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South Bruce Municipality narrowly votes to host underground nuclear waste disposal site

Matthew McClearn, October 28, 2024, Globe and Mail,

Residents in Ontario’s Municipality of South Bruce narrowly voted in favor of hosting a nuclear waste disposal site in a referendum completed on Monday.

Unofficial results published Monday evening by Simply Voting, an online voting platform, reported that of the 3,130 votes case, 51.2% voted in favor, while 48.8% were opposed.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), a non-profit organization representing major nuclear power generation utilities, has been hunting since 2010 for a site to store spent fuel from nuclear power reactors. Known as a deep geological repository, or DGR, the facility would be built more than half a kilometer underground, at an estimated cost of $26 billion.

South Bruce, located more than 120 kilometres north of London and home to about 6,200 residents, is a rural, largely agricultural area of less than 500 square kilometers. It includes a few small communities including Mildmay, Formosa, Culross and Teeswater. The NWMO has secured more than 1,500 acres of land north of Teeswater for the project.

From the outset, the NWMO said it would build the facility only “in an area with informed and willing hosts,” which meant one municipality and one Indigenous group. South Bruce is one of two finalists to host the DGR, down from an original list of 22 communities that expressed interest. The NWMO said it will announce its final selection by Dec. 31st.

Under a hosting agreement the municipality signed earlier this year, South Bruce stands to receive $418-million over nearly a century and a half if selected. The municipality agreed not to do anything to oppose or halt the project, and at the NWMO’s request will communicate its support. The NWMO can modify the project in several respects, including changing the sorts of waste it will store there. The facility would be constructed between 2036 and 2042, ns would then receive, process and store nuclear waste for another half-century.

South Bruce’s byelection, which began last week, asked residents to vote by phone or Internet on whether they were in favor of hosting the DGR. Simply Voting reported turnout of 69.3%, substantially above the 50% minimum required to make the outcome binding under Ontario’s Municipal Elections Act.

The other community in the running is Ignace, Ont., a town of 1,200 more than 200 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay. Its council voted to accept the DGR in July, and would receive $170-million under its own hosting agreement. (The move was supported by 77% of registered voters who participated in a non-binding online poll.) That location, known as the Revell site, is about 40 km west of the town.

The NWMO also seeks approval from two Indigenous communities: The Saugeen Ojibway Nation for the South Bruce site, and the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation for the Revell site. Neither First Nation has yet signaled consent, but the NWMO spokesperson Craig MacBride said the organization is “in active discussions” with both.

“The NWMO still anticipates selecting a site by the end of this year,” he wrote in an e-mailed response to questions.

As of June 2023, Canada had accumulated 3.3 million spent fuel bundles, each the size of a fire log. They’re currently stored at nuclear power plants in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, and roughly 90,000 new ones are added each year. Upon removal from a reactor, they’re highly radioactive and must be stored in pools of water for about a decade; afterward, they’re moved to storage containers made from reinforced concrete and lined with half-inch steel plate.

The South Bruce referendum follows a campaign that lasted a dozen years and produced rifts within the community.

Protect Our Waterways, a local group opposed to the DGR from the outset, had demanded a referendum. Some DGR supporters opposed putting the matter to a public vote, preferring to leave the decision to elected officials. Municipal officials pointed to the area’s declining economy and population, and emphasized the benefits brought by the NWMO’s spending. Supporters and opponents often accused each other of producing misinformation………………………………………………………….. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-south-bruce-municipality-narrowly-votes-to-host-underground-nuclear/#:~:text=Its%20council%20voted%20to%20accept,km%20west%20of%20the%20town.

October 30, 2024 Posted by | Canada, politics | Leave a comment

Oxfam reaction to Knesset decision

October 29, 2024, by: The AIM Network,  https://theaimn.com/oxfam-reaction-to-knesset-decision/—

Oxfam Australia

In reaction to the Knesset passing bills banning UNRWA from operating in areas under Israel’s control, Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam Regional Director in the Middle East and North Africa said:

“Israel has bombed Palestinians to death, maimed them, starved them, and is now ridding them of their biggest lifeline of aid. Piece by piece, Israel is systemically dismantling Gaza as a land that is autonomous and liveable for Palestinians. Its banning of UNRWA today is condemnable and another step in this crime.

“The decision will further undermine the ability of the international community to provide sufficient humanitarian aid and to save lives in any safe, independent and impartial way.

“UNRWA was not only the biggest and most established agency that has been delivering aid and sustenance to the people of Gaza for years, it was also a thread that connected them in some hope of solidarity and security to the United Nations.

“We are in no doubt that Israel and its allies are fully aware of the terrible consequences that this decision will have on Palestinians living in Gaza, many of whom are already starving. We join others in warning again that this will result in more death, more suffering, and more forced displacement of people from their besieged homeland. It is impossible not to believe that this is their aim.”

October 30, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | 1 Comment

Biden to Bibi: ‘OK to continue Gaza genocide till after election’

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coaliton, Glen Ellyn IL, 27 Oct 24

On October 14, President Biden sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving Israel 30 days to allow more aid of food, water and medicine into Gaza’s 139 square miles being utterly destroyed by Israel for the past year. It’s noteworthy that the 30 day time limit ends 9 days after the US election. Biden’s letter is brilliant politics and grotesque governance. Biden, who has been funding, supporting and enabling the yearlong genocide in Gaza, desperately needs to appear peace loving ahead of the election. He knows a majority of his Democratic voters are horrified by his genocide enabling. They want him to end the so far 50,000 tons of weapons he’s already given Israel to demolish Gaza.

The letter, designed to promote his concern for the devastation he’s enabled, will do nothing to end the genocide in Gaza. Netanyahu has ignored every one of Biden’s pleas for supplying life sustaining aid there. The letter doesn’t even state Biden will cut off aid to Israel. It merely implies that if US demands aren’t met, the US might consider enforcing foreign assistance laws. Those laws forbid the US from sending weapons to any nation committing wholesale destruction of civilian populations. But not one word about actually cutting off those weapons destroying Gaza.   

Every day dozens, hundreds, even a thousand or more Palestinians die in Gaza, obliterated by Biden’s 2,000 lb. bombs, or killed more slowly from disease or starvation. Biden does not care. His toothless letter begging for more aid to the 2,300,000 Palestinians will do nothing to alleviate their suffering. But it may mollify his antiwar critics enough to help achieve Democratic victory Election Day.

Win or lose November 5, Biden is unlikely to do anything substantive to end the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It goes against everything he’s believed in and supported about Israeli colonial domination of Palestine for his entire 52 year governmental career. But it will ensure he descends into historical infamy for enabling the worst genocide of the 21st century. 

