UN report finds Israel deliberately targeted journalists – Reuters
https://www.rt.com/news/594254-israel-attack-journalists-lebanon/ 14 Mar 24
The news agency has obtained a copy of an investigation into the killing of one of its staff in Lebanon last October
An Israeli tank fired two shells at a group of international journalists clearly marked as such, in violation of international law, a UN investigation has reportedly found. The deadly incident happened in Lebanon in mid-October.
The conclusions, published by Reuters on Wednesday, are part of a seven-page report dated February 27, obtained by the news agency. They coincided with what it had found on its own while looking into the death of its employee Issam Abdallah and the injuries of six other journalists, including those working for Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Al Jazeera.
The report was produced by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the peacekeeper mission deployed on the border between Israel and Lebanon in 2006 as part of a deal that ended the Israeli occupation of the southern part of its neighbor. Tracking and investigating presumed violations of the truce is part of its job.
The attack happened on October 13, in the early days of Israel’s siege of Gaza in retaliation for a large-scale incursion by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Tensions ramped up at the Lebanese border as well, with sporadic attacks launched by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah militants.
Abdallah, a Reuters photographer, was part of a group of journalists covering the situation from a hill in Lebanon. An IDF Merkava tank fired two shots at them, the UNIFIL report confirmed. It called the attack a violation of the truce it is mandated to uphold and of international law.
”It is assessed that there was no exchange of fire across the Blue Line at the time of the incident,” the report noted, referring to the de facto border. “The reason for the strikes on the journalists is not known.”
An IDF spokesperson told Reuters that Israeli forces do not target civilians on purpose, including journalists, when asked about the UN investigation. He added that the incident is being examined by the General Staff’s Fact Finding and Assessment Mechanism – a body responsible for reviewing exceptional events.
Reuters released its findings in early December, based on eyewitness accounts, forensic analysis of evidence found at the scene and interviews with officials.
The UNIFIL report was sent to the UN on February 28 and shared with the Israeli and Lebanese governments, Reuters said citing a source. The mission’s investigations are normally not made public.
Nuclear power and Artificial Intelligence – a dystopian vision of the future.
Susan O’Donnell Fredericton, 15 Mar 24
Re “Nuclear power and artificial intelligence: the perfect marriage” (Report on Business, March 12): I read with genuine horror the detailing of artificial intelligence’s voracious appetite for energy.
This is presented as a positive development, and it is suggested that more Canadian uranium could be mined to fuel small nuclear reactors and provide power for gluttonous AIs. This dystopian vision of the future looks devoid of humanity.
Environmentalists and everyone concerned with a sustainable future are thinking about how we will power a livable world, so that more than eight billion people will have a decent standard of living as the fossil fuel era comes to an end. I am sickened to contemplate that AI might gobble up much of the available energy that will be desperately needed for basic humanitarian needs.
Susan O’Donnell Fredericton
TODAY. A morally bankrupt organisation – the International Atomic Energy Agency
I do not know how this guy can sleep at night – his main job is propaganda- telling the world to trust in the “safety of the nuclear industry” – the latest effort is conning the Japanese.
The International Atomic Energy (IAEA) was set up in 1957 for the purpose of promoting the “peaceful” nuclear industry.
Already that was morally dubious, as the real reason was to distract attention from the guilt of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities, and from the industry’s true purpose – making nuclear weapons.
Over the decades, the IAEA has successfully pitched itself as the watchdog for nuclear safety. And to a certain extent, that is true. The IAEA’s inspection system does monitor nuclear facilities for safety, and compliance with commitments, under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Obviously, given the nuclear industry’s potential for catastrophic accidents, and for spreading nuclear weapons and the danger of catastrophic wars, – it needed some sort of safety body to be able to continue to exist.
But when the crunch comes – what do we find?
We find the IAEA pushing for “safe” new nuclear power while the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, the biggest nuclear power station in Europe , is in the middle of a war.
We find the IAEA pretending that it is environmentally OK to permanently pour nuclear irradiated water into the oceans, from the wrecked Fukushima power plant, – thereby legitimising the ocean dumping of radioactive wastes
And now – the latest, (but I’m sure not the last), straw – the IAEA is pushing for the restart and regrowth of the nuclear industry in Japan.
Should Japan ever have set up a nuclear industry?
“An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors”– Amory Lovins
So why did they do it?
To assuage USA’s guilt over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To turn a bad thing into a “good thing”: “Many Americans are now aware…that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was not necessary. How better to make a contribution to amends than by offering Japan…atomic energy” – Washington Post, 23 September 1954, p. 18, “A Reactor for Japan”
But now – the 2011 and never-ending Fukushima nuclear disaster is still there.. No worries – the nuclear lobby is all for restarting Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the world’s biggest nuclear power station, with its 7 reactors, just about 200 km away for Tokyo, with its population of 37 million.
