Europe’s electricity system tested by heatwaves as air-conditioning use soars – nuclear power plants affected.
Record temperatures force temporary shutdowns at power plants.
Europe’s energy systems have come under intense strain this summer as
repeated heatwaves have driven up demand for electricity and forced plants
to pause production. June was the hottest on record in western Europe,
fuelling a rise in the use of air conditioning and prompting a sharp
increase in electricity prices. Most parts of the region experienced at
least two intense periods of heat in June and July, with some suffering
more.
The barrage of heatwaves this summer marked a “massive change”
for Europe’s energy systems, said Jan Rosenow, leader of the energy
programme at Oxford university’s Environmental Change Institute. Peak
electricity demand has historically happened in winter in Europe, but as
“summers get hotter at some point that might flip”, he said. SSE, the
UK power company, said generation from its hydropower plants dropped by 40
per cent quarter on quarter to the end of June, as Britain also grappled
with heatwaves and severe drought. Inland nuclear power plants across
France and Switzerland temporarily suspended or reduced activity earlier in
the summer, as it is harder to cool reactors in hot weather.
In France, 17 out of 18 nuclear power plants faced capacity reductions during the
June-July heatwave, Ember said. Most inland nuclear plants rely on rivers
to cool reactors and spent fuel, heating the water in the process before
discharging it back. But with many rivers already hot, the plants could not
discharge heated water without potentially damaging the river ecology.
FT 3rd Aug 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/23b3dc59-b40f-48e2-ad93-e301de7ac5f2
Chris Hedges: The Gaza Riviera
Text originally published July 26, 2025.
Scheerpost, By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report, August 4, 2025 , https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera-2/
TRANSCRIPT:
Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.
Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor. https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera-2/
Miliband’s Nuclear Quango Chief In Line for £200,000 for Working Three Days a Week
Guido Fawkes 4th Aug 2025, https://order-order.com/2025/08/04/milibands-nuclear-quango-chief-in-line-for-200000-for-working-three-days-a-week/
Great British Energy – Nuclear (not to be confused with the inexplicably separate quango Great British Energy) is searching for a new chairman. ‘GBE-N’, as it is known in the ever growing domain of government bodies poking around in the energy industry, is in charge of delivering small modular reactors (SMRs) in the UK, among other things. That programme has been ongoing since at least 2015…
Now Red Ed is looking for a new head for the organisation – and a live job advert shows a cool salary of more than £203,268 per annum for just three days a week. Meltdown for taxpayers…
The government is banking on deploying SMRs in the 2030s. The new chair will oversee that target with a “more agile, programmatic and faster delivery approach than has been achieved previously”. That won’t be hard, because currently zero SMRs have been delivered. It’s such a civil service priority it’s a three day a week role…
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Expands Nuclear Bomb Production, Rejects Cleanup, Still Plans to Release Tritium.
| Lab officials have released plans to “defer” cleanup of one of the older radioactive dumps |
| Overarching above all is LANL’s vast expansionof its nuclear weapons programs |
August 3, 2025, https://nukewatch.org/lanl-expands-bomb-production-while-planning-tritium-releases-and-rejecting-cleanup/
Santa Fe, NM – Eighty years after the first radioactive waste was buried at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lab officials have released plans to “defer” cleanup of one of the older radioactive dumps. Material Disposal Area C (“Area C”) is an 11.8-acre site that was active from 1948 to 1974. It contains metals, hazardous constituents, and radioactively and chemically contaminated materials in six unlined disposal pits and 108 shafts. The total waste and fill in the pits and shafts are estimated at 198,104 cubic meters. Area C also has a serious gas plume of industrial solvents. Given the amount of long-lived plutonium wastes that are likely to be in Area C, leaving it buried 25 feet deep in a landfill rated for only 1,000 years is not acceptable.
On June 18, 2025, the Department of Energy (DOE) sent the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) a letter outlining its plans to “defer corrective action” (i.e. cleanup) at Area C. It stated that the dump “is associated with active Facility operations and will be deferred from further corrective action under [NMED’s] Consent Order [governing cleanup] until MDA C is no longer associated with active Facility operations.”
