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St. Louis Residents Seek Compensation for Illnesses Tied to Nuclear Contamination

By Jim Salter | April 8, 2024,  https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2024/04/08/768472.htm

Karen Nickel has been dealing with lupus and other illnesses for years, illnesses she blames on childhood exposure to a suburban St. Louis creek where Cold War-era nuclear waste was dumped decades ago. It’s time, she said Friday, for the federal government to start making amends.

“People have died and are still dying,” Nickel, co-founder of the activist group Just Moms STL, said.

Nickel and others impacted by nuclear waste exposure in the St. Louis region joined Democratic U.S. Rep. Cori Bush at a news conference at a park that sits near long-contaminated Coldwater Creek. They urged renewal of a law initially passed more than three decades ago that would provide an estimated $50 billion to compensate Americans exposed to radiation by the government.

Last month, the Senate approved legislation by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico that would not only extend the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, but expand its scope to include Missouri and other states adversely affected by the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

But the compensation plan was excluded from a spending bill.

“The Senate did its job, but House leadership has failed to act,” Bush, of St. Louis, said. “This injustice cannot stand.”

The plan isn’t dead. It could still pass as a stand-alone bill, or be attached to another piece of legislation. But time is of the essence, Bush said. The RECA program expires June 7.

Uranium processing in the St. Louis area played a pivotal role in developing the nuclear weapons that helped bring an end to World War II and provided a key defense during the Cold War. But eight decades later, the region is still dealing with contamination at several sites.

In July, an investigation published by The Associated Press, The Missouri Independent and MuckRock showed that the federal government and companies responsible for nuclear bomb production and atomic waste storage sites in the St. Louis area were aware of health risks, spills, improperly stored contaminants and other problems but often ignored them.

While it is difficult to prove definitively that the waste caused residents’ illnesses, advocates argue that there is more than enough evidence that it has sickened people.

Since the RECA program began, more than 54,000 claims have been filed and about $2.6 billion has been awarded for approved claims in Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

In New Mexico, residents in the communities surrounding the area where the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945 — the top-secret Manhattan Project — were not warned of the radiological dangers and didn’t realize that an atomic blast was the source of the ash that was raining down upon them.

Advocates also have sought to bring awareness to the lingering effects of radiation exposure on the Navajo Nation, where millions of tons of uranium ore were extracted over decades to support U.S. nuclear activities.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2022 extending RECA for two years, into June. Hawley’s bill would extend the law for five years and expand coverage to include people in Missouri as well as Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alaska and Guam.

The White House has indicated that Biden would sign the legislation.

“The President believes we have a solemn obligation to address toxic exposure, especially among those who have been placed in harm’s way by the government’s actions,” the White House said in a statement earlier this year.

Others worry about the cost. The taxpayer advocacy group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said that the legislation should include budget offsets to pay for it.

Nuclear waste stored near St. Louis’ Lambert Airport made its way into Coldwater Creek in the 1960s. Many people who grew up or live near the meandering creek believe the contamination is responsible for cancers and other illnesses, though experts say connecting radiation exposure to illness is complicated. Cancer concerns also have been raised by people in nearby St. Charles County, Missouri, where uranium was processed and a large quarry became contaminated, resulting in a Superfund cleanup.

In 2022, a St. Louis County grade school closed amid worries that contamination from Coldwater Creek got onto the playground and inside the building. The Army Corps of Engineers announced last month that it is testing a few homes near the creek after high radiation levels were found in their backyards.

Like Nickel, Democratic state Rep. Doug Clemens grew up along Coldwater Creek. He said every man in his childhood neighborhood eventually died of stomach or intestinal cancer.

“They knew they were poisoning us for 75 years,” Clemens said of the government. “RECA is a step. We must do RECA now.”

April 12, 2024 Posted by | health, USA | Leave a comment

CNN Finally Tells The Truth About The Flour Massacre After Previously Shilling For Israel

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, APR 10, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/cnn-finally-tells-the-truth-about?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=143447638&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

CNN has a new report out showing that (surprise!) Israel lied about the Flour Massacre in which IDF troops fired machine guns into a crowd of starving Gazans waiting for food this past February, killing over a hundred people. CNN found that Israel’s timeline and version of events doesn’t line up with video footage, witness testimony, and forensic evidence.

