I saw Russians as victims of ignoble leaders. Then came the rage of their war in Ukraine.

Ross K. Baker
Sat, May 14, 2022
My dad was what was referred to in those days as a "fellow traveler." He wasn’t a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, but he followed the party line. I remember accompanying him as he delivered copies of the Daily Worker to comrades in the neighborhood. And one of the decorative touches in our house was a portrait of Joseph Stalin that hung on a bedroom wall until the period in the 1950s when Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy's well-publicized hunt for communists in various corners of American life convinced my dad that the better part of valor was to take it down.

My dad's affection was less for Stalin than it was for the people of the Soviet Union and the terrible price they paid to defeat the armies of Adolf Hitler. He revered the Russians as a heroic people, and part of that rubbed off on me even when I became old enough to understand that a noble people could be led by ignoble men and, worse, that they had the power to obliterate my country – so I accepted the reality of the Cold War while reserving a hidden corner of my heart for the brave people of Russia.
Russians deserved my sympathy

While I found the leaders of the USSR colorless and uninteresting men with the exception of Nikita Khrushchev, they never seemed especially sinister or threatening: just a bunch of stony-faced functionaries in mohair topcoats and fedoras standing on a reviewing platform in Red Square saluting columns of men and missiles.

Ukrainians' courage: Now the world must act to honor their bravery

A man holds a poster with half portraits of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a protest in front of the Russian Embassy in Berlin, Germany, in 2014.

It was only when the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn became available and the dreadful word "gulag" entered our vocabulary that I began to think of Russians more as victims than as heroes and Russia as a place that harbored terrible secrets. Nearly a million Russian citizens were executed at Stalin's behest. Many more were severely mistreated. And his campaign triggered a famine in which millions of Ukrainians starved.



Russian Communist Party supporters hold portraits of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as they gather in Moscow in 2018.

But if their leaders were ignoble, the Russian people were long-suffering and deserving of my sympathy, not my scorn.

New face, same Russian misrule

My compassion for the Russians deepened when I visited Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and witnessed a once-proud people reduced to begging, and I cringed seeing soldiers and sailors of a once-mighty military selling their caps, blouses and belts in Red Square and taking bribes from foreign tourists to allow them to enter Vladimir Lenin’s tomb after visiting hours.

When Vladimir Putin came along, I thought the Russian people had finally caught a break. The fact that he was a former KGB officer I didn't find especially alarming because Russia was always honeycombed with spies and informers. Putin, moreover, was a colorless man who didn’t seem especially sinister and a great deal less embarrassing than the drunkard Boris Yeltsin who preceded him.

But when the poisonings of dissidents with polonium and Novichok began and became weapons to punish dissidents, and journalists were shot down near Red Square, Putin came to look less like a savior and more like just one more sinister figure in a long history of Russian misrule.
Unspeakable cruelty unleashed

Any residual respect I had for the Russian people withered this year when I began to see images and hear Ukrainian testimonies of the people of Irpin and Bucha under attack and occupation by the Russian army.

Whether acting under orders or as renegades, ordinary Russian soldiers unleashed a campaign of unspeakable cruelty on the innocent civilians of a country much like their own, mouthing absurd slogans in defense of their barbarism that they were hunting down Nazis. This reign of terror seemed spontaneous and not coerced by commanders.

This is when it became impossible for me to reconcile my youthful admiration for the Russian people, as Russian fighters inflicted atrocities on defenseless men, women and children. The Russians had become transformed from heroic and long-suffering victims into the very fascists their ancestors had fought against so valiantly eight decades ago.

What little affection I have for Russians is reserved for those who opposed Putin’s unjust war and fled the country. But what troubles me most deeply is that there is something in the national character of Russia that produces in large numbers of their young men a malicious impulse that leads them to inflict widespread brutality on people who never harmed them.

Ross K. Baker

I understand the rage that can come from a desire for vengeance, but this is not at issue in the dreadful carnage that they have inflicted on the blameless people of Irpin and Bucha and dozens of other towns and villages in Ukraine.

No historic injustice or humiliation inflicted on the Russian people can justify the pain and suffering their fighters are inflicting now on the innocent people of Ukraine.

Ross K. Baker is a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @Rosbake1

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Russian barbaric rage of war in Ukraine changed my view of Russians

Menaced by flames, nuclear lab peers into future of wildfire
  

 

 

sSassan Darian holds his cat Cyrus as he stands in front of his family's fire-damaged home in the aftermath of the Coastal Fire Thursday, May 12, 2022, in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

(AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)More

MORGAN LEE
Fri, May 13, 2022, 

LOS ALAMOS N.M. (AP) — Public schools were closed and evacuation bags packed this week as a stubborn wildfire crept within a few miles of the city of Los Alamos and its companion U.S. national security lab — where assessing apocalyptic threats is a specialty and wildland fire is a beguiling equation.

Lighter winds on Friday allowed for the most intense aerial attack this week on those flames west of Santa Fe as well as the biggest U.S. wildfire burning farther east, south of Taos.

“We had all kinds of aviation flying today,” fire operations chief Todd Abel said at a Santa Fe National Forest briefing Friday evening. “We haven’t had that opportunity in a long time.”

In Southern California, where a fire has destroyed at least 20 homes south of Los Angeles in the coastal community of Laguna Niguel, Orange County emergency officials scaled back the mandatory evacuation area Friday from 900 residences to 131.

People who remained on alert to prepare for evacuations west of Santa Fe included scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory who are tapping supercomputers to peer into the future of wildfires in the U.S. West, where climate change and an enduring drought are fanning the frequency and intensity of forest and grassland fire.

The research and partnerships eventually could yield reliable predictions that shape the way vast tracks of national forests are thinned — or selectively burned — to ward off disastrously hot conflagrations that can quickly overrun cities, sterilize soil and forever alter ecosystems.

“This actually is something that we’re really trying to leverage to look for ways to deal with fire in the future,” said Rod Linn, a senior lab scientist who leads efforts to create a supercomputing tool that predicts the outcome of fires in specific terrain and conditions.

The high stakes in the research are on prominent display during the furious start of spring wildfire season, which includes a blaze that has inched steadily toward Los Alamos National Laboratory, triggering preparations for a potential evacuation.

The lab emerged out of the World War II efforts to design nuclear weapons in Los Alamos under the Manhattan Project. It now conducts a range of national security work and research in diverse fields of renewable energy, nuclear fusion, space exploration, supercomputing and efforts to limit global threats from disease to cyberattacks. The lab is one of two U.S. sites gearing up to manufacture plutonium cores for use in nuclear weapons.

With nearly 1,000 firefighters battling the blaze, laboratory officials say critical infrastructure is well safeguarded from the fire, which spans 67 square miles (175 square kilometers)

 

Still, scientists are ready.

“We have our bags packed, cars loaded, kids are home from school — it’s kind of a crazy day,” said Adam Atchley, a father of two and laboratory hydrologist who studies wildfire ecology.

Wildfires that reach the Los Alamos National Laboratory increase the risk, however slightly, of disbursing chemical waste and radionuclides such as plutonium through the air or in the ashes carried away by runoff after a fire.

Mike McNaughton, an environmental health physicist at Los Alamos, acknowledges that chemical and radiological waste was blatantly mishandled in the early years of the laboratory.

“People had a war to win, and they were not careful,” McNaughton said. “Emissions now are very, very small compared with the historical emissions.”

