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vast stretch of rolling green pasture here on Japan's northern tip. Underground it's a different story.
• Workers and scientists have carved a sprawling laboratory deep below this sleep dairy town that, despite government reassurances, some of Horonobe's 2,500 residents fear could turn their neighborhood into a nuclear waste storage site.
• "I'm worried," said 54-year-old reindeer handler Atsushi Arase. "If the government already has its eye on us as a potential site, it may eventually come here even if we refuse."
• Japanese utilities have more than 17,000 tons of "spent" fuel rods that have finished their useful life but will remain dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. What to do with them is a vexing problem that nuclear-powered nations around the world face, and that has come to the fore as Japan debates whether to keep using nuclear energy after the 2011 disaster at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima plant.
• The answer to that problem may lie in the Horonobe Underground Research Center, which has been collecting geological data to determine if and how radioactive waste can be stored safely for as long as 100,000 years in a country that is susceptible to volcanic activity, earthquakes and shifting underground water flows.
• ___
Witty dealmaker Juncker set to be EU's new chief executive
• BRUSSELS (AP) -- The incoming leader of Europe's most powerful bureaucracy is a master of the backroom deal -- and an outspoken and witty career politician who once advocated the right to lie in times of crisis.
• Jean-Claude Juncker, who was prime minister of Luxembourg for almost two decades, was a controversial pick as the 28-nation European Union's new chief executive, not least because the British government vociferously opposed him. The British tabloid The Sun portrayed him as "the most dangerous man in Europe."
• Yet the 59-year-old conservative politician is set to be elected by overwhelming majority Tuesday as the next president of the European Commission. He will succeed the incumbent, Jose Manuel Barroso of Portugal, in November, and assume key responsibilities for steering the world's biggest economy during the next five years.
• The commission is the bloc's executive arm in charge of drafting EU legislation, overseeing countries' budgets, policing the EU free trade area and enforcing anti (Continued on page 24)
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