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No nuclear energy in Scotland – Greens

Labour’s nuclear obsession would be waste of time and money.

1 June 26, https://greens.scot/news/no-nuclear-energy-in-scotland

Labour’s plans to build nuclear power plants all over Scotland would be a costly error, says Scottish Green MSP Kristopher Leask.

This week saw the publication of a report by Great British Energy Nuclear, ordered by Ed Miliband, which identified multiple sites in Scotland which could be used if the Scottish Government’s opposition to nuclear was to change.

The report was publicly welcomed by Anas Sarwar, Michael Shanks and other Scottish Labour bosses.

Kristopher said:

“Labour’s obsession with forcing a new generation of nuclear power on Scotland rides roughshod over devolution and ignores the will of the Scottish Parliament. 

“Opening new plants across Scotland would be a huge waste of time and money. It would swallow billions of pounds and take decades to deliver, while doing nothing to tackle energy bills or the climate crisis. 

“Focusing on nuclear energy would be a huge missed opportunity. It would mean turning our backs on Scotland’s world-leading renewable resources. 

“Instead of pouring money into expensive nuclear projects, the UK Government should be backing renewable energy that can create jobs, cut bills and strengthen energy security at a fraction of the cost.

“Our priority should be creating clean, green, secure jobs that support nuclear workers into new industries while revitalising communities across Scotland.”

July 5, 2026 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Israel Is An Apartheid State – And Its Weird Marriage Laws Show Us How

in 2018 the Israeli government passed a Nation-State Law declaring that Israel belongs exclusively to the Jewish people, not to all citizens who live there.

Israeli nationality exists only as a fiction on Israeli passports to allow the population to travel internationally. Inside Israel, everyone is identified by their confessional group.

In Israel, “Jewish” is treated as a nationality. Remember the 2018 Nation State Law. What it declared is that the state of Israel belongs exclusively to the “nation” of Jews – that is, to every Jew around the globe, not just those living in Israel.

 July 1, 2026 , Jonathan Cook

Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own nationality. Why? Because a common national identity would sabotage Israel’s carefully veiled system of segregation

Israel’s supporters have gone apoplectic over a short post on X from the journalist Mehdi Hasan, highlighting Israel’s peculiar marriage laws.

Hasan asks: “Did you know that you can’t have a civil or secular marriage in Israel?”

Mehdi Hasan, @mehdirhasan

Did you know that you can’t have a civil or secular marriage in Israel?

Michael A. Cohen (NOT TRUMP’S FORMER FIXER) @speechboy, 71Jun 28

Something like 40 countries have an official state religion. Israel is not one of them! In fact, that Israel defines itself as a Jewish state is not even a religious designation. That Mamdani continues to make this mistake and continues to focus on the world’s one Jewish Show more 4:24 AM · Jun 29, 2026

He’s not wrong. Israel has banned civil marriage. You can wed only in a ceremony strictly controlled by religious authorities. If you want a civil marriage, you have to travel to another country.

Why, you might reasonably wonder. Isn’t Israel a modern, secular, western-style liberal democracy? After all, that’s what our politicians and media keep telling us.

The most popular rejoinder to Hasan from Israel’s apologists – that the situation is no better in Saudi Arabia – is not quite the flex they seem to imagine. So Israel offers the same human rights protections as Saudi Arabia? Impressive.

Others have pointed out that Israel inherited the so-called “millet” system from the Ottoman empire, which gave the leaders of each confessional group across the Middle East autonomous control over their community’s religious affairs.

Doubtless, 150 years ago the system worked relatively well in reducing communal tensions in religiously diverse parts of a large empire. It prevented officials in Constantinople – modern-day Istanbul – from getting dragged deeply into the day-to-day affairs of its often distant subjects.

But 150 years ago, Britain sent children up chimneys to sweep them. The law was changed around that time to stop this abusive and dangerous practice.

Israel was established nearly eight decades ago, supposedly as a secular, western-style liberal democracy. It has had 78 years to change those archaic Ottoman marriage laws.

Why hasn’t it done so?

All the bluster decrying Hasan’s post is a desperate attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that Israel’s antiquated marriage laws survive because they are useful to Israel.

In fact, they are more than that. They are a core component of Israel’s version of apartheid – a racist system of segregation Israel has successfully shielded from the view of western publics with the help of western politicians and media.

‘Demographic threat’

Israel’s ban on civil marriage is central to its efforts to prevent what past racist societies, such as apartheid South Africa and the American Deep South, termed “miscegenation” – that is, sexual relations between different ethnic groups. You might remember that the Nazis had unpleasant views on this subject too.

Here is the current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, opposing miscegenation in 2016:

“Preventing assimilation in the Jewish state is completely legitimate and not at all racist. You are assuming as a basis for the discussion that preventing intermarriage is wrong, while ignoring the fact that most [Jewish] girls who go with Arabs are poor girls who are being used.”

Former education minister Rafi Peretz called mixed marriages involving Jews a “second Holocaust”.

In Israel, such views are entirely mainstream. In 2018, Yitzhak Herzog, Israel’s current president and the former leader of an ostensible leftwing Israeli party, described mixed marriages among American Jews as a “plague” for which a “solution” had to be found – presumably by copying Israel’s approach.

In Israel, the chief concern is not about marriages between Jews and the Palestinians under occupation – which Israel and its supporters like to present, bogusly, as a straightforward “security” matter.

In the occupied territories, Israel uses far blunter methods than laws to prevent any kind of intimate relations developing between Jews and a captive Palestinian population. It prefers physical containment and violence.

Palestinians under occupation are forcibly separated from Israeli Jews. They are hemmed into their own tightly confined ghettoes by Israel’s network of steel and concrete barriers; by the Israeli army; by checkpoints; by separate, apartheid roads in the West Bank; and by Jewish militias living on stolen lands in so-called “settlements”.

There is little chance of interaction, let alone intermarriage, in such circumstances – except when Israeli soldiers or armed Jewish settlers come rampaging into Palestinian communities to destroy crops, kill livestock, poison wells, torch homes and cars, and beat up – and sometimes kill – the inhabitants.

Nonetheless, there is still a potential vulnerability in Israel’s system of segregation.

In 1948, Israel expelled 80 per cent of the Palestinian population from their homes and lands in an area that was henceforth to be called, not Palestine, but the “Jewish” state of Israel.

A few Palestinians remained, however, inside those borders – mostly from oversight or error. Despite covert efforts by Israel for several years after the 1948 war to force them out of the state, its officials soon came under international pressure to give these stranded Palestinians citizenship – even if in practice, as we shall see, this conferred on them very inferior rights.

Even today, Israel is extremely worried about a supposed threat from its third-class Palestinian “citizens” – officially termed “Israel’s Arabs”. Given a higher birth rate, their numbers have grown exponentially over eight decades. They now comprise a fifth of Israel’s population.

Israeli journalists, academics and politicians, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, regularly call the country’s Palestinian citizens a “demographic threat”, and endlessly worry about the “Palestinian womb”.

No state of all its citizens

But Israel faces a countervailing pressure. If it makes its treatment of Palestinian citizens too obviously racist and oppressive, some outsiders might start to realise it is not the secular western-style liberal democracy it claims to be.