But the bit that gets me is: Rafael Gross is not only pledging IAEA technical assistance for the restart of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa., he is “sending a team of experts to assist Tepco’s effort to gain public trust.” The IAEA’s job clearly is to mislead the public on the dangers of nuclear energy
Reversing Europe’s and Australia’s slide into irrelevance & insecurity – National Press Club of Australia speech- Yanis Varoufakis
First, Australia must restore a reputation tainted by blindly following America into lethal adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and, today, via its active and crucial complicity in Israel’s deliberate war crimes in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Children are not starving in Gaza today. No, they are being deliberately starved. Without hesitation or remorse. The famine in Gaza is no collateral damage. It is an intentional policy of starving to death thousands until the rest agree to leave their ancestral homeland.
Second, Australia has a duty to de-escalate the New Cold War. To understand that this can only be done if Australia ends its servility to a United States’ actively creating the threats that they then make us pay through the nose to protect us from.
Imagine an Australia that helps bring a just Peace in Ukraine, as opposed to a mindless forever war. A non-aligned Australia that is never neutral in the face of injustice but, also, not automatically aligned with every warmongering adventure decided in Washington.
Imagine an Australia which, having re-established its credentials as a country that thinks and acts for itself, engages with China in the spirit of peaceful cooperation – a far better way of addressing Beijing’s increasing authoritarianism toward its own peoples than buying useless, hyper-expensive submarines that only succeed in forcing China’s political class to close ranks around a more authoritarian core.
Imagine a truly patriotic Australian Prime Minister who tells the American President to cease and desist from the slow murder of Julian Assange for the crime of journalism – for exposing American war crimes perpetrated behind the back of US citizens in their name.
To conclude, if Europe and Australia are to escape gross irrelevance, we need separate but well-coordinated European and Australian Green New Deals.
DiEM25, our paneuropean movement, is working toward this goal.
Yanis Varoufakis – 14/03/2024
Europe and Australia are facing a common existential threat: a creeping irrelevance caused, on the one hand, by our failure properly to invest and, on the other hand, by our ill-considered slide from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic, self-defeating servility to Washington’s policy agenda.”
Yanis Varoufakis’s address at the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday 13 March, 2024
…………………………………. The three post-war phases that shaped Australia’s and Europe’s habitat
Our present moment in Europe and in Australia has been shaped by three distinct postwar phases.
The first was the Bretton Woods system. America exited the war as the only surplus, creditor country. Bretton Woods, a remarkable recycling mechanism, was, in effect, a dollar zone built on fixed exchange rates, sustained by capital controls, and erected on the back of America’s trade surplus. With quasi-free trade as part of the deal, Washington dollarised Europe, Japan and Australia to generate aggregate demand for the products of its factories – whose productivity had skyrocketed during the war. Subsequently, the US trade surplus sucked the exported dollars back into America. The result was twenty years of high growth, low unemployment, blissfully boring banking and dwindling inequality. Alas, once the United States lost its trade surplus, Bretton Woods was dead in the water.
The second phase was marked by the violent reversal of this recycling mechanism. The United States became the first hegemon to enhance its hegemony by boosting its trade deficit. Operating like a powerful vacuum cleaner, the burgeoning US trade deficit hoovered up the world’s net exports. And how did America pay for them? With dollars which it also hoovered up from the rest of the world as German, Japanese and later Chinese capitalists sent to Wall Street 70% of dollar profits made from their net exports to the US. There, in Wall Street, these foreign capitalists recycled their dollar profits into Treasuries, real estate, shares and derivatives.
This audacious inverted recycling system, built on US deficits, required ever increasing American deficits to remain stable. In the process, it gave rise to even higher growth than the Bretton Woods era, but also to macroeconomic and financial imbalances as well as mind-numbing levels of inequality. The new era came complete with an ideology (neoliberalism), a policy of letting finance rip (financialisation), and a false sense of dynamic equilibrium – the infamous Great Moderation built on hugely immoderate imbalances.
Almost inevitably, on the back of the perpetual tsunami of capital rushing in from the rest-of-the-world to Wall Street, financiers fashioned gigantic pyramids of complex wagers – Warren Buffet’s infamous Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction. When these crashed, to deliver the Global Financial Crisis, two things saved Wall Street and Western capitalism:
- The G7 central banks, that printed a total of $35 trillion on behalf of the financiers from 2009 to last year – a peculiar socialism for bankers. And,
- China, which directed half its national income to investment, thus replacing much of the lost aggregate demand not only domestically but also in Germany, Australia and, of course, in the United States.
The third period is more recent. The era of technofeudalism, as I call it, which took root in the mid-2000s but grew strongly after the GFC in conjunction with the rapid technological change that caused capital to mutate into, what I call, cloud capital – the automated means of behavioural modification living inside our phones, apps, tablets and laptops. Consider the six things this cloud capital (which one encounters in Amazon or Alibaba) does all at once:
- It grabs our attention.
- It manufactures our desires.
- It sells to us, directly, outside any actual markets, that which will satiate the desires it made us have.
- It drives and monitors waged labour inside the workplaces.
- It elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs.
- It provides the potential of blending seamlessly all that with free, digital payments.
