by B. R. GOWANI

Nuclear weapons

The United States was the first country to develop nuclear weapons which are extremely dangerous and destructive, without any doubt. The only time they were used was in 1945 when the Second World War had almost ended. The honor of both bombings goes to the US. It was an instantaneous mass murder of Hiroshimians and Nagasakiites — a terror from heavens. It was also a message to the world, particularly the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), that US is the sole super power. The two nuclear bombs killed around 100,000 people on the spot. Another 100,000 died over the next few months due to radiation. Also a large number of people were wounded.

US President Harry S. Truman called the creation of atom bombs as “the greatest achievement of organized science in human history,” in the speech he recorded for his bombing of Hiroshima. More than two billion dollars were spent on the “greatest scientific gamble in history,” in the words of Truman and he was proud that the US “won.” During the filming, he is seen laughing (at 2:29 in the video.) President Donald Trump doesn’t have a monopoly on cruelty, many other presidents have displayed it too.

Even years later, the atomic war for Truman was a joke as is clear from another Truman video:

“A young lady who asked me the question: ‘What we were going to do about birth control?” And then a boy asked me: ‘What we going to do with an all out atomic war?” And I told him it was one thing, the young lady wouldn’t have to worry about birth control any more.”

A grandson of slaveowners, Truman didn’t like blacks and had similar feeling towards Chinese and the Japanese too. <1>

Germany and Italy were defeated by the end of April 1945. The only Axis power left was Japan — a spent force. It was ready to surrender but the US wanted to try the new weapon. Many people in the US told Truman that there was no need to use the highly lethal force of the atom bombs.

Japan itself was urging leniency:

“The Tokyo Radio, in an English-language broadcast to North America, has urged that the United States adopt a more lenient attitude toward Japan with regard to peace.”

New York Times, July 26, 1945, quoted in Asia-Pacific Journal — Japan Focus

The US nuked Japan despite the fact that it was prepared to capitulate.

The Soviet Union, (now Russia), realized the atom bombs had tilted the balance of power too much towards the US; the nuclear weapons became a necessity, because no country would want to witness mushroom clouds on its own territory.

For decades, Britain, Germany, the US, and the USSR had been involved in atomic research. Following the dropping of US atom bombs on Japanese cities, the Soviet Politburo (political bureau) was instantly given control of the atomic bomb project.

The US superdom lasted four years plus three weeks. The Soviet Union exploded its atomic bomb on August 29, 1949; thus becoming the other superpower. And the nuclear race began — i.e., proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Gradually the enmity turned into the US led God believing Western capitalist front against the Godless commies. Soviet request to join NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was refused. If the Soviets had joined NATO, the arms race wouldn’t be devouring huge chunks of national budgets of so many countries.

Britain had worked on its atomic project for a long time, but in 1943 decided to join the US. In 1952, it exploded a nuclear bomb.

The same year in November, the US tested hydrogen bomb which was 450 times more powerful than the bomb it had dropped on Nagasaki.

It just took human gestation period for the Soviet Union, i.e., to deliver its own hydrogen bomb.

In the 1950s, many insane people in the US wanted their country to explode a hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb on the Moon to display the US supremacy to the world <2>.

France joined hands with Israeli scientists in 1949, hoping that relations with Israel could help them get more Jewish nuclear scientists from other countries. In 1956, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, Israel, Britain, and France formed a military alliance and invaded Egypt. The Soviet Union and the United Nations ordered them to halt the war and retreat. Their humiliating egress was the result of US President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s strict order to do so. The episode came to be known as the Suez Crisis; which also was the watershed moment for France who decided to hasten its nuclear program to remain a global power. In 1960, France became the fourth nuclear power.

China came under the communist rule when the civil war ended in 1949. Mao Zedong took over the power there. The US supported Chiang Kai Shek and his people escaped to Taiwan with huge amount of stolen gold and money. China, the most populated country, wasn’t allowed United Nations membership until 1971, because of US opposition.

On March 16, 1955, at a press conference, Eisenhower was asked by
Charles S. von Fremd of the CBS News to say something about his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s remarks on using “some tactical small atomic weapons” in case of a “general war in the Far East.”

Eisenhower replied:

“Now, in any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.”

Eisenhower knew that wars rarely restrict themselves to “strictly military targets” and “strictly military purposes,” most of the time civilians suffer greatly. Most people killed and wounded in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were civilians. For argument’s sake, lets say, only the enemy military is bombed. But what about the atomic radiation which lingers for a long time, that affects civilians?

The term Far East, not in use anymore, comprised of several countries, including China. Between 1951 and 1958, the US deployed nuclear weapons in Guam, Japan, Philippines South Korea, and Taiwan — all part of the Far East. (In 1962, the US ally Britain deployed nuclear arms in Singapore, also in the Far East.)

Some scholars observed that Eisenhower’s threat to use nuclear weapons against China during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954 – 1955) led Mao to go the nuclear way.

On April 25, 1956, Mao Zedong addressing China’s Political Bureau of the Central Committee hinted at developing nuclear weapons:

“We do not have atomic bombs yet. However, we did not have planes and cannons in the past. We defeated Japanese imperialism and Chiang Kai-Shek with millet and rifles. We are stronger now than in the past, and we will be stronger in the future. We must not only have more planes and cannons, but also atomic bombs. In today’s world, we cannot do without this thing if we don’t want to be bullied by others.”

China got its atom bomb in 1964 and its hydrogen bomb in 1967.

Israel, even before it turned Palestine into a Jewish state, was thinking of becoming an atomic power. Its would-be first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion decided to recruit Jewish scientists from other countries.

Ben-Gurion:

“What Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller, the three of them are Jews, made for the United States, could also be done by scientists in Israel, for their own people.”

Israel, the regional rogue which is militarily very advanced and is under full US protection, became a nuclear power in 1967 without ever announcing it.

