Breast cancer cases near Welsh nuclear plant 5 times higher than expected – academic
RT | June 10, 2015
Breast cancer rates are five times higher than expected near a defunct nuclear power plant in Wales, according to a study by environmental scientist Dr Chris Busby.
The power plant in Trawsfynydd, which has not been in use since 1993 but is yet to be decommissioned, relied on a nearby lake to operate its cooling system.
It’s alleged that contaminated water was returned to the same body of water.
Busby’s investigation claims 90 percent of those living in areas downwind of the plant have been tested.
The report, published in the Jacobs Journal of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, says: “Trawsfynydd is a ‘dirty’ nuclear power station. As it has carbon dioxide gas-cooled graphite block reactors, its releases to air are higher than most other types of nuclear reactor.
“In addition, all the liquid releases are discharged to the lake, where they have accumulated to the lake body sediment,” the investigation claims.
“Results show very clearly that the downwind population has suffered because of these exposures.”
“This is most clear in breast cancer in younger women below 60, where the rates were almost five times the expected.”
“Additionally we see a doubling of risk in those who ate fish from Trawsfynydd Lake, which supports the conclusion that it is mainly a nuclear power station effect that is being seen.”
Busby, who has acted as an adviser to the Green Party, has been the subject of controversy in the past.
In 2011, his claims there was a leukemia cluster in North Wales were met with opposition from other prominent environmental activists, including the [pro-nuclear energy] Guardian writer George Monbiot.
In a piece for the paper published in 2011, Monbiot wrote that Busby’s claims “were the result of some astonishing statistical mistakes.”
He claimed an assessment of Busby’s findings – which were not peer-reviewed – found that Busby has counted Welsh leukemia incidences twice and overestimated the number of child leukemia cases by 90 percent.
Public Health Wales is currently investigating, in co-operation with local health teams, whether or not such a cluster exists around Traswfynydd.
Trinity 70 Years On… the Nuclear Horror Still Haunts
By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture | 06.06.2015
America’s New Mexico state saw the birth of nuclear weapons 70 years ago at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first ever atomic explosion occurred. That was on July 16, 1945. Less than one month later, the bomb was dropped on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki wiping out some 200,000 lives in an instant.
Now the American state is grappling with the sinister problem of trying to bury seven decades of nuclear waste from America’s military-industrial complex. In many ways, the horror of nuclear weaponry still haunts the very place where it was first unleashed.
US federal and state politicians are planning to make New Mexico the permanent burial site for highly radioactive waste materials that up to now have been kept in temporary storage at other locations across the country, such as at Hanford in northwest Washington state where the nation’s main facility for producing plutonium and uranium for nuclear weapons is located.
There is, to be sure, strong opposition among various community groups and activists, who deplore the plans to scale up New Mexico’s nuclear-waste dumping. They point to an already heavy burden of environmental and public health toxicity in NM that includes not only fallout from the original Trinity test site, but also from Los Alamos Laboratories where the atomic bomb was conceived under the Manhattan Project during the 1940s, as well as from scores of uranium-ore mines, and an existing low-level nuclear waste site.
But the anti-dumping campaigners are up against the formidable US military-industrial complex and what they call a «genocidal ideology» in the east coast Washington political establishment. If plans go ahead, as seems likely, New Mexico will become the sole depository for the most dangerous of all radioactive waste in the US.
Randy Martin is one of the community campaigners trying to prevent the scaling up of nuclear-waste dumping in NM. He has been an activist on the issue for over 30 years. Some of his family relatives who had farms near the Gnome site – another disastrous nuclear-explosion test area hatched on the backs of natives and locals – succumbed to cancers and other diseases, which he believes were caused by the subsequent radioactive fallout. He reckons that thousands of people in New Mexico have been affected by inter-generational nuclear contamination.
«The trouble is that New Mexico has been enslaved to the military-industrial complex», says Martin. «Our relationship to the industry is from the cradle to the grave. This is where nuclear weapons technology was created and tested, and now we are being left with the task of burying its toxic waste».
One of the biggest advocates for the expanded waste facility in New Mexico is Republican state governor Susana Martinez. Martinez is touted to have ambitions of becoming a future vice-president in the White House. The plan is to take in high-level spent radioactive materials from all over the country, including fuel rods and bomb cores, in an expansion of an already existing low-level waste site located at Carlsbad – about 200 km from the Trinity site.
Advocates for the expansion of nuclear-waste dumping in New Mexico appear to have a strong suite of arguments in their favour. The state is one of the poorest in the whole of the US; therefore the development beckons jobs and a boost to local government coffers. There is also a onerous psychological pressure on communities to be «patriotic» in helping to serve the nation’s military. Moreover, since the Second World War, New Mexico has become so entwined with the US military that it seems extremely difficult to live without it.
The state hosts the biggest weapons testing and training sites in the whole country at the White Sands Missile Range covering 8,300 sq. km of desert at the foot of the San Andreas Mountains. The vast area encompasses the Trinity test site. There are also numerous other military bases dotted all over the state. Consequently, much of the civilian sector, even if it is not formally connected to the military, has a preponderant economic dependence on it. The argument that whatever is good for the military is good for New Mexico is a hard one to rebut. That makes it difficult for communities to oppose the plan to accept military nuclear waste even if there is an apprehension about contamination risk. Many livelihoods are at stake by not accommodating the Pentagon.