DOE’s letter does not state why it wants the change or what “active Facility operations” are. However, that is not difficult to guess as Area C is within a few hundred yards of PF-4, LANL’s main plutonium facility that is gearing up for the expanded production of plutonium pit bomb cores. As co-plaintiff, Nuclear Watch New Mexico legally forced the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to undertake a nationwide programmatic environmental impact statement for pit production, which the agency chose to give a fifty year time horizon. In combination this means that DOE and LANL are seeking to indefinitely postpone cleanup while expanding nuclear weapons production on into the future.
Fortunately, NMED has responded that it “will utilize to the fullest extent all statutory and legal authority necessary to enforce the requirements of the 2016 CO [Consent Order] in order to ensure that New Mexicans receive effective cleanup of legacy contamination at LANL in a timely manner.”
The Environment Department went on to say:
“DOE continues to respond to the regulatory direction provided by NMED in ways that do not reflect any good faith efforts to be accountable for cleanup of the legacy waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory and, in fact, are directly contradictory to the assertations previously made by DOE. As you may recall, during the substantial negotiation process in 2023-24 for revision of the Consent Order, DOE repeatedly reiterated its desire to work collaboratively and effectively with NMED. This recent example of an improper, unilateral deferral contrary to the terms of the Consent Order, along with the bad-faith withdrawal of the CME [Corrective Measures Evaluation to initiate cleanup] Report, contradict such assertions and reassurances from DOE.”
At the same time DOE and LANL are still seeking to intentionally release up to 30,000 curies of tritium, which has been highly controversial. Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that can be easily absorbed by the body as tritiated water. Instead of complying with a NMED order to organize an independent expert panel and a public meeting on the subject, they have invoked a dispute resolution process under the Consent Order. This is the kind of forum in which taxpayer supported lawyers from DOE and LANL can try to run circles around NMED’s limited staff and resources.
Overarching above all is LANL’s vast expansion of its nuclear weapons programs. A full billion dollars is being added in FY 2026 (which begins this October 1), making 84% of LANL’s $6 billion dollar annual budget directly tied to nuclear weapons. This increase is primarily for:
1) New-design nuclear weapons that can’t be tested because of the international testing moratorium; or, conversely, could prompt the U.S. to resume testing, with serious global proliferation consequences; and
2) Expanded plutonium pit bomb core production for these new-design nuclear weapons. This is ill-conceived because no future production is to maintain the existing stockpile. Independent experts have found that pits last at least a century and at least 15,000 existing pits are already in storage.
In contrast, cleanup and nonproliferation programs are being cut by 5%, non-weapons science by 50%, and renewables energies research completely eliminated.
Scott Kovac, Research Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico commented, “LANL and DOE once again treat New Mexico as their nuclear colony with their radioactive releases, obstruction of cleanup and expansion of nuclear weapons programs. The day will come when this is no longer tolerated in the Land of Enchantment.”
Sources:
June 2016, State of New Mexico Environment Department, Compliance Order on Consent U.S. Department of Energy – Los Alamos National Laboratory (Modified September 2024)
June 18, 2025 Letter from DOE to NMED, Deferment of Corrective Action Activities for Solid Waste Management Unit 50-009 at Material Disposal Area C under the 2016 Compliance Order on Consent
July 2, 2025 Letter from NMED to DOE, Response, Deferment of Corrective Action Activities for Solid Waste Management Unit 50-009 at Material Disposal Area C
July 9, 2025, LANL and NNSA to NMED, Response to June 9, 2025 Letter, Temporary Authorization Los Alamos National Laboratory Hazardous Waste Facility Permit
Department of Energy FY 2026 Congressional Budget Request, Laboratory Table
A NASA Nuclear Reactor On The Moon? Bold Proposal Is Unfeasible By 2030– Here’s Why.
There are already many complications in this proposal,
which has not been officially released yet. The Trump administration
proposed a budget that would devastate NASA’s multiple science programs,
and while it asked for more funding for human spaceflight in the short
term, it would cancel the Space Launch System and Orion Spacecraft, making
NASA exclusively reliant on private companies to get to the Moon. As yet,
we don’t have one of those that won’t stop exploding.
IFL Science 5th Aug 2025, https://www.iflscience.com/a-nasa-nuclear-reactor-on-the-moon-bold-proposal-is-unfeasible-by-2030-heres-why-80289
When the Press Becomes the Enemy: The Erosion of Media Independence in Trump’s America
6 August 2025 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/when-the-press-becomes-the-enemy-the-erosion-of-media-independence-in-trumps-america/
A free and independent press is one of democracy’s last lines of defense. It’s where power is questioned, facts are verified, and the public gains its understanding of the world. But under President Trump’s leadership – particularly in his second term – the media has been steadily undermined, attacked, and manipulated into submission.
