Is Zelensky still the most reckless, dangerous leader in the world?
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL , 24 Jan 26
Every day Ukraine sinks deeper into shattered rump state status. Every day brings more death, lost territory and degraded living conditions with no hope of prevailing against Russia.
Yet, instead of settling on Russia’s terms to end the war, end more casualties, end more lost land, Ukraine President Zelensky keeps shuttling between Europe and the US begging for weaponry to take the war deep into Russia.
The US has already bailed on investing in Ukraine’s lost cause. Europe is edging closer to bailing as well even as they continue the lie that a Ukraine victory is critical to keeping Russia from marching westward into NATO countries. They know the war is lost but cannot publicly admit that truth. In addition, without the US, they don’t have sufficient military resources to have any meaningful impact on the outcome.
Near four years into Ukraine’s demise, Zelensky may simply be delusional that Ukraine can prevail in expelling Russia from lost territories. It’s more likely he’s simply taking orders from his ultra-nationalist Kyiv handlers to keep demanding weaponry to continue Ukraine’s lost cause.
Zelensky’s recklessness was epitomized by his refusal to conclude the Istanbul Agreement with Russia in April 2022 that would have ended the 2 month conflict with a minimum of casualties, no lost territory and economy intact. All Zelensky had to do was give up NATO membership, guarantee Ukraine neutrality between Europe and Russia, and grant regional autonomy to the Russian cultured Ukrainians in Donbas being brutalized by Kyiv for 8 long years.
But instead of statesmanship, Zelensky chose recklessness, acquiescing in US, UK demands to keep the war going till Russia was defeated with US, NATO weaponry. But even with over $200 billion in such aid, Ukraine is nearing collapse, running out of soldiers that its western backers will never replace. $200 billion yes, but not one drop of western blood.
Zelensky’s recklessness in destroying Ukraine is exceeded by his dangerousness, putting the world at risk of nuclear war every day now for nearly 4 years. Every NATO bomb, tank, missile, gun given to Zelensky to attack Russia continues the threat of nuclear war between Russia and NATO. This was most irresponsibly demonstrated in 2022 when an errant Ukraine missile landed in Poland killing two Polish citizens. Zelensky immediately claimed it was a Russian missile which could have triggered a direct Article 5 NATO response against Russia. Tho the US quickly refuted Zelensky’s false claim, Zelensky has never wavered from demanding long range NATO weapons to attack deep into Russia, a prescription for all out NATO, Russia war that could go nuclear.
Continuing Ukraine’s inevitable collapse while keeping the whole world hostage to the possibility of nuclear war makes Volodymyr Zelensky the most reckless and dangerous leader in the world.
The Gratuitous Barbarity of Trump’s So-Called ‘Board of Peace’
Like Bush and Blair planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump is planning to systematically violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and especially the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees protection for civilians in war zones or under military occupation.
It is perhaps no wonder that Trump and Blair see eye to eye on Palestine, as they share the same ignorance, egotism and inhumanity, and the same disdain for international law.
In the fantasy being pushed by Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Jared Kushner, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.
Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, Jan 23, 2026, Common Dreams
At the opening ceremony for Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace in Davos, Jared Kushner unveiled glossy images of his vision for a “new Gaza”: shining apartment towers, luxury developments, and sweeping views of the Mediterranean. There were no Palestinians at the ceremony—and none on the Board of Peace itself. In Kushner’s fantasy, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.
But how, exactly, are Palestinians to be “demilitarized” and pacified to make way for this Riviera of the Middle East? The assassination of Gaza’s Khan Younis police chief in a drive-by shooting this January offers a chilling clue. It was not an isolated act of lawlessness, but an ominous signal of what lies ahead. As Israeli-backed Palestinian militias openly take credit for targeted killings, the United States is reviving a familiar, deadly—and thoroughly discredited—playbook from Iraq and Afghanistan, in which death squads, night raids, and “kill or capture” missions are cynically repackaged as stabilization and peace.
Gaza is now being positioned as the next laboratory for this model, under the banner of Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan,” with consequences that history has already shown to be catastrophic.
That strategy was laid bare on January 12th, 2026, when Lieutenant-Colonel Mahmoud al-Astal, the police chief of Khan Younis in Gaza, was assassinated by a death squad based in the Israeli-occupied part of Gaza beyond the “yellow line.” A militia leader known as Abu Safin immediately took credit for the killing, which he said was ordered by Shin Beit, Israel’s anti-Palestinian spy agency.
Another Israeli-backed militia, reputedly linked to ISIS, killed a well-known Gaza journalist, Saleh Al-Jafarawi, in October. That militia’s leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was disowned by his family for running a pro-Israel death squad and was killed on November 4th, reportedly by one of his own gang.
These Israeli-run death squad operations follow a similar pattern to the targeted killings of Iraqi civil society leaders as resistance grew to the hostile US military occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004. But as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, these targeted killings are likely to grow into a much more systematic and widespread use of death squads and military “kill or capture” night raids in the next phase of Trump’s “peace” plan.
President Trump has announced that the so-called “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) in Gaza will be under the command of US Major General Jasper Jeffers, who was, until recently, the head of US Special Operations Command. Jeffers is a veteran of “special operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US occupation responded to widespread armed resistance with death squad operations, thousands of airstrikes, and night raids by special operations forces that peaked at over a thousand night raids per month in Afghanistan by 2011.
But like Israel’s Palestinian death squads during the first stage of Trump’s “peace” plan, the US mass killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq began on a smaller scale.
For an article in the New Statesman, published on March 15, 2004, British journalist Stephen Grey investigated the assassination of Abdul-Latif al-Mayah, the director of the Baghdad Centre for Human Rights and the fourth professor from al-Mustansariya University to be killed. Professor al-Mayah was dragged out of his car on his way to work, shot 20 times and left dead in the street. A senior US military spokesman blamed his death on “the guerrillas,” and told Grey, “Silencing urban professionals… works against everything we’re trying to do here.”
On further investigation, Grey discovered that it was forces within the occupation government, not the resistance, that killed Professor Al-Mayah. An Iraqi police officer eventually told him, “Dr. Abdul-Latif was becoming more and more popular because he spoke for people on the street here… There are political parties in this city who are systematically killing people. They are politicians that are backed by the Americans and who arrived in Iraq from exile with a list of their enemies. I’ve seen these lists. They are killing people one by one.”
A few months later, retired Colonel James Steele, a veteran of the Phoenix program in Vietnam, the US war in El Salvador and the Iran-Contra scandal, arrived in Iraq to oversee the recruitment and training of new Special Police Commandos (SPC), who were then unleashed as death squads in Mosul, Baghdad and other cities, under command of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
Steven Casteel, who ran the Iraqi Interior Ministry after the US invasion, was the former intelligence chief for the US Drug Enforcement Agency in Latin America, where it worked with the Los Pepes death squad to hunt down and kill Pepe Escobar, the leader of the Medellin drug cartel.
In Iraq, Steele and Casteel both reported directly to US Ambassador John Negroponte, another veteran of US covert operations in Vietnam and Latin America.
Just as John Negroponte, James Steele and Steven Casteel brought the methods they learned and used in Vietnam and Latin America to Iraq, Jasper Jeffers brings his training and experience from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza, and will clearly bring other special operations and CIA officers with similar backgrounds into the leadership of the so-called International Stabilization Force (ISF).
The ISF, as described in Trump’s “Peace Plan,” is supposed to be an international force that would provide security, support a new Palestinian police force, and oversee the demilitarization and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip. But the Arab and Muslim countries that originally showed an interest in contributing forces to the ISF all changed their minds once they understood that this would not be a peacekeeping mission, but a force to hunt down and “disarm” Hamas and impose a new form of foreign occupation in Gaza.