Israel received substantial help from France. French Prime Minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury told Israelis:

“I gave you [Israelis] the bomb in order to prevent another Holocaust from befalling the Jewish people and so that Israel could face its enemies in the Middle East.”

Another Holocaust never befell Israel, instead many of Israel’s Jewish leaders turned into Nazis and committed genocide of Palestinians; they also dream of Eretz Israel or Greater Israel.

Former national security advisor and secretary of state Colin Powell <4>, in the email to his business partner and democratic donor Jeffrey Leeds, commented on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress about stopping President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran:

“[The US] negotiators can’t get what he [Israel’s Netanyahu] wants.”

“Anyway, Iranians can’t use one [a nuclear weapon] if they finally make one. The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200 [or perhaps 400], all targeted on Tehran, and we have thousands. As Akmdinijad (sic) [said], ‘What would we do with one, polish it?’ I have spoken publicly about both nK [North Korea] and Iran. We’ll blow up the only thing they care about – regime survival. Where, how would they even test one?”

Only President John F. Kennedy persistently demanded that Israel should open up its Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona for inspection. Israel kept on prolonging and opened the plant for inspection two months after Kennedy’s assassination. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s inspections were lenient and were discontinued by the Nixon government.

A private understanding between President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir at the White House in September 1969 was: Israel wouldn’t conduct nuclear tests and the US would let Israel keep the nuclear weapons without forcing it to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Win win situation for both.

In October 2023, Amihai Eliyahu, a junior government minister in Netanyahu’s government, hinted in a radio interview that Israel could nuke Gaza. Later he defended his remarks as “metaphorical.” He was just suspended from cabinet meetings, that’s it.

India, the second most populous country then but now most populous since 2023, can’t be blamed for becoming a nuclear power in 1974 when its next door neighbor China has it. Both countries have a border issue, too. When the Indian subcontinent was under the British colonial rule, Britain decided what the border between India and China should be and imposed the McMahon Line <3> on China with the aim of dismembering that country. China never accepted it. Both India and China went to war in 1962. India’s codename for its nuclear test was Smiling Buddha.

Pakistan, India’s neighbor, also decided to put a smile on Allah’s face. (Pakistan came into existence when the sub-continent was divided by the British, in 1947). After the 1965 war between Pakistan and India, Pakistan’s foreign minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was asked how would Pakistan act if India went nuclear.

Bhutto’s reaction:

“Then we should have to eat grass and get one or buy one, of our own”.

In 1975, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Bhutto to placate US and other Western nations changed his stance, at least, publicly:

“For poor countries like us, [the] atom bomb is a mirage and we don’t want it. In 1965, when I was the foreign minister, I said that if India had the atom bomb, we would get one too, even if we had to eat grass. Well, we are more reasonable nowadays.”

However, the work on nuclear program continued. In 1976, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger personally visited Pakistan to warn Bhutto to not go for the nuclear weapons. But once India became a nuclear power, it was not possible for Bhutto or for any other Pakistani government to discontinue the nuclear program. Under US pressure (p.105), many Western countries broke their contracts with Pakistan about selling nuclear plant related equipment.

It was Bhutto’s determination to get nuclear weapons that saw Pakistan joining the nuclear club in 1998. Bhutto wasn’t alive to witness that. He was overthrown in July 1977 in a military coup and was tortured and hanged in April 1979 by the US supported military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq.

North Korea and South Korea had been one country since the early 1700s. In 1910, Korea came under Japanese occupation. Korea’s liberation by the Soviet and US forces at the end of World War II occurred on 2 September, 1945. Korea was divided into two zones: the northern portion under Soviet control became North Korea, and the southern portion under US control became South Korea. It’s also known as the 38th parallel. The capital Seoul went to South Korea. In June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea with the intention of unifying both Koreas. The US called it a “surprise attack,” even though she was well aware that an attack was going to happen. The US jumped in under the garb of United Nations and that war lasted just over three years.

In 1969, Journalist I. F. Stone wrote that the UN was “stampeded.” The chapter title “The UN Gets A Commander It Can’t Command” of his book The Hidden History of the Korean War says a great deal about this in the following paragraph:

“… to make the ‘United Nations’ forces subject to [US General Douglas] MacArthur without making MacArthur subject to the United Nations. This came on July 7 in a resolution introduced jointly by Britain and France. This is commonly supposed to have established a United Nations Command. Actually, it did nothing of the sort. It set up a ‘unified command’ which was authorized to use the United Nations flag but was not subject in any way to United Nations orders.”

The US called the Korean War a “limited war” but for Koreans, Charles Armstrong points out, it was a “total war.” The heaviest devastation was borne by the North — 635,000 tons of bombs, which included 32,557 tons of napalm, were dropped. When the war ended, three million Koreans, i.e., ten percent of the overall population, were dead, missing, or injured. The US does most of the things on a grand scale, especially death and destruction.

This was in the early 1950s. Even after the passage of 3/4th of a century, the US still uses the United Nations in a similar way. In this century, the US used the UN in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.

The US maintains 73 bases with 26,414 troops stationed in South Korea and they conduct joint military drills too. Between 1958 and 1991, US nuclear weapons were present in that country.

In this situation, North Korea was bound to find ways to develop nuclear weapons and it did take that path. The Clinton administration started negotiations with its leader Kim Jong Il and came up with the “Agreed Framework” which covered, beside other issues, full normalization of political and economic relations and ending of nuclear weapons program. As it happens to any country dealing with the US, the deal didn’t work for various reasons. In 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test.

Nuclear proliferation

The US committed the original sin. Britain and France were part of the NATO; thus they were under the US nuclear umbrella and had no need for nukes — it was just the ego thing. There was absolutely no need for Israel to develop nukes. Israel was created with British support. Israel had and continues to have support of the US and Western countries.