You will hear the pro-Israel lobby in the West tell you that so-called “Israeli Arabs” have exactly the same rights as Israel’s Jewish population, guaranteed by Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That is not even remotely true.

Adalah, a leading legal rights group in Israel, has a database showing more than 70 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jewish citizens and Palestinian citizens. These laws form the core of Israel’s apartheid system.

Israel’s Basic Laws, a sort of constitution, explicitly exclude any principle of civic equality. Every attempt by a Palestinian party in Israel to get a debate in the parliament on Israel becoming a “state of all its citizens” – that is, a liberal democracy – is barred from discussion. And in 2018 the Israeli government passed a Nation-State Law declaring that Israel belongs exclusively to the Jewish people, not to all citizens who live there.

As with Palestinians under occupation, Israel has almost entirely confined its Palestinian citizens to their own segregated, underfunded, under-resourced communities (townships) on less then 3 per cent of the country’s territory.

A small minority of Palestinian citizens inside Israel live in segregated, deprived neighbourhoods of what are misleadingly termed “mixed” cities. Other Palestinian citizens, the most oppressed of all, live in communities inhabited by their families for centuries but which have been criminalised by an Israeli state that refuses to recognise them.

Many hundreds of Jewish rural communities, by contrast, operate effectively as exclusive membership clubs. They have the power to exclude Palestinian citizens – a right they take full advantage of.

Separate planning structures ensure massively overcrowded Palestinian communities inside Israel are unable to build new homes and expand. Palestinian children are schooled in a separate and much inferior education system.

For the who wish to dig deeper, I have written a lengthy essay setting out the details of Israel’s apartheid system here.

The ban on civil marriage inside Israel’s borders is not usually cited, even by critics, as an example of its apartheid system of rule. But the ban persists because it is the ideal way to conceal segregation under the veneer of equal treatment.

Israel’s Palestinian citizens must marry in ceremonies conducted by their religious community’s leaders: by Muslim clerics, or by various Christian churches, or by the Druze clergy.

It is the same for Jews in israel. They must be married by an Orthodox rabbi.

So everyone faces the same restrictions. But the point is this: the equality of treatment ensures very unequal outcomes. It is designed that way.

Fascist thugs

Inside Israel, intermarriage is only possible if one party can convert to their partner’s religion.

Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate makes it impossible for Palestinians under occupation to convert to Judaism in Israel, with the head of its conversion authority stating in 2016 that any such applicants are rejected “without review because of their ethnic origin”.

Meanwhile, Israel makes it almost as difficult for anyone else considered a non-Jew to convert to Judaism, most especially Palestinian citizens. Over decades, there have been only a handful of such cases.

In practice, this means that in any relationship between a Palestinian citizen of Israel and an Israeli Jew, it almost always falls to the Israeli Jew to convert to the religion of the Palestinian citizen, whether a Muslim, Christian or Druze. That entails the Jewish partner losing their Jewish status and the many consequential privileges inside Israel that derive from that status.

Israel has found this is a much better solution than apartheid South Africa’s, where blacks and whites were explicitly barred by law from marrying. Israel can achieve the same result more quietly.

Given the entirely segregated structure of Israeli society, and the strong social taboos among Israeli Jews on “miscegenation”, the number of intermarriages in Israel between Jews and Palestinian citizens barely reaches double digits each year.

There are even groups like Lehava – Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan – that go around beating up Palestinians caught anywhere near the Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem and terrorising any young Jewish women suspected of being romantically involved with a Palestinian. Lehava hold noisy and disruptive protests to shame the odd Jewish woman who converts and marries a Palestinian citizen.

All of this happens with a quiet wink from the authorities. The current police minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has long been a patron of the fascist, Jewish supremacist thugs of Lehava.

In the rare cases of a Jew converting and marrying a Palestinian citizen, the Palestinian partner faces innumerable legal and social obstacles to integrating into a Jewish community to which they do not belong.

Instead, the Jewish partner moves to a Palestinian community – an Israeli version of a township like Soweto – and educates their children inside the vastly inferior “Arab” school system. The former Jew loses most of the ethnic privileges they previously enjoyed inside the world’s only “Jewish” state.

Faced with this as their future, such couples often seize the opportunity for neither to convert and instead marry and live abroad.

Unwelcome guests

None of these difficulties are accidental. It is exactly how you would expect an apartheid system that prefers to obscure its apartheid character to structure its laws – and thereby help its lobby in the West, including the western political and media class, to claim that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

Israel learnt from the mistakes of the old South Africa. It mastered the modern arts of public relations – or at least it did until Benjamin Netanyahu tore up the script by erasing Gaza.

Inside Israel, the apartheid system extends far beyond marriage laws to touch all areas of life.

Here is another way Israel has obscured its apartheid system – again not in the occupied territories, but inside Israel itself.

The same system that denies Israelis the possibility of a civil or secular marriage also refuses to recognise that they have any kind of civil or secular identity, simply as Israelis. By law, everyone in Israel must belong to a confessional group, identified as a Jew, Muslim, Christian or Druze.

Which makes sense of another little-known fact about Israel: Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own – in this case, Israeli – nationality. Why? For the simple reason that, were Israelis to share a common national identity, it would be much harder for the Israeli state to operate its apartheid system.

Israeli nationality exists only as a fiction on Israeli passports to allow the population to travel internationally. Inside Israel, everyone is identified by their confessional group.

In Israel, “Jewish” is treated as a nationality. Remember the 2018 Nation State Law. What it declared is that the state of Israel belongs exclusively to the “nation” of Jews – that is, to every Jew around the globe, not just those living in Israel.

Muslims and Christians are lumped together into a similarly artificial “Arab” nationality, while the Druze have their own, different nationality. The same Nation State Law makes clear that the state of Israel does not belong to these other, non-Jewish “nations”, despite their families having lived on the same lands for centuries. Palestinian citizens are nothing more than guests – and unwelcome ones at that.

This segregation carries through to Israel’s ID cards. These cards, which must be carried at all times, used to include a section that expressly showed the “nationality” of each Israeli. But this section attracted uncomfortable scrutiny during a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by a group of dissident Israelis seeking recognition of an Israeli nationality. Officials removed the category from the card. However, Israel’s population register still includes a nationality classification.

In addition to Jew, Arab and Druze, there are more than 120 other categories to deal with all the anomalies. I was just one such anomaly after I married a Palestinian Christian and entered a lengthy and difficult naturalisation process. My nationality was classed as “British”.

Why all this complexity? Why all this unique weirdness?

Because Israel needs to conceal its system of apartheid. The old South Africa simply said: one law for whites and another for blacks.

Israel knows this no longer plays well. So it has devised a convoluted, baffling system that few understand as a way to avoid attracting attention and criticism.

Special Jewish rights

So let’s end with just one example of how Israel’s apartheid system works in practice.

Notionally, Israel confers on all its citizens – Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze – equal rights as citizens. But with a sleight of hand, it then undermines those equal rights by conferring superior “national” rights on one group only, Jews. If there is a conflict between a citizenship right and a Jewish “national” right, you’ve probably already guessed that the Jewish national right takes precedence.

