[Reuters] Fifteen times a year, the sheer volume of waste water entering Thames Water's Mogden sewage works in southwest London overwhelms its 90-year-old concrete tanks, forcing the utility to pump excrement into the River Thames.
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WEATHER MODIFICATION: The UK decided to inject aerosolized particles into the stratosphere to 'dim the sun' back in April. Now it is June and the UK is concerned that other countries will do the same, dimming the sun in England creating an environmental disaster. You literally… pic.twitter.com/idpQWDy9uQ
The Chinese Communist Party has a long, proud history of spycraft and theft.
1. They hack U.S. defense contractors to steal technology that is then crudely reconstructed into 5th-generation fighter jets that couldn’t outrun a decommissioned Concorde and warships whose only capabilities are 1.) combustion and 2.) floating (optional).
2. They honeypot many of America’s least fuckable local politicians.
3. They lie their way into protected facilities and strip their targets of technology transfer limb from limb.
If that wasn’t enough, they also force all foreign-owned companies conducting business in China to hire Chinese Communist Party representatives into their organizations. The explicit purpose of these party-sponsored scarecrows is to monitor that company’s compliance with CCP orthodoxy... And, of course, for spying and stealing.
So, when U.S. officials began questioning whether a Chinese-owned social media app might pose a threat to national security, you could say there was precedent for their concern:
December 2019: TikTok was banned on all government-owned mobile devices of U.S. Army and Navy service members.
December 2022: Congress banned TikTok on all House-managed mobile devices.
March 2023: Amidst data security concerns, the Biden Administration ordered all government agency staff to delete TikTok from federal devices and systems.
June 2023: State employees in 34/50 states are prohibited from using TikTok on government devices.
As of June 2025: TikTok is banned on all government devices for state and federal employees.
Then early last year, seemingly out of nowhere, things got very confrontational, very quickly.
In early March of 2024, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50-0 to advance a bill that would force ByteDance to divest from TikTok US, or face a nationwide ban.
This caught everyone off guard: The American public, the American Congress, the President (probably), and most of all TikTok.
In response, TikTok’s PR team immediately went into DEFCON 1, crafting a new comms strategy before the bill could hit the House floor for an official vote. Their message was simple:
[AP] KANANASKIS, Alberta (AP) — A Canadian Indigenous leader who greeted world heads of state arriving for the Group of Seven summit says he was "filled with rage" and considered leaving before Donald Trump arrived — saying the U.S. president has "caused much pain and suffering in the world."
Instead, Steven Crowchild prayed, consulted with his peoples' leaders and ultimately opted to stay on the tarmac for a long conversation with Trump that he hopes will call more attention to promoting peace, protecting clean water and other issues key to Canada's First Nation peoples.
"It was really intense, to say the least," Crowchild told The Associated Press on Monday, recalling his lengthy encounter with Trump on Sunday night in Calgary for the G7 in nearby Kananaskis. "When I woke up on Father's Day, I didn’t anticipate I would be seeing world leaders, and one certain individual that has caused much pain and suffering in the world."
[NYPost] A group of researchers in Antarctica have found strange radio waves coming from below the ice.
According to the results published in the Physical Review Letters, the mysterious radio waves were discovered by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA).
During this experiment, the researchers analyzed signals traveling to Earth using a variety of instruments.
Using balloons to send the instruments up high into the atmosphere, the goal was to gain new understandings of cosmic events throughout the universe.
According to the release, the reason Antarctica was the site of these experiments was due to little to no interference from other radio waves.
However, the researchers found radio waves transmitting from under the ice instead.
Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics from Penn State, and one of the researchers discussed in a release by the college, revealed they discovered the radio waves while searching for a particle known as neutrinos.
“The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” Wissel said in the release.
Wissel went on to explain that the radio waves should have been undetectable.
The waves would have had to go through thousands of kilometers of rock and would have been absorbed into the rocks.
She also said in the release that the team of researchers had no answer about how these neutrinos were detected.
According to Wissel, neutrinos are important to the understanding of the universe due to emitted by high-energy sources and are typically hard to detect.
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[France24] For nearly five decades, more than 200,000 barrels of radioactive waste were dumped in the icy depths of the northeast Atlantic. Today, no one knows precisely where these barrels are located, or what kind of state they are in. On June 15, a French-led team of scientists will set sail from Brittany in a bid to map the barrels and assess their impacts on surrounding marine ecosystems.
It had long been considered a safe way to dispose of radioactive waste. For nearly five decades, tens of thousands of tonnes of waste – sealed in watertight barrels of asphalt and cement – were dumped in international waters.
Although the practice is now banned, between 1946 and 1993, 14 European countries – including France and the UK – carried out dumping operations at more than 80 locations in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific.