Which of course was obvious from the beginning to anyone who isn’t deeply invested in pretending Israel ever tells the truth about these things. Within hours of the massacre Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor had a preliminary report up saying that video, audio and material evidence shows that the IDF had been firing into the crowd in contradiction of Israel’s claims that the injuries and deaths sustained on the scene were mostly due to Gazans trampling on each other in a mad rush upon the convoy of aid trucks. Now here’s CNN, a month and a half later, telling us essentially the same thing.

This is the same CNN who at the time reported on the Flour Massacre in ways that advanced Israel’s information interests with headlines completely exonerating Israel of any wrongdoing like “At least 100 killed and 700 injured in chaotic incident” and “Carnage at Gaza food aid site amid Israeli gunfire”. CNN also repeatedly refers to the killings as “food aid deaths”, as though it’s the food aid that killed them and not the military of a very specific state power.

I don’t know if there’s a word for when a government does something evil and then churns out a bunch of easily disprovable lies with the understanding that by the time those lies are debunked public attention will have moved on from the controversy, but there should be. Over and over again we’ve seen the Israeli regime do just enough lying to dampen the initial burst of attention and outrage and get people doubting themselves, only to discover far too late that it was all a bunch of crap after the initial crime has been forgotten.

This is exactly what happened with Israel’s initial assault on al-Shifa Hospital back in November, when Israel was cranking out propaganda claiming the hospital was being used as a command center for Hamas. Not until the end of December did The Washington Post show up to acknowledge the abundantly obvious fact that there was no evidence for Israel’s claims, which independent outlets like Consortium News had been reporting since mid-November. Now al-Shifa Hospital — the largest hospital in Gaza — has been completely destroyed.

Back in October Israel and its apologists were shrieking with outrage that anyone would dare suggest that Israel would ever attack a hospital at all, saturating the media with bogus evidence that it falsely claimed proved its innocence. Since that time Israel has launched hundreds of attacks on Gaza’s healthcare services and has destroyed most of its healthcare system.

It’s a weaponization of the adage “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth even puts its boots on.” They know all they have to do is lie really hard for a week or two, and then when the truth inevitably surfaces it won’t matter, because the truth will never be able to have the impact their lies had when it mattered.

It’s so obnoxious how even after all this time Israel is still given the benefit of the doubt on such claims by the western political-media class until they’re debunked weeks or months later, long after the outcry over the incident has been muted and neutered by Israeli lies. If a state power is preventing journalists and human rights groups from investigating the facts on the ground in a given area, then it is not legitimate to give their claims about what happens in that area weighted consideration when their track record and all the facts in evidence say they’re probably lying. 

The fact that the western press keep giving Israel the benefit of the doubt whenever reports like this emerge after they’ve been caught in so very many lies means the western press are just as culpable for the circulation of Israeli lies as Israel itself. In journalism you’re taught that if someone says it’s raining and someone else says it’s dry, your job isn’t to quote them both and treat both claims as equal, your job is to go look out the window and see which is true. The fact that the imperial media take so long to drag their asses to the window serves nobody but Israel and the globe-spanning empire of which it is a part.

April 12, 2024 Posted by | media, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Rolls Royce taps funding for nuclear-powered space missions

Rolls-Royce has received a funding boost from the UK Space Agency to
develop nuclear-powered projects for the space sector. Some £1.2m is being
offered up to Rolls-Royce Submarines and the US-based nuclear supplier BWX
Technologies as part of a project to use fission nuclear systems for space
missions.

It comes as part of a wider £13m funding package unveiled by the
government to support 11 international space projects, ranging from
capturing high-res photos of the Moon and Mars to X-ray images of the
Earth’s Aurora. Other beneficiaries include Vertical Future, which is
developing a “robotic space arm” facility to grow plants in space, and
the University of Leicester, which is identifying potential space missions
for nuclear powered technologies.

