April 26 marks the 33rd anniversary of the 1986 radiation disaster at Chernobyl reactor Number 4 in Ukraine, just north of Kiev the capital.
It is still nearly impossible to get scientific consensus on the vast extent of the impacts. The explosions and two-week long fire at Chernobyl spewed around the world something between one billion and nine billion curies of radiation — depending on whose estimates you choose to believe. The accident is classified by the UN as the worst environmental catastrophe in human history.
Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout has been blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) acknowledges only 56 deaths among firefighters who suffered and died agonizing deaths in the disaster’s immediate aftermath. However, the IAEA’s officially chartered mission is “to accelerate and enlarge the contributions of nuclear power worldwide.” Because of its institutional bias, one can dispute nearly everything the IAEA says about radiation risk.
Also on the low-end of fatality estimates is the World Health Organization which has to have its radiation studies approved by the IAEA! In 2006, the WHO’s “Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime (240,000 liquidators; 116,000 evacuees, and the 270,000 residents of the Strictly Controlled Zones).” The WHO added to this 4,000 the estimate that “among the five million residents of areas with high levels of radioactive cesium deposition” in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine” predictions suggest “up to 5,000 additional cancer deaths may occur in this population from radiation exposure…”
Alternately, Ukraine’s Minister of Health Andrei Serkyuk estimated in 1995 that 125,000 people had already died from the direct effects of Chernobyl’s radiation. Serkyuk said a disproportionate share of casualties were among children, pregnant women and rescue workers or “liquidators.” Liquidators were soldiers ordered to participate in the removal and burial of radioactive topsoil, heavy equipment, trees, and debris, wearing no protective clothing, respirators or radiation monitors.
On January 10, 2010 The Guardian reported that “reputable scientists researching the most radiation-contaminated areas of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine” dispute the IAEA estimates that only 56 firefighters died “and that about 4,000 will die from it eventually.” The paper noted for example, that, “The International Agency for Research on Cancer, another UN agency, predicts 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl; an assessment by the Russian academy of sciences says there have been 60,000 deaths so far in Russia, and an estimated 140,000 in Ukraine and Belarus.”
The Guardian further noted that, “Meanwhile, the Belarus national academy of sciences estimates 93,000 deaths so far and 270,000 cancers, and the Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection calculates 500,000 deaths so far.”
The Los Angeles Times reported in 1998 that, “Russian officials estimated 10,000 Russian ‘liquidators’ died.” The article quoted health officials who said “close to 3,600 Ukrainians who took part in the cleanup effort have died of radiation exposure.” In 2001, the BBC upped the estimate and reported, “More than 30,000 Russians have died from radiation, half of whom were involved in dealing with the immediate aftermath….”
An August 4, 2003 New Yorker magazine article noted vaguely that, “Thousands of people died of cancers and other diseases in the years after the Chernobyl disaster,” while The New York Times said April 23, 2003, “Thyroid cancer, leukemia and other cancers have skyrocketed in the area around the reactor.” Around the 10th anniversary, under the headline, “Genetics: Chernobyl’s burst in mutations,” The Washington Post reported that, “Studies indicated that people … living near Chernobyl are giving birth to offspring with a higher number of genetic mutations.” In her April 27, 1996 dispatch for the Associated Press, journalist Angela Charlton noted “a hundred-fold increase in the incidence of childhood thyroid cancers in the affected region.”
Chernobyl’s health effects were felt much further away than the area around the reactor. The Los Angeles Times reported July 25, 1996, that radiation from Chernobyl was “linked to leukemia cases in Greece.” Epidemiologic Reviews in Oxford Journals for March 30, 2005 reported, “The releases of radioactive materials were such that contamination of the ground was found to some extent in every country in the Northern Hemisphere.” In its 1988 Report to the General Assembly, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation found, “The accident at the Chernobyl … resulted in radioactive material becoming widely dispersed and deposited … throughout the northern hemisphere.”
In 2001, Alex Kuzma, executive director of the Children of Chernobyl Relief Fund, documented an 80-fold increase in cancers in Belarus and Ukraine, and reported that 50 million people, including 1.26 million children, are affected. Eugene Cahaill of the Dublin-based Chernobyl Children’s Project reported in the Irish Times in 2005 that, “Nine million people in Belarus, the Ukraine and Western Russian have been directly affected by the fallout.”
Thirty-six hundred deaths, or 125,000? Nine million people affected, or 50 million? The health effects of exposing everyone in the hemisphere to Chernobyl’s radiation (and Windscale’s, and Santa Susana’s, and Fukushima’s) — effects that are often delayed for decades — are quite incalculable. Got cancer?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GAjian Tyler Durden
Iran’s Army, Navy, Air Force, and Khatam al-Anbiya Air Defense Base took part in a nationwide military parade last week.
In Tehran, President Hassan Rouhani and Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) officers, attended the parade near the mausoleum of Imam Khomeini, also referred to as the holy shrine.
During the parade, the Iranian Armed Forces presented new defense achievements and unveiled new military hardware for the modern battlefield.
In particular, Iranian media published several photos of a new unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) with a rocket launcher mounted on top.
Another photo shows an anti-drone rifle that is designed to disable or knock out the navigation system of an enemy drone.
TV footage also showed MiG-29, F-4 Phantom and F-14 Tomcat fighters soaring above the parade area. More footage showed AH-1 Cobra and CH-47 Chinook helicopters.
There were reports of missiles, submarines, armored vehicles, radars, and electronic warfare systems showcased at the event.
In the south, the Navy’s warships practiced attacking and defensives maneuvers in the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman.
Speaking at the parade, President Rouhani criticized America’s hostile policies against Iran, the latest of which saw the Trump administration designate the IRGC — as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
The Iranian president described the designation as an “insult to all (Iranian) Armed Forces, and an insult to the great Iranian nation.”
Rouhani said Iran’s Armed Forces pose no threat against regional nations.
He added that Iran will defend the homeland against Western invaders using the weapons showcased at the parade.
Rouhani noted that the Trump administration is irritated with Iran’s Armed Forces, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi fighters and Yemen’s Popular Committees due to their abilities to efficiently combat American proxy armies across the Middle East.
“The Americans and their stooges in the region and the Zionist regime could not imagine that regional nations with the help of Iran, its Armed Forces and the IRGC could annihilate all their proxies, i.e. terrorists, in the Middle East,” he said.