Turkey wants to send troops, but so far, Israel has objected, and the other countries that have expressed interest, such as Indonesia, say there is no clear mandate or rules of engagement. And what Muslim country will send forces to Gaza while Israel controls over half of the territory and moves the “Yellow Line” even deeper into Gaza?
Even if some Arab and Muslim countries are persuaded to join the ISF, the most difficult and politically explosive job of actually destroying Hamas will most likely be in the hands of the US and Israeli Special Ops commanders, the mercenaries they bring in and the death squads they recruit.
We can expect to see General Jeffers and his team provide more training and direction to Palestinians already collaborating with Israel in death squad operations, and try to recruit more militia members from current and former Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank and from the Palestinian diaspora.
CIA and JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) officers with experience in death squad operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to oversee these operations from the shadows, using the same “disguised, quiet, media-free approach” that senior US military officers hailed as a success in Central America as they adapted it to the “war on terror” and the “war on drugs.”
For political reasons, Jeffers will probably use JSOC officers mainly for training and planning, and employ private military contractors to conduct night raids and other combat operations. Along with the huge expansion of US and allied special operations forces in recent US wars, there has been a proliferation of for-profit military contractors that employ former special operations officers from US and allied countries as unaccountable mercenaries.
These privatized forces have already been deployed in Gaza, notably by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its food distribution sites became death traps for desperate, hungry people forced to risk their lives just to try to feed their families. Israeli forces and mercenaries killed at least a thousand people at and around these sites.
The tens of thousands of Americans and others who took part in night raids in Iraq or Afghanistan and special operations in other US wars have created a huge pool of experienced assassins and shock troops that Jeffers can draw on, with for-profit military and “security” firms serving as cut-outs to shield decision-makers from accountability. More routine functions, such as manning checkpoints, can be delegated to other ISF forces, military police veterans and less specialized mercenaries.
The appointment of General Jeffers to command Trump’s ISF, and Israel’s formation and deployment of Palestinian death squads during the first phase of Trump’s phony peace plan, should be all the red flags the world needs to see what is coming—and to categorically reject Trump’s obscene plan before it goes any farther.
Like Bush and Blair planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump is planning to systematically violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and especially the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees protection for civilians in war zones or under military occupation.
Tony Blair’s role in Trump’s plan is further evidence that the plan has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with the Western imperialism that keeps rearing its ugly head around the world, and which has bedevilled Palestine for more than a century.
Appointing Blair to any role in governing Gaza ignores not only his role in US and British aggression against Iraq, but also his lead role in the U.K. and EU’s decision, in 2003, to abandon earlier efforts to bring Palestinian factions together in the interest of Palestinian unity. Instead, they adopted a militarized, “counterinsurgency” strategy toward Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups. Blair’s failed policy helped pave the way for Hamas’s election victory in 2006, and for the endless, US-backed Israeli violence against Gaza ever since.
It is perhaps no wonder that Trump and Blair see eye to eye on Palestine, as they share the same ignorance, egotism and inhumanity, and the same disdain for international law. But the savage methods used by US special operations forces and US-trained death squads to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq only fueled broader resistance, which ultimately drove U.S occupation forces out of both countries.
The same tactics will lead to the same failure in Gaza. But unleashing such horrific violence on the already desperate, starving, unhoused, captive people of Gaza is a policy of such gratuitous barbarity and injustice that it should compel the whole world to come together to put a stop to it.
The Magic System Of Zionism
Caitlin Johnstone, Jan 24, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-magic-system-of-zionism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=185598042&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
If I spoke critically of something abusive that India was doing in Kashmir, would you expect me to be accused of an anti-Hindu hate crime?
If you criticized an Indian military operation, would you have to preface it with “I don’t hate Hindus or their religion and am not the slightest bit Hinduphobic”?
If there was worldwide opposition to something that Indian military forces were doing, would you expect western governments to start frantically churning out laws to ban that opposition because it was making members of the Hindu community feel unsafe?
Would it ever in your wildest imaginings occur to you that a criticism of the violent actions of the government of India could in any way be interpreted as an attack on the Hindu faith and the membership of that religion?
You can probably see where I’m going with this.
You don’t expect to see criticisms of the state of India framed as an attack on its majority religion because people in your society haven’t been conditioned to have that expectation. But we have been conditioned to have that expectation about Israel.
The association between antisemitism and criticism of the state of Israel isn’t natural. It’s not something that would organically occur to an untrained mind.
If a man who’d never heard of Israel or Palestine were shown footage of the genocide in Gaza, he would reflexively recoil in horror and say what he was looking at was a bad thing. If somebody then ran up and explained to him that what he just said was actually a hateful act of religious persecution, he would be very surprised and confused. Because he hadn’t been indoctrinated into making that association, in the same way you haven’t been indoctrinated into associating criticism of the Indian government with an attack on the religion of Hinduism.
It’s a completely counterintuitive association. There’s nothing about it that that you could find your way into through your own observation and reasoning. It’s something you’d need to be taught by others. You need it to be explained to you.
That’s the literal translation of the Hebrew word “hasbara”. It means “explaining”. Israel and its supporters have spent decades “explaining” to the world that criticism of the state of Israel is actually a terrible hate crime against Jews and their religion, because otherwise it would never occur to a normal person that that is the case.
It’s actually astonishingly impressive. The political ideology of support for this tiny apartheid state has been so effective at explaining to the world what thoughts they should think about it that those efforts touch all our lives. It’s so effective that you could be at a social gathering all the way across the sea in the United States and, unless you are very familiar with the people around you, if the subject of Israel comes up you’ll immediately understand that you could be in for a very uncomfortable evening.
It’s stunning how much influence this ideology has had throughout our society’s culture and institutions. It’s almost magical.
There was a segment in last year’s Louis Theroux documentary The Settlers that stuck with me where Israeli settler leader Daniella Weiss refers to Zionism as a “magic system”.
“Jewish settlements in Gaza is a very difficult step that demands a lot of work,” Weiss told Theroux. “You have to influence the leftists, the government, the nations of the world, using the magic system: Zionism.”
It isn’t surprising to learn that Weiss views her operations as a kind of magic. On paper she and her ilk shouldn’t be able to do what they do. Forcefully dropping a foreign ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization and violently hammering it into place against every organic impulse of the region is freakish enough, but then convincing the rest of the world to support this? To the point that it actually affects our interpersonal relationships and interactions on the other side of the planet? It shouldn’t work. But it does.
I don’t really know what magic is, but it makes sense that some Zionists would see it that way. Because from the outside looking in all that mass-scale psychosocial manipulation kind of does look like an inexplicable sort of wizardry.
Luckily, the magic seems to be wearing off. The old tricks just aren’t working anymore. Calling someone who criticizes Israel an “antisemite” is widely recognized for the fraudulent manipulation that it is. Pro-Palestine politicians are winning elections despite highly coordinated smear campaigns saying their candidacy makes Jews feel unsafe. Everyone knows Israel lies about everything all the time. Trust in the media is at an all-time low, while awareness of the pro-Israel bias of the mainstream press is at an all-time high.
People are still showing up for protests and pro-Palestine events. The public is turning against Israel in unprecedented numbers. Nobody’s buying the old song and dance anymore.
Maybe the people are finding a little magic of their own.
As Trump Uses Military to Threaten Democracy, NYT Declares Military Needs More Resources.
In 2024, the US spent $997 billion on its military—more than the next nine countries’ spending combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a fact the Times (12/10/25) acknowledged. What it didn’t state was that China—the second-biggest military spender—spent only $314 billion in 2024. Why must the US spend even more than three times more on its military than China? The Times never addressed this obvious question.
Drew Favakeh, FAIR, January 23, 2026
The New York Times published a seven-day series of editorials (12/8/25–12/14/25) meant to examine, as the initial piece put it, “what’s gone wrong with the US military” and “how we can create a relevant and effective force that can deter wars whenever possible and win them wherever necessary.”
