Elbahrain.net The Indian Point nuclear power plant was an energy juggernaut for 50 years, generating a quarter of the electricity that powered New York City’s iconic, glowing skyline.

It is well into its decommissioning process after shutting down in 2021: The remaining waste of the radioactive fuel that once generated all of that power has been sealed inside more than 120 hulking metal and concrete canisters.

The massive containers are welded shut and stand in rows behind barbed-wire fences, watched 24/7 by security guards carrying long guns.

This is one of several misconceptions about nuclear energy: America’s nuclear waste is not buried in a mountain or tucked at the bottom of a deep, rocky cavern. It is sealed away in coffin-like casks and spread out among more than 50 locations around the country.

Most other countries with longstanding nuclear energy programs have plans to create a permanent home for these spent fuel canisters. The US does not. Congress’s decades-old idea to bury them deep in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain is long dead, and no alternative was ever identified.

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That is almost entirely because Americans are by and large opposed to living anywhere near nuclear waste, and suspicious of governments’ or utilities’ attempts to assuage nuclear fears. The byproduct of nuclear energy is still associated with atomic bombs or nuclear meltdowns. In reality, what comes out of reactors is far from the dangerous, radioactive sludge seen in movies or conjured in our imaginations.

People “imagine it’s like the green drums of goo that Homer Simpson has,” said Paul Murray, the US Energy Department’s deputy assistant secretary focused on nuclear waste. The spent fuel – metal rods containing uranium pellets – are “boringly safe” when sealed correctly, Murray said.

The waste from nuclear energy poses so little danger, a person would need to stand near it for an entire year to be exposed to as much radiation “as maybe one or two X-rays,” said Brian Vangor, a waste storage supervisor at Indian Point.

But the perception of danger is a hurdle quickly becoming one of the country’s biggest obstacles to uploading a glut of climate-friendly energy onto the grid.

Nuclear start-ups – including one run by Bill Gates – are pouring billions of dollars into new-wave reactor technology. Two massive reactors recently came online in Georgia, and a burst of activity in AI has tech giants scrambling to bring plants like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania – the site of America’s infamous nuclear meltdown – back to life.

On the threshold of America’s nuclear energy renaissance, federal officials are pleading with communities to say yes to storing spent fuel. No state has yet raised its hand to store the country’s nuclear energy waste, despite the lucrative deals it could foment. Not even temporarily.

Holtec, for example, the company that now owns the decommissioned Indian Point, is eyeing a site in New Mexico to store its spent fuel.

Officials in New Mexico – where the Manhattan Project tested the first nuclear bombs without telling any of the communities around it what was happening – are flat-out rejecting the idea.

“Just because we have the right geology, a low population, large land mass, does not mean that we agree to be a further sacrifice zone for the nation’s defense industry or even the power industry,” said James Kenney, secretary for New Mexico’s Environment Department.

A “political” problem
Other western countries that went all-in on nuclear energy – including Finland, Sweden, and Canada – spent years offering sweet deals to communities to host permanent repositories, either in the form of money or investments in new medical facilities, libraries, community centers or other public buildings.

The US went with a more ham-fisted approach. Congress’s decision in the late 1980s to bury the nation’s nuclear waste deep inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was done largely without consulting Nevada state officials, let alone its residents.

“The US followed the decide-announce-defend model, which is clearly a failure,” said Allison McFarlane, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission who wrote a book on the Yucca Mountain saga.

The decision sparked a firestorm of backlash. State leaders dubbed it the “screw Nevada bill,” and fought it tooth and nail. Some scientists and state officials alike were concerned about Yucca’s history of seismic activity and feared the repository could be more exposed to free oxygen – increasing the odds of radiation leaks.

The fact that Congress was telling, not asking, calcified opposition in a state that had no nuclear power plants and whose desert was the site of more than 900 Cold War-era atomic bomb tests.

That, combined with fears of shipping nuclear waste through Las Vegas – the state’s economic engine and nation’s party capital – sealed Yucca’s fate. It was Nevada’s Harry Reid who put the final nail in Yucca’s coffin when he Zbecame Senate majority leader.