So maybe the new military hardware showcased at the parade could soon find itself on a modern battlefield fighting against American proxy armies.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UFaAgo Tyler Durden
The new Ukrainian government is faced with reopening an inquiry into evidence of an organized mass killing in Kiev that Poroshenko stonewalled…
Police in Hrushevsky Street, Kiev, Feb. 12, 2014. (Wikimedia)
Five years ago, the Maidan massacre in Kiev, Ukraine, of Feb. 18-20, 2014, was a watershed event, not only for the politics and history of Ukraine but also for world politics generally. This mass killing in downtown Kyiv set the stage for the violent overthrow of the pro-Russian government in Ukraine and a new Cold War between Washington and Moscow.
Therefore, it is remarkable that five years after this massacre shook the world, no one has been sentenced for any of the Maidan killings. This was the best documented case of mass killing in history, broadcast live on TV and the internet, in presence of thousands of eyewitnesses. It was filmed by hundreds of journalists from major media in the West, Ukraine, Russia, and many other countries as well as by numerous social media users. Yet, to this day, no one has been brought to justice for this major and consequential crime.
From the start, the dominant narrative promoted by the Ukrainian and Western governments and mainstream media has placed the blame for this tragedy firmly on the Yanukovych government. It contends that forces loyal to former President Victor Yanukovych— either snipers and/or the Berkut, a special anti-riot police— massacred peaceful Maidan protesters on the direct orders of Yanukovych himself. Such charges against Yanukovych, his ministers and commanders and a special Berkut unit—whose five ex-members were tried for the murder of 48 Maidan protesters on Feb. 20, 2014 — are generally taken at face value. With some limited exceptions, challenges to this narrative are treated dismissively.
For the most part, mainstream news media in the U.S. and other Western countries ignored trial evidence, public statements by officials and politicians and scholarly studies that put the standard narrative under question. This includes non-reporting about my own academic studies of the Maidan massacre.
Killing Protesters and Police
My work found that this was an organized mass killing of both protesters and the police, with the goal of delegitimizing the Yanukovych government and its forces and seizing power in Ukraine. Oligarchic and far right elements of the Maidan movement were involved in this massacre. For this reason, the official investigation was fabricated and stonewalled. I presented studies to support this as well as several online video appendixes with various evidence at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco in 2015 and Boston in 2018, the 2017 World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York in 2017, and a joint conference by the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University and the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies in 2018, and published their summary in an academic press volume.
The prosecutor general of Ukraine recently announced that the investigation of the Maidan massacre is complete. He cited reconstructions of the Maidan massacre by a New York architecture company, working with a team of Ukrainian “volunteers” to provide a 3D model, as definite evidence that the Maidan protesters were massacred by the Berkut police and that snipers did not massacre the protesters.
This model was featured by The New York Times, in its May 30, 2018,report “Who Killed the Kiev Protesters?” as a proof that the Berkut police massacred Maidan protesters.
However, no expert knowledge or familiarity with the Maidan massacre or Ukraine is needed to see blatant misrepresentation of elementary data in that 3D model.
The wound locations of the killed Maidan protesters in the 3D model do not match the wound locations in the forensic medical examinations of the bodies. The reports of those examinations were used in this simulation to determine the locations of the shooters. They are published in Ukrainian and English on the linked website. According to one such report, Ihor Dmytriv was shot in the “right side surface” and the “left side surface” of the torso “from the right to the left, from the top to the bottom, and a little from the front to the back” with the entry wound 20.5cm (8 inches) higher than the exit wound. However, in the simulation, his wounds have been moved to the front and the back and made nearly horizontal.
Actual wound locations of Dmytriv and their misrepresentation.
A Maidan lawyer visually confirmed at the Maidan massacre trial that these wounds locations of were in the right and left sides. In the video of their examination of Dmytriv right after his shooting, Maidan medics also indicate such locations of his wounds with no wounds visible in the front area, contrary to the 3D model. The forensic medical reports also state that Dmytriv was wounded in his right shoulder from bottom to top direction, with this entry wound 5 cm lower, but the 3D animation also misrepresents this direction.
The wound locations of the other two victims have been similarly altered. The 3D model moved the exit wound location from around the middle line of the back of Andriy Dyhdalovych’s body in forensic medical and clothing examinations significantly to the right. It also changed a similar large vertical angle from a top and bottom direction and 17 cm difference in height of entry and exit wounds to nearly horizontal level.
Actual wound locations of Dyhdalovych and their misrepresentation.
In the case of Yuriy Parashchuk, forensic medical examinations found that his entry and exit wounds were in the back of his head on the left side. But the 3D analysis moved the entry wound location to the front area and changed its somewhat top-to-bottom direction to nearly horizontal. Frames from a videoby a French photographer shows a large bullet hole in the back of Parashchuk’s red helmet. How can he be shot in the back of his head by the Berkut police on a nearly similar horizontal level?
Changing the wound locations invalidates the entire reconstruction and, therefore, the conclusions of the SITU analysis and The New York Times article, that these and other Maidan protesters were shot from the Berkut positions.
One does not need to be a ballistic expert to see that locations of wounds in the back and on the sides and top-to-bottom directions of wounds specified in forensic medical reports and positions of these three killed protesters facing the Berkut in the videos cannot physically match with Berkut police positions located on a similar horizontal level on the ground in front of them. The forensic medical examinations conducted for the government investigation and made public at the Maidan massacre trial revealed that the absolute majority of the protesters were shot not in front and not from horizontal or near horizontal directions that are consistent with police positions. Rather, they were shot from a top-to-bottom direction and in sides or the back that are consistent with shooting from the Maidan-controlled buildings.
Government Investigation
The government investigation, conducted after the Maidan government came to power after this massacre, and which charged the Berkut police behind the barricades with killing these three protesters, raises the same concerns.
The complex medical examinations, which were published on the SITU website and which are presented by the government investigation in Ukraine as a key evidence that the Berkut police massacred the protesters, showed the same bullet trajectories as the 3D model. The text of these examinations, which are available in Ukrainian and in English translations, shows that these bullet trajectories were determined not by ballistic experts butby medical experts without any calculations or explanations.
Synchronized videos, which were used by the SITU to determine that the Berkut police behind a truck barricade killed Parashchuk, actually show that he and other protesters were in a blind spot below the line of police fire from behind a truck. It was physically impossible for the police behind the wide and tall truck to shoot at him below over the top of this truck. Dozens of other Maidan protesters who were killed and wounded around the same spot were in the same situation.