City AM 8th April 2024 https://www.cityam.com/rolls-royce-taps-funding-for-nuclear-powered-space-missions/

Rolls-Royce taps funding for nuclear-powered space missions

April 12, 2024 Posted by | space travel, UK | Leave a comment

 First Images Inside Fukushima’s Nuclear Reactor Show “Icicle-Like”Structures

 First Images Inside Fukushima’s Nuclear Reactor Show “Icicle-Like”
Structures. Many robots have ventured into the ruins of Fukushima, but few
have returned.

A snake-like robot and mini drones have ventured deep inside
the irradiated reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in
Japan.

As shown in their new images, the clean-up operations still have
some way to go 13 years after the catastrophic nuclear meltdown. In their
latest step to clean up the area, TEPCO sent robotic probes in the bowels
of this reactor to examine the core and its melted nuclear fuel. Their aim
is to learn about the condition of the spent fuel to facilitate its removal
so the plant can be decommissioned. It marks the first time they’ve managed
to return with images from inside the “pedestal” of reactor Unit 1.

 IFL Science 9th April 2024

https://www.iflscience.com/first-images-inside-fukushimas-nuclear-reactor-show-icicle-like-structures-73731

April 12, 2024 Posted by | Fukushima continuing | Leave a comment

TODAY.”Lavender” Where’s Daddy” -Sweet euphemisms for a dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future in “the Cloud”

It’s not really new. It has always been part of the playful little-boy mentality of the clever men who design weapons. Think of “Little Boy” – the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima, and the less fun-named “Fat Man” plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

Perhaps, for the servicemen actually dropping those bombs, the fun names might have helped to ease them in any anxiety about killing many thousands of civilians – children, women and men.

Well, no need for servicemen to worry like that nowadays. With Artificial Intelligence making the kill decisions, no human need feel any guilt.

So – why do they bother with the cute sweet names?

Well, apart from the little-boy mentality of the weapons designers, there is the very much more important reason – to deceive the public, to obfuscate, cover-up, veil, the horror of the new AI weaponry. And where better to hide things these days, than in the cloud?

I’ve written before about the cloud. It’s such a light, pretty, concept. Just wafting away into the never-never – nothing to worry about, nothing for mere mortals to try to understand. Leave it to the grown-up little boys to work out what to do with the cloud, and the new cute war toys too.

The cloud is, of course, an ever-increasing set of dirty great data “farms” (another cutesy word) around the world – large areas on land, not in the sky, with huge steel containers, with servers and computers guzzling electricity and water.

There is nothing vague about these things, except for the language used.

“Lavender” – an accurate name would be “Finder for Kill Victims “

“Where’s Daddy” – an accurate name would be “Tracker for Killing Location”

George Orwell would be delighted with this 21st Century obfuscating language. He warned us about vague and meaningless language intended to hide the truth rather than express it. 

And – it’s not as if these automatic killing systems are just being perfected so that the evil Hamas can be defeated. There’s another purpose for using them in Gaza . They’re a practise run for trying out this merchandise – a lucrative industry for Israel for the future: –

“intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar”.  

April 11, 2024 Posted by | Christina's notes | Leave a comment

Leadership , (Doom is not inevitable)

There Is No Grudge That Cannot Be Resolved, China’s Xi Jinping Tells Former Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou in Momentous Beijing Meeting ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/10/there-is-no-grudge-that-cannot-be-resolved-chinas-xi-jinping-tells-former-taiwan-president-ma-ying-jeou-in-momentous-beijing-meeting/

OCTOBER 5, 2012,  https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/05/nuclear-lies-cover-ups-and-secrecy/ Mangano observes: “Nuclear war, like any war, is not an inevitable force of nature, bit a conscious choice of leaders.”  (p. 66) So too is any decision to build or maintain a nuclear site.

April 11, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Patrick Lawrence: ‘Automated Murder’: Israel’s ‘AI’ in Gaza

In the Lavender case, the data it produced were accepted and treated as if they had been generated by a human being without any actual human oversight or independent verification.

A second AI system, sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?”—and how sick is this?—was then used to track Hamas suspects to their homes. The IDF intentionally targeted suspected militants while they were with their families, using unguided missiles or “dumb” bombs. This strategy had the advantage of enabling Israel to preserve its more expensive precision-guided weapons, or “smart” bombs. 

“intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar.   

dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future 

By Patrick Lawrence and Cara Marianna / Original to ScheerPost, April 9, 2024

ZURICH—“Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more, of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run. We strive to improve ourselves while risking a regression to the Stone Age if our ever more complex, ever more fragile technological infrastructure collapses.”  

That is Hans Köchler, an eminent Viennese scholar and president of the International Progress Organization, a globally active think tank, addressing an audience here last Thursday evening, April 4. The date is significant: The day before Köchler spoke, +972 Magazine and Local Call, independent publications in Israel–Palestine, reported that as the Israel Defense Forces press their savage invasion of the Gaza Strip, they deploy an artificial intelligence program called Lavender that so far has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as kill targets. In the early weeks of the Israeli siege, according to the Israeli sources +972 cites, “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.” 

Chilling it was to hear Köchler speak a couple of news cycles after +972 published these revelations, which are based on confidential interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have been directly involved in the use of AI to target Palestinians for assassination. “To use technologies to solve all our problems reduces our ability to make decisions,” Köchler asserted. “We’re no longer able to think through problems. They remove us from real life.” 

Köchler titled his talk “The Trivialization of Public Space,” and his topic, broadly stated, was the impact of technologies such as digital communications and AI on our brains, our conduct, and altogether our humanity. It was sobering, to put the point mildly, to recognize that Israel’s siege of Gaza, bottomlessly depraved in itself, is an in-our-faces display of the dehumanizing effects these technologies have on all who depend on them. 

Let us look on in horror, and let us see our future in it.

We see in the IDF, to make this point another way, a rupture in morality, human intelligence, and responsibility when human oversight is mediated by the algorithms that run AI systems. There is a break between causality and result, action and consequence. And this is exactly what advanced technologies have in store for the rest of humanity. Artificial intelligence, as Köchler put it, is not intelligence: “It is ‘simulated intelligence’ because it has no consciousness of itself.” It isn’t capable, he meant to say, of moral decision-making or ethical accountability.

In the Lavender case, the data it produced were accepted and treated as if they had been generated by a human being without any actual human oversight or independent verification. A second AI system, sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?”—and how sick is this?—was then used to track Hamas suspects to their homes. The IDF intentionally targeted suspected militants while they were with their families, using unguided missiles or “dumb” bombs. This strategy had the advantage of enabling Israel to preserve its more expensive precision-guided weapons, or “smart” bombs. 

As one of +972’s sources told the magazine:

We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity… . On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.

Once Lavender identified a potential suspect, IDF operatives had about 20 seconds to verify that the target was a male before making the decision to strike. There was no other human analysis of the “raw intelligence data.” The information generated by Lavender was treated as if it was “an order,” sources told +972—an official order to kill. Given the strategy of targeting suspects in their homes, the IDF assigned acceptable kill ratios for its bombing campaigns: 20 to 30 civilians for each junior-level Hamas operative. For Hamas leaders with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, +972’s sources said, “the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.” 

In other words, Israeli policy, guided and assisted by AI technology, made it inevitable that thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, would be killed. 

There appears to be no record of any other military deploying AI programs such as Lavender and Where’s Daddy? But it is sheer naïveté to assume this diabolic use of advanced technologies will not spread elsewhere. Israel is already the world’s leading exporter of surveillance and digital forensic tools. Anadolu, Turkey’s state-run news agency, reported as far back as February that Israel is using Gaza as a weapons-testing site so that it can market these tools as battle-tested. Antony Lowenstein, an author Anadolu quotes, calls this the marketing of “automated murder.” 

And here we find ourselves: Haaretz, the Israeli daily, reported on April 5 that “intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar.    …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

 the Biden regime is culpable in inflicting these multiple wounds on humanity in one other dimension we must not miss. With its incessant attempts to suspend us in a virtual reality of its making, distant from what it is doing in our names, it leads us into the dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future Köchler describes just as surely as the Israelis do as they murder human beings wholesale with AI weapons and kill innocent children with remotely controlled sniper drones.   https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/09/patrick-lawrence-automated-murder-israels-ai-in-gaza/

April 11, 2024 Posted by | Israel, technology, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel Prepares For Potential Strike On Iranian Nuclear Sites

 https://www.iranintl.com/en/202404108916

In the wake of last week’s airstrike in Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Israel has reportedly indicated its readiness to target Iranian assets should Iran launch a direct retaliatory attack.