Indeed campaigners say there is a sinister, but subtle, social atmosphere that pervades the state, whereby open criticism of the environmental and public health impacts from the Pentagon’s activities is frowned upon. That creates a climate of conformity and self-censorship. Jobs and contracts can be lost on a sly say-so.
Furthermore, there is a dearth of official data on the fallout from nuclear activity in New Mexico. Incredible as it might seem, it was only last year that the federal government finally launched a comprehensive epidemiological study into the possible health impact of the Trinity atomic test – some 70 years after it took place. So up to now, no-one was too sure how deleterious that explosion was to local populations, although there is ample anecdotal evidence of high rates of cancer and other environmental impacts.
That lack of impact-data makes it difficult to mount an effective campaign against the latest plans to scale up nuclear dumping.
However, there are warning signs. Last year, there was a serious radioactive leak at the existing waste site at Carlsbad, which resulted in contamination of some dozen workers at the plant. Yet the same facility is now being lined up to take in much greater quantities of higher-level spent radioactive material. The new waste is to be stored in vast underground caverns mined from the salt-rock terrain.
Advocates for the site claim that the geology provides a safe natural deposit. But given that the waste material represents a toxic lifespan of thousands of years it is a worrying assumption that leaks will not occur from future geological events. The New Mexico waste site lies perilously above the Delaware Basin that serves as the only fresh-water source for communities in the region and is a tributary to the Rio Grande River, which outflows to the Gulf of Mexico, potentially affecting millions of lives all along the US-Mexican border.
Campaigners against nuclear-waste dumping point out that the Soviet authorities acted with much greater alacrity to the fallout of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster compared with their American counterparts over New Mexico’s decades-old concerns. Following Chernobyl, medical surveys were carried out to assess human health impacts, and the then Soviet government enacted compensation payments to victims and families. In contrast, the US federal government has tended to suppress investigations into the legacy of nuclear activity in New Mexico, and has been reluctant to provide financial compensation for those allegedly affected by it. The pervasive dominant role of the US military in the state tends to further suppress any public criticism and calls for accountability.
The historical background of colonial conquest is another telling factor. New Mexico was long considered by the Washington establishment as backward «Indian territories». The modern state of New Mexico was only formed in 1912. Prior to that it was known simply as «The Territories» – a vast borderless hinterland populated by native American tribes. The Apache Wars were being waged by the newly formed United States up to the late 1800s – only 70 years before the Trinity test explosion occurred in 1945. During those wars, the Apache tribes were among the last native Americans to be conquered in brutal campaigns of extermination.
It is no coincidence then that the «worthless deserts and conquered people» of New Mexico would be later selected by the Washington establishment as the test site for the first atomic weapon. It must be recalled that even the scientists of the Manhattan Project were not sure whether the nuclear explosion would result in a catastrophic atmospheric reaction within New Mexico and surrounding US states.
Randy Martin, the campaigner, says that horrific atomic experiment at the Trinity site in 1945 was born out of the «genocidal mentality» that the Washington government retained from the earlier conquest of native American tribes.
«That genocidal mentality persists to this day», says Martin. «The United States government and its military-industrial complex unleashed the horror of nuclear weapons in this part of the country because they saw it as a conquered territory containing conquered people. Today, the Washington establishment and its ilk still view New Mexico as a place where they think nuclear problems can be buried and forgotten».
Under the Obama administration, the Pentagon has received a budget of over $350 billion to upgrade the US arsenal of nuclear weapons over the next decade. Some observers have discerned that this nuclear resurgence under Obama is emblematic of a new Cold War with Russia and other perceived global rivals. Notwithstanding the facts that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 in part supposedly for nuclear disarmament, and that the US is obligated to totally disarm under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that was signed 40 years ago.
Under Washington’s renewed nuclear arms quest, Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico has been assigned to replace plutonium cores in nuclear weapons with new fission devices. That inevitably means much greater volumes of nuclear waste will be dumped in the deserts of New Mexico.
Seventy years after Trinity, New Mexico is still being used in a pernicious nuclear experiment by the Pentagon. The toxic waste might be buried underground, but the horror lives on.
Why The Netherlands Just Banned Non-Commercial Use Of Monsanto’s Glyphosate-Based Herbicides
By Arjun Walia | Collective Evolution | May 30, 2015
The Netherlands has just become the latest country, following Russia, Mexico, and many others, to say no to Monsanto. The sale and use of glyphosate-based herbicides (the most commonly used herbicides in the world) has just been banned for non-commercial use in the country, effective later this year. This means that people will no longer be able to spray RoundUp on their lawns and gardens and will instead have to find another (hopefully more natural) means of pest control.
This is definitely a step in the right direction.
The move comes as no surprise, considering that the number of countries around the world who are choosing to ban this product is growing at an exponential rate. Bans and restrictions are being implemented due to the fact that glyphosate (the main ingredient in RoundUp) has been directly linked to several major health issues, including: birth defects, nervous system damage, Alzheimers, Parkinson’s, various forms of cancer, and kidney failure. (Sri Lanka recently cited deadly kidney disease as their reason for banning his product. You can read more about that and access the research here.) Indeed, The World Health Organization recently acknowledged the fact that glyphosate can cause cancer, and you can read more about that here.