Parashchuk in the blind spot below the line of fire from the police behind the truck.
The locations of the forces of the Yanukovych government during the massacre are well known, and they are identified in my studies, the government investigation charges, numerous videos, and in the SITU 3D model.
At the time of the killings of these three protesters, Berkut policemen were behind the barricades on Instytutska Street on the government side, while the protesters who were killed were in between Berkut and the Hotel Ukraina.
Forensic examinations of bullet holes by government experts described numerous bullet holes on the second, third, and higher floors and the roof of the Hotel Ukraina on the side that faced the government forces. But they did not identify a single bullet hole on the first floor on the Berkut facing side of the hotel behind these protesters. Simple positioning of the bullet hole locations described in these forensic reports clearly shows that almost all bullets from the Berkut and other positions flew above the heads of the protesters there or targeted poles, trees, and a flower box. This is also shown in vide and photos — including some I took there after the massacre — and in videos and reports of shooting at journalists in the hotel with a Google Street View image from the first Berkut barricade.
This confirms my study findings that the special Berkut police unit and the Omega unit of snipers of Internal Troops were shooting at snipers in the Hotel Ukraina.
After five long years, the failure by the Poroshenko government’s investigation to determine bullet trajectories by ballistic experts or conduct on-site investigative experiments for the same purpose — even after the Maidan massacre trial judges ordered them two years ago to do so — is therefore hardly surprising. It is impossible to bend physical reality. In a literal cover-up, large fences were recently erected on the crime scene for the construction of the Maidan massacre memorial, which would completely alter the landscape. The fences and the memorial would make it impossible to determine bullet trajectories on-site, which still has not been done by the investigation for five years after this mass killing.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with Poroshenko, outside Presidential Palace in Kiev, Feb. 5, 2015, during Kerry’s first round of meetings with the new government. (State Department via Flickr)
The SITU reconstruction also missed bullet holes that appeared in Dmytriv’s shield and in a shield of another protester in front of Dyhdalovych in videos of their shooting that were used in the reconstruction. The locations of these bullet holes are inconsistent with shooting from the Berkut barricades.
But these shields with clear locations of the bullet holes, like the helmet of Parashchuk and almost all the shields and helmets of protesters who were killed or wounded, mysteriously disappeared after the massacre, along with a lot of other crucial evidence, such as bullets and security-camera footage.
Similarly, crucial testimonies of Maidan protesters, who witnessed the killings of Dyhdalovych and Dmytriv, are ignored by the Times’ report, SITU and the official Ukrainian investigation. Dyhdalovych’s wife stated in her Ukrainian media interview that another protester told her that he saw that Dyhdalovych was killed by a sniper on the roof of the Bank Arkada. This protester was filmed following Dyhdalovych when they both went to evacuate Dmytriv after he was shot. The Bank Arkada is a tall green building in the front and to the right of both Dyhdalovych and Dmytriv, and it appears to match the apparent directions of their wounds. My Maidan massacre studies video appendices showed that it was in the Maidan-controlled area and that snipers on its roof during the massacre were reported by both numerous Maidan protesters, including many wounded who spoke at the Maidan massacre trial and investigation, and by Security Service of Ukraine commanders and snipers.
SITU diagram of victims’ locations and names.
A female Maidan medic during the massacre was pointing to the top of this green building and shouting about snipers. But her words were translated in a BBCreport as referring to six protesters killed by the snipers in that area. AMaidan protester and another Maidan medic, who were wounded near the same spot where these two protesters were killed, both testified at the Maidan massacre trial that they were shot from this building. Government ballistic experts confirmed this during on-site investigative experiments.
Western Press Silence
These revelations were not reported by any Western media. This includes The New York Times, which on April 5, 2014, profiled this wounded protester against the backdrop of an unquestioned report by the acting government in Kiev that blaming “former President Viktor F. Yanukovych, his riot police and their suspected Russian assistants for the violence that killed more than 100 people in Kiev in February.”
It also includes CNN, which filmed the shooting of this medic and attributed it to the government forces.
The government investigation simply denies that there were any snipers there and in other Maidan-controlled buildings, and refuses to investigate them. This is done despite videos of such snipers and testimonies of the absolute majority of wounded protesters at the trial and investigation and more than 150 other witnesses about snipers in these locations.
The assumption in the 3D model that Dmytriv was shot by the single bullet is also contradicted bytestimony of another protester who saw that Dmytriv was shot by “a sniper” from the Hotel Ukraina. My Maidan massacre studies and their video appendices showed that this hotel was then controlled by the Maidan forces.
The New York Times article described collaboration of the New York architecture firm with a Ukrainian “volunteer” in creating the 3D model. It did not report 2017 admissions by the prosecutor general of Ukraine on Facebook that his government agency funded the work of a group of anonymous “volunteers,” including this Ukrainian graduate student, in compiling and synchronizing various videos of the Maidan massacre in collaboration with a People’s Front party outlet.
Some of the People’s Front party leaders were accused by various Ukrainian politicians and Maidan activists, such as Nadia Savchenko, and by five ex-Georgian ex-military members in Italian and IsraeliTV documentaries, of direct involvement in this massacre. Meanwhile, the Times lauds the Ukrainian government’s investigation and Maidan lawyers for drawing on such analyses by these “citizen investigators” and treats a New York architect firm as providing key evidence in the Maidan massacre trial.
Brad Samuels is a founding partner of Situ Research, the New York architecture company that produced the 3D model of the killing of three protesters, which was presented by the Times as proof that such snipers did not exist and that 49 protesters were massacred by the Berkut police.
Samuels said in a video [start at 55:16] that “…eventually, there is a consensus that there was a third party acting. It is clear from forensic evidence that people were shot in the back. Somebody was shooting from rooftops.” His striking observation was not included anywhere in the SITU 3D model report that he produced. Nor was it reported by the Times.
Cases of protesters, who were shot in the back, were omitted from the SITU model. But even in the deliberately selected cases of the three protesters, who were presented by this simulation as shot in front, their actual wound locations suggest that they were also shot from a Maidan-controlled building, which was located in front and to the right of them.
There was not a single report in English-language media concerning testimonies at the Maidan massacre trial where 25 wounded Maidan protesters, with whose shootings Berkut policemen are charged, who stated that they were shot from Maidan-controlled buildings or areas.
Video still from trial.
