2026 August 16 « nuclear-news

The invisible geography of Israeli power

Real power belongs to whoever is able to access, process, transfer, restrict, or legally compel the disclosure of the information.

Countries that are rapidly building their own digital systems are entering a market already structured around dependency. A government may require that citizens’ data remain within national borders while simultaneously entrusting a foreign company with managing the platform, updating the software, providing the AI model, or controlling critical layers of the system. This creates the appearance of sovereignty without its substance.

Nowhere are the consequences of this hidden geography more evident than in occupied Palestine.

Data sovereignty is the new oil – but West Asia is pumping raw material while foreign tech giants refine it.

Strategic Culture Foundation, Lorenzo Maria Pacini, August 13, 2026, https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/08/13/the-invisible-geography-of-israeli-power/

On June 10, 2025, two executives from Microsoft France appeared before a French Senate investigative committee tasked with examining public procurement and digital sovereignty. The hearing proceeded in the usual reassuring tone until a question that completely shifted the mood: Could the company guarantee that the data of French citizens – even if hosted on servers located in France – would never be transferred to a foreign authority without the consent of the French government? Anton Carniaux, the subsidiary’s director of public and legal affairs, responded under oath with six words: “No, I cannot guarantee that.”

That statement cut through years of corporate rhetoric built around phrases such as “local cloud regions”, “reliable infrastructure”, and “data residency”. France could host the servers, French citizens could generate the data, and French institutions could pay for the service – yet ultimate authority could still reside elsewhere. The commission drew a clear conclusion. Microsoft was unable to guarantee sovereignty over the data it hosted. That exchange reveals a reality with specific consequences, including – and perhaps above all – for West Asia: the physical location of data no longer coincides with its political location.

Classical power geography teaches that sovereignty occupies territory. Oil belongs to the state beneath whose soil it lies; ports fall under the authority of the country on whose shores they stand; oil pipelines follow the borders they cross. In this tradition, power is read on the surface of the earth. Data follows a different geography.

A medical record can be created in Riyadh, stored in Bahrain, processed by an algorithm trained in the United States, and managed through a European subsidiary. Which state truly controls it? The conventional answer attributes the data to the individual, company, or government that generated it. In practice, ownership matters less than control. Real power belongs to whoever is able to access, process, transfer, restrict, or legally compel the disclosure of the information.

This principle is stated unambiguously by the U.S. Department of Justice itself. Under the CLOUD Act, providers subject to U.S. jurisdiction can be compelled to hand over data through valid legal proceedings, “regardless of where the company stores it”. Washington presents the law as a legitimate tool for obtaining electronic evidence. On a geopolitical level, it allows U.S. jurisdiction to extend through corporate control, reaching information stored far beyond U.S. territory. The new map of power is drawn not only by borders, cables, and data centers, but by registered offices, encryption keys, legal obligations, system administrators, and the states capable of compelling them to cooperate.

Across Western Asia, governments are investing heavily in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, digital identity, smart cities, and data-driven public services. Saudi Arabia aims to become a leading data economy; the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Turkey are expanding their information management and governance capabilities. Physical capacity is also concentrated in a few regional hubs: a 2025 assessment by the World Bank counted thirty-nine data centers in the UAE and thirty-three in Saudi Arabia – figures lower than the average for high-income countries (eighty-one) but significantly higher than the rest of the region.

The transition is measurable. According to the International Telecommunication Union, in 2024, 70 percent of the population of Arab states used the Internet, compared to 68 percent globally. The regional average, however, masks an 82-percentage-point gap between the least-connected and most-connected economies, while fixed broadband subscriptions remain less than half the global figure. Digital expansion is rapid and, at the same time, deeply unequal.

The provider landscape, on the other hand, is highly concentrated. According to Synergy Research Group, in the third quarter of 2025, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google accounted for 63 percent of global enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure, in a quarterly market that had grown to $107 billion from $68 billion just two years earlier. Countries that are rapidly building their own digital systems are entering a market already structured around dependency. A government may require that citizens’ data remain within national borders while simultaneously entrusting a foreign company with managing the platform, updating the software, providing the AI model, or controlling critical layers of the system. This creates the appearance of sovereignty without its substance.

Data localization answers only one question: where is the information stored? It leaves the crucial questions open. Who controls the encryption keys? Who updates the software? Who can suspend the service? Which country’s laws govern the provider? Who can compel its disclosure, and who possesses the computing power necessary to extract strategic value from it? Keeping servers within national borders does not place them under national control.

