As Israel Openly Declares Starvation as a Weapon, Media Still Hesitate to Blame It for Famine
this is a genocide, after all—even if the corporate media refuse to say the word—and starvation is part and parcel of that.
Belén Fernández, April 25, 2025, https://fair.org/home/as-israel-openly-declares-starvation-as-a-weapon-media-still-hesitate-to-blame-it-for-famine/
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 2 that “Israel has decided to stop letting goods and supplies into Gaza,” where the ongoing Israeli genocide, with the loyal backing of the United States, has officially killed more than 51,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The announcement regarding the total halt of humanitarian aid amounted to yet another explicit declaration of the starvation policy that Israel is pursuing in the Gaza Strip, a territory that—thanks in large part to 17 consecutive years of Israeli blockade—has long been largely dependent on such aid for survival.
Of course, this was not the first time that senior Israeli officials had advertised their reliance on the war crime of forced starvation in the current genocidal assault on Gaza. On October 9, 2023, two days after the most recent launch of hostilities, then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Two days after that, Foreign Minister Israel Katz boasted of cutting off “water, electricity and fuel” to the territory.
And just this month, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proclaimed that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza.” Following an April 22 dinner held in his honor in Florida at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Ben-Gvir reported that US Republicans had
expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.
Never mind that the hostages would have been brought home safely as scheduled had Israel chosen to comply with the terms of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas that was implemented in January, rather than definitively annihilating the agreement on March 18.
It is no doubt illustrative of Israel’s modus operandi that the March 2 decision to block the entry of all food and other items necessary for human existence took place in the middle of an ostensible ceasefire.
‘Starved, bombed, strangled’
While Ben-Gvir’s most recent comments have thus far eluded commentary in the US corporate media, the roundabout media approach to the whole starvation theme has been illuminating in its own right. It has not, obviously, been possible to avoid reporting on the subject altogether, as the United Nations and other organizations have pretty much been warning from the get-go of Israel’s actions causing widespread famine in Gaza.
In December 2023, for example, just two months after the onset of Israel’s blood-drenched campaign, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC scale, determined that “over 90% of the population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.08 million people) was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity, classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse).” The assessment went on: “Among these, over 40% of the population (939,000 people) were in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 15% (378,000 people) were in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5).”
A full year ago, in April 2024, even Samantha Power—then the administrator of the US Agency for International Development—conceded that it was “credible” that famine was already well underway in parts of the Gaza Strip. And the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs now warns that Gaza is “likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023”—its population being “starved, bombed, strangled” and subjected to “deprivation by design.”
Disappearance of agency
None of these details have escaped the pages and websites of corporate media outlets, although the media’s frequent reliance on ambiguous wordiness tends to distract readers from what is actually going on—and who is responsible for it. Take, for instance, the New York Times headline “Gaza Famine Warning Spurs Calls to Remove Restrictions on Food Shipments” (6/25/24), or the CBS video “Hunger Spreads Virtually Everywhere in Gaza Amid Israel/Hamas War” (12/5/24). Even news outlets that intermittently undertake to spotlight the human plight of, inter alia, individual parents in Gaza losing their children to starvation remain susceptible to long-winded efforts to disperse blame. (As of April of last year, Save the Children confirmed that 27 children in northern Gaza had already died of starvation and disease.)
In an era in which news consumption often consists of skimming headlines, the phrasing of article titles is of utmost import. And yet many headlines manage to entirely excise the role of Israel in Gaza’s “hunger crisis”—as in CNN’s report (2/24): “‘We Are Dying Slowly:’ Palestinians Are Eating Grass and Drinking Polluted Water as Famine Looms Across Gaza.” Or take the Reuters headline (3/24/24): “Gaza’s Catastrophic Food Shortage Means Mass Death Is Imminent, Monitor Says.” Or this one from ABC News (11/15/24): “Famine ‘Occurring or Imminent’ in Parts of Northern Gaza, Experts Warn UN Security Council.”
It’s not that these headlines are devoid of sympathy for Palestinian suffering. The issue, rather, is the dilution—and even disappearance—of agency, such that the “catastrophic food shortage” is rendered as transpiring in a sort of vacuum and thereby letting the criminals perpetrating it off the hook. Imagine if a Hamas rocket from Gaza killed an infant in Israel and the media reported the event as follows: “Israeli Baby Perishes as Rocket Completes Airborne Trajectory.”
‘No shortage of aid’
Then there is the matter of the media’s incurable habit of ceding Israeli officials a platform to spout demonstrable lies, as in the April 17 NBC News headline “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.” The fact that Israel is permitted to make such claims is particularly perplexing, given Israeli officials’ own announcements that no aid whatsoever may enter the territory, while the “dire conditions” are made abundantly clear in the text of the article itself: “The Global Nutrition Cluster, a coalition of humanitarian groups, has warned that in March alone, 3,696 children were newly admitted for care for acute malnutrition” in Gaza.
Among numerous other damning statistics conveyed in the dispatch, we learn that all Gaza bakeries supported by the UN World Food Programme closed down on March 31, “after wheat flour ran out.” Meanwhile, the WFP calculated that Israel’s closure of border crossings into Gaza caused prices of basic goods “to soar between 150% and 700% compared with prewar levels, and by 29% to as much as 1,400% above prices during the ceasefire.”
Against such a backdrop, it’s fairly ludicrous to allow Israeli officials to “maintain there is ‘no shortage’ of aid in Gaza and accuse Hamas of withholding supplies.” If the press provides Israel with space to spout whatever nonsense it wants—reality be damned—where is the line ultimately drawn? If Israel decides Hamas is using wheat flour to build rockets, will that also be reported with a straight face?
Lest anyone think that thwarting the entry of food into the Gaza Strip is a new thing, recall that Israel’s blockade of Gaza long predated the present war—although the details of said blockade are generally glossed over in the media in favor of the myth that Israel unilaterally “withdrew” from the territory in 2005. In 2010, the BBC (6/21/10) listed some basic foodstuffs—pardon, potential “dual-use items”—that Israel had at different times in recent history blocked from entering Gaza, including pasta, coffee, tea, nuts and chocolate. In 2006, just a year after the so-called “withdrawal,” Israeli government adviser Dov Weissglas outlined the logic behind Israel’s restriction of food imports into Gaza: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
Fast forward almost two decades, and it’s safe to say that the “idea” has evolved; this is a genocide, after all—even if the corporate media refuse to say the word—and starvation is part and parcel of that. But on account of Israel’s extra-special relationship with the United States, US media have institutionalized the practice of beating around the bush when it comes to documenting Israeli crimes. This is how we end up with the aforementioned long-winded headlines instead of, say, the far more straightforward “Israel is starving Gaza,” a Google search of which terms produces not a single corporate media dispatch, but does lead to a January 2024 report by that very name, courtesy of none other than the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.