Dave Fuehne, the laboratory’s team leader for air emissions measurement, says a network of about 25 air monitors encircle the facility to ensure no dangerous pollution escapes the lab unnoticed. Additional high-volume monitors were deployed as fire broke out in April.

Trees and underbrush on the campus are removed manually — 3,500 tons (3,175 metric tons) over the course of the last four years, said Jim Jones, manager of the lab’s Wildland Fire Mitigation Project.

“We don’t do any burning,” Jones said. “It’s not worth the risk.”

Jay Coghlan, director of the environmental group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, wants a more thorough evaluation of the lab's current fire risks and questions whether plutonium pit production is appropriate.

This year's spring blazes also have destroyed mansions on a California hilltop and chewed through more than 422 square miles (1,100 square kilometers) of tinder-dry northeastern New Mexico. In Colorado, authorities said Friday one person died in a fire that destroyed eight mobile homes in Colorado Springs.

The sprawling fire in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountain range is the largest burning in the U.S., with at least 262 homes destroyed and thousands of residents displaced.

Nearly 2,000 fire personnel are now assigned to that fire with a 501-mile (806-kilometer) perimeter — a distance that would stretch from San Diego to San Francisco.

Atchley says extreme weather conditions are changing the trajectory of many fires.

“A wildfire in the ’70s, ‘80s, '90s and even the 2000s is probably going to behave differently than a wildfire in 2020,” he said.

Atchley says he’s contributing to research aimed at better understanding and preventing the most destructive wildfires, superheated blazes that leap through the upper crowns of mature pine trees. He says climate change is an unmistakable factor.

“It’s increasing the wildfire burn window. … The wildfire season is year-round,” Atchley said. “And this is happening not only in the United States, but in Australia and Indonesia and around the world.”

He’s not alone in suggesting that the answer may be more frequent fires of lower intensity that are set deliberately to mimic a cycle of burning and regeneration that may have take place every two to six years in New Mexico before the arrival of Europeans.

“What we’re trying to do at Los Alamos is figure out how do you implement prescribed fire safely ... given that it’s exceedingly hard with climate change,” he said.

Examples of intentional prescribed burns that escaped control include the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire that swept through residential areas of Los Alamos and across 12 square miles of the laboratory — more than one-quarter of the campus. The fire destroying more than 230 homes and 45 structures at the lab. In 2011, a larger and faster-moving fire burned fringes of the lab.

Atchley said the West's forests can be thought of and measured as one giant reserve that stores carbon and can help hold climate change in check — if extreme fires can be limited.

 

 

  

Land managers say expansive U.S. national forests can't be thinned by hand and machine alone.

Linn, the physicist, says wildfire modeling software is being shared with land managers at the U.S. Forest Service, as well as the Geological Service and Fish and Wildlife Service, for preliminary testing to see if can make prescribed fires easier to predict and control.

“We don’t advocate anybody using any of these models blindly,” he said. “We're in that essential phase of building those relationships with land managers and helping them to begin to make it their model as well.”

The dangerous business of dismantling America's aging nuclear plants
 

Douglas MacMillan

WASHINGTON POST
Fri, May 13, 2022

LONG READ


FORKED RIVER, N.J. - The new owner took over the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in 2019, promising to dismantle one of the nation's oldest nuclear plants at minimal cost and in record time. Then came a series of worrisome accidents.

One worker was struck by a 100-ton metal reactor dome. Another was splashed with radioactive water, according to internal incident reports and regulatory inspection reports reviewed by The Washington Post. Another worker drove an excavator into an electrical wire on his first day on the job, knocking out power to 31,000 homes and businesses on the New Jersey coast, according to a police report and the local power company.

All three incidents occurred on the watch of Holtec International, a nuclear equipment manufacturer based in Jupiter, Fla. Though the company until recently had little experience shutting down nuclear plants, Holtec has emerged as a leader in nuclear cleanup, a burgeoning field riding an expected wave of closures as licenses expire for the nation's aging nuclear fleet.

Over the past three years, Holtec has purchased three plants in three states and expects to finalize a fourth this summer. The company is seeking to profitably dismantle them by replacing hundreds of veteran plant workers with smaller, less-costly crews of contractors and eliminating emergency planning measures, documents and interviews show. While no one has been seriously injured at Oyster Creek, the missteps are spurring calls for stronger government oversight of the entire cleanup industry.

In the nearly three years Holtec has owned Oyster Creek, regulators have documented at least nine violations of federal rules, including the contaminated water mishap, falsified weapons inspection reports and other unspecified security lapses. That's at least as many as were found over the preceding 10 years at the plant, when it was owned by Exelon, one of the nation's largest utility companies, according to The Post's review of regulatory records.

Joseph Delmar, a spokesman for Holtec, defended the company's record, saying it takes safety and security seriously. The recent incidents "are not reflective of the organization's culture," he said, adding that the worker who knocked down the power line "did not follow the proper safety protocols." Delmar said the company has decades of experience building equipment to store nuclear waste and employs veteran plant workers to dismantle reactor sites.

"While the decommissioning organization may seem new, the professionals staffing the company are experienced nuclear professionals with intimate knowledge of the plants they work at," Delmar said in an emailed statement.

Holtec is, however, pioneering an experimental new business model. During the lifetime of America's 133 nuclear reactors, ratepayers paid small fees on their monthly energy bills to fill decommissioning trust funds, intended to cover the eventual cost of deconstructing the plants. Trust funds for the country's 94 operating and 14 nonoperating nuclear reactors now total about $86 billion, according to Callan, a San Francisco-based investment consulting firm.

After a reactor is dismantled and its site cleared, some of these trust funds must return any money left over to ratepayers. But others permit cleanup companies to keep any surplus as profit - creating incentives to cut costs at sites that house some of the most dangerous materials on the planet.

Even after reactors are shut down, long metal rods containing radioactive pellets - known as spent fuel - are stored steps away, in cooling pools and steel-and-concrete casks. Nuclear safety experts say that an industrial accident or a terrorist attack at any of these sites could result in a radiological release with severe impacts to workers and nearby residents, as well as to the environment.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent federal agency tasked with overseeing safety at nuclear sites, conducts regular inspections during the decommissioning process. But state and local officials say the NRC has failed to safeguard the public from risks at shut-down plants, deferring too readily to companies like Holtec.

"The NRC is not doing their job," said Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who has pushed the agency to adopt stricter regulations around plant decommissioning. "We need a guaranteed system that prioritizes communities and safety, and we don't have that right now."

The NRC's leadership is divided over the role regulators should play. The agency was created in 1974, as the first generation of commercial reactors was going online, and its rules were mainly designed to safeguard the operation of active plants and nuclear-material sites. As reactors shut down, the NRC began reducing inspections and exempting plants from safety and security rules.

Last November, the NRC approved a new rule that would automatically qualify shut-down plants for looser safety and security restrictions. Christopher Hanson, a Democrat nominated by President Donald Trump and promoted to the role of chairman by President Joe Biden, has said the changes would improve the "effectiveness and efficiency" of the decommissioning process.

Commissioner Jeff Baran, also a Democrat, voted against the proposed rule and called for the NRC and local governments to play a bigger role. "Radiological risks remain at shutdown nuclear plants that must be taken seriously," he cautioned in public comments. Baran added that the agency already takes a "laissez-faire" approach to decommissioning and that the new rule "would make the situation even worse, further skewing the regulation towards the interests of industry."

Dan Dorman, the NRC's executive director for operations, said in an email that the agency lifts restrictions at plants only if it determines the plant will continue to be safe. In addition to citing Holtec for violations at Oyster Creek, the agency has required the company to take corrective measures, including external security assessments of all its nuclear sites.

