Press Room

So there is talk once again of a “new” US initiative in Israel-Palestine diplomacy. We have got a new secretary of state. John Kerry is shuttling between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Hopes are supposed to be rising again. 

Really? We are supposed to cheer the possibility that 21 years of failed US diplomacy might - just might - become 22? 

. . . But - if anyone inside is now peering outside the official Washington bubble to acknowledge the need for a different approach to Israel-Palestine diplomacy, that is all good. If anyone in the White House or State Department . . . begins to realise that doing the same thing over and over again, making the same failed claims that “the two sides have to sit together, both sides have to make compromises, only direct talks between the two parties can bring about peace” as if this were a negotiation between equals . . . rather than between a powerful, wealthy, nuclear-armed Occupying Power and an disempowered occupied people, that could mean the beginning of a new approach. 

In Alvarez’s opinion, the state of Vermont “should be prepared for the real possibility that spent nuclear fuel will remain on-site and require careful and expensive management for decades to come, whether or not VY [Vermont Yankee nuclear plant] keeps operating.”

However, Alvarez said, part of the problem in the relationship between the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] and nuclear industry is that operating license requirements, intended to ensure safe operating conditions, have changed in favor of the operators.

“If you can’t meet the rule, you move the goal post,” Alvarez said . . . “The NRC basically adopted the economic motivations of the entities it regulates.”