Education is a good illustration. All Israeli citizens enjoy a right to have their children educated, because education is a citizenship right. But lots of veiled manoeuvres – like extra budgets for National Priority Areas, special subsidies for Jewish religious schools, funding from the diaspora, and bigger tax disbursements from central government for Jewish local authorities – mean Jewish schools are far better funded than “Arab” schools.

Education for Israel’s Palestinian citizens has been underfunded for eight decades. So even though Israel’s apologists will claim the funding gaps are slowly narrowing, the continuing shortfall simply compounds a decades-long historical injustice. Arab schools are so far behind they can never catch up without aggressive additional funding Israel clearly has no intention of ever providing them with.

There are massive shortages of classrooms and staff in dilapidated school buildings. Old books are often grossly outdated and poorly translated into Arabic by the state. Palestinian educational leaders have no input into the curriculum the community’s children are taught. There are strict controls by Jewish (usually racist) officials over what can be taught and who can teach. And on top of all this, huge cultural biases in qualifying tests make it far harder for Palestinian citizens to gain entry to universities in Israel.

There are many other problems in education. For example, nearly one in 10 Palestinian children in Israel live in historic communities built on lands that the Israeli state now wishes to “Judaise” – reserve for the Jewish population – and are therefore denied all recognition.

Treated like criminals, these children rarely have schools in their communities because no permanent buildings are allowed. What buildings there are cannot be connected to the electricity or water grids. Even children of kindergarten age must typically travel long distances – sometimes close to 60 km a day – to get to a licensed school.

The forms of discrimination in education alone are endless. But they do not stop there. The discrimination is replicated in all major facets of life for Israel’s more than 2 million Palestinian citizens through these conceptual and legal contortions over religion, citizenship and nationality.

None of this should be a surprise. It is exactly what you would expect in an apartheid state like Israel.

July 4, 2026 Posted by | Israel, politics | Leave a comment

The plot to subvert the  midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous

Right-wing media figures including Steve Bannon, John Solomon, and Cleta Mitchell appear to be weaving together a narrative about interference by China in US elections to justify a national emergency to curtail voting rights

MEDIAMATTERS,  John Knefel, 07/02/26 

Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China.

The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify and release documents purporting to show foreign interference in U.S. elections, especially by the Chinese Communist Party.

Next, Trump would use that supposed “proof” of a stolen election to declare a national emergency, thereby — according to those pushing this idea — giving him extraordinary powers over the upcoming midterms. That move would serve as a way to advance the anti-voting rights measures in the SAVE America Act, like forcing voters to prove their citizenship, without having to actually pass the law — which Congress, so far at least, appears reluctant to do.

The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is a central node, attempting to advance the operation on his War Room podcast, aired on right-wing network Real America’s Voice, long a major source of misinformation about the 2020 election.

Bannon’s RAV colleague John Solomon, whose role in the plot appears to be running the declassification effort, was recently appointed to a White House “task force” into supposed election integrity. Solomon was Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year in 2019 for his role in laundering misinformation about the Bidens and Ukraine through his opinion columns.

Also in the mix is Peter Schweizer, who founded the Government Accountability Institute with Bannon and has moved from spreading misinformation about the Clintons to claiming that China is taking over the United States by exploiting birthright citizenship.

Then there’s Cleta Mitchell, a right-wing lawyer who was on the January 2021 call when Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough ballots to tip the state his way. She referenced Schweizer in a June 20 appearance on War Room, positively paraphrasing an argument he made on his podcast acknowledging that much of the voting activity he wants to suppress is actually legal.

“Peter Schweizer put it pretty well last week in a podcast that he does with Eric Eggers, and the question they posed is: If fraud is made — if election fraud is made legal, is it still fraud?” Mitchell asked. “Because what’s happened in California over the last decade is that the far-left Democrat, socialist, Marxists, communists have completely upended every vestige of election integrity.” (Bannon had teed her up by referencing the Los Angeles mayoral primary, claiming without evidence: “They stole it right in front of our face and laughed at us the entire time.”)

Mitchell is supported by a loose array of election deniers who have called on Trump to issue an executive order to seize “king-like powers” over voting systems, supported by the national emergency decree…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Bannon stated plainly on June 29 that Solomon’s “task force” and “also Pulte” would be central to creating a “predicate” for the declaration of a national emergency and subsequent executive order achieving the anti-voting rights goals of the SAVE America Act.

On June 30, Bannon interviewed another of his RAV colleagues, Wayne Allyn Root, who further elaborated what a national emergency declaration could look like.

“Stop talking about the SAVE Act and do a national security emergency for elections, which is the SAVE Act, which contains everything that’s in the SAVE Act, Steve, and more and more,” Root said.

Just days earlier, on June 24, Trump canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill to pressure Congress to pass the stalled out SAVE America Act, which he referred to as a “National Emergency.”

The “predicate” Bannon is hoping to manufacture could also be for other election initiatives the administration is working on — such as trying to force courts to give the administration access to various state voter rolls — an issue the administration is facing significant resistance to.

Whether this harebrained plot congeals into an active conspiracy to subvert the midterms remains to be seen, but given that Trump has already tried to overturn one election it would be a mistake not to take these rumblings seriously. There may indeed be an emergency — it’s just not the one that Bannon and company are talking about. https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/plot-subvert-midterms-getting-stranger-and-more-dangerous


July 4, 2026 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

SNP blocks new nuclear power

 SNP blocks new nuclear power despite ‘high-potential’ sites. A
Westminster-backed study identified places capable of hosting future
reactors, but the Scottish government’s longstanding opposition remains
unchanged. The SNP has shut down any hope for new nuclear power in Scotland
after a Westminster-backed report that highlighted the “high potential”
for projects. “The Scottish government is focused on supporting the
development of Scotland’s renewable energy potential, which provides
jobs, are safer and doesn’t leave a legacy of nuclear waste.

Times 30th June 2026, https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/snp-blocks-new-nuclear-power-high-potential-sites-vfrcjx5ns

July 4, 2026 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Nuclear Power is NOT the Solution – It’s the Problem! NO CANDU!

F. R. Greening Ph.D. 3 July 26

Carney’s Liberal Government has recently become fixated on promoting nuclear power as the best way for Canada to generate so-called “clean”, carbon-emission-free, electrical energy. In support of this policy the government likes to boast about Canada’s past accomplishments in developing and exploiting nuclear engineering technology through our very own, home-grown expertise.

Now this view may have had a basis in truth back in the 1970’s when Chalk River Laboratories truly was a center of nuclear research excellence that led to the development of the CANDU reactor. It’s also true that the first generation of CANDU reactors, located at Pickering and Bruce, were quite successful, with operating capacity factors well over 80% during their first 10-years of operation.

But this was back in the 1970s; fast forward to 2026 and, with all of these first generation CANDU reactors either refurbished or permanently shut down, we are left with a somewhat uncertain future for nuclear energy in Canada. Indeed, I believe we are now in an electrical energy crisis here in Ontario because our home-grown nuclear power stalwart – the CANDU reactor – has been in failure mode for at least the past 10 years.