These editorials serve as little more than propagandistic, jingoistic and Sinophobic tools that treat war as a game, turning a blind eye to the very real harms that wars have on civilians.
Devoting seven editorials to boosting the US military when the country’s own democracy is under threat—and Trump is using the military so irresponsibly and illegally that high-level officers are resigning—the Times demonstrated that its commitment to militarism knows few bounds.
‘Threaten democracies everywhere’
In total, the New York Times series referenced China 50 times, Russia 26 times and Israel just twice. It fed into an increasing Yellow Peril hysteria in a country that has a long history of hatred towards China and Chinese people, and from a news outlet that has repeatedly expressed anti-China sentiment.
The Times (12/8/25) kicked off the series by citing a Pentagon “classified, multiyear assessment,” called the “Overmatch brief,” which “catalogs China’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites, and identifies the US military’s supply chain choke points.” The paper—which didn’t disclose how it obtained the brief, and didn’t publish its contents—called it “consistent and disturbing.”
The editorial opined that a “rising China” will “outlast this administration,” and will “require credible US military power as a backstop to international order and the security of the free world.”
…………………………………….It’s not China, though, that is threatening to annex its neighbors—by force if need be—or declaring it has the right to replace the leaders of any country in its hemisphere it disapproves of.
The US has overthrown at least 31 foreign governments since the late 19th century—with Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro marking only the latest in that long string—and conducted more than 80 election meddling operations from 1946 to 2000 (NPR, 12/22/16). It has caused, conservatively, nearly a million deaths in the post-9/11 wars. By comparison, China has not been directly involved in a major external conflict since its 1979 invasion of Vietnam.
US special operations forces are deployed to 154 countries (Intercept, 3/20/21), and the Pentagon has at least 750 overseas military bases in 80 countries (Al Jazeera, 9/10/21), many of which surround China.
China, meanwhile, has just two overseas military bases, one it opened in 2017 in the East African nation of Djibouti (Reuters, 8/1/17; Foreign Policy, 7/7/21) and another it opened in 2025 in Cambodia (Newsweek, 4/7/25).
Moreover, the US currently has imposed some form of damaging economic sanctions on more than 20 countries, while China has issued no nationwide sanctions.
…………………………………………………………. While the US declares a right to use nuclear weapons first in a war (Council on Foreign Relations, 12/16/25), China has maintained a “no first use policy” since it first developed nuclear weapons in 1964—a position it has repeatedly re-affirmed, including late last year (Arms Control Association, 12/11/25).
The Times also warned about hypersonic missiles: “China in recent years has amassed an arsenal of around 600 hypersonic weapons,” compared to the US, which “has yet to deploy a single hypersonic missile,” wrote the Times (12/8/25). FAIR (7/12/19) has written before about media attempts to hype a hypersonic missile gap.
In fact, the US has pursued hypersonic weapons since 9/11, and is now among those “leading the pack” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 3/12/24), underscored by Trump’s near $4 billion request in 2026 for hypersonic weapons research. Most US hypersonic weapons are being designed for conventional payloads—making them usable weapons rather than deterrents. This means they will take longer to deploy (Congressional Research Service, 8/27/25), and will be more destabilizing if they are deployed.
………………………………….The Times‘ enthusiasm for defending Taiwan from forcible reunification with China contrasts sharply with its commitment to supporting Ukraine in its efforts to retake breakaway territories. In the Taiwanese case, the right to self-determination is unquestioned, trumping China’s sovereignty; in Ukraine’s case, the sacredness of national borders renders self-determination claims irrelevant.
Though popularity of a war hardly seems to matter to US administrations, intervening to protect Taiwan separatism remains largely unpopular among US citizens (although more are in favor of intervention this year than last).
‘Transformation of the American military’
US politicians often leverage the alarmist message of “imminent military threats” to increase military spending (Defense News, 2/17/21). The New York Times took on that role in these editorials. To achieve this country’s foreign policy goals, it argued (12/8/25), requires not just maintaining current obscene levels of military spending, but increasing them: “In the short term, the transformation of the American military may require additional spending, primarily to rebuild our industrial base.”
In 2024, the US spent $997 billion on its military—more than the next nine countries’ spending combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a fact the Times (12/10/25) acknowledged. What it didn’t state was that China—the second-biggest military spender—spent only $314 billion in 2024. Why must the US spend even more than three times more on its military than China? The Times never addressed this obvious question.
While the paper occasionally criticized military spending—calling the 2026 defense budget “loaded with pork for unnecessary programs” (12/11/25)—its issue wasn’t the amount spent, but rather how it was spent—“a stronger US national security depends less on enormous new budgets than on wiser investments” (12/8/25).
Ultimately, the Times (12/11/25) suggested spending $150 billion more on “manufacturing capacity” to rebuild the US naval industrial base, despite noting that the US has already spent nearly $6 billion on the industry over the past decade.
The editorial board didn’t seem to consider what the public wants in our nominal democracy: Only one in ten voters want a bigger military budget (Jacobin, 12/15/25).
Rather than funding an arms race, the US could focus more on diplomacy and turn its investments towards more popular measures like government-subsidized housing, healthcare for all, universal childhood education, infrastructure, clean energy, and/or community college. A 2023 report published by Brown University’s Costs of War project showed reducing military spending and diverting funds to these areas would create 9% to 250% more jobs than the military.
The killer robot gap
Another area where the New York Times wants the US military to spend more money is autonomous weapons systems.
The Times (12/9/25) wrote that “China is testing how to fly drones in sync. Soon such swarms could hunt and kill on their own.” To counter this “growing threat,” the US “must simultaneously win the race to build autonomous weapons and lead the world in controlling them.” To do so, “Congress needs to expand funding for research and development into technologies with military applications” and Trump needs to “bring private industry into the mission.”
The Times wrote that they “join the United Nations secretary general and the International Committee of the Red Cross in their call for a new treaty to be concluded by 2026 on autonomous weapons systems.” The editors then say the treaty should include
limits on the types of targets, such as outlawing their use in situations where civilians or civilian objects are present; and requirements for human-machine interaction, notably to ensure effective human supervision, and timely intervention and deactivation.
But that’s far short of what the secretary general and the Red Cross recommend: a ban on all autonomous weapons used to attack humans. This humanitarian goal doesn’t square with the Times‘ enthusiasm for the US to “win the race to build autonomous weapons,” even if it says it also wants to “win the race to control them.”
Then again, there’s nothing about the Times‘ editorial series that suggests any honest consideration of humanitarian concerns—just adding another notch on its belt of warmongering on behalf of the State. https://fair.org/home/as-trump-uses-military-to-threaten-democracy-nyt-declares-military-needs-more-resources/
Trump offers states a deal to take nuclear waste
POLITICIPRO, By: Sophia Cai | 01/20/2026
The Trump administration wants to quadruple America’s production of nuclear power over the next 25 years and is hoping to entice states to take the nuclear waste those plants produce by dangling the promise of steering massive investments their way.
President Donald Trump’s big bet on amping up nuclear production is not an easy feat, fraught with NIMBY concerns about safety and waste byproducts. The administration hopes to solve at least one of those issues — what to do with toxic nuclear waste — with a program they plan to roll out this week.
Governors would effectively be invited to compete for what the administration believes is a once-in-a-generation economic development prize in exchange for hosting the nation’s most politically and environmentally toxic byproduct.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has already begun laying groundwork with governors. Over the last two weeks, Wright has met with at least two governors who have expressed interest, according to two officials familiar with the private meetings granted anonymity to discuss them……………………………….(Subscribers only) https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2026/01/trump-offers-states-a-deal-to-take-nuclear-waste-00738104
An alarm sounds and Tepco suspends restart at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa
A September survey asked 12,000 residents if they believed the conditions for restarting operations were already in place — 37% responded positively and 60% negatively.