"Our increased oversight and the recent enforcement actions demonstrate our concern about the situation at Oyster Creek," Dorman said.

Holtec faces mounting criticism beyond Oyster Creek. Michigan officials have said they worry Holtec will leave residents on the hook for cleanup costs at the Palisades plant on the shores of Lake Michigan. Massachusetts officials have protested Holtec's plan to take 1 million gallons of contaminated water from the defunct Pilgrim power plant and dump it into Cape Cod Bay.

While Holtec acknowledges a funding shortfall at Palisades, Delmar says the fund will appreciate in value to cover the cost of the cleanup. At Pilgrim, Holtec has said the potential radiation dose from the Cape Cod release would be far less than the average traveler receives on a typical cross-country flight.

In the Southwest, Holtec has ignited a different controversy. As the company acquires old plants, it is proposing to ship the highly radioactive spent fuel to New Mexico, where it plans to build a storage facility. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D, has vowed to fight the plan, telling Trump in a 2020 letter that storing radioactive material in the oil-rich Permian Basin region would be "economic malpractice."

Holtec says it is working in partnership with a group of local officials who believe the benefits of the facility - including new jobs and investment - outweigh the risks. On its website, Holtec says the facility will provide "a safe, secure, temporary, retrievable, and centralized facility for storage of used nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste until such time that a permanent solution is available."

The growing debate marks the latest twist in the tortured saga of nuclear power, which once was hailed as a miracle technology capable of producing large quantities of clean, affordable energy. In the early 1970s, the federal Atomic Energy Commission estimated that about 1,000 reactors would be built in the United States, and that nuclear sources eventually would provide at least half of the world's power.

But those ambitions soon collided with fears about nuclear radiation, especially after disastrous meltdowns at Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan. Nuclear energy peaked at around 18% of global electricity production in the 1990s and now comprises about 10%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Association.

Reactors in the United States initially were licensed for 40 years, and most were renewed for another 20 years. Of 94 reactors that are still active, licenses at over half are set to expire in the next two decades, according to Julia Moriarty, a senior vice president at Callan.

Recently, worries about climate change have led some governments to embrace nuclear as a low-carbon source of power. Biden has called nuclear essential to the nation's climate goals, and Washington last year set aside $6 billion for extending the licenses of some plants and $2.5 billion for developing new nuclear technologies.

But the nation continues to puzzle over the problem of nuclear waste. This material, which emanates invisible but harmful radiation for hundreds of years, is stored in protective containers on the grounds of nuclear plants, scattered in dozens of towns across the country. A plan to build a national waste repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain stalled amid decades of political gridlock, leaving these towns saddled indefinitely with the threat of an accidental release or terrorist attack.

Holtec is approaching those communities with an offer to clean up the mess.

Founded and wholly owned by Kris Singh, an inventor and entrepreneur, Holtec says it is pioneering a new model of "accelerated decommissioning." At the 24 U.S. reactors currently undergoing decommissioning, over half are expected to take two decades or more to complete the process, NRC data shows; Holtec pledges to return nuclear sites to safe, clean usable land in as few as eight years.

Singh did not respond to requests for comment, and Holtec did not make him available for an interview.

The company's work at Oyster Creek, its first plant, was meant to be a blueprint for the national expansion, Holtec executives said in interviews with The Post in early 2020. Instead, safety advocates argue, it has served as a warning. Cost-cutting has left employees feeling overworked and prone to mistakes, according to two former plant workers who were both laid off by Holtec. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their former employer.

The company has said in regulatory filings it plans to keep about $85 million in profit from Oyster Creek's $826 million trust fund. It has already spent about one quarter of the fund.

Shortly after Holtec took over, regulators found problems with the plant's weapons program. All nuclear plants must maintain weapons, such as guns and ammunition used by security personnel, and test them on a regular basis to secure the sites from attacks. According to an NRC investigation, a Holtec manager skipped the annual tests and falsified the weapons inspection reports to give the appearance the tests were conducted. The manager said in a letter to the NRC that he made mistakes on the company's inspections report because he had been "overwhelmed" following staff cuts, though he denied that anything was intentionally falsified.

"I went from a staff of six to a staff of two, all having extra responsibilities, doubling our workload and learning new criteria of the positions," the manager said in the letter, which was posted on the NRC's website.

In a settlement with the NRC announced this year, Holtec agreed to pay a $50,000 civil penalty, hire a new corporate security director and conduct external security assessments.

Delmar, the Holtec spokesman, said the "roots" of some safety incidents "go back to when the plant was operating and under previous ownership," but declined to elaborate. The weapons manager, who was fired by Holtec last year, declined to comment.

Another incident took place in January 2020 on the reactor refueling floor - a cavernous space high up inside the building that houses the reactor, along with the gargantuan steel-and-concrete structures that protect its core. To remove these structures from the site, workers must cut them into smaller pieces.

As they were slicing the 100-ton reactor dome, the structure ​​unexpectedly swung and struck one employee, according to an internal incident report reviewed by The Post. This person was nearly knocked down a 10-story equipment hatch, according to the two former employees, who didn't witness the incident but were briefed on it afterward.

The manager overseeing the work had been responsible for three different teams that day and his "mind may have been elsewhere," according to the report, which blamed the accident on "complacency." The report described the incident as a "near miss" but did not mention the equipment hatch or the possibility of a fall.

Delmar said the accident occurred at least 100 feet from the equipment hatch, which he said had a guardrail around it. "Incidents like this are not normal, and unsafe work practices are unacceptable for any Holtec employee or contractor at our facilities," he said.

The NRC evaluated the incident, but because it did not find any violations of nuclear safety, referred the matter to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Dorman said. Holtec said the company has heard nothing from OSHA, and no record of the incident could be found on OSHA's online database. OSHA declined to comment and a request by The Post for such records is pending.

In February 2021, a faulty valve for a nuclear waste container unexpectedly flew into the air, leaking contaminated water on one worker, who took an internal dose of radiation, according to a federal inspection report. This probably means the worker ingested radioactive water through the eyes, nose, mouth or skin, nuclear safety experts said. The worker did not require medical attention because the dose was below the limits for people who work with radiation, Holtec said.

The incident could have been avoided if managers had fixed a problem with the snap rings that held the valve in place, regulators said in the inspection report. Holtec had "replaced the snap rings on prior occasions due to evidence of bending of the ring" but never recorded the action in its system so it would be fixed permanently, the NRC said. The regulators called this a very low-severity violation, because it was not willful or repeated.

Holtec has since modified the valve design and conducted new training, Delmar said.


Decommissioning is an unproven business with uncertain profits. The total saved in the nation's decommissioning trust funds is currently smaller than the estimated cost of shutting them all down, according to Callan's Moriarty.

"The gamble under all of this is you can do the cleanup for less than the amount of money that's in the fund. Nobody has proved that yet," said Gregory Jaczko, an appointee of President Barack Obama who headed the NRC from 2009 to 2012.

Some of the firms buying defunct nuclear power plants in the United States are backed by private equity, an industry with expertise in purchasing unwanted assets and improving their value, often by reducing costs. TriArtisan Capital Advisors, the investment firm that partly owns P.F. Chang's and TGI Fridays, now owns the company decommissioning Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, site of the biggest nuclear meltdown in U.S. history.

