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In praise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation

Noel WAuchope, Jun 20, 2026, https://theaimn.net/in-praise-of-pauline-hanson-and-one-nation/

You can laugh. You can sneer. But we will show you

FIRST ACTION. We must get rid of compulsory voting. That is the Nanny State in operation. That is the Elites infringing on our civil liberties. People should have every right not to participate in the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo of the electoral mess. With voluntary voting, citizens would have true freedom to choose their own government. What happens at present, is that every uninformed person is forced to vote, and so tends to just follow the tired old established parties. A mindless vote. That disadvantages our really visionary party, One Nation, which deservedly gets the votes of real thinkers.

SECOND ACTION – but perhaps for later on – get rid of the rorting of the voting system, as that uppity lot of inner-city over-educated middle class women take advantage of preferential voting to get themselves into Parliament, and distract progress with their wayout and ultra-feminist agendas. Preferential voting does have its uses, I admit, but only in the short term, in this period of our negotiations with the sad sick Liberal and Labor parties.

NOW – once the very unfortunate Australian electoral system is corrected – we’ll be off and away in our noble quest to correct Australia itself. Fortunately, we have some wise and well-informed people to support us. People like Gina Rinehart, people who understand the realities of this resource-rich land, and of the skills and values of those who’ve colonised and improved this land, over 200 years. And let’s face it, that’s basically the white people.

And who are we counting on to bring One Nation to power? Well, there are people like myself – country dwellers who don’t want to be pushed around, patronised or ignored by the privileged pampered inner-city dwellers with their university degrees, and their latte-sipping, theatre-snobby culture. They prioritise the causes of various minority groups – foreigners who don’t speak English, and people with every kind of sexual deviance, rather than the needs of the real true-blue Australians.

Then there are the hard-working people in the outer suburbs, struggling with the increasing cost of living. They will know that One Nation is dedicated to improving their lot – we will cut the red and green tape that stifle business, and so we’ll help businesses to grow and prosper, thus creating more and better jobs as the increased profits trickle down to the workers.

We are sick and tired of all the pontificating about that non-existent climate change, and about the non-sustainable folly of renewable energy, propped up as it is by the incompetent Labor government. We intend of course, to take care of indigenous people, but not to allow the remnants of their backwards culture to be used by troublemakers whose aim is to impede progress in developing industry.

Pauline Hanson has spoken a lot about immigration, but it’s not that she’s against immigration. Of course we want some migrants, but a limited number, and they should be carefully restricted to people that have adopted our English language and share our values.

You have to admire Pauline. She courageously speaks her mind, and challenges those biased lefties, especially in the media. Our taxes should not be going to the ABC and to the SBS – institutions with such a dangerously left-wing attitude. One Nation will deal with those nefarious influences.

Which brings me back to publications like The Australian Independent Media Network, Independent Australia, Crikey, and the positively dangerous Urban Wronski Writes. Something will have to be done about those. It is my hope to correct Australian Independent Media, for example, perhaps to bring it back to respectable, reliable journalism that will aid the Murdoch media in showing Australians the news in the correct way.

So, in conclusion – to all you Australians who feel aggrieved and hardly done by, we at One Nation offer you what you need: Change, and the promise of a better life.

Signed,

Noel Wauchope, proud rural dweller.

June 21, 2026 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Google’s New AI-Fueled Search Bar Threatens to Further Upend Journalism Industry

publishers are being sold the idea that they can cut costs by replacing staff with AI

The irony is that the misinformation and deepfakes created by AI make the need for journalists more urgent than ever.

Independent journalism needs a lifeline to survive as Google urges readers toward AI summaries instead of article links.

Who can a reader hold accountable if a Google AI summary is incorrect?

By Negin Owliaei , Maya Schenwar , Ziggy West Jeffery , Truthout, June 9, 2026, https://truthout.org/articles/googles-new-ai-fueled-search-bar-threatens-to-further-upend-journalism-industry/?utm_source=campaign_email&utm_campaign=061826pm

Google made an announcement last month that could turn the journalism world upside down, accelerating the internet’s shift toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven landscape and serving the Trump agenda of media suppression.

At its developer conference in May, the company announced the most disruptive changes to Google Search in over 25 years. Google Search will further demote its index of the web — a list of links that information-seekers can explore as they choose. Instead of prominently displaying links, it will increasingly become a destination that answers questions directly through AI, linking only to the sources it decides to reference in its overview.

On the majority of our tests, the AI overview was followed by a heavy block of sponsored results and a combination of videos, short clips, trending posts, and discussions. Index links — for example, to articles on news sites and research studies — were given only a small fraction of real estate. Additionally, Google is aggressively pushing readers to use AI Mode, which completely removes the index links.

In practical terms, this means users of the world’s largest search engine will see, in response to their queries, a summary generated by an AI bot developed by a corporate behemoth with close ties to the Trump White House.

This seismic move builds upon the launches of AI Overview in 2024 and AI Mode in 2025, shifting toward nearly eliminating the user’s ability to search autonomously, and toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven experience of the internet (and therefore, for many people, of life).

We must take into account the political context in which this shift transpires. Alphabet (Google’s parent company), along with Facebook’s parent company (Meta), as well as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, were among major tech companies that donated to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. They have also consistently capitulated to Trump’s recent manipulations.

Last fall, Alphabet’s subsidiary YouTube agreed to a $24.5 million settlement in a lawsuit stemming from the platform’s suspension of Trump’s YouTube channel. The majority of the settlement will go toward Trump’s now-infamous White House ballroom. Meta, similarly, agreed to a $25 million settlement in 2025. $22 million of that sum was designated to go to Trump’s presidential library.

Meta, like Google, has long been making moves that have severely destabilized the news industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided in 2018 that the platform would prioritize showing Facebook users posts made by their friends and dramatically reduce their ability to see posts made by news organizations that they had chosen to follow. In other words, due to a single algorithm change, the more than 758,000 people who had at the time eagerly signed up to receive links to all of Truthout’s articles in their Facebook feeds suddenly stopped seeing the majority of our posts.

This caused a major drop in traffic across the board to news sites, many of which had been persistently encouraged by Facebook to grow their brands on the platform. At Truthout, over 90 percent of our traffic from Facebook disappeared, which decreased our overall traffic by 40 percent and, consequently, the donations we rely on to survive.

Chaotic changes at Twitter also played a role in destabilizing the journalism ecosystem. In 2022, when Elon Musk finalized his takeover of that platform, the move quickly turned the social media site into a cesspool of far right trolls, disinformation, and bot-generated content. This toxicity and disinformation spiral forced many people on the left to leave X, which decreased traffic to progressive websites from the platform.

Over the course of these changes, news organizations like ours have struggled to respond to corresponding significant declines in readership and revenue, along with our readers’ understandable loss of trust in the social media platforms and search engines that initially allowed us to grow. Sudden algorithmic changes, news deprioritization, and increased implementation of AI summaries are shaking the economic foundation of journalism itself. Meanwhile, publishers are being sold the idea that they can cut costs by replacing staff with AI.