Is it any wonder that the owners of this cloud capital – I call them cloudalists – have a hitherto undreamt of power to extract? They are, already, a new ruling class: today, the capitalisation of just seven US cloudalist firms is approximately the same as the capitalisation of all listed corporations in the UK, France, Japan, Canada and China taken together!
Continue reading‘The most beige person’: The man behind the Coalition’s nuclear plans
The Coalition’s spokesman for climate change and energy, Ted O’Brien.
Mike Seccombe is The Saturday Paper’s national correspondent. March 16, 2024Just two months after the 2019 election, Barnaby Joyce was making trouble for the new Morrison government. The dumped Nationals leader was part of a group of maverick MPs pushing for nuclear power. He reckoned he knew a way to make such a policy saleable.
The Joyce plan, as articulated in The Sydney Morning Herald on July 21, was this: “If you can see the reactor [from your house], your power is for free. If you are within 50 kilometres of a reactor, you get power for half price.”
People living or working up to 75 kilometres away would get a 25 per cent reduction on their electricity bills, he told the paper. By his reckoning, communities across the country would be lining up to get reactors.
Scott Morrison didn’t want a bar of the idea, or of nuclear power. Inquiring media were assured the position taken by the Coalition to the election still held: there were no plans to build nuclear power plants and there would be none unless and until there was evidence they could stack up economically.
Still, the problem persisted. The split on energy policy was boiling over between moderates and right-wingers in the [Coalition] government’s ranks – the latter mostly from Queensland, mostly climate change sceptics and proponents of more coal-fired power as well as nuclear.
A number of the pro-nuclear members, prominently including Keith Pitt and James McGrath, had long been calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the prospect of taking Australia nuclear.
A few weeks later, Morrison gave them one, although technically the August referral to the Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy was from the then minister for energy and emissions reduction, Angus Taylor.
The chair of the committee was Ted O’Brien, the Liberal member for Fairfax on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, a relative neophyte elected to the parliament only three years prior, on the slogan “Time for Ted”.
To him fell the difficult task of steering through a report that would pacify the pro-nuclear zealots without undermining the Coalition leadership’s “no nukes” policy.
In some respects, O’Brien is typical of Queensland’s conservative party, a unique amalgam of the Liberals and Nationals.
Like many in the Liberal National Party, he is the scion of a family business with agricultural links, Defiance Mills. He began his working life as a trainee baker, before moving into management.
In other ways, though, he differs from the norm. ——— (subscribers only) https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/environment/2024/03/16/the-most-beige-person-the-man-behind-the-coalitions-nuclear-plans#mtr
CSIRO chief warns against ‘disparaging science’ after Peter Dutton criticises nuclear energy costings
Douglas Hilton says he will ‘staunchly defend’ scientists as opposition leader repeats incorrect claim that CSIRO report does not accurately represent cost of renewables
Guardian, Paul Karp and Graham Readfearn,15 Mar 24
Australia’s science agency, CSIRO, has rejected Peter Dutton’s claim its estimates of the cost of renewables are unreliable.
CSIRO chief executive, Douglas Hilton, has warned that maintaining trust “requires our political leaders to resist the temptation to disparage science”, rejecting Dutton’s comments about its GenCost report.
But the opposition leader has doubled down, repeating his incorrect claim on Friday that the report does not properly cost renewables and transmission required to integrate them into the grid.
On Tuesday, Dutton claimed the annual CSIRO report that had included estimates of costs for small modular reactors – which are not yet available commercially – was “discredited” because it “doesn’t take into account some of the transmission costs, the costs around subsidies for the renewables”.
Despite Dutton’s claim, the most recent GenCost report does include the cost of integrating renewables such as solar and wind into the electricity grid. That is, it includes the cost of building new transmission lines and energy storage such as batteries.
On Friday Hilton said that he would “staunchly defend our scientists and our organisation against unfounded criticism”.
“The GenCost report is updated each year and provides the very best estimates for the cost of future new-build electricity generation in Australia,” he said in a statement………………………………
Hilton insisted that “CSIRO’s scientists and engineers can be relied on by the community to work creatively, assiduously and with integrity”.
On Friday Dutton doubled down on the comments, despite the rebuke, telling Channel Nine his point was “we need to compare apples with apples”.
“And at the moment that report … doesn’t take into consideration all of the costs around renewables,” he claimed, repeating his original error…………………………………………
The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, has repeatedly rebuffed Dutton’s nuclear push, citing cost – including an estimate from the energy department that replacing fossil fuels with nuclear could cost $387bn.
Bowen has accused the Coalition of using “the rightwing playbook of 2023 – populism, polarisation and post-truth politics” in making false claims about the potential for nuclear power in Australia. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/15/csiro-peter-dutton-gencost-report-nuclear-energy-renewables-cost
Japan Ramps Up Drive to Restart World’s Biggest Nuclear Plant
Stephen Stapczynski and Aya Wagatsuma, Bloomberg News, 15 Mar 24
Japan’s government is ramping up an effort to secure local approval to resume operations at the world’s biggest nuclear power plant, according to a report, amid a wider push by the nation to restart its idled fleet of reactors.
Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Ken Saito will next week request Niigata Governor Hideyo Hanazumi to endorse the restart of Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station, according to the Niigata Nippo newspaper. METI didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The governor’s approval is one of the last hurdles before the nuclear plant can resume…………………………….
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency this week said that the organization would provide technical assistance for the plant, and send a team of experts to assist Tepco’s effort to gain public trust.
Kashiwazaki Kariwa, which has seven reactors totaling 8.2 gigawatts in capacity, is located about 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Tokyo. The nation’s regulator said in 2017 that reactor units 6 and 7 met post-Fukushima safety protocols.
–With assistance from Winnie Hsu and Shoko Oda. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/japan-ramps-up-drive-to-restart-world-s-biggest-nuclear-plant-1.2047179—
The ideology of war in Ukraine and Israel
by Thierry Meyssan, https://www.voltairenet.org/article220527.html 14 Mar 24
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are more similar than you might think, at least if you know their histories. The Ukrainian war didn’t start with the Russian military operation, but with the massacres in the Donbass, while the Gaza war didn’t start with the Al-Aqsa deluge, but 75 years earlier with the Nakhba. In the long term, those responsible for both wars share the same ideology.
Generally speaking, every war defines who “we” are and who “they” are. “We” are Good, while “they” are Evil.
Western leaders, while declaring that war itself is bad, claim that it is indispensable today in the face of aggression from Russia and Hamas. According to them, Russia, or rather its president Vladimir Putin, dreams of seizing our property and destroying our political system. After invading Ukraine, he will invade Moldavia and the Baltic states, then continue westwards. Hamas, on the other hand, is a hate-filled sect that begins by raping and beheading Jews out of anti-Semitism, and will continue by invading the West in the name of its religion.
It’s worth noting that both Israel and the USA were founded by their armies, the Haganah and the Continental Army. Today, the vast majority of their political leaders have spent their careers in the armed forces or secret services. But they’re not the only ones, since Xi Jinping is a military man and Vladimir Putin is a former member of the Soviet secret service (KGB).
One wonders what feeds the phantasms of the political West and how they prevent us from grasping reality. Russia didn’t invade Ukraine any more than France invaded Rwanda. Moscow and Paris stopped the massacre of Ukrainians in the Donbass and Rwandan Tutsis. Both were driven by their “responsibility to protect” and implemented Security Council resolutions. Palestinians don’t rape and behead anyone for pleasure, even if some of them belong to a secret society that does. They don’t fight the Jews out of anti-Semitism, except for the historic branch of Hamas, but against the apartheid system of which they are victims.
Perhaps the first function of collective blindness is to erase our previous crimes: it was the “democracies” of the United States and members of the European Union who organized the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. It was Germany and France that signed the Minsk Accords to guarantee peace for Ukrainians in Donbass (2015), but never intended to implement them and, according to the confessions of Chancellor Angela Merkel and President François Hollande, used them to arm Ukraine against Russia. This violation of our word and signature constitutes, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, the gravest of all crimes, that “against peace”.
Similarly, it is the “greatest democracy in the Middle East”, Israel, which has stolen, metre by metre, by occupation and nibbling, most of the Palestinian Territories established by Security Council resolution 181 (1947).
These conflicts are not about resources, but territories. Since 1917, Dmytro Dontsov’s Ukrainian integral nationalists have consistently claimed sovereignty over Nestor Makhno’s anarchist Novorossia and the Bolshevik Donbass and Crimea. Of course, these territories were merged into Soviet Ukraine by Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev, but Kiev cannot invoke recent history to claim them as its own. Similarly, since 1920, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionists have claimed sovereignty over the whole of Palestine, and eventually over the Egyptian Sinai, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – in short, all the territories from the “Nile to the Euphrates”. Of course, the ancient kingdom of Jerusalem consisted of the city and its suburbs, but that doesn’t allow them to evoke history for all these conquests.
It is often said that the age pyramid determines the aggressiveness of states. States with a majority of young people between the ages of 15 and 30 would by nature be inclined to war. But this is neither the case in Ukraine, nor in Israel. What’s more, it’s Palestine, not Israel that the age pyramid could push towards war.
The ideological question is probably the most important. Dmytro Dontsov and his henchman Stepan Bandera glorified the Ukrainian fighters, heirs to the Swedish Vikings, the Varegues, who had to slaughter the “Muscovites” to be able to feast in Valhalla. Today, it’s the “White Führer”, Andriy Biletsky, who has commanded the troops of the Azov Division in Mariupol, the 3rd Assault Brigade in Bakhmut/Artiomovsk and most recently in Avdeyevka/Avdiyevka. Similarly, Benjamin Netanyahu, son of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s private secretary, has not hesitated to compare the Palestinians to the ancient Amalekites. The implication is that they must all be exterminated as Yahweh commands, or else their race will re-emerge against the Hebrews. In the same way, the IDF has systematically destroyed all the universities and schools in the Gaza Strip and massacred 30,000 civilians under the pretext of fighting Hamas.
