ANDREW RESTUCCIA – President Donald Trump’s abrupt turnaround on U.S. climate policy is fueling tension with several of America’s closest allies, which are resisting the administration’s demands that they support a bigger role for nuclear power and fossil fuels in the world’s energy supply.
ERIC DE PLACE – After a string of successes defending the Northwest from ill-conceived dirty energy projects, the thin green line—the Northwest’s opposition movement to coal, oil, and gas exports—is starting to play offense. Local governments around the region are already updating land use laws to protect their communities from the depredations of fossil fuel infrastructure schemes.
TOM DICHRISTOPHER – The White House’s budget blueprint released Thursday seeks to revive spending for a hotly contested facility in Nevada that would store the nation’s nuclear waste.
BRUCE GAGNON – South Korea and the US launched their annual Key Resolve military exercise Monday, which involves scenarios for the employment of US anti-missile assets and special warfare forces tasked with removing North Korea’s leadership in a contingency.
BOB CHRISTIE – The speaker of the Arizona House said Monday he won’t hear a bill that makes participating in or helping organize a protest that turns into a riot an offense that could lead to criminal racketeering charges, a move prompted by widespread criticism that the legislation sought to limit First Amendment rights.
OREGON AND WASHINGTON PHYSICIANS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY – Portland utility economist Robert McCullough’s study indicates savings to Northwest ratepayers of between $261.2 million and $530.7 million over ten years if the Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant is closed and replaced with clean renewable energy alternatives.
WAKINYAN WAANATAN (MATT REMLE – LAKOTA) – ABN AMRO Bank based in Amsterdam released a statement strongly condemning Energy Transfer Equity (ETE), the parent company to Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), over the Dakota Access pipeline. While the Dutch based bank is not involved in financing the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, and is not a direct lender to the project sponsors, it does have a finical relationship with ETE.
ANADISGOI, OFFICIAL CHREOKEE NATION NEWSROOM – The Cherokee Nation and state of Oklahoma jointly filed and were granted a restraining order today against Sequoyah Fuels Corporation near Gore to stop the company from disposing radioactive waste near the Arkansas and Illinois rivers. The request was granted by Sequoyah County District Judge Jeff Payton.
DAVID CAPLAN – Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has issued a dire warning: “The world is preparing for war.” And with a phone call scheduled on Saturday between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Gorbachev is urging the leaders to put a halt to a such a deadly path by spearheading a United Nations resolution that essentially bans nuclear war.
LAUREN MCCAULEY – “In the past 30 years, America had 13 wars spending $2 trillion,” said Alibaba founder Jack Ma. “What if the money was spent on the Midwest of the United States?” Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Wednesday, Chinese billionaire Jack Ma accused the United States of spending too much money on foreign wars and risky financial speculation and not enough money “on your own people.”
STEPHEN EDELSTEIN – Over the past few years, the cost of electricity generation from renewable-energy sources has decreased dramatically. So much so, that renewable energy may have just hit an important milestone, according to one study. In the U.S., wind and solar power are now cheaper sources of electricity than natural gas—even without subsidies.
ERIC TEGETHOFF – Many of the effects of climate change scientists did not expect to happen for decades into the future are happening now. According to a new study in the journal Science, researchers found that every ecosystem on Earth is being impacted by a warming globe, from the genetic level up.
GILBERT DOCTOROW, UTE FINCKH-KRAMER, LUDGER VOLMER, ROLF EKEUS and NOAM CHOMSKY – A transatlantic appeal for a new policy of détente with Russia has been launched. The declaration’s authors invite the general public to join leading political figures and social activists who have publicly rallied to support the call.
PRESS RELEASE, PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY – Congress must take the shackles off of federal agencies trying to drain the Washington swamp and fix government, nine newly elected members of Congress told their future colleagues in a letter circulated November 28..
NEWS RELEASE, OFFICE OF GOVERNOR KATE BROWN – Oregon Governor Kate Brown, California Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr., Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and British Columbia Premier Christy Clark issue a statement that strongly supports their continuing lead on Climate Change.
ERIC TEGETHOFF – Immigrant communities across Oregon are preparing to take President-elect Donald Trump at his word regarding ramping up deportations during his presidency.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS – One place where Donald Trump’s election victory has had an immediate effect is in the battlefield around Aleppo. Reports from the area of the battlefield speak of a total collapse of morale amongst the Al-Qaeda led Jihadi forces which have been attacking the city from the south west, as whatever lingering hopes there were of a Western military intervention following a victory by Hillary Clinton in the US Presidential election have turned to dust.
SPUTNIK INTERNATIONAL – During testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services last week General Joseph Dunford rang the alarm over a policy shift that is gaining more traction within the halls of Washington following the collapse of the ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia in Syria saying that it could result in a major international war which he was not prepared to advocate on behalf of.
