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WWW.QNS.COM RIDGEWOOD TIMES APRIL 29, 2021 15
NYC’s #1 Source for Political & Election News
Biden praises Meng
BY CARLOTTA MOHAMED
President Joe Biden commended Queens Congresswoman
Grace Meng and her colleagues
for their leadership in the fi ght against anti-
Asian violence as the Senate passed the COVID-19
Hate Crimes Act to protect Asian Americans last
“I am grateful to Senator Hirono, Senator Duckworth,
Congresswoman Meng and CAPAC’s chair,
Congresswoman Chu, for their persistent and courageous
leadership on this issue — and I look forward
to swift consideration and passage in the House of
Representatives, and signing this important legislation
into law,” Biden said in a statement.
The president lauded the Senate and the leadership
of the Congressional Asian Pacifi c American
Caucus (CAPAC) for passing the COVID-19 Hate
Crimes Act on Thursday, April 22, by an overwhelming
margin, receiving a vote of 94-1.
“This critical legislation will bring our nation
one step closer to achieving justice and equality
for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacifi c
Islander communities. I was happy to see the Senate
add the bipartisan Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act as an
amendment, which will further our national eff orts
to stand strongly against acts of hate and violence,”
For more than a year, according to Biden, far too
many Asian Americans have woken up each morning
increasingly fearful for their safety and the
safety of their loved ones having been scapegoated,
(From l. to r.) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA), Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Rep.
Grace Meng (D-NY) and Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer speak at a press conference on
Tuesday, April 13, urging Congress to pass the
COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.
harassed and assaulted — some have even been
“It has been over a year of living in fear for their
lives, as acts of anti-Asian bias and violence have
accelerated from coast to coast — an unconscionable
burden our fellow Americans have been forced to
bear, even as so many Asian Americans serve their
communities and our nation tirelessly on the front
lines of the pandemic.”
“Too oft en throughout our history, acts of hate
and violence directed at Asian Americans have
been met with silence,” Biden added. “Our nation
must stand together to speak out against hate, and
declare unequivocally: These acts are wrong. They
are un-American. And they must stop.”
Who do they like?
City Council candidates
demand senior center
BY STEPHEN WITT
Yankee games? You bet. But bingo games?
Out of the question.
While Mayor Bill de Blasio has been
moving full steam ahead with reopening the
city to government workers, tourists and New
Yorkers alike with social distancing and health
measures in place, there are no plans on the
table to reopen the city’s senior centers even
with proof of vaccination.
“We as seniors need to get out, especially
to talk, to laugh — that means so much to our
bodies. Laughter is the spirit of our life,” said
senior Peggy Wiley during a rally outside
Alpha Phi Alpha Senior Center in Cambria
Heights, Queens last month about a plan for
reopening the facility.
Now, three weeks after that rally, the city
still has no plan in place to reopen senior
centers, despite having vaccinated more
than 64 percent of the city’s seniors to date.
Vaccination of more seniors, including the
homebound, is ongoing.
“While there are older New Yorkers who
have been vaccinated, there are many who
are not. We continue to consider everyone’s
safety and will continue to follow the science
and the city’s health guidance on congregate
gatherings and activities. It is also important
to note that the Mayor’s Executive Order 100,
which called for the closure of adult centers,
remains in effect,” said a Department for the
Aging (DFTA) spokesperson.
The continued lack of a plan for reopening
senior centers is gaining traction as an issue
in local City Council races.
“I’ve spoken to all the executive directors
of the senior center facilities in our area,
and they say they are ready to be open,” said
James Johnson, who is running to succeed
term-limited Councilman I. Daneek Miller in
southeast Queens. “They know that our elders
need to be back in these facilities.”
Johnson noted the mayor’s recent announcement
that city workers will be going back to
work in May, a signal that New York City will
be returning to business as usual, but he is yet
to announce a plan to open senior centers.
“Where is the plan to get our seniors back to
their routine?” Johnson said. “We understand
our elders are a vulnerable population, but
one year is extremely too long not to have a
Read more on PoliticsNY.com.
State Assemblyman Daniel
Rosenthal endorsed Sandra
Ung for City Council in the 20th
Rosenthal said he was proud to
“Sandra has the experience,
ideas, and conviction to be
the leader we need in the City
Council,” Rosenthal said. “With
our city in crisis, we need more
leaders like Sandra who truly
put community service before
Ung said she was humbled to
receive his endorsement.