Major outlets likewise neglected to cover the testimonies by 30 wounded protesters who said they witnessed snipers in those locations or were told about them by other protesters. This is stunning since these testimonies are publicly available in live online recordings of the Maidan massacre trial and they are complied with English-language subtitles into an online video appendix to my study. These testimonies represent the majority of wounded protesters with whose shooting Berkut was charged. They are consistent with video testimonies by about 100 witnesses in the media and social media and at the trial and the investigation. But the official investigation in Ukraine simply denies that there were any such snipers in Maidan-controlled buildings, even though the Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine previously stated that snipers massacred many protesters from the Hotel Ukraina and other buildings.
Similarly, not a single media outlet reported segments of the Belgian VRT News video that showed Maidan protesters shouting during the massacre that they saw snipers in the Maidan-controlled Hotel Ukraina shooting Maidan protesters, pointing towards them, and asking them not to shoot. These segments were only shown to a small number of people at the Maidan massacre trial and are included in my online video appendix on YouTube. Other segments from this same video, however,were broadcast to some several hundred million viewers by major television networks in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, and Ukraine, and many other countries as evidence that the government forces massacred the Maidan protesters.
With the notable exception of an Associated Press story quoting the charismatic politician Nadia Savchenko, news agencies have ignored the public remarks of several Maidan politicians and activists who said that they witnessed the involvement of specific top Maidan leaders in the massacre.
Testimonies by five Georgian ex-military members in Italian, Israeli, Macedonian and Russian media and their published depositions to Berkut lawyers for the Maidan massacre trial have also been ignored. They stated that their groups received weapons, payments, and orders to massacre both police and protesters from specific Maidan and Georgian politicians.
They also said that they received instructions from a far-right linked ex-U.S. Army sniper and then saw Georgian, Baltic States, and Right Sector-linked snipers shooting from specific Maidan-controlled buildings.
Western media silence also greeted a recent statement by Anatolii Hrytsenko, one of the top Ukrainian presidential candidates, who was also a Maidan politician and minister of defense, that the investigation of the massacre has been stonewalled because of the involvement of someone from the current leadership of Ukraine in this mass killing.
In contrast, there were no such testimonies admitting involvement in the massacre or knowledge of such involvement by the Berkut policemen, ex-police and security services commanders; nor by ex-Yanukovych government officials. No specific evidence of orders by then-president Yanukovych or his ministers and commanders to massacre unarmed protesters has been revealed by the trials, investigations or news reporting. Nonetheless, the Western mainstream media report existence of such orders as a matter of a fact.
Yanukovych with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (President of Russia)
Not a single major Western media reported that a forensic ballistic examination, conducted by government institute experts on the prosecution request with use of an automatic computer-based IBIS-TAIS system, determined that bullets extracted from killed protesters did not match a police database of bullet samples from Kalashnikov assault rifles of members of the entire Kyiv Berkut regiment. The latter included the special Berkut company charged with the massacre of the protesters. The same concerns the forensic examination findings that many protesters were killed with hunting bullets and pellets.
There are no Western media reports, at least in English, concerning the investigation by the Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine. This investigation determined, based on protester’s testimonies and investigative experiments, that almost half of the protesters (77 out of 157) were wounded on Feb. 20 from other sectors than the Berkut police and that no one was charged with their shooting.
A female Maidan medic, whose wounding on the Maidan was highly publicized by Western and Ukrainian media and politicians and attributed to government snipers, is one of them. Since the official investigation determined that government snipers did not massacre the Maidan protesters, with a single implausible exception announced recently, this implies that these protesters were wounded from the Maidan-controlled buildings and areas.
Medic sniper vicim. (Youtube)
There was Western media silence, including from the BBC, about revelations by the Prosecutor General Office that one of the leaders of far right party Svoboda, who was also a member of the Ukrainian parliament at the time of the massacre, occupied a Hotel Ukraina room from which a sniper in Maidan-style green helmet was filmed by the BBC shooting in the direction of the Maidan protesters and the BBC’s own journalists.
Similarly, there are no mainstream media reports of the visual examinations of bullet holes and their impact points by the government investigators that determined that one German ARD television room at the Hotel Ukraina was shot from the direction of the Main Post Office, which was at the time the headquarters of the Right Sector. The latter far-right group included radical nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations and football ultras. This bullet just narrowly missed a German ARD TV female producer. The government investigators also determined that another ARD room in the same hotel was shot at from the Music Conservatory building, which was then the headquarters of the Right-Sector-linked special armed Maidan Self-Defense company.
Likewise, nothing was reported about a forensic ballistic examination made public at the trial that revealed that an ABC Newsproducer was shot in his Hotel Ukraina room by a Winchester caliber hunting soft-point bullet that did not match a caliber of Berkut Kalashnikovs.
Misrepresentation of the Maidan massacre and its investigation by Western media and governments is puzzling.
American independence leader John Adams once defended the British soldiers charged with the Boston massacre in 1770. He regarded this defense as important for the rule of law to prevail over politics. He famously stated at the Boston massacre trial that “facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” He not only won this politically charged case of a crucial massacre in U.S. politics and history but became U.S. president afterwards. The question is why this dictum is not heeded almost 250 years later in the case of the Maidan massacre in Ukraine.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Gsz2MK Tyler Durden
China has unveiled its newest high tech destroyer during Tuesday’s 70th anniversary of the Chinese PLA Navy’s founding, in an event witnessed by naval delegations from some 60 countries around the world gathered at the eastern port city of Qingdao.
President Xi Jinping reviewed the major naval parade which further had the direct participation of nearly a dozen regional navies, including Japan, Australia, and the Philippines. In hosting the major exercises, China is using the opportunity to both flex its muscle amid heightening tensions with the US in the East and South China seas, and show off its new generation of guided-missile destroyers.
Chinese Navy’s 055-class guided missile destroyer Nanchang takes part in a naval parade off the eastern port city of Qingdao on Tuesday. Image source: Reuters
China’s navy has been a major focal point and beneficiary of Xi’s push for rapid modernization, which has shifted priority away from a conventional infantry in order to create a more high tech and agile force.
The PLA navy has been rapidly growing since 2000, a year ago surpassing the United States’ own in size, and compliments an already huge over 2-million strong PLA troop fighting force.
Reuters summarized Tuesday’s naval parade scene as follows:
After boarding the destroyer the Xining, which was only commissioned two years ago, Xi watched as a flotilla of Chinese and foreign ships sailed past, in waters off the eastern port city of Qingdao.