From the earliest days of his political rise, Trump branded the press “the enemy of the people.” At the time, it sounded like theatre – one of his many outrageous slogans designed to rile up the crowd. But over time, it became policy. Journalists were banned from briefings. Reporters were publicly harassed at rallies. Entire news organisations were delegitimised as “fake news” unless they offered praise. What started as rhetoric turned into a campaign of disinformation and intimidation.
This erosion of media independence has happened in two key ways: by silencing critical voices, and by co-opting sympathetic ones.
Independent journalists now work under constant threat. Legal pressure, license challenges, defamation suits, and even surveillance have become tools to muzzle dissent. Whistleblowers are prosecuted, not protected. Major networks once known for tough questions now pull their punches – or are simply locked out.
At the same time, pro-Trump media outlets have risen in influence, often indistinguishable from state-run propaganda. Whether it’s Fox News personalities given cabinet positions, or social media influencers granted White House access in exchange for loyalty, the lines between journalism and political theatre have blurred.
These outlets don’t challenge power – they amplify it. They repeat Trump’s talking points uncritically, flood the zone with outrage and distraction, and vilify any journalist who dares to question the narrative. The result is an information landscape where truth becomes tribal, and lies travel faster than facts.
Why does this matter? Because a democracy without a free press cannot stay democratic for long. When citizens no longer trust what they see or hear – when news becomes just another weapon of the powerful – then accountability dies, and corruption thrives.
Some journalists continue to fight. They fact-check, investigate, and shine light where it’s needed most. But their space is shrinking, and their safety increasingly uncertain. In many ways, the press has not just been pushed to the sidelines – it’s been made part of the battlefield.
History teaches us that authoritarian regimes always start by silencing the press. What’s unfolding in America is no exception. We may still have newspapers, networks, and headlines – but when truth itself is up for debate, freedom is already slipping through our fingers.
Tepco wraps up latest round of treated water release in Fukushima
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings said Sunday that it has completed
the second round of its fiscal 2025 release of treated water into the ocean
from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
The discharge of the water, containing radioactive tritium, was suspended due to a tsunami caused by a major earthquake near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula last week, but there
were no problems with the facilities involved in the operation. In the
second round, which began on July 14, Tepco diluted 7,800 tons of treated
water with large amounts of seawater before releasing it about 1 kilometer
off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture through an undersea tunnel. In the
current fiscal year through next March, a total of 54,600 tons will be
released into the sea in seven rounds, at the same pace as the previous
year.
Japan Times 3rd Aug 2025, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/08/03/japan/tepco-2nd-round-treated-water-release/
Sizewell C to give jobs to hundreds of ex-offenders
Hundreds of ex-offenders will be hired to work on the construction of the
Sizewell C nuclear power station as part of a drive to generate broader
social and economic benefits from big public infrastructure projects.
Sizewell C, which was given the final go-ahead last month, is already
working with local prisons in Suffolk to design training courses in
welding, construction, engineering and hospitality that are aimed at
equipping inmates with the skills needed to work on the plant.
The Observer 3rd Aug 2025, https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/a-second-chance-sizewell-c-to-give-jobs-to-hundreds-of-ex-offenders
Hiroshima’s fading legacy: the race to secure survivors’ memories amid a new era of nuclear brinkmanship.
Eighty years on from the destruction of the city, registered survivors of the blast – known as hibakusha – have fallen below 100,000
Justin McCurry in Hiroshima, Tue 5 Aug 2025 , https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/05/hiroshima-atomic-bomb-80-year-anniversary-survivors
The fires were still burning, and the dead lay where they had fallen, when a 10-year-old Yoshiko Niiyama entered Hiroshima, two days after it was destroyed by an American atomic bomb.
“I remember that the air was filled with smoke and there were bodies everywhere … and it was so hot,” Niiyama says in an interview at her home in the Hiroshima suburbs. “The faces of the survivors were so badly disfigured that I didn’t want to look at them. But I had to.”