By Francis Tang, 23 Jan 26, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/01/23/japan/science-health/kashiwazaki-kariwa-alarm/
One day after Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) restarted the world’s largest nuclear power plant, what was meant to mark a turning point in Japan’s long-stalled nuclear revival became an object lesson in just how fragile that effort remains.
At stake is Japan’s decadelong attempt to reduce imported energy dependency, which increased following the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and restore trust lost during the meltdown and in the 15 years since.
On Wednesday night, Tepco restarted reactor No. 6 at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant — the company’s first restart since all of its reactors were shut down in the aftermath of Fukushima.
Hours later, an alarm sounded for one rod inside the reactor, and the removal of control rods was suspended. About 16 hours later, Tepco announced that it would carry out a “planned temporary shutdown,” taking the reactor back offline to allow a full probe into the cause of the alarm to proceed.
“We are not assuming that the investigation and related work will be wrapped up in one day or two, but at this point, we cannot say at all how many days it will take,” plant manager Takeyuki Inagaki told a news conference on Thursday night.
Control rod insertion began at 11:56 p.m. on Thursday, and the reactor was formally shut down early Friday morning, according to the company.
“For now, our priority is to move forward with the cause investigation,” Inagaki said.
The company said that the alarm came from a control panel for a motor that drives the control rod, indicating a problem in the control panel. A separate alarm indicated a problem with an inverter.
Tepco added that the alarms indicate with light and sound.
Control rods regulate the nuclear reaction inside a nuclear power reactor. They are pulled out to start fission and reinserted to slow and stop it.
Located 120 kilometers northwest of Tokyo, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world’s largest nuclear power plant, with seven reactors. It is one of the three nuclear power plants owned by Tepco, with the other two located in Fukushima.
After the March 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami triggered triple meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, all nuclear plants in Japan were shut down. While some owned by other operators have since resumed operation after meeting stricter safety standards, Tepco has not been able to restart any of its reactors until this week.
Two prerequisites come into play when the government greenlights the restart of a nuclear plant: that it meets the post-Fukushima regulation standards set by the Nuclear Regulation Authority, and that it gains the “understanding” of local communities.
The local community in Niigata Prefecture, where Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is located, has mixed views on the plant’s restart. A September survey asked 12,000 residents if they believed the conditions for restarting operations were already in place — 37% responded positively and 60% negatively.
In 2017, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa units No. 6 and No. 7 passed Nuclear Regulation Authority reviews required for restart, but the subsequent discovery of inadequate antiterrorism measures in 2021 led to an effective withdrawal of approval through 2023.
Tepco was initially set to restart the reactor on Tuesday, but postponed the restart after a problem — which was separate from Thursday’s — was identified in one of the control rod alarms during testing.
An alarm that was designed to notify of unintended control rod removals did not go off when one of the rods was pulled out, the company said on Saturday. The process to address this delayed the restart by a day.
The government has positioned its restart as central to Japan’s energy strategy, which includes a goal of achieving 30% to 40% energy self-sufficiency by fiscal 2040, and having nuclear power generating roughly 20% of the country’s power, up from 8.5% in fiscal 2023
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is also keen on energy security.
During her campaign for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s presidency last year, she vowed to achieve “100% self-sufficiency” in energy, and said in her first policy speech as prime minister that her government would aim for the quick implementation of next-generation reactors and fusion power.
In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, Japan’s rate of self-sufficiency on energy dropped from 20.2% in fiscal 2010 to 6.5% in fiscal 2012. While it rebounded to above 10% in recent years, data center and semiconductor needs are expected to lead to a surge in electricity demand.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa’s restart is “extremely important” in resolving vulnerabilities in eastern Japan’s power supply, containing electricity prices and developing decarbonized power sources, Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa said on Friday, calling the restart a “highly significant step.”
“Under guidance of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, Tepco should continue to respond with the highest priority placed on safety and with a strong sense of vigilance. It should first and foremost work to identify the cause and resolve the issue, and provide careful and easy-to-understand explanations to local communities and the public,” he added.
3 Myths About the Shah of Iran — “Dictator, CIA Puppet, Brutal”
Quick article debunking Cold War-era propaganda that’s still being repeated
SL Kanthan, Jan 22, 2026, https://slkanthan.substack.com/p/3-myths-about-the-shah-of-iran-dictator?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=844398&post_id=185383071&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Now that Iran is experiencing the biggest protests since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, there is renewed interest in the history of the country during the Shah era. This is a short article to debunk three myths about the Shah of Iran. I have written a much longer article on this topic — here is the link. Okay, let’s look at the myths and debunk/clarify them.
The three talking points to demonize Mohammad Reza Pahlavi are:
- He was a dictator
- He was a puppet of the US, since he was installed by the CIA in the 1953 coup
- He ran a brutal secret police known as the SAVA
All of these accusations have some truths and some lies. The claims are exaggerated and miss the context.
Shah being a Dictator
First, the Shah was a monarch and would be considered a “dictator” by today’s Western standards. But, in those years, most countries in the world were under dictatorships — left or right. From the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc to China and the Middle East to Latin America and even Spain and South Korea, dictators ruled the world!
What matters is this: Iranians had incomparably more political freedom, more economic freedom and more social freedom under the Shah than under the current theocratic regime in Iran.
Below [on original] is a photo of protesters — in Tehran from 1978 — with a sign that says, “Down with the Shah, the blood-sucker.” Can you imagine a similar sign today that says, “Down with Khamenei, the blood-sucker”? The protesters will be hanged from a crane.
Anti-Shah groups such as liberal university students, communists (like the Tudeh Party), and Islamic extremists thrived in Iran under the Shah. A terrorist group named as Fedayeen of Islam tried to assassinate the Shah — they fired five bullets, of which 4 narrowly missed, and one hit him in the shoulder.
Ironically, all the anti-Shah groups were brutally suppressed and eliminated by their former ally, Khomeini, after the revolution.
Within a month after coming to power, Khomeini denounced leftist Iranians as “non-Muslims” who “are at war with the philosophical beliefs of Islam.”
One year later, the Ayatollah openly declared a jihad on Iran’s liberals, Marxists and communists.
During the Shah’s rule, Iran had a parliament (majlis) which was freely elected by the people. In fact, one of the Prime Ministers — Mossadegh — was so powerful that the Shah had to flee the country for a couple of days in 1953!
The simple fact is that, if the Shah were a true dictator, there would have been no revolution in 1979!
Shah was a Puppet of the USA
This is a Soviet-era propaganda that is still being repeated today — remember that during the Cold War, both the US and the USSR were fighting over control of Iran, a very strategic country in terms of resources, influence and location.
The USSR was funding communist groups within Iran to destabilize the Shah’s government. And from radio stations near the Iranian border, the Soviets were blasting anti-Shah propaganda 7 hours a day.
The Shah was a very Westernized man who gravitated towards the US/Europe. But, of course, in such relations, the US would naturally have more power.
But he was not a “puppet.” In fact, the CIA complained in a classified psychological profile that the Shah was a “megalomaniac” who followed his “own plans, while disregarding US interests.” Not the description of a subservient leader.
The Shah also met with Soviet leaders in an act of extraordinary diplomacy during the intense Cold War. Here he is [on original] in Moscow with his wife Soraya in 1956:
About that infamous 1953 CIA coup: It was a coup to stop a coup
Contrary to the popular myth, the Shah was NOT installed by the CIA in a 1953 coup. He had actually come to power in 1941– that was 12 years before the coup and even 6 years before the CIA was created!
But… here is the nuance. The CIA certainly carried out the coup and helped the Shah, who had left/fled the country for 3–4 days.
Here is what happened:
Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh was an influential and ambitious populist, who nationalized the oil sector in 1951. But it was a total disaster — Iran’s oil production fell a staggering 95% over the next two years, as the British withdrew all their technicians, and Iranians did not have the skill to operate the refineries.
