THE HANDSTAND	MAY 2005
stoppress stoppress stoppress Thorp reprocessing plant leak, closed at sellafield(see below)

This American request also should be of interest internationally:

maple flag training exercises in Canada invite israel airforce
Sent: May 12, 2005 8:19 PM
It is an affront to all Canadians who respect the law that the Israeli Air Force has been invited to participate in the Maple Flag training exercises. They Israeli Air Force is one of the instruments of repression that the state of Israel uses to subjugate the Palestinian civilian population. They are not regular defense forces. They are forces of aggression.  Canada should not allow Canadians to exercise with them.   Details below 

If you feel outrage, please circulate this alert and let the Canadian government know how you feel.  Write/phone/fax your concern to:
The Hon. Bill Graham:  Graham.B@parl.gc.ca  (I do not have his email at DND)
Phone: 613-996-3100 - Facsimile: 613-995-8189
and cc:
Prime Minister Paul Martin: pm@pm.gc.ca
Keith Martin, MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence:  Martin.K@parl.gc.ca 
4wingcoldlake@forces.gc.ca  
Your own MP - find out your MP using your postal code: http://www.parl.gc.ca/common/index.asp?Language=E
Exercise MAPLE FLAG is a six-week international air combat exercise held annually at 4 Wing Cold Lake, Alberta. The exercise, which will be taking place from May 15 to June 24 2005, provides Canadian and allied aircrew with realistic training in a modern simulated air combat environment, and emphasizes air operations involving large package coalition forces.

More than 5,000 military personnel from 11 nations and a NATO Airborne Early Warning and Control (AWACS) contingent will participate in Exercise MAPLE FLAG XXXVIII. In addition, seven nations will observe the exercise as part of the International Observer Program (IOP) - a number unprecedented in the 27 years 4 Wing Cold Lake has hosted the exercise. The IOP provides observers with a clear overview of the exercise, and is often a precursor to flying participation.
http://www.airforce.forces.gc.ca/4wing/training/mapleflag/about_e.asp


12thMay Advert. in Ha'aretz newspaper israel:

The day
The occupation
Ends
Will be
The real
Independence Day
Of the
State of Israel

Israel seals off jerusalem; major fear of assault on dome of the rock.Inside eastern Jerusalem, daily life came to a standstill as schooling was interrupted and businesses closed out of fear of the Jewish extremists who started burning tires and blocking streets according to Haaretz breaking news.

Huge radioactive leak closes Thorp nuclear plant

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Monday May 9, 2005
The Guardian.

A leak of highly radioactive nuclear fuel dissolved in concentrated nitric acid, enough to half fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, has forced the closure of Sellafield's Thorp reprocessing plant. The highly dangerous mixture, containing about 20 tonnes of uranium and plutonium fuel, has leaked through a fractured pipe into a huge stainless steel chamber which is so radioactive that it is impossible to enter. Recovering the liquids and fixing the pipes will take months and may require special robots to be built and sophisticated engineering techniques devised to repair the £2.1bn plant.

The leak is not a danger(???) to the public but is likely to be a financial disaster for the taxpayer since income from the Thorp plant, calculated to be more than £1m a day, is supposed to pay for the cleanup of redundant nuclear facilities. A problem at the plant was first noticed on April 19 when operators could not account for all the spent fuel that had been dissolved in nitric acid. It was supposed to be travelling through the plant to be measured and separated into uranium, plutonium and waste products in a series of centrifuges. Remote cameras scanning the interior of the plant found the leak.

Although most of the material is uranium, the fuel contains about 200kg (440lb) of plutonium,(nearly the entire yearly production of plutonium at the plant) enough to make 20 nuclear weapons, and must be recovered and accounted for to conform to international safeguards aimed at preventing nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands.

The liquid will have to be siphoned off and stored until the works can be repaired, but a method of doing this has yet to be devised.

On Friday the British Nuclear Group, a management company formed to run the Sellafield site on behalf of the NDA, held a meeting with the government safety regulator, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), to discuss how to mop up the leak and repair the pipe. The company has to get the inspectors' approval before proceeding.