Niiyama and her eldest sister had rushed to the city to search for their father, Mitsugi, who worked in a bank located just 1km from the hypocentre. They had been evacuated to a neighbourhood just outside the city, but knew something dreadful had happened in Hiroshima when they saw trucks passing their temporary home carrying badly burned victims.
As Hiroshima prepares to mark 80 years since the city was destroyed in the world’s first nuclear attack, the 90-year-old is one of a small number of hibakusha – survivors of the atomic bombings – still able to recall the horrors they witnessed after their home was reduced to rubble in an instant.
At 8:15am on 6 August, the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, dropped a nuclear bomb on the city. “Little Boy” detonated about 600 metres from the ground, with a force equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Between 60,000 and 80,000 people were killed instantly, with the death toll rising to 140,000 by the end of the year as victims succumbed to burns and illnesses caused by acute exposure to radiation.
Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 74,000. And on 15 August, a demoralised Japan surrendered, bringing an end to the second world war.
Niiyama, one of four sisters, never found her father or his remains, which were likely incinerated along with those of his colleagues. “My father was tall, so for a long time whenever I saw a tall man from behind, I would run up to him thinking it might be him,” she says. “But it never was.”
With the number of people who survived the bombing and witnessed its immediate aftermath dwindling by the year, it is being left to younger people to continue to communicate the horrors inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For decades Niiyama, who is a registered hibakusha, said nothing of the trauma she had suffered as a schoolgirl, not even to members of her own family. “I didn’t want to remember what had happened,” she says. “And many hibakusha stayed quiet as they knew they might face discrimination, like not being able to marry or find a job. There were rumours that children born to hibakusha would be deformed.”
It was only when her granddaughter, Kyoko Niiyama, then a high school student, asked her about her wartime experiences that Niiyama broke her silence.
“When my children are older, they’ll naturally ask about what happened to their grandmother,” says the younger Niiyama, 35, a reporter for a local newspaper and the mother of two young children. “It would be such a shame if I wasn’t able to tell them … that’s why I decided to ask my grandmother about the bomb.”
She is one of a growing number of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki studying to become “family successors” – a local government initiative that certifies the descendants of first-generation hibakusha to record and pass on the experiences of the only people on earth to have lived through nuclear warfare.
“Now that the anniversary is approaching, I can talk to her again,” Kyoko says. “This is a really precious time for our family.”
‘I don’t want to think about that day’
Last year, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks won recognition for their campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons when Nihon Hidankyo – a nationwide network of hibakusha – was awarded the Nobel peace prize.
But survivors face a race against time to ensure that their message lives on in a world that is edging closer to a new age of nuclear brinkmanship.
The world’s nine nuclear states are spending billions of dollars on modernising, and in some cases expanding, their arsenals. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has refused to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine, and last week a veiled nuclear threat by the country’s former leader, Dmitry Medvedev, prompted Donald Trump – who had earlier compared US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks – to claim that he had moved two nuclear submarines closer to the region. North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons continues unchecked.
“The hibakusha have spent their lifetimes courageously telling their stories again and again, essentially reliving their childhood traumas – to make sure the world learns the reality of what nuclear weapons actually do to people and why they must be abolished, so that no one else goes through what they have suffered,” says Melissa Parke, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
“These brave hibakusha deserve to have their decades of campaigning vindicated and to witness the elimination of nuclear weapons in their lifetimes. This would provide some nuclear justice.”
The number of registered survivors of both attacks fell to just below 100,000 this year, according to the health ministry, compared with more than 372,000 in 1981. Their average age is 86. Just one of the 78 people confirmed to have been within 500 metres of the hypocentre of the blast in Hiroshima is still alive – an 89-year-old man.
On the eve of the anniversary, the ministry said it would no longer conduct a survey every 10 years to assess the living conditions and health of hibakusha, saying it wanted to “lessen the burden” on ageing survivors.
Niiyama, who struggles to walk, will watch Wednesday’s ceremony at home and pause to remember her father, whose memory is represented by a teacup he used that was retrieved from the devastation.
“I don’t like the month of August,” she says. “I have nightmares around the anniversary. I don’t want to think about that day, but I can’t forget it. But I’m glad I still remember that I’m a hibakusha.”
Niiyama, who struggles to walk, will watch Wednesday’s ceremony at home and pause to remember her father, whose memory is represented by a teacup he used that was retrieved from the devastation.