‘Starving as negotiation tactic’
That said, there have been a few surprises. The New York Times (3/13/25), for example, took a short break from its longstanding tradition of unabashed apologetics for Israeli atrocities in allowing the following sentence to appear in a March opinion article by Megan Stack: “Israeli officials are essentially starving Gaza as a negotiation tactic.” In the very least, this was a vast improvement, in terms of syntactic clarity and assignation of blame, over previous descriptions of Israeli behavior immortalized on the pages of the US newspaper of record—like that time the Israeli military slaughtered four kids playing by the sea in Gaza, and the Times editors (7/16/14) went with the headline “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife.”
In the end, Israel’s starvation of the Gaza Strip is multifaceted. It’s not just about physically blocking the entry of food into the besieged enclave. It’s also about Israel’s near-total decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system: the bombardment of hospitals, the targeting of ambulances, the massacres of medical personnel (FAIR.org, 4/11/25). It’s about Israeli military attacks on humanitarian aid convoys and workers, including the April 2024 massacre of seven international employees of the food organization World Central Kitchen.
It’s about Israel razing agricultural areas, wiping out food production, devastating the fishing industry and depleting livestock. It’s about Israel bombing water infrastructure in Gaza. And it’s about Israeli troops slaughtering at least 112 desperate Palestinians queuing for flour on February 29, 2024 (FAIR.org, 3/22/24)—which was at least a quicker way of killing starving people than waiting for them to starve.
In his 2017 London Review of Books essay (6/15/17) on the use of famine as a weapon of war, Alex de Waal referenced the “physical debilitation of groups as a technique of genocide,” noting that “forced starvation was one of the instruments of the Holocaust.” It’s worth reflecting on the essay’s opening paragraph:
In its primary use, the verb “to starve” is transitive: It’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: Today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase “man-made famine” as if such events were unusual.
As for the current case of the Gaza Strip, US establishment journalists appear to be doing their best to avoid the transitive nature of the verb in question—or any subject-verb-object construction that might too overtly expose Israeli savagery. And by treating famine in Gaza as a subject unto itself, rather than a “technique of genocide,” to borrow de Waal’s words, the media assist in obscuring the bigger picture about this very man-made famine—which is that Israel is not just starving Gaza. Israel is exterminating Gaza.
Plutonium’s Hidden Legacy at Piketon
Plutonium was here. It was processed, mishandled, released, and denied. It contaminated water, soil, fish, and workers. It spread to schools. And it killed.
Investigative Team April 24, 2025, https://appareport.com/2025/04/24/plutoniums-hidden-legacy-at-piketon/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=jetpack_social&fbclid=IwY2xjawJ5XrBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE3b0JDR3JZZ0xqRkNqVU1oAR5YM8gN60lbVkb21XEno8JBYLC_Rnqv7LD993TwfBersmNr-c-SsZuL1J_1mA_aem_sCNRay627WxIPPEuu7DVsA [ample illustrations]
For decades, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) claimed that plutonium had no place at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS). But government documents, congressional testimony, and radiological data spanning more than 40 years tell a different story — one of systemic exposure, buried secrets, and radioactive contamination that continues to haunt the soil, water, and people of southern Ohio.
The truth has been revealed in pieces. Some of it was made public as early as the 1990s. Some surfaced only recently. Together, it paints an undeniable picture: plutonium was present at PORTS, it was mishandled, and it left a toxic legacy that federal agencies have failed to clean up — or fully acknowledge.
The Paper Trail: Plutonium Officially Confirmed
The denial cracked in 1999, when The Portsmouth Daily Times published a front-page bombshell: “Plutonium Confirmed in Piketon.” The article cited admissions by federal officials that plutonium-contaminated uranium had been shipped to the site from Paducah, Kentucky, as part of a Cold War-era uranium recycling program.
In a formal letter to DOE Secretary Bill Richardson, U.S. Senators Mike DeWine and George Voinovich confirmed that at least 570 tons of contaminated feed material had been sent to Piketon, beginning as early as 1983. DOE had known. The public had not.
The Incinerator and the Burned Truth
Records show the X-705A incinerator, which operated from the 1970s until 1986, was used to burn approximately 50,000 pounds of uranium-contaminated solid waste annually. But it didn’t stop there.
ccording to on-site Ohio EPA coordinator Maria Galanti, uranium-contaminated solvents — materials never meant for incineration — were also burned in the unit. The result? Soil surrounding the incinerator is now radioactive to a depth of at least 12 feet.
Until the late 1980s, operators even tilled radioactive oils into unlined soil, assuming it would degrade over time. It didn’t. And it won’t — the plutonium isotopes involved have half-lives exceeding 24,000 years.
Radiation in the Waterways — and the Food Chain
A 2006 Ohio EPA report confirmed what residents feared: plutonium had migrated offsite and into the public environment.
Testing in Little Beaver Creek, Big Beaver Creek, Big Run, and the Scioto River revealed the presence of:
- Plutonium-238
- Plutonium-239
- Americium-241
- Neptunium-237
- Alongside technetium-99 and uranium isotopes
All these elements were detected well above background levels, confirming they originated from the plant, not nature.
The Hazard Index (HI) — a risk threshold used by federal agencies — was exceeded across all tested water bodies, with Big Run scoring more than 20 times the EPA’s risk cutoff.
Separate DOE assessments show Pu-238 in fish as a significant dietary exposure source, second only to Tc-99 in produce. Plutonium has entered the food chain.
Offsite Spread: Plutonium Detected Near Schools and Homes
Monitoring data confirmed the presence of plutonium-239/240, neptunium-237, and americium-241 at offsite stations including:
- Station A41A near Zahn’s Corner Middle School
- Station A6 in northwest Piketon
- Station A23 near local residential zones
DOE contends that any plutonium found in air monitors comes from 1950s nuclear weapons testing fallout and not PORTS.
Workers Testify to Deception and Disease
At a 2000 Senate hearing, former worker Sam Ray described his fight with chondrosarcoma, a rare bone cancer he linked directly to his work at PORTS. He spoke of no health monitoring, no protective equipment, and no transparency.
Jeffrey Walburn, a plant whistleblower, testified to a 1994 chemical exposure that permanently damaged his lungs. He alleged a criminal cover-up by Lockheed Martin, including the alteration and destruction of radiation dose records.
He warned that widows of deceased workers may never receive compensation because exposure data had been falsified.
DOE’s Own Admissions: Plutonium in the Cascade System
According to a 2024 DOE report, plutonium-238 and plutonium-239 were present in enrichment equipment, having entered the cascade system through contaminated uranium hexafluoride cylinders. The isotopes were found in the X-326 Process Building and throughout the cascade.
