Washington still reportedly owes the intergovernmental organization billions of dollars in mandatory funding
The US has paid $160 million towards the more than $4 billion it owes the UN in the first payment since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The UN faces a mounting financial crisis, while the US president positions his Gaza Board of Peace to “oversee” the global body. Some experts have already warned that the initiative could undermine the UN.
Washington’s latest contribution is a “partial payment of its past dues,” Reuters cited a UN spokesperson as saying on Thursday.
The money is a small fraction of the $2.19 billion the US reportedly owes for the UN regular budget and $2.4 it owes for current and past peacekeeping missions. The US is responsible for around 95% of the overdue payments to the UN’s regular budget, Reuters quoted the organization’s spokesperson as saying.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the UN is facing a looming crisis which could end in “imminent financial collapse,” unless member states started making mandatory payments or the organization overhauled its financial rules.
The US, the organization’s biggest contributor, cut voluntary funding to multiple UN programs and cut aid spending last year, as part of Trump’s ‘America First’ policy pivot. In December, Washington pledged $2 billion for the UN’s humanitarian programs, warning it to “adapt or die.” By comparison, the US had contributed $14.1 billion in 2024.
In a speech on Thursday, Trump again criticized the UN as ineffective.
“The United Nations… is going to be much stronger and the ‘Board of Peace’ is going to almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly,” he said at the inaugural Board of Peace event in Washington.
The board would help the struggling UN “money-wise” and make sure it’s “viable,” he said.
The Board of Peace was established to guide the stabilization of Gaza following the Israel-Hamas war. UN experts, however, have argued that oversight by such a body is “reminiscent of colonial practices,” due to it being chaired by Trump, rather than being under transparent multilateral or UN control.
Comment: The US behaves like a customer who goes into a restaurant, orders the most expensive meal and after gorging itself, complains about the food while commanding the staff around and growling at the other guests in the restaurant. When presented with the bill it throws a $5 dollar note to the waiter while leaving the restaurant in a huff without paying the main bill while yelling loudly how ungrateful the restaurant was for the honor to have their visit.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the US has been gathering the most air power seen in the middle east since the Iraq invasion in 2003.
CNN says the US military is prepared to strike Iran as early as this weekend.
A Trump advisor has reportedly told Axios that “The boss is getting fed up. Some people around him warn him against going to war with Iran, but I think there is 90% chance we see kinetic action in the next few weeks.”
The US is by every indication headed straight toward war with Iran, and Trump’s ostensible opposition has conspicuously little to say about it. We’re seeing some pushback from House Democrats like Ro Khanna, but party leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are completely missing from the scene on this issue of unparalleled urgency.
Democratic Party leaders are doing nothing to oppose Trump’s war plans for Iran because they support those plans. They just don’t want to be the ones pulling the trigger.
When the attack begins they’ll do the same thing they did with Venezuela: publicly finger-wag about rules and protocol while providing no meaningful resistance and privately being glad the empire took out another unauthorized leader.
Democratic Party empire managers love Trump. They love having a bad cop who’s willing to get his hands dirty and slit the throats that need slitting while they sit back looking pretty and fundraise off his depravity.
Democrats hate having to be the bad guy. They hated trying to come up with excuses for why it was fine for Biden to aggressively back a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, and they were relieved to finally hand off that PR nightmare to Trump. They wanted to lose in 2024, and they were glad when they did.
Now they get to just coast along and let Trump take the blame for all the imperial depravity.
On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Mark Warner told MS NOW’s Katy Tur that “I think it’s appropriate that the president has all the options on the table” with regard to war with Iran, complaining only that Trump was too incompetent to strike last month when Iranian domestic turmoil was at its peak.
Warner said that “seeing regime change in Iran would make sense” and made it clear that he would like to see the Iranian government removed, with his only criticism being that Trump was going about obtaining it in a clumsy and impolite way.
“First of all, remember the president said in our previous bombing that we had obliterated Iran’s nuclear program,” Warner said. “While clearly our military did an exquisite job, we did not obliterate Iran’s nuclear program, number one. Number two, if the president is calling for regime change in Iran — and Iran is an awful regime — but he should make the case to the American public and to the world of how we’re going to go about doing that.”
This is such a perfect example of the Democratic Party’s relationship with all of Trump’s most depraved agendas. Here’s this monstrous warmonger, poised to unleash violence in the middle east of potentially devastating consequence, and all Warner can do is hem and haw about proper war etiquette and criticize the president for failing to drop enough bombs on Iran’s nuclear energy infrastructure.
The United States has two right wing war parties: the polite one and the rude one. No party or faction which advances peace and human interests is allowed to flourish at the heart of the empire.
Trump is responsible for the war crimes of his administration, and he belongs in a cell in The Hague. But these Republican swamp monsters wouldn’t be able to do the damage they do without the assistance of the Democratic Party.
Recent reporting suggests that President Donald Trump privately envisions a bold “regime change” in Iran, seeing it as a historical legacy project. Sources indicate he has pressed military planners for contingency strategies that could allow major attacks while keeping potential chaos politically manageable for the midterms.