Palestine and data as a weapon

Nowhere are the consequences of this hidden geography more evident than in occupied Palestine. Modern warfare increasingly depends on the collection, cross-referencing, and interpretation of enormous amounts of information. Phone records, biometric identifiers, intercepted communications, location histories, and aerial imagery can be transformed into military intelligence through cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

The combined use of Microsoft and OpenAI products by the Israeli military in March 2024 had reached a level nearly two hundred times higher than that of the week preceding October 7, 2023. The data stored on Microsoft servers had more than doubled, exceeding 13.6 petabytes by July 2024, while server usage grew by nearly two-thirds during the first two months of the war. The Azure platform was reportedly used to compile, transcribe, and translate information obtained through mass surveillance, with some of the intelligence cross-referenced with target-acquisition systems.

In September 2025, Microsoft deactivated certain cloud and AI services provided to an Israeli military unit after an internal audit confirmed that its products were being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians; the data in question was stored in the company’s cloud facilities located in Europe. This chain of events is revealing: information collected in Palestine, processed by an Israeli military unit, hosted in Europe, and ultimately subject to a decision made by a U.S. company. The limitation of this measure is equally telling. As Hossam Nasr, a former Microsoft employee and advocate for the No Azure for Apartheid campaign, noted, the bulk of the contract with the Israeli military apparatus remained intact. Big tech companies now occupy positions once reserved almost exclusively for states: they provide capabilities used in intelligence operations, decide whether a customer retains access, investigate alleged abuse, and impose restrictions across borders.

Israel itself recognizes the strategic importance of control over the cloud. The Nimbus project, awarded to Google and Amazon Web Services, was designed to provide Israeli ministries and related public agencies with a comprehensive cloud infrastructure. The contract, worth $1.2 billion, required local infrastructure and was presented as a means of keeping government information within the country’s borders. The main providers, however, remain U.S. companies, embedded in American legal and technological systems.

Nimbus embodies the central paradox of data sovereignty: a government can demand that information remain within its territory while entrusting the storage, computing, and platform management to companies headquartered elsewhere. Israel negotiated hard to reduce this vulnerability. Most countries in West Asia lack Israel’s bargaining power, its technological integration with Washington, or its ability to exert pressure on major American corporations. Here, sovereignty is also a function of negotiating power.

The dispute over data is ultimately a struggle over three strategic rights. The first is the right to collect: governments, digital platforms, telecommunications operators, banks, and security services accumulate information on identity, movements, communications, health, consumption, and behavior. The second is the right to process: raw data acquires strategic value only if the actor possesses the chips, algorithms, cloud platforms, and qualified personnel necessary to process it. The third is the right to compel: the authority, claimed by governments and courts, to force providers to disclose, retain, remove, or restrict information.

The economic concentration behind these three rights is intensifying. UNCTAD reports that the five largest digital multinationals have increased their combined share of industry sales from 21 percent in 2017 to 48 percent in 2025, while their share of assets rose from 17 to 35 percent. Control over data and computing is accumulating faster than infrastructure is spreading. A country that controls only the first right is a supplier of digital raw materials; one that controls data collection and computing can become a digital power; an actor capable of exercising all three possesses something close to digital sovereignty.

The economic stakes are rising rapidly. UNCTAD estimates that the global artificial intelligence market will grow from $189 billion in 2023 to $4,800 billion in 2033 – a twenty-five-fold increase over a decade. Regions that supply data but lack the computing infrastructure and intellectual property necessary to process it risk retaining only a minimal portion of that value. In the 20th century, strategic value lay not only in extracting oil, but in refining it, transporting it, pricing it, and financing it. In the 21st century, the same distinction applies to data: West Asia can generate the raw material, but the decisive power lies in the “data refineries” – that is, in the cloud platforms, AI models, and computing systems that convert information into profit, intelligence, and geopolitical leverage.

Beyond digital colonialism

The solution is not technological isolation. No single West Asian state can reproduce every layer of the global technology stack on its own, and replacing dependence on U.S. suppliers with total reliance on Chinese or other platforms would merely shift the external center of gravity. The risk to avoid is that breaking free from oil dependence could turn into digital colonialism: a scenario in which companies in the region generate the data while foreign platforms own the infrastructure, extract its value, and retain control over access. What is needed is distributed technological autonomy.

