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After signing a military decree on May 18, allowing illegal Israeli Jewish settlers to reclaim the abandoned Homesh settlement located in the northern Occupied West Bank, the Israeli government has informed the US Biden Administration that it will not turn the area into a new settlement.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Pita Limjaroenrat is deliberately entering a political minefield, littered with politicians and governments which failed.

Wealthy Mr. Pita's youth-led victory in nationwide elections on May 14 to try and become Thailand's youngest prime minister, is a vivid rejection by a large swath of Thai society against the U.S.-trained military's unpopular political domination and coups.

Mr. Pita, 42, is now struggling to have his Move Forward Party (MFP) form a coalition government uniting smaller parties, while litigious knives sharpen around him.

Projecting robust defiance, Mr. Pita said May 15 it would be "quite far-fetched" for anyone to oppose his victory.

"With the consensus that came out of the election, it will be quite a hefty price to pay for someone who is thinking of abolishing the election results, or forming a minority government," Mr. Pita said at a celebratory reception.

Ballots from Sunday's election for the 500-member House of Representatives gave him and his MFP the most votes of all candidates and parties.

Twenty-two years ago, Congress put sanity up for a vote. Sanity lost in the House, 420-1. It lost in the Senate, 98-0.

Barbara Lee’s lone vote for sanity — that is to say, her vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force resolution, allowing the president to make war against . . . uh, evil . . . without congressional approval — remains a tiny light of courageous hope flickering in a chaotic world, which is on the brink of self-annihilation.

Militarism keeps expanding, at least here in the USA. If there’s a problem out there, option one is to kill it quickly. Problem solved! This simplistic (and utterly false) mindset, which is always present — the companion of fear — may have a grip on American politics like never before, as demonstrated in the recent debt-ceiling standoff, in which President Biden came to an agreement with the Republicans that social spending will be slashed but “defense” spending must continue to expand.

“Nuclear Renaissance (version 4.0)” is the centralized corporate power industry’s final grab at mega-sums of public money and total control of energy.

Facing a definitive tsunami of cheaper, cleaner, safer, faster-to-deploy renewables, it’s meant primarily to serve the nuclear weapons complex while insulating entrenched centralized power against distributed green social democracy.

The “Renaissance’s” prime medieval reality is the escalated likelihood of another Three Mile Island-Chernobyl-Fukushima disaster at one of America’s lingering 94 reactors.

Most US nukes were designed in the pre-digital 1960s and ‘70s. They are dangerously decayed, with an average age of around 40. They are structurally dubious, seriously under-maintained and inherently unsafe.

None have significant private accident insurance. But a major meltdown/explosion could threaten millions of lives and inflict apocalyptic health, ecological and economic harm.