At that point, the Shah tried to fire Mossadegh, but couldn’t. (So much for being a brutal dictator). Afraid of a coup or worse (assassination), the Shah fled to Italy for a couple of days.
At the same time, powerful Western oil interests and the deep state (MI6/CIA) were waiting for an opportunity to get rid of Mossadegh. Hence the CIA coup of 1953.
It was a coup to stop a coup.
SAVAK — The Shah’s Brutal Secret Police
After the 1953 coup discussed above, the Shah sought help from the West. That’s why SAVAK was created in 1957 with help from the CIA and MI6. Yes, SAVAK was ruthless, operated outside the law, and engaged in spying, arrests, torture etc.
But guess what happened after the Islamic Revolution? SAVAK was not dismantled, but simply renamed as SAVAMA! In fact, the deputy chief of SAVAK — General Hossein Fardoust — became the head of SAVAMA. All the infrastructure, files, intelligence, torture methods, along with most intel agents continued under Khomeini.
The anti-Shah people never talk about this inconvenient fact.
Conclusion
For ideologues on the far left, a good dictator is an anti-American dictator. So, they worship Stalin, Fidel Castro, Islamic regime in Iran etc., while hating on the Shah.
This is a short summary. You can read my much longer article on Substack:
Trump Could Offer Deals to U.S. States to Store Nuclear Waste
Oil Price, By Charles Kennedy – Jan 22, 2026,
The Trump Administration plans to offer U.S. states incentives for building nuclear reactors in exchange for agreeing to store nuclear waste, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.
However, a spokesperson for the U.S. Energy Department told Reuters that the story was “false” and that “no decisions have been made at this time,” after POLITICO first reported on the plan late on Wednesday.
The POLITICO report said that the Energy Department could invite interest from U.S. states as early as this week.
Handling nuclear waste is a politically and environmentally sensitive issue, and the U.S. may have much more of that in the coming years as it the Trump Administration plans to facilitate the expansion of U.S. nuclear energy capacity from about 100 gigawatts (GW) in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050.
The U.S. Administration has bet big on nuclear power, alongside gas, to meet the expected surge in America’s electricity demand driven by AI, data centers, and the onshoring of manufacturing………….
Earlier this month, the Energy Department announced a $2.7 billion investment to strengthen domestic enrichment, in support of President Trump’s commitment to expand U.S. capacity for low-enriched uranium (LEU) and jumpstart new supply chains and innovations for high-assay low-enriched uranium.
Last month, the Energy Department awarded $800 million to TVA and Holtec to advance the deployment of U.S. small modular reactors.
In November, DOE extended a $1-billion loan to help Constellation Energy restart the Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear reactor to add baseload power to the grid and help the AI advancement in the United States. https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Trump-Could-Offer-Deals-to-US-States-to-Store-Nuclear-Waste.html
Today in History – January 24: Pure luck stops two nuclear bombs destroying US city
By Nick Pearson, Jan 24, 2026, https://www.9news.com.au/world/today-in-history-january-24-what-happened-on-this-day/67dc0e76-b5a5-4799-8fd0-ef2c401b7812
Two concurrent nuclear explosions over a US town were narrowly averted on January 24, 1961.
A B-52 bomber flying over Goldsboro, North Carolina, started to break up in mid-air after a fuel leak.
The centrifugal forces set off a trigger in the cockpit which would be used to drop the payload in the back of the plane.
That payload was two hydrogen bombs, which dropped out of the plane as it broke up in the sky.
Five of the eight crew were able to bail out safely, but three were killed.
Meanwhile, the two hydrogen bombs fell to the ground.
By pure luck, neither of the weapons exploded.
The first weapon had landed in a field on a farm, landing reasonably softly because of its deployed parachute.
With one of the 24-megaton warheads, there were six interlocking safety mechanisms which needed to be triggered for the bomb to explode.
“When Air Force experts rushed to the North Carolina farm to examine the weapon after the accident, they found that five of the six interlocks had been set off by the fall,” nuclear safety supervisor Parker F. Jones wrote in a 1969 report.
“Only a single switch prevented the 24-megaton bomb from detonating and spreading fire and destruction over a wide area.”
The second bomb landed in a muddy field, leaving a 1.5m hole in the ground.
When it was recovered after a three-day operation, they found the safety switch had been turned to “Armed”.
It created a mystery as to why this bomb did not detonate.
The conclusion from investigators was that the impact from hitting the earth shifted the switch to “Armed”, but that same impact had broken the circuits that would have set the bomb off.
After breaking up on impact and sinking into deep mud, some major components of the bomb have still not been recovered.
If either bomb had detonated, it would have likely wiped out a city of about 30,000 people.
The farmer was paid $100 by the US government for a 61m-radius section of the farm.
They are still allowed to use the land for agricultural purposes but forbidden from digging more than five feet down.
Kushner Reveals Dystopic Plan to Build Data Centers on Ruins of Gaza Genocide.
“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’”
The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s bulldozing of Gaza to make real estate opportunities for investors.
“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’”
The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s bulldozing of Gaza to make real estate opportunities for investors.
By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, January 22, 2026, https://truthout.org/articles/kushner-reveals-dystopic-plan-to-build-data-centers-on-ruins-of-gaza-genocide/
White House Adviser Jared Kushner revealed a neocolonial plan to transform Gaza into a home for luxury tourist resorts and data centers at the World Economic Forum on Thursday.
The plan has been widely condemned by human rights advocates, who say it is an an attempt to erase Palestinians by building a capitalist dystopia on the ruins of Israel’s genocide.
At the signing ceremony for President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” Kushner shared a set of slides depicting a colonialist fantasy of the Gaza Strip under a hypothetical “demilitarization” of Hamas — despite the group’s repeated refusal to disarm, saying it would leave them defenseless against further attacks by Israel or otherwise.
The slides show computer-generated photos of high rise buildings along the coast and rows of residential buildings elsewhere.
The presentation includes a blueprint of Gaza divided into sections, which Kushner says is the U.S.’s plan for “catastrophic success” in the event of demilitarization of Hamas. The blueprint, labelled as the “Master Plan,” shows the entirety of the coast — where Palestinians have long fished for sustenance — dedicated to “coastal tourism,” with a sea port and an airport. There are large swaths dedicated to “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities.”
Tellingly, numerous parts of the map located next to residential areas are dedicated to industry and “data centers.” Ruinous technology like AI, reports have said, are slated to be a major part of the White House’s plan for Gaza, with other slides in the pitch deck reported by The Wall Street Journal showing a transformation of the Strip into a “smart city” with “tech driven governance.”
Nowhere is there a designation for cultural sites, nor does the map seem to be built around keeping or restoring any parts of Gaza that retain Palestinian heritage or life. The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s razing of the territory, clear the rubble in which thousands of Palestinians’ bodies are thought to be trapped, and replace it with real estate opportunities for investors.
“Gaza, as President Trump has been saying, has amazing potential,” said Kushner.
At the signing ceremony, Trump said that Gaza, home to millions of Palestinians, is “a great location” that should be viewed as a “big real estate site,” and expressed his interest in the region as a “real estate person at heart.”
“I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property — what it could be for so many people, it’ll be so great, people that are living so poorly are gonna be living so well,” Trump said.
Kushner touted the White House’s goal of applying “free market economy principles” to the razing and redevelopment of Gaza. He also expressed a desire to replace the humanitarian aid system for Palestinians in the region using those principles.
Palestinians have strongly condemned the plan.
“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’” wrote Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa. “Palestinians will be pushed behind walls and gates, retrained in ‘technical schools’ to serve Israel’s supremacists ideology. The indigenous traditions and social fabric of this land will be obliterated utterly.”