On this basis, a concrete order of priorities can be established. The procurement of cloud services must be treated as a national security decision, not as routine IT business: contracts must specify who controls the encryption keys, how foreign legal requests will be handled, and whether data and applications can be migrated to another provider. Health, defense, biometric, judicial, and civil registry data require stricter protection than ordinary commercial information. Governments must invest in interoperable regional cloud capabilities, open standards, independent auditing, and the ability to maintain essential services should a foreign provider revoke access. Above all, data sovereignty must extend beyond storage to encompass the entire chain: collection, classification, computation, access, sharing, and deletion.

For over a century, the geopolitical importance of West Asia has been mapped through oil fields, pipelines, ports, straits, and military bases. Those structures remain central, but another strategic network has spread over them – one made up of databases, cloud contracts, legal jurisdictions, identity systems, AI models, and invisible authorizations. Control over data gives states and corporations the power to map societies, interpret their behaviors, anticipate their political and economic shifts, and translate that knowledge into action.

The states of Western Asia are rapidly building the digital infrastructure upon which their economies and public institutions will rest. Much of the authority governing those systems, however, remains outside the region. In the 21st century, control over a territory will increasingly depend on control over the data that reveals its people, institutions, and resources.

The question posed to the French Senate in June 2025 clearly extends far beyond France: those who cannot guarantee where their data will end up do not fully govern their own territory. And with that data, literally anything can be done.

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | ASIA, Israel, technology | Leave a comment

The big catch with small modular nuclear reactors

Those advantages are also shared by renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind turbines — without the risks that come with nuclear power.

Tim Schauenberg, 08/05/2026August 5, 2026 https://www.dw.com/en/small-reactors-big-promises-what-the-nuclear-trend-can-really-deliver/a-77491854

Mini nuclear reactors are seen as a flexible energy source. Their promise: abundant energy, cheap, clean and climate-friendly with lower water use. But do the numbers add up? We look at what’s behind the SMR hype.

Many politicians and tech companies are now pushing to build new nuclear power plants to meet the world’s rapidly growing energy demands. Small reactors — known as Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs — are gaining momentum.

They could be built in less time and come online faster than conventional nuclear power plants. Originally developed to power submarines and aircraft carriers, SMRs largely work the same way as larger reactors.

They contain a nuclear reactor fueled by uranium, which releases enormous amounts of heat through nuclear fission. That heat turns water into steam, and the steam pressure drives turbines that generate electricity.

Companies and startups are working on a wide variety of SMR designs and concepts, but the underlying principle is similar across all of them.

One advantage over conventional nuclear stations is that mini reactors require a maximum of two hectares (around five acres) of land — roughly the size of two soccer fields. By comparison, conventional plants require up to 280 soccer fields, according to the industry.

Why use a modular design for mini nuclear plants?

What makes SMRs particularly attractive is their modular construction. Individual components can be mass-produced as prefabricated modules and pre-assembled off-site — much like a prefab house that simply needs to be put together once it arrives at its location.

Manufacturers promise an extremely short construction time of between one and a half to six years. Large reactors in the US can take anywhere from seven to 10 years to build.

Proponents also argue that modular units could deliver low-emission power to remote regions, where grid infrastructure is often not developed enough to handle the enormous energy output of a large conventional plant.

Those advantages are also shared by renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind turbines — without the risks that come with nuclear power.

Why less radiation can mean greater risk

The output of mini nuclear reactors is significantly lower than that of conventional nuclear power plants. Depending on the design, SMRs can deliver between 10 and around 200 megawatts of power, while a conventional plant generates between 1,000 and 1,600 MW.

To produce the same amount of energy as the roughly 400 high-capacity reactors currently operating worldwide, tens of thousands of small reactors would need to be built.

SMRs could offer some safety advantages: they contain less radioactive material than large reactors and would be distributed across multiple sites. This means that an accident or military strike resulting in a meltdown would not be as catastrophic as a worst-case scenario at a large reactor. Nevertheless, the consequences of an SMR accident could still be severe.

Germany’s Federal Office for Radiation Protection points out that despite lower radiation levels per reactor, the overall risk posed by mini reactors could be many times higher. Replacing the output of existing nuclear plants with large numbers of smaller ones would require an enormous number of reactors worldwide — and that increases the likelihood that at least one of them will eventually suffer a serious incident.

Nuclear accidents and radiation leaks are extremely rare — but the consequences can be catastrophic. The last major nuclear accident occurred in 2011 at the Fukushima power plant in Japan, following a tsunami. Parts of the region have been contaminated for generations to come, and nearly 170,000 people were forced to flee their homes.