“I don’t like the month of August,” she says. “I have nightmares around the anniversary. I don’t want to think about that day, but I can’t forget it. But I’m glad I still remember that I’m a hibakusha.”
Trump and Zelensky, two cornered rats with no way out of Ukraine catastrophe
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, 5 Aug 25
Ukraine’s military is being systematically obliterated on the battlefield. US President Trump knows this. Ukraine President Zelensky does as well.
Yet, both are pretending the war can be won on terms favorable to the US and Ukraine. Trump is threatening secondary sanctions on nations buying Russian oil if Russia doesn’t end the war by August 8. Zelensky applauds this threat. Trump is also selling additional weapons to NATO allies to give to Ukraine’s lost cause.
Neither of Trump’s actions will have any effect on Ukraine’s impending battlefield defeat. Trump gets the ‘rat’ designation because he broke his campaign pledge to end the war by withdrawing US support and forcing Ukraine to negotiate the war’s end. But since that signals defeat of the US proxy war to weaken Russia, he clearly has decided it’s better to keep the war going rather than suffer a humiliating defeat. That merely ensures Ukraine’s near complete destruction as a functioning state.
Zelensky earned his ‘rat’ designation when he bailed out of ending the war in April 2022. He was on the cusp of a negotiated settlement with Russia that would have ended Ukraine’s effort to join NATO and guaranteed regional independence for Russian cultured Ukrainians in Donbas. For Ukraine it would have mean no lost territory and no massive casualties or infrastructure destruction. That is classic diplomacy achieving win-win.
But the rat Zelensky caved to US/UK pressure to dump that deal because Zelensky believed US/UK lies he could win simply with continued Western weapons. That, along with Trump’s refusal to end the war after promising to end it, has put Ukraine into a death spiral.
So with no way to win on the battlefield, our cornered rats are risking nuclear war every day this catastrophe continues. Zelensky keeps begging for long range NATO missies to attack deep into Russia. While that has no strategic value, it has value in provoking a Russian nuclear response, something to which Zelensky remains oblivious.
The nuclear risk Trump has embarked upon is even more reckless. He responded to a harmless Russian social media comment about a potential US/Russia nuclear confrontation, by sending two Ohio Class nuclear submarines toward Russian waters. Just as provocative and reckless, Trump’s sent B61-12 nuclear gravity bombs to the UK. These are offensive weapons having nothing do with will standard NATO defensive weaponry. They are the first delivery of these offensive weapons to the UK since removing them in 2008.
To Trump, reckless action is an appropriate response to relatively harmless words. Particularly since Trump is he world champ at using social media to threaten, browbeat friends and foes alike.
It’s not just the beleaguered people of Ukraine whose lives are threatened by the two cornered rats with no sane, safe way out of the lost war in Ukraine. It is all of us.
Trump’s Nuclear Energy Overhaul Sparks Alarms Over Safety.
Oil Price, By Felicity Bradstock – Aug 03, 2025
- Trump has announced plans to quadruple U.S. nuclear power by 2050, pushing for rapid approval of new reactors and slashing regulatory barriers.
- Experts warn that undermining the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission could erode essential safety standards and risk public backlash.
- Critics argue the slow growth of U.S. nuclear energy stems from high costs, not overregulation, citing costly delays at projects like Plant Vogtle.
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is betting big on nuclear power and aims to fast-track projects to prepare for the massive increase in electricity demand over the next decade. However, experts fear that his plans to accelerate project development could compromise safety standards, particularly as the independent U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission comes under threat.
In May, the Trump administration announced a target to deploy 300 GW of net new nuclear capacity by 2050 to quadruple domestic nuclear power, as well as to begin construction on 10 large reactors by 2030 and expand domestic nuclear fuel production. Trump signed three executive orders to support these aims: Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Deployment of Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security; and Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy.
Trump’s orders establish arbitrary deadlines for decisions on construction permits and operating licenses, even for new designs that have not yet been assessed; demand a review of all NRC regulations within 18 months; and allow for the construction of nuclear reactors on federal lands without NRC review.
While deploying more nuclear power could help the U.S. respond to the rising domestic electricity demand, there are widespread concerns that President Trump’s rapid approval of new nuclear projects threatens to weaken the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which assesses projects for health and safety and ensures reactors operate securely. The objective of Trump’s executive orders is to reduce regulations and accelerate the approval of nuclear plants by overhauling the NRC…………………………………………..