Elbahrain.net A hard-right critic of NATO who has praised Russia is set to face a center-right opposition leader in a presidential election runoff in Romania that could undermine its pro-Western stance after a shock outcome in the first-round vote.

With 99.9% of votes counted after voting on Sunday, independent hard-right politician Calin Georgescu, 62, had 22.95% of votes. Center-right contender Elena Lasconi, leader of the opposition Save Romania Union, lay second with 19.2%.

The outcome was a huge shock as pre-election opinion polls had made Social Democrat Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu the frontrunner. The candidate of the center-right Liberals, Ciolacu’s coalition partners, also failed to secure a place in the election runoff, which will be on Dec. 8.

Campaigning focused largely on the soaring cost of living in Romania, which is a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance and has the EU’s biggest share of people at risk of poverty.

“I have voted for the wronged, the humiliated, those who feel they do not matter in this world,” Georgescu said on Sunday. “Today, the vote is a prayer for the nation.”

Georgescu had been polling in single digits before the vote and ran a Tik Tok-driven campaign

“Just imagine, we are in a position where we could have a far-right president,” political scientist Cristian Pirvulescu said. “This is where the establishment parties have led us, first by vehemently denying the existence of a hybrid war and then by falling into it. His chances of winning are high.”

Romania’s sovereign euro bonds fell nearly 2 cents on Monday following the first round of voting.

Asked about the election outcome, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “I would not make any predictions yet. We probably cannot say that we are that familiar with the world view of this candidate as far as relations with our country are concerned.”

“For now, we understand very clearly the current leadership of Romania, which is not a friendly country to us. We will of course watch how the electoral processes develop and who wins.”

Parliamentary election looms
Romania, a southeast European country of 19 million that was under communist rule for four decades until 1989, holds a parliamentary election on Dec. 1 in which political analysts said hard-right groupings were likely to receive an electoral boost from Georgescu’s success.

Georgescu is a former member of the hard-right opposition Alliance for Uniting Romanians who has praised Ion Antonescu, Romania’s de facto World War Two leader who was sentenced to death for his part in Romania’s Holocaust, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, leader of a pre-war violent anti-Semitic movement.

Georgescu has called a NATO ballistic missile defense shield in Romania a “shame of diplomacy” and questioned whether the Western defense alliance would protect any of its members if they were attacked by Russia.

He said Romania’s best chance lay with “Russian wisdom,” but has refused to say explicitly whether he supports Russia.

Romania shares a 650-km (400-mile) border with Ukraine and since Russia attacked Kyiv in 2022, it has enabled the export of millions of tons of grain through its Black Sea port of Constanta and provided military aid, including the donation of a Patriot air defense battery.

“I voted for him, he came out of the (blue), we are glad to have a president, it’s a big thing,” said Elena Bardea while sweeping leaves outside her courtyard in Izvorani, a village near capital Bucharest from which Georgescu ran his campaign.

Also in Izvorani, Alexandru Stelu Ghita wondered if the country could be repaired.

“Everything was sold off, what can be repaired, agriculture is working badly, industry is working badly,” he said.

Pirvulescu said retaining control of parliament would be important for pro-Western forces to serve as a counterbalance to Georgescu if he becomes president.

The president, who is limited to two five-year terms, has a semi-executive role which includes heading Romania’s armed forces and chairing the supreme defense council that decides on military aid.

The president represents Romania at EU and NATO summits and appoints the prime minister, chief judges, prosecutors and secret service heads. The current head of state, Klaus Iohannis, won power in 2014 on a promise to bolster the fight against endemic corruption.

Elbahrain.net Smith’s criminal pursuit of Trump over the last two years for trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election and his mishandling of classified documents represented a unique chapter in American history: Never before has a former occupant of the White House faced federal criminal charges.

Though the election subversion case culminated this summer in a landmark Supreme Court ruling that said Trump enjoyed some presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, Trump’s strategy of delay in the case ensured that a trial never got underway before the November election.