Dmytro Dontsov formed an alliance with Adolf Hitler as early as 1923, i.e. before he came to power, and became one of the administrators of the Reinhard Heydrich Institute, responsible for carrying out the Final Solution of the Jewish and Gypsy question. Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had formed an alliance with Dontsov in 1922, founded the Betar cadre school in Civitavecchi (Italy) with the help of Duce Benito Mussolini in 1935. He was unable to play a major role in the Second World War, dying in August 1940. There can be no doubt about the adherence of Ukrainian integral nationalists to Nazism and revisionist Zionists to fascism.
Incidentally, we find the territorial logic of fascist and Nazi regimes in the current discourse of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At the same time, the Russian and Palestinian presidents, Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Abbas, constantly claim to be defending their peoples.
To find out more about Dmytro Dontsov’s integral nationalism, read:
“Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?“, by Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, November 15, 2022.
For more on Volodymyr Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionists read:
“The veil is being torn: the hidden truths of Jabotinsky and Netanyahu“, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, January 23, 2024.
and “In Jerusalem, the ’Conference for the Victory of Israel’ threatens London and Washington“, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, February 13, 2024.
ABC interview- Sarah Ferguson and Tom O’Brien – a case study in exposing Trumpian-style deceptive spin
Greg Phillips 13 Mar 24
We need a proper transcript of this – Ferguson made a great point (11m25s) that Bill Gates said we should take advantage of our bountiful wind and solar potential. (Plus there are so many things that O’Brien said that I want to add to my “wacky nuclear predictions” file.) – Ferguson: I asked Bill Gates on this program whether Australia should get involved with nuclear energy – this was his answer – “Australia doesn’t need to get engaged on this, Australia should aggressively take advantage of Australia’s natural endowment to do solar and wind, that’s clear cut and beneficial to Australia”
Greg Phillips In the interview, Ted O’Brien employs logical fallacies to support the Coalition’s position on nuclear energy:
O’Brien appeals to the authority of experts and government agencies, such as ANSTO [Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation], to support his argument for nuclear energy.
O’Brien presents a false dichotomy by framing the energy debate as a choice between nuclear energy and renewables, suggesting that nuclear is necessary due to the perceived failure of renewable energy targets.
O’Brien engages in ad hominem attacks by criticising the Labor Party’s energy policies and accusing them of lacking transparency and effectiveness, rather than directly addressing the interviewer’s concerns about nuclear energy.
O’Brien misrepresents the interviewer’s arguments by suggesting that they are arguing against the attractiveness of nuclear energy to investors, rather than questioning its feasibility and cost-effectiveness in the Australian context.
O’Brien selectively then cites examples of successful nuclear energy projects in other countries, such as Canada and the United States, while ignoring instances of cost overruns and delays in countries like the United Kingdom and France.
These logical fallacies detract from the soundness of O’Brien’s arguments and undermine the credibility of the Federal Coalition’s stance on nuclear energy.
AUKUS anniversary brings a sinking feeling.
The Age, By Matthew Knott, March 13, 2024 —
As anniversaries go, this one has turned out to be quite a downer.
A year since Anthony Albanese, Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak stood at a naval base in San Diego to unveil Australia’s plan to acquire a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, critics of the AUKUS pact are cock-a-hoop and its backers are on the defensive.
It’s a turnaround from December, when AUKUS’s champions were celebrating the fact that the notoriously dysfunctional and divided United States Congress had passed legislation authorising the sale of three Virginia-class submarines to Australia.
“This is a very significant accomplishment for all the parties involved,” declared US Congressman Joe Courtney, co-chair of the Congressional Friends of Australia Caucus.
“A lot of people have been holding their breath to see whether Congress takes this seriously.”
Yet in the lead-up to the one-year milestone, prominent commentators have been promoting a sense of gloom around the submarine plan.
“Dead in the water: the AUKUS delusion,” screams the bright yellow cover of the current edition of the Australian Foreign Affairs journal.
In the lead essay, defence expert and longtime AUKUS sceptic Hugh White argues the submarine plan will “almost certainly fail”, effectively reading AUKUS’s last rites before the pact has even reached teething age.
After laying out multiple ways in which the submarine plan could fall apart, White predicts the crunch is “perhaps most likely to come in Washington, where a number of hurdles could prove fatal to America’s willingness to sell us Virginia-class subs”.
Esteemed Financial Times foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman ventilated these anxieties to an international audience in February in a piece titled, “The squawkus about AUKUS is getting louder”.
Then came the Tuesday release of the Biden administration’s 2025 defence budget request, revealing it was only seeking funding for one Virginia-class submarine to built in the coming year. That is down from the two previously expected and well below the production rate of 2.33 subs a year the US says is necessary to sell any submarines to Australia.
As it tries to compete with China for supremacy in the Indo-Pacific, the US Navy is currently 17 attack submarines below its target of 66 – raising obvious questions about whether it will agree to hand over three boats to Australia beginning in 2032.
The legislation passed by Congress last year requires the president of the day to certify that the transfer of the submarines “will not degrade the United States undersea capabilities” and would be contingent on the US “making sufficient submarine production and maintenance investments” to meet its own needs.