DOE also confirmed that residual technetium-99 remained embedded in internal pipe surfaces, requiring special disposal decades after operations ended.
From Russian Warheads to Pike County: The Megatons to Megawatts Program
Between 1993 and 2013, the U.S. and Russia dismantled over 20,000 nuclear warheads under the Megatons to Megawatts Program — converting highly enriched uranium (HEU) into low-enriched uranium (LEU) for use in American power plants.
But that uranium didn’t just vanish. It came through U.S. enrichment sites — including the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon.
Contractor and DOE records confirm that Russian-origin uranium — some of it likely carrying residual contaminants from dismantled warheads — was introduced into the U.S. enrichment stream at PORTS.
Whether plutonium from these shipments contributed to PORTS contamination is still under question. What’s undeniable is this: the U.S. government sent Russian bomb-grade material through an Appalachian processing plant with a history of unsafe handling, minimal oversight, and deliberate secrecy.
They took Soviet nukes and ran them through Appalachian lungs. Without warning. Without consent.
While the legacy of plutonium contamination at PORTS stretches back to the Cold War, the threat isn’t just historical — it’s current, legal, and active.
Centrus Energy: HALEU, the NRC license, and legal plutonium storage at PORTS
In 2021, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted Centrus Energy Corp. a license to operate a first-of-its-kind High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) facility inside the old enrichment footprint at PORTS. HALEU is a higher-enriched form of uranium (5–20% U-235), specifically produced for next-generation small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).
But buried in the licensing documents is something the public was never told:
The HALEU license explicitly authorizes Centrus to store an undisclosed amount of plutonium-bearing material at the site.
That’s not speculation — that’s federal licensing language. In plain English: Centrus is legally allowed to store plutonium compounds at a facility that already has a catastrophic contamination legacy.
A Legacy Buried in Contamination and Lies
Plutonium was here. It was processed, mishandled, released, and denied. It contaminated water, soil, fish, and workers. It spread to schools. And it killed.
Some of the evidence has been buried. Some altered. But most of it has been in plain sight — ignored by federal agencies and omitted from cleanup plans.
This is not an old story. This is an ongoing disaster.
The time for quiet compliance is over. The reckoning for Piketon — and for the people poisoned by its secrets — has come.
Call it what it clearly is: Genocide
April 26, 2025, By Walt Zlotow, https://theaimn.net/call-it-what-it-clearly-is-genocide/
Some dare not call it genocide
Folks following the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, fully enabled by America, are of two views.
Those of us in the peace community instantly recognised that Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack was a genocidal ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza.
We didn’t have to guess. Israeli leaders made clear through word and deed that return of Israeli hostages was secondary to their primary goal of killing and clearing out all 2,300,000 Palestinians so Gaza could be redeveloped to expand Greater Israel.
It was also clear that the US, under both Biden and Trump, were and are in complete accord with Israel’s grisly, murderous policy. Biden feigned sympathy for the tens of thousands of dead Palestinian innocents on his watch and the decimated 139 square miles of Gaza rubble. But he kept mum while delivering over $20 billion in weapons allowing Israel to rain down on Gaza over 50,000 tons of American bombs dropped from American planes.
Trump, no surprise, gloried in the worst genocide this century. He invited indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to the Oval Office to discuss which African countries they could intimidate to take in the roughly 2.2 million remaining starving, sick, traumatized Palestinians. Trump is eager to kick start his biggest real estate project ever, expanding Greater Israel into Gaza once the Palestinians have been cleared out. That is grotesque, not something to champion.
Then there are those who refuse to believe or admit that genocide is occurring before their eyes and ears in real time.
Reasons likely many.
Some simply view it not as genocide but a war between Israel and Hamas.
Some argue that the Palestinian destruction, no matter how horrible, does not rise to genocide which they equate to the Nazi horrors of WWII.
Some are in complete sympathy with Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign, indeed, cheering it on. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s new Ambassador to Israel, claims there is no such thing as Palestine or even Palestinians, so let the ethnic cleansing proceed unabated to expand Greater Israel.
There is a near total blackout in mainstream media of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Whether conservative or progressive, the talking heads go mute when it comes to the informing the public of the most horrific US policy in their lifetime.
None in Congress dare cross the Israel lobby by calling it genocide. To do so risks having millions in lobby campaign funds dry up or worse, going to a pro lobby primary opponent. Some are horrified by the violence crushing the Palestinians but cannot embrace the moral imperative to call it out and demand its end.
To his credit, Sen. Bernie Sanders tried twice to pass Senate Joint Resolutions to cut off the flow of genocide weapons to Israel but only garnered 17 votes from the other 99 mostly genocide-supporting Senators. But tho Sanders calls Israel’s conduct “ethnic cleansing”, he refuses to call it what it truly is: genocide.
Representing Sanders’ Senate opposite is colleague John Fetterman, who supports Israel cutting off all food, medicine, and water to Gaza until the Israeli hostages are released. Horrifying.
Israel breaks the January ceasefire with daily bombings, killing dozens of Palestinian innocents while most Americans turn away.
Collectively, American genocide deniers enable President Trump to fund, supply, and cheer on arguably the most murderous, destructive and tragically bi-partisan foreign policy in American history.
EDF’s new UK plants should be negotiated as one, French energy minister says.
EDF’s two UK nuclear construction projects at Hinkley Point and Sizewell
should be negotiated as a single financial venture, France’s energy
minister has urged, to prevent the French energy giant shouldering
significant cost overruns.
Marc Ferracci said he had held discussions on
the projects with Britain’s energy minister Ed Miliband on Thursday, on
the sidelines of an energy security summit in London. “France and EDF are
very committed to deliver the projects but we have to find a way to
accelerate them and we have to find a way to consolidate the financial
schemes of both projects,” Ferracci told the FT.
France has been lobbying
the UK government to help EDF with the finances of Hinkley Point C in
Somerset for more than a year. It argues that the French state-owned
electricity operator should not be left on the hook for cost overruns that
have taken the total bill to as high as £46bn. EDF — which has also
experienced long delays on other projects using the same reactor technology
in Finland and France — has warned that the first of two reactors at
Hinkley Point C could be delayed to as late as 2031, which would be six
years later than its original target.
The French company has a smaller
equity stake in the Sizewell C project in Suffolk, which it is also
developing. Ferracci denied that the French government was seeking to use
Sizewell as “leverage” to help bail it out of financial difficulties at
Hinkley.