This decline is due to the aging of Ontario’s fleet of 18 CANDU reactors: 6 at Pickering, 8 at Bruce and 4 at Darlington.  All Pickering and Bruce Units are now over 40 years old, and it is important to note that these nuclear reactors were designed and built using 1960’s technology, with 1960’s computers. Thus, it is impressive that Pickering B and Bruce B units lasted 40 years before requiring major refurbishments.

However, the performance of Darlington is another story because all four Darlington units required refurbishments after only about 30 years of operation, thereby creating a short-fall in Ontario’s nuclear energy production. This is clearly illustrated in Figure 1, below, which shows Ontario’s nuclear power output has declined from about 92 TWh in 2014, to a current value of about 75 TWh – a loss of about 20 % in Ontario’s electric power output in just 12 years. But to make matters worse, it is predicted that this decline will continue to about 60 TWh by 2030, before all existing CANDUs have been refurbished, and/or new reactors have been built and commissioned.

[Greening supplies graphs on this issue

 the percentage of Ontario’s electricity derived from natural gas has increased substantially from about 10% in 2015 to 30% in 2026. Furthermore, extrapolation of these data points predicts that natural gas as a source of electricity for Ontario will exceed nuclear generated electricity production by 2028.

It is indeed ironic that “Climate-Change Carney” recently, (Canada Day!), declared:]

“We can’t afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix – natural gas – to meet a short-term goal. I want to be clear on this point. The changes we have made will mean that our GHG emissions will be higher in the next few years than were projected under the previous (Liberal!) government’s plan”.

What Carney fails to acknowledge, however, is that when it comes to Ontario’s electrical energy short-fall, nuclear power is not the solution; it’s the problem! If Ontario’s CANDU reactors were performing up to expectations, there would be no need for OPG to rely on natural gas combustion,

, with the associated annual release of tens of Megatonnes of CO2, as a viable alternative.  And Carney et al’s blind faith in Canada’s alleged nuclear prowess, as exemplified by the CANDU reactor, is in reality a myth that is not supported by fact!

By way of proof of Canada’s less than excellence in its CANDU reactor’s performance, consider lifetime capacity factor data, (derived from the IAEA PRIS website), for seventeen countries with extensive nuclear power programs. Sad to say, Canada has the lowest lifetime capacity factor, a miserable 68.2%, compared to any other country on the list.

July 4, 2026 Posted by | Canada, politics | Leave a comment

Canada’s Nuclear Energy Strategy a “Cash Cow” for the Nuclear Industry.

Gordon Edwards, 30 June 2026

Ottawa – Critics from civil society organizations and academia are calling out the Nuclear Energy Strategy for Canada released by the Federal Government as a cash cow for the nuclear industry and a hubris-driven attempt to grab world “energy superpower” status based on past-Century technology.

The Strategy, released on June 22, is an ambitious agenda to spend public funds on new nuclear reactors to the detriment of readily available clean renewable sources, and to short-circuit independent oversight of nuclear projects.

The document reads like a wish list of nuclear developments, including the goal of 10 new large reactor projects in Canada by 2040. It parallels a US announcement made the next day, also promising 10 new large reactor projects and standing to benefit some of the same corporations.

Critics are calling the Canadian strategy a gross economic mistake, dangerous for human health and security, and a diversion from urgently needed action on safer, faster and cheaper energy alternatives. The federal initiative would seriously delay or derail an urgently needed energy transition, buying time for the fossil fuel sector and funneling billions of tax dollars to well-connected nuclear industry players.


“While the world moves urgently to clean renewables and storage to meet electricity needs, Canada is diverting major resources to dirty, dangerous and absurdly expensive Cold War era technology which will burden future generations,” commented J. P. Unger, director with the Greenspace Alliance of Canada’s Capital.

“The strategy reads like a public relations fantasy rather than the cost data and financial risks analysis that would attract private investment” said Dr. Susan O’Donnell, Sustainability and Environmental Studies Program, St. Thomas University.


“Lost is the memory of massive cost overruns and extensive delays that plagued the construction of the current fleet of reactors in the 1970s and ‘80s. Those decisions led to the demise of “Ontario Hydro” – death by drowning (in debt),” said Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

“Gone is the “sticker shock” that caused Ontario to cancel the last push for a nuclear “renaissance” in the early 2000s. Forgotten are the financial realities of previous international sales, where Canada swallowed huge losses (Argentina) or accepted goods like strawberries rather than actual money (Romania) in exchange for the CANDU reactors they were peddling overseas”.


The document also promises to “streamline” the regulation of nuclear projects by removing independent oversight and speeding up approvals. This presents a huge public risk when dealing with inherently dangerous technology like nuclear power.

The government is also promoting the export of home-grown CANDU reactors, something that will facilitate the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as happened when Canada gifted reactor technology to India, sparking an arms race in South Asia.

“Putting all our eggs in the nuclear exports basket completely ignores the risk of a major nuclear accident anywhere in the world, which history has shown will immediately tank enthusiasm for this technology,” said Anne Lindsey, an organizer with the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition’s No-Nukes campaign
The pressing issue of nuclear waste is sandwich

“This strategy is not fooling anyone who is serious about the energy transition. Private money is pouring into wind, solar and energy storage developments, not nuclear energy – by far the most expensive way to generate electricity.”


“Lost is the memory of massive cost overruns and extensive delays that plagued the construction of the current fleet of reactors in the 1970s and ‘80s. Those decisions led to the demise of “Ontario Hydro” – death by drowning (in debt),” said Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

“Gone is the “sticker shock” that caused Ontario to cancel the last push for a nuclear “renaissance” in the early 2000s. Forgotten are the financial realities of previous international sales, where Canada swallowed huge losses (Argentina) or accepted goods like strawberries rather than actual money (Romania) in exchange for the CANDU reactors they were peddling overseas”.

The document also promises to “streamline” the regulation of nuclear projects by removing independent oversight and speeding up approvals. This presents a huge public risk when dealing with inherently dangerous technology like nuclear power.

The government is also promoting the export of home-grown CANDU reactors, something that will facilitate the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as happened when Canada gifted reactor technology to India, sparking an arms race in South Asia.

“Putting all our eggs in the nuclear exports basket completely ignores the risk of a major nuclear accident anywhere in the world, which history has shown will immediately tank enthusiasm for this technology,” said Anne Lindsey, an organizer with the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition’s No-Nukes campaign

The pressing issue of nuclear waste is sandwiched into the section of the strategy on massive expansion of uranium production, with false claims and reassurances that the problem has been solved by handing the long-term management of nuclear waste over to the nuclear industry. A deep geological repository for high-level waste proposed for northwestern Ontario is taken as if already established despite major questions and opposition, including legal challenges.


Two days after the Nuclear Strategy was released the federal government announced that the Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s proposed Deep Geological Repository was being considered for listing as a “Project of National Interest” under the Build Canada Act, meaning that its approval would be guaranteed.

“Designating NWMO’s DGR project as a Project of National Interest would be a betrayal of public trust”, commented Brennain Lloyd with the northern Ontario based environmental coalition Northwatch.


