economic crisis was failing to create jobs and that economic inequality threatened to bring future instability.

Results from Iceland's referendum on Saturday show that Icelanders overwhelmingly voted "no" on a government-approved plan to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of euros lost in Iceland's 2008 bank crash.

In Sunday's final results almost 60 percent rejected the deal, with the voting turnout high, the government reported. This is the second repayment plan rejected by the voters; the first one was rejected by 93 percent last year.

The crisis at a stricken nuclear plant on the northeast coast of Japan is now as severe as the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986, officials have said. Radiation is continuing to leak from the plant, which was damaged during the devastating magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami last month, which left thousands dead. Japanese authorities have warned the crisis is now a "major accident" with "wider consequences" than previously thought.