“Salute to you, comrades. Comrades, thanks for your hard work,” Xi called out to the officers standing on deck as the ships sailed past, in images carried on state television.
“Hail to you, chairman,” they replied. “Serve the people.”
In all, 32 Chinese warships are participating the anniversary exercises, including the Liaoning aircraft carrier and nuclear subs, along with destroyers, frigates, landing ships, auxiliary ships.
Air assets deployed as part of the exercise also include bombers, fighters, carrier-based fighters, and carrier-based helicopters engaged in flyovers.
The 70th anniversary exercise appeared an occasion for Beijing to reassert its own vision of “freedom of navigation” and maritime security issues with “major naval leaders” from the region at a time when the US is challenging Chinese territorial claims.
This week’s PLA Navy exercises via China.org.cn
Other regional powers sent some of their advanced warships to showcase, such as a stealth guided-missile destroyer of the Indian Navy, INS Kolkata, and the Russian Caliber cruise missile-equipped frigate, the Admiral Gorshkov.
Noticeably absent from the naval parade and exercises, however, was China’s first domestically produced aircraft carrier, the Type 001A, reported to still be undergoing sea tests before its official future launch.
And though older submarines were present, China did not showcase its new nuclear submarines as previously promised, according to footage aired on state television.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IRLcSc Tyler Durden
Whether the Arctic will become a platform for cooperation or warfare has been a question often posed throughout the past 150 years.
As early as 1875, a vision for Eurasian-American cooperation was becoming realized as leading Americans and Russians alike foresaw the construction of telegraph and even rail lines across the 100 km Bering Strait crossing separating Russia from Alaska. Proponents of this policy on the American side included Lincoln-ally and Colorado’s 1st governor William Gilpin, whose book The Cosmopolitan Railway was published in 1890 showcasing a “post-imperial world” where mutual development was driven by rail lines across all the continents and featured the Bering Strait rail connection as its keystone. Many of Gilpin’s co-thinkers in Russia grew in influence and even convinced Tsar Nicholas II to endorse the project in 1905. The fact that the newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway was modelled on Lincoln’s Trans-Continental Railway and carried train cars built in Philadelphia made this concept very feasible in the minds of many people in those days… not excluding a British Empire that desperately wished to see this potential destroyed.
Although a few assassinations, a Russian revolution and Wall Street/London-funded wars disturbed this paradigm of cooperation from unfolding as it should have, hopes again ran high as Franklin Roosevelt and Stalin recognized that they had much more in common with each other than either did with the British Empire’s Winston Churchill. This partnership re-opened discussion for a Bering Strait rail connection during World War II after decades of dormancy. When FDR prematurely passed away in office and his leading American co-thinkers began to be targeted by the FBI-led “red scare”, Stalin ruminated that “the great dream had died”. Churchill’s Iron Curtain ushered in a new age of Mutual Assured Destruction whereby all talk of the Arctic as a domain of cooperation perished.
Despite efforts of certain leading figures such as John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert in America, or Enrico Mattei of Italy and Charles De Gaulle in France to establish cooperation between east and west, the growth of what has today come to be known as the “deep state” continued apace, with the creation of NATO, and technocratic infiltration of all western governments… often over the dead bodies of nationalist leaders.
While the west celebrated the collapse of Communism, and puppets like Sir Henry Kissinger and Sir George Bush ushered in the New World Order of NAFTA, NATO, the Eurozone, and WTO during the 1990s, a new alliance was forming, and soon the emergence of such institutions as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, APEC, and later Eurasian Economic Union occurred.
With these new institutions, the designs for a Bering Strait rail tunnel were once again revived when Russia signaled its willingness to construct the century-old project in 2011 offering over $65 billion towards its funding, which only required the cooperation of the United States and Canada.
As China began to emerge as a global force, it not only petitioned to become an observer in the Arctic Council in 2012, but also soon unleashed the Belt and Road Initiative in September 2013. A year later, in May 2014, China too gave its support to the construction of the Bering Strait Tunnel. Until this period the only serious discussion of the program was found in the work of the Schiller Institute, whose founders had publicized the New Silk Road and Bering Strait rail line through thousands of conferences and publications since 1993.
While the period of 2014-present has been tense at the best of times, and close to world war at the worst of times, the potential of the Arctic as a platform for international dialogue has continued un-abated and has served as the theme of this year’s fifth International Arctic Forum in St. Petersburg from April 9-10, 2019. The theme of the conference which saw the involvement of 3600 representatives of Russian, and international sectors both private and public was “Arctic: Territory of Dialogue”.
Russia’s Arctic: Territory of Dialogue
The keynote speech at the forum’s plenary session was given by Vladimir Putin whereby the Russian leader discussed the plans for Russia’s Arctic development for the coming decades stating:
“This year we are going to draft and adopt a new strategy for the development of the Russian Arctic up to 2035. It is to combine measures stipulated in our national projects and state programmes, the investment plans of infrastructure companies and programmes for developing Arctic regions and cities. All Arctic regions should be brought to the level of at least the national average in key socioeconomic indicators and living standards.”
In attendance were the heads of every Arctic Council nation (except Canada and the USA) who listened to Putin describe the upgrading of a global transportation corridor involving the Northern Sea Route, the Northern Latitudinal Railway connecting western Siberia to ports on the Arctic Ocean, a boost of freight traffic to 80 million tons by 2025 (from its 20 million tons today), and the creation of new nuclear powered ice breakers. Vast programs for resource development of LNG, oil and other minerals were announced throughout the conference and a new federal law to offer a special system of preferences for Arctic zone investments was publicized. Over 100 oil and gas extraction, infrastructure and tourism projects were finalized totalling over $164 billion.
Most importantly, a vision for this growth process was tied to the creative spirit of scientific discovery that distinguishes the human species as unique among the biosphere, as scientific and educational centers to integrate universities, research institutions and the private sector with the productive industrial processes underlying the “real economy” were announced. This last component of an Arctic vision brought into focus Russia’s partnership with China brilliantly, as a strategic agreement on scientific cooperation was signed between the two allies
The Russia-China Silk Road on Ice
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has already spread across Eurasia and Africa uplifting standards of living, cognitive potential and building mega projects along the way. The grand design is a fluid concept driven by rail development and city building on its land (road) component, with ports and shipping lanes on its sea (belt) component. A philosophical commitment to scientific and technological progress (aka: creative reason) which once animated western society is its driving power.