The connections to the Trump agenda aren’t hard to see. Trump has been an outspoken critic of news organizations, particularly those that are left-leaning and critical of his administration. Facebook and Google are suppressing journalism on their platforms and weakening news organizations’ ability to hold Trump to account, while also donating to Trump and settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits in his favor.

Whether Facebook and Google are capitulating to Trump due to fear of economic retribution, shared politics, or a desire to increase their stock prices or keep up with technology, the impact is devastating for journalism and democracy.

AI Is Eroding Journalism — and Obscuring Truth

We’ve already seen some corporate publishers try to jump on the AI bandwagon, arguing that AI will come for our costly but necessary industry one way or another. They frame AI as a way to solve journalism’s most intractable problem: the cost of reporting. But in reality, they’re proposing a vision of journalism resembling content without the journalists — just regurgitated slop of varying accuracy.

Take one high-profile example from last year: Just two months after the Chicago Sun-Times laid off 20 percent of its staff, the paper issued an AI-generated summer reading list sourced from a third-party company. One key problem: Several of the books on the list didn’t actually exist. Some outlets are going so far as to create AI-generated “writers,” complete with fake names and photos, to author their AI-generated articles. And in one notable case, an AI news initiative meant to provide more information in areas with limited access to local news was scrapped after it repeatedly plagiarized the local journalists actually doing that work.

The irony is that the misinformation and deepfakes created by AI make the need for journalists more urgent than ever. For example, during the height of the war on Iran, we watched AI-generated fakery wreak havoc on the sphere of public information. And it should come as no surprise that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot most known for spewing racist hate and distributing child sexual abuse material, further spread inaccuracies when users called upon it for help with fact checking. Right now, those of us who are real human journalists are still able to act as a bulwark against AI-introduced errors. What happens when we’re taken out of the mix?

These inaccuracies are perhaps one of the reasons why people are reluctant to get their news from AI chatbots in the first place. Make no mistake — these changes are being forced upon an unwilling public. Fewer than 1 percent of Americans say they prefer getting their news from chatbots, compared to other news sources, a recent Pew Research survey found. For people who do use chatbots for news, roughly a third of them say they have a hard time determining what’s actually true, and about half say they see news from chatbots that they think is inaccurate.

They are right to be skeptical. A recent study from the AI research company Forum AI found that the answers that top AI chatbots provided on questions about elections were riddled with errors; more than one-third of responses included fact errors of some type. Oftentimes those errors sounded incredibly precise, the research found, giving an undeserved air of confidence to factual inaccuracies. Those chatbots also regularly pulled from commercial sources in their summaries — even using websites like firearm retailer Ammo.com to answer questions about gun control, the researchers discovered.

Trusted news outlets have policies for issuing corrections and clarifications. Publications like ours maintain policies and avenues for offering such corrections and feedback. Who can a reader hold accountable if a Google AI summary is incorrect? Matched with the likelihood of factual errors, the lack of accountability has terrifying implications.

On a deeper level, the hyperindividualization of chatbots also poses some bleak questions about the escalating fragmentation of our shared sense of reality. For years, we’ve heard media critics sound the alarm about how social media has helped false information travel far further at much quicker speeds. Additionally, Big Tech companies, understanding that their bottom line requires eyeballs to stay on their platforms as long as possible, designed the algorithms that feed us information to be as addictive as possible by sticking us in echo chambers.

Now AI could atomize us all even further. Study after study has shown that AI chatbots are sycophantic, offering users excessive praise and telling them what they want to hear. And the timing — ahead of a high-stakes election, at a moment when trust in media is at new lows, and in a period where the future of journalism itself is at risk — could not be worse.

An Existential Threat to Journalism

As the Google Search changes take their toll, we will very likely see a new round of cost-saving measures at longstanding newsrooms. These steps will likely include massive layoffs and downsizing, more aggressively invasive revenue generation tactics, mergers, consolidation and closures. It will be harder for existing news sites to continue publishing and nearly impossible for new newsrooms to reach a large enough audience to become financially viable.

Read more: Google’s New AI-Fueled Search Bar Threatens to Further Upend Journalism Industry

Organizations like Truthout — ones that depend on community-building and audience growth to sustain their work — will be among the most impacted.

For 25 years, Truthout has survived by publishing impactful investigative journalism and analysis; distributing full editions 365 days a year; and building a community of readers who support us with small, hard-earned donations.

Eighty percent of our $3 million yearly budget comes from small donors alone. Of those, 8,000 readers support us with monthly donations. Back in 2018, when Facebook decided to suppress the circulation of posts made by organizations, thereby cutting readers off from seeing many articles shared by the news organizations they had intentionally decided to follow, Truthout’s total traffic declined by 40 percent, as nearly all of our traffic from that platform disappeared.

The consequences of the impending changes to Google’s search engine promise to be even more explosive. Google Search is our single largest source of traffic; it’s the route by which 27 percent of our readers find us. And visitors who find us via Google Search are more likely to stay for longer, engage with our work, and donate than those who find us through social media.

If even half of that 27 percent disappears, it will have a devastating impact on our journalism.

Truthout is just one example; journalism organizations across the field will be devastatingly affected by Google’s new move, just as they were impacted by Meta’s abrupt algorithmic shift. The entire journalism ecosystem will shoulder this blow, particularly independent publishers and news sites that depend on traffic and aren’t bankrolled by large corporations.

How Do We Resist?

The sudden shift in Google Search presents us with a pointed question, not only about journalism, but about the future of humanity: How much of our autonomy will we cede to AI? To what extent will we adopt an “oh well!” mentality? Or will we seek creative ways to resist, even when it may feel impossible to confront the largest corporations on the planet?

We cannot allow ourselves to become mired in the trap of inevitability-based thinking.

When grappling with questions around the future of AI, it’s helpful to remind ourselves of how the people — yes, actual humans — are relating to all this. The truth is, most people in the United States are concerned about AI. In fact, in a deeply divided country, AI is something of a uniting cause. A significant majority of Americans rate the “societal risks” of AI as high, with majorities worried that AI will disrupt human connection and inhibit creativity. People in this country are overwhelmingly more worried than excited about how AI has become enmeshed in everyday life. Meanwhile, across political lines, most people in the U.S. oppose the building of data centers in their communities. This is a mobilizable base.

Why should an entirely AI-driven future be inevitable, when most people don’t really want one? Instead of assuming the die is cast, let’s imagine a world in which the onslaught of AI threats is fuel for a broad-based movement.

This movement isn’t just aspirational: It’s already begun. Some of the most hopeful organizing in recent years can be seen in local fights against data centers. Communities are pushing back against corporate giants like Blackstone, BlackRock, and xAI. And from Arizona to New York to Wisconsin and beyond, they’re often winning. According to Data Center Watch, in 2025, local opposition efforts prevented or stalled dozens of data centers, totaling around $156 billion in investment funds.