At the same time, some Democratic leaders appear less focused on preventing war than on the political calculus of who would bear the consequences. Internal discussions reveal a tension: a portion of the party sees a potential conflict as both strategically and politically advantageous if Trump ends up owning the fallout. Meanwhile, a few members of Congress, including Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, have pushed for a War Powers resolution to require public accountability.
the “advanced” nuclear power plants being promoted today are decades-old designs that didn’t work then and are now being wheeled out as new-and-improved nuclear power plants.
That’s the amount of money the New York State Public Service Commission—its members appointed by the state’s governor—has just approved for you as an electric ratepayer, and every other ratepayer in the state including all businesses and non-profit institutions, to pay from 2029 to 2049 to bail out four nuclear power plants upstate.
The $33 billion would be included as a charge in the bills electric utilities send to all the state’s ratepayers.
In 2017, the PSC approved a $7.6 billion 12-year bail-out of the plants, which their owners had wanted to shut down because they said they were not economical.
They include the oldest nuclear power plant of the 94 now operating in the United States, the Nine Mile Point 1 nuclear power plant in upstate Oswego, which began operating in 1969, and the second-oldest nuclear plant running in the nation, the R.E. Ginna plant, near Rochester.
Nuclear power plants, when they were first introduced in the U.S. in the 1950s, were licensed for 40 years. After 40 years, it was determined that internal parts, especially metals, would become so embrittled by radioactivity that the plants would not be safe to operate.
Now, our money, to the tune of $33 billion, would be used in the coming two decades to keep Nine Mile Point 1, having run in 2026 for 57 years, and Ginna, running for 56 years, going far longer.
If there is an accident at any of these plants, upstate is not that far from Suffolk County, as the radioactivity would blow in the wind. A check on Google says they are in the range of 200 air miles, and a little more depending on what part of Suffolk.
Consider taking a drive in a 57-year-old automobile upstate, or anywhere. How confident would you be in its mechanical ability?
But Hochul is totally enamored of nuclear power. She seemingly believes that the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima disasters never happened. She has been calling for New York State to become the “center” of a nuclear revival in the U.S.
As she said in her “State of the State” address last month, in 2025 “I took the bold step of greenlighting the first nuclear power project in a generation….We set a goal of building one gigawatt of nuclear power,” the equivalent of one large nuclear power plant. She went on that for 2026, it’s “go big” on nuclear power. “So I’ve decided to raise the bar to five gigawatts. That’s more nuclear energy than has been built anywhere in the United States in the last 30 years.”
She is pushing particularly so-called “advanced” nuclear power plants—even though, as a comprehensive analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and other studies, have found they are not “advanced.”
“If nuclear power is to play an expanded role in helping address climate change, newly built reactors must be demonstrably safer and more secure than current generation reactors. Unfortunately, most ‘advanced’ nuclear reactors are anything but,” concluded its report.
“Not So Advanced: Hype vs. Reality for Nuclear Technology,” was the headline of a piece from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
But, as Hochul declared recently, “This is not your grandmothers’ and your grandfathers’ nuclear. This is advanced. This is state-of-the-art. This is safe.”
In fact, the “advanced” nuclear power plants being promoted today are decades-old designs that didn’t work then and are now being wheeled out as new-and-improved nuclear power plants.
Meanwhile, Hochul also keeps insisting that nuclear power is “zero-emission” and thus an antidote to climate change. But the nuclear-fuel-cycle—mining, milling and enrichment of nuclear fuel—is heavily carbon-intensive, and nuclear power plants also emit carbon, a radioactive form of carbon, Carbon-14.
She is fond of old nuclear plants, too, like the four upstate plants the $33 billion bail-out would keep running. “They’re all up on Lake Ontario and one is actually the oldest operating nuclear facility in the United States going strong and safe since 1969,” Hochul claims
Of the bail-out and Hochul’s push for nuclear power, Laura Shindell, the New York State director of the organization Food & Water Watch, says: “It’s outrageous that New Yorkers will once again be forced to bail out this toxic, money-burning industry with billions and billions more in the coming years. Despite decades of evidence that nuclear power is both inherently dangerous and cost-foolish, Governor Hochul insists on throwing good money after bad, with everyday families footing the bill. We’re fed up with the governor’s repeated failure to deliver on promises of clean, affordable energy for this state. She claims she cares about affordability, and then approves this rate increase.”
Says Avni Pravni-Buck, deputy director of Alliance for a Green Economy: “Governor Hochul and her Public Service Commission have locked New Yorkers into an expensive and inefficient scheme to enrich Constellation Energy, while taking New York further away from our renewable energy and climate goals. Every dollar spent on Constellation’s reactors is a dollar that could have gone to building renewable energy and storage, which is cheaper, cleaner, and better for our electricity grid. We’re dismayed to hear that electric ratepayers will now be footing a $33 billion bailout for the upstate nuclear reactors, without any forward-looking plan to transition to renewable resources…”
Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, says: “New York’s nuclear bailout program has always been a classic ‘bridge-to-nowhere’—forcing households and businesses to fork over pots of gold, only to leave us with an ever-growing pile of radioactive waste. Since 2017, we have been charged over $4 billion to prop up old, uneconomical nuclear power plants—12 times more than we have spent on incentives for renewable energy. The bailout program was supposed to be expensive but temporary, a $7 billion ‘bridge to renewable energy.’ Here we are years down the road, and the PSC has decided not only to make the bailout basically permanent, but to dramatically increase the cost to $33 billion over an extra 20 years. New York needs to pull the plug on it.”