“The project is unprecedented, it’s still at a conceptual stage of development, the transportation will impact millions along the route, and the waste is lethal virtually forever. That project approval could be a foregone conclusion – despite the lack of evidence that the project can be done safety – is absolutely beyond reason”.

The nuclear strategy followed the discussion paper Getting Major Projects Built in Canada and the National Strategy for an Electrified Canadian Economy, both released in early May. The discussion paper announces plans to gut the impact assessment process for nuclear projects, while the electricity strategy promotes nuclear power ahead of lower cost options such as renewable energy and energy efficiency which could be brought online much more quickly.

Unlike the discussion paper and the electricity strategy, there is no public comment period on the Nuclear Energy Strategy for Canada.

July 3, 2026 Posted by | Canada, politics | Leave a comment

UK: Inside Labour Together’s secret war against Jeremy Corbyn

Documents disclosed to Corbyn expose covert efforts by Starmer’s former chief of staff to combat the British left

DECLASSIFIED UK, PAUL HOLDEN, Jessica Murray and JOHN McEVOY, 24 June 2026

  • Labour Together monitored views on antisemitism in Labour while stoking that crisis
  • Media outlet The Canary was targeted amid concerns it was trusted among Labour members 
  • John McDonnell says new information about Labour Together “makes a call for a public inquiry overwhelming”

Newly released documents reveal the inner workings of Labour Together and its role in covertly undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party.

The documents were disclosed to Corbyn in response to a subject access request. They contain emails from Labour Together’s two key figures Morgan McSweeney and Josh Simons.

McSweeney went on to be Keir Starmer’s chief of staff while Simons became a cabinet minister until he resigned following revelations that he had hired a reputation management firm to “proactively undermine” journalistic investigations into Labour Together, McSweeney and Sir Keir Starmer. 

Simons subsequently vacated his Makerfield constituency seat for Andy Burnham.

Internal documents detail how Labour Together under McSweeney’s watch (2017-20) conducted polling of the Labour membership to monitor its views on the incidence of antisemitism in the party.

This polling allowed McSweeney and his allies to track responses to the antisemitism narrative that they were simultaneously helping to sustain by placing arguably alarmist stories in the media.

The documents further detail how The Canary media outlet was highly trusted among Labour members and identified as a political challenge because it defended Corbyn amid antisemitism accusations.

The Canary was subsequently targeted by the McSweeney-linked Stop Funding Fake News campaign with an advertiser boycott, which helped to diminish its revenue.

Weaponising antisemitism

McSweeney quietly inflamed the “antisemitism crisis” that would dog Corbyn’s leadership from at least 2018.

He did so by seeding and placing stories into the press that helped to build the narrative that Corbyn’s Labour had become riddled with antisemitism and that this flowed inexorably from a resurgent left-wing anti-imperialism. 

At the same time, the new documents show, Labour Together was paying YouGov to repeatedly poll Labour members on whether they agreed with the framing of the party as a hotbed of antisemitism.

The goal was apparently to gain a detailed guide to the opinions of the party’s membership as McSweeney sought to detach it from Corbyn’s leadership.

Although the precise cost is unknown, polling of this kind was likely to be expensive. 

It was also at this time that Labour Together unlawfully failed to declare most of its donations, amounting to over £700,000, with key funders of the organisation including hedge fund manager Martin Taylor and pro-Israel lobbyist Trevor Chinn.

‘Deliberately exaggerated’…………………………………………………..

‘Dreadful performance’…………………………………………………..

The Canary……………………………….

Stop Funding Fake News

When read against other emails and Labour Together’s polling, the briefing note points to concerns about how The Canary was undermining the antisemitism narrative that McSweeney and his allies were covertly helping to inflame in this period.

In March 2019, McSweeney and his ally Imran Ahmed would launch the Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) campaign, which sought to demonetise The Canary by pressuring companies to withdraw advertising from its website. 

While being led by factional Labour insiders, the SFFN campaign presented itself as a project run by committed grassroots activists who were concerned with the proliferation of “fake news”.

Interestingly, the internal briefing note, which appears to have been a precursor to the SFFN campaign, made no mention of the accuracy of The Canary’s reporting.

The emphasis was on its political influence, strongly suggesting the subsequent campaign was initiated in response to The Canary’s challenge to the political ambitions of Labour Together, onto which claims of “disinformation” were grafted.

Indeed, McSweeney reportedly told Labour Together colleagues: “Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us”.

That campaign, alongside changes to social media algorithms, played a powerful role in circumscribing the impact and reach of The Canary by late 2019. 

By then, Labour Together’s plan to install Sir Keir Starmer as the leader of the Labour Party was well-advanced.

McSweeney and Labour Together’s fixation on polling would carry over the organisation while led by Josh Simons (2022 – 2024).

These intense polling efforts apparently also helped the organisation to create caricatures of target voters for the Labour party which were at once crude, bizarre, and insulting.

A version of the “Workington Man” curated by Labour Together was 62 years old, white, “absolutely despised Jeremy Corbyn”, “hates Europe and European culture”, drives an “Audi A4”, and “thinks South Asians who live nearby are terrible drivers”…………………………………………..

Labour Together is now called ThinkLabour. Think Labour, Josh Simons, Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney were asked to comment.


Paul Holden is a journalist for Shadow World Investigations and author of the book The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy. Between 2020 and 2021, Holden worked directly with the Zondo Commission to assist its investigations into complex money laundering schemes used to hide and dissipate state capture loot in South Africa. https://www.declassifieduk.org/inside-labour-togethers-secret-battle-against-jeremy-corbyn/

July 3, 2026 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Jeffrey Sachs: The Greater Israel Project is Collapsing

 June 27, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/27/jeffrey-sachs-the-greater-israel-project-is-collapsing/

For further reading, the interview references the article “Stop ‘Greater Israel’ to Make Peace”: In which Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares argue that the ideology of “Greater Israel” has become the driving force behind decades of conflict across the Middle East, describing it as an expansionist doctrine that continues to fuel war rather than security.

Sachs and Fares argue that lasting peace in the Middle East requires rejecting the ideology of “Greater Israel,” which they contend has driven decades of conflict in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and, most recently, Iran. The authors claim that Israeli expansionism—backed by both secular nationalists and religious extremists, and enabled by unwavering U.S. political support—has repeatedly fueled wars that have devastated the region while ultimately undermining Israel’s own security and international standing. They maintain that the recent U.S.-Iran ceasefire demonstrates diplomacy is more effective than military force and argue that a durable peace depends on ending the war in Gaza, halting Israeli occupation and expansion, withdrawing from neighboring territories, and establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel within the 1967 borders.

The authors highlight what they characterize as increasingly hardline rhetoric among Israel’s leadership, writing that the ideology is rooted in “secular hardliners like Netanyahu who say that Israel must control all the land from the river to the sea to be safe, and damn the eight million Palestinians in the way.” They also point to statements by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has declared there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” and vowed that Israel “won’t commit suicide to make them happy” by relinquishing military control of the West Bank, Gaza, or occupied territory in Lebanon and Syria. Sachs and Fares contend that these views help explain continued military action despite diplomatic breakthroughs, arguing that “Greater Israel” advocates view peace itself as a setback. As evidence, they note that “even after the deal was sealed, Israel has continued to bomb Lebanon,” arguing that the ideology remains a major obstacle to a lasting regional peace.