Meanwhile, we can all respond to Google’s shift toward AI with concrete steps to support independent media and reject the “inevitability” assumption.

Instead of jumping to social media or a search engine for our news, let’s return to visiting news websites directly. Each of us can maintain a list of trusted publications to visit each day. Bookmark your favorites, and return to them. Sign up for email newsletters from your trusted publications, and create filters so that those newsletters arrive in your primary inbox instead of in spam or “promotions.” Subscribe to print publications. Commit to simply reading the news.

Double down on media literacy, practicing discernment and critical thinking as you read and watch the news. In a time when mammoth corporations are attempting to literally tell us what to believe, these commitments are acts of rebellion.

Additionally, since Google Search’s overwhelming prioritization of AI will severely impact revenue for many publications, it’s time to support independent journalism with your money as well as your readership. If you can afford to give, do so, at any level. Without material support from readers and viewers, many independent journalism organizations will fall by the wayside amid the AI onslaught.

For foundations and major donors, there’s a clear mandate here: It’s time to fund our journalism organizations while we experiment and determine new ways of expanding our audiences and driving traffic. We need room to try things — to test out strategies to map an online world beyond Google.

Funding these experiments doesn’t just help one organization or even one sector: As journalism organizations figure out new methods to reach readers, we can share those strategies with other groups, expanding the potential for grassroots groups, unions, and more to connect with human beings in a manner not dictated by the whims of giant corporations’ platforms.

Truthful journalism is an essential public good, and as Google and Meta wage algorithmic warfare against it, it’s essential to protect it. Foundations, donors, and folks connected with money should prioritize journalism alongside other urgent issues, recognizing that trustworthy information is a bulwark against rising fascism.

Finally, we must all adopt a resistance mindset in relation to AI’s slippery slope. Each day, we have an opportunity to choose another way. Resist inevitability. Resist inertia.

Our ability to access facts — and to discern truth from disinformation — is at stake. How will we fight back?

June 21, 2026 Posted by | media | Leave a comment

The Nuclear Reactors Coming to a Small Town Near You

As a disruptive new nuclear power project embeds itself in Parsons, Kansas, residents are divided on whether it’s worth the potential risk.

The New Republic Finn Hartnett, June 16, 2026

Parsons, Kansas …… With a population of about
9,600 ………

 ……………………………………The Parsons Sun had it first: a deal struck between industrial park board members and the nuclear company Deep Fission. A first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor was coming to the park. “I saw it on Facebook, and I thought it was a joke,” Marjorie Reynolds, a home nurse who lives in the area, said. The public was not informed before the deal was completed: Even county commissioners were only told “a week or two” prior, according to Commissioner Terry Weidert. “They just announced it in the newspaper December 4, like it was a done deal,” anti-nuclear activist Ann Suellentrop said. “So arrogant and so dismissive of the public.”

Park officials said they could not inform the public because they were under nondisclosure agreements with Deep Fission and the Department of Energy. “You’ve got intellectual property that … they like to keep under wraps,” Reams said. “If you’re the DOE, it’s a national security risk. It’s an energy project that has national implications.” Zaleski concurred, arguing that the agreement with Deep Fission was a standard one. “That’s just how the cookie crumbles in this industry,” he said.

Holger Meyer, a particle physics professor at Wichita State University with a background in nuclear energy, said the public should have been informed regardless. “There sometimes are good reasons for the desire for nondisclosure agreements,” he said. “But this isn’t something that just impacts the land it is on. It impacts the entire county—the entire region.… There is obvious public interest.”

It didn’t matter. Five days later, park officials, executives of Deep Fission, a smattering of locals, and roughly 40 TV stations gathered in the park for a groundbreaking. Parsons may not have liked it, but it was going nuclear.

Founded three years ago, the California-based start-up Deep Fission was thrust into prominence last August, when its reactor project became one of 11 selected as part of Donald Trump’s “Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program.” The pilot program, created by executive order, fast-tracks the companies’ ability to receive commercial operating licenses. The stated goal at the time was for three reactors to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026; one already has, and the DOE claims two more are on track. Deep Fission is not among them.

This rapid schedule is possible in part because Trump has overhauled the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since the start of his second term, relaxing regulations and inspections to meet demand from data centers.

In May 2025, the president ordered the theoretically independent NRC to submit to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and cut the annual hours spent on nuclear inspections by an estimated 38 percent. Hundreds of staff members have since departed the agency, and the two remaining Democrats on its board have expressed fear they could be fired after Democratic Chair Christopher Hanson was canned last year. Suellentrop warned that the NRC will be “gutted” if Trump continues to get his way. “The DOE will rubber-stamp whatever he wants, and to hell with people’s safety, their health, the environment,” she said.

………………….For advocates of Deep Fission, the government’s promotion of the project is evidence of its safety.

But others warned against such implicit trust. Meyer said “industry interest” was behind the Trump administration’s embrace of nuclear power. “Environmental regulations are being dismantled in all areas,” he said. “It’s clear that nuclear safety isn’t prioritized by the Trump administration.” Kent Rowe, a retired professor of aeronautics and anti-nuclear activist from near Parsons, stated that the Deep Fission project was “a scheme to bury [reactors] haphazardly and worry about consequences later.”

A March letter signed by 11 state attorneys general condemned the DOE for creating an exemption allowing certain nuclear projects to skip previously mandated environmental reviews. Paul Gunter, director of the group Beyond Nuclear, said he was concerned the exemption would allow Deep Fission to bypass proper safety measures.

“There should be no question about whether or not a novel nuclear technology without a designed reactor containment system can avoid an environmental review for potential severe accidents and the long-term consequences,” he said. When asked whether Deep Fission would indeed be exempt from the review, a DOE spokesperson said, “No determination has been reached.”

While the other nuclear companies in Trump’s pilot program are working on more or less traditional reactors, Deep Fission is getting weird with it, forecasting a reactor it has described as both “discreet” and “bespoke.” A laudatory Forbes profile on company founders Richard and Liz Muller outlines the plan: “Drill a 30-inch-diameter borehole a mile into the earth, fill it with water, then insert a teeny-tiny nuclear reactor that will boil the water at the bottom and send it up a separate pipe to run a steam turbine. Each hole will generate 15 megawatts, enough to power 12,000 homes.” (The profile fails to note some less savory details from Richard’s past: He was a vocal global warming skeptic until 2012, and has been criticized for taking research funding from the oil and gas tycoon Charles Koch.)

A small, scalable reactor is Deep Fission’s Theranos-esque goal, perfect for supporting Silicon Valley’s new obsession: AI data centers. Seventy in-house reactors can power one data center, according to Forbes. Deep Fission has been open about a desire to “meet the explosive demand for power from artificial intelligence” with a system “designed to scale modularly.” They have already seduced the likes of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, who owns an 8 percent stake in the company.

Speed is one of the company’s core tenets, which is concerning to some critics. Deep Fission’s website proudly states its reactors take an “estimated six months” to build, and the company told Parsons in December it aimed to have a test reactor running by July. “We have to build fast enough to meet data center demand before they decide to go with something else,” Liz Muller told Forbes.