According to a report by the London-based Elaph News, citing an “anonymous Western security official,” Israel has been conducting air force drills, specifically preparing to target Iranian nuclear facilities and other critical infrastructure.

The airstrike killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi, alongside six other senior members of the IRGC.

Although Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the strike, both Damascus and Tehran have blamed Israel.

However, unnamed US intelligence sources, as reported by CNN, suggest that Iran is unlikely to launch a direct attack, fearing retaliation from both the US and Israel.

Instead, Iran will more likely use its regional proxies, which since Iran-backed Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, have launched attacks from Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Both Iran and its proxy groups, including Hezbollah, have pledged revenge for the strike. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s adviser has warned that Israeli embassies are no longer safe, while Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has promised an imminent Iranian response.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a recent security cabinet meeting, “Iran has been acting against us for years — directly and via proxies. And, therefore, Israel acts against Iran and its proxies — defensively and offensively”.

As the Israeli military bolsters its manpower and defenses, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel has “completed preparations for a response against any scenario that would develop against Iran.”

April 11, 2024 Posted by | Iran, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel’s ‘Where’s Daddy?’ AI system helps target suspected Hamas militants when they’re at home with their families, report says

Business Insider, Rebecca Rommen , Apr 7, 2024, 

  • An Israeli AI system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracks suspected Hamas militants to their homes.
  • Civilians are often “collateral damage” in the following strikes, one unnamed officer told +972 Magazine and Local Call.
  • The IDF has said it “makes various efforts to reduce harm to civilians to the extent feasible.”

…………………………………………………. (Subscribers only)  https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-ai-system-wheres-daddy-strikes-hamas-family-homes-2024—

April 11, 2024 Posted by | Israel, technology, weapons and war | Leave a comment

New blast at Europe’s largest nuclear plant in Ukraine

EUROPE’S largest nuclear plant was attacked by drones again today,
posing no direct threat to its safety but underscoring the “extremely
serious situation” at the facility in Ukraine, the United Nations has
said. The International Atomic Energy Agency said its team was aware of an
explosion at a training centre next to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
today.

 Morning Star 9th April 2024

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/new-blast-europes-largest-nuclear-plant-ukraine

April 11, 2024 Posted by | incidents, Ukraine | Leave a comment

No surprise genocide promoter, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, denies genocide in Gaza

 https://heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com/ Walt Zlotow 10Apr 24

As Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin fervently fulfills his role as US pointman for America’s enabling Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The former commander of US forces in America’s senseless, criminal Afghan and Iraq wars, has never failed to embrace a monstrous US war destroying countries and the millions ruined in their wake.

After four decades making a great living engaged in those in those murderous follies, he joined the weapons makers making millions off his expertise in pulling the levers of defense influence peddling.

Now, as Secretary of Defense, he’s promoting tens of billions in weapons deliveries to continue the genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza of 2,300,000 Palestinians in the way of Israeli expansion on Palestinian land.

Austin knows his work is fueling genocide. But he told Superhawk Senator Tom Cotton at a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing. ‘Genocide? Not a shred of evidence to support that charge.’

CODEPINK demonstrators with infinitely greater moral clarity than Austin, disrupted the hearing 25 times. CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin responded to Austin’s ghoulish genocide denial with “We are obviously here to say stop the complicity, stop the sending of weapons, stop the sharing of intelligence, just killing so many people, just stop the blood on your hands.”

If there were justice, Austin would join his masters of war in Washington in the dock at The Hague. The Defense Secretary’s likely defense? ‘I was just following orders.’

Sound familiar?

April 11, 2024 Posted by | PERSONAL STORIES, USA | Leave a comment

There Is No Grudge That Cannot Be Resolved, China’s Xi Jinping Tells Former Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou in Momentous Beijing Meeting

“[There is] [n]o problem that cannot be talked through. And there are no forces that can separate us,” Xi Jinping said.