In January 2018, a Chinese white paper announced China’s northern vision with Russia “will bring opportunities for parties concerned to jointly build a ‘Polar Silk Road’, and facilitate connectivity and sustainable economic and social development of the Arctic.”
In its press release announcing the creation of the China-Russia Arctic Research Center (CRARC) on April 10, 2019, the Russian government announced:
“Joint efforts will be made in Arctic marine science research, which will promote the construction of ‘Silk Road on Ice’. In future, QNLM looks forward to more fruitful and efficient partnerships worldwide to contribute to the sustainable development of the world oceans and a shared future for mankind.”
NATO hawks Freak Out
NATO hawks have reacted to these incredible developments as if the Cold war had never ended, with James Stravridis (former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO) penning an op-ed on April 16 stating China’s polar silk road is only an “aggressive program of building influence” and that the melting arctic ice “will create shipping routes that could be geopolitically central for China’s One Belt, One Road global development strategy.”Citing the recent China-Russia joint military exercises such as the Vostok 2018 China-Russia-Mongolia maneuvers of September 11-17, 2018 that involved over 300 000 military personnel, Stravridis said “they [Russia and China] see working together as a hedge against the US and their cooperation will create significant challenges for the NATO nations with Arctic territory”. The cold warrior called on the USA and Canada to respond with their own joint military maneuvers and collaboration with NATO.
Stravridis’ words echoed those of NORAD chief US General Terrance O’Shaughnessy who spoke in Ottawa earlier calling for joint military cooperation in the Arctic saying “we must acknowledge the reality that our adversaries currently hold our citizens, our way of life and national interests at risk… we are at risk in ways we haven’t been in decades”.
While fear-mongering headlines documenting Russia’s Arctic Summit with such titles as “Putin Bolsters Arctic Presence with Anti-Aircraft Missiles” are the norm in the western press, a major Canadian Foreign Affairs Committee report published on April 11 features a valuable insight into the powerful effects of which the New Silk Road paradigm is creating even among pro-NATO countries as hostile to the BRI and Russia as Canada has proven itself to be over recent years.
The New Paradigm inspires potential change in Canadian Artic Strategy
While paying lip service to the “danger of Russian and Chinese interest in the Arctic”, the 140 page committee report broke with the tradition of treating the Canada’s Arctic Sovereign as somehow “threatened by outside forces” as has been the trend for decades and instead stated that “the Committee is of the view that the challenges Canada faces in the Arctic are those of security, national defence, stewardship, well-being, and prosperity. With that in mind, it seems unproductive to continue approaching these issues from the perspective of determining whether Canada is somehow losing sovereignty over land and waters that are Canadian.” Expressing an awareness that a new global system was rising the paper stated “the government must … ensure that it is not caught unprepared if the geopolitical reality changes.”
While other similar white papers published over the years have taken more aggressive stances against Russia and China’s BRI, this committee report stated “The Arctic situation now goes beyond its original inter-Arctic States or regional nature, having a vital bearing on the interests of States outside the region and the interests of the international community as a whole, as well as on the survival, the development, and the shared future for mankind.”
Ultimately, the report called for Canada to break the British-steered zero growth/post-industrial policy of the past 60 years and instead create a new federal program for Arctic infrastructure investment, cooperation with China on the Polar Silk Road, involve natives trapped in suicide-laden under-developed reservations with the opportunity to participate in growth programs, mapping of northern resources (which Canada has failed to do unlike their Russian counterparts), and importantly provide for the social integration of natives with the rest of Canada.
Of extreme importance was the call to reverse the 2016 Trudeau-Obama ban on Arctic drilling which was done to protect the ecosystem while excluding all natives who live in said ecosystems with any opportunity to have a say. The report stated “The manner in which that decision was carried out was not described warmly by the people with whom the Committee met in the North. There was a feeling that the decision had been made without consideration for the interests of the people who live and work there. One Indigenous organization received 20 minutes’ notice.”
Rather than call for confrontation, or joining NATO’s ABM encirclement of Russia as previous reports had done, the committee called for discussion, science diplomacy, dialogue and a return to an Arctic growth policy not seen in over 70 years.
While discussions of the Bering Strait rail connection between Eurasia and the Americas was absent, as was all discussion of nuclear energy, whose development is instrumental for the Arctic, it is relevant that no mention was made of “green energy” like windmills and solar panels which would serve no use in any serious national development strategy.
The fact is that the polar Silk Road is a reality. The ports and shipping lines opening up along the Northwest Passage express only the beginning phases of it, but as Russia continues to develop rail and scientific capabilities with China’s assistance across its Arctic, the rail will follow and the dream of Governor Gilpin and Tsar Nicholas II to unite both worlds new and old with rail will occur, as long as the west chooses to take history seriously and not sleepwalk into world war once more.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UApoMX Tyler Durden
For two years Donald Trump told us the truth over and over again: Neither he nor his presidential campaign illegally conspired with Russian agents to influence the 2016 election. But Trump also lied to us over and over again, which cast doubt on his assertions of innocence.
I was never much impressed by the evidence of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, an allegation that was conclusively debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which was released by the Justice Department last Thursday. The one thing that made me think there might be something to the conspiracy theory was the fact that Trump kept denying it.
The president’s habitualdishonesty justifies a rebuttable presumption that the truth is the opposite of whatever he says. That rule of thumb led many of his critics astray in this case, but it also illustrates the practical advantages of telling the truth, since Trump’s weaselly ways prolonged the Russia investigation and lent credence to the suspicion that he had something to hide.
“I have nothing to do with Russia,” Trump insisted in July 2016. Yet his lawyer, Michael Cohen, was working on a licensing deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow as late as the previous month and giving his boss regular updates on the project. When Cohen suggested to Trump that his statement was misleading, he told Mueller, Trump replied, “Why mention it if it is not a deal?”
A year later, when The New York Times reported that Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman had met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, Trump edited a public statement about the meeting, excising any reference to that offer. When his communications director, Hope Hicks, suggested that Trump come clean about the motivation for the meeting, he told her, “You’ve given a statement. We’re done.”
When Trump fired James Comey in May 2017, angry that the FBI director had refused to publicly say he was not a target of the Russia investigation, he claimed he had acted based on a recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had decided “on his own” to review Comey’s performance. As the Mueller report notes, Trump abandoned that preposterous cover story two days later, but only because Rosenstein refused to go along with it.