It turns out, though, that building a nuclear reactor is quite difficult. The company now will not say when its test reactor will be ready, and is unsure on whether it will be able to open a commercial reactor at all. Deep Fission recently completed a test well in Parsons 6,000 feet deep and eight inches in diameter. That may sound impressive, but it’s far smaller than the mile-deep, 30 to 50 inch–wide borehole that will be needed for the real thing.

While a white paper sent to the NRC gives insight into the proposed reactor blueprint, Deep Fission’s design is not final yet. The company has not submitted a preliminary safety analysis to the DOE, nor applied for the NRC license it will need to sell energy, according to federal officials. Deep Fission declined to speak with The New Republic for this piece, with vice president of communications Chloe Frader citing the “active registration process.”

Reams said Deep Fission was never going to hit the deadline it set for itself. “I think even if it had gone perfectly, they probably wouldn’t have hit July 4,” he said. As to why the company may not be selling its energy anymore? “They weren’t sure [of] all the P’s and Q’s that they had to make sure were covered,” Reams said. “It’s been a learning process for them.”

…..some have been vocal in their opposition to Deep Fission, particularly Reynolds, who founded a local group called Prairie Dog Alliance for the express purpose of fighting the development. In a matter of months, Reynolds has assembled a hodgepodge of community members, among them farmers, business owners, activists, and professors. (Suellentrop, Meyer, Rowe, and Gunter have all been in contact with the group.) Prairie Dog Alliance now boasts over 500 Facebook followers and about 15 members who attend regular meetings.

Some locals say Prairie Dog represents the majority opinion. Librarian Heather Fouts estimated that “at most 25 percent” of residents support the nuclear project. “I would say most of Parsons is against the reactor,” echoed Beachner, who recently joined the group. “But I also feel … nobody believes they can do anything.” In contrast, Zaleski and Parsons Sun editor Hannah Emberton cast Prairie Dog as a vocal minority.

The group forced a public meeting with Deep Fission in March after rejecting private talks. There have been a handful of meetings since, but Prairie Dog still wants more transparency. Member Jill Blankinship said the March meeting was “turned into a meet-and-greet”; at a later May in-person meeting where company officials took questions, participants were made to write them down ahead of time. Deep Fission also promotes a “community advisory group” in Parsons, which has no public facing presence at the moment, though Deep Fission says has met twice.*

Deep Fission is also drilling its boreholes at the edge of the Roubidoux aquifer, an underground water source that’s part of the larger Ozark system. While Parsonites get their drinking water from nearby Lake Parsons, the Ozark system is used for commerce, farming, and rural water districts all over the shop. “If something did happen, there’s potential that it could contaminate groundwater, which then contaminates the Neosho River, which goes … all the way down to Oklahoma,” Blankinship said. “Thirty-six towns, all kinds of people.”…………..

There’s also the issue of nuclear waste. Deep Fission’s founders said in April they wanted to just abandon their spent fuel rods underground after each reactor’s six-year lifespan. “Instead of pulling them out of the hole, they’ll pour in a mix of cement and rock to seal it all in place,” the Forbes profile states happily. Activists called the idea dangerous. 

A month after the Forbes piece, Deep Fission seemingly changed its tune. Chief Operating Officer Mike Brasel said in a May public meeting that the company will only leave spent fuel underground temporarily and that “we do not plan on disposing fuel down in that hole.” While the federal government is “contractually required to take the fuel,” Brasel said, Deep Fission aims to have a recycling or disposal facility in place before its boreholes begin to collapse in “40 to 50” years.

By then, things could already be going very wrong. Reynolds’s doomsday scenario is that radiation poisoning of the city’s soil and water will turn Parsons into something akin to Picher, Oklahoma, a small town 35 miles away. Once a bastion of lead and zinc mining, the town underwent dangerous corporate practices that caused irreconcilable environmental damage to the land; Picher was soon declared uninhabitable, and the municipality was officially dissolved in 2013.

In the event of a disaster, Deep Fission is seeking liability insurance under the Price-Anderson Act, which indemnifies the company in the event of a nuclear accident, providing costs fall above a certain threshold. “They’re going to … look for being indemnified from an accident that they’re saying will never happen,” Gunter said. “That’s a clear no-confidence vote.”…………………………………………………………..https://newrepublic.com/article/211643/nuclear-reactor-parsons-kansas-safety

June 21, 2026 Posted by | technology, USA | Leave a comment

US Finally Capitulates with ‘Memorandum’ of Surrender

Simplicius, Jun 17, 2026

The US has finally capitulated in its disastrously failed war against Iran, reportedly drafting a memorandum of understanding which is highly favorable to the Islamic Republic, and gains as concession nothing more than the promise that “Iran will not obtain nuclear weapons”—a position Iran had already long held.

The most explosive detail is the alleged $300 billion “reconstruction fund” that Iran will be entitled to once the deal is sealed.

Trump has downplayed or denied this point, with everyone seemingly perplexed as to what this massive sum entails, exactly. In the above article, Reuters writes the following:

The new fund is a private investment vehicle, not a reconstruction or reparations program and will not include any ⁠government money or grants, the source said, adding that companies based in the U.S., the Gulf Arab states, Asia, South America and Africa have agreed to commit financing.

Investments ​pledged span energy, logistics, manufacturing and transport, the source said.

They claim it’s not a reparations program, yet the official name of the fund is the ‘Reconstruction and Development Fund’. It appears to revolve around regional entities—both corporate and governmental—providing credit lines, direct financing, etc., to Iran. As can be seen above, over half of the fund is claimed to be already committed.

Some American propaganda pundits had claimed that this fund is being pulled from Iran’s frozen assets abroad, but Reuters begs to differ, citing that as an entirely separate negotiating track:

The investment fund is entirely separate from a parallel negotiating track over the lifting of U.S. sanctions and the release of Iranian sovereign assets frozen abroad, the source said, describing the two as distinct financial mechanisms with different purposes and timelines.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/us-finally-capitulates-with-memorandum?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1351274&post_id=201961444&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=c9zhh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

June 21, 2026 Posted by | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Maersk Still Shipping Weapons Components to Israel, Despite Claiming Otherwise

 June 17, 2026, By Shireen Akram-Boshar, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/17/maersk-still-shipping-weapons-components-to-israel-despite-claiming-otherwise/

“Maersk facilitated the transport of bullets Israel used to snipe Palestinian children in the head,” said one activist.

On June 8, the Palestinian Youth Movement’s Mask off Maersk Campaign published a report with Oxfam Denmark demonstrating that Maersk has continued to ship weapons to Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, despite claiming otherwise.

The shipments include “parts for bullets, bombs, mortars and projectile bodies” which have been “central” to weapons used by Israel to slaughter civilians in Gaza and now Lebanon, the report states. In 2025, Danish shipping and logistics giant Maersk denied sending weapons to Israel, claiming to have “maintained a strict policy of not shipping weapons or ammunition to Israel.” But the report reveals components of weapons shipped by Maersk to Elbit Systems facilities in Israel from October 2023 through 2025 — many of which came from suppliers in the U.S. 