A true green energy path is before us. This is not it.
Today’s Update is continuation of our reporting on the diligent and thorough work done by the New Mexico Environment Department to hold Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) accountable for not responsibly addressing the hexavalent chromium plume beneath LANL that has now spread beneath Pueblo de San Ildefonso.
On Tuesday, February 11th, the New Mexico Environment Department issued two Administrative Compliance Orders under the New Mexico Hazardous Waste Act and the New Mexico Water Quality Act to address the on-going migration of hexavalent chromium into the sole source regional drinking water aquifer that feeds the Rio Grande and those living downstream. The Orders proposed civil penalties for multiple violations of both laws that total nearly $16,000,000. https://www.env.nm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2026-02-11-COMMS-NMED-acts-to-hold-DOE-accountable-for-legacy-waste-Final.pdf
Both Orders provide detailed histories of what has led the Environment Department to issue civil penalties for contamination of groundwater, which was first discovered in 2004 in a newly drilled monitoring well in Sandia Canyon.
Since then LANL has not done everything in its power to properly investigate and protect against the groundwater contamination. It has drilled wells at least 1,000 deep to reach the contaminated waters, extracted those waters, treated the waters on the surface, and returned them back into the deep aquifer. Due to the findings of contamination beneath Pueblo de San Ildefonso, in November 2025, the Environment Department ordered the cessation of these operations. This is not the first time the Environment Department ceased operations.
The word unclassified potentially gives Trump and the CIA wide latitude to hold back Epstein-related materials that they claim are too sensitive to release.
We won’t know the full truth about his crimes until the extent of his ties to US intelligence are clear.
On November 18, Donald Trump suffered a major political defeat when the House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act by a nearly unanimous vote: 427–1. But while emphatic, the House measure included a significant proviso that might yet prevent a full reckoning with Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.
Trump had fought for months against the bill, which was drafted by a bipartisan coalition created by California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie. In the end, the strong public revulsion for Epstein’s crimes made opposing the bill untenable. But the final version specified that the Department of Justice must make public “all unclassified” documents on Epstein
The word unclassified potentially gives Trump and the CIA wide latitude to hold back Epstein-related materials that they claim are too sensitive to release. In this, they have the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson, who insisted that US intelligence agencies be allowed to “protect their critical sources and methods. It is incredibly dangerous to demand that officials or employees of the DOJ declassify material that originated in other agencies and intelligence agencies.”
Johnson’s words stand in stark contrast to the remarks by Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of four dissident House Republicans who forced Trump to abandon his opposition to the Epstein bill. “The real test will be: Will the Department of Justice release the files, or will it all remain tied up in investigations?” she asked in a November 18 press conference. “Will the CIA release the files?” Greene—perhaps feeling too bruised by the clash with Trump, who attacked her repeatedly over her Epstein heresy—subsequently announced that she will be retiring from Congress. But her words still cut to the heart of why getting……………………………………..[Subscribers only]
a science fiction novel with a distinctly bizarre premise: that, at some future moment, thanks to the endless burning of fossil fuels, we humans would essentially threaten to burn ourselves off planet Earth. And when the voters of the world’s largest democracy heard that such a thing might, sooner or later, actually happen to us, they would respond by freely electing a genuine madman — who ran his second candidacy in 2024 on the all-too-bluntly apocalyptic slogan “drill, baby, drill” — to “lead” us into a literal hell on earth.
the American people elected as president, twice, a man who, as a businessman, had either four or more likely six bankruptcies to his name,
Our planet is melting in a climate broiler that we control and we’re not only not turning down the heat fast enough, but we Americans elected someone (twice!) determined to turn it up ever higher.
The Personification of an Imperial Power (and Planet) in Decline
Once upon a time, if you had described Donald Trump’s America to me (the second time around), I would have thought you mad as Alice in Wonderland‘s proverbial hatter — or, if you were a fiction writer, I would have considered your plot so ludicrous that, after reading a few pages, I would undoubtedly have tossed your book in the trash.
And yet here we are, not once (yes, all of us can make a mistake once, can’t we?) but twice!
And the one thing you should take for granted is that Donald Trump in the White House a second time around is the all-too-literal personification of imperial decline. In fact, decline is hardly an adequate word for it. We just don’t happen to have another word or phrase that would describe him and his crew aptly enough in all their eerie strangeness. Yes, this country, even in the best of (imperial) times, certainly had its problems. (Remember the Vietnam War, for instance, or President “Tricky Dick” Nixon and the Watergate scandal.) Still, nothing was ever quite like this, was it? Never.
The First American King?
A literal Mad Hatter in command in Washington, D.C. Once upon a time, who would have believed it? In fact, if we could indeed travel into the past and I were able to take you back to 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, ending the Cold War, while China had not yet faintly “risen,” the world of that moment might essentially have been considered American property, lock, stock, and proverbial barrel.
This planet could have been thought of then as the property of just one great power — my country, of course — that, in imperial terms, had essentially been left alone on planet Earth in a fashion that might never have happened before in the history of humanity. And if I had then been able to see into our future and had tried to fill you in on the Trumpian world we’re now living through a mere three decades later, you would have quite literally laughed me off the planet (and, believe me, that’s putting it politely).