October 29, 2024 Posted by | Israel, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Media Hawks Make Case for War Against Iran

This depiction of Iran as an aggressor that has victimized the United States for 45 years, causing “suffering for thousands of Americans,” is a parody of history. The fact is that the US has imposed suffering on millions of Iranians for 71 years, starting with the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. It propped up the brutal Pahlavi dictatorship until 1979, then backed Iraq’s invasion of Iran, helping Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons against Iranians (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13). It imposes murderous sanctions on Iran to this day (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23).

What Stephens is deploying here is the tired and baseless propaganda strategy of hinting that World War II redux is impending if America doesn’t crush the Third World bad guy of the moment.

Gregory Shupak, FAIR, 25 Oct 24

The media hawks are flying high, pushing out bellicose rhetoric on the op-ed pages that seems calculated to whip the public into a war-ready frenzy.

Just as they have done with Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 10/10/24), prominent conservative media opinionators misrepresent Iran as the aggressor against an Israel that practices admirable restraint.

Under the headline, “Iran Opens the Door to Retaliation,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (10/1/24) wrote that Iran’s October 1 operation against Israel “warrants a response targeting Iran’s military and nuclear assets. This is Iran’s second missile barrage since April, and no country can let this become a new normal.”

The editors wrote:

After April’s attack, the Biden administration pressured Israel for a token response, and President Biden said Israel should “take the win” since there was no great harm to Israel. Israel’s restraint has now yielded this escalation, and it is under no obligation to restrain its retaliation this time.

‘We need to escalate’

The New York Times‘ self-described “warmongering neocon” columnist Bret Stephens (10/1/24), in a piece headlined “We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran,” similarly filed Iran’s April and October strikes on Israel under “aggression” that requires a US/Israeli military “response.” And a Boston Globe editorial (10/3/24) wrote that Iran “launched a brazen attack,” arguing that the incident illustrated why US students are wrong to oppose American firms making or investing in Israeli weapons.

All of these pieces conveniently neglected to mention that Iran announced that its October 1 missile barrage was “a response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Hezbollah and Hamas” (Responsible Statecraft, 10/1/24). One of these assassinations was carried out by a bombing in Tehran, the Iranian capital. But we can only guess as to whether the Globe thinks those killings are “brazen,” Stephens thinks they qualify as “aggression,” or if the Journal believes any country can let such assassinations “become a new normal.”

Likewise, Iran’s April strikes came after Israel’s attack on an Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers (CBS, 4/14/24). At the time, Iran reportedly said that it would refrain from striking back against Israel if the latter agreed to end its mass murder campaign in Gaza (Responsible Statecraft, 4/8/24).

‘Axis of Aggression’

A second Stephens piece (New York Times, 10/8/24) claimed that “the American people had better hope Israel wins” in its war against “the Axis of Aggression led from Tehran.” The latter is his term for the coalition of forces resisting the US and Israel from Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran, which refers to itself as the “axis of resistance.” Stephens’ reasoning is that, since Iran’s 1979 revolution, the country has meant suffering for thousands of Americans: the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran; the diplomatsand Marines in Beirut; the troops around Baghdad and Basra, killed by munitions built in Iran and supplied to proxies in Iraq; the American citizens routinely taken as prisoners in Iran; the Navy SEALs who perished in January trying to stop Iran from supplying Houthis with weapons used against commercial shipping.

The war Israelis are fighting now—the one the news media often mislabels the “Gaza war,” but is really between Israel and Iran—is fundamentally America’s war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing; an enemy that has been attacking us for 45 years. Americans should consider ourselves fortunate that Israel is bearing the brunt of the fighting; the least we can do is root for it.

This depiction of Iran as an aggressor that has victimized the United States for 45 years, causing “suffering for thousands of Americans,” is a parody of history. The fact is that the US has imposed suffering on millions of Iranians for 71 years, starting with the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. It propped up the brutal Pahlavi dictatorship until 1979, then backed Iraq’s invasion of Iran, helping Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons against Iranians (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13). It imposes murderous sanctions on Iran to this day (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23).

Given this background, suggesting—as the Journal, the Globe and Stephens do—that Iran is the aggressor against the US is not only untenable but laughable. Furthermore, as I’ve previously shown (FAIR.org, 1/21/20), it’s hardly a settled fact that Iran is responsible for Iraqi attacks on US occupation forces in the country. Stephens’ description of the Navy SEALs who died in the Red Sea is vague enough that one might be left with the impression that Iran or Ansar Allah killed them, but the SEALs died when one of them fell overboard and the other jumped into the water to try to save him (BBC, 1/22/24).

Stephens went on:

Those who care about the future of freedom had better hope Israel wins.

We are living in a world that increasingly resembles the 1930s, when cunning and aggressive dictatorships united against debilitated, inward-looking, risk-averse democracies. Today’s dictatorships also know how to smell weakness. We would all be safer if, in the Middle East, they finally learned the taste of defeat.

What Stephens is deploying here is the tired and baseless propaganda strategy of hinting that World War II redux is impending if America doesn’t crush the Third World bad guy of the moment. More realistically, the “future of freedom” is jeopardized by the US/Israeli alliance’s invading the lands of Palestinian and Lebanese people and massacring them. These crimes suggest that, in the Journal’s parlance, it’s the US/Israeli partnership that is the “regional and global menace.” Or, to borrow another phrase from the Journal’s editorial, it’s Israel and the US who are the “dangerous regime[s]” from which “the civilized world” must be defended.

‘A global menace’

Corporate media commentators didn’t stop at Iran’s direct strikes on Israel, casting Iran as, in the Journal‘s words (10/1/24), “a regional and global menace”:…………………………………………………………………

Painting Iran as the mastermind behind unprovoked worldwide aggression helps prop up the hawks’ demands for escalation. But the US State Department said there was “no direct evidence” that Iran was involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, “either in planning it or carrying it out” (NBC, 10/12/23)…………………………………………………………………………………..

Propaganda goes nuclear

As usual, those who are itching for a war on Iran invoke the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Stephens (New York Times, 10/1/24) wrote:

This year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Iran was within a week or two of being able to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. Even with the requisite fissile material, it takes time and expertise to fashion a nuclear weapon, particularly one small enough to be delivered by a missile. But a prime goal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions is plainly in sight, especially if it receives technical help from its new best friends in Russia, China and North Korea.

Now’s the time for someone to do something about it.

That someone will probably be Israel.

By “something,” Stephens said he also meant that “Biden should order” military strikes to destroy the “Isfahan missile complex.” “There is a uranium enrichment site near Isfahan, too,” Stephens wrote suggestively.