Not only that, there are multiple environmental concerns associated with the use of this chemical.
What’s even more disturbing is the fact that studies have shown that RoundUp herbicide is over one hundred times more toxic than regulators claim. For example, a new study published in the journal Biomedical Research International shows that Roundup herbicide is 125 times more toxic than its active ingredient glyphosate studied in isolation. You can read more about that here. The eye opening abstract reads as follows:
“Pesticides are used throughout the world as mixtures called formulations. They contain adjuvants, which are often kept confidential and are called inerts by the manufacturing companies, plus a declared active principle, which is usually tested alone. We tested the toxicity of 9 pesticides, comparing active principles and their formulations, on three human cell lines. Glyphosate, isoproturon, fluroxypyr, pirimicarb, imidacloprid, acetamiprid, tebuconazole, epoxiconazole, and prochloraz constitute, respectively, the active principles of 3 major herbicides, 3 insecticides, and 3 fungicides. Despite its relatively benign reputation, Roundup was among the most toxic herbicides and insecticides tested. Most importantly, 8 formulations out of 9 were up to one thousand times more toxic than their active principles. Our results challenge the relevance of the acceptable daily intake for pesticides because this norm is calculated from the toxicity of the active principle alone. Chronic tests on pesticides may not reflect relevant environmental exposures if only one ingredient of these mixtures is tested alone.” (source)
Equally disturbing is the fact that RoundUp has been found in a very high percentage of air and rainfall test samples. You can read more about that here.
Significant concentrations of it have also been found in the urine of people across Europe, you can read more about that here.
One recent study published in the Journal of Environmental & Analytical Toxicology has now proven that animals and humans who consume GMO foods – those that are loaded with glyphosate chemicals, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp – have extremely high levels of glyphosate in their urine.
It’s also noteworthy to mention that there are Wikileaks documents showing how the United States planned to “retaliate and cause pain” on countries who were refusing GMOs. You can read more about that story and view those documents here.
It’s troubling to think that so many children are within proximity of and playing on lawns that have been sprayed with this stuff. Cancer is not a mystery, it is not a stroke of bad luck, it’s time for the world to wake up and realize what research has been confirming for years.
More Information on Pesticides & Herbicides Here:
**There are also multiple articles linked within the article above that provide more information**
Scientists Link Autism To These Toxic Chemicals During Fetal Development
Another Groundbreaking Study Emerges Linking Agricultural Pesticides To Autism
Scientists Can Predict Your Pesticide Exposure Based On How Much You Eat
This Is What Happens To Your Body When You Switch To Organic Food
What Parents Need To Know About Monsanto: “By 2025 One In Two Children Will Be Autistic”
Monsanto’s Glyphosate Linked To Birth Defects
Groundbreaking Study Links Monsanto’s Glyphosate To Cancer
New Study Links Gmos To Cancer, Liver/Kidney Damage & Severe Hormonal Disruption
Multiple Toxins From GMOs Detected In Maternal And Fetal Blood
Sources Used:
Shambles… Energy Professor Declares Germany Energiewende “A Failure”
By Pierre L. Gosselin | NoTricksZone | May 5, 2015
The editor-in-chief of the Iserlohner Kreisanzeiger und Zeitung (IKZ) daily Thomas Reunert dedicated an entire page on the topic of wind energy last Sunday, bearing the headline: “The Norwegians Are Giving Us The Finger!”
It is an interview with a former professor from the University of Bielefeld, Dr. Kurt Gehlert, 75, an expert in mining. It focuses on the state of Germany’s Energiewende (transition to green energies), particularly wind power and the illusions of energy storage technology.
The sub-heading reads
Dr. Kurt Gehlert is certain that the Energiewende has already failed. Or we will drown and cover ourselves in wind turbines.”
Germans pushing the Energiewende are aiming to see 80% of Germany’s energy needs being met by green energies by 2050. Some are even calling for doing away with natural gas, in addition to coal and oil.
But the monster-sized insurmountable obstacles loom as German policymakers begin to scramble in a confused state of denial.
Germany’s alternative baseload-capable sources, such as hydro and biogas, are severely limited and account for only 11.5% of Germany’s total energy supply today. Moreover there still does not exist a viable technology for storing the irregular supply of wind and solar power. Gehlert says these technologies are nowhere near being capable of taking on the role of providing a reliable baseload.
The 75-year old professor points out that although there is a huge capacity of wind and solar energy already in place, often both are not available because they are weather-dependent. Gehlert tells the IKZ that the media like to give the public the impression that the technology is not far away, but the reality is that it is nowhere near in sight.
Energy storage concepts such as accumulators, power-to-gas, compressed air storage are plagued by low efficiencies and sky-high costs. He reminds readers that using electric car batteries as a storage media is also a pie-in-the-sky-vision. Gehlert tells IKZ :
It sounds like a good idea and so let us illustrate it using a rough calculation. In 2020 it is planned to have 1 million electric cars on the roads in Germany. If we tap into them and remove 50% of the average 25 kwh charge capacity, then we will extract enough power from them (12.5 x 1000000 =12.5 gigawatt-hours) to cover Germany’s needs each day for 25 minutes and 17 seconds; Germany’s total daily consumption is 712 gigawatt-hours. And then all the electric car owners will have only 50% of the range available for their next trip.”