Truly, who could have ever (ever!) imagined this bizarre Trumpian era of ours in which the joker (in the worst sense of the term) in the ultimate deck of cards is indeed sitting in the White House. Yes, unbelievably enough, he was elected a second time in 2024 by a “sweeping,” “landslide,” “historic” 49.7% of American voters. It’s true, not even 50% of us voted to make him the first American king a second time around.
And if that made you chuckle just a little, well, stop doing so right now! Yes, what happened to us in Trumpian terms was and remains genuinely absurd. Still, given this deeply endangered world of ours, it should be anything but funny. Just imagine for a moment, a president who, before entering the White House, was essentially known for only one thing: being the host of the TV show The Apprentice (“You’re fired!”). Once upon a time, if you had described the (ir)reality we’re now living through, you would have been laughed not just out of the room but off this planet. You would, in short, have been fired.
In fact, if what we’re now experiencing were a novel, it would be considered to have the most ludicrous plot imaginable and, a few pages in, you would undoubtedly have tossed it into — yes, again! — the trash. (Unfortunately, it’s not just you or me but this planet itself that Donald Trump now threatens to toss into that garbage pail.)
So here we are in February 2026 and, like it or not, we’re all apprentices to one Donald J. Trump — oops, sorry, one President Donald J. Trump. And the ongoing TV show he emcees these days from the White House is undoubtedly the wackiest one in our history, as he fires not just everyone but everything that rubs him the wrong way from the Kennedy Center (gone!) to the East Wing of the White House (now rubble) to the U.S. Agency for International Development (once upon a time…).
One way to think about all of this is to go back in time and imagine that, long, long ago, Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury wrote a science fiction novel with a distinctly bizarre premise: that, at some future moment, thanks to the endless burning of fossil fuels, we humans would essentially threaten to burn ourselves off planet Earth. And when the voters of the world’s largest democracy heard that such a thing might, sooner or later, actually happen to us, they would respond by freely electing a genuine madman — who ran his second candidacy in 2024 on the all-too-bluntly apocalyptic slogan “drill, baby, drill” — to “lead” us into a literal hell on earth. Now, of course, that “president” is insisting that he be given the largest iced island on this planet, Greenland, that, were all its ice to melt (as indeed is already beginning to happen), could send global sea levels up by 23 feet and quite literally drown this world’s coastal cities. Imagine that!
And now, try to imagine this: in 2026, such terrible fiction is, in fact, our reality and one thing is guaranteed (excuse the colons inside colons but this is a strange, strange world to try to sum up): it’s only going to get worse in the three years to come before Donald Trump’s presidency is officially ended, if, of course, it ever does end. (As he typically said at one point last year, “Based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens,” and he’s now talking about “nationalizing” — think “Trumpifying” — our elections!)
Given him and everything that’s gone on so far in his second term in office, including the way he recently had Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accompany FBI agents to an election voting hub in Fulton County, Georgia, where they “seized hundreds of boxes containing ballots and other documents related to the 2020 election,” I wouldn’t count on anything Trumpian ending according to plan. Whew! That was one long sentence!
The Trump administration is planning to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza, sprawling more than 350 acres, according to Board of Peace contracting records reviewed by the Guardian.
The site is envisioned as a military operating base for a future International Stabilization Force (ISF), planned as a multinational military force composed of pledged troops. The ISF is part of the newly created Board of Peace which is meant to govern Gaza. The Board of Peace is chaired by Donald Trump and led in part by his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The plans reviewed by the Guardian call for the phased construction of a military outpost that will eventually have a footprint of 1,400 metres by 1,100 metres, ringed by 26 trailer-mounted armored watch towers, a small arms range, bunkers, and a warehouse for military equipment for operations. The entire base will be encircled with barbed wire.
The fortification is planned for an arid stretch of flatlands in southern Gaza strewn with saltbush and white broom shrubs, and littered with twisted metal from years of Israeli bombardment. The Guardian has reviewed video of the area. A source close to the planning tells the Guardian that a small group of bidders – international construction companies with experience in war zones – have already been shown the area in a site visit.
The Indonesian government has reportedly offered to send up to 8,000 troops. Indonesia’s president was one of four south-east Asian leaders scheduled to attend an inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace in Washington DC on Thursday.
The UN security council authorized the Board of Peace to establish a temporary International Stabilization Force in Gaza. The ISF, according to the UN, will be tasked with securing Gaza’s border and maintaining peace within the area. It is also supposed to protect civilians, and train and support “vetted Palestinian police forces”.
It is unclear what the ISF’s rules of engagement would be if there is combat, renewed bombing by Israel, or attacks by Hamas. Nor is it clear what role the ISF is meant to play in disarming Hamas, an Israeli condition to proceed with Gaza’s reconstruction.
While more than 20 countries have signed up as members of the Board of Peace, much of the world has stayed away. Although it was set up with the UN’s approval, the organization’s charter appears to grant Trump permanent leadership and control.
“The Board of Peace is a kind of legal fiction, nominally with its own international legal personality separate from both the UN and the United States, but in reality it’s just an empty shell for the United States to use as it sees fit,” said Adil Haque, a professor of law at Rutgers University.