FT 25th April 2025,
https://www.ft.com/content/0c50a553-3376-42d8-8ac5-c8aa84d2e78d
Trump’s transactional instincts could help forge a new Iran nuclear deal
Mohamad Bazzi, 265 Apr https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/25/trump-iran-nuclear-deal
The president has a chance to make good on his reputation as a dealmaker as Iran moves closer to a nuclear weapon.
In May 2018, Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed American sanctions that crippled the Iranian economy. Trump tore up the 2015 agreement, which had taken years for Iran to negotiate with six world powers, under which Tehran limited its nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. Trump insisted he would be able to negotiate a better pact than the one reached by Barack Obama’s administration.
Today, in his second term as president, Trump is eager to fix the Iran deal he broke nearly seven years ago.
While Trump’s overall foreign policy has been chaotic and has alienated traditional US allies in Europe and elsewhere, he has an opportunity to reach an agreement with Iran that eluded Joe Biden. Since Trump walked away from the original deal, Iran has moved closer to having a nuclear weapon than it has ever been. It has enriched enough uranium close to weapons-grade quality to make six nuclear bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But analysts believe that even after enriching enough uranium for a bomb, Iran would still need up to a year to develop an actual nuclear warhead that could be deployed on a ballistic missile.
Last month, Trump sent a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying the US wanted to negotiate a new deal. Trump followed up with a public threat, saying if Iran’s leaders did not agree to renewed talks, they would be subjected to “bombing the likes of which they have never seen before”. After Trump’s threats and a buildup of US forces in the Middle East, Iran’s military said it would respond to any attack by targeting US bases in the region, which house thousands of American troops.
But Iranian leaders also agreed to indirect negotiations, rather than the direct talks Trump had proposed. Trump dispatched his special envoy, the real estate developer Steve Witkoff, to lead a team of US negotiators to meet indirectly with top Iranian officials, including the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. The two sides held two rounds of productive talks so far this month, under the mediation of Oman. And the US and Iranian teams are due to meet again this weekend in Muscat, the capital of Oman, where they will start talks on technical details of a potential agreement.
While Trump and Iran’s leaders both changed their tones in recent weeks, there are many obstacles before a deal can be reached, including hardliners in Iran and Washington, as well as opposition from Israel’s rightwing government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent years working to undermine negotiations between the US and Iran. The main barrier will be whether the Trump administration insists on a total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program – the so-called “Libya model”, named after the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who decided to eliminate his country’s nuclear weapons program in 2003 under pressure from the US. But that decision deprived Gaddafi of a major lever to stave off western military intervention after the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, which led to his regime’s fall and his killing by Libyan rebels.
Some foreign policy hawks in Washington, including Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, insist on this maximalist strategy, which echoes Netanyahu’s demand that Iran must completely dismantle its nuclear enrichment activity and infrastructure as part of any deal with the US. If Trump takes a similar approach, negotiations would probably break down and Trump could follow through on his threat to carry out military strikes.
Iran has made clear that it will not agree to the total end of its nuclear program, but would accept a verification-based approach, as it did under the 2015 deal negotiated by the Obama administration along with China, France, Russia, the UK and Germany, together with the European Union. That type of agreement would place strict limits on Iran’s ability to enrich uranium and impose an inspections regime involving international monitors. Several of Trump’s advisers, including Witkoff and the vice-president, JD Vance, seem to favor this solution.
“I think he wants to deal with Iran with respect,” Witkoff said of Trump’s outreach to the Iranian regime, in a long interview last month with Tucker Carlson, the rightwing media host who has been highly critical of Republican hawks agitating for war with Iran. “He wants to build trust with them, if it’s possible.”
Iran’s leaders apparently got that message – and have tried to stroke Trump’s ego and convey that they respect him in ways they never respected Biden. In a Washington Post op-ed published on 8 April, Iran’s foreign minister seemed to be speaking to Trump directly when he blamed the failure of earlier negotiations on a “lack of real determination by the Biden administration”. Araghchi also played to Trump’s oft-repeated desire to be a peacemaker who ends America’s legacy of forever wars, writing: “We cannot imagine President Trump wanting to become another US president mired in a catastrophic war in the Middle East.”
And the minister appealed to Trump’s reputation as a deal-maker, citing the “trillion-dollar opportunity” that would benefit US companies if they could gain access to Iran after a diplomatic agreement. Iran’s leaders evidently understand that Trump loves to frame his foreign policy as being guided by his desire to secure economic deals and benefits for American businesses.
In this case, Trump’s transactional instincts and bulldozer style of negotiations could lead to a positive outcome, avoiding war with Iran and undermining the hardliners in Washington, Iran and Israel. Trump has already adopted a significant shift toward Tehran from his first term, when he had insisted that Iran was the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and the greatest threat to US interests in the Middle East.
After he took office in 2017, Trump wanted to tear up the Iran deal partly because it was one of Obama’s major foreign policy accomplishments. Trump also surrounded himself with hawkish advisers who reinforced the danger of an Iranian threat, including HR McMaster, who served as national security adviser, and James Mattis, who was defense secretary. Both men commanded US troops during the occupation of Iraq, and they fought Iraqi militias funded by Iran. Trump later appointed John Bolton, another neoconservative and advocate of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, as his national security adviser.
In his second term, Trump has banished most of the neocons from his administration. Trump also seems to realize that Netanyahu could become one of the biggest obstacles to an Iran deal, as he was during the Obama and Biden administrations. It was no accident that the president announced his plan for renewed talks with Iran while Netanyahu sat beside him at an Oval Office meeting on 7 April. Netanyahu had arranged a hasty visit to Washington to seek an exemption from Trump on new tariffs on Israeli exports. But he left empty-handed and embarrassed by Trump’s Iran announcement. That meeting was a signal to Iran’s leaders: that Trump would not allow Netanyahu to steamroll him, as the Israeli premier had done with other US presidents.
If Trump continues to resist Netanyahu, along with hawkish Republicans and some of his own advisers, he might well be able to negotiate a dramatic deal with Iran – and repair the nuclear crisis he unleashed years ago.
- Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies and a journalism professor at New York University.
Weatherwatch: sage advice 50-odd years ago on UK nuclear power still relevant
Ministers might care to heed conclusions of 1976 Flowers report before they go ahead with latest energy policy plans
Paul Brown, 25 Apr 25, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/apr/25/weatherwatch-sage-advice-50-odd-years-ago-on-uk-nuclear-power-still-relevant
Gathering dust somewhere in Whitehall is the 1976 royal commission’s sixth report on environmental pollution, known afterwards as the Flowers report after its chair, Sir Brian Flowers. It dealt with the future of the nuclear industry, warning about the dangers of producing large quantities of plutonium amid fears of potential threats from terrorists. The report particularly emphasised the pressing need to find a way of disposing of nuclear waste and recommended there should be no great expansion of nuclear power until a satisfactory way had been found of disposing of it.