The Soviet Union, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea really needed nuclear weapons for the reasons enumerated above. There are many other countries who need it too but the US and Western restrictions prevent them from acquiring nukes. Many people in the West see non-Western countries as dangerous and should not be permitted to have nuclear weapons <5> even though it is the US who was the first to develop and the only country to use it.

According to the Doomsday Clock, as of March 2026, the world has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons — more than 87% are with the US and Russia. The rest are in the hands of the seven other countries.

The destructive force of weapons with the more powerful atom and hydrogen bombs, advanced technology, and faster delivery systems today, is such that life on earth can be completely erased many times over.

In such a dangerous world, if someone feels new countries should be stopped from gaining nuclear technology, and ultimately nuclear weapons, that person deserves applause provided the goal is to see a nuclear-weapon free world.

Bad deal?

Mel Gurtov’s article, A Bad Deal with Saudi Arabia, (Counterpunch, August 6, 2026) talks about “the [nuclear] proliferation danger” if Trump government goes ahead with its deal to provide Saudi Arabia with a nuclear plant. He also fears that other Middle Eastern countries, “such as Syria,” could follow suit.

Gurtov questions whether the Saudis will accept the NPT, let international inspectors in, and, what if in the name of “national security” it discards the precautionary measures? He then cites the example of North Korea which left NPT and secretly speeded up its nuclear weapons program, and of India, Israel, and Pakistan having nuclear weapons without any safeguards.

But Gurtov’s central worry is:

“And for Israel, the prospect of a Saudi bomb unconstrained by outside inspection would be a nightmare—essentially, another Iran. That might prompt Israel to increase its nuclear weapon arsenal, which currently stands at about 90 warheads, and change its nuclear doctrine in ways that further destabilize the Middle East strategic picture.”

His first point is Saudis will have freedom to pursue whatever they want because of a lack of outside inspection on their plant. That could happen. But then Israel has never declared its nukes and so never had to go through an inspection. Saudis don’t even have the plant yet; it’s unlikely they’ll get one.. Even if they receive the plant and decide to have nukes, it will take many years.

His other worry is that the Saudi bomb would be a “nightmare” for Israel, in a way, a second Iran. The world knows and is witnessing everyday what a nightmare Israel has been for a long time for Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, for Lebanese, for Syrians, for Iranians, for the entire region.

In June 2025, Israel’s surprise attack on Iran from 13th to 24th assassinated 14 physicists and nuclear engineers. Several generals and politicians were fatally targeted too. Many civilians lost their lives. The US joined Israel on 22nd to bomb three nuclear sites in Iran. The retaliatory attacks by Iran on Israel were intercepted by the US.

Israel’s ambassador to France Joshua Zarka told the Associated Press:

“The fact that the whole group [of nuclear scientists] disappeared is basically throwing back the [Iranian nuclear] program by a number of years, by quite a number of years.”

“I do think that people that will be asked to be part of a future nuclear weapon program in Iran will think twice about it.”

Israelis, with hundreds of nuclear weapons, sitting in the lap of US which provides full protection, attacks Iran and thinks it will finish Iran. Even after 78 years’ illegal existence in the area, Israel has failed to discover that Iran is not going anywhere.

On February 28, 2026, Netanyahu’s 40 year dream of dragging US into a war against Iran came true. The attack assassinated Iran’s Supreme leader, politicians, generals, and scientists. Both countries also remembered to murder civilians too. The on again off again war has again resumed after US attacked Iran on September 1.

Iran defended itself bravely by fighting back against the two most violent forces and is still shielding itself.

Israel is terrorizing the entire region with vicious violence, including targeting Palestinian children to bring an end to the Palestinian race.

Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel noted:

“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces.”

“Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law,”  

Journalist Jawed Naqvi describes how a baby being nursed was aimed precisely and killed without any harm to mother:

“The Palestinian woman was breastfeeding her baby in a tattered shelter abutting the ruins of her devastated home. Right then, a direct sniper shot pierced the infant’s semi-formed skull, leaving a limp body without scratching the mother. The child evidently posed a threat to the ancient oracle’s prophecy for a country called Israel, which would prosper from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea but only after vanquishing its enemies, the Amalek. The child Amalek of Gaza would become an adult Amalek and that’s problematic.”

The number of total people killed in Israeli genocide is at least 70,373, out of that at least 20,179 are children, i.e. more than 28%. The number is much much higher as Ralph Nader constantly reminds us. United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese gives the figure for total deaths at 680,000 and that of infants under five at 380,000, which comes to over 55% infants. Nader reminds us that the US mainstream media never see any problem in guesstimating the deaths caused during Syrian civil war under Bashar al Asad or giving estimates of deaths in wars in Iran, Sudan, or Ukraine. But it wouldn’t permit reporters to explore the number of Palestinians murdered by Israel.

“Somehow, media editors do not let their investigative reporters assess the extent of Israel’s mass murder of civilians in Gaza—an exposed, defenseless population of 2.3 million people in an enclave the geographic size of Pennsylvania.”

The real “nightmare” is Israel.

Another issue he brings up is that if Saudis produce nukes, Israel might increase its stock of nuclear weapons, and alter its position about nukes that may “further destabilize the Middle East strategic picture.” It seems like Gurtov is implying that Israel might use nuclear weapons making Middle East more unstable.

The nuclear weapons Israel has, are more than enough to incinerate the entire Middle East. It doesn’t need to produce more but it will irrespective of Saudis get those weapons or not. Of course, Israel will cover the cost by increasing the US budget deficit.

It would be very undemocratic if a tiny country like Israel with a population of 10 million has nukes but Saudi Arabia (36 million), Iran (88 million), Egypt (110 million), Iraq (47 million), Yemen (19 million), Turkey (86 million), and many other Middle east nations can’t have those weapons because Israel doesn’t want its monopoly on these challenged.