“If the goal is truly peace, then the path is simple: end the occupation and help restore the rights that have been taken from Palestinians since 1948,” said Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian writer from Gaza. “We, the Palestinian people, are the ones who must determine our own future. Peace cannot be imposed while our land is occupied, our lives controlled, and our voices ignored.”
Nuclear project with locals opposed will get federal review
Federal law requires large projects to examine whether there are other feasible ways to meet the same goals with fewer risks.
That opens the door to arguments that renewables, storage and grid upgrades could deliver similar benefits faster, more cheaply and with less environmental harm.
Recent studies from the Ontario Clean Air Alliance suggest alternatives exist and that the province could save up to $19 billion per year by investing in wind, solar and storage instead of pursuing the Wesleyville nuclear megaproject.
Canada’s National Observer, By Abdul Matin Sarfraz, January 22nd 2026
For most of her life, Faye More has lived in the shadow of nuclear waste, grappling with radioactive contamination in her home and her hometown left behind by uranium and radium processing.
She grew up in Port Hope, a lakeside community about 100 kilometres east of Toronto that is still undergoing cleanup of contaminated soil that continues to be removed from neighbourhoods and stored in a huge engineered mound about the size of 70 hockey rinks, visible from Highway 401.
In the 1970s, government investigators found high levels of radon gas at St. Mary’s elementary school in Port Hope, where radioactive mining waste from the town’s uranium mine had been used as fill beneath the building. The school was closed and tests were conducted elsewhere around the town. Investigators uncovered contamination in unexpected places — including backyards and basements.
“I grew up in a contaminated house. I later ended up buying a contaminated property without knowing it and I raised my family there because the locations of radioactive waste were not being disclosed,” More said.
Radon is a colourless, odourless radioactive gas that forms naturally as uranium breaks down in soil and can seep into homes through foundations — it’s naturally occurring in many places but, in Port Hope, levels were significantly higher than normal. Health Canada says radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer after smoking, linked to about 16 per cent of cases nationwide, or more than 3,000 deaths each year.
Now, More’s community is being asked by the Ford government to shoulder another nuclear burden, one of the largest nuclear projects in the world. This time, she is fighting back, helping lead local residents who say they have already paid the price.
The province last year announced that Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is proposing a new nuclear generating station on its Wesleyville property. The company says the project could eventually host up to 10,000 megawatts of generating capacity, enough to power up to 10 million homes for roughly 78 years.
In its own documents, the Ontario Power Generation says it is not considering alternatives to the Wesleyville project itself. It describes nuclear expansion as a policy decision already made by the province.
The Ford government celebrated the project, claiming more nuclear power is essential to meet rising electricity demand while helping Canada hit its climate targets.
Nuclear energy is frequently cited as a clean, reliable alternative to fossil fuels…………………….
“I was really shocked and appalled,” said More, now chair of the Port Hope Community Health Concerns Committee. “I felt it was very disrespectful to the people, the way it was announced as good news.”
More says the group has more than 100 members and is a volunteer-run non-profit formed in 1995 to address health and environmental risks linked to radioactive contamination in the town.
The group organizes public meetings, shares information online, writes letters to officials and urges residents to take part in public consultations.
Last week, the federal government formally designated the proposed Wesleyville project for a federal environmental impact assessment, opening the door to public consultation.
Unlike most major infrastructure projects, nuclear plants fall largely under federal jurisdiction. The Federal Impact Assessment Act requires a full review for any new nuclear facility larger than 200 megawatts.
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission must then decide whether the project meets safety and environmental rules under the Nuclear Safety and Control Act and the Impact Assessment Act before issuing a licence.
More hopes the federal process will stop the project altogether. She says the risks to nearby communities are too great, that safer alternatives exist and that the Ford government ignored Port Hope’s long and painful history with the nuclear industry.
For her, the idea of building one of the world’s largest nuclear plants nearby feels surreal.
“To suddenly hear that in this beautiful rural area they are going to build what could be the largest nuclear plant in the world is really unimaginable,” she said.
More worries about what that would mean for land, water and ecosystems. “It is hard to picture the scope of changes that would happen out there,” she told Canada’s National Observer. “And with that scale comes enormous risks, including emissions to the water, the air and impacts on biodiversity.”
OPG’s filings describe major physical changes that would come with the project. These include shoreline filling, dredging, building docks and large-scale excavation and blasting.
The company also says the plant would rely on cooling water from Lake Ontario. The company acknowledges the site includes wetlands, creeks and fish habitat. It also says parts of the area fall within highly vulnerable aquifer zones.
More says the pace of the project is almost as alarming as its size. She believes people should have veto power, a view not shared by the Ford government, which like the federal government is seeking to build infrastructure more quickly.
“One of the most basic questions in any environmental assessment is: Do we actually need this much energy? And if we do, why does it have to come from here?”
The company says it already owns the property, that it has been intended for electricity generation for decades and that the region has major infrastructure nearby such as transmission corridors, rail access and road that make the site ideal for the expansion plans.
Moving faster than expected
Legal experts note the project is moving at unusual speed.
Theresa McClenaghan, executive director and counsel at the Canadian Environmental Law Association, has followed nuclear projects for decades and says the timeline alone should raise red flags.
“From the very first idea, where the province asked OPG to look at potential new sites, to filing a project description with the federal agency, it’s been something like a year,” she told Canada’s National Observer. “That’s incredibly fast for something of this scale.”
McClenaghan believes OPG is trying to secure approvals while political conditions are favourable.
““They see a friendly Nuclear Safety Commission. They see a supportive provincial government and a supportive federal government,” she said.
“I think they’re thinking: let’s get this licence in our back pocket.”
She points to earlier cases where OPG obtained approvals long before construction began, protecting itself from future political or economic shifts. That strategy matters, she says, because nuclear megaprojects often face soaring costs.
Recent regulatory changes mean many of those costs can now be passed on to ratepayers long before any electricity is produced.
McClenaghan says the federal impact assessment may be the only real opportunity for the public to closely examine the project’s risks, costs and alternatives.
“It’s extremely rare for nuclear projects to be denied,” she said. “But it’s not impossible.”
The review will eventually combine two decisions into one: whether the project’s impacts are acceptable under federal law and whether the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission should grant OPG a licence.
Under federal rules, the process must look at accident scenarios, long-term environmental effects and whether the project makes sense in its proposed location, including near population centres. In its own documents, OPG says it is not considering alternatives to the Wesleyville project itself. It describes nuclear expansion as a policy decision already made by the province.
McClenaghan says that stance could become a major sticking point. Federal law requires large projects to examine whether there are other feasible ways to meet the same goals with fewer risks.
That opens the door to arguments that renewables, storage and grid upgrades could deliver similar benefits faster, more cheaply and with less environmental harm.
Recent studies from the Ontario Clean Air Alliance suggest alternatives exist and that the province could save up to $19 billion per year by investing in wind, solar and storage instead of pursuing the Wesleyville nuclear megaproject.
Ontario’s big nuclear bet
More than half of Ontario’s electricity currently comes from nuclear power.
Under the province’s long-term planning, that share is projected to rise above 70 per cent by 2050 as electricity demand is expected to increase by about 75 per cent.
Nuclear projects are expensive and complex. The province says it plans to explore new ownership models and equity partnerships to attract private capital.
The government argues nuclear power is more cost-effective and land-efficient than renewables. It says alternatives would require vast amounts of land and major new transmission infrastructure, a claim challenged by energy experts.
For More, the fight has already begun. She is organizing meetings, sharing information online and urging people to take part in the consultation. But she says the timelines are too short for communities to respond in a meaningful way.
She worries that political efforts to “cut red tape” are turning health and environmental protections into barriers to be removed.
“What happens at Wesleyville doesn’t stay at Wesleyville. The reach of a nuclear plant is enormous,” More said. “When a wind turbine fails, it doesn’t contaminate an entire region,” she said. “Nuclear is different.”