The shipments, the report says, demonstrate that Maersk is “a critical artery connecting U.S. military producers with Israeli military facilities.”

The research was compiled by analyzing shipping records and bills of lading – which document receipts of shipping cargo – and clearly showed relationships between Elbit Systems, Israel’s Ministry of Defense, and Maersk. The report states that Maersk “has facilitated a direct industrial pipeline from the United States to Israel.” 

The report also notes that the bullet cores shipped by Maersk were the same class of bullets that Israeli forces used to shoot and kill 5-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza in January 2024.

Maersk responded to the report by once again denying the company’s shipments of weapons to Israel since 2023: “From the outset of the conflict, we have maintained a strict policy of not shipping weapons or ammunition to Israel,” the company said.

However, this statement conveniently avoids mentioning that the company continues to ship components of weapons, if not intact and completed weapons. 

“Their actual practice is to completely ignore the policies that they have on the books,” Nadya Tannous, international coordinator for the #MaskOffMaersk campaign, told Middle East Eye.“Our question to Maersk is: What’s a weapon? You don’t ship weapons, so what is a weapon?”

The campaign and report call for Maersk to immediately halt its shipments of weapons components to Israel. “We don’t want policy statements, we want material change from the company,” Tannous said.

In March 2025, when Maersk denied shipping arms to Israel, it simultaneously admitted that it shipped military-related cargo. “When we draw a line between what we accept to transport and what we don’t, it’s done after a very careful assessment and considering recommendations and regulations,” Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc told shareholders at the time. “We realize that our line may not coincide with the wishes of everybody.” 

“For years, Maersk has lied about the scale to which they are supplying Israel with the tools necessary to commit genocide in Gaza,” Tannous told Truthout. “Maersk facilitated the transport of bullets Israel used to snipe Palestinian children in the head, shipping everything but the explosives itself.”

“If Maersk halted services to Russia due to the Russia–Ukraine war, why are they continuing to evade responsibility for shipping military cargo to Israel? Maersk is not able to deceive us or minimize its central role in facilitating genocide any longer. We call on Maersk to immediately halt all military cargo shipments to Israel indefinitely, or face international consequences and accountability.”

June 21, 2026 Posted by | weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Trillionaire Economy

 June 17, 2026, ScheerPost Staff, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/17/the-trillionaire-economy/

As Elon Musk crossed the trillion-dollar threshold following SpaceX’s historic public offering, millions of Americans received a very different economic message: their paychecks are buying less.

The juxtaposition could hardly be more stark.

On the same week that Musk became the first person in history to accumulate a trillion-dollar fortune, new economic data showed inflation-adjusted wages declining and many workers losing ground to rising energy costs and persistent inflation. While Wall Street celebrated a new age of technological wealth, ordinary Americans continued to struggle with housing costs, healthcare expenses, retirement insecurity, and fears that artificial intelligence may soon eliminate entire categories of jobs.

The story is larger than Elon Musk.

His trillion-dollar milestone is merely the most visible symbol of an economic system increasingly defined by extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power. According to economists cited in The New York Times report, the richest Americans now control a share of national wealth that would have been almost unimaginable even during the Gilded Age. The fortunes of a tiny handful of billionaires have grown faster than wages, productivity, and in many cases entire sectors of the economy.

The question confronting Americans is not whether Musk deserves his fortune. The deeper question is what happens to a democracy when wealth becomes so concentrated that individual fortunes rival the economic output of nations.

Extreme wealth inevitably translates into political influence. Billionaires can shape public policy, fund political movements, influence media ecosystems, purchase competitors, and increasingly determine the direction of technological development itself. As economist Gabriel Zucman argues, concentrated wealth does not merely distort markets—it can distort democracy.

This concern has become particularly acute in the age of artificial intelligence.

The same technologies creating vast new fortunes are also generating widespread anxiety among workers. Tech executives routinely warn that AI could eliminate millions of jobs while simultaneously assuring investors that productivity and profits will soar. Workers are effectively being told that their economic future may depend on technologies designed to replace them.

That contradiction helps explain the growing public unease.

For decades Americans were promised that economic growth would lift all boats. Yet many families increasingly experience an economy where stock market records coexist with unaffordable housing, rising healthcare costs, stagnant purchasing power, and declining economic security. Wealth exists in abundance, but access to it grows ever more unequal.

The SpaceX IPO may be remembered as a historic financial event. But it may also serve as a symbol of a deeper crisis: an economy capable of creating trillionaires while leaving millions uncertain about their future.

Whether that future produces broader prosperity or even greater inequality may prove to be one of the defining political questions of the coming decade.

June 21, 2026 Posted by | business and costs | Leave a comment

Georgia nuclear power plant cleared for 80-year operating life

 The two boiling water reactor units at Georgia Power’s Edwin I Hatch plant
have been cleared by the regulator to operate until the mid-2050s. Hatch
unit 1 began commercial operation in December 1975, with Hatch 2 following
in September 1979. The units were originally licensed to operate for 40
years, with the NRC approving a previous 20-year licence extension in 2002.
The plant is operated by Southern Company subsidiary Southern Nuclear on
behalf of its co-owners Georgia Power, Oglethorpe Power Corporation, the
Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and Dalton Utilities.

 World Nuclear News 16th June 2026, https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-cleared-for-80-year-operating-life

June 21, 2026 Posted by | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Governments would have to foot the bill for nuclear shipping

‘Essentially, the government stands behind the operator with an open chequebook’No global liability framework in place, and getting one could take decadesFinance and insurance give nuclear a chicken-and-egg problem

19 Jun 2026, Declan Bush, Llyoyd’s

Governments will be on the hook for the potentially unlimited liability created by a nuclear incident at sea, Core Power’s annual nuclear conference was told. There are doubts they are keen to take such a burden on………….. (Subscribersonly) https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1157569/Governments-would-have-to-foot-the-bill-for-nuclear-shipping

June 21, 2026 Posted by | business and costs | Leave a comment

UK to guarantee enriched uranium supplies to Ukraine

WNN, 17 June 2026


The UK has agreed to provide guarantees for a GBP210 million (USD282 million) loan for supplies of enriched uranium to Ukraine’s nuclear power producer, Energoatom, over the next two years.

The deal was agreed between the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during their meeting in London last week.

The financing, backed by UK Export Finance, builds on a previous two-year deal to supply nuclear fuel to Ukraine.