In the northeast Atlantic, home to the most concentrated stretch of this radioactive marine waste, some 200,000 barrels lie at a depth of 4,000 metres. On June 15, a team of scientists from the CNRS (France’s National Centre for Scientific Research), Ifremer (the French national institute for ocean science and technology) and the French oceanographic fleet, will set sail from the Brittany port of Brest in a bid to locate the barrels.
The team of nuclear physicists, geologists, oceanographers, biologists and marine chemists will be joined by UlyX, a 4.5 metre autonomous underwater robot that will be their eyes and ears during the 26-day expedition.
"The robot can dive to a depth of 6,000 metres,” explained geophysicist Javier Escartin, who will co-lead the mission. “It will be able to use sonar-type systems to map large areas and detect where barrels are located. It will also be able to get close to the seabed and take photographs, enabling us to assess the barrels’ condition, establish where they are scattered, and to plan further studies at a later date."
A STABLE ENVIRONMENT
The submerged barrels, which have a lifespan of between 20 and 26 years, are now long past their expiry date.
In 2000, the environmental NGO Greenpeace filmed barrels of waste at the site closest to the French coast, the Casquets trench in the English Channel, used to dump waste by Belgium and the UK. Their footage showed the rusting barrels were badly degraded and corroded.
However, the barrels dumped at sea do not contain the most hazardous waste. Most of the waste is classified as very low-, low- and medium-level radioactive waste, according to the available data.
In addition, the radioactivity emitted by radioactive waste gradually diminishes over time. The time it takes for a radioactive substance to decrease by half is called the half-life. However, this half-life period varies greatly – depending on the type of atom or radionuclide. For instance, it is approximately two years for caesium 134, approximately 13 years for plutonium 241, approximately 30 years for caesium 137 and some 4.5 billion years for uranium 238.
The radioactive waste comes in two forms: either solid or liquid. Solid waste is surrounded by a concrete or bitumen matrix before being sealed in a watertight barrel. Only the former USSR and the United States have dumped other types of waste, such as nuclear reactor tanks, some of which still contain fuel, reported the French National Agency for Nuclear Waste Management (Andra).
The total radiological activity of the submerged waste was around 85,000 terabecquerels when it was released into the ocean, Andra added.
In the postwar period, as nuclear technology spread to many sectors of activity, developed countries viewed dumping waste in deep waters as a safe option. The deep ocean is one of the most stable environments on Earth and scientists mistakenly believed it to be deserted and devoid of life.
On their return to dry land, the scientists will spend several months studying the samples taken near the radioactive barrels. A second mission to refine the results will then be scheduled. All the data from both missions will be made available to the public in the interests of transparency.
“This is not a mission to assess whether the releases were well or badly done,” warned Escartin. "It's an opportunity to look at what was done in the past, without passing judgment, to carry out scientific studies. Afterwards, of course, we'll have to conduct a complete inventory, because we need one."
However, during the mission, the scientists will only be able to assess the condition of a small fraction of the 200,000 barrels in the northeast Atlantic. And on each dive, the UlyX autonomous robot will only be able to focus on an area of around 20 square kilometres – a drop in the ocean given that the two research areas where the submerged barrels lie covers more than 6,000 km2.
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[AP] Iran’s state-run news agency said Monday that its governmental television station abruptly stopped a live broadcast after an Israeli strike. During a live broadcast from the capital Tehran, the sound of an explosion could be heard as a the news presenter hurried off camera amid dust and debris wafting in the air. Afterwards, a fire could be seen at the state TV building.
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[NYP] Sobering footage has captured a massive traffic jam as thousands frantically tried to flee Tehran — with President Trump ominously warning that Israel wouldn’t be slowing its attacks on Iran anytime soon.
The president urged "everyone to evacuate" the Iranian capital late Monday as Israel appeared to be expanding its air assault five days after launching its surprise attack on Iran’s military and nuclear program.
He predicted, too, that Israel was showing no signs of relenting.
“You’re going to find out. Nobody’s slowed up so far.”
Trump demands 'complete give-up' by Iran — as Israel takes out Tehran's most senior military commander
The grim warning came as aerial footage emerged of the scores of vehicles lining up bumper to bumper on the highway in Tehran as citizens headed north in search of safety.
The lines of headlights could be seen snaking throughout the city at some point after Israel started pummeling Iran with the airstrikes on Friday.
Meanwhile, Trump doubled down and said he wanted a “real end” to the nuclear problem with Iran, declaring: “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, it’s very simple.”
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[NYP] Sobering footage has captured a massive traffic jam as thousands frantically tried to flee Tehran — with President Trump ominously warning that Israel wouldn’t be slowing its attacks on Iran anytime soon.