Singh founded Holtec in the 1980s, when he saw that nuclear plants were running out of space to safely store radioactive fuel, according to Joy Russell, a senior vice president at Holtec and one of the company's longest-tenured employees. A mechanical engineer who specialized in heat transfer, Singh became a pioneer of the nuclear industry by devising new systems for safely storing spent fuel rods, including metal racks that go inside cooling pools and steel-and-concrete cylinders that can store fuel for decades, Russell said in a 2020 interview.

In 2017, Holtec opened the doors of a stately new manufacturing center in Camden, N.J., that showcases Singh's accomplishments. Employees arriving at the main office building on the Krishna P. Singh Technology Campus walk by a parking space reserved for the CEO's chauffeured Rolls-Royce and into an atrium where more than 100 patents bearing Singh's name are on display.

But the Camden campus also brought controversy. After opening the facility, Singh complained to an area paper that Camden residents "don't show up to work" and "some of them get into drugs," angering community leaders in the mostly Black and Hispanic city. Singh later apologized and said his comments were taken out of context.

The NRC has given Holtec permission to pare back safety and security requirements at its plants, including security personnel, cybersecurity, emergency planning, terrorist attack drills and accident insurance, according to documents on the agency's website. In approving these requests, the NRC has accepted Holtec's rationale that such measures are less crucial for retired plants, which experts agree do not carry the same radiological risk.

Some nuclear safety advocates say the NRC is being too deferential to Holtec and other companies. Years of research by the NRC itself shows plants are still vulnerable to a disaster after they shut down. In staff reports, the NRC has said severe accidents can result from mishandling spent fuel rods and that sites storing nuclear waste remain vulnerable to sabotage.


When Holtec announced its deal to acquire Oyster Creek, some local residents were uneasy about the plant becoming a test case for Holtec's corporate expansion, said Janet Tauro, an environmental activist who lives 20 minutes north of the plant.

"When you are dealing with highly radioactive nuclear fuel and taking apart a nuclear power plant, you have to be infallible - there is no room for mistakes," said Tauro, the New Jersey board chair of the nonprofit group Clean Water Action.

For 50 years, the plant's towering gray chimney had been one of the area's most distinctive physical landmarks. Its single reactor generated enough electricity to power 600,000 homes - roughly two New Jersey counties.

With the NRC's blessing, Holtec shrank the plant's emergency response staff, documents show. The plant lowered its on-site insurance from $50 million to $10 million and stopped providing funds to the surrounding community for emergency equipment, staff and training, because, the company said, hazards at the site had been reduced.

While rare, major accidents have occurred at nuclear waste sites with no operational reactor. In 2014, an explosion inside New Mexico's underground repository for "low level" radioactive waste items, such as contaminated clothing and tools, led to 21 workers testing positive for internal contamination and some reporting respiratory problems, according to an investigation by the Energy Department. The entire site had to close for a three-year, $2 billion cleanup.

The NRC's Dorman said the agency still requires emergency planning measures on the premises of a shut-down nuclear plant, which he said provides ample resources to respond to accidents. However, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned the NRC last year that having no dedicated personnel or equipment in neighboring communities "could have unfortunate consequences."

Holtec's Delmar said its exemptions at Oyster Creek "are consistent with other decommissioning sites" and "reflect the reduction in risk at each of the key points in the decommissioning process."

Last summer, Holtec finished moving all of Oyster Creek's spent fuel rods from cooling pools into dry storage containers in just 32 months - a "world record," the company said in a news release. The process normally takes five years or more, but Holtec sped it up by building a fuel canister the company says can accommodate nuclear waste at hotter temperatures. After reviewing the company's calculations, the NRC concluded it was safe to reduce the mandatory minimum cooling time to one year, filings show.

In an empty cow pasture in the New Mexico desert, Holtec is attempting to write the next chapter of the American nuclear story. The company is in the final stages of getting NRC approval for an "interim" waste storage site designed to secure spent fuel from around the country in a shopping-mall-size bunker for up to 40 years.

In meetings with New Mexicans, Holtec representatives have said the facility would create jobs and fulfill an important national need. New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, D, has sued the NRC, claiming the regulator "colluded with Holtec" by rubber-stamping its plans and ignoring potential environmental harms.

The NRC's Dorman says the agency's review of the Holtec site has been rigorous. The agency recently approved a separate, privately owned storage facility in Texas, a project that now faces legal challenges by that state. Holtec declined to comment.

"The NRC has not figured out a permanent solution" to nuclear waste, Balderas said in an interview. "They are using Holtec as a Band-Aid."

- - -

The Washington Post's Alice Crites contributed to this report.

UPDATE 2-California regulator rejects desalination plant despite historic drought

Daniel Trotta
Thu, May 12, 2022

By Daniel Trotta

COSTA MESA, Calif., May 12 (Reuters) - California regulators on Thursday rejected a $1.4 billion desalination plant on environmental grounds, dealing a setback to Governor Gavin Newsom, who had supported the project as a partial solution for the state's sustained drought.

The California Coastal Commission voted 11-0 to reject the proposal by Poseidon Water, controlled by the infrastructure arm of Canada's Brookfield Asset Management, to build the plant on a low-lying coastal site at Huntington Beach, near the town of Costa Mesa, about 30 miles (50 km) south of Los Angeles.

The plant was designed to convert Pacific Ocean water into 50 million gallons (189.3 million liters) of drinking water a day.

That is enough for 400,000 people, but the plant would use a process that staff experts at the commission said would devastate marine life and expose the plant to future risk of sea level rise while producing expensive water too costly for low-income consumers.

Environmentalists who have opposed the project for years burst into celebration after the vote in a Costa Mesa hotel conference room.

Representatives of Poseidon issued a statement expressing disappointment but made no comment on whether they would attempt to revive a project in which they have invested more than 20 years and $100 million.

Any new proposal for the site would face difficult odds or have to undergo significant redesign, so thorough was the staff report in detailing its flaws.

"It was a defining day for the for the Coastal Commission," said Susan Jordan, a plant opponent and director of the California Coastal Protection Network. "When you have a project like this that is so damaging over the next half century, you really can't allow that to move forward."

The commission's staff experts said the facility would destroy marine life in about 100 billion gallons of seawater per year, and the company's ability to mitigate that damage with wildlife habitat restoration fell far short of state requirements.

"California continues to face a punishing drought, with no end in sight," Poseidon said in a statement after the vote. "We firmly believe that this desalination project would have created a sustainable, drought-tolerant source of water."

Environmentalists have long said desalination harms ocean life, costs too much money and energy, and the plant would soon be made obsolete by water recycling.

Though the vote was unanimous, with one member abstaining, commissioners said they would be willing to support other desalination projects.

"We have a dire need for more water, but we have to do it the right way," said commissioner Effie Turnbull-Sanders, one of Newsom's four political appointees on the commission.

Days after the staff recommendation for denial was published last month, Newsom spoke publicly in favor of the project, telling the editorial board of the Bay Area News Group: "We need more tools in the damn tool kit" to produce water for a thirsty state.

Newsom, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year with the drought on many Californians' minds, disappointed environmental supporters by backing the project.

Commission Chair Donne Brownsey, also a Newsom appointee, said she did not expect to governor to dismiss the commissioners who defied him.

"He's going to be disappointed. But I'm hoping he saw that we wanted to open the door to a path to success in the future for desalination," Brownsey said.

The commission has approved 11 other desalination plants, including another one that Poseidon has operated down the coast in Carlsbad since 2015.