By Diego Ramos ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/10/there-is-no-grudge-that-cannot-be-resolved-chinas-xi-jinping-tells-former-taiwan-president-ma-ying-jeou-in-momentous-beijing-meeting/

In a historic meeting marking mainland China’s first reception of a former or serving Taiwanese president, President Xi Jinping and former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou engaged in a dialogue of peace and unity in Beijing on April 10.

Amidst heightened tensions between China and Taiwan, mentions of war are commonplace but according to Ma, “If there’s war, it would be unbearable to the Chinese nation, and the two sides of the [Taiwan] strait have the wisdom to handle their disputes peacefully.”

This echoes Xi’s assertion that the two governments can converse and resolve issues: “Compatriots on the two sides are both Chinese. There is no grudge that cannot be resolved. No problem that cannot be talked through. And there are no forces that can separate us.”

Xi, alluding to reunification, also made reference to “foreign interference,” which, according to him, could not get in the way of a “family reunion.”

The meeting comes a month before William Lai Ching-te, current Taiwanese vice president and president-elect, is set to step into office. Despite being part of the independence-favoring Democratic Progressive Party, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports that Beijing does not see significance in the party’s electoral victory.

Zhu Songling, a Taiwan affairs specialist at Beijing Union University, told SCMP that the talks came at a favorable time, citing president-elect Lai’s approaching inauguration. Songling also said Ma’s reception in Beijing signaled the Chinese government’s willingness and resolve to peacefully settle the cross-strait issues.

“Since Ma is not in office, many of his ideas may not be implemented in concrete terms, but in general this [meeting] is still of great significance,” Zhu said, mentioning Ma’s continued influence in the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) party.

Towards the end of Ma’s “journey of peace,” another KMT leader, former mayor of Taipei Hau Lung-bin, also plans to visit mainland China, with the possibility of meeting with Xi as well.

Hau is set to visit Zhengzhou and take part in the annual cultural spectacle that pays tribute to the Yellow Emperor. The tribute honors Chinese ancestry and heritage and Hau said his visit “emphasise[s] the fact that the people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait share the same root, the same origin, and the same historical and cultural backgrounds, which should go beyond political differences.”

“It would be unreasonable for the cross-strait relations to end up in a military crisis or dangerous war caused by political manipulation,” Hau also mentioned.

April 11, 2024 Posted by | China, politics international, Taiwan | Leave a comment

Nuclear Lies, Cover-Ups and Secrecy

Mangano observes: “Nuclear war, like any war, is not an inevitable force of nature, bit a conscious choice of leaders.”  (p. 66) So too is any decision to build or maintain a nuclear site.

BY JANETTE D. SHERMAN, OCTOBER 5, 2012,  https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/05/nuclear-lies-cover-ups-and-secrecy/

Do Governments and Corporations lie, cover-up and maintain secrecy as they harm our planet and us?  Joe Mangano’s new book, Mad Science – The Nuclear Power Experiment, clearly lays it out that they have done so for more than half a century.

This book is a page-turner, filled with useful information that many of us don’t know or have forgot.   His chapter “Tiny Atoms, Big Risks” explains the various forms of nuclear energy in terms that anyone can understand, and details the harm that has come to all life on our planet as a result of nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants.

Among the many nuclear catastrophes that Mangano chronicles  – from Three Mile Island, the Nevada and Marshall Island nuclear bomb tests to Chernobyl and Fukushima- is the nuclear accident at the Santa Susana site in Ventura County, close to Los Angeles, CA. Santa Susana is one of the best-kept secrets in the history of nuclear power. The Santa Susana site had 10 sodium-cooled reactors the 1959 accident spewed radioactivity, tetralin – toxic naphthalene, and other chemicals into Simi Valley, the Pacific Ocean and eastward that are still detected over a half-century later.

A near meltdown of the Fermi-1 nuclear reactor nearly destroyed Detroit in 1968.  It was a sodium-cooled reactor, as were the ones at Santa Susana.  Located at the western end of Lake Erie, a Fermi meltdown would have crippled or destroyed much of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River as well.  As has occurred since the Chernobyl meltdown, in the southern lake areas of Belarus, fish and boats travel upstream as well as down-stream.