The LA Times published two guest op-eds in less than two weeks urging attacks on Iran based on its alleged nuclear threat. Yossi Klein Halevi (10/7/24) wrote:…………………………………..

‘Threshold’ is a ways away…………………………………………………….

Recent history shows that Iran has been willing to “stop itself” from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran abided by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal, under which Iran limited its nuclear development in exchange for a partial easing of US sanctions. It stuck to the deal for some time even after the United States unilaterally abandoned it.

Just before President Donald Trump ripped up the agreement in 2018, the IAEA reported that Iran was “implementing its nuclear-related commitments” under the accord. The year after the US abrogated the agreement, Iran was still keeping up its end of the bargain.

‘Provocative actions’ from US/Israel

Iran subsequently stopped adhering to the by then nonexistent deal—often advancing its nuclear program, as Responsible Statecraft (5/7/24) noted, “in response to provocative actions from the US and Israel”:

In early 2020, the Trump administration killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and soon after Tehran announced that it would no longer abide by its enrichment commitments under the deal. But, even so, Tehran said it would return to compliance if the other parties did so and met their commitments on sanctions relief.

In late 2020, Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated near Tehran, reportedly by Israel. Soon after, Iran’s Guardian Council approved a law to speed up the nuclear program by enriching uranium to 20%, increasing the rate of production, installing new centrifuges, suspending implementation of expanded safeguards agreements, and reducing monitoring and verification cooperation with the IAEA. The Agency has been unable to adequately monitor Iran’s nuclear activities under the deal since early 2021.

However, situating Iranian policies in relation to US/Israeli actions like these would get in the way of the Journal’s campaign, which it articulated in another editorial (10/2/24), to convince the public that “If Mr. Biden won’t take this opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, the least he can do is not stop Israel from doing the job for its own self-preservation.”

Of course, the crucial, unstated assumption in the articles by Stephens, Halevi, Heilman and the Journal’s editors is that Iran’s hypothetical nuclear weapons are emergencies that need to be immediately addressed by bombing the country—while Washington and Tel Aviv’s vast, actually existing nuclear arsenals warrant no concern. https://fair.org/home/media-hawks-make-case-for-war-against-iran/

October 29, 2024 Posted by | Iran, media | Leave a comment

‘You couldn’t make this up’: Expert pans Ontario nuclear option

SMH, By Bianca Hall and Nick O’Malley, October 28, 2024

Ontario subsidises its citizens’ electricity power bills by $7.3 billion a year from general revenue, an international energy expert has said, contradicting the Coalition’s claim that nuclear reactors would drive power prices down in Australia.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has repeatedly cited the Canadian province as a model for cheaper power prices from nuclear.

“In Ontario, that family is paying half of what the family is paying here in Perth for their electricity because of nuclear power,” Dutton said in March. “Why wouldn’t we consider it as a country?”

In July, Dutton said Canadian consumers paid about one-quarter of Australian prices for electricity.

Professor Mark Winfield, an academic from York University in Canada who specialises in energy and environment, on Monday said the reaction among people in Ontario to the comparison had ranged from disbelief to “you couldn’t make this up”.

Ontario embarked on a massive building spree between the 1960s and the 1990s, Winfield told a briefing hosted by the Climate Council and the Smart Energy Council.

In the process, he said, the provincial-owned utility building the generators “effectively bankrupted itself”. About $21 billion in debt had to be stranded to render the successor organisation Ontario Power Generation economically viable.

In 2015, the Canadian government approved a plan to refurbish 10 ageing reactors, but Winfield said the refurbishment program had also been beset by cost blowouts.

“The last one, [in] Darlington, east of Toronto, was supposed to cost $C4 billion and ended up costing $C14 [billion],” Winfield said.

“And that was fairly typical of what we saw, of a cost overrun in the range of about 2.5 times over estimate.”

In Melbourne, Dutton said while he respected new Queensland Premier David Crisafulli’s opposition to nuclear, he would work with “sensible” premiers in Queensland, South Australia and NSW on his plan, if he was elected………………………………………………..

Winfield said household bills were kept artificially low under the Ontario model, despite the high cost of refurbishing ageing nuclear facilities.

“There’s a legacy of that still in the system that we are effectively subsidising electricity bills to the tune of about $C7.3 billion a year out of general revenues. That constitutes most of the provincial deficit; that’s money that otherwise could be going on schools and hospitals.”

Dutton’s comments came as a parliamentary inquiry into the suitability of nuclear power for Australia continued in Canberra. Experts provided evidence on how long it would take to build a nuclear fleet, and the potential cost and impact on energy prices compared with the government’s plan to replace the ageing coal fleet with a system of renewables backed by storage and gas peakers.

……………………………………………………….. In its annual GenCost, CSIRO estimated earlier this year that a single large-scale nuclear reactor in Australia would cost $16 billion and take nearly two decades to build, too late for it to help meet Australia’s international climate change commitments, which requires it to cut emissions 43 per cent by 2030. It found renewables to be the cheapest option for Australia.

Dutton has so far refused to be drawn on the costs of his nuclear policy. Opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said the Coalition would release costings before the next federal election, which must be held by May.

O’Brien told this masthead “expert after expert” had provided evidence that nuclear energy placed downward pressure on power prices around the world. ……………. https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/you-couldn-t-make-this-up-expert-pans-ontario-nuclear-option-20241028-p5klx1.html

October 29, 2024 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, Canada, spinbuster | Leave a comment

MP seeks answers on Submarine Dismantling Project in Rosyth

26th October, By Ally McRoberts

THE UK Government have been asked what steps they’re taking to keep West Fife safe and mitigate the “potential risks” posed by the Submarine Dismantling Project.

Radioactive waste is being removed from old nuclear subs at Rosyth Dockyard and Babcock have just applied for permission for more hazardous material to be taken out in the next stage.

Christine Jardine, Lib Dem MP for Edinburgh West, submitted a question at Westminster: “To ask the Secretary of State for Defence (John Healey), what steps his department is taking to (a) ensure the safety of and (b) mitigate potential risks posed by the decommissioning of nuclear submarines at Rosyth Royal Dockyard for surrounding residential areas.”

 On Mr Healey’s
behalf, Maria Eagle, Minister for Defence Procurement, replied: “All the
submarines currently stored at Rosyth have already been de-fuelled, which
has significantly reduced overall potential risk. “Further, steps include
contractual requirements with Babcock International around safety and
environmental factors. “These include regular sampling of surrounding
waters and beaches, and dismantling one boat as a demonstrator to determine
the safest methods before starting on other boats.