KATHLEEN HARRIS – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took provinces by surprise Monday, October 3, by announcing they have until 2018 to adopt a carbon pricing scheme, or the federal government will step in and impose a price for them.
BBC – Russia has suspended an agreement with the US on the disposal of surplus weapons-grade plutonium, the latest sign of worsening bilateral relations.
HUNTER BLAIR – Since 1952, corporate profits as a share of the economy have risen dramatically (from 5.5 percent to 8.5 percent), while corporate tax revenues as a share of the economy have plummeted (from 5.9 percent to just 1.9 percent). This trend has worsened since the end of the Great Recession.
KARL MATHIESEN – Climate change is the “mother of all risks” says Aviva CEO, and hundreds of billions in annual government assistance to oil, gas and coal is “simply unsustainable.” Three of the world’s biggest insurers called on G20 leaders to implement a timeframe for the end of fossil fuel subsidies when they met in China last week.
LEE FANG – The escalating anti-Russian rhetoric in the U.S. presidential campaign comes in the midst of a major push by military contractors to position Moscow as a potent enemy that must be countered with a drastic increase in military spending by NATO countries. Weapon makers have told investors that they are relying on tensions with Russia to fuel new business in the wake of Russian’s annexation of Crimea and modest increases in its military budget.
JAY SYRMOPOULOS – A new Department of Defense Inspector General’s report, released last week, has left Americans stunned at the jaw-dropping lack of accountability and oversight. The glaring report revealed the Pentagon couldn’t account for $6.5 trillion dollars worth of Army general fund transactions and data, according to a report by the Fiscal Times. The Pentagon, which has been notoriously lax in its accounting practices, has never completed an audit, [which] would reveal how the agency has specifically spent the trillions of dollars allocated for wars, equipment, personnel, housing, healthcare and procurements allotted to them by Congress.
PAUL SONNE, GORDON LUBOLD, CAROL E. LEE – A proposal under consideration at the White House to reverse decades of U.S. nuclear policy by declaring a “No First Use” protocol for nuclear weapons has run into opposition from top cabinet officials and U.S. allies. The opposition, from Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, as well as allies in Europe and Asia, leaves President Barack Obama with few ambitious options to enhance his nuclear disarmament agenda before leaving office, unless he wants to override the dissent.
ADAM KREDO – Undercover inspectors working for the U.S. Government Accountability Office were able to fool the United States’ top nuclear regulator into granting it licenses to acquire material necessary to build a “dirty bomb,” or crude nuclear device, according to a new oversight report.
KINGSTON REIF – A growing number of non-nuclear-weapon states are expressing support for the immediate commencement of negotiations on a legally binding agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons, despite strong opposition from those states that possess nuclear weapons and many U.S. allies. The contentious debate over how best to advance nuclear disarmament occurred at a meeting last month of an open-ended working group on disarmament taking place in Geneva this year.
CONN HALLINAN – “Aggressive,” “revanchist,” “swaggering”: These are just some of the adjectives the mainstream press and leading U.S. and European political figures are routinely inserting before the words “Russia,” or “Vladimir Putin.” It is a vocabulary most Americans have not seen or heard since the height of the Cold War. The question is, why?
CATHY BREEN – Outwardly everything seemed so normal that at first I forgot I was with people now counted among the hundreds of thousands who are internally displaced in Iraq. In the next couple of hours, though, we would hear many tragic stories that would dispel any thought of “normalcy.”
REBECCA RIFFKIN – For the first time since Gallup first asked the question in 1994, a majority of Americans say they oppose nuclear energy. The 54% opposing it is up significantly from 43% a year ago, while the 44% who favor using nuclear energy is down from 51%.
NUKEWATCH QUARTERLY – The U.S. government has compensated over 52,000 nuclear workers for illnesses related to radiation exposure, but the process is complicated. Deaths resulting from exposure while working at the factories and the compensation process for survivors begs the question: How much is a life worth? As the death toll mounts, nuclear weapons workers must decide whether their jobs are worth it.
HARVEY WASSERMAN – Seven top Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) experts have taken the brave rare step of publicly filing an independent finding warning that nearly every U.S. atomic reactor has a generic safety flaw that could spark a disaster. The warning mocks the latest industry push to keep America’s remaining 99 nukes from being shut by popular demand, by their essential unprofitability, or, more seriously, by the kind of engineering collapse against which the NRC experts are now warning.
EDWARD HASBROUCK – On Friday the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles that had dismissed the complaint in National Coalition for Men v. Selective Service System. The Court of Appeals reinstated the complaint, and remanded the case to the U.S. District Court for consideration of the other issues in the case.
ROBERT HUNZIKER – The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster may go down as one of history’s boundless tragedies and not just because of a nuclear meltdown, but rather the tragic loss of a nation’s soul.