The US navy is struggling to cope with supply chain blockages and worker shortages, so much so that the defence sector bought prime-time advertisements during the Oscars telecast to convince welders, forklift drivers, plumbers and marine biologists to help make AUKUS a reality.
Far from elated, AUKUS’s biggest champion in the US Congress is now furious. Describing the budget request as a “hard rudder turn”, Courtney said the decision to produce just one Virginia-class boat in a year “makes little or no sense” and would have a profound impact on both the US and Australian navies.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who has long argued Australia would be better off under the deal he struck with France to acquire conventional diesel submarines, leapt onto ABC radio to say he told us so.
“This is really a case of us being mugged by reality,” Turnbull said.
“We are bobbing along as a cork in the maelstrom of American politics…Unless the Americans are able to dramatically change the pace at which they’re producing submarines, and there’s no reason to believe they will be able to do so, we will not ever get the submarines that were promised.”
The Australian and US governments have tried to push back on the doubters, with Defence Minister Richard Marles insisting the three nations “remain steadfast in our commitment to the pathway announced last March”.
The US Navy argues it is pouring $11 billion into the US industrial base over five years, with a plan to produce two Virginia-class submarines by 2028 and the 2.33 required to meet its AUKUS commitments soon after that.
……………………………………………………….. depends on how optimistic you feel about the American political system and the strength of the US-Australia alliance. Meanwhile, we have to contend with the possibility of Donald Trump’s return to the White House and no one knows what he would do about AUKUS…………………………….
From the moment it was announced a year ago, it has been clear the submarine plan was courageous in the Yes, Minister sense of the word: a hugely ambitious and risky endeavour that could come unstuck in several ways. While it is vastly premature to declare AUKUS dead, immense challenges remain.
Ultimately, only the delivery of the promised submarines will silence the doubters – not soothing words from Washington and Canberra. https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/aukus-anniversary-brings-a-sinking-feeling-20240313-p5fc0y.html
Pentagon sparks fresh AUKUS doubts on anniversary of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine plans
ABC, By defence correspondent Andrew Greene, 13 Mar24
- In short: Defence Minister Richard Marles says AUKUS partners are working to help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines despite changes to procurement plans in the US.
- The US Navy says it will order just one fast-attack nuclear submarine in 2025, rather than two.
- What’s next? As part of the AUKUS deal, Australia will provide more than $4.5 billion to bolster America’s submarine industrial base
………………………………………Already the US is struggling to ramp up its submarine production rate to an annual target of 2.33 so it can replace retiring boats in its own fleet and begin transfers of second-hand stock to Australia in the early 2030s.
At present, the US is only achieving around 1.2 to 1.3 boats each year due to labour shortages and supply chain delays following the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Navy not expected to consistently hit a two-per-year target until 2029.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told the ABC Australia’s future defence had become completely dependent on the United States.
…………………………………….. This week marks one year since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined British counterpart Rishi Sunak and US president Joe Biden at a San Diego Naval Base to outline the AUKUS “optimal pathway” for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
Greens senator David Shoebridge described the latest US defence budget request as a failure for the AUKUS partnership that was “almost too big to wrap your head around” and predicted Australia would end up with “nothing”.
“When the US passed the law to set up AUKUS they put in kill switches, one of which allowed the US to not transfer the submarines if doing so would ‘degrade the US undersea capabilities’. Budgeting for one submarine all but guarantees this,” he warned
………………………….Budget changes under new proposal
As part of the AUKUS deal, Australia will provide more than $4.5 billion to bolster America’s submarine industrial base, while the US aims to contribute a similar amount contingent on congressional negotiations over defence spending that are complicated by the Ukrainian war.
However, this week’s Pentagon budget proposal requests Congress to appropriate a further $US4 billion for the US submarine industrial base in 2025, and $US11.1 billion over five years, for a “historic” investment to expand production.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-13/us-defence-announcement-raises-questions-on-aukus-anniversary/103578408
Victorian Premier blasts nuclear plan as renewable appeals curbed
Canberra Times, By Callum Godde and Rachael Ward, March 14 2024
Opponents of solar and wind farms will be stripped of the power to appeal approvals to a Victorian tribunal, as the premier blasts the federal opposition’s nuclear pitch as a cartoon-inspired distraction.
The Victorian government will remove the ability for third parties to appeal planning decisions for renewable energy projects through the Victorian Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
From April 1, shovel-ready renewable energy projects will be eligible for an accelerated pathway under an expansion of a development facilitation program.
The change will remove the planning panel process and third-party appeal rights at VCAT amid the rise of the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) movement.
Premier Jacinta Allan said more than one in five planning applications had ended up in VCAT since 2015, with the overwhelming majority of the initial decisions being upheld.
“Eventually these projects are getting built but it’s taking far too long,” she told reporters at a wind farm in Mount Wallace on Thursday.