 Dunfermline Press 26th Oct 2024, https://www.dunfermlinepress.com/news/24679595.mp-seeks-answers-submarine-dismantling-project-rosyth/

October 29, 2024 Posted by | decommission reactor, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Green jobs and green skills – the state of play

October 26, 2024,  https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2024/10/green-jobs-and-green-skills-state-of.html

In 2023, the global renewable energy sector witnessed a record increase in jobs, rising from 13.7 million in 2022 to 16.2 million. China led with an estimated 7.4 million renewable energy jobs, representing 46% of the global total. The EU followed with 1.8 million jobs, while Brazil had 1.56 million. The US and India each contributed nearly one million jobs. The strongest growth was seen in the solar photovoltaics sector, which accounted for 7.2 million jobs globally, with 4.6 million jobs located in China. 

However, as I have reported in earlier posts, green skill shortages may slow progress and, exploring this issue in the UK context, an Imperial College Futures Lab briefing paper has investigated the Net-Zero job skills and training requirements in the UK’s energy system. It notes that the governments advisory Committee on Climate Change (CCC) estimates that between 135,000 and 725,000 net new jobs could be created in the UK by 2030 directly in low-carbon sectors, this wide range highlighting uncertainties in estimates about the number of workers required to support the transition to Net-Zero. The Futures Lab study identifies ongoing barriers and opportunities for expanding low-carbon job competencies, culminating in a set of policy recommendations to create clear, inclusive training pathways into low-carbon energy jobs. 

Using three sectoral case studies, the paper investigates challenges and opportunities for improving skills and training. Firstly it shows how the building energy retrofit sector faces a significant shortage of skilled workers, particularly in heat pump installation, energy efficiency measures, retrofit coordination, and digital roles. Despite the potential to create 120,000–230,000 new jobs by 2030, it says ‘inconsistent policies and funding have hindered private investment in training’. Secondly, the offshore wind sector is forecast to employ over 100,000 workers in 2030, compared to 32,000 in 2022. But it says ‘offshore wind struggles with skills gaps in electrical, digital, consenting, and marine roles, relying on experienced workers and those from other industries to fill these gaps’. Thirdly, the paper claims the electric vehicles sector ‘could generate at least 80,000 new jobs over the next 10-15 years’ but says that this ‘is contingent on gigafactory development, with key skills needed in charging point installation, vehicle recycling, battery manufacturing, and electrification engineering.’    

Most of these cases involve expanding training for specific green energy technologies and electrification, but the report says that ‘not all industrial decarbonisation can be achieved through direct electrification, and particularly across hard-to-abate industries, decarbonisation will depend on the development of hydrogen and CCUS sectors’. It notes that ‘growth of these sectors is considered highly conditional, subject to the competitiveness of international markets, the availability of skilled labour, and levels of investment,’ but reports that the CCC estimates that ‘these industries could create between 1,500 and 97,000 new jobs by 2030’. It adds that ‘the current offshore oil and gas workforce is expected to provide a large number of skills required in these sectors’. 

That’s good news (arguably blue hydrogen/CCUS apart) but making it happen won’t be easy. It is interesting in this context that there has recently been a call for £1.9bn a year to help oil and gas workers move into clean energy, with the Green Jobs Taskforce also estimating that ‘the low-carbon transport sector could create 78,000 new jobs by 2040, including 24,500 in battery manufacturing, 43,500 in the battery supply chain, and 10,000 in EV manufacturing’. 

Looking to the way ahead, the Future Lab identify a series of barriers facing this type of job transition. First come straight forward ‘skills transferability’ barriers.  For example it notes that it has been estimated that 100,000 jobs in the UK’s offshore energy sector will be filled by workers transferring from oil and gas into offshore renewable roles, and by new entrants from outside the sector. But it says  ‘there is debate about how transferable skills across high- and low-carbon sectors actually are, and whether a ‘topping up’ of skills or more rigorous retraining will be required for those transitioning’.    

Then there are mobility barriers. ‘Whether or not workers are able to take low-carbon jobs will depend on where and when existing jobs are being lost and new jobs become available. It will also depend on the supply of and demand for relevant training, which is likely to be unevenly distributed in terms of quantity and quality. If green jobs or re-skilling opportunities do not appear in areas where jobs have been phased out, workers will either have to lose out on opportunities, seek employment in other high-carbon sectors, or relocate, which risks reinforcing existing regional inequalities.’  

That links up to regional barriers. It says  ‘UK regions with a higher concentration of energy-intensive industries, such as the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the West Midlands, stand a higher chance of being negatively affected by the transition. These regions are often also those whose economies have seen the least growth in recent decades. They are also likely to have less capacity and resources to be able to provide adequate re-skilling support’. 

And finally there are diversity barriers. The report notes that ‘the current energy sector is predominantly represented by white male workers. Available statistics suggest that only 5% of the workforce comes from BAME backgrounds. Unless active measures are taken to support underrepresented groups joining the Net-Zero energy workforce, occupational gender & ethnicity gaps are likely to persist’.  

Some of the reports recommended actions are obvious enough from the foregoing analysis.  For example green sectors should be ‘inclusive and respectful places to work, where underrepresented groups not liable to be discriminated against’, and we should build ‘closer links between high- and low-carbon energy sectors to create direct routes into new jobs.’  

More specifically ‘current public financing mechanisms for skills, including the Apprenticeship Levy, the National Skills Fund, and the Adult Education Budget, should be reviewed to see how funding can be better directed towards the development of training for green jobs. Additional public funding should also be leveraged to support long-term development of skills for Net-Zero, specifically for FE colleges and training providers to be able to develop new, high-quality green courses and overcome low participation rates. There is also a case for targeted funding for SMEs who cannot afford to send staff to be trained or take on apprentices’. And more generally, ‘introduce a national Net-Zero Skills Commission to take on monitoring, research and advisory roles to support development of skills for the Net-Zero transition in England.’

Plenty of good ideas. Let’s hope some are implemented soon, and meantime, the UK government is pushing ahead with its ‘skills passport’ initiative. In parallel, we hope helpfully, OU Visiting Research Fellow Terry Cook and I are putting together a journal paper on this whole area, looking in particular at what governments can do at the strategic level, by making new energy technology funding/subsidies conditional on the provision of green skill training programmes.  

October 28, 2024 Posted by | employment, renewable, UK | Leave a comment

Israel’s Iran reprisal, Middle East destabilized.

By Dan Steinbock, 27 Oct 24,
On Saturday, Israel’s retaliatory attack was framed as “carefully
calibrated.” But in the absence of ceasefire, regional turmoil is
simmering close to an edge, thanks to the escalation ladder.