In November 2023, Urenco agreed to continue supplying Energoatom with enriched uranium until 2035, with an option to extend the contract to 2043………………….. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/uk-to-guarantee-enriched-uranium-supplies-to-ukraine

June 21, 2026 Posted by | business and costs | Leave a comment

Trump’s ‘nuclear bros’ race to deliver US atomic revival 

 At a factory in Texas, Matt Loszak is building a new type of nuclear reactor he
hopes will allow the US to reclaim leadership in an industry dominated by
Russia and China. “Our goal is to ship hundreds and possibly thousands of
reactors every year,” the 35-year-old founder of Aalo Atomics said as he
inspected components for the Aalo-X, designed to power AI data centres.
Aalo is one of several US start-ups planning to switch on new reactors this
month ahead of a July 4 deadline set by President Donald Trump to mark the
250th anniversary of America’s independence.

Antares Nuclear and Valar
Atomics have already announced they have achieved “criticality” — the
moment a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining. Radiant Nuclear
and Oklo told the FT they were in the final stages of receiving safety
clearances under Trump’s pilot programme, which aims to have at least
three test reactors reach criticality by the target date. Many of the
founders leading the charge are under 40 and come from outside the nuclear
industry, while some have ties to the Trump administration. Backed by
Silicon Valley, they say small reactors can help meet soaring electricity
demand from AI data centres.

 FT 18th June 2026,
https://www.ft.com/content/0d074795-e54a-41d7-9c97-baf2bd6deb94

June 20, 2026 Posted by | technology, USA | Leave a comment

Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks

A coalition of some rich nations and the world’s most vulnerable have vowed to protect climate science in UN negotiations


Matteo Civillini, Joe Lo, 17 June 26. https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/06/17/science-under-attack-from-fossil-fuel-interests-at-un-climate-talks/

Dozens of countries have called out growing “coordinated attacks” by fossil fuel interests aimed at undermining the role of climate science in the UN negotiations at the mid-year talks in Bonn.

Under the banner of ‘Friends of Science’, in an overflowing press conference room lined with negotiators and civil society supporters, diplomats from Fiji, Nepal, the European Union, Switzerland, Sierra Leone and Panama vowed to ensure that decision-making in the UN climate process remains based on the “best available science”. That includes reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate science body, they said.

While steering clear of singling out any specific country, they said efforts to cast doubt on established scientific concepts, such as the 1.5 global warming limit, are led by “the usual suspects” and those who think “science threatens their economic prospects”. 

Saudi Arabia and India have opposed calls in draft texts to encourage scientific work on scenarios that would minimise the magnitude and duration of any overshoot of 1.5C, according to one negotiator in the room and summaries of closed-door discussions published by a reporting service. 

UN chief António Guterres conceded last year that a temporary breach of the key warming limit is inevitable, while urging countries to redouble efforts to bring temperatures back down.

‘Polluted narrative’

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Dozens of countries have called out growing “coordinated attacks” by fossil fuel interests aimed at undermining the role of climate science in the UN negotiations at the mid-year talks in Bonn.

Under the banner of ‘Friends of Science’, in an overflowing press conference room lined with negotiators and civil society supporters, diplomats from Fiji, Nepal, the European Union, Switzerland, Sierra Leone and Panama vowed to ensure that decision-making in the UN climate process remains based on the “best available science”. That includes reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate science body, they said.

While steering clear of singling out any specific country, they said efforts to cast doubt on established scientific concepts, such as the 1.5 global warming limit, are led by “the usual suspects” and those who think “science threatens their economic prospects”. 

Saudi Arabia and India have opposed calls in draft texts to encourage scientific work on scenarios that would minimise the magnitude and duration of any overshoot of 1.5C, according to one negotiator in the room and summaries of closed-door discussions published by a reporting service. 

UN chief António Guterres conceded last year that a temporary breach of the key warming limit is inevitable, while urging countries to redouble efforts to bring temperatures back down.

‘Polluted narrative’

Scientists have long established that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause of man-made climate change and a rapid shift away from oil, coal and gas is essential to curb global warming.

Saudi Arabia is dependent on oil and gas exports, while India largely relies on coal to power its economic development.

One negotiator said that research on how climate action can be equitable for developing countries, produced by Indian universities, had been published too late to be incorporated into the last IPCC assessment report in 2023. This incident led the Indian government to try and discredit the IPCC, they said. Some Indian scientists have argued that the IPCC’s scenarios are unfair on developing countries.

Saudi Arabia and India have played down the importance of making sure that the latest IPCC assessments – regarded as the gold standard of climate science – are available for the next global stocktake, the UN scorecard of climate action around the world. 

“Anyone that is blocking references to science – they are not our friends,” Sivendra Michael, lead negotiator for Fiji, told a press conference, highlighting the rise of a “polluted narrative” both inside and outside the negotiating rooms.

1.5C is a ‘hard limit’

Speaking for the AILAC coalition of Latin American countries, Panama’s Ana Aguilar said they went to Bonn to negotiate positions, not to negotiate the facts laid out by science.

“We see coordinated efforts to cast doubt on the best available science driven by a narrow set of interests, not by the needs of our people,” she added. “We have seen this playbook before… manufacture doubt, delay the response and let the vulnerable people pay this bill.”

The ‘Friends of Science’ coalition stressed that the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement cannot be negotiated, as the survival of the most climate vulnerable communities is at stake if it is permanently breached.

“Science tells us that 1.5C is a hard limit for many countries, including the small island developing states and least developed countries,” said Manjeet Dhakal, a negotiator for Nepal. “We still have a chance to keep 1.5 degrees in reach and minimise the overshoot if we act fast and drastically.”

Long-running IPCC standoff

While diplomats claimed attacks on science are broadening, one long-standing issue of contention is whether the latest assessment reports of the IPCC will be ready in time for the next UN global stocktake due to start this November and end in 2028. 

This matters because, as some experts have pointed out, previous IPCC findings played a key role in the first such exercise, which culminated at COP28 in Dubai in the landmark agreement on transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems

The IPCC, which works with academics worldwide, publishes its comprehensive scientific assessment reports every five to seven years. The process for the last one, AR6, lasted around seven and a half years. The seventh assessment cycle, AR7, began in July 2023, but a political battle over the timing has dragged on for over two years at successive IPCC meetings, with governments repeatedly failing to find a solution. 

A large majority of nations have been pushing for an accelerated timeline that would ensure the AR7 reports can be fed into the UN’s global stocktake. But a group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, India, China, Russia and Kenya, have said at previous IPCC meetings they want a longer process, arguing a fast-tracked assessment would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources.

Science and the stocktake

That fight has now bled into the Bonn talks where governments began discussing the arrangements for the next stocktake. At a session earlier this week, most developed countries, Latin American and small island states, and the world’s poorest nations emphasised the assessment of collective climate action must be guided by the “best available science” – code for the findings of the IPCC reports.

The Maldives, speaking for small island states, said IPCC science remains “essential to the integrity, credibility and usefulness” of the stocktake. AILAC said that starting the process “on the right footing” requires a political decision on the timeline to deliver the AR7 reports in time. Switzerland said IPCC reports “ask more than is politically comfortable, but that is precisely why they must guide every decision we make”.

Saudi Arabia, however, said no particular scientific input – and in particular what comes out of the IPCC – should be prioritised. Similarly, India warned against creating “some kind of preferred hierarchy” in the role that any specific source of information should play in the process.