When Comey said the president had privately pressed him for a promise of personal loyalty and encouraged him to drop the FBI’s investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Trump flatly denied Comey’s account of those one-on-one conversations, even implying he might have “tapes” that would show Comey was lying. The Mueller report accepts Comey’s account, which is supported by documentation of the meetings, a memo that Comey wrote at the time, and his contemporaneous conversations with other officials.
The report likewise credits former White House Counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony that Trump repeatedly asked him to fire Mueller. Trump publicly denied he said any such thing, and he privately urged McGahn to recant his statements about those episodes.
The Mueller report also addresses the 2016 hacking of embarrassing emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, which were published by WikiLeaks, much to candidate Trump’s delight. Politicocounted more than 140 occasions when Trump praised WikiLeaks during the campaign. Yet after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested this month, Trump claimed, “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing.”
The report does not discuss the hush payments that Cohen arranged for women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump, a case that was referred to the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. But Trump lied about those too, claiming he had no knowledge of them at the time.
Trump’s lawyers wisely rebuffed Mueller’s attempt to follow up on the president’s evasive responses to written questions and stopped him from sitting for an interview. Trump thereby avoided a “perjury trap” that he would have walked into just by being himself.
The Green New Deal’s goal is to move America to zero carbon emissions in 10 years.
“That’s a goal you could only imagine possible if you have no idea how energy is produced,” James Meigs, former editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, says in my latest video.
“Renewable is so inconsistent,” he adds. “You can’t just put in wind turbines and solar panels. You have to build all this infrastructure to connect them with energy consumers.”
Because wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, “renewable” energy requires many more transmission lines, and bigger batteries.
Unfortunately, says Meigs: “You have to mine materials for batteries. Those mines are environmentally hazardous. Disposing of batteries is hazardous.”
“Batteries are a lousy way to store energy,” adds physicist Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Also, the ingredients of green energy, like battery packs, are far from green.
“You have to consume 100 barrels of oil in China to make that battery pack,” he explains. “Dig up 1,000 pounds of stuff to process it. Digging is done with oil, by big machines, so we’re consuming energy to ‘save’ energy—not a good path to go.”
Still, wind turbines and solar batteries are 10 times more efficient than when they were first introduced! That’s not good enough, writes Mills, to make “the new energy economy” anything more than “magical thinking.”
“They hit physics limits. In comic books, Tony Stark has a magic power source, but physics makes it impossible to make solar 10 times better again.”
The dream of “green” causes us to misdirect resources. Even after billions in government subsidies, solar still makes up less than 1 percent of America’s energy—wind just 2 percent. And even that energy isn’t really “clean.”
“We use billions of tons of hydrocarbons to make the windmills that are already in the world, and we’ve only just begun to make them at the level people claim they would like them to be built,” says Mills. “Pursue a path of wind, solar and batteries, we increase how much we dig up and move by a thousand-fold.”
“You gotta clear-cut the forest. These machines kill a lot of birds,” says Meigs. “I agree that we should bring down our carbon emissions…but we should also make sure we’re spending money on stuff that really works.”
There is one energy source, though, that efficiently produces lots of power with no carbon emissions: nuclear.
But people fear it. They point to the Chernobyl plant accident in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.
“The Chernobyl plant design was idiotically bad,” says Meigs. They don’t make nuclear plants like that anymore.
What about Fukushima?
“Fukushima helps prove how safe nuclear power really is. No one was killed.”
I pointed out that people were killed during the evacuation.
“Fear of radiation killed people,” responded Meigs. They evacuated older people who didn’t need to go.
People fear what they don’t understand and what they can’t see.
“A dam breaks, and hundreds of thousands of people die. Nuclear plants, their safety, ironically, is actually evident in their accidents!” says Mills.
“More people have fallen off of roofs installing solar panels than have been killed in the entire history of nuclear power in the U.S.,” adds Meigs.
Yet after Fukushima, Germany shut down its nuclear plants. That led to higher electricity prices and increased carbon emissions because Germany burned coal to make up for the loss of nuclear power.
Likewise, “in Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont, they shut down their nuclear plant. Guess what happened? Carbon emissions went up,” recounts Meigs. “This supposedly green state, ultra-liberal Vermont, went backwards.”
If a Green New Deal is ever implemented, says Mills, it would rob the poor by raising energy costs, while “giving money to wealthy people in the form of subsidies to buy $100,000 cars, to put expensive solar arrays on their roofs or to be investors in wind farms.”
“It’s upside-down Robin Hood,” he adds. “That’s a bad deal.”
Yet a majority of Americans—including Republicans surveyed—say they support some version of it.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2UCW9ZW
via IFTTT
For two years Donald Trump told us the truth over and over again: Neither he nor his presidential campaign illegally conspired with Russian agents to influence the 2016 election. But Trump also lied to us over and over again, which cast doubt on his assertions of innocence.
I was never much impressed by the evidence of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, an allegation that was conclusively debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which was released by the Justice Department last Thursday. The one thing that made me think there might be something to the conspiracy theory was the fact that Trump kept denying it.
The president’s habitualdishonesty justifies a rebuttable presumption that the truth is the opposite of whatever he says. That rule of thumb led many of his critics astray in this case, but it also illustrates the practical advantages of telling the truth, since Trump’s weaselly ways prolonged the Russia investigation and lent credence to the suspicion that he had something to hide.
“I have nothing to do with Russia,” Trump insisted in July 2016. Yet his lawyer, Michael Cohen, was working on a licensing deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow as late as the previous month and giving his boss regular updates on the project. When Cohen suggested to Trump that his statement was misleading, he told Mueller, Trump replied, “Why mention it if it is not a deal?”
A year later, when The New York Times reported that Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman had met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, Trump edited a public statement about the meeting, excising any reference to that offer. When his communications director, Hope Hicks, suggested that Trump come clean about the motivation for the meeting, he told her, “You’ve given a statement. We’re done.”
When Trump fired James Comey in May 2017, angry that the FBI director had refused to publicly say he was not a target of the Russia investigation, he claimed he had acted based on a recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had decided “on his own” to review Comey’s performance. As the Mueller report notes, Trump abandoned that preposterous cover story two days later, but only because Rosenstein refused to go along with it.
When Comey said the president had privately pressed him for a promise of personal loyalty and encouraged him to drop the FBI’s investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Trump flatly denied Comey’s account of those one-on-one conversations, even implying he might have “tapes” that would show Comey was lying. The Mueller report accepts Comey’s account, which is supported by documentation of the meetings, a memo that Comey wrote at the time, and his contemporaneous conversations with other officials.