“We want to spend more time on projects being build and less time on it being caught up in red tape.”……………………………
Ms Allan also took the opportunity to hit out at the federal opposition’s pre-election policy to establish nuclear reactors at retiring coal-fired power plants……………………
Ms Allan accused the federal coalition of deliberately “whipping up anxiety” over renewable projects in their backyards and pushing the nuclear debate to “distract” from Australia’s transition to net zero by 2050…………
Victoria has an estimated $90 billion worth of renewable projects in the pipeline and is targeting 95 per cent renewable energy generation by 2035 and net zero emissions by 2045………………… https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8555578/premier-blasts-nuclear-plan-as-renewable-appeals-curbed/
Opposition eyeing off six sites for nuclear reactors
New Daily, Poppy Johnston, Mar 12, 2024
Households and businesses close to the six nuclear power reactors the opposition hopes to see built could have their energy bills subsidised.
Teasing the coalition’s yet-to-be-unveiled energy policy at the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Sydney on Tuesday, opposition leader Peter Dutton said the plan would likely include six nuclear plant sites.
Tasmania has been ruled out as a potential host state.
Dutton said the coalition would seek a social licence by incentivising close-by communities with subsided energy, a model he said was used in the United States.
“It provides incentive for industry to establish jobs,” he told the audience.
The opposition is expected to release its energy policy ahead of the federal budget in May, with the plan likely to include overturning the moratorium on nuclear technology and possible sites for reactors on old coal station locations to take advantage of existing transmission infrastructure…………….
The Albanese government has dismissed nuclear as an unsuitable technology for Australia that has a high price tag and will take too long to roll out.
Energy experts also say it’s difficult to estimate the cost of transitioning to nuclear given the technology is not currently commercially available.
Dutton addressed a number of what he described as “straw man arguments” against nuclear, including cost.
He used other regions with nuclear in the energy mix – South Korea and the Ontario region of Canada – to make his case for the system-wide cost of the energy source and its influence on power bills.
Reactors also produce a “small amount of waste” and Dutton said the government had already signed up to deal with nuclear waste via the AUKUS agreement……………………………. https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2024/03/12/dutton-six-sites-nuclear-reactors
Radioactive waste, baby bottles and Spam: the deep ocean has become a dumping ground
The ocean’s depths are not some remote alien realm, but are in fact intimately entangled with every other part of the planet. We should treat them that way
by James Bradley. Guardian 12 Mar…….
“…………………………………………………………………………………………..The ocean’s depths have also been used as the final resting place for large amounts of nuclear material.
A 2019 study found at least 18,000 radioactive objects scattered across the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, many of them dumped there by the Soviet Union. These objects include vessels such as the K-27, the 110-metre nuclear submarine powered by an experimental liquid-metal-cooled reactor, which was scuttled in 1982 with its reactor still on board (when the explosive charges that were supposed to sink the K-27 failed to fully detonate, it had to be rammed with a tug); the wreck of the K-141 Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea in 2000 during a naval exercise, killing all 118 on board and bearing its reactor and fuel to the bottom; and the K-159 attack submarine, which sank while being towed near Murmansk in 2003 with 800kg of spent uranium fuel on board. The head of Norway’s Nuclear Safety Authority says it is only a matter of time before these objects begin to release their toxic legacy into the water; others have called the situation a “Chornobyl in slow motion on the sea floor”.
While the Soviet Union dumped more nuclear waste on the sea floor than any other country, it was certainly not alone. Between 1948 and 1982, the British government consigned almost 70,000 tonnes of nuclear waste to the ocean’s depths, and the US, Switzerland, Japan and the Netherlands are just a few of the nations that have used the ocean to dispose of radioactive material, albeit in much smaller quantities. And while international treaties now prohibit the dumping of radioactive material at sea, the British government is exploring plans to dispose of up to 750,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste, including more than 100 tonnes of plutonium, beneath the sea floor off Cumbria. British officials argue this sort of geological disposal offers a way of keeping waste stable and secure over hundreds of thousands of years, although incidents such as the 2014 leak of radioactive material at a waste disposal facility half a kilometre beneath salt beds in New Mexico suggests that like many of the assurances offered by the nuclear industry, this claim should be approached with great caution.
The dumping of nuclear waste in the ocean is only one part of a far larger story of carelessness and greed. Human waste in the form of plastics and other objects is everywhere in the deep ocean, a fact that is made brutally apparent by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology’s Deep-sea Debris Database, which documents the presence of tyres, fishing nets, sports bags, mannequins, beach balls and baby’s bottles spread across the sea floor at depths of many thousands of metres. In some regions, the number of such objects exceeds 300/sq km.
This tide of garbage has even reached the deepest and most remote parts of the ocean: …………………………………………………………………………………….
Possibly more disturbing, though, is the growing accumulation of microplastics in the ocean depths………………………………………………..