More says her community has already paid the price of Canada’s nuclear history once and they are not willing to do it again.
All Unquiet on the Ukrainian Front
“The Kremlin has tried every which way to bring its ‘special military operation,’ along with its broader confrontation with the West, to a mutually beneficial conclusion.”
The Europeans have run out of postures and gestures in the way of performative statecraft: This is my conclusion. And the Russians, evidently sharing it in one or another form, see no point in indulging them any further.
By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, 22 Jan 26, https://consortiumnews.com/2026/01/21/patrick-lawrence-all-unquiet-on-the-ukrainian-front/
The Europeans have run out of postures and gestures in the way of performative statecraft, and the Russians see no point in indulging them any further.
Sometimes wars have occasions that can be read — immediately, soon or in time — as turning points, clarifying moments. D–Day, June 6, 1944, is an obvious case: The Allies and the Red Army were in Berlin less than a year later.
The Tet Offensive, which began 58 years ago next week (Can you believe it?), is another: All the victory-is-near illusions the American command had cultivated for years collapsed. There were many more casualties at the altar of imperial delusion, but the war in Southeast Asia was on the way to over.
On Jan. 8 Russia attacked Lviv, the city in western Ukraine, with an Oreshnik missile. To me this looks very like a clarifying event in the Ukraine war — Moscow’s announcement that it has decided to begin the beginning of the end.
The Oreshnik is a new-generation weapon that already wears a little of the mystique of Ares, the Greek god of war. It travels at hypersonic speeds and is undetectable by air-defense systems. It is capable of carrying nuclear warheads, although the missile that hit Lviv wasn’t armed with one.
This was not Russia’s first use of the Oreshnik in Ukraine. Its first was in November 2024, when the target was a munitions factory in Dnipro, not far from the front lines. That blew minds as well as production lines.
But the missile that hit Lviv seemed to have more to say to the regime in Kiev and its Western backers, notably all those supercilious Europeans. Lviv, Ukraine’s cultural capital, has been a safe haven these past four years of conflict. Not to be missed, it lies roughly 45 miles from the border with Poland.
Russia’s declared intent in launching its second Oreshnik was to respond to the Dec. 29 drone attack the Ukrainians, with the usual assistance of the Americans and Brits, launched on President Vladimir Putin’s secondary residence in Valdai, northwest of Moscow.
Parenthetically, Kiev and the C.I.A., two famous truth-tellers, deny any such attack took place, but let us not waste any time with this silliness. The Russians have reportedly presented Western officials with evidence of the event.
Would Putin raise it in a telephone exchange with President Trump were it, as corporate media now have it, just another disinformation operation?
These things said, the Oreshnik hit in Lviv merits a broader reading, in my view.
Here is an account of the Oreshnik as it descended through the winter clouds above Lviv. It is written by Mike Mihajlovic, who publishes, edits and writes frequently for Black Mountain Analysis, a Substack newsletter I have found worth looking at on previous occasions.
This passage is based on Mihajlovic’s apparently diligent study of digital evidence and eyewitness accounts. Good enough we know what happens when these things arrive, as there may be more of them in the skies above Ukraine as the war begins its fifth year:
“As the hypersonic penetrators broke through the cloud layers, each was enveloped in a luminous plasma sheath, producing brief but violent flashes that momentarily illuminated the surrounding atmosphere. These flashes were not explosions in the conventional sense, but visual signatures of extreme velocity, friction, and compression as the warheads tore through dense air at hypersonic speed.
Observers on the ground reported an unsettling soundscape that followed the visual phenomenon. Rather than a single detonation, there were sharp, cracking noises that seemed to ripple across the terrain, as if the ground itself were fracturing under stress.
“What made the event particularly striking was the setting. The impacts occurred against the backdrop of an idyllic winter landscape: fields and forests blanketed in snow, small settlements dimly lit, and a horizon that, moments earlier, conveyed calm and stillness.
Against this muted palette, the light generated by the strike stood out with almost surreal intensity. Reflections danced across the snow, briefly turning the ground into a mirror that amplified the event’s brightness. Witnesses described the glow as unnatural, a cold, shimmering illumination that lingered just long enough to be noticed and remembered.”
The Lviv attack seems to be part of an intensifying campaign to cripple Ukraine’s power grids, energy infrastructure and productive capacity. The Russians have been hitting such targets for years, of course, but these new operations suggest Moscow is after the endgame now.
Moscow’s Attempts to End Conflict
The Kremlin has tried every which way to bring its “special military operation,” along with its broader confrontation with the West, to a mutually beneficial conclusion. You can go back to the spring of 2022, when was ready to sign an accord with Kiev a few months into the war — only for the Brits, with American consent, to scotch it.
Or December 2021, when it sent Washington and NATO draft treaties as a basis of negotiating a new security framework between the Russian Federation and the West. They were dismissed as “nonstarters,” a British-ism the Biden regime thought was clever.
Or the Minsk Protocols, September 2014 and February 2015, which the British and French sabotaged. Or back to the early 1990s, when Michail Gorbachev hoped to bring post–Soviet Russia into “a common European home.”
The Kremlin has proven exceptionally restrained, not to say forebearing, through all of this. And it would be a mistake now to conclude the Russians have lost their patience.
No, in my read they have simply concluded there is no point waiting around while the Western powers indulge themselves in pantomime statecraft or — maybe better put —some kind of group onanism they seem to find satisfying.
And in public, no less.
For weeks toward the end of last year we read incessantly of the intense diplomatic work Kiev, the Europeans and the Trump regime’s contingent were getting up to. The swashbuckling Musketeers cooked up a 20–point peace plan that was supposed to supersede Trump’s 28–point document.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s unconstitutional president, went from one European capital to another and then to Washington and then to Mar-a–Lago and then back to Europe, all along asserting he and his backers were “90 percent there.”
Ninety percent there on security guarantees providing for European troops to serve as peacekeepers on Ukrainian soil. Ninety percent there on a territorial settlement. And so on.
You watched all this with your jaw dropping. None of it had anything to do with fashioning an accord Moscow would find even preliminarily negotiable. The 20–point plan’s intent, indeed, was to subvert the 28–point plan, the first pieces of paper since the spring 2022 attempt that Moscow appeared to find worth its time.
Not Enough Delusion
No, the Trump plan was too realistic as a draft of a settlement accord in recognizing that Moscow was the victor in its war with Ukraine, Kiev the vanquished. There wasn’t enough delusion in it.
And now, roughly since the start of the year, more or less complete silence from Zelensky and the Musketeers — Kier Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz, a prime minister, a president and a chancellor.
There is no establishing any certain causality between the Oreshnik attack in previously safe — relatively speaking — western Ukraine, and this nothing-to-say lapse in Kiev, London, Paris and Berlin (and for that matter Washington). But the point may prove the same.
The Europeans have run out of postures and gestures in the way of performative statecraft: This is my conclusion. And the Russians, evidently sharing it in one or another form, see no point in indulging them any further.
As to the Trumpster, it seemed to me unimaginable from the outset that the national security state in all its appendages would ever allow him to reach a comprehensive settlement with Moscow that would open into a new era in East–West relations.
So has the war turned. So do matters clarify. So does the war in Ukraine appear set to end — not with a single detonation, no, rather with sharp cracking noises that seemed to ripple across the terrain.
Nuclear lapses overshadow reactor restarts in post-Fukushima Japan.
Power provider admits to manipulating data to downplay effect of large
earthquake. This month, one of Japan’s biggest utilities admitted to
manipulating data to downplay the effect of a large earthquake on a nuclear
power plant under review for reopening.
The admission followed a security
failure at Japan’s nuclear energy watchdog, in which an employee lost a
work phone with contact details of staff involved in nuclear security
during a personal trip to China.