Experts say the funding and governance structures are murky, and several contractors have told the Guardian that conversations with US officials are often conducted on Signal rather than over government email.
The military base contracting document was issued by the Board of Peace, according to a person familiar with the process, and prepared with the help of US contracting officials.
The plans say there is to be a network of bunkers each 6 metres by 4 metres and 2.5 metres tall, with elaborate ventilation systems where soldiers can go for protection.
“The Contractor,” says the document, “shallconduct a geophysical survey of the site to identify any subterranean voids, tunnels, or large cavities per phase.” This provision is likely referencing the large network of tunnels Hamas has built in Gaza.
One section of the document describes a “Human Remains Protocol”. “If suspected human remains or cultural artifacts are discovered, all work in the immediate area must cease immediately, the area must be secured, and the Contracting Officer must be notified immediately for direction,” it says. The bodies of about 10,000 Palestinians are believed to be buried under the rubble in Gaza, according to Gaza’s civil defense agency.
It is unclear who owns the land where the military compound is set to be built, but much of the south Gaza area is currently under Israeli control. The UN estimates that at least 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced during the war.
Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and former peace negotiator, called building a military base on Palestinian land without the government’s approval an act of occupation. “Whose permission did they get to build that military base?”
Officials from US Central Command referred all questions about the military base to the Board of Peace.
A Trump administration official declined to discuss the military base contract: “As the President has said, no US boots will be on the ground. We’re not going to discuss leaked documents.”
The Military Connection. For Australian workers and the public, the situation is complicated by and made more urgent as a result of the Australia, UK, USA (AUKUS) agreement regarding the building and stationing of nuclear-powered submarines in Australia. We have already seen the creation of a separate Australian Naval Nuclear Power Standards Regulator (ANNPSR) that will be responsible for all standards in the construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning, and radioactive waste management from the submarines built or stationed here. We can expect pressure from the USA to have these standards align with those in the USA. As such the ANNPSR could become a back door for pressuring the current standards agency ARPANSA to revise and weaken rather than tighten protection standards across the full range of other occupational and public radiation health risks.
Radiation Protection Standards For most of the past century national and international standards agencies have regulated radiation protection based on three fundamental principles.
1 A ”Linear No Threshold ‘ (LNT) model based on scientific evidence that indicates there is no safe level of exposure. Any dose however small can be the one which can cause cancer – sometimes taking years to develop – or genetic damage affecting future generations.
2 That, therefore, all exposures should be kept ‘As Low As Reasonably Achievable’ – known as the ALARA principle
3 And that exposures to workers and the public should be kept below specified annual limits.
The science behind this protection regime is based on the capacity of ionising radiation to cause damage at the cellular level in the human body. Radiation striking a cell can either cause no damage or it may kill the cell outright – in which case, unless too many cells are killed at once, the body will eliminate the dead cells and function healthily. The problem comes when the cell is merely damaged, and the natural process of repair is imperfect, leaving the cell to replicate in this damaged form – which may in some cases lead to the kind of growth we call a cancer, other long term health or genetic damage. The level of this kind of damage (known as stochastic) is a hit-and-miss affair – a low level of radiation exposure doesn’t determine a health effect but as the level of exposure increases, it increases the probability of the damage.
Current Standards Need Tightening The limits on exposure have been progressively tightened over the years as estimates of the cancer risks, mainly drawn from the Life-Span Studies (LSS) of Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts in 1945, showed progressively higher rates of this stochastic health damage. Recent evidence from studies of workers in the Nuclear Industries in France the UK and USA (The INWORKS studies) suggest the worker-exposure limits need to again be revised – and significantly tightened. In addition, studies on health of populations living close to nuclear power plants in Europe and the USA show significantly elevated rates of cancer in both children and the elderly directly related to living distance from these facilities.
United States Proposals Would Weaken Current Standards Unfortunately, it appears that the USA is headed in the opposite direction and given the recent behaviour of the current President, may soon pressure other countries to follow suit. In May 2025 US President Donald Trump issued a Directive (EO 14300) Instructing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to revise all its regulations – in particular, to revise those relating to radiation health and safety. He instructed the NRC to abandon the LNT and ALARA principles and re-set limits on worker and public exposures based on ‘deterministic’ rather than ‘probabilistic’/’stochastic ‘ health outcomes – potentially allowing much higher levels of exposure.
Exactly how the NRC will respond to these directives is unclear. To comply with the president’s orders would put the USA in conflict with national and international agencies such as the International Commission of Radiological Protection (ICRP), the United Nations Scientific Committee on Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), the US National Academy of Science’s. Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation (the BEIR committee) and other countries’ national agencies including the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Standards Agency (ARPANSA) – all of which have recently reaffirmed commitment to the LN and ARPANSA principles and the current annual limits on worker and public exposure.
TThe draft of the revised NRC regulations on radiation protection is expected on 30 April 2026 with a 30-day period for comments before the final comprehensive revision of all NRC regulations is published in November 2026.