In Germany about 125 times more storage lakes than what exists today would need to be constructed by 2050. This area and topography simply does not exist at all.”
On the idea of using Norway’s, Switzerland’s or Austria’s mountainous regions to build the necessary pump-storage capacity, Gehlert tells the IKZ :
The Swiss are reacting allergically, and the Norwegians are giving us the finger.”
Go ruin your own landscape, and leave ours alone.
And even if it was possible to use pump-storage in foreign countries, Gehlert tells the IKZ that in order to bring the power from the above-mentioned mountainous countries to the big consumption centers in Germany’s industrial heartland, it would require the construction of about 70 high voltage power lines ranging from 300 to 1200 km in length!
Gehlert also scoffs at the idea of using wind-power-to-gas as a method for storing energy, which would be used to fire gas turbines to produce electricity in times of low-winds. And expanding the calculation to 50% constant electrical power from wind energy would require about 470,000 German wind turbines (Currently there are about 25,000). Gehlert elaborates:
The figure is difficult to fathom. Germany has an area of approximately 360,000 square kilometers. That means each of the 470,000 wind turbines would have 0.76 sq km.. The city of Iserlohn alone has an area of 125.5 square kilometers and so would have 165 wind turbines.”
The IKZ asks Gehlert to summarize:
The Energiewende under the given conditions in Germany is a failure […]. The policymakers state in a worried manner: Our predecessors have left behind a disillusioned population.”
Abandoning Nuclear Waste
By Gordon Edwards | Dissident Voice | May 8, 2015
Ontario Power Generation owns 20 nuclear power reactors. Two of them permanently shut down. Six more scheduled to be retired by 2020.
The largest nuclear power station in North America is the Bruce NPP, located close to the shore of Lake Huron. The Western Waste Management Facility (WWMF) is sited on land adjacent to the eight operating reactors at Bruce. At WWMF, radioactive reactor wastes of all kinds from all of Ontario’s reactors are stored in surface or near-surface facilities. In recent years, because of the removal of large volumes of materials from inside the cores of these reactors and other materials connected directly to the core reactor vessel, the amounts and levels of radioactivity have gone up dramatically in the nuclear waste inventory at WWMF.
These wastes will remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. No one denies this elementary fact. But corporate bodies can not tolerate the concept of a never-ending liability, one that may require repeated expenditures far into the future, so they want to devise a protocol by which they can abandon these wastes. OPG describes the project as having four phases — construction, emplacement, closure, and abandonment. The object of the exercise is to abandon the waste. That is one of the chief motivations for burying nuclear waste — it’s a case of “out of sight, out of mind”. If and when this dangerous radioactive material escapes from the repository, as has happened at two such deep underground nuclear waste dumps in Germany and one in Carlsbad New Mexico — it will be somebody else’s problem. Not OPG’s. And not CNSC’s. Those bodies will have washed their hands of all responsibility. And if the radioactive material leaks out in the future, people will have no idea what those materials are or how to deal with them, and no resources to do so, because amnesia inevitably follows abandonment.
Alternatively, CCNR advocates a policy of Rolling Stewardship, by which the waste will never be abandoned but will be constantly monitored and kept in a retrievable condition indefinitely. We know how to package this waste very well so that it does not contaminate the environment. This information and this responsibility must be passed on to each successive generation with all necessary documentation regarding the dangers involved and the necessity of retrieving and repacking the material before any leakage problems develop. The necessary authority, information, and resources can be ceremonially transmitted to the next generation by means of a formal inauguration ceremony every 20 years or so. With the advance of knowledge and engineering capability, each generation will hopefully be able to do as well or better than the previous generation, until one day there may be a method for genuinely neutralizing these wastes or otherwise rendering them harmless. In the meantime, when the Bruce site closes down, the waste should be removed from the vicinity of the Great Lakes for greater security.
Abandoning the waste, as OPG plans to do in Phase 4 of their proposal, is not a solution to the problem. It is simply a corporate strategy for terminating liability.The waste is dangerous for much more than 100,000 years. The Great Lakes came into existence only 10,000 years ago. The pyramids of Egypt were built about 5000 years ago. OPG brags that it has studied this geological formation for 10 years. Over a period of 60 years, the USA has tried 8 times to locate a safe underground waste repository for its spent nuclear fuel, and it has failed all 8 times.
Why would anyone want to permanently lodge all of Ontario’s nuclear waste (except spent fuel) from all of its nuclear reactors right beside one of the most important reservoirs of fresh water in the world — the Great Lakes? The answer is simply: convenience. That’s where the reactors were built, so that’s where the waste has accumulated. And that’s where waste from other reactor sites has been dumped. There is no other reason for such proximity to the drinking water supply for 40 million people.
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Gordon Edwards, PhD in Mathematics (Queen’s University), co-founded the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, and has been its president since 1978. He can be reached at: ccnr@web.ca. Visit Gordon’s website.
Navajo Nation struggles with fallout from uranium mining
RT | May 9, 2015
Waste outside an abandoned uranium mine on the Navajo Nation, Cameron, Arizona (Image from ehp.niehs.nih.gov)
As part of a cleanup settlement, the US will pay out more than $13 million to start dealing with hundreds of abandoned uranium mines on Navajo Nation territory. Navajo officials tell RT it is just the first step on a long road ahead.