The Carlsbad desalination plant, the largest in the United States, turns ocean water to drinking water in 90 minutes, but it was built on more elevated geography and approved before statewide desalination regulations came into effect. (Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Chris Reese, Robert Birsel)

Europe and US Set for Scorching, Dry Summer, Scientists Say


Jonathan Tirone
Fri, May 13, 2022, 

(Bloomberg) -- Europe and parts of the US are set for a sweltering and dry summer this year, posing risks for crops and boosting demand for energy for cooling at a time when prices of commodities are already running high.

Scientists at the Copernicus Climate Change Service, who published their seasonal outlook on Friday, said hotter and drier weather is highly likely across key agricultural regions in the European Union. It could bring drought conditions for farmers that are already battling the impacts of climate change.

Abnormally high temperatures could also fuel natural gas demand for air conditioning. Russia’s war on Ukraine has already driven gas prices in Europe higher, contributing to a cost of living crisis across the region.

The scientists said there’s a 70% to 100% probability that temperatures across the northeastern US, Spain, France and Italy will be well above average from June to August. At the same time, the chance of below-normal rainfall across swathes of central Europe, France, Spain and the US northwest was more than 50%, the Copernicus team said.

Their model brings together data from scientists in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the US. The EU program uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world for its monthly and seasonal forecasts.

Persistent drought has threatened to stress production of crops like wheat and corn, just as Russia’s war in Ukraine threatens to curtail shipments.. The models developed by Copernicus are intended to help businesses and governments plan for and potentially mitigate weather-related damages.

Birds are falling from the sky in India as a record heatwave dries up water sources

Alia Shoaib
Sat, May 14, 2022

A caretaker feeds water mixed with multivitamins to a parakeet dehydrated due to heat at Jivdaya Charitable Trust in Ahmedabad.Amit 

Dave/Reuters

Dehydrated birds are falling from the sky in India as a record heatwave dries up water sources.


In India's Gujarat state dozens of high flying birds such as pigeons or kites are falling from the sky daily.


This month temperatures were expected to peak at around 122°F near the India and Pakistan border.

Dehydrated birds are falling from the sky in India as a record heatwave dries up water sources, veterinary doctors and animal rescuers said, according to Reuters.

In India's western Gujarat state, currently averaging temperatures over 110°F, dozens of high flying birds, including pigeons and kites, have been dropping out of the sky every day, Reuters reported.

Vets in an animal hospital in Ahmedabad said they had treated thousands of birds in recent weeks, the outlet said.

A vet provides medicine to an eagle after it was dehydrated due to heat at Jivdaya Charitable Trust in Ahmedabad.Amit 

Dave/Reuters

"This year has been one of the worst in recent times. We have seen a 10% increase in the number of birds that need rescuing," Manoj Bhavsar, who works with the trust and has been rescuing birds for over a decade, told Reuters.

Vets have been injecting water into birds' mouths with syringes and feeding them multivitamin tablets.

Other animals, including cats, have also been suffering from dehydration.

Vets administer saline drip to a cat that is covered by a wet cloth after it was dehydrated due to heat at Jivdaya Charitable Trust in Ahmedabad.Amit

 Dave/Reuters

Since March, large parts of India and Pakistan have been suffering from searing temperatures, which the World Meteorological Organization said was India's hottest March.

This month temperatures were expected to peak at around 122°F near the India and Pakistan border.

The nearly "unsurvivable" heat is increasingly the result of human-caused climate change, according to Yale Climate Connections.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has warned of fire risk from the extreme temperatures, and hospitals in Gujarat have been warned to set up special wards to treat heatstroke and other heat-related diseases, Reuters said.

India has recorded 25 deaths resulting from heatstroke since March, and residents have described vomiting, dizziness, and skin rashes caused by the heat.

Tuvalu, sinking in the Pacific, fears becoming a superpower 'pawn'


Tuvalu's Foreign Minister Simon Kofe gives a COP26 statement while standing in the ocean, in Funafut

Thu, May 12, 2022
By Kirsty Needham

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Tuvalu fears that climate change, an existential threat to the Pacific nation, is being forgotten and it worries that fellow island nations could become "pawns" in a global competition between China and the United States, its foreign minister said.

Simon Kofe told Reuters the superpower competition was a concern, distracting attention from climate change, the priority for Pacific islands endangered by rising sea levels.

"It is important that the Pacific handles these issues carefully," he said in an interview on Thursday. "The last thing we want is that countries in the Pacific are used against each other or used as pawns."

Kofe grabbed global attention for his nation of 12,000 people last year when he addressed a global climate conference standing ankle deep in the sea to illustrate Tuvalu was "sinking". Forty percent of the capital district is underwater at high tide, and the tiny country is forecast to be submerged by the end of the century.

Pacific Island leaders will discuss a controversial new security pact between the Solomon Islands and China at a meeting next month, Kofe said. He said he had been briefed on the issue by his Solomon Islands counterpart and that, although Honiara said it was an internal matter, it had regional implications.

"In the Pacific, the way we handle issues, the Pacific way, is by consensus, is by sitting down and face to face," he said. COVID-19 has prevented in-person meetings for two years, and "some of these critical issues can only be resolved when you meet face to face and really have a frank discussion."

The United States has warned the Solomon Islands it would have "significant concerns and respond accordingly" to any steps to establish a permanent Chinese military presence, after it struck the security pact, which has also alarmed allies Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

Beijing says the deal covers internal security, not a base, and criticism by western countries was interfering in the Solomon Island's sovereign decision-making.

Another key issue for Tuvalu is fishing, where China is seeking more agreements with Pacific islands for its fleet. Washington says it will soon announce plans to battle illegal fishing in the region, as part of increased U.S. engagement to counter China's growing influence.

"The Pacific is the richest fishing ground in the world and is said to be the last healthy fish stock of tuna," Kofe said. "That is really a tribute to the conservation and management measures applied by the Pacific island countries."

Tiny Pacific islands, feeding the world from their economic exclusion zones, carry a disproportionate burden, he said.

"Tuna is supporting the economies of Japan, China, many countries around the world," he said. "Bigger players that are coming into the region need to listen and look at what the Pacific is doing right now and use that as lessons for collaboration on issues other than fisheries."

Seeking an international platform on climate change, Tuvalu has proposed its former governor-general, Iakoba Taeia Italeli, become secretary general of the Commonwealth – the first time a Pacific nation has sought the role in the grouping.

"It’s time for the Pacific to have a chance to lead and unite the Commonwealth," Italeli told Reuters in the same interview, conducted remotely.

Commonwealth heads of government, meeting in Rwanda in June, will select the next public face of the 54-member group of countries with ties to the former British empire. The incumbent, British peer Patricia Scotland, is running for another term in the hotly contested race.

The Commonwealth had "failed to speak with one voice" at COP26, Italeli said, despite including 32 of the world's 42 smallest states, which are heavily affected by climate change.

At the next global climate change conference, in Egypt in November, Tuvalu will continue its push for easier financing for small islands states to build the physical infrastructure they need to "save themselves", Italeli said.

(Reporting by Kirsty Needham; Editing by William Mallard)

Outcry after Israel police beat mourners at journalist funeral

 (AFP/Jorge NOVOMINSKY)

Majeda El-Batsh with Gareth Browne in Ramallah
Sat, May 14, 2022,

The US and EU led an international outcry Saturday after Israeli police charged the funeral procession in Jerusalem of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and beat pallbearers who almost dropped her coffin.

Thousands of people packed Jerusalem's Old City on Friday for the burial of the veteran Al Jazeera journalist, two days after she was killed in an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank.