Early on Saturday, Israel hit Iran with a set of airstrikes, stating it was targeting
military sites in retaliation for the 180 missiles that Iran fired into Israel over 3
weeks ago (which itself was a reprisal against a prior Israeli offensive).

Officially, it was a “carefully orchestrated, underwhelming retaliation” that was
preceded by Israel’s message to Iran ahead of the impending attack. But not
everything is what it seems to be in the Middle East.

The stories behind the stories
The Israeli retaliation was designed to be underwhelming; not by the
Netanyahu cabinet, but by the White House and the Pentagon.

Presumably, portions of Iranian military sites in three provinces – Tehran, Ilam
and Khuzestan – were hit. Iran said its air defenses successful and damage
was estimated as “limited.”

Yet later, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stated Israel targeted “missile
manufacturing facilities used to produce the missiles that Iran fired at the state
of Israel over the last year.” It also hit surface-to-air missile sites and
“additional Iranian aerial capabilities.”

To stress that the retaliation was more effective, the Israeli Air Force later
claimed that these attacks had destroyed “the backbone of Iran’s missile
industry”, a critical component of its ballistic missile program. The targets
struck were sophisticated equipment that Iran could not produce on its own
and had to be purchased from China. Subsequent reports claim Israel
destroyed air defense systems near oil refineries in retaliatory strike on Iran.

If that’s the case, Netanyahu government was trying to minimize the damage
it caused in Iran, to appease the White House and defuse a potential Iranian
response. By the same token, Netanyahu struggled to deflect international
attention away from atrocities in northern Gaza and southern Lebanon.
The Netanyahu cabinet was playing with fire.

Retaliation scenarios and repercussions
Since early October, I had argued that there were basically three basic
scenarios for an Israeli retaliation:

  1. First, a proportionate Israeli retaliation would signal might without
    causing widespread economic and human costs.
  2. A disproportionate escalation would also target vulnerable
    infrastructure.
  3. Finally, if the aim is to seek regime change, the retaliation would
    additionally target Iranian nuclear sites and critical military
    infrastructure, hoping to destabilize Iran for a US-style regime change.

In the first case, Iran would likely contain its further response. In the second,
Iran would escalate. In the third, all bets would be off in the Middle East and
global reverberations would ensue.

Israel’s Saturday attack seems to have been positioned within the scenario 1
(unless critical infrastructure was, indeed, destroyed which takes us into
scenario 2 and more lethal consequences). This was a surprise to many who
expected a massive Israeli reprisal, as President Netanyahu and his defense
minister Gallant had pledged and the cabinet’s far-right had urged.

Reaction in Israel
The net effects in Israel? PM Netanyahu lost political capital. In part, he will
suffer heavy criticism by the Messianic far-right. It seeks a war with Iran and
would like to drag the U.S. administration into a regional conflict.

At the same time, the opposition blames Netanyahu for the failure to better
sync Israeli responses with Washington (the argument of center-right Benny
Gantz). Another part of the opposition says Israel should have deployed a
stronger response against Iran (the argument of the centrist Yair Lapid)

The fact that a pure scenario 2-like retaliation did not happen – if that proves
to be the case – is likely a direct outcome of hard American pressure. After all,
the initial Israeli retaliation plan was leaked, which undermined the expected
scenario 2 attack.

Most likely, Israel’s initial plans were far more aggressive and offensive. Most
probably, those plans were buried after U.S. pressure. If the Biden
administration and/or its stakeholders were behind the leak, it would not be
surprising.

A regionwide war in the Middle East is the last thing the Democratic White
House needs just two weeks before the U.S. presidential election –
particularly as the fragile lead of Vice-President Kamala Harris is softening.

Israel, Iran and US presidential race
The way the Israeli response was constrained may contain the ongoing
destabilization in the Middle East in the short-term; until the U.S. election day.
That, however, is predicated on the assumption that the impending attack by
Hezbollah against more than two dozen Jewish settlements in northern Israel
will not further escalate the status quo.

Nonetheless, during the U.S. presidential transition – between November and
mid-January – there is another vacuum when much can still happen. 

It is not in the interest of Iran to attack. But it is very much in the interest of the
Netanyahu cabinet and particularly PM Netanyahu to retaliate harder. To
retain his immunity and avoid prosecution for corruption, Netanyahu depends on the far-right support.

The bottom line: If Harris wins the US election, Netanyahu will face some
constraints. If Trump emerges as the winner, Netanyahu is likely to see it as a
carte blanche for a broad-scale Iran attack.

Currently, both Israel and the U.S. share the strategic objective of
destabilizing Iran and undermining its government. As I show in my book The
Fall of Israel, these goals were developed in the US already two decades ago.

The question is not “what” and “why”, but “when” and “how.” 
The Middle East crisis is far from over. Tragically, the future of the Middle East
is effectively a hostage of the U.S. presidential race.

Regional uncertainty
There are many possible scenarios, as long as Israel is able and willing to
execute offensive actions in multiple fronts, thanks to the incessant flow of
U.S. weapons to Israel, American bases in Israel and the region at large, and
massive financial inflows of U.S. military aid.

In the past, U.S. military aid to Israel amounted to $3.8 billion per year; last
year, it soared to $18 billion. It is not transparent aid. The Biden administration
has not disclosed its true extent. Financially, it contributes to the soaring U.S.
debt, which already exceeds the size of the American economy. In the Gaza
Strip and possibly in southern Lebanon, this aid has made U.S. complicit to
genocidal atrocities.

Thanks to the continued destabilization, the turmoil in the Middle East is
simmering close to an edge. Worse, the uncertainty is likely to prevail as long
as:

  • Israel’s genocidal atrocities, backed by U.S. weapons and funds,
    continue in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere in Israel’s proximate
    neighborhood;
  • there is no ceasefire between Israel and Hamas;
  • the Israeli hostages are ignored by the Netanyahu cabinet;
  • the anti-Arab pogroms prevail in the West Bank which is effectively
    being annexed into Israel;
  • the IDF keeps pushing deeper into southern Lebanon;
  • Iran’s government and critical civilian and military infrastructure remain
    Netanyahu cabinet’s ultimate targets, with intelligence and logistical
    support by the United States.

The worst is not behind. It has only been deferred, for now.

On the new book, The Fall of Israel, see
https://www.claritypress.com/product/the-fall-of-israel/
Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar
world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China
and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see
https://www.differencegroup.net

October 28, 2024 Posted by | MIDDLE EAST, politics international | Leave a comment

Inside the radioactive island with mutant sharks that was used to test nuclear bombs

The water….remains undrinkable and sealife and plants cannot be eaten due to the radioactive water and soil.