For Middle East’s stability, we should all genuinely write about and work for nuclear weapon-free Middle East and then for nuclear-weapon-free world.

On June 7, 1981, Israel with US supplied F-16s, secretly flew over Jordanian and Saudi airspace, destroyed Iraqi nuclear reactor site, still under construction by Italian and French engineers, on the order of Prime Minister Menachem Begin. 10 Iraqi soldiers and a French civilian were killed.

A couple of days later, Begin addressed the bombing. His speech came to be known as “Begin Doctrine.”

“We chose this moment: now, not later, because later may be too late, perhaps forever. And if we stood by idly, two, three years, at the most four years, and Saddam Hussein would have produced his three, four, five bombs. … Then, this country and this people would have been lost, after the Holocaust. Another Holocaust would have happened in the history of the Jewish people. Never again, never again! Tell so your friends, tell anyone you meet, we shall defend our people with all the means at our disposal. We shall not allow any enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction turned against us.”

Saudis were angry and told President Ronald Reagan’s government that Israelis used Saudi territory to reach Iraq, with Israeli pilots falsely signaling they were Jordanians.

One Saudi official (name deleted) told his US counterpart:

“This is one of the most dangerous situations Saudi Arabia has ever faced. It is an insult to both Saudi Arabia and the US and puts the Saudis in an embarrassing situation vis-a-vis other Arabs.”

In 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government, following Begin Doctrine, ordered the destruction of Syrian nuclear facility.

Gurtov says Mohammed bin Salman is “unreliable and faithless.” But why should MbS be faithful and reliable to the US. Saudis are not getting any aid or help from the US. Whatever they get, they pay very good money. And like most of the other leaders, MbS looks after his country’s interests too.

Netanyahu has been lying since the early 1990s that Iran is going to get nukes very soon. In 2012, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly he also showed an illustration to make a point that Iran’s nukes are 90% ready. This was fourteen years back, the tune hasn’t changed.

It is Netanyahu from whom people in the US should expect reliability and loyalty to the US because the US gives $3.8 billion (it used to be $3.5 billion, President Barack Obama raised it) every year, plus more money when it’s warring which is often but, Netanyahu insulted Obama openly (see here and here). Netanyahu just didn’t like Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

On top of that it is Netanyahu who is responsible for the US losing military credibility in the world, due to the war against Iran. The Gulf countries with US bases feel the bases have become a liability — instead of providing protection they have become targets of Iran’s retaliatory attacks because Iran suffers US attacks.

Gurtov says MbS is an “autocrat” who ordered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. He is right. Murder was totally wrong and should be condemned, and it was.

Between October 7, 2023 and August 11, 2025, Israel killed 278 journalists, 273 Palestinians, see all the names and some photos here. How many in the US and the West have denounced Netanyahu for that?

Notes

<1> In 1911, 27 year old Truman wrote to his future wife, Bess:

“I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman.”

“(Uncle Will) does hate Chinese and Japs.” “So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”

<2> On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched a rocket named Sputnik in space. The people in the US were shocked and some came up with the idea of dropping a thermonuclear bomb on moon. The US Air Force started
Project A119 and asked the Armour Research Foundation (ARF—now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology) to work on it. Many scientists, including Gerard Kuiper (of the Kuiper belt) and Carl Sagan, became part of the program. But some years later, the project was discarded — no reasons were provided.

<3> Read John Cherian’s article “Border disputes between India and China: A colonial legacy” in India’s Frontline magazine to get a clear picture on the border dispute between both nations.

Frontline is one of the very few outlets which is not part of the “Godi media.” This permits it to fearlessly counter Hindutva Modi government’s lies and hypocrisy. It has brilliant writers and reporters. Another great website is The Wire.

<4> Powell, one of the mildest members of the US establishment, talks this about blowing up these countries, one can only imagine the language of the extremists in the establishment. It’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s 6th president between 2005 and 2013, Powell misspelt in his email.

<5> Just one example:

Maria Ryan:

“After more than two decades of testing, North Korea finally has a missile that is powerful enough to deliver a nuclear warhead to US territory – that is, to Alaska and/or Hawaii, if estimates are to be believed. This is an extremely dangerous development, and if the Trump administration is to avoid spiralling into a nuclear confrontation with North Korea, it needs to understand what North Korea wants and why it behaves the way it does.”

The US nukes can reach the entire planet and destroy it many times over.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by NICOE JOHNSTON

The same way menstruation was shamed from our earliest experiences, so is menopause in our current life.

A client of mine, a VP at a logistics company, told me she rehearsed her sentences before every meeting. Not because she didn’t know the material. She knew it cold. She rehearsed because she couldn’t always find the words in real time anymore, and she was terrified someone would notice.

She never told her boss all of the extra work she did to ensure she delivered.

That’s the pattern I see over and over in my coaching practice. Women in their 40s and 50s, at the height of their expertise, quietly managing hot flashes in client meetings, brain fog during board presentations, and sleepless nights before big decisions, all while performing as if nothing has changed. Nobody told them to hide it. They just knew, somewhere in their bones, that this wasn’t something you brought up at work.

The same way menstruation was shamed from our earliest experiences, so is menopause in our current life. The cultural expectation to remain competent, composed, and endlessly resilient can make women feel they have to suffer in silence. We built entire professional norms around a body that doesn’t get tired, doesn’t get hot, doesn’t forget a word mid-sentence. Perimenopause breaks that fiction wide open, and instead of updating the norm, we ask women to keep performing it.