As many as 16,000 workers were employed at Santa Susana by corporations that included, North American Aviation (a spin-of of General Motors), Rocketdyne, Atomics international and finally Boeing.  Santa Susana was closed by 1980, but never fully decontaminated. Everyone in the Los Angeles area who has had a family member with cancer, a low birth-weight child, death of an infant, or thyroid disease should read the book.  So should those who live down-wind of a nuclear test area or a nuclear power plant – which includes practically everyone in the United States and Canada.

It was Lewis Strauss, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who in 1954 touted nuclear power as “too cheap to meter.”   Today we learn it is too costly to bury waste, clean up contaminated land and buildings, and too costly to build and maintain aging nuclear power and bomb plants.

Mangano observes: “Nuclear war, like any war, is not an inevitable force of nature, bit a conscious choice of leaders.”  (p. 66) So too is any decision to build or maintain a nuclear site.

Since the Fukushima releases began, Japanese citizens are marching and protesting the continuation of nuclear power as they observe the obvious reality of contamination.  How long will it take for U. S. citizens to demand a stop to nuclear power and its’ twin nuclear war weapons.

Janette D. Sherman, M. D., who died in 2019,  was the author of Life’s Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer and Chemical Exposure and Disease, and was a specialist in internal medicine and toxicology. She edited the book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature, written by A. V. Yablokov, V. B., Nesterenko and A. V. Nesterenko, published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009.  Her primary interest was the prevention of illness through public education. 

April 11, 2024 Posted by | resources - print, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

The US and Japan’s Mission to Push Next Generation Nuclear Power 

Japan ramps up the joint nuclear power agenda with the U.S. and Philippines, with an eye to deterring regional conflict.

By Thisanka Siripala, April 10, 2024

Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio is on an official state visit to the United States with a firm eye on underscoring the importance of the Japan-U.S. alliance in Asia. Kishida’s trip marks the first state visit by a Japanese leader to the U.S. in nine years. 

Kishida is expected to move forward with joint economic and security projects with the Philippines and the United States as clashes between Beijing and Manila escalate in the South China Sea. It’s the first time the countries will meet for a trilateral summit.

The visit gives Kishida a global platform to outline Japan’s vision for Japan-U.S. relations as he faces a precarious political outlook at home. His public support rate hovers around a record low amid looming Liberal Democratic Party leader elections in September 2024.

Kishida framed the highly anticipated summit with U.S. President Joe Biden on April 10 as a meeting of two “global partners” tackling global issues. This will be followed by three-way talks between Biden, Kishida, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to discuss developing “multilayered’ ties on April 11. ……………………………………………….

For Japan and the United States, a next generation nuclear power plant is the answer to phasing out Asia’s dependency on fossil fuel. As part of their trilateral cooperation, both countries will facilitate the development of “miniature” nuclear power plants, called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), in the Philippines. 

Currently, the country struggles with chronic power outages. It relies heavily on coal, which generates 60 percent of its electricity. Marcos hopes to restart the only nuclear power plant facility in the Philippines, which was constructed and immediately abandoned in the 1980s. The government plans to have it operational by 2032.

Next generation nuclear plants like SMRs are considered much safer and cheaper than their predecessors. However, the U.S. start-up manufacturing the technology, NuScale Power, canceled its plan to construct an SMR facility in Idaho in November last year. They explained the project – which would have been the first in the United States – was economically unfeasible, as inflation and increased construction costs meant the price of energy generated by the plant would be too high. 

Japan has shifted its policy on nuclear power since the devastating 2011 tsunami and earthquake disaster. ………….  https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/the-us-and-japans-mission-to-push-next-generation-nuclear-power/

April 11, 2024 Posted by | politics international | Leave a comment

Death by Algorithm: Israel’s AI War in Gaza

April 10, 2024 by: Dr Binoy Kampmark,  https://theaimn.com/death-by-algorithm-israels-ai-war-in-gaza/

Remorseless killing at the initiation of artificial intelligence has been the subject of nail-biting concern for various members of computer-digital cosmos. Be wary of such machines in war and their displacing potential regarding human will and agency. For all that, the advent of AI-driven, automated systems in war has already become a cold-blooded reality, deployed conventionally, and with utmost lethality by human operators.