The Defence Department concluded in the ’70s that the soil was so contained with cesium-137 and strontium-90 – both taking about three decades to decay, called a half-life – that the best course of action was to just let it rot.

Plutonium-239, however, takes a little longer; 24,000 years..…………………

Josh Milton,  Oct 26, 2024, 
https://metro.co.uk/2024/10/26/inside-radioactive-island-mutant-sharks-caused-nuclear-bombs-21376332/

Mutant sharks. White sand laced with plutonium. Water tainted with strontium. Hub cap-sized hermit crabs eating coconuts containing caesium. A dome ‘coffin’ crammed with radioactive material in plastic bags.

The Marshall Islands, a ring of coral reefs in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, looks like the perfect place to throw on a floppy sun hat and read a book below swaying palm trees.

But in the 1940s and ’50s, the US used two of the far-flung atolls, Bikini and Enewetak, to test out 67 nuclear bombs.

One was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, according to Hibakusha Worldwide, which tracks nuclear incidents.

This was part of Operation Crossroad, an atomic testing programme that came out of the anxiety of the Cold War.

With 52,000 Marshallese people calling the islands home at the time, the 20 islands are the remnants of ancient volcanoes halfway between Hawaii and Australia.

Yet entire islands were vaporized and craters gouged into its shallow lagoons, forcing hundreds of people out of their homes, never to return.

Bikini Atoll now has such a reputation for groovy wildlife it inspired the setting of Spongebob Squarepants.

While the islands are unlikely home to talking sponges, the radiation that lingers in its waters is impacting the wildlife.

Nurse sharks with just one dorsal fin swim around the Bikini Atoll and car-sized coral grows along the seafloor.

‘Popular belief is that radiation causes mutations, and you know what, it’s true,’ Steve Palumbi, a professor of marine sciences also at Stanford, told The Sun.

Even low levels of radiation can cause genetic mutations. Caesium, strontium and other radioactive isotopes break apart DNA, compressing thousands of years of evolution into a few decades in what one paper once described as ‘unnatural selection‘.

Marine life is on the rebound in Bikini. ‘The fact there is life there and the life there is trying to come back from the most violent thing we’ve ever done to it is pretty hopeful,’ said Steve Palumbi, a professor in marine sciences at Stanford University.

The water, though, remains undrinkable and sealife and plants cannot be eaten due to the radioactive water and soil.

People living on nearby islands, now part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, during and after the testing show a higher risk of developing cancer – not one of the top two causes of death – and birth defects.

The list of woes for the Marshallese does not end there, with rising sea levels fuelled by climate change slowly swallowing up the habitable atolls.

The largest nuclear detonation was the hydrogen bomb Castle Bravo, fired on March 1, 1954, in Bikini. As the mushroom-shaped clast cast a shadow over the island, the radioactive fallout and debris spewed well beyond the shorelines.

‘Traces of radioactive material were later found in parts of Japan, India, Australia, Europe, and the US,’ says the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

‘This was the worst radiological disaster in US history and caused worldwide backlash against atmospheric nuclear testing.’

Bikini, the colonial spelling of Pikinni, became so radioactive there’s little hope it’ll ever be habitable.

After the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 put an end to atmospheric nuclear testing, this left American officials – and the islands’ displaced citizens – with one option: wait.

The Defence Department concluded in the ’70s that the soil was so contained with cesium-137 and strontium-90 – both taking about three decades to decay, called a half-life – that the best course of action was to just let it rot.

Plutonium-239, however, takes a little longer; 24,000 years. The US dumped 437 plastic bags filled with lumps of plutonium that had spewed after a bomb misfired into a 33-foot crater left behind in 1958 by a nuke on Runit Island.

That, and about 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of radioactive soil and nuclear waste.

The crater was plugged up by a 350-foot-wide slab of concrete called the Runit Dome, which locals call ‘The Tomb’, in the ’70s. The dome almost looks like something from a science fiction movie, surrounded by a tropical paradise.

And the dome is leaking. ‘The dome is a significant visible scar on the landscape,’ Ken Buesseler, a marine radioactivity expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), told Oceans magazine in 2020.

But it’s a relatively small source of radioactivity.’

Overall, more than half of the 167 original inhabitants of Bikini Atoll have died. Some started showing cancers related to radiation exposure in the 1960s, while people living downwind of the explosions suffered burns and low blood counts.

Several generations later, about 5,400 Bikinians are still living in exile. Some live on a lone Pacific island called Kili, roughly 400 miles from Bikini, and others from Honolulu to the ‘Wheat Capital’ of Oklahoma, Enid.

Bikini Atoll largely remains uninhabited, with a tiny caretaker team taking care of the island infrastructure and divers pop in from time to time.

Bikinians continue to fight, however. Lobbying the US Congress for money to redevelop and clean up the place they once called home.

Scientists are hopeful. Remediation efforts include sprinkling affected areas with potassium fertilizer which reduces how much cesium-137 seeps into locally grown crops. How radioactive the soil is has also been decreasing.

The Marshall Islands Program advises that, once resettlement finally begins, a radiation monitoring programme be set up.

‘In this way, the Kili-Bikini-Ejit Local Government and the people of Bikini can be assured that radiological conditions on the islands remain at or below applicable safety standards, and the United States Government can avoid mistakes of the past,’ the programme says.

October 28, 2024 Posted by | environment, OCEANIA | Leave a comment

Japan to resume trial removal of Fukushima nuclear debris, reports say

Storage tanks for radioactive water are seen at Tokyo Electric Power Co’s (TEPCO) tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, Japan February 18, 2019. Picture taken February 18, 2019. REUTERS/Issei Kato


https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/10/25/japan/fukushima-debris-removal/
 The operator of the tsunami-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant will resume an operation to remove a sample of highly radioactive material next week, reports said Friday, after having suspended the effort over a technical snag.

Extracting the estimated 880 tons of highly radioactive fuel and debris inside the former power station remains the most challenging part of decommissioning the facility, which was hit by a catastrophic tsunami in 2011.

Radioactivity levels inside are far too high for humans to enter, and last month engineers began inserting an extendable device to try and remove a small sample.

However, operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings had to halt the procedure after noticing that remote cameras on the apparatus were not beaming back images to the control center.

Tepco on Friday said it would resume the removal on Monday after replacing the cameras with new ones, the Asahi Shimbun daily and other local media reported.

Tepco officials could not immediately be reached to confirm the reports.

Three of Fukushima’s six reactors went into meltdown after a tsunami triggered by the nation’s biggest earthquake on record swamped the facility in one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents.

Japan last year began releasing into the Pacific Ocean some of the 540 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of reactor cooling water amassed since the catastrophe.