Extreme efficiency and the dream of radioactive recycling

Part of the hype around some new mini reactors rests on the hope of extracting significantly more energy from the same amount of uranium. Some SMR models — known as “fast reactors” — could theoretically yield 60 to 70 times more energy from uranium than conventional technology, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

But the technology is still in the early stages of development and has so far played only a limited role in IAEA projections. In practice, it has barely been proven in SMRs at all. Only two SMR facilities are currently in operation worldwide — one in China and one in Russia.

Work is also underway on recycling SMR fuel rods, but that process remains largely untested. Most SMR projects continue to rely on the same conventional technology used in traditional reactors.

And the problem of radioactive waste remains unsolved — for both conventional and fast reactors. The risks this poses are already visible: at the Asse facility in Lower Saxony, Germany, a temporary storage site built in the 1970s, hundreds of barrels of intermediate-level radioactive waste are now rusting and beginning to leak. Germany has yet to establish a permanent disposal site.

In fact, no permanent repository for spent fuel or highly radioactive reactor waste is currently in operation anywhere in the world. After 20 years of construction, the Onkalo facility in Finland is set to become the first when it opens in 2026.

Another problem for nuclear power is growing water scarcity. Recent heat and drought have already forced European nations to curb nuclear output due to for cooling due to low river levels.

Because SMRs are mainly just smaller, simplified versions conventional reactors, they still use water to run and for cooling. While individual units use less water than traditional plants, clustering units could increase overall use, warn experts. Researchers are investigating the use of alternative coolants like molten salts and helium gas for newer designs.

When would SMRs make a climate impact — and at what cost?

Enthusiasm for small reactors runs high in the nuclear community. But what may look promising at first glance is, in many respects, difficult or impossible to back up with solid evidence.

Calculating the costs of a technology still in development is no easy task. Nevertheless, the German Institute for Economic Research estimates that electricity from new mini nuclear plants — even accounting for economies of scale, including construction and manufacturing — will cost at least twice as much per megawatt-hour as the already very affordable electricity generated by solar or wind power. In a worst-case scenario, the cost could be nearly eight times higher.

Adding up all the announcements, plans and strategies of major nations, a few hundred SMRs could come online in China, the US, Europe and India by 2050. But according to Germany’s Federal Office for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection, citing figures from the nuclear industry, production would only become economically viable at a threshold of 3,000 reactors.

The international community has committed to limiting global warmingto well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Meeting that target requires large parts of the global economy to become climate-neutral by 2050. The EU aims to reach zero emissions by then; Germany is even targeting net negative CO2 emissions by 2050.

That means climate-friendly nuclear technology would arrive too late to meaningfully limit global warming — and its advantages would be significantly diminished as a result.

What would remain: the radiation risk, and the question of what to do with the radioactive waste.

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

Zelensky Must Go Before Real Peace Talks Can Begin

Zelensky, he argues, has come to equate Ukraine’s survival with his own continued leadership. That belief has justified the suspension of elections, the refusal to pursue realistic diplomacy, and a strategy that has steadily worsened Ukraine’s negotiating position, its economy, and its military situation.

We also discussed the deeper problem. Western policy has become trapped in a form of moralism that treats any contact with Russia as contamination. This makes genuine diplomacy almost impossible and prepares the ground for permanent confrontation long after the fighting stops.

In conversation with Professor Nicolai Petro

Ian Proud, Aug 12, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/zelensky-must-go-before-real-peace?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=210874375&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Something has shifted.

For the first time in years, serious people in European capitals are quietly exploring track-two contacts with Moscow. My old boss, Tim Barrow, was recently dispatched to Vienna for meetings that were supposedly secret — until the newspapers reported them. At the same time, Ukraine’s military, economic and demographic position continues to deteriorate in ways that no amount of Western propaganda can disguise.

I sat down with Professor Nicolai Petro of the University of Rhode Island to discuss what this means. Petro is one of the most thoughtful and independent analysts of Russia and Ukraine writing today. His book The Tragedy of Ukraine remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the deep domestic roots of this conflict rather than the simplified morality play offered by most Western media.

Our conversation was frank. Petro’s central argument is blunt: serious negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are almost impossible while Volodymyr Zelensky remains in office. Zelensky, he argues, has come to equate Ukraine’s survival with his own continued leadership. That belief has justified the suspension of elections, the refusal to pursue realistic diplomacy, and a strategy that has steadily worsened Ukraine’s negotiating position, its economy, and its military situation.