The report likewise credits former White House Counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony that Trump repeatedly asked him to fire Mueller. Trump publicly denied he said any such thing, and he privately urged McGahn to recant his statements about those episodes.
The Mueller report also addresses the 2016 hacking of embarrassing emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, which were published by WikiLeaks, much to candidate Trump’s delight. Politicocounted more than 140 occasions when Trump praised WikiLeaks during the campaign. Yet after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested this month, Trump claimed, “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing.”
The report does not discuss the hush payments that Cohen arranged for women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump, a case that was referred to the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. But Trump lied about those too, claiming he had no knowledge of them at the time.
Trump’s lawyers wisely rebuffed Mueller’s attempt to follow up on the president’s evasive responses to written questions and stopped him from sitting for an interview. Trump thereby avoided a “perjury trap” that he would have walked into just by being himself.
The Green New Deal’s goal is to move America to zero carbon emissions in 10 years.
“That’s a goal you could only imagine possible if you have no idea how energy is produced,” James Meigs, former editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, says in my latest video.
“Renewable is so inconsistent,” he adds. “You can’t just put in wind turbines and solar panels. You have to build all this infrastructure to connect them with energy consumers.”
Because wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, “renewable” energy requires many more transmission lines, and bigger batteries.
Unfortunately, says Meigs: “You have to mine materials for batteries. Those mines are environmentally hazardous. Disposing of batteries is hazardous.”
“Batteries are a lousy way to store energy,” adds physicist Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Also, the ingredients of green energy, like battery packs, are far from green.
“You have to consume 100 barrels of oil in China to make that battery pack,” he explains. “Dig up 1,000 pounds of stuff to process it. Digging is done with oil, by big machines, so we’re consuming energy to ‘save’ energy—not a good path to go.”
Still, wind turbines and solar batteries are 10 times more efficient than when they were first introduced! That’s not good enough, writes Mills, to make “the new energy economy” anything more than “magical thinking.”
“They hit physics limits. In comic books, Tony Stark has a magic power source, but physics makes it impossible to make solar 10 times better again.”
The dream of “green” causes us to misdirect resources. Even after billions in government subsidies, solar still makes up less than 1 percent of America’s energy—wind just 2 percent. And even that energy isn’t really “clean.”
“We use billions of tons of hydrocarbons to make the windmills that are already in the world, and we’ve only just begun to make them at the level people claim they would like them to be built,” says Mills. “Pursue a path of wind, solar and batteries, we increase how much we dig up and move by a thousand-fold.”
“You gotta clear-cut the forest. These machines kill a lot of birds,” says Meigs. “I agree that we should bring down our carbon emissions…but we should also make sure we’re spending money on stuff that really works.”
There is one energy source, though, that efficiently produces lots of power with no carbon emissions: nuclear.
But people fear it. They point to the Chernobyl plant accident in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.
“The Chernobyl plant design was idiotically bad,” says Meigs. They don’t make nuclear plants like that anymore.
What about Fukushima?
“Fukushima helps prove how safe nuclear power really is. No one was killed.”
I pointed out that people were killed during the evacuation.
“Fear of radiation killed people,” responded Meigs. They evacuated older people who didn’t need to go.
People fear what they don’t understand and what they can’t see.
“A dam breaks, and hundreds of thousands of people die. Nuclear plants, their safety, ironically, is actually evident in their accidents!” says Mills.
“More people have fallen off of roofs installing solar panels than have been killed in the entire history of nuclear power in the U.S.,” adds Meigs.
Yet after Fukushima, Germany shut down its nuclear plants. That led to higher electricity prices and increased carbon emissions because Germany burned coal to make up for the loss of nuclear power.
Likewise, “in Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont, they shut down their nuclear plant. Guess what happened? Carbon emissions went up,” recounts Meigs. “This supposedly green state, ultra-liberal Vermont, went backwards.”
If a Green New Deal is ever implemented, says Mills, it would rob the poor by raising energy costs, while “giving money to wealthy people in the form of subsidies to buy $100,000 cars, to put expensive solar arrays on their roofs or to be investors in wind farms.”
“It’s upside-down Robin Hood,” he adds. “That’s a bad deal.”
Yet a majority of Americans—including Republicans surveyed—say they support some version of it.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2UCW9ZW
via IFTTT
An 18-year-old New Yorker is suing Apple for $1 billion, claiming he was falsely arrested and charged for a series of thefts that he did not commit due to facial recognition software that Apple allegedly uses to track theft. Ousmane Bah was arrested at his home in New York in November and was charged with stealing from Apple stores in Manhattan, Boston, Delaware and New Jersey. However, the photo that accompanied the arrest warrant showed somebody that “looked nothing like” the student, according to the Daily Mail.
Not only that, one of the thefts had occurred on the same day that Bah was attending his senior prom. He was in Manhattan for the event while one of the thefts occurred in Boston. So now, he is suing Apple for the hassle he has suffered as a result… which in his opinion is worth a solid one billion dollars.
Bah believes that a learners permit that he lost, containing his name, address and other personal information, was used for identification at Apple stores during the thefts. The thief was caught stealing $1200 worth of products from Apple in Boston on May 31, 2018. The same thief then stole from Apple stores in Manhattan, New Jersey and Delaware, while at the same time allegedly being tracked by Apple software.
Bah said he learned about the thefts the hard way: when a Boston municipal court summons arrived at his door in June. He was then arrested by the New York Police Department on November 29.
When the New York Police Department Detective who was assigned to the case examined surveillance footage from the Manhattan Apple Store, they found that the suspect “looked nothing like” Bah. Instead, the detective found that Apple’s (highly flawed) security technology had been using facial recognition to try and identify suspected thieves.
The investigator suspected that the thief had presented Bah’s learners permit during one of the multiple thefts. Bah then was forced to respond to all of the false allegations which led to ‘severe stress and hardship’ and left him ‘feeling humiliated, afraid, and deeply concerned’. In his lawsuit, he claims:
‘[Apple’s] use of facial recognition software in its stores to track individuals suspected of theft is the type of Orwellian surveillance that consumes fear, particularly as it can be assumed that the majority of consumers are not aware that their faces are secretly being analyzed.’
While the charges in most states have been dropped against him, the ones in New Jersey are still pending. Apple has claimed it “does not use facial recognition technology in its stores.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IDgP2z Tyler Durden