“The assemblyman has been
a steadfast advocate for funding
vital community institutions
like libraries, and I look forward
to working with him to continue
this work for our community,”
Weprin, a city comptroller
candidate, and Queens Borough
President Donovan Richards
announced that they cross endorsed
each other in their bids
for offi ce.
Weprin said he was proud to
accept Richards’ endorsement
and to off er him his.
“This endorsement not only
means a great deal to me as a son
of Queens, but because I know
the level of respect to which
Donovan is held throughout the
entire borough by the more than
2 million residents who have
chosen to make Queens their
homes,” he said.
Richards called Weprin a
dedicated public servant who
will serve well as comptroller.
“His background in the private
sector, as the City Council
fi nance chair, and as a member
of the Assembly, has uniquely
prepared him for the challenges
of managing a complicated
financial system, protecting
the pensions of millions of New
Yorkers and serving as a watchdog
over the city’s agencies and
departments,” he said.
PoliticsNY.com PoliticsNYnews PoliticsNYnews PoliticsNYnews

domain: politics


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Dr Ana Manzano, Faculty of Social Sciences
Shift.ms is a Leeds based online global health community for people recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis with outstanding worldwide reach. This project will examine the impact of new forms of digital health peer- support groups like Shift.ms in society. It will support Shift.ms and similar national organisations to improve their self-evaluation skills and in doing so, increase their reach and support, becoming more responsive to user needs. An interdisciplinary team of academics including health economists, social scientists and methodologists will work in this innovative and contemporary project to develop the evidence-based around a key topic- online health communities- that can have direct impact in young people living with a chronic illness.
There are important gaps in evidence about what online health communities do, how they do it and why. All those questions will be explored in this study. This will generate societal impact by supporting the project partner and similar third sector organisations to engage with various evaluation methodologies to assess user impact. It will also have the potential to generate economic impact by designing a sophisticated and context specific “Self-evaluation toolkit” for online health communities that could be accessed worldwide.
This toolkit lays out a set of principles that can be applied to evaluate digital technologies often used by health communities. It is also a summary of Shift.ms’ learning from evaluation projects either self-initiated or conducted in partnership with academics and external evaluators. You can access the PDF here: Shift.ms Toolkit
Dr Ana Manzano can be contacted by email: firstname.lastname@example.org

domain: medical


text:
Mirror from LifesiteNew Fri Sep 22, 2017 – 9:44 am EST
Response by School District article follows.
More than 40 families pull children from school that forced transgender lesson on 5-year-olds
ROCKLIN, California, September 22, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Forty-one families have pulled 73 children from the elite Sacramento-area Rocklin Academy charter schools as the board continues to defend a kindergarten transgender lesson several parents say traumatized their 5-year-olds and that parents weren’t told about beforehand.
A mother who pulled her son from Grade 6 and daughter from Grade 3 at Rocklin Academy Gateway, where the incident took place, has kept a tally of parents who’ve done likewise.
“It was just the tipping point for most families,” the parent, who asked her name not be published, told LifeSiteNews.
Some parents pulled their kids “solely for this,” while other had “multiple reasons, but yes, this was part of everyone’s reason,” she said.
The controversy erupted after a lesson in which the boy appeared in girl’s clothes and was reintroduced to his kindergarten classmates as a girl.
Teacher Kaelin Swaney also read the pro-transgender “I am Jazz” during the lesson, which took place just before summer vacation.
A number of parents are upset because they weren’t told about the lesson that has left their children disturbed and afraid they, too, will “change” into the opposite sex.
Moreover, it’s still not clear what happened in the classroom because Swaney and the board refused to tell parents, and the board’s account differs from what a number of parents say their five-year-olds told them, the parent told LifeSiteNews.
What appear to be “inaccuracies” in the board’s accounts “make us feel betrayed as parents,” she said.
The board and administration “didn’t talk to the parents of the children in the class to get the story.”
The Rocklin Academy school board countered that it didn’t have to tell parents about lessons on gender identity because it wasn’t sex education. California law requires parental notification and allows opt out for sex education.
Moreover, the board claims not affirming the five-year-old boy’s transition to a “girl” will leave it open to lawsuits because California bans discrimination based on gender identity and expression.