Television footage showed the pallbearers struggling to stop Abu Akleh's casket from falling to the ground as baton-wielding police officers charged towards them, grabbing Palestinian flags from mourners.

The United States said it was "deeply troubled" by the scenes, while the European Union said it was "appalled" by the "unnecessary force".

The Jerusalem Red Crescent said 33 people were injured, of whom six were hospitalised. Israeli authorities said six arrests were made after mourners had thrown "rocks and glass bottles".

Israel and the Palestinians traded blame for the death of Abu Akleh on Wednesday who was shot in the head during the Israeli army raid on the Jenin refugee camp.

The Israeli army said an interim investigation could not determine who fired the fatal bullet, noting stray Palestinian gunfire or Israeli sniper fire aimed at militants were both possible causes.

But the Palestinian prosecutor's office in the West Bank city of Ramallah said later the initial results of an investigation showed "the only origin of the shooting was the Israeli occupation forces".

Al Jazeera has said Israel killed her "deliberately" and "in cold blood".

In a rare, unanimous statement, the UN Security Council condemned the killing and called for "an immediate, thorough, transparent, and impartial investigation," according to diplomats.

- 'Deeply disturbed' -

Abu Akleh, a Christian and a Palestinian-American, was a star reporter and her funeral drew massive crowds.

As her body left St Joseph's hospital in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, Israeli police stormed mourners who had hoisted Palestinian flags.

Police said about "300 rioters" had arrived at the hospital for the procession and "prevented the family members from loading the coffin onto the hearse to travel to the cemetery — as had been planned and coordinated with the family in advance".

The police then intervened "to disperse the mob and prevent them from taking the coffin, so that the funeral could proceed as planned." Glass bottles and other objects were thrown at the police, it added in a statement.

The United States was "deeply troubled to see the images of Israeli police intruding into her funeral procession today," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

"Every family deserves to be able to lay their loved ones to rest in a dignified and unimpeded manner."

The EU said it was "appalled by the violence in the St Joseph Hospital compound and the level of unnecessary force exercised by Israeli police throughout the funeral procession.".

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was also "deeply disturbed" by the violence, according to a spokesman.

Thousands of Palestinian mourners attempted to follow the coffin towards the cemetery just outside the walled Old City.

Police briefly attempted to prevent them but ultimately relented, allowing thousands to stream towards the graveside, and did not intervene as Palestinian flags were waved, AFP reporters said.

- 'Sister of all Palestinians' -

In a sign of Abu Akleh's prominence, she was given what was described as a full state memorial service on Thursday at Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's compound in Ramallah before her body was transferred to Jerusalem.

The United States, European Union and United Nations have backed calls for a full investigation into Abu Akleh's killing.

Israel has publicly called for a joint probe, which the Palestinian Authority has rejected.

Grief over Abu Akleh's killing spilt beyond the Palestinian territories, with protests erupting in Turkey, Sudan and elsewhere.

She "was the sister of all Palestinians," her brother Antoun Abu Akleh told AFP.

- Fresh violence -

Fresh violence erupted Friday in the West Bank, including a raid and clashes around Jenin refugee camp in which an Israeli commando was killed.

The Islamic Jihad group said its fighters were responsible.

The Israeli officer killed was identified as Noam Raz, a 47-year-old father of six. Police said he was wounded "during a shootout with armed terrorists," and later died.

The Palestinian health ministry said 13 Palestinians were wounded in the clashes, one of them seriously.

An AFP photographer said Israeli forces had surrounded the home of a suspect, besieging two men inside and firing anti-tank grenades at the house in an effort to flush them out.

Tensions were already running high after a wave of anti-Israeli attacks that have killed at least 18 people since March 22, including an Arab-Israeli police officer and two Ukrainians.

A total of 31 Palestinians and three Israeli Arabs have died during the same period, according to an AFP tally, among them perpetrators of attacks and those killed by Israeli security forces in West Bank operations.

bur/dv/jkb

Israeli police beat pallbearers at journalist’s funeral

By JOSEF FEDERMAN

1 of 20

Israeli police confront with mourners as they carry the casket of slain Al Jazeera veteran journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during her funeral in east Jerusalem, Friday, May 13, 2022. Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American reporter who covered the Mideast conflict for more than 25 years, was shot dead Wednesday during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin. 

(AP Photo/Maya Levin)


JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli riot police on Friday pushed and beat pallbearers at the funeral for slain Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, causing them to briefly drop the casket in a shocking start to a procession that turned into perhaps the largest display of Palestinian nationalism in Jerusalem in a generation.

The scenes of violence were likely to add to the sense of grief and outrage across the Arab world that has followed the death of Abu Akleh, who witnesses say was killed by Israeli troops Wednesday during a raid in the occupied West Bank. They also illustrated the deep sensitivities over east Jerusalem — which is claimed by both Israel and the Palestinians and has sparked repeated rounds of violence.

Abu Akleh, 51, was a household name across the Arab world, synonymous with Al Jazeera’s coverage of life under Israeli rule, which is well into its sixth decade with no end in sight. A 25-year veteran of the satellite channel, she was revered by Palestinians as a local hero.

Late Friday, the Palestinian public prosecutor said preliminary findings show Abu Akleh was killed by deliberate fire from Israeli troops. The prosecutor said the investigation would continue. Israel’s military said earlier Friday that she was killed during an exchange of fire with Palestinian militants, and that it could determine the source of the shot that killed her.

At the funeral, thousands of people, many waving Palestinian flags and chanting: “Palestine! Palestine!” It was believed to be the largest Palestinian funeral in Jerusalem since Faisal Husseini, a Palestinian leader and scion of a prominent family, died in 2001.

Ahead of the burial, a large crowd gathered to escort her casket from an east Jerusalem hospital to a Catholic church in the nearby Old City. Many of the mourners held Palestinian flags, and the crowd began shouting, “We sacrifice our soul and blood for you, Shireen.”

Shortly after, Israel police moved in, pushing and clubbing mourners. As the helmeted riot police approached, they hit pallbearers, causing one man to lose control of the casket as it dropped toward the ground. Police ripped Palestinian flags out of people’s hands and fired stun grenades to disperse the crowd.

Abu Akleh’s brother, Tony, said the scenes “prove that Shireen’s reports and honest words ... had a powerful impact.”

Al Jazeera correspondent Givara Budeiri said the police crackdown was like killing Abu Akleh again. “It seems her voice isn’t silent,” she said during a report.

East Jerusalem, home to the city’s most important Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites, was captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war. It claims all of the city as its eternal capital and has annexed the eastern sector in a move that is not internationally recognized.



The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state. Israel routinely clamps down on any displays of support for Palestinian statehood. The conflicting claims to east Jerusalem often spill over into violence, helping fuel an 11-day war between Israel and Gaza militants last year and more recently sparking weeks of unrest at the city’s most sensitive holy site.

Outside of prayers at the Al Aqsa Mosque, Israel rarely allows large Palestinian gatherings in east Jerusalem and routinely clamps down on any displays of support for Palestinian statehood.

Police said the crowd at the hospital was chanting “nationalist incitement,” ignored calls to stop and threw stones at them. “The policemen were forced to act,” police said. They issued a video in which a commander outside the hospital warns the crowd that police will come in if they don’t stop their incitement and “nationalist songs.”

Shortly before midnight, the Israeli police issued a second statement claiming that they had coordinated plans with the family for the casket to be placed in a vehicle, but that a “mob threatened the driver of the hearse and then proceeded to carry the coffin on an unplanned procession.” It said police intervened “so that the funeral could proceed as planned in accordance with the wishes of the family.”