The teasing illusion here is the idea that autonomous systems will become so algorithmically attuned and trained as to render human agency redundant in a functional sense. Provided the targeting is trained, informed, and surgical, a utopia of precision will dawn in modern warfare. Civilian death tolls will be reduced; the mortality of combatants and undesirables will, conversely, increase with dramatic effect.

The staining case study that has put paid to this idea is the pulverising campaign being waged by Israel in Gaza. A report in the magazine +972 notes that the Israeli Defense Forces has indulgently availed itself of AI to identify targets and dispatch them accordingly. The process, however, has been far from accurate or forensically educated. As Brianna Rosen of Just Security accurately posits, “Rather than limiting harm to civilians, Israel’s use of AI bolsters its ability to identify, locate, and expand target sets which likely are not fully vetted to inflict maximum damage.”

The investigation opens by recalling the bombastically titled The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World, a 2021 publication available in English authored by one “Brigadier General Y.S.”, the current commander of the Israeli intelligence unit 8200.

The author advances the case for a system capable of rapidly generating thousands of potential “targets” in the exigencies of conflict. The sinister and morally arid goal of such a machine would resolve a “human bottleneck for both locating new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.” Doing so not only dispenses with the human need to vet, check and verify the viability of the target but dispenses with the need to seek human approval for their termination.

The joint investigation by +972 and Local Call identifies the advanced stage of development of such a system, known to the Israeli forces as Lavender. In terms of its murderous purpose, this AI creation goes further than such lethal predecessors as “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which identifies purportedly relevant military buildings and structures used by militants. Even that form of identification did little to keep the death rate moderate, generating what a former intelligence officer described as a “mass assassination factory.”

Six Israeli intelligence officers, all having served during the current war in Gaza, reveal how Lavender “played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war.” The effect of using the AI machine effectively subsumed the human element while giving the targeting results of the system a fictional human credibility.

Within the first weeks of the war, the IDF placed extensive, even exclusive reliance on Lavender, with as many as 37,000 Palestinians being identified as potential Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants for possible airstrikes. This reliance signalled a shift from the previous “human target” doctrine used by the IDF regarding senior military operatives. In such cases, killing the individual in their private residence would only happen exceptionally, and only to the most senior identified individuals, all to keep in awkward step with principles of proportionality in international law. The commencement of “Operation Swords of Iron” in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 led to the adoption of a policy by which all Hamas operatives in its military wing irrespective of rank would be designated as human targets.

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Officers were given expansive latitude to accept the kill lists without demur or scrutiny, with as little as 20 seconds being given to each target before bombing authorisation was given. Permission was also given despite awareness that errors in targeting arising in “approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.”

The Lavender system was also supplemented by using the emetically named “Where’s Daddy?”, another automated platform which tracked the targeted individuals to their family residences which would then be flattened. The result was mass slaughter, with “thousands of Palestinians – most of them women and children or people not involved in the fighting” killed by Israeli airstrikes in the initial stages of the conflict. As one of the interviewed intelligence officers stated with grim candour, killing Hamas operatives when in a military facility or while engaged in military activity was a matter of little interest. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

The use of the system entailed resorting to gruesome, and ultimately murderous calculi. Two of the sources interviewed claimed that the IDF “also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.” Were the targets Hamas officials of certain seniority, the deaths of up to 100 civilians were also authorised.

In what is becoming its default position in the face of such revelations, the IDF continues to state, as reported in the Times of Israel, that appropriate conventions are being observed in the business of killing Palestinians. It “does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist.” The process, the claim goes, is far more discerning, involving the use of a “database whose purpose is to cross-reference intelligence sources… on the military operatives of terrorist organizations.”

The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, stated how “deeply troubled” he was by reports that Israel’s bombing campaign had used “artificial intelligence as a tool in the identification of targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, resulting in a high level of civilian casualties.” It might be far better to see these matters as cases of willing, and reckless misidentification, with a conscious acceptance on the part of IDF military personnel that enormous civilian casualties are simply a matter of course. To that end, we are no longer talking about a form of advanced, scientific war waged proportionately and with precision, but a technologically advanced form of mass murder.

April 11, 2024 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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