Martin Forwood, of Cumbrians Opposed to Radioactive Environment, said the NDA had been "naive" in placing trust on income from Thorp, given its track record. "Reprocessing is blatantly incompatible with the official cleanup remit of the NDA, which will now find itself out of pocket as a result of the latest Thorp accident. The new owners would do the taxpayer the greatest service by putting Thorp out of its misery and closing it once and for all." The managing director of British Nuclear Group, Sellafield, Barry Snelson, who ordered the plant to be closed down, said: "Let me reassure people that the plant is in a safe and stable state."


??British troops should leave Iraq and leave the Americans alone to continue with their inhuman acts. The Americans do not have any culture to uphold whereas the British may have something. Pilli, Kochi, to BBC??!!


Labour isn’t an Option!!!
Gilad Atzmon


In two days the British people are going to vote-in a war criminal to be their prime minister for another five years. Not only that Blair is a war criminal who initiated an illegal war, following the British press, the picture is more than clear: the man is a compulsive liar who has surrounded himself with morally deteriorated advisers and obedient servants. Even his attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, the man who was supposed to uphold law within government, doesn’t exactly look squeaky clean when put under scrutiny.

But surely this is not a great novelty. Blair and his Junta didn’t invent a thing. Politicians are known to be pretty horrible people and if this is not enough, ordinary people do tend put their fate into the hands of nasty politicians. Seemingly, there must be something appealing about mass murderers. Stalin and Hitler were loved by their people for more than a while. But then, democracy was supposed to change it all, we were supposed to become morally guided peace loving creatures. Somehow, it didn’t happen. Not only did it not happen, we are now killing in the name of democracy.

Thinking of Britain in terms of a morally deteriorated democracy we may as well draw a lesson from the cases of America and Israel, no doubt, the two leading morally deteriorated democracies. The current Israeli prime minister is a convicted war criminal. And yet, it didn’t stop the Israeli people from electing him twice. Needless to say that Sharon, has never laid down his weapons, day by day he is engaged in killing Palestinian civilians and ethnically cleansing those who managed to survive. And yet he enjoys the support of the majority of the Israeli people. He is far more popular than any serving Israeli prime minister in recent years.

Not at all surprising, we would find that America is no different to Israel. In the last American election Bush’s success was more than just marginal, This time, he won the popular vote. The majority of the American people believe that the warmonger cowboy is the right man for the job. They must be happy with the American expansionist policy in the Middle East.

Thus we are allowed to deduce that it isn’t only the British people who crown a war criminal. People love to be lead by warmongers. But then, we should stop for a second and ask ourselves, is Britain as bad as Israel or America? Surely, we want to think that Britain is far better off.

In fact, it is the other way around, Britain is far worse. While in America and Israel it is the ‘right wing’, the so called ‘lower classes’ and the ‘uneducated’ who are voting-in war criminals, in Britain it is the ‘centre left’ who are doing the Job. In Britain, it is the ‘enlightened’, ‘well educated’ and well-informed broadsheet readers. In Britain it is those who read day after day about the PM’s lack of integrity. It is those people who read daily about the growing numbers of Iraqi civilian victims. True, they all admit in public that Mr. Blair is a dreadful choice and yet, they are going to vote labour. Furthermore, while in Israel and America the shift towards the right is usually blamed on the direct assault on the American and Israeli people. British people are yet to become victims of any direct terror. British people are voting Blair in spite of his crimes, in spite of the horror this man is liable for. This support of Labour cannot be morally justified.

Seemingly, Labour supporters developed a unique form of righteous blindness. They would say, yes we vote Labour in spite of Blair, we vote for health and education. As if the state of the NHS or schools is something to boast about. They would say, we vote for the economy, they obviously refer to Blair’s prosperous economy, a miraculous success maintained by masses of abused illegal immigrants who are working and living in inhuman conditions. And yet I am not intending to blame the British voter nor the Labour supporter, it isn’t their fault. In fact the Brits do not have much of a choice. They have to choose between the one who initiates the murder of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the one who supported this illegal war in the first place, They have to choose between Blair, the compulsive liar and Howard, the tactical liar, a man who declares a populist war against immigrants whilst praising the British people for letting his Jewish grandmother escape the Nazis.