In the election case Trump faced in Washington, DC, Smith charged the former president over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, a plot that culminated in the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges in both cases.

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung in a statement called the move “a major victory for the rule of law.”

“The American People and President Trump want an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and we look forward to uniting our country,” Cheung added.

Trump employees still face appeal
Smith, in a filing with a federal appeals court, said that prosecutors were keeping their case on mishandling classified documents alive against two of Trump’s employees.

The case is before the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which is reviewing Judge Aileen Cannon’s order dismissing all charges.

The co-defendants are Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira, who work for Trump and are accused of helping the former president obstruct a federal investigation into sensitive government documents taken from his first administration. Both have pleaded not guilty.

“The special counsel’s decision to proceed in this case, even after dismissing it against President Trump, is an unsurprising tribute to the poor judgment that led to the indictment against Mr. De Oliveira in the first place,” John Irving, a defense attorney for De Oliveira, said. “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. If they prefer a slow acquittal, that’s fine with us.”

A lawyer for Nauta, Stanley Woodward, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dismissing without prejudice
Smith said he was seeking to drop the charges against the president-elect “without prejudice,” which would keep the door open for charges to be brought again in the future, calling the presidential immunity Trump will have as “temporary.”

Smith said he consulted with Justice Department lawyers on the question and that they also weighed the possibility of pausing the case until Trump no longer had the immunity of the presidency protecting him.

Ultimately, however, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the bar on prosecuting sitting presidents is “categorial,” including for indictments handed up before a defendant enters office.

“Accordingly, the Department’s position is that the Constitution requires that this case be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated. And although the Constitution requires dismissal in this context, consistent with the temporary nature of the immunity afforded a sitting President, it does not require dismissal with prejudice,” Smith wrote

State cases will continue against Trump
As president, Trump will not have the power to interfere with the prosecutions brought against him by state authorities in Georgia and New York. However, the courts in those cases will still have to work out immunity questions and issues raised by his return to the White House.

Last week, the judge overseeing Trump’s criminal hush money case in New York postponed his sentencing indefinitely. A jury in the state convicted Trump earlier this year on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment made during the 2016 campaign to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who alleged a prior affair with the president-elect. (Trump denies the affair.)

And Trump is still working to stave off prosecution in Georgia, where he is a defendant in a sprawling case that accuses him and several allies of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in the Peach State.

Elbahrain.net The high price of bread and eggs doomed her. Nope, it was raw racism and sexism. Well, maybe she should have gone on Joe Rogan’s show.

If you’re looking for a reason why Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, there are plenty to choose from. Many of Harris’ reeling supporters are still trying to understand the forces behind Trump’s win. Trump won less than half of the popular vote, where his margin of victory was smaller than President Biden’s in 2020. Still, he swept all seven swing states and he has forced Democrats to ask what they must do to reach more working-class and Latino voters.

One prominent evangelical pastor offers some insight. The Rev. William J. Barber II has long been one of America’s most persistent and eloquent spokespersons for poor and working-class Americans. Barber, who has been called “the closest person we have to MLK” in contemporary America, has organized coalitions of the poor, working-class Whites and people of color around such causes as raising the minimum wage, expanding health care and strengthening unions. Barber is the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” and helps lead the Poor People’s Campaign, which seeks national solutions to ongoing poverty.

Barber also done something else: He’s shown Democrats how they can win political victories in red states. Barber is currently the founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School and Repairers of the Breach, a group that trains social justice leaders.

But he made his mark from his home state of North Carolina. As one of the architects of the “Moral Mondays” movement, he helped lead a racially diverse coalition that is credited with toppling a Republican governor and turning North Carolina into a swing state. Though Harris lost North Carolina, Democrats in 2024 won races for governor and attorney general, and the GOP appears likely to lose its veto-proof majority in the state legislature.