On Monday, the five-member board unanimously rejected a “model parent proposal” to allow opt-out for lessons on gender identity and parental review of sensitive material before it hits the classroom.
The board did approve a policy directing teachers to try to let parents know beforehand that sensitive material would be taught, but the measure is “really weak” according to Greg Burt of the California Family Council.
Moreover, at “every board meeting, the administration seemed very adversarial to the parents,” according to the parent who spoke to LifeSiteNews.
But the August 21 meeting was the deal-breaker for her.
That’s when a number of teachers defended Swaney, she said.
“They were saying, ‘your kids will surprise you, they’re so accepting and loving, this is a great topic for kindergarteners to learn.’ … They were there to tell us parents to get out of the way,” she said.
“I did not feel safe sending my kids to school after that meeting,” the parent added.
“It’s a very tense atmosphere over there right now. It’s very like, which side are you on,” she said. “You don’t know who to trust, you don’t know who’s looking at you the wrong way.”
And with the board voting Monday to continue enforcing transgender ideology, more parents will be leaving, Burt predicted.
That’s echoed by Karen England, executive director of parents’ rights group Capitol Resource Institute, which authored the parent proposal the board rejected Monday.
“Several families are waiting until the end of the week” to pull their children out, she told LifeSiteNews in an email.
Elizabeth Ashford, a spokesperson for Rocklin Academy Family of Schools, agreed that more families will leave, “which is really a shame,” she told NBC-affiliate KCRA3 TV.
Ashford said 14 families and 23 kids have left over the controversy.
LifeSiteNews called Ashford at the public relations firm Fiona Hutton & Associates to confirm this figure, but she did not respond by deadline.
Many families might not have given the reason for their departure, suggested the parent who spoke to LifeSiteNews anonymously.
When the school emailed her to confirm her son’s leaving, it listed “moved during school year” as the reason.
The schools reportedly have a waiting list of 1,300, but a friend whose child was 110 on the list for a specific grade at the beginning of this year refused a spot the other day, she said.
“So that means they called 110 people before they called her, and they all turned the spot down,” the parent said.
The parent wanted to make it clear that those who left or are leaving Rocklin Academy Gateway are “not saying anything hateful or bigoted” regarding the transgender student.
“In fact, [many] of us have cried over this poor child because we feel for him. I don’t think he’s in a great situation.”
But the “board didn’t show any concern for the families or any respect for parents and our rights for our children,” she added.
“Many, many families are trying to figure out what to do with their kids,” she added. “Parents are saying they’ll homeschool if they have to.”
California school board won’t let kids opt out of transgender lessons
Kindergarten celebrates 5-year-old transgender ‘transition;’ kids traumatized
School gives transgender lesson to 5-year-olds, refuses to give details to parents
Pediatric expert calls kindergarten transgender lesson ‘psychological abuse’
And they say Christian home schoolers are anti-science?!
Now, in the California charter school district of Rocklin, parents will not be notified or allowed to opt-out of lessons about transgenderism.
Let that sink in: schools in this district are now teaching little boys and little girls the outright lie that gender is interchangeable. No doubt this school would scoff at the idea of teaching Biblical creation because “science”, and yet they insist on teaching something so blatantly contrary to basic biology that even a small child could tell you is wrong.
Of course, if a small child in this district uses the pronoun aligned with another child’s biological gender when everyone is pretending the other child is really a girl, they are punished. (This actually happened in this school district, by the way.)
It all started at the end of last school year when a kindergarten teacher took it upon herself to hold a “transition ceremony” for a five-year-old whose parents had apparently led to believe he was a she.
The parents of the other students were not informed that this lesson would take place, and some children were so traumatized to see the little boy emerge from the bathroom dressed like a girl, that they went home crying worried they’d turn into the opposite sex as well.
Because they are five.
Now the Rocklin Academy School board has ruled to not allow parents to opt-out of these lessons following a heated school board hearing attended by parents and agenda-driven LGBTQ activists who didn’t even have children in the school district.
The board had gathered to decide on a “model parental rights” proposal that the parents’ rights group Capitol Resource Institute had put forth. The proposal was also backed by the California Family Council, Pacific Justice Institute, and Alliance Defending Freedom.