The report was written before climate change and the current extremes of weather were of public concern, but the commission was exercised by the pressing need to increase the electricity supply. The report did not rule out the expansion of nuclear power but urged the government to look at wave power and other renewables as much more desirable alternatives.
Fast-forward almost half a century and the UK is still no nearer to dealing with its ever increasing pile of nuclear waste, costing billions every year just to keep safe. However, the Flowers commission would be delighted that wind, solar and other renewables have largely replaced nuclear power, and be puzzled that the government seems poised to ignore sage advice and expand nuclear energy again.
Tankers travel from Alton Water to Sizewell C every day
Tankers full of water are travelling 30 miles up the A12 and B1122 to keep Sizewell C’s offices topped up because the local water company cannot cope with demand.
Essex and Suffolk Water is the company that supplies the north
east of the county – and it has long been known that it has problems in
coping with increasing demand. The company is operating at near capacity –
and this problem has forced some development or expansion plans in the area
to be cancelled or postponed. It is not able to supply water to the offices
that have been built at Sizewell so a temporary deal has been signed with
Anglian Water to bring in supplies.
Ipswich Star 25th April 2025,
https://www.ipswichstar.co.uk/news/25110191.tankers-travel-alton-water-sizewell-c-every-day/
UN: Gaza Is Facing Worst Humanitarian Situation Yet Due to Israeli Blockade.
“Hunger is spreading & deepening, deliberate & manmade,” “Two million people: a majority of women & children are undergoing collective punishment.”
The Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid and all other goods entering Gaza has been imposed for 50 days
by Dave DeCamp April 22, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/04/22/un-gaza-is-facing-worst-humanitarian-situation-yet-due-to-israeli-blockade/
The UN’s humanitarian office, OCHA, warned on Tuesday that Gaza is facing its worst humanitarian situation yet, as a total Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid and all other goods has been imposed for more than 50 days.
“Right now is probably the worst humanitarian situation we have seen throughout the war in Gaza,” Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for OCHA, said at a press briefing in Geneva, according to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.
Also on Tuesday, the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA, said Gaza had become a “land of desperation” and warned of spreading hunger.
“Hunger is spreading & deepening, deliberate & manmade,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X. “Two million people: a majority of women & children are undergoing collective punishment.”
Lazzarini said that aid trucks, including 3,000 from UNRWA, are ready to enter Gaza but are being blocked by Israel. “The siege must be lifted, supplies must flow in, the hostages must be released, the ceasefire must resume,” he said.
The US has strongly backed Israel’s collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee released a video statement on Monday in response to calls for him to pressure Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and blamed Hamas for the Israeli blockade.
Last week, 12 major aid organizations issued a statement that said the “people of Gaza – particularly women and children – are paying the price” and that “famine is not just a risk, but likely rapidly unfolding in almost all parts of Gaza.”
Scottish nuclear plant emptied of fuel as UK winds down ageing gas-cooled reactors.
the cost of decommissioning should be taken into
account when the government decided on new nuclear plants as “no scheme can be guaranteed to meet a cost more than a century into the future”.
The first of the UK’s seven advanced gas-cooled reactor nuclear power
stations has been emptied of fuel, kick-starting a decommissioning process
that will cost at least £27bn in total and take almost a century.
EDF said on Thursday it had defuelled Hunterston B, on the west coast of Scotland,
paving the way for the transfer of the site and 250 staff from the French
power company to the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority next April. The
site provided most of Scotland’s energy for more than 40 years from its
launch in 1976 until its final closure in 2022.
EDF owns seven advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs) plants in the UK, which were built between the 1960s and 1980s and differ from newer nuclear plants that use water for
cooling. Just four are still operating.
The uranium fuel has been packaged
into 350 large flasks, which will be stored by the NDA at the Sellafield
nuclear site in Cumbria for at least 50 years until a longer-term
underground facility has been built.
Although the process took just three
years and £400mn, it will take almost a century to eradicate the radiation
from the land and buildings, EDF has said. The decommissioning of the seven
AGRs is separate to a much wider £105bn decommissioning programme, which
will cover an additional 17 closed nuclear sites over the next 120 years,
according to the NDA.
The closures will leave the UK with just one nuclear
power plant still running by 2030 — Sizewell B in Suffolk, which is also
managed by EDF and uses a pressurised water reactor. The NDA said it was
“acutely aware of the costs associated with delivering our mission”.
The cost of decommissioning nuclear power plants is under scrutiny as the
UK presses ahead with new nuclear projects, including the £40bn Sizewell
C, which is expected to get government go-ahead this spring, and the £46bn
Hinkley Point C, which is still under construction and will open by 2030 at
the earliest.
Steve Thomas, emeritus professor of energy policy at
Greenwich university, said the cost of decommissioning should be taken into
account when the government decided on new nuclear plants as “no scheme
can be guaranteed to meet a cost more than a century into the future”.
Although EDF has owned Hunterston B and the seven other AGR nuclear plants
since 2009, the cost of decommissioning is being paid for through the
ringfenced Nuclear Liabilities Fund (NLF), which was set up in 1996 after
privatisation and is valued at £20.6bn. Decommissioning costs have soared
over the past three decades, with the fund requiring cash injections from
the Treasury, including £5bn in July 2020 and a further £5.6bn in March
2022, according to the NLF.
FT 24th April 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/c31af2d6-eeaa-4a3d-a2c0-81c63b29cb1d
EDF’s two nuclear plants in Britain should be negotiated as one, French minister says.
Guy Taylor, Transport Reporter, 25 April 2025
EDF’s two nuclear construction schemes at Hinkley Point and Sizewell C should be treated as one financial venture in negotiations, according to France’s energy minister.
Marc Ferracci told the FT he had held discussions with the UK’s energy minister Ed Miliband at the sidelines of a conference in London on Thursday.
“France and EDF are very committed to deliver the projects but we have to find a way to accelerate them and we have to find a way to consolidate the financial schemes of both projects,” he said.
The French government has been pushing ministers in the UK to lend a hand with Hinkley Point’s floundering finances over the last year.
Costs on the nuclear project have risen to as high as £46bn and it argues EDF, the French state-owned energy firm, should not be forced to cover the overruns.
EDF’s equity stake in Sizewell C, a 3.2 gigawatt nuclear station on the Suffolk Coast, is smaller than Hinkley Point.
Ferracci denied that the French government was looking to use Sizewell as “leverage” against the financial troubles at Hinkley………………….. https://www.cityam.com/edfs-two-nuclear-plants-should-be-negotiated-as-one-french-minister-says/
The Australian Labor Party is No Friend of the Nuclear-Free Cause.
https://theaimn.net/the-australian-labor-party-is-no-friend-of-the-nuclear-free-cause/ 26 Apr 25
I’m thinking that the nuclear lobby loves the ALP even more than it loves the Liberal Coalition opposition party.