The observable realities are hard to ignore. The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is now over forty. The pool of viable recruits is shrinking fast. Casualty rates in the specialised assault battalions remain extremely high. Winter is approaching, and with it the near-certainty of another Russian campaign against energy infrastructure. Ukraine’s finance ministry will shortly return to Western capitals asking for yet more money. And the political mood inside Ukraine itself is shifting — recent polling shows Zelensky’s trust ratings underwater, even in Kyiv.

Petro believes Russia’s military objective remains the consolidation of the four regions plus Crimea. Once those administrative borders are secured, Moscow will be in a position to declare its goals achieved and place a clear choice before Kyiv: negotiate now on the basis of current realities, or face further losses. In his view, that moment is approaching.

The EU’s own statements about retaining and even expanding sanctions after the war reveal the logic: there is to be no real peace, only a frozen conflict managed under permanent pressure.

There are faint signs of movement. Serbia’s potential role as a mediator is intriguing. Subtle shifts in London and elsewhere suggest some officials are beginning to grasp that the current course is unsustainable. But without a change of leadership in Kyiv, Petro sees little prospect of meaningful talks.

This was one of the most clear-eyed conversations I’ve had on the war. Petro does not deal in wishful thinking or propaganda. He deals in political and military reality.

You can watch the full interview here.

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Takaichi, the Three Non-Nuclear Principles, and a Strained US Nuclear Umbrella

Takaichi herself raised the underlying issue well before becoming prime minister. In a 2024 book, she revealed that, as a Cabinet minister in 2022, she had objected to language in the National Security Strategy stating that Japan’s basic policy of adhering to the Three Non-Nuclear Principles would remain unchanged

For Japan, the most immediate question is not whether to pursue nuclear weapons itself, but whether to allow its ally’s nuclear-capable assets on Japanese soil.

By Takahashi Kosuke, August 12, 2026

Eighty-one years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9, Japan is confronting an increasingly difficult contradiction: how to uphold its identity as the only country to have suffered atomic attack in wartime while strengthening deterrence against an increasingly formidable group of nuclear-armed neighbors.

The dilemma came into sharper focus during this year’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations. Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae stated that Japan “maintains” its Three Non-Nuclear Principles and reaffirmed Tokyo’s commitment to pursuing a world free of nuclear weapons. Yet when asked whether the principles would continue to be explicitly affirmed in the three strategic documents her government plans to revise by the end of the year, Takaichi declined to prejudge the wording.

That ambiguity matters. Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles – not possessing, not producing, and not permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japanese territory – trace back to former Prime Minister Sato Eisaku’s 1967 declaration and have long stood as a symbol of Japan’s postwar identity.

The tension was particularly visible in Nagasaki on August 9. Mayor Suzuki Shiro described nuclear weapons as an “absolute evil,” warned of the dangers of relying on nuclear deterrence, and urged the government to uphold the Three Non-Nuclear Principles. Takaichi, by contrast, reiterated Japan’s current adherence to the principles while emphasizing a “realistic and practical” approach toward achieving a world without nuclear weapons…………………………………………………………………………………………………

Abandoning the Three Non-Nuclear Principles hastily would carry substantial political and diplomatic costs. They remain closely tied to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and underpin Japan’s credibility in advocating global nuclear disarmament…………………….

For Japan, the choice is not simply whether to pursue nuclear armament or nuclear pacifism. The more immediate question is whether the third principle specifically – “not permitting the introduction” of nuclear weapons – can remain unchanged while Japan simultaneously asks the United States to strengthen extended nuclear deterrence. https://thediplomat.com/2026/08/takaichi-the-three-non-nuclear-principles-and-a-strained-us-nuclear-umbrella/

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, politics | Leave a comment

Hungary’s government plans interventions on Danube River to keep nuclear plant running

By ASSOCIATED PRESS, 13 August 2026 ,
https://www.dailymail.com/wires/ap/article-16047513/Hungarys-government-plans-interventions-Danube-River-nuclear-plant-running.html

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) – Authorities in Hungary will begin taking steps to raise the level of the Danube River this week in order to ensure the country’s only nuclear power plant can continue operating, Prime Minister Péter Magyar said on Wednesday.

Persistent drought and successive extreme heat waves in recent months have deprived one of Europe´s largest rivers of water, bringing Danube levels to record lows and pushing the Paks nuclear power plant to the brink of shutting down for the first time in its 44-year history.