China and Russia banned Japanese seafood imports as a result, although Tokyo insists the discharge is safe, a view backed by the U.N. atomic agency.

Beijing last month said it would “gradually resume” importing seafood from Japan after imposing the blanket ban.

In a Tepco initiative to promote food from the Fukushima area, swanky London department store Harrods began selling peaches grown in the region last month.

October 28, 2024 Posted by | Fukushima continuing, wastes | Leave a comment

US nuclear regulator kicks off review on Three Mile Island restart

By Laila Kearney, October 26, 2024

  • Summary
  • Companies
  • NRC holds first public meeting on Three Mile Island restart
  • Constellation wants to restore Unit 1’s operating license
  • NRC requests more emergency, environmental restart plan details
  • Watchdog group questions plans, including simulator

NEW YORK, Oct 25 (Reuters) – U.S. nuclear regulators kicked off a long-winding process to consider Constellation Energy’s (CEG.O), opens new tab unprecedented plans to restart its retired Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in an initial public meeting held on Friday.

Constellation, which announced last month that it had signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft that would enable reopening the Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island, made its case before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to restore its operating license for the plant.

The company also sought to extend the life of the plant and change its name to the Crane Clean Energy Center.

Three Mile Island, which is located in Pennsylvania on an island in the Susquehanna River, is widely known for the 1979 partial meltdown of its Unit 2 reactor. That unit has been permanently shut and is being decommissioned.

Members of the NRC requested details about the emergency evacuation plans for the restarted plant and information about the commercial deal with Microsoft, while imploring Constellation to quickly work on permitting related to its water use for the plant.

The NRC also raised questions about how the restart of Unit 1 would intersect with the decommissioning of Unit 2, which began last year, nearly 45 years after the partial meltdown.

Utah-based nuclear services company EnergySolutions owns Unit 2 and related infrastructure, while Constellation owns Unit 1 and the site’s land.

Unit 1 shut down due to economic reasons in 2019, some 15 years before the operating license was set to expire. At the time, Constellation said it did not anticipate a restart.

Constellation now expects to restart the 835-megawatt Unit 1 in 2028, delivering power to the grid to offset electricity use by Microsoft’s data center in the region.

A recent jump in U.S. electricity demand, driven in part by Big Tech’s energy-intensive AI data center expansion has led to a revival of the country’s struggling nuclear industry.

No retired reactor has been restarted before. The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, owned by Holtec, is also in the process of being resurrected.

…………………..The physical work to restore Three Mile Island, which is expected to start in the first quarter of 2025, cost at least $1.6 billion, and could require thousands of workers, still needs licensing modifications and permitting.

Local activists have also vowed to fight the project over safety and environmental concerns, including the storage of nuclear waste on the site.

Scott Portzline, who is with nuclear watchdog group Three Mile Island Alert in Harrisburg, questioned the site’s backup power and criticized the proposed nuclear control room simulator used for training.

“I have a constitutional right to know how my nuclear plants are operating and the utility ought to be able to answer that,” Portzline said during the meeting……….

Under the National Environmental Policy Act, the NRC will be required to complete an environmental assessment within the final year of any restart. The plant will require other environmental permits, including ones for air emissions and water pollutants. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-nuclear-regulator-hears-three-mile-island-power-plant-restart-plan-2024-10-25/

October 28, 2024 Posted by | safety, USA | Leave a comment

CND condemns ‘outrageous railroading’ of US-UK nuclear agreement renewal through Parliament.

 Anti-arms campaigners today condemned the
“outrageous railroading” of the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA)
renewal through Parliament. The MDA, active since 1958, enables vital
nuclear material and technology transfers between the US and Britain,
reviewed every 10 years. But the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)
condemned the government’s intention to make the treaty permanent by
removing the clause that requires the treaty to be extended and enables
debate and amendment, including rejection.

 Morning Star 25th Oct 2024 https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/cnd-condemns-outrageous-railroading-us-uk-nuclear-agreement-renewal-through-parliament

October 28, 2024 Posted by | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel’s War on Journalism

Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press. 

All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.

To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years………..What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.

Chris Hedges, October 25, 2024, https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/25/chris-hedges-israels-war-on-journalism/

 

Israel has not defeated Hamas. It has not defeated Hezbollah. It will not defeat Iran. But it must convince its own public, and the rest of the world, it is winning. Censorship and the silencing of journalists who expose Israel’s war crimes and the suffering Israel inflicts on civilians is an Israeli priority.  

It would be reassuring to call Israel an outlier, a nation that did not share our values, a nation that we support in spite of its atrocities. But of course, Israel is an extension of ourselves. 

As the playwright Harold Pinter said: 


US foreign policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it is so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.

In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

The most important impediment to Israel’s mass hypnosis are the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. This is why the kill rate is so high. It is why U.S. officials say nothing. They, too, hate real journalists. They, too, demand reporters domesticate themselves to scurry like rats from one choreographed press event to the next. 

The U.S. government says and does nothing to protect the press because it endorses Israel’s campaign against the media, as it endorses Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Journalists, along with the Palestinians, are to be extinguished. 

There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas. They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors. Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.

And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.

The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination. At least 128 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992. 

Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.  

Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.

The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.


“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel’s onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”

The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media dwarfs anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63 were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted. 

Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.

Representative James P. McGovern and 64 House members sent a letter to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the United States to push for Israel to allow unimpeded access for U.S. and international journalists. In July, over 70 media and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on Israel to permit foreign reporters into Gaza. 

Israel has not budged. Its ban on international journalists in Gaza remains in place. Its genocide grinds forward. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed and wounded daily. During October, Israel killed at least 770  Palestinians in northern Gaza. Israel spins out its lies and fabrications, from Hamas using Palestinians as human shields, to mass rape and beheaded babies, to a captive press that slavishly amplifies them. By the time the lies are exposed, often weeks or months later, the media cycle has moved on and few notice.

Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes. It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies. 

Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press. 

Those who wage war, any war, seek to shape public opinion. They court the reporters they can domesticate, the ones who prostrate themselves before generals and, although they do not openly admit it, seek to stay as far away from combat as possible. These are the “good” journalists. They like to “play” at being a soldier. They enthusiastically assist in disseminating propaganda in the guise of reporting. They want to do their part for the war effort, to be part of the club. Sadly, they constitute the majority of the media in the wars I covered. 

All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.

These domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon — “terrorists,” “peace process,” “two state solution” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.” 

The New York Times, The Intercept writes, “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”

“The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine ‘except in very rare cases’ and to steer clear of the term ‘refugee camps’ to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars,” The Intercept notes. “The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.”

“There is no battle between power and the media,” Fisk noted. “Through language, we have become them.