The money will be put into an “environmental response trust” managed by the Navajo Nation with the support of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
“It will provide us with funding to do a very specific task under the cleanup process that’s authorized by the federal superfund law,” Stephen Etsitty, executive director of the Navajo Nation’s EPA, told RT’s Ben Swann.
The funds will cover evaluations of 16 abandoned mines throughout Navajo lands, chosen from a list of 46 priority sites. There are hundreds of sites that still need to be addressed. By one estimate, there are more than 1,200 abandoned uranium mines within the borders of the Navajo Nation, a 27,000-square-mile territory stretching across Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.
The EPA says it has repaired 34 homes, surveyed 521 mines, compiled a list of 46 priority sites for cleanup, and performed stabilization or cleanup work at nine mines so far. The agency has also provided safe drinking water to more than 1,800 families.
A 2014 settlement set aside $985 million from a multi-billion dollar settlement with subsidiaries of Anadarko Petroleum Corp to clean up approximately 50 abandoned Kerr-McGee mining operations in the Navajo Nation.
Federal surveyors found rich uranium deposits on Navajo lands in the 1940s, and the government authorized private contractors to extract the ore for US weapons and energy needs. About 4 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from the area between 1944 and 1986, after which the mining was halted. The federal government, through the Atomic Energy Commission, was the sole purchaser of the ore until 1966.
Navajo miners worked without any kind of protective gear or decontamination protocols for wages sometimes less than $1 an hour. In her 2011 book, Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed, journalist Judy Pasternak wrote that the miners suffered radiation exposure four times that of the Japanese exposed to nuclear bombs during World War II.
In the 1950s, cancer rates among the Navajos were so low, they were thought naturally immune, wrote environmental journalist Sonia Luokkala. By 2004, cancer had become the leading cause of illness and death among the Navajo.
A 2014 survey by the EPA of about 500 abandoned mines found radiation levels up to 25 times higher than normal. Many of the mines with the highest radiation levels were found within a quarter mile of human habitation.
“Chronic exposure is definitely one thing we want to get a better understanding of,” Etsitty told RT. Many of the Navajo live in the remote areas of the reservation, often close to the abandoned mining pits that have since filled up with water. Humans and animals drink the water from the pits, often not aware of the possible issues with radiation or toxicity.
“We still have not completed meaningful public health studies to begin answering those questions,” Etsitty said. The DOJ settlement should offer a little bit of help in the process, but merely surveying the extent of the contamination and environmental impact will take much more money and time.
Colombians Tired of US Planes Dumping Tons of Monsanto’s Roundup on Them to Fight the Drug War
By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | May 6, 2015
For over two decades now, US planes have been dumping tons of pesticides over Colombian coca fields.
Originally the Colombian government wholeheartedly supported the ridiculous notion of mass killing all vegetation in attempt to cull the drug trade. However, it is no longer a secret that the health effects of long-term exposure to glyphosate are less than desirable.
Just last month, the World Health Organization was forced to admit that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
The recent acceptance by the mainstream that Monsanto’s Roundup causes a slew of negative health effects has sparked fear and infighting among the Colombian government.
According to the AFP,
Health Minister Alejandro Gaviria said last week that Colombia should “immediately suspend” spraying — a move vehemently opposed by Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon, who said it would “give criminals the upper hand.”
The row erupted just as US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a visit to Colombia, which the United States sees as one of its closest allies in the region.
The politicians who are fear-mongering about stopping the program are likely scared of losing the hundreds of millions in funds received annually from the US to combat the cultivation of this plant.
Daniel Mejia, the head of Colombia’s Center for Research on Security and Drugs explained why they are worried about the program. “We carried out a study that showed fumigating caused dermatological and respiratory problems and provoked miscarriages,” he said.
Even if dumping massive amount of carcinogenic pesticides from airplanes was a good idea, it’s not effective. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, this program has aided Colombia in reducing its coca fields from more than 140,000 hectares (346,000 acres) in 2001 to 48,000 hectares in 2013. However, they conveniently left out the increase seen last year.
The amount of land under coca cultivation in Colombia jumped 39 percent in 2014 to 112,000 hectares (about 27,000 acres), according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Cocaine trafficking in Latin American region has caused a slew violence and turmoil, including the Colombian civil war. However, this turmoil is a direct result of prohibition spearheaded by the United States.
Colombia never had a cocaine trafficking problem until the US-funded war on drugs began its destructive path across South America.
During the 1980s, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia were responsible for 65%, 25% and 10% of the world’s coca production respectively. By 2000, however, the US “war on drugs” in neighboring Andean countries had turned Colombia into the world’s largest cocaine producer by far, representing 90% of the total, according to a report from the from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
The coca plant is one of the most beneficial and astonishingly resilient plants in the world. Resistant to drought and disease, coca needs no irrigation and the alkaloids it contains provide a myriad of medicinal uses. From its analgesic effects to digestive aid, coca’s positive influence in medicine is vast.
The plant has played an important role in history dating back to the Pre-Inca period.