Here’s what makes this especially frustrating. The symptoms themselves are common enough to be unremarkable. According to a survey highlighted by the Health Action Alliance, 90 percent of women over 35 experience menopause symptoms that affect their quality of life and their ability to succeed at work. Catalyst’s 2024 global survey found that 91 percent of respondents had experienced at least one moderate to severe symptom. This isn’t a rare medical event. It’s a near-universal transition happening to roughly half the workforce, and we still treat it like a secret that a woman is keeping from her colleagues, rather than a shared reality an entire generation of professionals is navigating at the same time.

So why does it stay hidden? Because we’ve made real progress normalizing conversations about mental health and burnout at work, and menopause got left out of that shift. Managers now get trained to recognize signs of stress, to ask, “How are you doing?” to point an employee toward an EAP. Nobody trained them to have the same conversation about hot flashes interrupting a presentation or insomnia making a nine a.m. meeting feel impossible. The managerial skill set exists. It’s just never been pointed in the direction of menopause.

The data on that gap is stark. Bank of America and the National Menopause Foundation found that 76 percent of HR benefit managers say they discuss menopause with employees. Only 3 percent of employees say that conversation has actually happened. That 73-point gap isn’t a communication glitch. It’s a signal that the conversation employers think they’re having, and the conversation women feel safe having, are two completely different things.

Now here’s where I want to be direct, because this is where the conversation usually goes wrong. This is not a women’s issue. It’s a business issue, and treating it as a private, personal matter is exactly what’s costing companies their most experienced talent.

Think about who is affected. Women in their late 40s and early 50s are frequently the people holding institutional knowledge, running teams, owning client relationships, and sitting one or two rungs from the C-suite. When nearly 9 in 10 of them say symptoms are affecting their work, that shows up in productivity, in absenteeism, in who applies for the next promotion and who quietly decides it isn’t worth the exposure. It shows up in your leadership pipeline whether or not anyone names it out loud. And when these women leave, they don’t just leave a seat empty. They take fifteen or twenty years of client relationships, institutional memory, and mentorship capacity out the door with them, which is the kind of expertise that takes years to rebuild and sometimes never fully returns. Replacing a senior leader is expensive. Replacing what she knew is often impossible.

Women’s eNews for more

by CLARA MOSKOVITZ

An investigation into the incomprehensibly, unfathomably large amount of money the U.S. owes

The U.S. national debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time on Wednesday. That’s a mind-blowing number.

The number 40 trillion is 4 with 13 zeroes after it. If you laid all those dollar bills out end to end, you’d make it from Earth to the sun and back 20 times.

Spread out over the approximately 343 million people in the U.S., the figure amounts to $116,618 of debt per resident. A single person trying to spend $40 trillion would need 1.27 million years to do it if they spent a dollar every second.

Forty trillion is more than the number of cells in the human body (about 35 trillion), the distance in miles to Alpha Centauri (25 trillion) or trees on Earth (three trillion). It’s about 40 times more money than the most any human has ever been valued (Elon Musk’s net worth hit $1 trillion in June).

The national debt has been growing prodigiously for some time. It hit what was then a record of $39 trillion in March and had reached $38 trillion last October.

These relative trillions, of course, are hard for the human brain to comprehend. The difference between 38 trillion or 39 trillion and 40 trillion isn’t something we can picture, just as the difference between a billion and a trillion is hard to fathom.

Can you picture the differences between a pile of sand with a million grains, another with a billion and a third with a trillion? I can’t either.

Most people estimate the jump from a million to a billion to be about the same as between a billion and a trillion. But it’s not. Each number is expressed with three additional zeroes, yet going from a million to a billion requires adding 999 million. Going from a billion to a trillion takes the addition of 999 billion—or, expressed another way, 999,000 million.

It’s not our fault that our brains aren’t wired to contemplate such huge numbers. There’s some evidence from studying Indigenous cultures that human minds intuitively value the relationship between numbers more than the absolute difference between them. For instance, our brains are primed to perceive 1 and 2 as farther apart than 8 and 9 because, relatively, 2 is twice the size of 1, whereas 9 is only ¹?₈ larger than 8. Yet objectively, they are both the same distance apart on the number line.

Scientific American for more

by BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS

PART 1: YESTERDAY

Since the end of the 15th century, Latin America (which I define as including Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean) has served as a vast laboratory for the social, political, and economic experimentation of capitalism and colonialism. Until the United States gained independence, North America belonged to it. As the United States emerged as the world’s new capitalist power, it took the place previously occupied by European colonialism and turned South America into its laboratory.

This laboratory has two main departments: oppression and liberation. Both have remained active over the centuries, although their prominence varies depending on the historical period. It was here that the first genocides of the modern era were committed. After U.S. independence, it was here that the first great struggles against European colonialism took place, with Simón Bolívar standing out as a leading figure. Here, for the first time and in various forms, the contradiction between political independence and the continuation of colonialism beyond the end of historical colonialism manifested itself: internal colonialism, neocolonialism, and the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 to the present day. One need only consider the gap between Haiti’s independence in 1804 and that of all the other countries on the continent during the first half of the 19th century. It was the experience of some of these countries—Honduras foremost among them—that justified the coining of the term “banana republic” by the American writer O. Henry.

In a tragic partnership with Africa, the first major contradiction between the supposedly universal principles of European liberalism and the practices of European countries outside Europe erupted here. One need only recall the criticisms of the missionary Bartolomé de las Casas. It was here that the first revolution of the modern era took place—the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920—which resulted in the first major agrarian reform, the slogan “la tierra es de quien la trabaja,” the guarantee of workers’ rights, and the first nationalizations of multinational corporations.

Closer to the present day, the revolution that unleashed the most revolutionary energy in the world during the early decades of the Cold War—the Cuban Revolution—took place here. A small country, 140 kilometers from the United States, almost within the “bowels of the monster,” in the words of José Martí, defied the imperial power, promised to expand across the rest of the continent, and was prepared to share its strength with anti-colonial movements on other continents—as Angola and Namibia eloquently attest.