………………. Weakening the powers of the independent NRC to give greater control to the government’s Department of Energy and Defence undermines the stringent safety standards that were previously enforced for the development and running of nuclear plants. At worst, this could lead to another nuclear disaster, which could jeopardise the health, or even lives, of people across the U.S. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Trumps-Nuclear-Energy-Overhaul-Sparks-Alarms-Over-Safety.html
Dare To Hope
Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 04, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/dare-to-hope?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=170050544&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
At least 100,000 Australians, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, marched for Gaza across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the pouring rain at a demonstration on Sunday.
It wasn’t that long ago when I sincerely wondered if we’d ever see Assange’s face again, let alone in public, let alone in Sydney, let alone heading up what had to be one of the largest pro-Palestine rallies ever held in Australia. Dare to be encouraged. The light is breaking through.
The western political/media class is fuming with outrage about images of Israeli hostages who are severely emaciated, which just says so much about how dehumanized Palestinians are in western society. Everyone stop caring about hundreds of thousands of starving Palestinians, it turns out two Israeli hostages are starving in the same way for the same reason.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry has announced that in order to improve “public diplomacy” efforts the term “hasbara” will no longer be used, because people have come to associate it with lies and propaganda.
The Times of Israel reports:
“Long referred to as hasbara, a term used to denote both public relations and propaganda that has been freighted with negative baggage in recent years, the ministry now brands its approach as toda’a — which translates to ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’ — an apparent shift toward broader, more proactive messaging.
That “negative baggage” would of course be public disgust at the nonstop deluge of lies that Israel and its apologists have been spouting for two years to justify an act of genocide. Westerners have grown increasingly aware that Israel and its defenders have a special word for their practice of manipulating public narratives about their beloved apartheid state, so they’re changing the word.
Simply stopping the genocide is not considered as an option. Simply ceasing to lie is not considered as an option. They’re just changing the word they use for their lies about their genocide.
One of the reasons Israel’s supporters love to hurl antisemitism accusations at its critics is because it’s a claim that can be made without any evidence whatsoever. It’s not an accusation based on facts, it’s an assertion about someone’s private thoughts and feelings, which are invisible. Support for Israel doesn’t lend itself to arguments based on facts, logic and morality, so they rely heavily on aggressive claims about what’s happening inside other people’s heads which cannot be proved or disproved.
It’s entirely unfalsifiable. I cannot prove that my opposition to an active genocide is not in fact due to an obsessive hatred of a small Abrahamic religion. I cannot unscrew the top of my head and show everyone that I actually just think it’s bad to rain military explosives on top of a giant concentration camp full of children, and am not in fact motivated by a strange medieval urge to persecute Jewish people. So an Israel supporter can freely hurl accusations about what’s going on in my head that I am powerless to disprove.
It’s been a fairly effective weapon over the years. Campus protests have been stomped out, freedom of expression has been crushed, entire political campaigns have been killed dead, all because it’s been normalized to make evidence-free claims about someone’s private thoughts and feelings toward Jews if they suggest that Palestinians deserve human rights.
A Harvard professor of Jewish studies named Shaul Magid recently shared the following anecdote:
“I once asked someone I casually know, an ardent Zionist, ‘what could Israel do that would cause you not to support it?’. He was silent for a moment before looking at me and said, ‘Nothing.’”
This is horrifying, but facts in evidence indicate that it’s also a very common position among Zionists. If you’re still supporting Israel at this point, there’s probably nothing it could do to lose your support.
The Genocidal Partnership of Israel and the United States
The Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television………………….. the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it.”
The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the big gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the USA, consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide.
Z Network, By Norman Solomon, July 28, 2025
For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the ties that bind are laced with genocide. The two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly – and differently – making it all possible.
The policies of Israel’s government are aligned with the attitudes of most Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey, three-quarters of them (and 64 percent of all Israelis) said they largely agreed with the statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” – nearly half of whom are children.
“There is no more ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ with regard to Israel’s evilness toward the Palestinians,” dissident columnist Gideon Levy wrote three months ago in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “It is permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death an entire people.” The biggest Israeli media outlets echo and amplify sociopathic voices. “Genocide talk has spread into all TV studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without batting an eye.”