According to a study published by Harvard University in 1975, (Nutritional Value of Coca Leaf (Duke, Aulick, Plowman 1975)) chewing 100 grams of coca is enough to satisfy the nutritional needs of an adult for 24 hours. Thanks to the calcium, proteins, vitamins A and E, and other nutrients it contains, the plant offers even better possibilities to the field of human nutrition than it does to that of medicine, where it is commonly used today.
However, the state cares not about the benefit of such a plant, only that it can be turned into a white powdery substance and snorted to stimulate long and often nonsensical conversations. Instead of cultivating the plant for its benefits, the immoral war on drugs drops carcinogens from airplanes to stop its growth.
The president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, is avoiding any stance on the aerial spraying program whatsoever. According to the AFP, his staff said the final authority on the matter is the National Narcotics Council, which falls under the Justice Ministry. In the meantime, however, the spraying continues.
Fire near Chernobyl site alarming, ‘radiation respects no boundaries’
RT | April 29, 2015
A forest fire near Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear site may cause problems for communities a long way from the area as the dispersal plumes can transport radiation further to the north, nuclear safety expert John Large told RT.
RT: How dangerous is the situation in your opinion? Do you agree with ecologists who say the smoke will spread the radiation?
John Large: I spent some time in Ukraine in 2006 and I assessed the Chernobyl situation interviewing about 30 scientists and engineers who were working on the aftercare of Chernobyl. Brush fires and forest fires were the greatest concern in terms of the means by which you can disperse a secondary radiological impact from the original dissipation that occurred in 1986… What you have in Chernobyl in the exclusion zone and the further way you have an area that has been abandoned for farming, abandoned for management. That means you’ve got lots of brush and young wood growing out of control. Let me assess that – a big fuel load to have a fire. That means that the biological load is very high, so the radiation particles can be dispersed. Take down the chemistry as well. The chemistry is the way in which the strontium and cesium from the radioactive strontium and cesium from the reactor are bound here, and of course the elevated temperature of the fire and plus all the plume and aerial dispersion – means that could transport it hundreds of kilometers, particularly to the north, to Belarus. So there are more problems here for communities that are long way away from the site. What I had hoped was that the Ukrainian officials would have had in place firefighting capacity greater than they normally would have at any other area of Ukraine, because it certainly needs to be protected not just now but in the longer term as well.
We know that Ukraine is cash-strapped. There was a responsibility for its neighbors, Russia, the EU, not Belarus as much because it’s in an even worse financial situation, but there was a general responsibility to protect this area from another bout of radioactive dispersion.
RT: What lessons can be learned from this particular incident then to make sure that the brush and the forest doesn’t catch light again, or if it does, to make sure that site is secured?
JL: It is not the reactor, it is not the location of the reactor that is the problem – it is the dispersal plumes from the original accident – that is the problem. If there are radioactive materials on the ground now and then it’s engulfed by forest fire maybe 40-50 km away from the reactor. But that deposited radioactivity is re-suspended into gas, blown high into the atmosphere by the heat of the flames, and then of course it settles somewhere else. And it may be those communities to the north that are not prepared to have this new radiation plume and deposition and fallout come down on their communities.
RT: Do you think there should be a common international strategy and response for situations like this?
JL: We’ve seen recently with Chernobyl, with Windscale in the 1950’s in the UK, and particularly now with Fukushima that the radiation doesn’t respect any international boundaries. So an international effort is required for this type of catastrophe, all potential catastrophes. I would have thought that the EU or Russia would have healed their scars over this and got together and put some efforts and resources into controlling this and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Obama Fights to Spread GMO Foods Throughout Europe
By Eric Zuesse | Black Agenda Report | April 29, 2015
One of the major barriers blocking U.S. President Barack Obama’s campaign for his mammoth international trade deals — the TTIP with Europe, and the TPP with Asia — is: other countries want the freedom to make up their own minds about the safety or dangerousness of the foods they allow to be sold within their borders.
The Obama Administration insists that no nation has that freedom. In fact, all participating nations would be removed from that responsibility and authority. The Obama trade deals propose to replace that national authority, and basic national sovereignty on these important matters, by decisions that would instead be made by international panels, whose members will be appointed by international corporations, which have their own profits at stake in these matters. Consumers and others will be ignored: they will not be represented in the proposed panels. Nor will any government be represented there. That soverignty will instead be transferred to the billionaire families who control and derive their income from these corporations.
On Friday, April 24th, Agence France Presse headlined “US Stresses Opposition to EU Opt-Out for GMO Imports,” and reported that, “The United States underscored Friday its opposition to a new European Union plan to allow member states to block genetically engineered imports after bilateral talks on a transatlantic free-trade pact.”
President Obama’s Trade Representative, Michael Froman, who is a Wall Street banker and a longtime close personal friend of the President, said on April 22nd that he was “very disappointed” that the EU wants to allow individual EU nations to “opt out” of automatic approval of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) that the international panels will approve to be marketed everywhere. Furthermore, Froman’s assistant said that the U.S. rejects “a proposal to allow EU member states to ban products deemed safe by Europe’s own scientists.” He was referring there to the half of scientific papers that find GMO foods to be safe. However, those papers were produced by companies that manufacture and market GMOs. The other half of the scientific papers on GMOs, the half that were produced independently of the GMO industry, have not found GMO foods to be safe — to the exact contrary. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative ignores those papers.