Click the Image Below [on original]to Read the Full Article

July 3, 2026 Posted by | Israel, politics | Leave a comment

Poll shows many Danes worried about planned nuclear reactors at Barsebäck, near Copenhagen

 Mon 29 Jun 2026 , https://swedenherald.com/article/poll-finds-many-danes-worried-about-new-nuclear-plant-plans-near-copenhagen

Plans to build new nuclear reactors at Barsebäck worry many Danes, according to an opinion poll conducted on behalf of the Ritzau news agency.

39.5 percent say they agree or completely agree when asked whether they are concerned about plans to locate reactors just over 20 kilometres from Copenhagen, according to a survey conducted by the Voxmeter institute. Almost as many, over 38 percent, believe the reactors should not be built.

Just over 1,000 people responded to the survey.

Earlier in June, Nordic Baseload Power submitted an application to the government for state aid to build two full-scale boiling water reactors of the BWR-N type at Barsebäck. However, Uniper, which owns Barsebäck, has stated that it does not plan to provide any land for the company’s plans.

July 2, 2026 Posted by | EUROPE, public opinion | Leave a comment

Friends of the Earth Adelaide has made a submission to the AUKUS Public Inquiry.

Philip White, June 29 2026

FoE Adelaide’s submission added perspectives related to national security, safety, employment and radioactive waste. Click here to read the full submission.

Based on decades of experience regarding nuclear waste management issues and debates in Australia, our submission focused on those problems insofar as they relate to AUKUS.

By rights, the parliament should conduct a genuine public review of the AUKUS program, given that it commits Australian taxpayers to spending hundreds of billions of dollars for decades to come with dubious benefit to our security in return. 

In the absence of an official inquiry, we are hopeful that this independent inquiry will shine a light on the many issues that should have been considered before the government committed Australia to AUKUS.

The first hearing, held in Melbourne on 11 June, received many high-quality presentations. Most of the points that we would make were covered in that hearing. In particular, we endorse the comments made by the expert witnesses: Gareth Evans,

Tilman Ruff, Richard Tanter, John Lander, Joseph Camilleri, Rod Campbell and Dave Sweeney. Their critiques of the flaws in AUKUS align with ours, including in regard to the following:

• sacrifice of Australian sovereignty,

• negative impact on national security,

• opportunity cost,

• questionable industrial and employment benefits,

• safety risks and environmental cost,

• challenge of managing and disposing of radioactive waste, including foreign-sourced waste,

• negative impact on First Nations people,

• nuclear proliferation and safeguards implications of military reactors powered by highly enriched uranium fuel,

• implications for our obligations under the Treaty of Rarotonga of ‘rotation’ through Australian bases of nuclear weapon-capable vessels and aircraft, and

• the uncertainty that nuclear-powered submarines will even be delivered.

FoE Adelaide’s submission added perspectives related to national security, safety, employment and radioactive waste. Click here to read the full submission.

July 1, 2026 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, politics | Leave a comment

In Historic First, Congress Passes Concurrent War Powers Resolution To End Iran War

The bill passed the Senate in a vote of 50-48 after it was advanced by the House

by Dave DeCamp | June 23, 2026, https://news.antiwar.com/2026/06/23/in-historic-first-congress-passes-concurrent-war-powers-resolution-to-end-iran-war/

The Senate on Tuesday approved a House-passed concurrent War Powers Resolution directing President Trump to end hostilities against Iran, marking the first time Congress has approved a concurrent resolution under the 1973 War Powers Act directing the termination of an unauthorized war.

In previous years, Congress has passed joint resolutions directing the president to end wars, such as the 2019 bill to end US support for the Saudi war in Yemen, which President Trump vetoed at the time, but a concurrent resolution doesn’t require the president’s signature.

Section 5(c) of the 1973 War Powers Act states that “at any time that United States Armed Forces are engaged in hostilities outside the territory of the United States, its possessions and territories without a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization, such forces shall be removed by the President if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution.”

The bill passed the Senate on Tuesday by a 50-48 vote, with four Republicans — Senators Rand Paul (KY), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Susan Collins (ME), and Bill Cassidy (LA) — voting in favor. Senator Jon Fetterman (PA) was the only Democrat to oppose the effort, and Republican Senators Mitch McConnell (KY) and Dave McCormick (PA) were not present for the vote.

Trump administration officials will likely claim that the vote is meaningless since there is currently a ceasefire between the US and Iran as they negotiate a deal under the Memorandum of Understanding, but proponents of the War Powers effort say the passage of the concurrent resolution means the administration is now legally bound not to restart the war without congressional authorization.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who sponsored the legislation in the House, told The Lever earlier this month that if the resolution passed the Senate, he would work with “House counsel to urge leadership to bring a court case to enforce the Iran War Powers Resolution.”

While the US and Iran have been engaged in negotiations, President Trump has continued issuing threats against Iran and has maintained forces in the region to potentially re-impose the blockade or restart the bombing campaign.

June 30, 2026 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

The NDAA Proposed Merger of the U.S. and Israeli Military is Strategically Unwise and Inherently Unconstitutional

Section 219 creates a framework for permanent military integration that weakens American sovereignty, blurs constitutional accountability, and places the nation’s independent decision making at risk.

Dennis Kucinich and Elizabeth Kucinich, June 26, 2026

This article is Part 2 in a three part series on the proposed merger of U.S and Israeli intelligence, military and biotechnology. Read Part 1 here

Prior to the American Revolution being fought on battlefields, it was fought as an argument about sovereignty.

Who decides the fate of a nation? Who commands its armies? Who determines when its citizens go to war and when they remain at peace?

The Founders answered those questions with remarkable clarity. In a republic, sovereignty belongs to the people and is exercised through constitutional institutions accountable to them. Section 219 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2027 threatens to undermine the foundational principles of our republic and our constitutional democracy.

Advocates for Section 219 describe it as a strategic partnership, a modernization of military cooperation between the United States and Israel. Yet the language of the provision reaches far beyond cooperation. It calls for the integration of military planning, intelligence sharing, technological development, procurement systems, research capabilities, and strategic operations in ways that blur the distinction between two sovereign nations.

This is not merely a policy question, it is a constitutional one.

America has alliances with many nations. We cooperate with allies. We conduct joint exercises. We share intelligence. However, there is a profound difference between cooperation and integration.

Cooperation preserves independent decision making.

Integration creates pressure toward shared decision making and shared consequences.

The Constitution was deliberately designed to prevent precisely this type of entanglement.

The President serves as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States. Congress possesses the authority to declare war. Together these provisions were meant to ensure that decisions involving American lives, American treasure, and American military power remain accountable to the American people.

Section 219 moves the nation in the opposite direction. It creates permanent structures through which military, intelligence, technological, and strategic functions become increasingly intertwined with those of another government. Even if no formal transfer of command occurs, the practical effect is to make American decision making dependent upon relationships and commitments that exist far beyond the reach of American voters.

There are at least nine reasons why Congress should reject Section 219 of the NDAA:.