Labour is a dead concept and yet, by no means am I suggesting here that Left philosophy is over. The idea of equality is as alive as ever, the problem is just those people who were supposed to transform that idea into practice. It is them who fooled us completely. It is the Labour party that should have replaced Blair way before this doomed election. It is the Labour party, once a major European left institute, nowadays a morally bankrupt power-seeking society. True, a few Labour MP’s rebelled at the time; some even left behind their comfortable seats. But those who were not brave enough to stand up to Blair are the real bad guys in this saga. Together with Blair they betrayed the very notion of humanism. Being the ruling party, they betrayed the British people.

Clearly, it was the Labour party that was supposed to spit Blair out ages ago. They should have done it not only in order to protect world peace but as well, to help Labour regain its moral ground. But now it is too late, in two days, when Blair is re-elected, it won’t be just about Labour’s moral bankruptcy. In two days it will be the entire British society that will lose its innocence forever.

Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military. He is
the author of two novels: A Guide to the Perplexed and the recently released
My One and Only Love. Atzmon is also one of the most accomplished jazz
saxophonists in Europe. His recent CD, Exile, was named the year's best jazz
CD by the BBC. He now lives in London and can be reached at:
atz@onetel.net.uk

If re-elected later this week, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair would scrap a traditional autumn EU summit at the early stage of the UK's EU presidency.
Article >> http://euobserver.com/?aid=18989&rk=1

. Family Home Authorised by Israeli Authorities now Demolished in Jerusalem By the Israeli Military

The house of Rami Dabash, his wife and two children was demolished today in the Jerusalem suburb of Tsur Baher by the Israeli Defense forces. About 125 border police, some mounted on horses, arrived at the house this morning, accompanying a bulldozer. The police formed a cordon at the bottom of the street to prevent journalists and human rights activists from seeing the destruction. The police refused to produce a military order declaring the area a closed zone and used force to push journalists and activists back away from the demolition site.

Police then assaulted members of the Dabash family while they were giving interviews, including Rami's 68 year old mother who had just been discharged from hospital after spinal disc surgery.

The Dabash house was not yet fully constructed. The family had started building it in October 2003 after receiving the necessary permissions from the Israeli authorities. They spent $35 000 US on building the house before construction was stopped by the authorities. They were then informed that the house would be demolished. The family then spent a further $12 000 on legal fees in an attempt to challenge the demolition with no success.

The family was not notified in advance as to when the demolition would take place. Rami Dabash's sister, Jalila, said that she had arrived from Beit Hanina to visit her elderly mother this morning when suddenly the bulldozer arrived.

Since 1967, Israeli policy has been geared to create a "Greater" Jerusalem which controls the entire central portion of the West Bank and cuts the physical and economic heart out of a potential
Palestinian state. While constructing 90,000 housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem, the municipality has intentionally created a shortage of 25,000 housing units for Palestinians. Since occupying the west bank and Gaza strip, Israel has demolished over 12,000 Palestinian homes, leaving some 70,000 without shelter and traumatized.
Jalila Dabash * * * * *

After the Sharm Al sheikh agreement, we Palestinians hoped for some peace or at least a cease fire to work towards peace. We hoped for no invasions, no assassinations, no arrest campaigns, fewer checkpoints and more freedom of movement. The cease fire was accepted by the Palestinian movements, but the IOF is still using their guns and tanks for training on the Palestinian people. Invasions and assassinations continue.

It seems as well that arrests can't be stopped because there is still space for the Palestinian people inside the Israeli prisons. The IOF actually increased their numbers of soldiers at checkpoints.
And of sourse there was no decrease in the number of checkpoints. They didn't even increase the lanes of the checkpoints to facilitate movement. Roadblocks which used to have no soldiers now have a number of soldiers to excercise even more control over Palestinian movement.

The fact here, my friends, is that the obstacles that Palestinian people face have remained or increased. And the apartheid wall and the settlements continue to grow. So how much more of this peace can the Palestinian people take?

palsolidarity@yahoogroups.com