The Soviet-built plant, which uses water from the Danube to cool its four reactors, is currently operating at little more than 10% of its 2,000 megawatt capacity due to low water levels. It supplies Hungary with around a third of its electricity.

In a video posted to Facebook on Wednesday, Magyar said authorities would begin building a bed sill – a low concrete or stone structure built into the riverbed to slow the current and raise upstream water levels – on Thursday on a section of the Danube just upriver from the plant.

Delivery of some 145,000 cubic meters of rocks used in its construction would begin on Wednesday evening, Magyar said, adding that the intervention could raise the level of the Danube by up to a meter (3 feet).

Meanwhile, two 80-meter (262-foot) barges will be transported to the site near Paks and may be sunk in order to raise the Danube up to a further 20 centimeters (8 inches) at the plant’s cooling pumps. A decision on whether to sink them will be made on Friday, Magyar said.

“We can no longer consider this extraordinary situation as a one-time natural extreme,” he said, adding that the work must be carried out quickly to avoid a full Paks shutdown.

Magyar referred to the construction of the bed sill as a “long-term” solution which could ensure that water levels never fall below the threshold at which reactors at Paks must be powered down.

He said that after a recent temporary rise in water levels, they were expected to begin falling again in coming days which, without external intervention, could lead to the complete shutdown of the Paks plant.

“The Danube has given us days, not months,” he said.

Similar measures were taken in Romania last week when authorities sank four barges laden with rock into the Danube in an attempt to redirect water downstream toward the Cernavoda nuclear plant, which had already shut down one of its two reactors due to low water levels.

On Wednesday, Magyar said the Paks plant operating at its current output is costing Hungary’s economy up to 50 billion forints ($158 million) per month. By contrast, he said the planned interventions on the Danube will cost around 6 billion forints ($19 million).

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, EUROPE | Leave a comment

Trump: Iran is broke (or is the U.S. the broken nation?)

August 14, 2026, https://space4peace.blogspot.com/2026/08/trump-iran-is-broke-or-is-it-us-is.html

Former Mossad chief was just handed full control of one of the biggest U.S. defense tech companies. David Barnea completed his term as Mossad director on June 2, 2026. On August 3 he was appointed Global President and Chairman of Ondas Defense Ltd., the defense division of Nasdaq-listed U.S. firm Ondas Inc., which develops autonomous systems, drones, counter-UAS, and AI-enabled multi-domain defense platforms.

The U.S. military has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper reconnaissance-strike drones since the start of the war with Yemen and Iran. The cost of the lost aircraft may exceed $1.3 billion. Before the conflict began, the U.S. Armed Forces had approximately 185 such drones.

Yemen military: Yemen appreciates Russia’s stance in the UN Security Council in condemning the strikes on Sanaa Airport by Saudi Arabia, as it called for lifting the complete siege on Yemen by Al Saud.

By Jonathan Cook @ Consortium News: We are on the brink of a series of catastrophes of our own making that humankind will be exceptionally lucky to survive. There is a path ahead, but being able to see it and where it leads will require — at least from most Westerners — a difficult feat of imagination. We will need to cast aside many of the things we have been taught to most closely identify with. It will demand of us a realisation that our most cherished values are actually harmful. The West has only been superficially democratic — in the sense that everyone gets a vote — for the last century or so. Even then, democracy has been highly restricted and controlled: the public usually gets a choice between two capitalist parties, one more extreme than the other, following a lifetime of exposure to opinions crafted for them by the ultimate beneficiaries of capitalism — the billionaires who own the mass media. The ruling class understands the tide is turning. The world’s resources are finite and running out. Capitalism’s model of mass consumption can only hasten the end. Consumption pollutes the planet. It fuels climate chaos. It decimates other species that sustain a living planet. If individualism is shown to bring only ruin, we are likely to prefer collective ideologies. If greed brings only death, we are likely to prefer cooperation and solidarity. Hope of salvation resides not in iPhones and jeans but in the resurrection of the commons — of public good, of shared wealth.