Ghana’s Antwi-Boasiako Amoah, who chairs the African Group, told a press conference on Tuesday that some countries think rushing to get IPCC inputs into the global stocktake could “undermine or compromise the IPCC process”. “Africa is for science,” he said, without saying where the continent stands on the IPCC timeline.

Crunch talks in October

At the “Friends of Science” press conference, Dhakal pushed back on the idea that science would have to be rushed to be incorporated. He said the IPCC leadership has “perfectly made it clear” that they can deliver the report before the global stocktake. “It is the scientists who are saying they can deliver it on time,” he said.

The discussion will be picked up again at the next IPCC session in October, where its boss Jim Skea is hoping to reach an agreement. “As a scientist myself, I cannot overstate the importance of this decision,” he told governments in Bonn last week.

Andreas Sieber, head of political strategy at campaigning group 350.org, told Climate Home News that the debate may sound procedural, “but it is anything but”. “Science is the backbone of the Paris Agreement ambition cycle, and the evidence assessed through AR7 will help determine not only the emissions pathways countries pursue, but also how the world responds to mounting climate losses and who receives support,” he said in Bonn.

June 20, 2026 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Take a bow to the renewable revolution. The nuclear renaissance that never was is already fizzling

A tried and true technology should get cheaper and faster to develop. With nuclear power, it’s just the opposite.

  by beyondnuclearinternational, Linda Pentz Gunter, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/06/16/wont-get-fooled-again/

These days the mainstream media routinely parrot the nuclear industry party line that it is enjoying a “global renaissance.” These meek media sycophants don’t stop to question the veracity of this claim at all, or to notice that the rhetoric does not appear to match reality.

But if we are really living through a “nuclear renaissance”, which one is it? The old nuclear renaissance of 2006? Or a new re-renaissance? And where is their Michelangelo? Bill Gates appears to have made billions, but he hasn’t made masterpieces.

You have to wonder about the nuclear industry’s marketing mavens, though. Why on earth would they rebrand what they are trying to suggest is the new world dominance of nuclear power as an essential energy source by giving it the same name as their most abject failure?

Meet the new nuclear renaissance. Same as the old nuclear renaissance. All promise and, so far, no delivery.

That first nuclear renaissance wasn’t a renaissance at all, it was a stillbirth. And as a student of Italian, I have to say it peeves me that the nuclear industry dares to use the name at all. 

The actual renaissance, which began in Italy, fully blossomed across Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was an extraordinary simultaneous flowering of culture, intellectualism, art, music, science, economics and technology, a genuine “rebirth” after the relatively primitive Middle Ages.

As former energy department official Joe Romm so aptly put it during a recent briefing on nuclear power on Capitol Hill: “if the actual renaissance had been anything like the nuclear renaissance, we’d still be in the dark ages. But I guess in some respects, we still are.”

The first nuclear renaissance was launched around 2006 with about the same hubris as President Nixon’s famous claim that there would be 1,000 nuclear reactors operating in the US by the year 2000. (There were 104.)

The Nuclear Renaissance Part One promised 34 new reactors. We got two, limping in at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, years late and wildly over budget, ballooning from an original price tag of $14 billion to more than $35 billion and raising electricity rates to new heights.

Two more reactors — at the V.C. Summer site in South Carolina — broke ground but were canceled before completion, also raising electricity rates and sending executives to prison for bribery and corruption.

But now it’s the nuclear renaissance all over again! The John Carter of the nuclear world (John Carter, a 2012 Disney release, was one of the biggest box office bombs in movie history).

Everything is on track for it to be as big a dud as last time, except for one important difference. In 2026 we have an administration that is vehemently, and criminally, anti-renewable energy, casting aside actual climate solutions to prioritize fossil fuels and new nuclear projects and trashing reactor safety regulations — and the nuclear regulator — to ensure it happens.

This is all designed to clear the path — or superhighway — to allow an unprecedented acceleration of new reactor development and deployment. The theory is that it is overly stringent safety regulations that hold up nuclear power expansion. 

But the field is now populated by ingenue startup companies with no reactor development experience. History shows that even with a known and familiar technology, there are frequent stumbles that hold things up that have nothing to do with the already compliant regulator — the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission currently being constrained and circumvented — or popular opposition (we wish!) It’s called “negative learning.” A tried and true technology should get cheaper and faster to develop. With nuclear power, it’s just the opposite.

But even with the NRC stripped of its oversight, Nuclear Renaissance the Sequel could still be a box office flop. That’s because, despite everything, renewables are simply doing it for themselves. Battery technology is advancing by leaps and bounds — crucially important not only to ensure renewable reliability but also to move away from extractive minerals mining with all its attendant predatory colonialism.

And renewables are soaring worldwide, despite the wrong-headed policies of far too many of the world’s governments — and especially our own governors here in the US — who have insisted on leaping aboard the atomic Titanic.

In 2025, renewables accounted for almost 86% of the total global power capacity added. Globally, renewable power capacity is projected to increase almost 4,600 GW between 2025 and 2030 – double the deployment of the previous five years, according to the International Energy Agency. This will see renewables become the largest global energy source, used for almost 45% of electricity generation by 2030.

The irony is, that even as he spouts gibberish about wind farms causing cancer, while directing billions towards an energy technology — nuclear power — that actually does, President Trump has accidentally boosted an already robust global green energy revolution by bombing Iran and forcing the closure of the strait of Hormuz, a key passageway for the transport of fossil fuels.

To compensate for this sudden shortage of fossil fuels — a bizarre mixed blessing given we absolutely shouldn’t be using them anyway— countries are quickly finding alternatives. What they aren’t finding are those new nuclear power plants, the paper atomic airplanes still in the design phase. 

Instead, they are switching on renewables, which can be deployed in months to a handful of years, at a far lower cost, and of course without all the attendant complications of radioactive waste production or meltdowns that could irradiate entire regions effectively forever.

And it’s really not that hard, as we already know. The barriers to renewables are not technological, they’re political. But when nations’ hands are forced, how quickly things change.

Just look at Pakistan. In 2020 the country was struggling to get access to Liquified Natural Gas. It was at 3% solar. Today Pakistan is at 30% solar capacity.

“Storage will make renewable energy dominant,” says the International Renewable Energy Agency, borrowing Trump’s favorite word.

So no, we won’t get fooled again by the promise of a new nuclear renaissance. We are watching the renewable revolution take a bow instead.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the Executive Director of Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. She is the author of the book, No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, published by Pluto Press. Any opinions are her own.

June 20, 2026 Posted by | spinbuster | Leave a comment

The U.S. And Iran Have Struck A Deal To Open The Strait Of Hormuz, But Israel May Prevent An End To The War

The U.S. and Iran have reportedly signed a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz and to begin negotiations to end the war. It is a hopeful sign that this disastrous war of choice may soon be over, but once again, Israel stands to be the spoiler.

