Disaster
One Year After the Earthquake
Inside a prefabricated house atop a hill in Antakya, Turkey, Saniye Yılmaz is sitting on a beige velvet sofa, charging the beeping pill installed in her heart. She is shaking, and struggles to speak. “Everything got worse after the earthquake,” she says, adding that the stress has made the symptoms of her Parkinson’s disease even more unbearable. “We’re the living dead.” It’s been over a…
Remembering the victims of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands
Protests marked the 70th anniversary of nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll
Originally published on Global Voices
Bikini Atoll nuclear test site. Marshall Islands. Photo by Ron Van Oers / UNESCO. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO
Pacific communities marked the 70th year of nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in Marshall Islands by highlighting the demand for justice and accountability.
March 1 is Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day, but in Marshall Islands it is commemorated as Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day in honor of the victims of Castle Bravo, the codename for the thermonuclear bomb test made by the United States military.
The 15-megaton bomb dropped on Bikini Atoll was the equivalent of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. It created a mushroom cloud that reached 40 kilometers into the atmosphere and its radioactive fallout affected nearby inhabited atolls. The US military conducted 67 nuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958.
The tests vaporized at least two islands and forced the permanent displacement of communities contaminated by radioactivity. Cancer cases and other serious diseases linked to nuclear testing went up over the next several decades.
Reparations were made but the toxic consequences of the testing continue to inflict damage up to this day. Civil society group ICAN emphasized that the Castle Bravo testing “is a story of how life on the Marshall Islands was uprooted, lands contaminated, and people left to struggle with the consequences for generations.”
Public assemblies in Fiji and the Marshall Islands marked the 70th anniversary of the Castle Bravo testing with calls for justice.
FWRM led the chants at the Nuclear Victims Solidarity March at USP Laucala Campus in Suva today.
It has been 70 years since the Castle Bravo explosion on 1st March 1954.#NuclearFreePacific #PeoplePower pic.twitter.com/etKO1i9pgJ
— Fiji Women's Rights Movement (@FWRM1) March 1, 2024
Some veterans and descendants of those who were evacuated from their homes also joined the event.
We also acknowledge Pacific nuclear test veterans and their descendants who joined @misa4thepacific Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day solidarity march at @UniSouthPacific today.
Lest We Forget.#NuclearJustice #NewClearWays #NukeFreeFridays #NukeFreePacific pic.twitter.com/nvSqkhlz7o
— PANG (@pangmedia) March 1, 2024
Kathy Joel was six years old in 1954 when her family was uprooted from their community.
I remember when I saw planes flying over my island, I was really frightened. We were evacuated by the US. Until now I long for my homeland. I always think about my homeland and I wish one day, with the help of our President, that I may set foot again on my homeland.
Kathy Joel was six years old when the #Bravo nuclear test spread radioactive fallout over the northern atolls of the #MarshallIslands, including Rongelap and Ailinginae. pic.twitter.com/jt7wTHyyLK
— Nic Maclellan (@MaclellanNic) March 1, 2024
Henry Puna, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, noted that resolving the issues related to nuclear testing has remained inadequate.
Our history is littered with overwhelming foreign disrespect for our Blue Pacific. Clearly, we were used as a testing ground – more like a testing laboratory. And we must ask the question, why was the most beautiful corner of the world, with the most beautiful and peaceful people, chosen for these horrific acts without our informed consent?
While we have come a long way in mending past grievances, regrettably, the terms of resolving nuclear legacy issues in the Marshall Islands have been inadequate, and therefore remain unfinished.
Peace Movement Aotearoa pointed out the political significance of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day.
Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day is a day to remember that the arrogant colonial mindset which allowed, indeed encouraged, this horror continues today – the Pacific is still neither nuclear free nor independent.
It is a day to celebrate the courage, strength and endurance of indigenous Pacific peoples who have persevered and taken back control of their lives, languages and lands to ensure the ways of living and being which were handed down from their ancestors are passed on to future generations.
Shaun Burnie, the international climate and nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace International, also expressed solidarity with the people of the Marshall Islands.
The proud people of the Marshall Islands have retained their profound and deep connection to their Pacific home, despite all efforts to destroy that connection through displacement and contamination. That same determination is now evident in their response to the devastating impacts of climate change.
Garston residents launch fight against ‘time-bomb’ that threatens whole of South Liverpool
Chemical processing plant will process greater volume in Liverpool than caused one of biggest non-nuclear explosions history
A 5-mile radius from Veolia’s Garston waste chemical processing works – the 1974 Flixborough disaster, which had a 3-mile radius had a far lower volume
Residents have begun their fight against a plan to process at least 56,000 tonnes a year of toxic and highly hazardous chemical waste next to homes in south Liverpool.
Garston and Grassendale residents have engaged lawyers in their bid to stop a dangerous facility that threatens whole of South Liverpool. Liverpool City Council’s Planning Committee has granted permission for a controversial hazardous waste facility to process the same chemicals that caused the 1974 Flixborough disaster, which caused one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history.