By Nate Bear The Elaborate Fairy-Tales Justifying The War In Ukraine: It appears that a significant number of people who support the Ukraine war understand that in every other part of the world the US is a self-interested empire using its military power and hegemonic status to assert its influence for geostrategic and political ends. But in Ukraine, apparently, this isn’t the case. In Ukraine the US has shed its imperial ambitions and is merely helping a scrappy little upstart in a fight against its big bully neighbour. In this telling of events, it is Russia which is the imperial power, with the US playing the role of good global citizen. This to me is incomprehensibly fractured logic resting on a seemingly sincere belief that the US can pursue selfless policy in one part of the world because it is a benign empire, but pursues selfish war in another part of the world because it is a malign empire. A truly baffling and incoherent analysis. In 2008, in a conversation with John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, Tony Blair said western strategy “should be to make Russia a little desperate with our activities in areas bordering on what Russia considers its sphere of interest and along its actual borders.” This meeting came just 10 days before the 2008 Budapest summit where the west affirmed that Ukraine and Georgia “will become” NATO members. Those who support this war until the last Ukrainian are the elites in Ukraine, Europe and the US whose husbands, fathers, sons and brothers are not being sent to die an ignominious death. Those who indulge in double-standards, false equivalences and fairy-tale narratives do so to avoid the painful unravelling of their cognitive dissonance. And those who make peace impossible make war inevitable.

SpaceNews: The Pentagon’s push to replenish missile inventories is creating an opening for a new class of manufacturers that say the problem isn’t simply a shortage of factory space. It is how those factories are built. Startups such as Machina, Hadrian and Freeform are applying software, robotics and highly automated production techniques to aerospace and defense manufacturing, challenging a model that has long relied on dedicated machinery, specialized tooling and skilled labor to make relatively small numbers of complex parts. Lockheed is also an investor in Machina through Lockheed Martin Ventures.

It would be wise to recall that during the 2003 ‘Shock & Awe’ US attack on Iraq, then Naval War College instructor Thomas Barnett’s new book ‘Pentagon’s New Map’ was published stating that ‘America’s role in the world will be security export’. He said we won’t make cars, TVs, shoes, etc. Our role will be to make weapons and wage endless war to secure the parts of the world not yet under US-NATO control. He called it the ‘non-integrating gap’. Iran, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, Southern Lebanon, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, China and the African continent all fit these days into that plan. He stated these wars would enable corporate globalization of the world economy. We are still in that place today.
Historic Foreign Policy Speech at American University in Washington DC on June 10, 1963 by President John F. Kennedy: JFK was killed in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Compare JFK’s words with those of Donald Trump these days.

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Britain races against the world to unlock energy’s holy grail

“Most British people don’t know that their Government has started a
Manhattan Project,” says Michael Cole, a plasma physicist and author of a
history of fusion energy. “It is an engineering project on the same
scale.

” I’ve come to see it for myself, but as my train slows to a halt
at what feels like a branch-line station that Richard Beeching forgot to
close, it’s hard to believe. Culham railway station is as quiet as the
Adlestrop of Edward Thomas’s melancholy poem, in which there’s nothing
but “willow-herb … and all the birds of Oxfordshire”.

But just behind
the hedges is Britain’s Los Alamos: the Centre for Fusion Energy. Spread
across a sprawling industrial park more than 160 acres, it is home to some
2,600 scientists and engineers busy trying to tame atoms. The project, some
believe, is as ambitious as Robert Oppenheimer’s in New Mexico.
“There’s enough energy potential in a glass of seawater to light up a
city,” says Mark Thomas, the chief executive of First Light Fusion.

But unlocking it requires a dramatic, violent process called nuclear fusion.
Every star, including our own sun, is a giant natural fusion reactor, and
here in the Oxfordshire countryside, they are making machines that operate
on the same principles of physics. Temperatures inside the machines have
reached 10 times hotter than the sun’s core, easily the hottest ever
recorded in the solar system.

After decades of demonstrations and
experiments, the UK has decided it’s time to commit to building the
world’s first commercial prototype fusion power plant. The programme is
known as Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, or Step.

Telegraph 14th Aug 2026,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/08/14/britain-races-against-the-world-to-unlock-energy-holy-grail/

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, UK | Leave a comment

Sizewell no-show halts holiday park expansion bid

Joao Santos, Local Democracy Reporting Service, 14 Aug 26, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cre4pnd179xo

A decision whether a holiday park can be expanded to house workers for Sizewell C has been delayed after no-one from the project showed up to a planning meeting.

Britannia Jinkey Jersey Ltd, which owns Pontins Pakefield, near Lowestoft, wants to develop an additional 340 caravan pitches at the site.