An international Campaign These US proposals have stimulated the beginnings of an international campaign bringing together trade unions, environment and public health groups and communities concerned about current and future exposures from mining, industrial, medical, and nuclear radiation sources. The objectives of this campaign are two-fold:
1 To pressure national and international agencies with responsibility for radiation protection to publicly repudiate any US regulations that align with the Trump Directive and resist any pressures from the US to similarly weaken existing national standards. 2. To build pressure on these national and international agencies to revise and tighten the standards in line with the best available scientific evidence that the health risks are greater than those used to set current standards.
The Military Connection For Australian workers and the public, the situation is complicated by and made more urgent as a result of the Australia, UK, USA (AUKUS) agreement regarding the building and stationing of nuclear-powered submarines in Australia. We have already seen the creation of a separate Australian Naval Nuclear Power Standards Regulator (ANNPSR) that will be responsible for all standards in the construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning, and radioactive waste management from the submarines built or stationed here. We can expect pressure from the USA to have these standards align with those in the USA. As such the ANNPSR could become a back door for pressuring the current standards agency ARPANSA to revise and weaken rather than tighten protection standards across the full range of other occupational and public radiation health risks.
For further information For references to the scientific evidence and to be kept informed of developments as this campaign evolves contact:
Rubio’s speech isn’t just another round of transatlantic posturing. It marks a moment when a top U.S. official openly reframes five centuries of Western expansion — conquest, colonization, and domination — as a civilizational triumph that must be revived.
According to journalist Ben Norton, Rubio’s remarks went beyond simple rhetoric — openly lamenting the end of Western imperial expansion and portraying decolonization movements as destructive forces driven by “godless communist revolutions.”
In a striking address at the Munich Security Conference, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed Western history not as a legacy of colonial domination, but as a “great civilization” whose decline must be reversed.
Rubio stated:
“For five centuries before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding… its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers… building vast empires extending out across the globe. But in 1945… it was contracting.”
He described anti-colonial uprisings as accelerating Western decline and rejected what he called “managed decline,” urging Europe and the United States to renew “the greatest civilization in human history.”
As reported in the Guardian this is something along the lines of “Empire is great. Empire is back. Empire is American.” Adding “The US secretary of state delivered what can only be described as a 22-minute ode to empire. A love letter to conquest and colonialism. A proud defense of the west’s territorial expansion.
Why This Matters
Since the post-World War II wave of decolonization across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, formal empires largely collapsed. Yet Rubio’s framing — praising Western expansion while dismissing colonial crimes as “purported sins” — signals a broader ideological shift.
Norton argues that this speech represents:
A defense of Western imperial legacy
A call for renewed transatlantic unity
A strategic push to restructure global supply chains away from China
An ideological justification for reasserting dominance over the Global South
Context: Competing Global Visions
While Rubio emphasized Western civilizational unity and supply chain control, China’s foreign minister presented an opposing vision centered on multilateralism and sovereign equality at the same conference.
The divide reflects a larger geopolitical struggle between:
A U.S.-led Western alliance seeking strategic dominance
A rising multipolar bloc emphasizing sovereignty and UN-centered governance
For more context on Rubio’s speech and the broader geopolitical stakes, here’s Ben Norton and The Geopolitical Economy Report:
Scotiabank’s subsidiary firm, 1832 Asset Management, has sold its remaining shares in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems Ltd., according to regulatory filings reported on 16 February.
The latest disclosure to the US Securities and Exchange Commission no longer lists Elbit among 1832’s holdings, ending an investment that once made the Canadian bank the company’s largest foreign shareholder.
In a press release on Monday, No Arms in the Arts, a Canada-based arts coalition opposing institutional ties to the arms trade and Israel’s actions in Palestine, and Just Peace Advocates, a Canadian human rights organization, said the sale followed “more than two years of sustained organizing that made the bank’s investment a liability.”
“Scotiabank’s divestment from Elbit Systems signals that investment in companies complicit in Israeli war crimes has become too risky to sustain,” Karen Rodman of Just Peace Advocates said.
“Yet 2025 data showed the ‘Big Five’ Canadian banks holding over $182 billion in companies operating in the occupied Palestinian territory – a clear contradiction of Canada’s stated opposition to illegal settlements that demands immediate government action to align policy with practice,” Rodman added.
Jody Chan of No Arms in the Arts said, “This news comes after years of sustained pressure across the country, with thousands protesting at Scotiabank branches, hundreds of artists refusing to let their work whitewash the bank’s complicity, and many more closing their accounts.”
Chan added, “Against our government’s attempts to use the façade of a ceasefire to normalize Israel’s siege on Gaza, this demonstrates our collective power to define what we find morally unacceptable and force real change.”
The investment drew sustained protests across Canada, including demonstrations at Scotiabank branches and the disruption of the bank-sponsored Giller Prize broadcast in November 2023.
In November 2025, filings showed approximately 165,000 shares worth around $84 million.
By August 2024, 1832 had cut its stake to roughly 700,000 shares, valued at about $315 million at the time. At the end of 2021, the asset manager held more than 2.2 million shares in the company.
As of mid-February 2026, the position stands at zero.
During the period of divestment, Elbit’s share price rose sharply, climbing from below $175 in 2021 to above $400 last year, before spiking past $700 in January 2026.
Scotiabank had previously said it did “not directly hold the shares” and that it could not interfere in the independent investment decisions of its subsidiary’s portfolio managers.
Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer and supplies military equipment used in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The company reported record profits during that period, openly marketing weapons used in Gaza as “battle-tested” to demand higher premiums in international contracts,
President Trump just made one of the most depraved statements about destroying living conditions for a foreign people ever uttered by a US president. “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
Trump doesn’t just talk depravity. He practices depravity. He’s ratcheted up America’s 66 yearlong campaign of economic sanctions and embargo to unprecedented heights. For the 11 million beleaguered Cuban people that means a new low in living standards from Trump’s cruelty.
Trump‘s criminal intervention in Venezuela allows him to cut off Venezuelan oil which suppled one third of Cuba’s oil. Not satisfied with that, Trump is pressuring Mexico to cut off the 44% of Cuban oil it supplies. If successful that would cut Cuba’s oil supplies by 78%. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum cancel one oil shipment but says Mexico will still provide Cuba oil based on “humanitarian needs.” Tho reducing oil shipments, Mexico is sending two ships containing 800 tons of desperately needed food, water and hygiene products. Hopefully Trump won’t mistake the Mexican ships for drug boats to be obliterated.
The oil shortage has already created a humanitarian crisis as less than half of Havana’s garbage trucks have fuel to cope with mountains of waste. Russia has ordered all its tourists out of Cuba. The collapsing tourist industry is destroying one of Cuba’s last economic lifelines.
But that is not good enough for Trump who’s considering a total blockade on oil imports to collapse the Cuban economy and depose the communist government. Last month Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba. Seeking to out-deprave the depraved Trump when it comes to Cuba, U.S. Charge d Affaires in Havana Mike Hammer told his staff “Now there is going to be a real blockade. Nothing is getting in. No more oil is coming.”
Nine years ago my wife and I visited Cuba for 10 days before newly elected Trump began dismantling Obama’s wonderful détente with Cuba. While his détente reestablished diplomatic relations and increased badly needed US tourism, it did not end the embargo which requires Congressional legislation. It was heartbreaking being there to ponder the madness of US policy inflicting such cruelty on such a beautiful country and its people for the past 57 years.
I’d been studying US Cuban relations since January 1, 1959 when news broke on Castro’s successful takedown of the brutal US supported Batista regime. I welcomed the news that 60 years of US exploitation of Cuba following our takeover of Cuba from Spain in 1898 had ended. Sadly, Ike rescinded his initial outreach to Castro within a year over US obsession in destroying any popular left wing government seeking to uplift its people suffering under colonialism.
My visit greatly expanded all I’d been studying about Cuba since 1959. It inspired me to develop a talk entitled ‘US Cuban Relations 1898 to Present: What They Didn’t Teach Us in School’ which I’ve presented many times. I end the talk imploring attendees to stay informed, support end to America’s cruel, heatless embargo, and visit Cuba to see for yourself its beauty and the need to end senseless US cruelty.
Alas, at next presentation I’ll drop the third request they visit Cuba to see for themselves its beauty and its people. The current depraved US administration is making Cuba unlivable for its 11 million citizens and any tourist who dares visit.
US empire managers have been making some surprisingly honest admissions in recent days, with Senator Lindsey Graham saying the wars of the future are being planned in Israel and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling for a return to old-school western colonialism.
During a Monday press conference in Tel Aviv after a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Graham said that “I’ve been coming here every two weeks whether I need to or not.”
Why is a South Carolina senator traveling to Israel every two weeks, rain or shine? The bloodthirsty warmonger answers this question in short order.
“The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel,” Graham said. “Because if you’re not one step ahead of the enemy, you suffer. The most clever, creative military forces on the planet are here in Israel.”
Graham salivated about the possibility of a US war with Iran, acknowledging that such a war could absolutely result in American troops in the region being struck by Iranian missiles but saying the US should go to war anyway.
“Could our soldiers be hit in the region? Absolutely, they could. Can Iran respond if we have an all-out attack? Absolutely, they can,” Graham said, arguing that “the risk associated with that is far less than the risk associated with blinking and pulling the plug and not helping the people as you promised.”
During a speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the mask all the way off in an unsettling rant about the need to return to the good old days when western powers dominated the global south without pretense or apology.
“For five centuries, before the end of the second world war, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” Rubio said. “But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”
Rubio, a notoriously anti-communist gusano, is here admitting that socialism played a leading role in pushing back against the abusive colonialism and empire-building of the western world in recent decades. A normal person would take this as a strong argument in favor of socialism, but Rubio says it like it’s a bad thing.
Rubio urged Europeans to join their white Christian brethren in the United States in re-conquering the brown-skinned communists and heathens who have been insisting upon their own sovereignty and the advancement of their own interests:
“Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past. And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.
“For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.
“We are part of one civilization — Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
It takes a special kind of psychopath to look back with fondness upon five centuries of unchecked western colonialism and imperialism and then advocate a return to those horrific days. Mass genocides across entire continents. The African slave trade. The violent subjugation and enslavement of entire populations. That is what Rubio is looking back on and sighing with nostalgia.
And this is of course to say nothing of the savagery his beloved “Western civilization” is perpetrating in the present day. This is the civilization of the Gaza holocaust. The civilization that cannot exist without constant war, exploitation and extraction. The civilization that is presently strangling Cuba to death and preparing for war with Iran. The civilization that still to this day violently subjugates and robs the global south. The civilization of ecocide. The civilization of Epstein.