The Rocklin Academy School board is claiming that because gender supposedly has nothing to do with sex, it would technically be “illegal” and “discriminatory if [it] notified parents ahead of time or had an opt out for issues of gender identity,” Greg Burt of the California Family Council told LifeSiteNews.
“To teach my kid that biologically this boy was born a boy and to teach him that now he’s a girl is very confusing and I feel that it’s a lie,” another parent told local Fox40 News.
The is because it is a lie to teach children that gender is separate from sex and that anyone can simply change their gender at will. It is also, however, abusive, according to pediatric experts.
But defenders of parents’ rights are not giving up despite the school board ruling.
“A lot of parents were holding out to see what the school board would do, hoping that they would respond positively,” Burt says. “Now that they haven’t … I think you’re going to have a much bigger reaction. But we’ll see.”
“We’re not giving up,” he continued. “We knew it would be a long haul, and that initially, they would reject our suggestions, but this is not the end of it.”
Hopefully, this will wake parents up everywhere to the dangers of the public school system.

domain: news


text:
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domain: artistic


Hot DamReading Time: 7 minutes
I Have a Radical Proposal to Make New York a Better Place to Live, A radical, beaver-filled idea to improve city parks., How beavers can help make parks more diverse.
Imagine a New York City brimming with life. A city where bullfrogs sing in marshes, where otters and muskrats frolic along the waterfront, and where kingfishers perform aerial acrobatics into ponds thick with fish.
This may seem like a distant dream. But what if I told you that New York could take a meaningful step toward this urban paradise with a little help from a humble rodent?
I’m talking, of course, about beavers.
Unlike the brown rats that terrorize the city, beavers are native to North America and a key part of New York City’s history and ecology. And while you may think that a concrete jungle is not the right place for an animal that clogs up streams with dams, I’m here to tell you that restoring a population of urban beavers could help bring New York City—and, perhaps, other cities like it—into a more prosperous, ecological future.
My yearning for a New York City beaver began in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, my local green space, and a 526-acre landlocked patch of lawns, forests, and waterways in the center of the borough. Although most of the park fills up daily with birthday parties, off-leash dogs, and brass bands, it’s also home to a network of shady glens, murmuring creeks, and still ponds.
Despite the almost wildernesslike quality of these hidden woodlands—and to my endless disappointment—the park is devoid of much wildlife larger than a rabbit or a raccoon. (There are also swans, which are an invasive species and can be very territorial.) That’s mostly for good reason; this mosaic of habitat likely isn’t big enough to host something as big as a deer or a fox, which would probably come into conflict with the aforementioned birthday parties, dogs, and brass bands.
But beavers, I realized one day, are not particularly large—and they prefer to stay in the water, away from dogs and small children. The question was: Would it be possible to introduce a small population of these semiaquatic rodents somewhere like Prospect Park?
‘Oh, I think it’s possible. I totally do,’ Benjamin Dittbrenner, a beaver expert at Northeastern University, told me.
Beavers can live in a relatively small area, Dittbrenner said, as long as there’s enough food and water. Prospect Park has plenty of water in its creeks, ponds, and lake—and those waterways are full of potential beaver food like pondweed. Beavers will also gnaw down trees along the water to open up space and stimulate the growth of the shrubby vegetation they love to eat, Dittbrenner said.
Some parkgoers, of course, might throw a fit over the potential for beavers to dam up waterways. But the lake in Prospect Park is more than 50 acres wide and 7 feet deep—and with big-enough lakes, beavers often won’t go through the trouble of building a dam, opting to build their lodges on the existing body of water, Emily Fairfax, a beaver expert at California State University Channel Islands, told me. Beavers don’t seem to be particularly picky with their choice of habitat either. ‘They’re building in stormwater drainage impoundments and roadside ditches, and just really crazy spots,’ Dittbrenner told me.
That’s not to say bringing beavers to the big city would be easy.
In a place like Prospect Park, if a beaver were to dam up a creek, those creeks could flood, submerging nearby trails and amenities. Plus, the beavers would go to town on some of the park’s trees.
But these problems are manageable. To start, beavers don’t like to move very far over land, Fairfax said, meaning that only the trees closest to water would be at risk for gnawing—and the city could wrap fences around more important trees. The park could also plant some of the beavers’ preferred species, like willows, to supplement their food options, Dittbrenner suggested.