Advance Australia, and the U.S-controlled Atlas Network are powerful and well-funded groups dedicated to molding public opinion on behalf of wealthy right-wing groups. They did a fine job in 2023 of destroying Australian support for the 2023 Australian referendum on the indigenous Voice to Parliament.
I was expecting them to pretty much run riot in support of the Liberal Coalition’s plan for a nuclear Australia. That does not seem to have happened. Why not?
Advance “kicked off with outright lies“, but has been rather quiet lately. And the Atlas Network is nowhere in sight, although its modus operandi is secretive anyway, spreading simplistic memes.
My conclusion is that Peter Dutton’s Liberal Coalition campaign is so inept, so incompetent, that it has turned out to be counter-productive to the party’s cause. There’s just so much evidence of this ineptitude – particularly when it comes to the estimated costs of setting up seven nuclear power plants around Australia. The latest of many examinations of these costs is – “Coalition’s nuclear gambit will cost Australia trillions – and permanently gut its industry.” Half-baked plans to keep old coal-power plants running for many years until nuclear is “ready”, no mention of plans for waste disposal, – the tax-payer to cop the whole cost. Even a suave sales magician like Ted O’Brien has not been able to con the Australian public. The party’s incompetence is on show in other ways, too, unconnected to the nuclear issue.
But what of Labor? They have been remarkably quiet on the nuclear issue – focussing on their own rather ha[f-baked plans for housing. It’s all cost-of-living issues – and I don’t deny that this is important. But nuclear rarely gets a mention – except when Labor finds it useful to mention the costs.
It doesn’t look as if Peter Dutton’s Liberal Coalition has a hope in hell of getting a majority win for its nuclear platform.
But does the nuclear lobby really care? I’m afraid not. You see, the Labor Party, supposedly opposed to the nuclear industry, has a long tradition of caving in on nuclear issues. From 1982 – a weak, supposed “no new uranium mines” policy became a “three mines uranium policy” 1984 then a pathetic “no new mines policy” in the 1990s. Backing for South Australia’s uranium mines further weakened Labor anti-nuclear policy.
Over decades, Labor luminary Gareth Evans has been acclaimed for his supposed stance against nuclear weapons. But he’s done a disservice to the nuclear-free movement, in his long-standing position in favour of “the contribution that can be made by nuclear energy capable of providing huge amounts of energy, and just as clean as renewables in its climate impact”. Evans has always been close to the International Atomic Energy Agency, in his complacency that nuclear power has nothing to do with nuclear weapons!
Labor has always been officially opposed to nuclear power, but at the Federal level, and some State levels, there have always been significant Ministers like Bob Hawke, and Martin Ferguson, who pushed for the nuclear industry. To his credit, Anthony Albanese for a long time held out against the nuclear industry. Even up until 2024, he was still trying .
But the crunch had already come – Albanese on Thursday, 16th September 2021 – “We accept that this technology [nuclear-powered submarines ] is now the best option for Australia’s capability.”
Why did Albanese agree to this deal, arranged between the Morrison Liberal government, and the USA and UK? Apparently, he did so, after just a two-hour briefing, with no documents provided, on the previous day. Labor Caucus was presented with it as a fait accompli. No vote was taken.
I can only conclude that Albanese’s decision was based on that time-honored fear of Labor looking “weak on security”.
In one fell swoop, Labor’s anti-nuclear policy was wrecked. The nuclear submarines will mean nuclear reactors on Australia’s coast. The will mean nuclear waste disposal in Australia, including foreign nuclear waste from the second-hand submarines. They will surely eventually mean nuclear weapons, as who can really tell if a nuclear-powered submarines has or has not got nuclear weapons? (The Chinese will be very wary about them.)
Since 2021, Australia’s nuclear submarine arrangement has been largely in the hands of Defence Minister Richard Marles, who worked with that dodgy company PWC to set it up, and who is a committed supporter of Australia’s solidarity with the USA.
March 2023 – Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak unveiled the path to acquiring nuclear-powered submarines.
“In 2024, Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, made undisclosed “political commitments” with its AUKUS partners in an agreement for the transfer of naval nuclear technology to Australia, sparking concerns about the potential for high-level radioactive waste to be stored in the country. “
The global nuclear lobby works across national boundaries to promote its industry. It does well with Russia – as government clamp-down on dissent makes it easier to expand the industry in all its forms, and to market nuclear power to Asian ana African countries.
The nuclear industry is well aware of the problems in maintaining the belief that nuclear is clean, cheap, and climate friendly. But above all, it’s the nuclear-waste problem that its most expensive and difficult obstacle. Here’s where Australia has always looked appealing. All this nonsense about getting small nuclear reactors is just a distraction . The industry knows that small nuclear reactors are fraught with difficulties – too expensive, requiring too much security, public opposition at the local level, still needing too much water……… But to keep the global industry going, a nuclear-waste-welcoming country would be such a boost.
Well, it is early days, even for the prospect of those AUKUS nuclear submarines ever actually arriving. But in the meantime – the whole AUKUS thing has quietly introduced the Australian public to the idea that nuclear submarines are OK, and so are their wastes, and so are USA nuclear weapons based in Australia.
So, really, the Australian Labor Party has done a much better job of promoting the nuclear industry, than the fumbling Liberal Coalition could.
We are fortunate inn Australia to have proportional representation in our election. If you care about keeping Australia nuclear-free, you don’t have to vote for either of the big parties.
China, Russia may build nuclear plant on moon to power lunar station, official says
By Eduardo Baptista, April 24, 2025,
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-led-lunar-base-include-nuclear-power-plant-moons-surface-space-official-2025-04-23/
- Summary
- China and Russia plan nuclear reactor for lunar base by 2035
- China and Russia-led ILRS aims to rival NASA’s Artemis program
- China-Russia cooperation strengthened by tensions with West
SHANGHAI, April 23 (Reuters) – China is considering building a nuclear plant on the moon to power the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) it is planning with Russia, a presentation by a senior official showed on Wednesday.
China aims to become a major space power and land astronauts on the moon by 2030, and its planned Chang’e-8 mission for 2028 would lay the groundwork for constructing a permanent, manned lunar base.
In a presentation in Shanghai, the 2028 mission’s Chief Engineer Pei Zhaoyu showed that the lunar base’s energy supply could also depend on large-scale solar arrays, and pipelines and cables for heating and electricity built on the moon’s surface.
Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said last year it planned to build a nuclear reactor on the moon’s surface with the China National Space Administration (CNSA) by 2035 to power the ILRS.