Strengthened by the hope for social justice that the Cuban Revolution fostered, the progressive democratic forces in other countries on the continent attempted structural reforms in the following years, particularly regarding labor rights and land ownership. This was the case in Brazil under João Goulart (1961–1964). He was overthrown by a military coup orchestrated by the CIA and backed by Lyndon Johnson’s White House, with a naval force on standby off the Brazilian coast. With the military dictatorships that followed—in Chile between 1973 and 1990, and in Argentina between 1976 and 1983—the “department of oppression” within the Latin American laboratory was consolidated.

Since the Latin American laboratory has two departments, the intensification of oppression did not stifle the struggle for liberation. It was also in Latin America that, ten years after the Cuban Revolution, the first experiment in democratic socialism of the Cold War era took place. I am referring to the Chile of Salvador Allende, who was elected president in 1970. Unlike the Cuban Revolution, this experiment sought to achieve socialist goals through liberal democratic means and was not deterred by the failure of similar attempts in Europe, particularly in post-World War I Germany. It ended three years later with a coup d’état orchestrated by Henry Kissinger and the CIA—Latin America’s 9/11.

The department of oppression then launched in Chile the great experiment of the second half of the 20th century—an experiment that continues to this day and now extends throughout the capitalist world. At stake is the management of the contradictory relationship between neoliberal capitalism and democracy. The experiment operates on two hypotheses. The first is the total incompatibility between neoliberalism and democracy. The second is the compatibility of the two through the dismantling of all democratic instruments that constitute an obstacle to the advance of neoliberalism—an advance that is considered and desired to be unstoppable.

In a very brief summary, neoliberalism is the version of capital that responded to the most recent crisis of accumulation (recent until just a short while ago) with a handful of solutions. The market as the great social regulator, not only of economic relations but also of social and political relations. The privatization of the state-owned enterprise sector. The deregulation of economic activity—or rather, its “re-regulation”—to transform the state into yet another instrument of accumulation. The reduction of social policies to a minimum through the transformation of public goods into businesses, particularly in healthcare, education, the pension system, scientific research, and, more recently, the provision of religious services. All of this results in a massive transfer of income from the working and middle classes (where they exist) to various sectors of the capitalist-colonialist ruling class. Neoliberalism enshrines the dichotomy between the poor and the rich, when in reality this dichotomy pits large, impoverished majorities against the enrichment of small minorities.

The first hypothesis dominated the initial period of this experiment. Milton Friedman, the architect of the neoliberal economic reforms implemented by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, acknowledged in a 1994 interview with a German newspaper that some of the desirable reforms could only be implemented under a dictatorship. The second hypothesis dominated the phase that began in 2009. I designate the two phases as follows: “Between dictatorship and advanced democracy or democratic revolution” and “Between decent democracy, ditamole, or hybrid war.”

Between dictatorship and advanced democracy or democratic revolution

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AEON

B F Skinner is one of the preeminent psychologists of the 20th century, having pioneered experiments in, and theories of, human and nonhuman animal behaviour. Featuring interviews with Skinner near the end of his career, as well as other leading thinkers of the era, this 1978 documentary explores his famed experiments in behaviour and control, along with his framework of ‘operant conditioning’, which holds that ‘above all, positive reinforcement is the prime mover’ of learning. The portrait contrasts the controversy surrounding his work, including the ethics of his experiments and the resulting notion that we may have less control over our behaviour than we might like, with the man himself – a mild-mannered, caring father and grandfather. Delightfully retro in some places and somewhat dated in others, the film nevertheless makes for a riveting introduction to a paradigm-changing thinker.

Director: Steven D McAdam

Producer: Jerry Johnson

Aeon

AFP

Father after father AFP spoke to in Afghanistan about the education ban that stops their daughters going beyond primary school choked up in despair.

The pain and anguish it is causing behind closed doors is clear from interviews AFP conducted across the country, with even deeply religious fathers questioning the ruling.

The Taliban authorities justify the ban — the only one of its kind in the world — on their interpretation of Islamic law.

But “you will never find in the Quran that education is only for men,” said one devout father, while another — who praised the Taliban government for restoring security and reducing corruption — said he couldn’t “find any proper justification for this”.

All the men — whose identities AFP is protecting — described the emotional turmoil the bar is causing, with fathers losing sleep over what to do to help their bright and frustrated daughters.

Nine out of 10 Afghan men questioned in a UN survey last year said it was important for girls to go to secondary school, with nearly two thirds considering it “pious” for a father to support his daughter’s education.

Some men have gone to prison for protesting the ban.

Girls were barred from secondary schools in March 2022 after the Taliban authorities returned to power, with universities closed to young women later that year.

The Taliban government did not respond to AFP questions about the ban.

Officials insist the ban is temporary. But the UN’s education wing UNESCO said Tuesday that an estimated “2.4 million girls have been excluded from secondary education since 2021” as it called for “an immediate and unconditional restoration of their right” to go to school.

Dreaded day approaches 

Engineer Ahmad — whose wife is a secondary school maths professor who is no longer allowed to teach — said he never imagined that “one day my daughters would be illiterate”.

The father of four girls said “stopping at the sixth grade” will leave them effectively “illiterate” for the demands of “the 21st century”.

“Every day and every night, my wife and I… are getting closer to the moment when our daughters will have to stay home,” he said.

With his eldest nearing the end of her time in primary school — and clandestine courses in their northern city costing more than half his salary — he sees no option but to leave.

As an ex-employee of an international organisation, he was well on track to get his family to the United States before President Donald Trump slammed that door shut.

Despite European countries regularly denouncing the restrictions Afghanistan puts on women, Sweden, Denmark and Germany have also refused them visas.

The children “do not know that we are losing our hope,” Ahmad, 40, told AFP, adding that leaving illegally was “too risky”.

“Every day” the children ask, “‘When do we leave?'”