For Democrats debating how best to reach new voters, Barber’s perspective could be valuable. He has written a blueprint for expanding the Democratic base in North Carolina and elsewhere through what he calls “fusion politics,” a multiracial and multiclass coalition that transcends the conservative-vs.-progressive binary. Racism is often depicted as a Black problem, but Barber insists it’s also been used throughout US history to hurt the economic interests of everyday White people. He once said, “Racism may target Black people, but it damns a democracy, and it damns humanity.”

CNN spoke with Barber about the country’s future in Trump’s impending second term. In his rumbling preacher’s baritone, Barber explained why he thinks both political parties fail the working class, how the Democratic Party can move forward and why he still believes America can become a genuine multiracial democracy.

His answers were edited for clarity and brevity.

Were you shocked by the election results?

I don’t know if shocked is the word. I’m deeply concerned for this country. I’m deeply disappointed that you could have someone who spews as much violence and viciousness, a sexual abuser (a federal jury found last year in a civil case that Trump sexually abused a woman in 1996 in New York City) who clearly doesn’t believe in the rule of law. He lies, curses and creates an enemy list. If Vice President Harris had done a half of one of those things, her poll numbers would have dropped and she would have not even been able to stay in the race. Trump is able to do it, and somehow so many Americans look the other way.

For people to say they still support him, there’s something deeply wrong with a large section of the country. And then what’s really shocking to me is the number of people who still choose not to vote. What is it about our society that we can see someone who leans into fascism, and there is not an all-out effort to get to the polls and say no?

What’s your answer to that question? What is it about people that saw all this and still didn’t vote?

I think people get turned off because they feel as though politics is just a game of the rich and things are not going to really change. From one study, we found out that 30 million poor and low-wage people did not vote because they said nobody talked to them. Nobody talked to their issues. If you look at the two (2024 presidential and vice-presidential) debates, not one candidate was asked how would their policies affect the issues of people dying every day from poverty and low wages. Not one candidate was asked would they raise the minimum wage, which we’ve not raised for 15 years.

The debates write a lot of people off. They (low-income viewers) don’t hear their names, they don’t hear their conditions. So our discourse, or lack thereof, is causing more and more people to just remove themselves (from the political process). We have a lot of questions to ask about our soul and mindset in this culture.

Critics say Democrats are elitist and look down on working-class people. What do you say to that?

Neither party has done enough, and all of them dismiss poor and low-wage service people in different ways. The Republicans tend to say poverty and low wage is your own fault. And then they try to racialize poverty and make it like it’s a Black issue. When they talk about poverty, the first thing they do is show a Black woman with food stamps.

On the other side, Democrats think that they can just talk “middle class.” They don’t have to say “poverty.” They don’t have to say “low wages.” They fall in the trap of allowing poverty to be marginalized.

In North Carolina, you had a Democrat — the governor, the lieutenant governor, the superintendent of schools, the attorney general — win (in 2024). And yet the vice president loses in North Carolina. That is not an easy thing to solve. The votes went down, rather than up, for both candidates (Harris and Trump). We know that extremists love election numbers to be down. That’s where they flourish.

I talked to a Black woman who said after the election that she is done with America. She doesn’t want to live in this country anymore. What would you say to people who are in despair and just want to check out?

They should have a level of grief, hurt and anger to see someone who can be as fascist-leaning and mean-spirited, both in words and in public policy, as Trump beat someone who is upstanding and cares about the whole of all people.

But what you saw election night is not the whole of America. It’s a part of America in a particular moment around the election. You have to stop and say, wait a minute, this is the same America that I went to sleep in the night before. It’s not some strange America. This is part of America. America has always had multiple stories running at the same time.

A democracy is a hard struggle. Sixty years after the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the first Reconstruction, you had something similar. An extremist got elected named Woodrow Wilson. He played “Birth of a Nation” (the 1915 silent film that featured racist depictions of Black people while glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, which Wilson screened at the White House). But the point I’m making is people were hurt. He lied to the Black community. He got elected, he started wanting to turn back all kinds of (civil rights) laws. The Supreme Court voted to begin separate but equal (the notorious “Plessy v. Ferguson” decision that legitimated Jim Crow laws). But what did people do? They hurt, they grieved and then they got up and fought.