The inclusion of the nuclear power unit in a Chinese space official’s presentation at a conference for officials from the 17 countries and international organisations that make up the ILRS suggests Beijing supports the idea, although it has never formally announced it.
“An important question for the ILRS is power supply, and in this Russia has a natural advantage, when it comes to nuclear power plants, especially sending them into space, it leads the world, it is ahead of the United States,” Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program, told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference.
After little progress on talks over a space-based reactor in the past, “I hope this time both countries can send a nuclear reactor to the moon,” Wu said.
China’s timeline to build an outpost on the moon’s south pole coincides with NASA’s more ambitious and advanced Artemis programme, which aims to put U.S. astronauts back on the lunar surface in December 2025.
Wu said last year that a “basic model” of the ILRS, with the Moon’s south pole as its core, would be built by 2035.
In the future, China will create the “555 Project,” inviting 50 countries, 500 international scientific research institutions, and 5,000 overseas researchers to join the ILRS.
Researchers from Roscosmos also presented at the conference in Shanghai, sharing details about plans to look for mineral and water resources, including possibly using lunar material as fuel.
They didn’t know their backyard creek carried nuclear waste. Now, they’re dying of cancer.
By Skyler Henry, Cait Bladt, https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/coldwater-creek-st-louis-missouri-nuclear-waste-manhattan-project/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJ5WlNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE3b0JDR3JZZ0xqRkNqVU1oAR6r1OHnTIbzQszYmq5UdxWm2CDEhfSw2CBAqIbrvNc_QJ0mnVpSMlz18FoZ6A_aem_HBiqzbUxMZqObYI2gfOYx April 24, 2025
This story is part one of a two-part series that examines the effects of nuclear waste contamination in Coldwater Creek on the surrounding community in St. Louis, Missouri. Part two aired Wednesday, April 23 on “CBS Evening News.”
When Linda Morice and her family first moved to St. Louis in 1957, they had no idea they had anything to fear. Then, people started getting sick.
“It was a slow, insidious process,” Morice said.
After the death of Morice’s mother, her physician uncle took her aside and gave her a stark warning: “Linda, I don’t believe St. Louis is a very healthy place to live. Everyone on this street has a tumor.”
Their neighborhood was bordered by Coldwater Creek, a 19-mile tributary of the Missouri River It wound through their backyards, near baseball fields, schools and cemeteries — and past lots where leaking barrels and open-air dumps of nuclear waste leeched into its waters.
“It was shocking that this creek was likely making people sick,” Morice said.
Starting in 1942, roughly one ton of pure uranium was produced per day in downtown St. Louis. It was then shipped to labs across the country for the top secret Manhattan Project that created the first nuclear bomb.
The leftover waste was dumped around the city.
“That material was in 82 different spots throughout St. Louis County. It spilled. Children played in it. It seemed to me that there wasn’t an attempt to absolutely get to the bottom of it,” Morice said.
In Morice’s family alone, her mother, father and brother died of cancer, leaving her to think differently about her childhood.
“All that time, all those fun things were happening, but that whole time we, and the rest of the community were being exposed to some pretty dangerous stuff,” Morice said.
Now her husband, who also lived in the area, is fighting cancer. He’s being treated by urologic oncologist Dr. Gautum Agarwal. For the last several years, Agarwal has been tracking which of his patients lived near Coldwater Creek.
“I was seeing patients who are young, who had developed pretty significant cancers from areas that there’s been some contamination with nuclear waste,” Agarwal said.
While radiation is known to cause cancer, experts say they can’t pin down the specific cause of the disease in a given patient.
But a 2019 study from the Department of Health and Human Services found that people who lived and played near Coldwater Creek from the 1960s to 1990s “could be at an increased risk of developing lung cancer, bone cancer or leukemia.”
“The people there deserve for us to look at this much closer than we have,” Agarwal said.
The Ever-Expanding War Machine
Dismantling the Government While Pumping Up the Pentagon
By William D. Hartung, April 22, 2025 https://tomdispatch.com/the-ever-expanding-war-machine/
Under the guise of efficiency, the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to essential programs and agencies that are the backbone of America’s civilian government. The virtual elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and plans to shut down the Department of Education are just the most visible examples of a campaign that includes layoffs of budget experts, public health officials, scientists, and other critical personnel whose work undergirds the daily operations of government and provides the basic services needed by businesses, families, and individuals alike. Many of those services can make the difference between solvency and poverty, health and illness, or even, in some cases, life and death for vulnerable populations.
The speed with which civilian programs and agencies are being slashed in the second Trump era gives away the true purpose of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In the context of the Musk-Trump regime, “efficiency” is a cover story for a greed-driven ideological campaign to radically reduce the size of government without regard for the human consequences.
So far, the only agency that seems to have escaped the ire of the DOGE is — don’t be shocked! — the Pentagon. After misleading headlines suggested that its topline would be cut by as much as 8% annually for the next five years as part of that supposed efficiency campaign, the real plan was revealed — finding savings in some parts of the Pentagon only to invest whatever money might be saved in — yes! — other military programs without any actual reductions in the department’s overall budget. Then, during a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7th, Trump announced that “we’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military . . . $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.”
So far, cuts to make room for new kinds of military investments have been limited to the firing of civilian Pentagon employees and the dismantling of a number of internal strategy and research departments. Activities that funnel revenue to weapons contractors have barely been touched — hardly surprising given that Musk himself presides over a significant Pentagon contractor, SpaceX.
The legitimacy of his role should, of course, be subject to question. After all, he’s an unelected billionaire with major government contracts who, in recent months, seemed to have garnered more power than the entire cabinet combined. But cabinet members are subject to Senate confirmation, as well as financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules. Not Musk, though. Not only hasn’t he been vetted by Congress, but he’s been allowed to maintain his role in SpaceX.
A Hollow Government?
The Trump and Musk hollowing out of the civilian government, while keeping the Pentagon budget at enormously high levels of funding, means the United States is well on its way to becoming the very “garrison state” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in the early years of the Cold War. And mind you, all of that’s true before Republican hawks in Congress like Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS), who is seeking $100 billion more in Pentagon spending than its officials have asked for, even act.
What’s at stake, however, goes well beyond how the government spends its money. After all, such decisions are being accompanied by an assault on basic constitutional rights like freedom of speech and a campaign of mass deportations that already includes people with the legal right to remain in the United States. And that’s not to mention the bullying and financial blackmailing of universities, law firms, and major media outlets in an attempt to force them to bow down to the administration’s political preferences.In fact, the first two months of the Trump/Musk administration undoubtedly represent the most blatant power grab by the executive branch in the history of this republic, a move that undermines our ability to preserve, no less expand, the fundamental rights that are supposed to be the guiding lights of American democracy. Those rights have, of course, been violated to one degree or another throughout this country’s history, but never like this. The current crackdown threatens to erase the hard-won victories of the civil rights, women’s rights, labor rights, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights movements that had brought this country closer to living up to its professed commitments to freedom, tolerance, and equality.