On 8 July 2009, Agence France Presse headlined “Scientists Warn of Hazards of GMOs,” and reported that an article in the International Journal of Biological Science co-authored by world-leading scientists, reported that, “Agricultural GM companies and evaluation committees systematically overlook the side effects of GMOs and pesticides.” An accompanying study, “How Subchronic and Chronic Health Effects Can Be Neglected for GMOs, Pesticides or Chemicals,” found “a significant underestimation of the initial signs of diseases like cancer and diseases of the hormonal, immune, nervous and reproductive systems.”
The United States does not regulate GMO foods, because the patents are owned mostly by U.S. companies, and the U.S. Government doesn’t want to get in the way of their selling their patented products. Consequently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration takes any given GMO manufacturer’s word for the safety of its GMO products. U.S. President Obama wants to promote U.S. trade by convincing all other countries to sell GMO foods. His TTIP and TPP are supported by the GMO industry, which has approved their GMO foods and allowed their product-labels to not mention that some or all of the ingredients are genetically modified crops.
One of the major advantages of GMO crops is that they can survive the use of herbicides — weed-killers — that kill natural crops. (The GMO-seed manufacturer also markets the pesticide or herbicide; these are chemical companies, and GMOs are a complementary or synergistic product-line for them. For example, the leading herbicide “Roundup” is from Monsanto which produces the GMO seeds that tolerate it.) Another advantage is that the foods can stay longer as looking and smelling fresh, which also lowers the cost of production, and yet the consumer doesn’t even know that the food is actually stale — the food is competing against costlier-to-produce non-GMO foods and so driving them off the market by the lower price, which leaves more and more food-production dependent upon GMO makers such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow Chemical. The lower price is obvious; the lower quality is hidden. It’s race-to-the-bottom international ‘competition,’ in which the aristocracy reap all the winnings; the public get the losses.
A recent news report from independent food scientists was bannered “FDA Product Safety Declaration Misleads Nation—Again” and it contains references to many recent scientific papers that find GMO foods to be dangerous, and harmful to human health.
An international analysis, “A Comparative Evaluation of the Regulation of GM Crops” was published in 2013 in the scientific journal Environment International, and it concluded by saying that, “Regulatory bodies are not adequately assessing the risks of dsRNA-producing GM products. As a result, we recommend a process to properly assess the safety of dsRNA-producing GM organisms before they are released or commercialized.” The Obama Administration is trying to prevent that from happening; and their proposed TTIP and TPP international-trade treaties are crucial components of achieving this objective. In the United States, GMO-producers are granted the right to self-regulate, and this practice will become the standard worldwide practice if the TPP and TTIP become passed into law.
The U.S. Government is doing everything it can to spread to other nations the same deregulatory policies that American companies rely upon to market their products inside the United States. On Friday, April 25th, a key U.S. Senate Committee approved a “Trade Promotion Authority” bill to help rush through the U.S. Senate the approval of Mr. Froman’s TPP trade deal with Asian countries. For a summary of the regulatory practices around the world regarding GMO crops, see here. A discussion of the votes in the U.S. Senate on the measure that was proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders to allow individual states to establish their own regulations requiring the labeling or indication of whether or not particular food ingredients are GMOs (since the federal Government refuses to consider such a proposal), is here, and it shows that even some allegedly progressive U.S. Senators voted the GMO industry’s way on that bill to regulate it, which failed, on a vote of 71 to 27. One might call this the Monsanto Congress, because the U.S. House is even more conservative than the Senate. Of the 27 U.S. Senators who voted for the Sanders bill, 24 were Democrats, 2 were Independents, and 1 was Republican. 43 Republicans, and 28 Democrats voted against it. The Obama Administration had lobbied against the bill, in order to continue the GMO industry’s free reign over America’s food-supply.
When Barack Obama campaigned for the Presidency in 2008, he said, “Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they’re buying.” But as soon as he won the Presidency “The new president filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA and the FDA.” And whereas Republican news-organizations such as Fox ‘News’ criticized him as being a Muslim Marxist, he was actually implementing policies that continued those of the Republican George W. Bush Administration on this and on many other issues. Yet, no matter how far to the right Mr. Obama actually was, he was portrayed as a ‘leftist’ in Republican ’news’ media. And yet, still, even today, the vast majority of Democratic voters approve of his actions as President. They still believe his rhetoric, even though he has lied to them constantly and even filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that lying in politics must continue to remain unrestricted not only at the national level but also in each and every one of the states. Consequently, in the United States, there is no effective political opposition to the large international U.S. corporations. (And, under the Republican Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, corporations now have virtually unlimited freedom to use stockholders’ money to purchase politicians.)
Hillary Clinton is a big supporter of the GMO industry, and the response of liberals to that is to ask her to give them rhetoric they like on the matter, just as Obama had done when he was running for President in 2008. In other words: they will campaign for her to become President if she will only lie to them as Obama did to them. What liberals are demanding is rhetoric; but if they get it from her, then the industries that are funding her Presidential campaign won’t be worried, because she has a solid record of doing what her financial backers want her to do. As long as Americans don’t care when a politician has lied to them, lying to them will continue to be the way to win public office — especially considering that America’s international corporations now have been granted by the Republican U.S. Supreme Court a ‘free speech’ right to purchase the U.S. Government. And now that the Supreme Court has also ruled that political lies are a Constitutionally protected form of speech, those ads don’t even need to be true. If the American people don’t care about honesty, then they won’t have an honest government, because America’s corporations can then buy any U.S. Government they want — they’ll have total impunity if the U.S. public don’t even care about honesty in their government. There are no legal penalties for political lying; so, if there are also no political penalties for it, then the U.S. can only be ruled by lies and their liars. Should that be called “fascism”?