The compliance lapses at Chubu Electric
and the Nuclear Regulation Authority threaten confidence in Japan’s safety
regime as the country tries to reopen its nuclear plants 15 years after a
massive quake caused a tsunami that inundated reactors in Fukushima.
FT 22nd Jan 2026,
https://www.ft.com/content/0bb511ab-80dc-44c2-ab06-d0e587c8367e
Nuclear reactor owned by Fukushima plant operator TEPCO to shut down again hours after restart.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS, 22 January 2026 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-15487139/Nuclear-reactor-owned-Fukushima-plant-operator-TEPCO-suspends-hours-old-restart.html
TOKYO (AP) – A reactor at the world’s largest nuclear power plant that restarted for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster is now being shut down again Thursday due to a glitch that occurred hours after the unit’s resumption, its operator said.
The No. 6 reactor at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in north-central Japan reactivated Wednesday night for the first time in 14 years, as plant workers started removing neutron-absorbing control rods from the core to start stable nuclear fission.
But the process had to be suspended hours later due to a malfunction related to control rods, which are essential to safely starting up and shutting down reactors, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings said.
TEPCO, which also manages the wrecked Fukushima plant, said there was no safety issue from the glitch.
Kashiwazak-Kariwa plant chief Takeyuki Inagaki told a news conference that he has decided to shut down the reactor to ensure safety. The operation had to stop when an alarm went off after 52 of the 205 control rods were removed from the core, he said. Inagaki said he hoped to start putting them back in later Thursday to bring the No. 6 reactor to a shutdown.
“The equipment is essential to safe operation, and we will examine it inside out,” he said, adding that the reactor will not be restarted until the cause is found and measures are taken.
“I don’t think this is going to be resolved in a couple of days,” Inagaki said.
The restart at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant was being watched closely since TEPCO also runs the Fukushima Daiichi plant that was ruined in the 2011 quake and tsunami. Resource-poor Japan is accelerating atomic power use to meet soaring electricity needs.
All seven reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa have been dormant since a year after the meltdowns of reactors at the Fukushima plant contaminated the surrounding land with radioactive fallout so severe that some areas are still uninhabitable.
TEPCO is working on the cleanup at the Fukushima site that´s estimated to cost 22 trillion yen ($139 billion). It’s also trying to recover from the damage to its reputation after government and independent investigations blamed the Fukushima disaster on TEPCO´s bad safety culture and criticized it for collusion with safety authorities.
Fourteen other nuclear reactors have restarted across Japan since 2011, but the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, about 220 kilometers (135 miles) northwest of Tokyo, is the first TEPCO-run unit to resume production.
A restart of the No. 6 reactor could generate an additional 1.35 million kilowatts of electricity, enough to power more than 1 million households in the capital region.
The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant´s combined output capacity of 8 million kilowatts makes it the world´s largest, though TEPCO plans to resume only two of the seven reactors in coming years.
Anti-climate opinion columns becoming a regular feature in UK newspapers.
Sidhi Mittal, 21st January 2026, https://www.edie.net/anti-climate-opinion-columns-becoming-a-regular-feature-in-uk-newspapers/
Nearly 100 UK newspaper editorials were published opposing climate action in 2025, a record figure that shows the scale of the backlash against net-zero policies in the right-leaning press.
Carbon Brief examined editorials published since 2011. These included those written by external columnists and those acting as a publication’s official editorial ‘voice’.
In 2025, it identified 98 editorials rejecting climate action, compared with 46 in support. This was the first year in which opposition overtook support across the 15 years of data.
All 98 editorials opposing climate action appeared in right-leaning titles. The largest contributors were the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, followed by the Times and the Daily Express.
By contrast, almost all of the editorials pushing for more climate action were published in the Guardian and the Financial Times, which have far smaller circulations than several of the conservative papers.
Overall, 81% of climate-related editorials in right-leaning newspapers in 2025 rejected climate action – either overall, or due to specific policy interventions.
Carbon Brief said this marked a sharp change from a few years earlier, when many of the same papers showed increased enthusiasm for climate policy as Conservative governments under Theresa May and Boris Johnson introduced the net-zero by 2050 target and backed measures to deliver it.
Right-leaning press drives opposition
The media shift has coincided with political changes on the UK right, according to the research.
Over the past year, the Conservative party has distanced itself from the net-zero target it legislated for in 2019 and from the Climate Change Act.
Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch has stated that she would scrap the Act altogether if elected. This would spell the end of the UK Government’s official climate advisory body and all future carbon budgets.
Reform UK has also been rising in the polls while pledging to “ditch net-zero”. Carbon Brief said the positions taken by right-leaning newspapers tend to reflect and reinforce the politics of the parties they support.
None of the editorials opposing climate action questioned the existence of climate change or the science behind it. Instead, they criticised the policies designed to address it, a position Carbon Brief describes as “response scepticism”.
In many cases, newspapers attacked “net-zero” without mentioning climate change at all.
The report links this to earlier research by Dr James Painter of the University of Oxford, which found that UK newspaper coverage has been “decoupling net-zero from climate change”. This comes despite polling showing majority public support for many of the policies that underpin net-zero and for the 2050 target itself.
Economic arguments dominated the opposition. Carbon Brief found that more than eight in ten of 2025’s editorials rejecting climate action cited cost as a reason, describing net-zero as “ruinous” or “costly” and blaming it for driving up energy bills.
Earlier this month, several national newspapers also gave prominent coverage to a pamphlet from the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) on the “cost of net-zero” that misrepresented the work of the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO).
The IEA claimed net-zero costs could exceed £7.6trn, but the figures were based on the flawed assumption that no investment would be made in energy systems if the UK did not have its 2050 climate target.
Critics also say the IEA mischaracterised NESO’s analysis. Regardless, the pamphlet appeared on the front page of the Daily Express and was reported by political correspondents at the Express, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph without scrutiny of the underlying energy data.
Miliband under sustained attack
Alongside criticism of policy, newspapers also targeted the Labour Government’s energy security and net-zero secretary, Ed Miliband.
In 2025, UK newspapers published 112 editorials taking personal aim at him, nearly all in right-leaning titles. The Sun alone published 51.
Six in ten editorials opposing climate action used criticism of climate advocates as part of their justification, and almost all of these mentioned Miliband.
Miliband was described as a “loon”, a “zealot” and the “high priest of net-zero”, and accused of “eco insanity” and “quasi-religious delusions”.
Newspapers frequently framed policies as “Ed Miliband’s net-zero agenda”, “Mr Miliband’s swivel-eyed targets” or “Mr Miliband’s green taxes”, presenting climate measures as being imposed on the public by the energy secretary. This is despite the fact that many targets and initiatives were kick-started under the Tories.
Renewables, nuclear and fossil fuels
Carbon Brief additionally analysed editorials on specific energy technologies.
There were 42 editorials criticising renewable energy in 2025. For the first time since 2014, anti-renewables editorials outnumbered those supporting them.
Cost was the dominant argument, with 86% of critical editorials using economic justifications.
The Sun referred to “chucking billions at unreliable renewables”, while the Daily Telegraph warned of an “expensive and intermittent renewables grid”.
At the same time, right-leaning newspapers continued to support nuclear power despite its high costs. There were 20 editorials backing nuclear energy in 2025, nearly all in conservative titles, and none opposing it.
The Times was the only right-leaning newspaper to publish any editorials backing renewables.
Support for fracking also reappeared. After falling away in 2023 and 2024, there were 15 editorials in 2025 arguing that fracking would be economically beneficial, even as the Government plans to ban the practice permanently.
North Sea oil and gas remained a major focus. Thirty editorials, all in right-leaning newspapers, mentioned the issue, with most arguing for increased extraction while also opposing climate action or renewable expansion.
Related article: Tories invoke fears of electricity blackouts to criticise renewable energy roll-out
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