  1. IT VIOLATES THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF CLAUSE

Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution designates the President as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.

Congress cannot constitutionally dilute, share, or transfer command responsibilities through ordinary legislation. The armed forces of the United States must remain exclusively accountable to constitutional authority established by the American people.

  1. IT BYPASSES THE TREATY PROCESS

The Constitution provides a mechanism for creating major international commitments: treaties ratified by two thirds of the Senate.

If Congress believes permanent military integration with any foreign nation is necessary, it should present that proposal openly and subject it to the scrutiny required by the Constitution.

Congress cannot use a spending bill to accomplish what the Constitution requires to be debated and approved through the treaty process.

  1. IT CREATES PROBLEMS OF AUTHORITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Foreign officials do not swear an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States.

Yet military integration creates circumstances in which foreign officers, planners, intelligence officials, and strategic personnel may influence decisions affecting American troops, intelligence assets, military technologies, operational planning and decisions to use military force.

The Framers established safeguards to ensure that authority over American military power remained accountable to American institutions and American voters.

Section 219 weakens those safeguards.

  1. IT VIOLATES THE PRINCIPLE OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

Congress cannot delegate core sovereign responsibilities to another government.

The defense of the nation, decisions involving military force, intelligence operations, and national security policy are among the most important powers entrusted to the federal government.

A nation that cannot independently determine matters of war and peace cannot truly be considered sovereign.

  1. IT INCREASES THE RISK OF FUTURE WARS

The Founders understood the danger.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned against permanent foreign attachments that could pull the United States into conflicts not of its own choosing. His concern was not isolationism. It was independence.

Our first president understood that foreign entanglements have a way of creating obligations that gradually supersede national interests.

That warning has particular relevance today.

The recent escalation with Iran demonstrates how rapidly regional conflicts can draw the United States toward broader military commitments. Every new layer of institutional integration increases the likelihood that future conflicts involving Israel become, in practical terms, American conflicts as well.

  1. IT RISKS SUBORDINATING AMERICAN INTERESTS TO FOREIGN PRIORITIES

The issue is not whether one supports Israel.

The issue is whether any foreign nation should be granted a permanent place within executive, military, intelligence, technological, and strategic structures that are constitutionally intended to serve the United States alone.

The first responsibility of the United States government is to protect the security and wellbeing of the American people. Foreign policy should be guided by American interests, American laws, and American constitutional principles.

  1. IT THREATENS DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY

When sovereignty is diluted, accountability disappears.

Citizens can no longer identify who is responsible for decisions. Power becomes dispersed through networks, agreements, and institutions beyond public control.

Democracy weakens because the connection between the voter and the decision maker is broken.

The Constitution deliberately places decisions involving war and national defense within institutions accountable to the American people. Section 219 weakens that connection.

  1. IT IMPOSES ENORMOUS FINANCIAL COSTS

The United States has spent decades engaged in costly military interventions throughout the Middle East.

Trillions of dollars have been spent. Thousands of American lives have been lost. Countless civilians have perished. Yet the pressure for deeper involvement continues.

This is especially troubling at a moment when the national debt exceeds forty trillion dollars. Every additional military commitment carries a financial cost. Every escalation requires resources that must ultimately be borrowed, taxed, or diverted from domestic priorities.

Americans struggling with inflation, housing costs, healthcare expenses, and declining infrastructure deserve a government focused first on their security and prosperity.

  1. IT BETRAYS THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

The timing could not be more ironic.

As America marks the 250th anniversary of its independence, Congress is considering legislation that undermines our independence.

The Revolution was fought to secure self government. The Constitution was written to preserve it.

Sovereignty is not an outdated concept. It is the foundation of democratic accountability.

The question before us is larger than Israel. Larger than any single administration. Larger than any current conflict.

It is whether the United States will remain a nation whose military power is directed exclusively by constitutional institutions accountable to the American people, or whether we will gradually surrender that independence through permanent foreign integration that the Constitution neither contemplated nor authorizes.

A nation that cannot control its own military decisions cannot claim to be sovereign – and that is a core reason why Section 219 should be rejected.

TAKE ACTION………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/26/the-ndaa-proposed-merger-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-military-is-strategically-unwise-and-inherently-unconstitutional/

June 30, 2026 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Sweden has agreed first financing package for new nuclear reactors, PM says

By Reuters, June 25, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-has-agreed-first-financing-package-new-nuclear-reactors-pm-says-2026-06-25/

STOCKHOLM, June 25 (Reuters) – Sweden’s government has agreed on ​the details of a first financing package to ‌build new nuclear power reactors with developer Videberg Kraft, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on ​Thursday.

“The state will also go in ​as an owner in this project,” Kristersson ⁠told reporters.

Kristersson gave no details of ​the financing package, which has to be ​approved by the European Commission.

The government said in a statement it will take a 60% stake in Videberg Kraft, ​currently 80% owned by state utility Vattenfall ​and 20% by a consortium of industrial companies. Vattenfall’s ‌stake ⁠will drop to 20%, the government added.

Sweden’s parliament last year passed legislation to finance a new generation of reactors, the first built ​in Sweden ​for more ⁠than 40 years and which the government says is necessary ​for energy security and achieving net ​zero ⁠emissions by 2045.

Earlier this month, Vattenfall selected Rolls-Royce SMR (RR.L), opens new tab to supply small modular nuclear reactors, choosing ⁠the ​British company over U.S. ​rival GE Vernova (GEV.N), opens new tab, in a deal worth several billion ​pounds.

Reporting by Simon Johnson, editing by Louise Rasmussen

June 30, 2026 Posted by | business and costs, politics, Sweden | Leave a comment

Should the State of Israel be defascistized?


Thierry Meyssan, Voltairenet.org, Tue, 23 Jun 2026, https://www.sott.net/article/507084-Should-the-State-of-Israel-be-defascistized

We are becoming aware, often belatedly, of the crimes committed by the Benjamin Netanyahu government against civilians in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. No other government in the world considers the elimination of those who resist it to justify all collateral damage, regardless of the number.

We must also realize that this way of thinking did not arise from nowhere; it has a long and abhorrent history.

We must take responsibility and intervene before this government begins to attack its own citizens. Not because they are more valuable than Arabs and Persians, but because they are the same: they are human beings too.

International public opinion has shifted significantly regarding Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. It is now clear to a majority that he is not seeking peace, but is attempting to annihilate the population of southern Lebanon, as he tried to do with that of Gaza.

This only became clear when he opposed the US peace plan with Iran, because, for the first time, his main ally showed that another way was possible.

We have been explaining since the Likud/Kahanist coalition came to power [ 1 ] , that the current Israeli government was pursuing the “revisionist Zionist” project of Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky [ 2 ] .

Although we have repeatedly emphasized that the “revisionist Zionist” project of a “Jewish Empire” has no connection whatsoever with Theodor Herzl’s “Zionism”, some readers have dismissed our arguments, believing they mask an antisemitic bias. Besides being insulting, this ignores our work in promoting equality for all.

We therefore recall a long-hidden truth:

The revisionist Zionists were allies of the Duce Benito Mussolini and they negotiated with associates of the Führer Adolf Hitler throughout the Second World War and even beyond. They organized, with the SS Adolf Eichmann, the deportation of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz [ 3 ] .