We’re in the birth pangs of what I call a Third Reconstruction. We have to grab on to our foreparents. They didn’t have the luxury to go anywhere. It is not a moment to walk away. It is not a moment to say this is all of America. All of America’s voice wasn’t even heard (in this election). We can’t blame it all on Trump. If less people voted, we got to own that. A democracy demands engagement. It’s built on “we the people.” Checking out is how extremists get elected.

Do you still believe we could have a genuine multiracial democracy in America?

Oh, yes. I believe it. I think it’s hard work. We’ve had two attempts at reconstructing the country (Reconstruction in the 18th century and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s). And remember: the reconstructionists didn’t just quit or lose. People were beaten down, cheated and assassinated. But I believe in the possibility of a Third Reconstruction. Out all of this grief and struggle we’ve seen, it’s going to cause a massive pushback. I know the history of folk who tend to wield injustice. They always go too far. And they end up producing their own resistance.

My word to progressives and Democrats is to not try to have a left or a right agenda. Have a moral agenda. Look at what issues are a violation of our deepest moral values. Lift from the bottom. Own the fact that the things we talk about — a living wage, health care — are highly popular in the public square.

Elbahrain.net The discovery of a severed horse head, and a cow quartered with its bloodied dead calf on top, have rattled a Sicilian town, with authorities treating the incident as a mafia threat.

The dead animals were discovered on the property of a building contractor in the town of Altofonte, near Palermo, police told CNN.

The gruesome scene was reminiscent of the 1972 film “The Godfather” where a character wakes up to find a decapitated head of a horse in his bed

The contractor, who is not being named to protect him during the ongoing investigation, told police that he had not received any threats prior to the discovery of the dead livestock, who were kept on an adjacent property.

The construction and garbage industries remain the two most prominent mafia-linked business sectors in Sicily, according to a recent report from the Anti-Mafia Directorate.

The contractor often carried out construction work for the local municipality, which has worked hard to deny mafia-related firms from winning bids, but he had told police he had not been approached by any group demanding money or favors.

A police spokesperson told CNN the incident is being treated as a mafia intimidation tactic.

The horrific incident may be related to the recent release of 20 mafia members from local prisons, whose sentences expired, and who may be on a vengeance, according to the Anti-Mafia Directorate’s chief Maurizio de Lucia.

“We can’t let our guard down, the fight against the mafia just got more difficult with these men free,” he said in September.

The mayor of Altofonte, Angela De Lucia, said she was “petrified” when she heard the news. “I can’t comprehend such barbarity,” she told local media outlets.

“This act seems to take us back to the middle ages.”

A common intimidation tactic
The use of dead animals, more often dogs than horses, has precedence on the southern Italian island.

It is a tactic that has been used by the notorious Sicilian Cosa Nostra crime syndicate for decades. Several similar incidents involving the decapitated heads of animals have been reported by local business people in Sicily: In 2023, a severed pig’s head was found hanging at local police station while a local business contractor found the severed head of one of his goats on his garden gate.

Organized crime in Sicily has been a problem since the 19th century when the Cosa Nostra was first identified. Violence peaked in 1992 when two anti-mafia judges, Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, were assassinated in separate roadside bombs.

More recently, Cosa Nostra, working in conjunction with the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta syndicate, have turned away from violence and focused more on white collar crimes, infiltrating local governments, and industries like construction and sanitation.

But extortion and demanding protection money or “pizzo” remains a staple for these groups.

In a 2023 criminal case, 31 people were convicted of abetting local mobsters by lying about paying protection money to the group, which served to protect them, according to the judge’s sentencing document.

In 2023, Matteo Messina Denaro, a Sicilan Cosa Nostra mafia boss who had been on the run for 30 years was captured while seeking cancer treatment in Palermo, underscoring the level of complicity that continues to protect and enable criminal enterprises.