Mondoweiss, By Mitchell Plitnick  June 16, 2026 

According to reports, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz and formally end the fighting between the two countries was signed on Monday. 

It is important to clarify that, regardless of White House statements, this is not a peace deal. It is an agreement to end the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz and a commitment to stop fighting for 60 days while an agreement is reached, hopefully. The negotiation period can be extended if both parties agree. Still, it is a important agreement that indicates a end to this disastrous war could be in sight.

But as usual Israel stands to play the role of spoiler. The one thing that is most clear is that Tel Aviv won’t give up on its long-term goal of regime change in Iran. But if this MOU actually takes effect and opens the Strait of Hormuz, that will not be achieved through this war. 

…………………………………………………………………. There seems to be a consensus that the ceasefire does apply to Lebanon. Even the Israelis seem to believe this. But there is less clarity about exactly what that means.

Israel is currently occupying a large portion of Lebanon. Israeli leaders have already made it clear they have no intention of leaving. 

For the time being, it seems that the MOU will allow Israel to remain in place. The language both sides have used has often featured the “end of attacks” on Lebanon. Iran obviously seeks a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, but whether they are willing to put that off to the negotiation period rather than insisting on it happening immediately remains to be seen.

Speaking on the Breaking Points podcast, journalist Jeremy Scahill said he had been told that, in exchange for refraining from retaliating against Israel for its attack on Sunday on Dahiya in Lebanon, U.S. President Donald Trump would press Israel to withdraw entirely from Lebanon. 

That would be welcome if true, but it is more likely that Iran refrained from that attack so Israel would not get what it wanted from its bombing, namely the disruption of this MOU. So Lebanon still stands out as the main trigger point for blowing up this agreement……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..https://mondoweiss.net/2026/06/the-u-s-and-iran-have-struck-a-deal-to-open-the-strait-of-hormuz-but-israel-may-prevent-an-end-to-the-war/

June 20, 2026 Posted by | politics international | Leave a comment

The interim US-Iran deal leaves the fate of Tehran’s nuclear program still to be negotiated

 The interim deal between the U.S. and Iran is supposed to usher in a
two-month period that would address the most divisive issue between the
longtime adversaries – Tehran’s nuclear program. Preventing Iran from
attaining a nuclear bomb is a key reason that President Donald Trump said
he launched the war alongside Israel in February, but the tentative
agreement he has trumpeted leaves little runway to negotiate the
long-running sticking point.

The previous nuclear pact between Iran and
world powers, which Trump pulled the U.S. from in his first term, took many
months to negotiate. Few details have been publicly released about the
initial deal, set to be officially signed Friday in Switzerland, but it
generally calls for reopening the Strait of Hormuz to global oil shipments,
financial incentives for Iran if it meets certain benchmarks, and a 60-day
period for talks on ending the country’s nuclear program.

 Daily Mail 17th June 2026, https://www.dailymail.com/wires/ap/article-15906411/Interim-US-Iran-deal-leaves-thorniest-issue-negotiated-Tehrans-nuclear-program.html

June 20, 2026 Posted by | politics international | Leave a comment

The forgotten towns of the Chernobyl exclusion zone

Sam Farley, Tue 16 June 2026, https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-forgotten-towns-of-the-chernobyl-exclusion-zone/

When reactor four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant melted down in 1986, beyond impacting Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, it had an effect across the world.

In the years that have followed, it’s become a niche tourist attraction, with dark tourists fascinated by this apocalyptic environment,  with pictures abound on the internet of that famous, rusting Ferris wheel, the tall tower blocks being eaten up by nature and the school gymnasium littered with gas masks. Everyone remembers Pripyat, and it’s undergone a second life in popular culture, decades after the final resident left, but there lie some other towns and villages, forgotten from the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Pripyat was the zone’s largest settlement, but it’s estimated that around 40,000 people from outside that city were forced to flee the area after the reactor went ablaze. The village of Zalissya was once the largest in what became the exclusion zone, with a population of around 3,000 people, and unlike Pripyat, which was built with the power plant, it had been a settlement for 400 years before the accident, surviving conflict, famine, occupations and even revolution.

Now, Zalissya is littered with the remains of those who fled in May 1986; there are toys left to rot, alongside signs of domestic life with pots and pans, and even canned food. Despite being regularly used as the first stop for dark tourist tours of Chernobyl, pre-Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s largely been reclaimed by Mother Nature, with buildings overtaken by greenery and vegetation carpeting the streets.

Not far away is Kopachi, or more technically, was Kopachi, a village, once home to 1,100 people, situated by the plant’s cooling pond, roughly equidistant between the towns of Chernobyl and Pripyat. While the place was evacuated like everywhere else, the radiation levels were so high that the authorities decided that abandonment wasn’t enough, and they needed to bury the village entirely.

Besides two brick buildings, one of which was the village’s nursery school, everything else was buried. From a distance, Kopachi looks like a bumpy meadow, but under those mounds remain houses and a reminder of the panic that defined those early weeks following the accident. Then, just over a mile from reactor four sits Yaniv, which housed only 100 people but was significant thanks to the train station there serving the plant. As of April 2003, it’s no longer a village, having been deregistered, but it still has an incredible story.

Some of the machinery used pre-accident and even after in the clean-up still sits there and sets Geiger counters off with their high levels of radiation; hence, the decision to not bury some of the equipment, such as the engineering vehicle built on the chassis of a tank, was a strange choice. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was even occupied by invading forces for two months in early 2022, which was both a crazy decision given the health risks, and a reminder that history doesn’t stop.

It’s easy to think that all the abandoned settlements in the zone were tiny villages, but that wasn’t always true, like Poliske, which was a thriving town founded in 1415, and had led many lives, both as a textile production hub and a home for Jews, who made up 80% of the population around a century before the accident. Due to its location right on the western edge of the exclusion zone, it wasn’t abandoned with the haste of many other towns and villages closer to the power plant.

There was a decline following the accident, but it wasn’t until 1999, some 13 years after, that most of the population was evacuated. In fact, there were still around 1,000 people living there as recently as 2005, with a number of the elderly refusing to leave and happy to see out their days there. Its abandoned buildings have inspired the computer game STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, and like Yaniv, it was occupied by Russian forces during the invasion.

The village of Krasne has long been silent; just four miles from Pripyat, it was on the northern contamination track, which was one of the first directions that saw nuclear fallout following the explosion. While its residents have long gone, it’s notable because the over 200-year-old wooden church of St Michael still stands tall, its decay almost noble and rebellious, as it greys and is slowly devoured by weeds and undergrowth from below, serving to remember the power of faith.

The disaster at Chernobyl has had a lasting impact on Ukraine and the Soviet Union (the eventual collapse of which can be attributed to the incident), but while we think of Pripyat and its huge abandoned tower blocks, it’s worth remembering that there was life all over what is now the exclusion zone, where generations of families grew up, got old, married, and died, in the villages and towns that all got caught up in this epic disaster.

June 20, 2026 Posted by | environment, Ukraine, wastes | Leave a comment

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