Nor is plastic the only thing that drifts downwards. In 2019 Chinese scientists discovered radioactive carbon-14 from the detonation of nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 50s in the bodies of amphipods living at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, borne into the deep not by ocean circulation, but in the rain of organic matter from above. More recent studies have found radioactive caesium from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in sediment more than 7,000 metres down in the Japan Trench……………………………………………………….. more https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/12/radioactive-waste-baby-bottles-and-spam-the-deep-ocean-has-become-a-dumping-ground
Aid Wars over Gaza: Resuming Funding to UNRWA
March 12, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark https://theaimn.com/aid-wars-over-gaza-resuming-funding-to-unrwa/
The steady and ruthless campaign by Israel to internationally defund the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is unravelling. The lynchpin in the effort was a thin, poison pen dossier making claims that 12 individuals were Hamas operatives who had been involved in the October 7 attacks. Within a matter of days, two internal investigations were commenced, various individuals sacked, and US$450 million worth of funding from donor states suspended.
As the head of the agency, Philippe Lazzarini, explained at a press conference on March 4, he has “never been informed” or received evidence of Israel’s claims substantiating their assertions, though he did receive the prompt about the profane twelve directly from Israeli officials. Every year, both Israel and the Palestinian authorities were furnished with staff lists, “and I never received the slightest concern about the staff that we have been employing.”
Had Israeli authorities signed off on these alleged participants in bungling or conspiratorial understanding? Certainly, there was more than a pongy whiff of distraction about it all, given that Israel had come off poorly in The Hague proceedings launched by South Africa, during which the judges issued an interim order demanding an observance of the UN Genocide Convention, an increase of humanitarian aid, and the retention of evidence that might be used for future criminal prosecutions for genocide.
An abrupt wave of initial success in starving the agency followed, with a number of countries announcing plans to freeze funding. In the United States, irate members of Congress accused the agency of having “longstanding connections to terrorism and promotion of antisemitism.” A hearing was duly held titled “UNRWA Exposed: Examining the Agency’s Mission and Failures” with Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies frothing at an agency that supposedly incited “violence against Israel, subsidizes US-designated terrorist organizations, denies Palestinians their basic human rights, and blocks the pathways to a sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”
The attempt to cast UNRWA into gleefully welcomed oblivion has not worked. Questions were asked about the initial figure of twelve alleged militants. News outlets began questioning the numbers.
The funding channels are resuming. Canada, for instance, approving “the robust investigative process underway”, also acknowledged that “more can be done to respond to the urgent needs of Palestinian civilians.” The initial cancellation of funding to the agency, charged Thomas Woodley, president of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, had been “a reckless political decision that never should have been made.”
The Swedish government was also encouraged by undertakings made by UNRWA “to allow independent auditing, strengthen internal supervision and enable additional staff controls”, promising an initial outlay of 200 million kroner (US$19 million).
The Minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade, Johan Forssell, promised that it would “monitor closely to ensure UNRWA follows through on what it has promised.” Aid policy spokesperson for the Christian Democrats, Gudrun Brunegård, also conceded that, given the “huge” needs on the part of the civilian population, that UNRWA was “the organisation that is best positioned to help vulnerable Palestinians.”
Much the same sentiment was expressed by the European Union, with the Commission agreeing to pay 50 million euros to UNRWA from a promised total of 82 million euros on the proviso that EU-appointed experts audit the screening of staff. “This audit,” a European Commission statement explains, “will review the control systems to prevent the possible involvement of its staff and assets in terrorist activities.” Having been found wanting in her screeching about-turn, the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen insisted that the EU stood “by the Palestinian people in Gaza and elsewhere in the region. Innocent Palestinians should not have to pay the price for the crimes of [the] terrorist group Hamas.”
Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi was stiffly bureaucratic in expressing satisfaction at “the commitment of UNRWA to introduce robust measures to prevent possible misconduct and minimise the risk of allegations.” At no point was Israel’s own contribution to the calamity, and its insatiable vendetta against the agency, mentioned.
The bombast and blunder of the whole effort by Israel was further discoloured by claims that UNRWA staff had been victims of torture at the hands of the IDF in drafting the dossier. In a statement released by the agency, a grave accusation was levelled: “These forced confessions as a result of torture are being used by the Israeli Authorities to further spread misinformation about the agency as part of attempts to dismantle UNRWA.” In doing so, Israel was “putting our staff at risk and has serious implications on our operations in Gaza and around the region.”
For its part, the IDF, through a statement, claimed that this was all exaggerated piffle: “The mistreatment of detainees during their time in detention or whilst under interrogation violates IDF values and contravenes IDF [sic] and is therefore absolutely prohibited.”
Increasingly on the losing side of that battle, Israeli authorities decided to cook the figures further, declaring with crass confidence that 450 URWA employees in Gaza were members of militant groups including Hamas. Sticking to routine, those making that allegation decided that evidence of such claims was not needed. Those employees, claimed Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, “are military operatives in terror groups in Gaza”. “This was no coincidence. This is systematic. There is no claiming, ‘we did not know’.”
In the fog of war, mendacity thrives with virile vigour; but the current suggestion on the part of various donor states is that the humanitarian incentive to ameliorate the suffering of the Gaza populace has taken precedence over Israel’s persistently lethal efforts. That, at least, is the case with certain countries, leaving the doubters starkly exposed.
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