The police claims could not be immediately verified. Earlier this week, Abu Akleh’s brother had said the original plans were to move the casket in a hearse from the hospital to the church, and that after the service, it would be carried through the streets to the cemetery.

Al Jazeera said in a statement that the police action “violates all international norms and rights.”

“Israeli occupation forces attacked those mourning the late Shireen Abu Akhleh after storming the French hospital in Jerusalem, where they severely beat the pallbearers,” it said. The network added that it remains committed to covering the news and will not be deterred.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the images “deeply disturbing.”

The focus should be “marking the memory of a remarkable journalist who lost her life,” Psaki said. “We regret the intrusion into what should have been a peaceful procession.”

During a Rose Garden event, U.S. President Joe Biden was asked whether he condemns the Israeli police actions at the funeral, and he replied: “I don’t know all the details, but I know it has to be investigated.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “was deeply disturbed by the confrontations between Israeli security forces and Palestinians gathered at St. Joseph Hospital, and the behavior of some police present at the scene,” according to a statement from his deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq.

Israeli police eventually escorted the casket in a black van, ripping Palestinian flags off the vehicle as it made its way to the church.

“We die for Palestine to live!” crowds chanted. “Our beloved home!”

Later, they sang the Palestinian national anthem and chanted “Palestine, Palestine!” before her body was buried in a cemetery outside the Old City.

Her grave was decorated with a Palestinian flag and flowers. The Palestinian ambassador to the U.K., Husam Zomlot, and Al Jazeera’s bureau chief, Walid Al-Omari, placed flowers on the grave.

Salah Zuheika, a 70-year-old Palestinian, called Abu Akleh “the daughter of Jerusalem,” and said the huge crowds were a “reward” for her love of the city.

“We already miss her, but what had happened today in the city will not be forgotten,” he said.

Abu Akleh was a member of the small Palestinian Christian community in the Holy Land. Palestinian Christians and Muslims marched alongside one another Friday in a show of unity.

She was shot in the head Wednesday morning during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin.

In preliminary findings released late Friday, the Palestinian public prosecutor disputed the military’s claim that Abu Akleh was caught in crossfire. The prosecutor said that at the time she was shot, Israeli troops were the only ones firing, with the nearest forces about 150 meters (yards) away.

The report said Abu Akleh was shot deliberately, citing traces on the tree next to where she was hit which, the prosecutor argued, indicated that the shots were fired directly at her. It said the shooting continued after she was hit, hindering first aid attempts.

Earlier Friday, the Israeli military said it could not could not determine who was responsible for her death without a ballistic analysis.

“The conclusion of the interim investigation is that it is not possible to determine the source of the fire that hit and killed the reporter,” the military said.

Israel has called for a joint investigation with the Palestinian Authority and for it to hand over the bullet for forensic analysis to determine who fired the fatal round. The PA has refused, saying it will conduct its own investigation and send the results to the International Criminal Court, which is already investigating possible Israeli war crimes.

Reporters who were with Abu Akleh, including one who was shot and wounded, said there were no clashes or militants in the immediate area. All of them were wearing protective equipment that clearly identified them as reporters.

The PA and Al Jazeera, which has long had a strained relationship with Israel, have accused Israel of deliberately killing Abu Akleh. Israel denies the accusations.

Rights groups say Israel rarely follows through on investigations into the killing of Palestinians by its security forces and hands down lenient punishments on the rare occasions when it does. This case, however, drew heavy scrutiny because Abu Akleh was well-known and also a U.S. citizen.

Palestinians from in and around Jenin have carried out deadly attacks in Israel in recent weeks, and Israel has launched near daily arrest raids in the area, often igniting gunbattles with militants.

Israeli troops pushed into Jenin again early Friday, sparking renewed fighting.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said 13 Palestinians were wounded. The Israeli military said that Palestinians opened fire when its forces went in to arrest suspected militants. Police said a 47-year-old member of a special Israeli commando unit was killed.

___

Associated Press reporters Majdi Mohammed in Jenin, West Bank, Fares Akram in Hamilton, Ontario, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Aya Batrawy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed.

The Problems With Israel's Version of the Killing of Reporter Shireen Abu Akleh

Orly Halpern/Jerusalem
Thu, May 12, 2022,

Palestinians carry the flag-draped body of veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as they walk toward the offices of the news channel in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on May 11, 2022. 

Credit - Ronaldo Schemidt—AFP/Getty Images

When word got out on Wednesday that esteemed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in the West Bank city of Jenin, where Israeli forces has been making military arrest raids, Israel convened its National PR staff to form a plan of action. It decided to circulate a video of a Palestinian gunmen shooting indiscriminately from inside the Jenin refugee camp and blame them for the Al Jazeera reporter’s death. But its strategy fell flat when another video revealed that Abu Akleh died nowhere near there.

Abu Akleh was a 51-year-old Catholic Palestinian who switched to journalism after studying to be an architect and became one of the Arab world’s most famous TV journalists. Most nights for 25 years, her face lit up millions of TV screens as she shared the stories of Palestinian people living under Israeli military occupation. Arab girls and women looked up to her. And foreign journalists who reported from the Palestinian territories held her in high regard. Now Al Jazeera has accused Israel of “assassinating her in cold blood” and Arab journalists from Washington to Tunisia to Syria are staging sit-ins. Qatar lit up a building with her image. Cartoons are circulating of Abu Akleh holding a bleeding microphone with an M-16 rifle pointed at it, the type of rifle used by Israeli soldiers. A few Arab parents have named their newborn daughters ‘Shireen.’ Abu Akleh has become a Palestinian symbol.


Read More: What We Know So Far About the Killing of Al Jazeera Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh

To Israel, her death risks damage to essential relationships in the Arab world, while Abu Akleh’s U.S. citizenship brings relations with Washington into the equation, raising both the stakes and the level of scrutiny. The State Department declared ” the investigation must be immediate and thorough and those responsible must be held accountable.”

Deny and deflect is Israel’s usual strategy for dealing with high-profile civilian deaths. The deflection has come in three forms: One is claiming Palestinians killed the civilian (famous examples are British cameraman James Miller, 10-year-old Abir Aramin, the three daughters and niece of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish inside their home in Gaza while he begged on live television for Israel to stop firing). Often Israel claims that the victim was near a site from which Palestinian gunmen were attacking Israelis and, hence, got killed by accident by Israeli gunfire (four Gaza children on the beach, 40 people taking refuge at a U.N. school in Gaza, the British U.N. worker Iain Hook in Jenin). Israel has also claimed that the civilian was involved in an attack on Israeli soldiers or was a member of a Palestinian militant organization (photojournalist Yaser Murtaja in Gaza). In other cases, Israel said that the facts around a killing are unclear, but definitely not Israel’s fault (Palestinian family killed by shell on beach in Gaza). In the case of the 2003 death of American pro-Palestinian activist, Rachel Corrie, who was run over by a military bulldozer, the Israeli army claimed “a slab of concrete” was likely what killed her. When Israeli missiles brought down an 11-story media building last year in Gaza, where Palestinian media networks and the Associated Press were located, Israel justified it by saying it was being used by Hamas.

Back in 2006, Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, initially apologized for the killings of seven members of the Ghalia family in Gaza by Israeli artillery. “But the military swiftly realised it was confronting another PR disaster to rival that of the killing of Mohammed al-Dura,” wrote Guardian journalist, Chris McGreal, referencing the wrenching footage of the Gaza boy killed cowering beside his father during a 2000 firefight. “The army quickly convened a committee to investigate the deaths on the beach and almost as swiftly absolved itself of responsibility.”