ELLIOT NEGIN – China’s military wants to put its relatively small nuclear arsenal on hair-trigger alert for the first time, according to newly translated documents. That’s not good. Such a radical departure from the country’s longtime nuclear policy could pose a threat not only to the United States, but to China itself.
PRESSTV – The Israeli regime has received of a fifth submarine from Germany, amid pressure on Berlin to halt the delivery of the state-of-the-art weaponry that is capable of being armed with nuclear warheads.
ARI PAUL – Skeptics said it wouldn’t last, and they were right. On January 13, the world learned that Al Jazeera America would soon close. And while some employees could migrate into the network’s expanded digital operations, many will spend the coming days and weeks looking for new work.
BASHKAS JUGSODAAY – A group of Kenyan Muslims travelling on a bus ambushed by Islamist gunmen protected Christian passengers by refusing to be split into groups, according to eyewitnesses.
PAUL VALE – The former top US Special Forces chief claimed on Sunday, November 29, that blinding emotion after the 9/11 attacks led the United States and its allies to take the wrong strategic decisions to counter al-Qaeda, calling the subsequent Iraq War a “huge error.” The admission by Michael Flynn, made to German newspaper Der Spiegel, comes as British MPs prepare to vote on extending the UK’s bombing campaign against the Islamic State into Syria following the massacre in Paris.
SAM ROSS-BROWN – As national efforts heading into the Paris summit fall short of averting catastrophic warming, how far cities can go to close the gap is hard to know.
MURTAZA HUSSAIN – U.S. DRONE OPERATORS are inflicting heavy civilian casualties and have developed an institutional culture callous to the death of children and other innocents, four former operators said at a press briefing in New York.
WILLIAM M. ARKIN and ALEXA O’BRIEN – An information and intelligence shift has emerged in America’s national security state over the last two decades, and that change has been reflected in the country’s educational institutions as they have become increasingly tied to the military, intelligence, and law enforcement worlds. This is why VICE News has analyzed and ranked the 100 most militarized universities in America.
GENE WEXLER – A new survey of 23,000 injured service members finds post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) are two of the biggest mental health issues facing veterans right now.
JOHN LAFORGE – “We should be carefully monitoring the oceans after what is certainly the largest accidental release of radioactive contaminants to the oceans in history,” marine chemist Ken Buesseler said last spring. Instead, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency halted its emergency radiation monitoring of Fukushima’s radioactive plume in May 2011, three months after the disaster began. Japan isn’t even monitoring seawater near Fukushima, according to a Sept. 28 story in “The Ecologist.”
ISAAC SAUL – In the Canadian town of Medicine Hat, Alberta, where 60,000 people live, everyone has a home tonight.
UNFOLD ZERO [November 1, 2015] – From Monday November 2, and running the whole week, the United Nations General Assembly in New York [is voting] on a number of draft resolutions on nuclear disarmament. Many of these are repeat resolutions from previous years – and countries [are likely voting] for them the same way as they have in the past. However there are a few exciting new resolutions – which if adopted with significant support – could pave the way for effective multi-lateral negotiations.
KATHY KELLY – Before the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing in Iraq, a group of activists living in Baghdad would regularly go to city sites that were crucial for maintaining health and well-being in Baghdad. These sites included hospitals, electrical facilities, water purification plants, and schools. The activists would then string large vinyl banners between the trees outside these buildings that read: “To Bomb This Site Would Be A War Crime.” At the time, we encouraged people in U.S. cities to do the same, trying to build empathy for people trapped in Iraq, anticipating a terrible aerial bombing. Tragically, sadly, the banners must again condemn war crimes, this time echoing international outcry.
JOE CIRINCIONE and TOM Z. COLLINA – Under Pope Francis the Catholic church is moving away from Cold War nuclear acceptance faster than Congress and the Obama administration; some people are not going to like this key shift in church doctrine on nuclear weapons.
DAVE MURPHY – What happens when a private company with a long history of producing some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet and now produces our food starts facing public pressure from a growing national grassroots movement to label their products to conform with basic principles of democracy and transparency? Well, if the company in question is Monsanto, then you take a page out of Big Tobacco’s playbook and hatch a secret plan to enlist public university scientists to bury the potential harm of your genetically engineered crops by whitewashing negative studies and systematically demonizing your opponents in the media to mislead elected officials and the American public about the safety of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and their accompanying toxic pesticides.
SYLVIA FRAIN – On Saturday morning August 29, 2015, the United States Navy signed the Record of Decision (ROD), the final document needed for the implementation of one of the largest “peacetime” military build-ups in American history. This will cost between $8 and 9 billion, with only $174 million for civilian infrastructure, which Congress has not released yet. As a central aspect of American’s foreign policy ‘Pivot to the Pacific’, the build-up will relocate thousands of Marines and their dependents from Okinawa, Japan to Guam. This does not auger well for the people of Guam.