Retired general David Petraeus, one of the authors of the 2006 U.S. Counterinsurgency Manual used by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, argues that persuading the public that you are winning — even if, as in Afghanistan, you are trapped in a quagmire — is more important than military superiority. The domesticated media is vital in perpetrating this deception. 

Then there are the real journalists. They shine a light into the machinery of power. They tell the truth, for as the poet Seamus Heaney said, “There’s such a thing as truth and it can be told.” They make public the cruelty, mendacity and criminality of the powerful. They expose the collaboration of the domesticated media.

To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years. WikiLeaks published a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document where British government officials equated investigative journalists with terrorists. The animosity is not new. What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.

October 27, 2024 Posted by | Israel, media | Leave a comment

Crippling The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA): The Knesset’s Collective Punishment of Palestinians

UN Secretary-General Guterres was aghast at the two bills. “It would effectively end coordination to protect UN convoys, offices and shelters serving hundreds of thousands of people.”

October 26, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark,  https://theaimn.com/crippling-unrwa-the-knessets-collective-punishment-of-palestinians/—

The man has a cheek. Having lectured Iranians and Lebanese about what (and who) is good for them in terms of rulers and rule (we already know what he thinks of the Palestinians), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been keeping busy on further depriving access and assistance to those in Gaza and the West Bank. This comes in draft legislation that would prevent the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from pursuing its valuable functions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The campaign against UNRWA by the Israeli state has been relentless and pathological. Even before last year’s October 7 attacks by Hamas, much was made of the fact that the body seemed intent on keeping the horrors of the 1948 displacements current. Victimhood, complained the amnesiac enforcers of the Israeli state, was being encouraged by treating the descendants of displaced Palestinians as refugees. Nasty memories were being kept alive.

Since then, Israel has been further libelling and blackening the organisation as a terrorist frontbest abolished. (Labels are effortlessly swapped – “Hamas supporter”; “activist”; “terrorist”.) Initially came that infamous dossier pointing the finger at 12 individuals said to be Hamas participants in the October 7 attacks. With swiftness, the UN commenced internal investigations. Some individuals were sacked on suspicion of being linked to the attacks. Unfortunately, some US$450 million worth of donor funding from sixteen countries was suspended.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini was always at pains to explain that he had “never been informed” nor received evidence substantiating Israel’s accusations. It was also all the more curious given that staff lists for the agency were provided to both Israeli and Palestinian authorities in advance. At no point had he ever “received the slightest concern about the staff that we have been employing.”

In April, Lazzarini told the UN Security Council that “an insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s operations is under way, with serious implications for peace and security.” Repeatedly, requests by the agency to deliver aid to northern Gaza had been refused, staff barred from coordinating meetings between humanitarian actors and Israel, and UNRWA premises and staff targeted.

Israel’s campaign to dissuade donor states from restoring funding proved a mixed one. Even the United Kingdom, long sympathetic to Israel’s accusations, announced in July that funding would be restored. In the view of UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, UNRWA had taken steps to ensure that it was meeting “the highest standards of neutrality.”

In August, the findings of a review of the allegations by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, instigated at the request of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres,were released. It confirmed UNRWA’s role as “irreplaceable and indispensable” in the absence of a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians, a “pivotal” body that provided “life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.”

In identifying eight areas for immediate improvement on the subject of neutrality (for instance, engaging donors, neutrality of staff, installations, education and staff unions), it was noted that “Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence” that the agency’s employees had been “members of terrorist organizations.”

On October 24, UNRWA confirmed that one of its staffers killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza,Muhammad Abu Attawi, had been in the agency’s employ since July 2022 while serving as a Nukhba commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion. Attawi is alleged to have participated in the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im in October last year. His name had featured in a July letter from Israel to the agency listing 100 names allegedly connected with terrorist groups. But no action was taken against Attawi as the Israelis failed to supply UNRWA with evidence. Lazzarini’s letter urging, in the words of Juliette Touma, the agency’s director of communications, “to cooperate … by providing more information so he could take action” did not receive “any response”.

Having been foiled on various fronts in its quest to terminate UNRWA’s viable existence, Israeli lawmakers are now taking the legislative route to entrench the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. Two bills are in train in the Knesset. The first, sponsored by such figures as Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky and Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz, would bar state authorities from having contact with UNRWA. The second, sponsored by Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, would critically prevent the agency from operating in Israeli territory through revoking a 1967 exchange of notes justifying such activities.

Even proclaimed moderates – the term is relative – such as former defence minister Benny Gantz support the measures, accusing the UN body of making “itself an inseparable component of Hamas’s mechanism – and now is the time to detach ourselves entirely from it.” It did not improve the lot of refugees, but merely perpetuated “their victimisation.” Evidently for Gantz, Israel had no central role in creating Palestinian victims in the first place.

By barring cooperation between any Israeli authorities and UNRWA, work in Gaza and the West Bank would become effectively impossible, largely because Jerusalem would no longer issue entrance permits to the territories or permit any coordination with the Israeli DefenseForces.

UN Secretary-General Guterres was aghast at the two bills. “It would effectively end coordination to protect UN convoys, offices and shelters serving hundreds of thousands of people.” Ambassadors from 123 UN member states have echoed the same views, while the Biden administration has, impotently, warned that the proposed “restrictions would devastate the humanitarian response in Gaza at this critical moment” while also denying educational and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

In their October 23 statement, the Nordic countries also expressed concern that UNRWA’s mandate “to carry out […] direct relief and works programmes” for millions of Palestinian refugees as determined by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) would be jettisoned. “In the midst of an ongoing catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza, a halt to any of the organisation’s activities would have devastating consequences for the hundreds of thousands of civilians served by UNRWA.”

The statement goes on to make a warning. To impair the refugee agency would create a vacuum that “may well destabilise the situation in [Gaza, and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem], in Israel and in the region as a whole, and may fundamentally jeopardize the prospects of a two-state solution.”

These are concerns that hardly matter before the rationale of murderous collective punishment, one used against a people seen more as mute serfs and submissive animals than sovereign beings entitled to rights and protections. Israel’s efforts to malign and cripple UNRWA remains a vital part of that agenda. In that organisation exists a repository of deep and troubling memories the forces of oppression long to erase.

October 27, 2024 Posted by | Israel, politics | Leave a comment

Lying Western Press Scramble To Frame Israel’s Attack On Iran As Self Defense.

26 Oct 2024 JOHNSTONE radio, Israel has launched a round of airstrikes on Iran which the western news media are falling all over themselves to falsely frame as “retaliatory” strikes against an unprovoked missile attack by Iran.

October 27, 2024 Posted by | Israel, media | Leave a comment

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