Continue readingOn Neo-Nazi Influence in Ukraine
The Azov Battalion, which arose during the coup, became a significant force in the war against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass, who resisted the coup. Its commander, Andriy Biletsky, infamously said Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
the Azov backer’s television channel had by this time aired the hit TV show Servant of the People (2015-2019), which catapulted Volodymyr Zelensky to fame and ultimately into the presidency under the new Servant of the People Party. The former actor and comedian’s presidential campaign was bankrolled by Kolomoisky, according to multiple reports.
Zelensky was elected president on the promise of ending the Donbass war. About seven months into his term he traveled to the front line in Donbass to tell Ukrainian troops, where Azov is well-represented, to lay down their arms. Instead he was sent packing. The Kyiv Post
A short history of neo-Nazism in Ukraine in response to some who say, “There is no evidence that Nazism has substantial influence in Ukraine.” Joe Lauria reports.
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 20 Apr 25
The U.S. relationship with Ukrainian fascists began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles.
Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives.
The government study said, “Bandera’s wing (OUN/B) was a militant fascist organization.” Bandera’s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, said: ““I…fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine…. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine….”
The study says: “At a July 6, 1941, meeting in Lwów, Bandera loyalists determined that Jews ‘have to be treated harshly…. We must finish them off…. Regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.’”
Lebed himself proposed to “’cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,’ so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918.” Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians….”
The C.I.A. was not interested in working with Bandera, pages 81-82 of the report say, but the British MI6 was. “MI6 argued, Bandera’s group was ‘the strongest Ukrainian organization abroad, is deemed competent to train party cadres, [and] build a morally and politically healthy organization….’” An early 1954 MI6 summary noted that, “the operational aspect of this [British] collaboration [with Bandera] was developing satisfactorily. Gradually a more complete control was obtained over infiltration operations …
Britain ended its collaboration with Bandera in 1954. West German intelligence, under former Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, then worked with Bandera, who was eventually assassinated with cyanide dust by the KGB in Munich in 1959.
Instead of Bandera, the C.I.A. was interested in Lebed, despite his fascist background. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he directed sabotage and propaganda operations on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Soviet Union. The U.S. government study says:
“CIA operations with these Ukrainians began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC. … Lebed relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship. It kept him safe from assassination, allowed him to speak to Ukrainian émigré groups, and permitted him to return to the United States after operational trips to Europe. Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his ‘cunning character,’ his ‘relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,’ [and] the fact that he was ‘a very ruthless operator.’”
The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sabotage and pro-Ukrainian nationalist propaganda operations inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s independence in 1991. “Mykola Lebed’s relationship with the CIA lasted the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says. “While most CIA operations involving wartime perpetrators backfired, Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union.”
Bandera Revival
The U.S. thus covertly kept Ukrainian fascist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrainian independence was achieved. “Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University,” the U.S. National Archives study says.
The successor organization to the OUN-B in the United States did not die with him, however. It had been renamed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), according to the International Business Times (IBT).
“By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed [Yaroslav] Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT reported. “Following the demise of [Viktor] Yanukovich’s regime [in 2014], the UCCA helped organise rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests,” it reported.
That is a direct link between Maidan and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism.
Despite the U.S. favoring the less extreme Lebed over Bandera, the latter has remained the more inspiring figure in Ukraine.
In 1991, the first year of Ukraine’s independence, the neo-fascist Social National Party, later Svoboda Party, was formed, tracing its provenance directly to Bandera. It had a street named after Bandera in Liviv, and tried to name the city’s airport after him. (Svoboda won 10 percent of the Rada’s seats in 2012 before the coup and before Sen. John McCain and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared with Svoboda’s leader the following year.)
In 2010, pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, a status reversed by President Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown with the help of Ukrainian neo-Nazis in 2014.
More than 50 monuments, busts and museums commemorating Bandera have been erected in Ukraine, two-thirds of which have been built since 2005, the year the pro-American Yuschenko was elected. A Swiss academic study says:
“On January 13, 2011, the L’vivs’ka Oblast’ Council, meeting at an extraordinary session next to the Bandera monument in L’viv, reacted to the abrogation [skasuvannya] of Viktor Yushchenko’s order about naming Stepan Bandera a ‘Hero of Ukraine’ by affirming that ‘for millions of Ukrainians Bandera was and remains a Ukrainian Hero notwithstanding pitiable and worthless decisions of the courts’ and declaring its intention to rename ‘Stepan Bandera Street’ as ‘Hero of Ukraine Stepan Bandera Street.’”
Torchlit parades behind Bandera’s portrait are common in Ukrainian cities, particularly on Jan. 1, his birthday, including this year.
Mainstream on Neo-Nazis
From the start of the 2013-2014 events in Ukraine, Consortium News founder Robert Parry and other writers began providing the evidence NewsGuard, which bills itself as a news-rating agency, says doesn’t exist. Parry began reporting extensively on the coup and the influential role of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis. At the time, corporate media also reported on the essential part neo-Nazis played in the coup. [See: ROBERT PARRY: Ukraine’s Inconvenient Neo-Nazis]
As The New York Times reported, the neo-Nazi group, Right Sector, had the key role in the violent ouster of Yanukovych. The role of neo-fascist groups in the uprising and its influence on Ukrainian society was well reported by mainstream media outlets at the time.
The BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN all reported on Right Sector, C14 and other extremists’ role in the overthrow of Yanukovych. The BBC ran this report a week after his ouster:
After the coup a number of ministers in the new government came from neo-fascist parties. NBC News (100 percent NewsGuard rating) reported in March 2014: “Svoboda, which means ‘Freedom,’ was given almost a quarter of the Cabinet positions in the interim government formed after the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February.”
Svoboda’s leader, Tyahnybok, whom McCain and Nuland stood on stage with, once called for the liberation of Ukraine from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” The International Business Times (82.5 percent) reported:
“In 2005 Tyahnybok signed an open letter to then Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko urging him to ban all Jewish organisations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which he claimed carried out ‘criminal activities [of] organised Jewry’, ultimately aimed at the genocide of the Ukrainian people.”
Before McCain and Nuland embraced Tyahnybok and his social national party, it was condemned by the European Parliament, which said in 2012:
Continue reading1 This Month
29 Jan. Thursday 7-8 p.m. Webinar – World’s Largest Nuclear Station in Port Hope, ON?
31st January – Challenging the War Machine – a DECLASSIFIED UK SUMMIT
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