According to the generally progressive Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio (who, along with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders is one of the Senate’s three leading opponents of Mr. Obama’s proposed international-trade treaties), President Obama has been lobbying Senators more insistently and more intensely on getting them to grant him “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority” to ram these treaties through, than on any other single issue since Obama first became President in 2009. No issue, not even Obamacare nor any other, has been as important to Obama as is his getting signed into law the TPP and TTIP. It would certainly be the culmination of his Presidency if he succeeds. It would be his crowning achievement. He and his heirs will be amply rewarded if he succeeds; and that’s apparently what he really cares about. He has shown it by his actions as President, not by his rhetoric to voters. After all: Americans, it seems, don’t really care about honesty. All they really care about is rhetoric that pleases them. They merely want to be told what they want to hear.
Perhaps this is the reason why no progressive has entered the Democratic Presidential contest against Hillary Clinton. If the only realistic possibilities to become the next President are her and her Republican opponent (whomever he will turn out to be), then America will continue to be a de facto one-party State, and this will be the U.S. international-corporate party, in both of its factions or nominal varieties, controlling the U.S. Government. The only comprehensive scientific study that has yet been done finds that the U.S. has, in fact, already been ruled in this way for some time. (The history of how it came to be this way, starting gradually after the end of World War II, is the subject of my latest book.) Obama is merely implementing it more; he didn’t start it. He is implementing it more than even Republicans were able to do.
Obama wouldn’t have been able to do this if he didn’t come bearing the label ‘Democrat.’ And Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill was the key person to subordinate that Party to Wall Street. Hillary and Obama are following in his footsteps. Obama’s “Change” occurred actually when Bill Clinton became President in 1993. It simply hasn’t been much recognized until now. Today’s Democratic Party started when Bill became President. That’s when the one-party State, with the national Democrats playing the role of the ‘Good Cop’ to the national and local Republicans’ role of the ‘Bad Cop,’ in the eyes of the Democratic Party’s electoral base of deceived liberals, actually began to take over the U.S. Government, for the benefit of, and service to, America’s aristocracy.
This is why both Obama and Clinton are big supporters of essentially unregulated GMOs. It’s sort of like unregulated Wall Street: the profits get privatized, while the losses (poor health etc.) get socialized.
This will make the world sorry it put a CIA death squad in charge of Chernobyl
By Niqnaq | April 29, 2015
Yatsenyuk inspects forest fire in the exclusion zone. After visiting the zone, the Head of Government told journalists at the airport:
The situation is under control. Fire stations are from Chernobyl at a distance of about 20 km. Our State emergency service actively works to cut off the spread of fire. The localization of the fire involved three aircraft, one helicopter and a significant amount of equipment. There sent forces, including the Ministry of internal Affairs. This fire is the largest since 1992. But we cope, perform, and we will actively inform.
Answering a question about the situation with background radiation Arseniy Yatsenyuk said:
I was informed that the situation is normal; there are no changes in the background radiation level.
———–
The fire encompasses the plutonium burial areas. According to State Emergency Service (GSChS) the fire blazes already near the village. It is 13 km from the station. People are close to panic. The Deputy Director on scientific work of the Museum of Chernobyl, Anna Royal, said:
The fire had already moved in close to Chernobyl, the radioactive waste burial site. There is one of the most polluted places. Nearby the burial of radioactive waste. Plutonium is one of the most dangerous elements that infects the haematopoietic system of a person. As long as nobody touches it, this element is not dangerous. But if in the street the wind and the fire, plutonium particles can rise a meter and be transported over long distances.
Meanwhile, as reported by the interior Minister Arsen Avakov, to extinguish the fire involved the national guard. In Kiev, there are rumors that some deputies of the Verkhovna Rada and members of the government have taken their families out of town.
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Woolsey Fire started at Santa Susana Field Lab — where “radioactive materials released were never accurately measured”
By John Laforge | CounterPunch | November 30, 2018
In my Nov. 16 column, I reported on potential radiation risks posed by California’s Woolsey wildfire having burned over parts or all of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—south of Simi Valley, Calif., 30 miles outside Los Angeles—site of at least four partial or total nuclear reactor meltdowns.
The field laboratory operated 10 experimental reactors and conducted rocket engine tests. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents, researcher James Mahaffey writes, “The cores in four experimental reactors on site … melted.” Reactor core melts always result in the release of large amounts of radioactive gases and particles. Clean up of the deeply contaminated site has not been conducted in spite of a 2010 agreement.
Los Angeles’s KABC-7 TV reported Nov. 13 that the Santa Susana lab site “appears to be the origin of the Woolsey Fire” which has torched over 96,000 acres. Southern Calif. Public Radio said, “According to Cal Fire, the Woolsey Fire started on the afternoon of Thursday, Nov. 8 … on the Santa Susana site.” … continue
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