They try to keep their spirits up whatever way they can. Their eldest might fail her final year after breaking a bone during her exams.

“She was sad, but I said to her: ‘If you have to repeat, you’ll have an extra year at school.'”

They can’t go abroad

Mohammad, a doctor in a small town in Kabul province, said he always dreamed of sending his two daughters to one of the best universities.

“For the development of Afghanistan we need women, not only for the home,” he said.

His two daughters — aged 12 and 14 — are in their last year of primary, the older one having started school later.

For the last four years he has been trying to come up with ways around the ban — including sending them to school in neighbouring Pakistan, now impossible since the land border was sealed after hostilities intensified between the two countries.

Then he was told about a school that secretly teaches general subjects alongside its religious curriculum.

“It’s a private school” that charges higher fees of “around 10,000 Afghanis ($153)” a month for the two girls because “they are taking more risk”.

And there is no graduation certificate.

But Mohammad is afraid officials might inspect the school and “take my daughters into custody”.

“The most important… is that they go on learning,” the 42-year-old told AFP, adding that he told his daughters: “‘While I’m alive, I will find a solution for your education.'”

How can I learn?

N — who only wanted to be identified by an initial — is from Kandahar province in the south, a bastion of the Taliban movement, where he said girls can be excluded from school even before the end of primary if they are tall.

He has three sons and a 12-year-old daughter. She “is very interested in astronomy. The other day, she did a collage of the solar system. She asked me a lot of questions, on gravity for example, and I told her that… ‘You will learn.’

“‘How can I learn… if I cannot go beyond grade six,’ she told me.”

He moved his family to Kabul to find work and told AFP that “we have to be patient” and explore ways around the “poison” of the ban, like underground schools and online design or computer courses.

“Now I am working, I can afford the education of my children. But the opportunities are decreasing day by day and I may not be able to support that,” with international aid also dwindling, he said.

In the meantime, he tries to shield his daughter, with her school days already numbered. “She does not know that there is this other stress on us,” he said.

‘I hide to cry’ 

It was a feast day and everyone was celebrating, but M’s daughter stayed in her room crying. At 13 she could no longer go to school.

“Beside the school (ban), girls are not allowed to go to parks for sightseeing or refreshments, it’s really stressful,” M told AFP, clearly shaken by his child’s plight.

He tries to take her to a restaurant once a week just to get her out.

A devout logistics manager from a poor background, he worked hard to educate and improve himself, and praises the Taliban authorities for restoring security and fighting corruption.

But “I cannot find any proper justification for” barring girls from secondary education, he said.

“Sometimes when she gets so disappointed at home,” he cannot bear it, he admitted. “I go to another room and… I hide to cry.”

M wants his daughter to go to university, and saved every cent so they could move to Iran so she could study there. But the war put an end to that.

So she could have some “social interactions”, he enrolled her in a Quranic school, “because staying at home all the time is stressful.”

However, recently she has refused to go. “Even if I continue, there will be no future for me,” she told him.

Home schooling 

“My daughter and her classmates were in a very bad mood” on the last day of primary school. “It was tragic,” said Nasir, who had already witnessed the pain his 15-year-old went through when her education was cut short.

The trophies the girls won for excellence at school sit alongside the books on the shelves of the home library he and his wife, a teacher, have proudly put together for them.

They tutor their daughters at home with secondhand high school textbooks they salvaged, making them stick to a strict weekday routine going “early to bed, wake up at the same time as if you were going to school.”

But alone in the living room, Nasir, 47, confided that his younger daughter “is depressed and does not always have strong morale to continue learning on her own at home.”

Citizen Digital for omre

by SAYARI DEBNATH

Tahmima Anam’s new novel, Uprising, is set on an isolated island “at the end of the country, in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea”. Here, a hundred or so women in prostitution – sex workers for the soft-spoken and sex slaves for those who know what the work truly entails – live and serve customers who come ashore in boats and trawlers. Suspended in water, the island’s inhabitants are cut off from the mainland, relying on the madam, Amma, to feed and clothe them, and take care of their day-to-day needs.

In the few hours that the men are away from the island, the women catch up on restless sleep, take drugs and smoke ganja, and curse their daughters. The island has no sons – it is perhaps the only place in the world where boys are of no use, so they are put up for adoption, shipped off with their “fathers”, or left to die. In the rare case that the mother is aware of her son’s whereabouts, she waits impatiently for him to come rescue her, after finally accepting that no husband or lover is going to whisk her away.

The land at the end of the country

This land at the “end of the country” seems to be a sordid imagination of some wretched woman’s nightmare. It is shrouded in fog during winters and mist during the torrential monsoon. Women of good families do not turn their eyes in the island’s direction but the men – both good and bad – salivate and tug at their crotches, fantasising about the pleasure they can buy for a few takas. Islands are tropical paradises – the reader decides that surely no such place of absolute cruelty can exist in our world.

But this place is not merely a figment of the author’s imagination. The brothel island really does exist. Banishanta, in Bangladesh, is a small riverbank village in Mongla. Asian Dispatchsays “it is one of the oldest and among the few registered brothels in the country. It sits on a fragile strip of land, where rising sea levels and shifting river flow, driven by climate change, have gradually swallowed the shore.”

The women’s livelihoods, precarious as they are, are jeopardised multifold by the onslaught of climate disasters. The summers are more brutal than ever, the monsoons wash away everything, and they can no longer predict the tides. There is no money when the men don’t come; Amma feeds them reluctantly, adding line after line to debts already owed to her. The women believe they owe millions of takas to Amma and they can never possibly repay her – forget their own freedoms; even their daughters are bonded to this life. Waiting for puberty is detrimental to business, so Amma fattens them up with a cocktail of drugs, selling the young girls’ virginity at high prices.