The plans, by waste giant Veolia UK, would result in a massive expansion of the volume of highly toxic and explosive waste being processed at the facility in King St, Garston, only metres from established residential communities and 200m from a primary school.
The chemicals processed are the same – but in far larger quantities – as those involved in the infamous 1974 explosion in rural Flixborough, which killed 28 people and damaged buildings three miles away, and would have killed far more had the disaster not happened on a weekend night. A key recommendation of the inquiry into the Flixborough disaster was not to build such facilities near residential areas.
A previously approved scheme of 28,000 tonnes along with the recent plans for a further 28,000 tonnes will total 56,000 tonnes a year when both plants are operational to process solvent recovery – with a large amount of this chemical waste imported from abroad. Campaigners believe these plans contravene the National Planning Policy Framework, which requires ministerial oversight for volumes of 30,000 tonnes or more. Ultimately the site would process as much as 96,000 tonnes a year, according to campaigners.
Spokesperson for the Garston United community group, Gary Woollam said:
We are deeply concerned about the impact of this massive intensification of a hazardous waste processing activity in the heart of our community. Amongst the materials being processed on this site is Cyclohexanone, the chemical responsible for the tragic 1974 Flixborough disaster.
Cyclohexanone is only one of the cocktail of hazardous and highly flammable chemicals that are processed by Veolia in Garston along with Isopropanol, Ethanol and Methanol. Concerns about the potential risks and health impacts of
the proposed facility have now spread to other nearby communities, with residents in the Grassendale & Cressington area opposing the plans and pledging to support a legal challenge.
Local activist and campaigner Sylvia McCleod said:
Residents across the area are angry at the way that the applicant and the city council have failed to engage with and consult the community. It looks like they were trying to get this through under the radar with minimum objections and minimum scrutiny. It is absolutely outrageous that Veolia’s first application was approved under delegated powers without it even being considered by Councillors.
Residents from local communities have come together to form the L19 Action Group, and have already secured funds to instruct a leading UK environmental and planning law firm, Richard Buxton Solicitors. They believe that evidence that the Council failed to adequately consult on the application, or subject it to the required level of environmental scrutiny, form the basis of a successful legal challenge.
Skwawkbox editor Steve Walker, who lives locally, said:
The most astonishing thing about the council’s planning meeting, which seemed
to reach a foregone conclusion of approving the scheme, is that there was no
discussion at all about the explosive risk. Flixborough’s blast radius was
three miles and they said not to build such plants near people. With the far larger
quantities they want to process in Garston, at least the whole south of the city
will be in danger, as well as the risk of the wind carrying leaked toxins for miles
further.”
A large explosion last November at a similar chemical recycling plant in Shepherd, Texas, led to police imposing a five-mile ‘shelter in place’ order because of the ‘acute toxicity’ of substances it released into the air.
Campaigners have already covered the first tranche of legal costs and have launched a crowdfund to help cover further expenditure.
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Labour trumpets endorsement by ‘leader’ who boasted of part in Truss disaster economics
40yr-Tory’s praise not the compliment Labour thinks it is…
Labour has put out a video trumpeting an endorsement by ‘former business champion and Cicero chair’ Iain Anderson for the austerity policies – disguised as the risible ‘fiscal discipline’ – of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
But – as with almost everything the red Tory regime tries – it’s already backfired massively, with Twitter user ‘jrc1921‘ pointing out that in 2022 Anderson boasted of his ‘almost 4 decades’ of being a Tory and his part in the ‘economic reform’ of then-soon-to-be Tory PM Liz Truss. Truss went on to have the shortest tenure ever as British prime minister – just forty-five days – and was ousted by the Tories for crashing the pound to its lowest-ever rate against the dollar, doing colossal harm to the UK economy and being the most useless and unpopular PM ever.
Starmer and co are clowns – except clowns are trying to be funny and don’t usually support genocide or help build a police state.
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3 months after attacking Tories for scrapping bankers’ bonus cap, Reeves says Labour won’t put it back
‘It tells you everything you need to know’
On 31 October last year, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves – the awful Keir Starmer’s equally awful right-hand woman – derided the Tories for scrapping the cap on bankers’ obscene bonuses in the middle of the cost of living ‘crisis’, which is in reality an engineered emergency fattening corporate profits at the expense of putting millions into hardship and often outright poverty.
Today, three months to the day later, she has announced that Labour will not restore the cap, because she considers the predatory capital machine of the City of London to be a solution to the UK’s problems and not a key driver of them – and has seemingly forgotten how Blair and Brown’s support for wild banking led to the 2008 financial crash. To quote Reeves’s own words back at her, ‘It tells you everything you need to know’.
Three months. On the one hand, it’s a pathetically short time to hold a policy – and on the other it’s a lot longer than Starmer’s hollowed-out corpse of the Labour party has held onto most other positions, except those involving support for apartheid and genocide, privatising and destroying the NHS, sucking up to the US, putting the police and army beyond justice and accountability and promising to do the same as the Tories only faster.
Labour is dead and there is no depth to which the ghouls animating its corpse will not stoop.
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