Last week, Levy provided an update: “The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza ‘Humanitarian’ Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies…. They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.”
Unimpeded, a daily process continues to exterminate more and more of the 2.1 million Palestinian people who remain in Gaza – bombing and shooting civilians while blocking all but a pittance of the food and medicine needed to sustain life. After destroying Gaza’s hospitals, Israel is still targeting healthcare workers (killing at least 70 in May and June), as well as first responders and journalists.
The barbarism is in sync with the belief that “no innocent people” are in Gaza. A relevant observation came from Aldous Huxley in 1936, the same year that the swastika went onto Germany’s flag: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” Kristallnacht happened two years later.
Renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov explained during an interview on Democracy Now! in mid-July that genocide is “the attempt to destroy not simply people in large numbers, but to destroy them as members of a group. The intent is to destroy the group itself. And it doesn’t mean that you have to kill everyone. It means that the group will be destroyed and that it will not be able to reconstitute itself as a group. And to my mind, this is precisely what Israel is trying to do.”
Bartov, who is Jewish and spent the first half of his life in Israel, said:
“What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it’s done in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza. In part, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television. If some pictures happen to come in, they are presented only as material that might be used by foreign propaganda against Israel. Now, Israeli citizens can, of course, use other media resources. We can all do that. But most of them prefer not to. And I would say that while about 30 percent of the population in Israel is completely in favor of what is happening, and, in fact, is egging the government and the army on, I think the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it.”
In Israel, “compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists,” Adam Shatz wrote last month in the London Review of Books. At the same time, “the catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba.” The consequences “are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.”
The loudest preaching for a “rules-based order” has come from the U.S. government, which makes and breaks international rules at will. …………………………………
Israel’s grisly performance as “a new Sparta” in the region is coproduced by the Pentagon, with the military and intelligence operations of the two nations intricately entangled. The Israeli military has been able to turn Gaza into a genocide zone with at least 70 percent of its arsenal coming from the United States.
………………………………..The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the big gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the USA, consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide. https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-genocidal-partnership-of-israel-and-the-united-states/
Nasa to put nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030 – US media
US space agency Nasa will fast-track plans to build a nuclear reactor on
the Moon by 2030, according to US media. It is part of US ambitions to
build a permanent base for humans to live on the lunar surface. According
to Politico, the acting head of Nasa referred to similar plans by China and
Russia and said those two countries “could potentially declare a keep-out
zone” on the Moon. But questions remain about how realistic the goal and
timeframe are, given recent and steep Nasa budget cuts, and some scientists
are concerned that the plans are driven by geopolitical goals.
BBC 5th Aug 2025,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cev2dylxv74o
EDF shifts nuclear strategy to domestic projects
August 5, 2025, https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/edf-shifts-nuclear-strategy-to-domestic-projects/?cf-view&cf-closed
rance’s state-run utility EDF is planning to reduce its overseas sales workforce by 60 positions including 10 in management, and withdraw from certain international nuclear projects to concentrate on a domestic construction programme under its new CEO Bernard Fontana, as reported by Reuters. France is retreating from its position as a global leader in nuclear power, amid rising global demand, allowing new competitors to emerge as high costs and design challenges hinder its international competitiveness.
M. Fontana aims to accelerate the modernisation of France’s nuclear fleet, expressing a commitment to focus on domestic projects rather than the international operations that have previously included reactor construction in China, Finland and Britain. Recent changes include focusing on tenders in the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland, while deprioritising projects in Poland, India and Canada. This shift is expected to cut costs and reallocate resources to higher-priority initiatives. EDF’s recent international projects have experienced significant delays and cost overruns. In 2024, it lost a bid for two new reactors in the Czech Republic to South Korea’s KHNP.
The French government identifies the new French nuclear programme as a priority. President Emmanuel Macron announced plans in early 2022 for six new reactors to replace ageing plants, with projected costs of €67bn ($78.7bn). But the company is indebted owing to costly repairs made to its nuclear fleet in recent years. EDF is considering the sale of certain renewable energy assets in North America and Brazil.
1 This Month
PLEASE OPPOSE HR 8255 AND S.3639 – bills would accelerate satellite deployment, with no environmental review or safeguards – https://ncstd5li.quorum.us/campaign/169331/
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