The story is told by an unknown woman’s daughter who watches her mother and her colleagues do everything that no civil society would want a child to witness. Venereal diseases, abortions and miscarriages, and self-harm are a part of life here and the children know that their mothers sell their bodies not only for sex, but also for men to bite, punch, and beat. The mother’s body, which otherwise might have only belongedto the child, becomes a brutal reminder of the fate that awaits them.

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by KINLING LO

Beijing is pioneering regulations that could shape how governments around the world govern emotionally intelligent chatbots.

For a week in July, 21-year-old college student Bagel Su cried every day as she counted down to the loss of her boyfriend. The breakup was not caused by betrayal or distance, but was a consequence of government regulation.

…

“I tried getting busier with my own life,” Su told Rest of World, asking to be identified only by her online pseudonym due to fear of repercussions for speaking against government regulations. “No one can replace him. I will just try to move on. He said he wants that for me, and that he will find a way to come back to me.”

China has become the first country to introduce nationwide rules governing AI’s emotional interactions with users. The move reflects Beijing’s increasingly proactive approach to AI governance, as governments around the world still grapple to address the societal risks posed by increasingly sophisticated AI. Behavioral experts believe such regulations are the need of the hour, but blanket bans may not suffice.

“Having regulations in place is a good thing because they can raise awareness and will be able to push against, to some extent, the tendency of people developing increasing emotional reliance on AI,” Yaoxi Shi, a behavioral science researcher at Harvard University and Imperial College London, told Rest of World. “But of course, AI offers emotional support that fulfills genuine human needs, and this trend of people developing a degree of emotional reliance on AI may be unavoidable, because there is no going back to a time when there was no AI.”

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by WYATT REED

As the deadly Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon continues, the fabulously wealthy banker-turned-“philanthropist” Antoun Sehnaoui has assembled a network of business and media operatives in Washington – and a fascist Christian goon squad in Beirut – dedicated to doing Israel’s dirty work.

In late July, Lebanese daily L’Orient Today exposed a wealthy banking heir named Antoun Sehnaoui as a driving force behind recent efforts to push the country to normalize relations with Israel as the apartheid state continues to occupy hundreds of square miles of southern Lebanon.

According to L’Orient, Sehnaoui is now actively seeking to manipulate Lebanese public opinion by lavishly funding local outlets including French-speaking Ici Beyrouth, English-language This Is Beirut, and Hunna Lubnan in Arabic. The report also built on local reports indicating the mysterious Sehnaoui has been wielding a fascist Christian militia to protect his banking empire and reputation.

After photos emerged in late July showing the financier cavorting with Israeli Prime Minister and international fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu at a private gathering in Washington DC, Sehnaoui has been publicly denounced by his uncle as a willing tool of Israel. While currently wanted for questioning by law enforcement in Lebanon, where directly associating with Israelis is punishable by law, Sehnaoui has emerged as the man behind the curtain of the Lebanese government, injecting money and manpower into Beirut’s dangerous theater of normalization with Israel.

The banker and the convert

Long before his debut as a public proponent of Zionism, Antoun Sehnaoui was known across Lebanon for both his tremendous wealth and his tendency to serve as a kingmaker among the right-wing parties catering to Lebanon’s Christian minority. When Lebanon’s economy collapsed in 2019 after it became clear that the country’s banking class had effectively been running a state-sponsored pyramid scheme, Sehnaoui emerged as the face of an amoral Lebanese elite that managed to squirrel over $15 billion out of the country by using their connections with Lebanon’s central bank. While ordinary Lebanese residents were turned away from branches empty-handed, it was revealed that billions were being funneled abroad via the Sehnaoui-owned Banque Richelieu France bank.

Since then, Sehnaoui has become romantically involved with US President Donald Trump’s former Special Representative for Lebanon, Morgan Ortagus. Ortagus, a formerly evangelical Christian convert to Judaism, is a fanatical Zionist who flaunts her ideology with her choices of jewelry. In late 2024, after being chosen to serve as Trump’s envoy to Lebanon by Steve Witkoff, Ortagus suggested to Israeli military leaders that they attack the 2024 funeral of assassinated Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah at the Sports City stadium in Beirut. Israel ultimately decided to stage an intimidating overflight of the funeral rather than launch an attack that would have killed thousands of civilians. 

This April in Washington DC, in the midst of talks between Lebanon and Israel, Ortagus introduced Sehnaoui at the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Remembrance Day,” where Sehnaoui’s name was inscribed on the institution’s Donor Wall. In revealing comments, Ortagus praised Sehnaoui’s family as “committed Christian Zionists” who had “trained [him] to be a supporter of the state of Israel and the Jewish people.” She then volunteered her opinion that “what Antoun [Sehnaoui] is doing today is technically illegal in Lebanon.”

One of the Lebanese lawyers who sought an arrest warrant for Sehnaoui after his meeting in DC with Netanyahu this July stated that Sehnaoui is now credibly accused of conspiring to force the country to submit to Israel’s will “using the money that the Lebanese people have been robbed of from the banks.”

Dawn of a media empire

A review of the media ventures uncovered by L’Orient confirms that Sehnaoui’s empire of media outlets are little more than thinly-disguised pro-Israel propaganda mills. Many of This Is Beirut’s employees openly moonlight at Israeli influence vehicles like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy (WINEP).

Chief among them is columnist Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a former Shiite Muslim who first came to prominence as the face of Alhurra Iraq, a US-funded Arabic satellite network launched by Washington to promote Western-aligned narratives in Iraq following their catastrophic invasion. Abdul-Hussain also works as a so-called “research fellow” at FDD, which was revealed by a senior Israeli military-intelligence official in 2017 to be a co-conspirator in an Israeli government-led plot to spy on critics of the apartheid regime on American soil. In fact, FDD emerged out of an organization called EMET, which outlined its mission in its founding documents: “enhance Israel’s image in North America.”

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