Confusion arose after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023. A debate ensued regarding whether the Israeli response should be classified as genocide. Some argued that, firstly, the Israeli army clearly did not seek to kill targets based on their ethnicity, and secondly, that there were no government orders to that effect.

However, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were implementing the “Dahiyah Directive,” drafted by the highly respected General Gadi Eizenkot in October 2008 [ 4 ] . Speaking about the suburbs of Beirut and South Lebanon, he told Yediot Aharonot:

“We will apply disproportionate force to the villages and cause extensive damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are not civilian villages; they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. It is a plan. And it has been approved.”

This plan was first implemented in Gaza over the past three years and in Lebanon in recent months. These are war crimes publicly claimed by a Jewish Arab military officer who served as Chief of Staff of the IDF from 2015 to 2019 and who became a minister without portfolio, joining the war cabinet, on October 11, 2023.

These war crimes are aimed at crushing the popular resistance of Gazans and Lebanese. To conflate resistance fighters with the civilian populationis to claim that all Gazans and all southern Lebanese will be annihilated. This undoubtedly constitutes genocide.

It was up to the International Court of Justice (the internal tribunal of the United Nations) to decide. This is what South Africa, already a victim of revisionist Zionists during the apartheid era, attempted to obtain as early as December 29, 2023. Unfortunately, the majority of the Court initially opposed it under the influence of its president, the Lebanese Nawaf Salam. He owes his family fortune to his grandfather’s purchase of Palestinian bourgeois land on behalf of Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild. Following Salam’s intervention, he was appointed Prime Minister of Lebanon… where he must now confront the very same situation he failed to resolve in Gaza.

The question now is: “Should we defascize the State of Israel?” as Germany was supposedly denazified. Everyone, in fact, must be aware that Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies intend to profoundly transform the State of Israel, which they have already defined as “the Jewish State,” and which they have said they want to make, no longer an “Athens,” but a “Super-Sparta” [ 5 ] .

This question is likely to be vital: to date, Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition has practiced torture, war crimes, and genocide, but it has never taken the lives of its opponents. Yet this is the next step in its seizure of power and the achievement of its goals. It has not done so out of humanity, but for one reason only:to maintain the unity of the Israeli people in order to use their image to mask its crimes.

We must all understand, Israelis and non-Israelis, Jews and non-Jews, that the “revisionist Zionists” are enemies of humankind.They had no qualms about murdering pro-Soviet Ukrainian Jews in 1921-1923 [ 6 ] , and then the wealthiest Hungarian Jews in 1942-1945.

They will have no more restraint tomorrow in killing those who resist them, regardless of who they are. We must look at the facts clearly and stop them.

References:
[ 1 ] ” The Straussian coup in Israel “, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , March 7, 2023.
[ 2 ] ” The veil is torn away: the hidden truths of Jabotinsky and Netanyahu “, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , January 23, 2024.
[ 3 ] מדוע חוסל קסטנר (Why was Kastner murdered?). Nadav Kaplan, Steimatzky (2024).
[ 4 ] ” Israel warns Hezbollah war would invite destruction “, Reuters, October 3, 2008.
[ 5 ] ” Netanyahu and Nazism “, ” After “Greater Israel”, Netanyahu pleads for a “Super-Sparta” and “finish the job in Gaza” “, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, September 23 and 30, 2025.
[ 6 ] ” Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists? “, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , November 15, 2022.


Thierry MeyssanPolitical consultant, President-founder of the Réseau Voltaire (Voltaire Network).Latest work in English – Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump, Progressive Press, 2019.

June 29, 2026 Posted by | Israel, politics | Leave a comment

Canada – Federal Initiative to Fast-Track Approvals for Deep Geological Repository a Betrayal of Public Trust

June 24, 2026, We the Nuclear Free North
Borups Corners – We the Nuclear Free North vehemently opposes the Canadian government’s initiative, announced today, to potentially designate the Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s (NWMO’s) Deep Geological Repository (DGR) as a Project of National Interest under the Building Canada Act. Such a designation would mean guaranteed approval of the DGR, despite any lack of evidence to support the safety of the project.

In its media release today, the federal government defined the implications for the DGR project and other projects that were named:

“Listing these projects under the Act would streamline and consolidate key federal permits and authorizations, subject to a document outlining the conditions under which the project may proceed.”

“If the federal government does designate the NWMO’s DGR project as a Project of National Interest, it is very likely that the full Impact Assessment of the Project, currently underway, would be discontinued,” said Brennain Lloyd, project coordinator with Northwatch.

“At best, the remaining vestiges of environmental assessment and licencing would be simply adding details to a done deal. Project approval would be a foregone conclusion.”

Today’s announcement stated that national interest listing of a project would include
“shifting Canada’s regulatory focus from ‘whether’ the project should proceed to ‘how’ it will proceed.”

“In its ‘Getting Major Projects Built in Canada’ framework, the government had proposed that nuclear projects in the Impact Assessment’s Planning Stage, such as the DGR project, be vetted by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) instead.”

“Canadians have well-founded doubts about the CNSC’s objectivity and its strong ties to the nuclear industry,” continued Lloyd. “When it comes to the integrity of the CNSC’s potential safety assessment process, the faith of Canadians just isn’t there. CNSC has never denied a licence to a nuclear project.”

We the Nuclear Free North volunteer Wendy O’Connor said, “As we continue our strong opposition to this project, it is jarring that the federal government would propose a measure that could discontinue the Impact Assessment process. Concerned Canadians have already sent more than a thousand comments to the Impact Assessment’s Registry – most of them expressing concerns with or opposition to the DGR project. We have been relying on the Impact Assessment Agency’s full assessment process to stringently vet the project’s social and environmental safety. I want to stress that the decision on this has yet to be made by our federal government. We are watching for promised input opportunities regarding this proposed change. Canadians have a right to a thorough and responsible assessment process.

We the Nuclear Free North also noted that in the case of the two other projects named in the announcement – the Mackenzie Valley Highway and the Grays Bay Road and Port projects – the federal government committed that the project moving forward would be “contingent on both projects successfully completing treaty-based impact assessment and regulatory processes”. No such statement was made with respect to the proposed deep geological repository in Treaty 3 territory. Grand Council Treaty #3 Chiefs in Assembly passed a unanimous resolution opposing the project in October 2024, just weeks before the site selection was announced, and Wabigoon Lake Ojbway Nation, whom the Nuclear Waste Management Organization refers to as a “host” for the project, responded to the site selection by announcing that they would be holding their own sovereign Regulatory Assessment and Approvals Process. There is no acknowledgment of the treaty rights or respect for a treaty-based impact assessment for the deep geological repository project in today’s announcement.

We the Nuclear Free North continues to strongly oppose the NWMO’s proposed DGR project in northwestern Ontario and is requesting meetings with Ministers and Members of Parliament in response to today’s announcement. The organization will monitor federal government announcements regarding actions under the Building Canada Act, including public input opportunities, and share those engagement opportunities with the public.

June 28, 2026 Posted by | Canada, politics | Leave a comment

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