Western civilization is the most depraved and abusive civilization that has ever existed. It doesn’t need a return to its prime, it needs to be stopped in its tracks and made healthy. This is obvious from a glance at the deranged empire managers this civilization has been elevating to positions of leadership.
Trump frames the ongoing negotiations as designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. This despite Trump’s bragging that he completely destroyed their nuclear program with his one-off bombing last June
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL, 17 Feb 26
Back in 2002 the US demanded Iraq give up its WMD, weapons of mass destruction, ostensibly to prevent another 911 attack a year earlier. To back up its demand the US threatened attacking the Iraqi regime to safeguard the Homeland.
Along with most Americans, I fell for the line that the US would stand down due to the weapons inspectors and intelligence resources in Iraq concluding Iraq had no WMD and was not a threat to America whatsoever.
Then in August 2002, I read a report buried deep in the Chicago Tribune describing America’s massive military buildup, concluding with the strong implication that such a buildup made attack on Iraq inevitable with nothing Iraq could do to prevent it.
At that moment I knew everything the Bush administration said about the Iraqi danger was a vicious lie in service of ousting Saddam Hussein and conquering Iraq. Seven months later, contrary to all the evidence, Bush did precisely that.
I’m getting the same ominous feeling when I hear Trump bragging out his massive buildup of air and naval forces near Iran poised to attack should Iran not capitulate to Trump’s non-negotiable demands that Iran give up its missile defense resources and cease supporting its regional allies.
Trump frames the ongoing negotiations as designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. This despite Trump’s bragging that he completely destroyed their nuclear program with his one-off bombing last June in support of Israel’s 12 day war on Iran that utterly failed to topple the Iranian regime.
The current negotiations in Geneva have nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear weapons program since, like Iraq’s imaginary WMD program in 2002, Iran has none. Indeed, for verification Iran is willing to negotiate limited nuclear enrichment for peaceful domestic purposes; even allow inspections to verify compliance But they will never negotiate away their missile program which is their only defense against further Israeli, US attacks such as they incurred last June.
Another similarity to Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq 23 year ago? It had nothing to do with vital US national interests. It had to do with Israeli demands that successive US administrations, bought up with Israel Lobby money, take out any Israeli rivals for Middle East hegemony.
Trump’s fealty to Israeli demands, encouraged by their near quarter billion in campaign support, fueled Trump’s blowing up Obama’s sensible 2015 Iran nuclear agreement in 2018. He lied to us then how the deal favored Iran by not ending its nuclear bomb program that did not exist. Trump is lying to us now on the urgency of destroying Iranian sovereignty which includes the right to self-defense.
But there is one huge difference between Trump’s trumped up Iranian threat likely presaging all out war today and George W. Bush’s falsified Iraqi threat in 2002. Unlike Iraq which had no defensive military means and no powerful allies to assist his defense, Iran has both.
They have thousands of missiles scattered thruout their large country capable of inflicting massive damage on US and Israeli forces. In addition they are getting defensive support from Russia and especially China in the form of intelligence resources to track approaching US bombers and provide accurate targeting information in retaliation.
History shows that sending a military armada near a pretend enemy never gets recalled. Its sole purpose is to attack and destroy based on a tissue of lies. And any lie and any ludicrous demand to negotiate an impossible deal in furtherance of war will be used to justify attack.
George W. Bush got 4,497 soldiers and 1,487 civilian contractors killed for nothing in his made up Iraq war. Trump’s march to war with Iran may make Bush’s folly pale in comparison.
Viewed closely, a pattern emerges, pointing to a presidency where private capital, foreign networks, and personal access converge to shape outcomes that consistently serve Israeli interests, and not Americans
”Trump did not walk into the White House alone. He stormed in with a promise to “drain the swamp,” but trailing in his shadow was Jared Kushner, carrying a tangled web of private financial networks, offshore holdings, and foreign capital so deeply embedded it functioned like a quiet engine at the heart of the presidency. Years later, FBI documents released alongside the Epstein files crystallised the danger, with a Confidential Human Source (CHS) alleging that Trump had been compromised by Israel, and that Kushner was the true centre of gravity, orchestrating both the Trump Organisation and the White Housefrom within.
Here -documents: [on original]
DOCUMENT: Federal Bureau Of Investigation (FBI) – CHS Reporting Document, 10/19/2020 (Source: US DOJ)
This is not theatre. Intelligence reporting rarely accuses outright; it maps vulnerability, flags leverage, and exposes the invisible pathways through which foreign influence can seep into the corridors of American power, remaining unnoticed, unchallenged, and structurally unstoppable
The question is not whether the allegation would hold up in court. The question is whether the record itself, including Trump’s 2025 mandate, his cascade of executive orders, and his most consequential foreign policy moves in the Middle East, confirms the risk it described. Viewed closely, a pattern emerges, pointing to a presidency where private capital, foreign networks, and personal access converge to shape outcomes that consistently serve Israeli interests, and not Americans’. The decisions emanating from the Trump 2:0 administration appear to be dictated from within rather than guided by democratic oversight. As this story unfolds, it becomes clear that these are not isolated incidents or accidental alignment—they are structural, enduring, and deeply consequential.
nuclear-news 