At an East Suffolk Council planning meeting, Conservative councillor Paul Ashdown criticised Sizewell C for not being “bothered to come and sit with us” and moved to defer the decision to allow for a site visit.

A Sizewell C spokesperson said: “We worked closely with local partners to help develop and submit this application. We will continue to work with all parties involved to support the next steps.”

The proposals sought permission for the new pitches alongside amenity buildings, including toilets, 36 communal showers, laundry and dishwashing facilities.

Members of the planning committee urged for a representative from Sizewell C to be present when the authority meets again.

The plans were recommended for approval by officers, but councillors said questions remained unanswered.

Gisleham and Kessingland parish councils both agreed with the officer’s recommendation of approval but raised concerns, particularly around the impact on traffic and road safety.

Lowestoft Town Council recommended “total refusal” over concerns around infrastructure capacity and the long-term sustainability of public transport.

The planning application will now be heard at a meeting in the future.

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Major nuclear power station shut down by millions of invading jellyfish

The massive Gravelines nuclear power plant just 30 miles from Britain has been forced to close down in order to avoid disaster after a swarm of jellyfish got sucked into the cooling system on Monday

Joe Smith News Reporter, 11 Aug 2026, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nuclear-plant-millions-invading-jellyfish-37540444

Western Europe’s biggest nuclear power station has been shut down after it was invaded by millions of jellyfish.

EDF’s Gravelines plant near Dunkirk, just 30 miles from Britain, was forced to shut down in order to avoid disaster on Monday as the sea creatures swarmed into the plant.

EDF revealed how the jellyfish had been filter drums at the seawater pumping stations, used to cool the giant nuclear reactors at the heart of the plant.

The company was forced to take emergency measures, with reactors two, three and four taken offline, while output from reactor one was halved.

“This situation has no impact on the safety of the facilities, the safety of our personnel, or the environment,” a statement from EDF said.

Only reactor six was operating at full power on Tuesday, with reactor five previously taken offline for scheduled works.

The jellyfish invasion comes exactly a year after another swarm of the creatures took the French nuclear site offline for two days.

An invasive species of jellyfish, called the Asian Moon Jellyfish, have been making themselves at home in the English Channel and North Sea in 2020.

The species, usually native to the Pacific, is thought to have been brought here in the ballast tanks of supertankers and dumped into the seas around France and Britain.

Nuclear plants in China, Japan and India, which also rely of seawater for cooling, have previously been thrown into chaos by the slimy sea creatures. And last year power production at Gravelines came to a standstill after the jellies caused chaos.

The plant installed cameras monitoring the seawater intake and filters after last year’s fiasco and set up a warning system to give advanced notice of swarms heading their way.

The system saw fishing boats sent out of saturday with trawler nets in an attempt to thin the numbers of the invasive jellyfish. This helped to limit the latest invasion, the engineer said.

Meanwhile vacuum trucks are sucking out the jellyfish already trapped inside the plant. The engineer said that since no new jellies are arriving the plant will hopefully be back on line soon.

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, France, safety | Leave a comment

Reactors shut down in Romania were of the Candu design, already notorious for high tritium release when in operation.

Susan O’Donnell. 16 Aug 26

The reactor shutdown in Romania has been reported clearly identifiying the reactors as CANDU design. They are similar or identical to the Point Lepreau reactor operating in New Brunswick and the Gentilly2 reactor in Quebec that was shut down in 2012. Two years ago the Canadian government provided a $3 billion export financing loan to build two more CANDU reactors at the same nuclear site in Romania.

That work has been ongoing with most of the funding coming back to AtkinsRealis. The Canadian government has been pointing to the new build in Romania in its ongoing efforts to sell more CANDU reactors abroad. CANDU exports are central to Canada‘s new nuclear energy strategy. It will be very interesting to see how this latest development impacts rolling out the strategy.

David Geary, – Canada has had trouble marketing CANDUs in Europe (and in the U.S) because these reactors emit way more tritium during routine operations than other reactor designs … and the E.U. has a much stricter regulatory body than Canada has in that regard.

Whereas former Soviet republics, like Romania, have more lax regulatory standards, as well as more shady / sketchy / bribery-driven business practices. .

A quote from a CleanGreenSask factsheet: ” …the E.U. allows up to 100 Bq/L of tritium in drinking water, the U.S. allows 740 Bq/L, but the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) allows up to 7,000 Bq/L ” This is but one example showing how the CNSC is clearly compromised by the Canadian CANDU reactor

August 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, EUROPE, safety | Leave a comment