Within a half hour of Abu Akleh’s killing, the Israeli state PR machine went to work on a deflection strategy. Israeli journalist Barak Ravid revealed in a Hebrew report on Walla! website that “there was an urgent consultation of the National Hasbara (PR) Headquarters together with representatives of the Prime Minister’s Office, the Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Defense Forces. They decided that the main goal was to try and fend off the narrative that was emerging in the international media, according to which Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli fire.” (The English version of Ravid’s report on the Axios website did not include this information.) So Israel used a short video that was filmed that morning by Palestinian militants in a residential area, in which the men were heard saying that they had shot a soldier. Bennett posted the video and claimed that, since no Israeli soldier was injured in Jenin that day, the footage was evidence that the militants had mistaken Abu Akleh, in her helmet and body armor, for a combatant.

But then Al Jazeera posted footage showing Abu Akleh face down on the ground in a less built-up area and her colleagues trying helplessly to reach her as bullets continued to fly. The word PRESS was visible in large letters on her protective gear. “We saw the soldiers in the area and there were no Palestinians there,” said producer Ali Samudi, who was also shot. The soldiers were about 150 meters away….I did not see who was shooting, but I see [sic] from where the bullets coming. They coming from the area where the soldiers. There were no fighters in the area.” Two hours later a local researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem filmed a video geolocating the clip of the Palestinian gunmen in the Jenin refugee camp, hundreds of yards and several turns away from the spot where Abu Akleh was killed.

A Palestinian man looks at the front pages of local newspapers reporting on the death of veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead while covering an Israeli army raid in Jenin, West Bank, on May 12, 2022.

Hazem Bader—AFP/Getty Images

By then the U.S. Ambassador to Israel had confirmed that Abu Akleh was a U.S. citizen. President Biden is considering a visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories in June. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called Abu Akleh a “reporting legend.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called her killing a “horrific tragedy.” Congress members Betty McCollum and Mark Pocan condemned it and Rashida Tlaib accused Israel of murder. Israel regrouped, the army quickly backtracking from its claim. On Wednesday evening, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz was on a conference call with reporters, saying he was “very sorry for what happened,” that Israel wants to conduct a full-scale investigation and that he had asked the Palestinians to share the bullet that was found embedded in Abu Akleh’s head, promising to share all forensic findings with the Americans and the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians declined, saying they do not trust Israel—a point an Israeli minister appeared to concede in an interview with a Israeli radio outlet on Thursday. “Israel’s credibility is not great in situations like this,” said Diaspora Minister Nachman Shai.

When Palestinian Americans come to harm by Israeli forces, Israel is quick to investigate, but the process rarely ends in severe punishment. Four months ago, following a U.S. demand, Israel conducted an investigation into the killing of an elderly Palestinian-American man, who Israeli soldiers detained in the middle of the night. Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad had returned to Palestine after living in Milwaukee for almost 40 years. He died of a heart attack outside in the cold at a construction site where soldiers had left him on the ground, gagged with his hands tied tightly and his eyes covered, after beating him. The top commander of the unit was rebuked; the soldiers were not punished. In 2014, an Israeli policeman beat 15-year-old Tariq Abu Khdeir to a pulp and then put him under house arrest. The attack was caught on video. But it wasn’t until it was revealed that he was a U.S. citizen that he was allowed to return to Florida and Israel opened an investigation, at the demand of Washington. An Israeli judge sentenced the police officer to community service; the State Department expressed disappointment.

Abu Akleh was killed just days after the International Federation of Journalists, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) and the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) filed a formal complaint at The Hague for “systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists.” An estimated 50 Palestinian journalists have been killed since 2000, according to the PJS. Israeli forces have a “track record of employing lethal force and systematically targeting Palestinian journalists with complete lack of accountability,” said the ICJP. Four years ago, Haaretz journalist Amira Hass uncovered court files that revealed that in 2012 Israeli soldiers beat Palestinian journalists with batons and arrested them, on their commanders’ orders, with the declared intention of disrupting their coverage of a Palestinian demonstration. Last August, Israeli soldiers detained seven Palestinian reporters covering non-violent protests in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank. During the May 2021 war, Israel said it bombed the Gaza City media building because it was being used by Hamas. But it produced no evidence, and the devastating strike also had the effect of discouraging reporting from the ground in Gaza, where 254 people were killed. Thirteen people in Israel were killed.

In Jenin, where Israeli forces were carrying out anti-terrorism operations after a spate of fatal attacks on Israeli Jews, hundreds of Palestinians carried Abu Akleh’s corpse from the morgue, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, her press flak jacket laid over her chest. IPriests prayed over her body. In Ramallah, it was received with a state marching band. A state funeral was held Thursday with burial on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem on Friday.

Hours after she was killed, Israeli police shot and severely injured a young Palestinian who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and charged at them in the Old City. Police did not say whether he had a weapon, and no police were injured. And in East Jerusalem Israeli police stormed Abu Akleh’s home, demanding that her family and friends remove the Palestinian flag from the building. Visitors shouted at them until they voluntarily left. In the streets outside Palestinians demonstrated carrying Palestinian flags, one attaching a flag to an Israeli police car and getting detained for it. But remarkably, Israeli police did not intervene with force.

The next day, Thursday, unnamed Israeli officials told reporters that soldiers in a military vehicle had been about 150 yards from where the journalists were working, and fired repeatedly about the time Abu Akleh was killed.

With reporting by Simmone Shah/New York

Palestinians welcome foreign support in inquiry into reporter's death



Sat, May 14, 2022, 

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - The Palestinian Authority would welcome the involvement of international groups in the investigation into the death of an Al Jazeera journalist killed while reporting on an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian official said on Saturday.

The death of veteran reporter Shireen Abu Akleh has sparked an outpouring of grief and Israel police charged at a crowd of Palestinian mourners carrying her coffin through Jerusalem's Old City on Friday, drawing international condemnation.

The violence, which lasted only minutes, added to Palestinian outrage over Abu Akleh's killing, which has threatened to fuel tensions that have escalated since March.

Palestinian authorities have described the death of Abu Akleh as an assassination by Israeli forces. Israel initially suggested Palestinian fire might have been to blame, but officials have since said they could not rule out it was Israeli gunfire that killed her.

The U.N. Security Council has strongly condemned the killing and called for an "immediate, thorough, transparent, and fair and impartial investigation".

Hussein al Sheikh, a senior Palestinian Authority (PA) official, said on Twitter it would welcome the participation of all international bodies in its inquiry.

The authority has rejected an offer from Israel, which has voiced regret over Abu Akleh's death, to cooperate in the investigation.

Israel police initially said some of the mourners near the coffin at Abu Akleh's funeral threw stones at police officers.

In a later statement issued overnight, police said the mourners had not kept to the original funeral arrangement and "threatened the driver of the hearse and then proceeded to carry the coffin on an unplanned procession to the cemetery by foot".

"Israeli Police intervened to disperse the mob and prevent them from taking the coffin, so that the funeral could proceed as planned in accordance with the wishes of the family," police said.

At a hospital in Jerusalem, a Palestinian died on Saturday of wounds inflicted during clashes with Israeli security forces three weeks ago at the al-Aqsa mosque compound.

It was the first fatality from clashes at the sensitive holy site in several years.

(Reporting by Ali Sawafta and Nidal al-Mughrabi; Editing by David Clarke)