When it comes to flooding, as dedicated to hydrological interference as beavers are, humans are also pretty crafty. ‘Beavers: amazing engineers. People: also amazing engineers,’ Fairfax said.
We’ve invented various ways of outsmarting beavers with contraptions like ‘pond levelers,’ which drain water out of beaver ponds and limit flood potential. When trails do flood, the park can build signs to help people understand why the trails are flooding—Fairfax noted that ongoing environmental education is important for any urban beaver population. And when in doubt, the city could always build a boardwalk to help parkgoers cross over newly muddy patches. ‘People love boardwalks,’ Fairfax said.
Then there’s the question of population control. Beavers are social animals, Dittbrenner said, so you’d want to have more than one. But if you stick a male and a female beaver in the same park, you’ll end up with a new crop of baby beavers soon enough—and beaver children setting off into the big city could spell trouble.
So instead of introducing a family of beavers to Prospect Park, perhaps we could take the Jurassic Park approach and introduce an all-female group of beavers. Fairfax noted that in a completely single-sex environment, the beavers might try to leave the park to find a mate, but she also suggested that maybe Prospect Park could become a rehabilitation site where injured beavers would heal before being relocated elsewhere.
Speaking of injuries, if you’ve ever seen beavers’ impressive orange incisors, you might feel … nervous about releasing those iron-fortified teeth into the streets of New York. But although beavers have occasionally been recorded attacking humans and could bite a curious dog, they are unlikely to do so unless they feel threatened or are being actively harassed (or, in rare instances, are infected with rabies), Fairfax told me in an email. She added that people can keep their dogs under control to prevent any conflicts—and that ‘you don’t need to be an athlete to outrun a beaver on land.’
Dittbrenner also said via email that beavers sometimes get a bad rap for spreading the digestive parasite Giardia—but plenty of animals (including humans) can spread Giardia, and the parasite may already be in many urban parks. (If you regularly drink water straight from the pond in a public park, maybe consider not doing that.)
OK, so, if you’ve made it this far: We’ve got tree gnashing, potential flooding, and a small but nonzero chance of bites and disease—which may seem like a lot of trouble for a couple of beavers. But after immersing myself in the beaver literature, I’m convinced this mission is well worth the hassle.
To start: By engineering their ecosystems, beavers create wetlands and build habitat for other animals, including ducks, herons, amphibians, and fish—which could help to turn New York City into the kind of biodiverse oasis I described above. If you frequent the park, you’ve spotted some of these animals already; it could be positively brimming with them. Dam-building can also help decrease erosion, improve water quality, and even reduce flood risk during storms.
Then there’s the fact that beavers are an important part of New York history. The local beaver population was a major reason the Dutch settled around the harbor in the 1600s. (The Dutch slaughtered beavers for their fur, but we could choose to leave that part of 1600s New York in the past.) The beavers’ significance to New York is still memorialized in the two beavers adorning the city’s flag.
Beavers can also bring a lot of joy to a community. In 2006, beavers moved into Alhambra Creek, which runs right through downtown Martinez, California. Initially, the city wanted to kill the animals because of flooding concerns, but many Martinez residents quickly protested the removal plan. This was partly because of local political quarrels, Heidi Perryman, a Martinez local and beaver advocate, told me—but at a 2007 City Council meeting to discuss the beavers’ fate, many locals also expressed their appreciation for the animals.
‘I mean, these were beavers right in the middle of town,’ Perryman said. ‘So you could go to Starbucks, get your morning latte, and stroll on onto the patio, and you could watch beavers—beaver kits, actually—playing in the water.’
Eventually, the city installed a device to prevent the creek from flooding and wrapped some of the trees to prevent gnawing. The beavers, meanwhile, got to work transforming Alhambra Creek into a lush, vegetated habitat filled with animals like otters and green herons. Even though the beavers moved away from Martinez a few years ago, the city still hosts an annual Beaver Festival.
Although supporting beavers in New York City is more complicated, these animals are already knocking on our doors. The first beaver to live in the city in more than 200 years—named José—moved into the Bronx River in 2007, and lived there until 2018. For a few years, José was even joined by a second beaver, named Justin. (Justin … Beaver.) Beavers also live on Staten Island, and last year, a beaver was spotted at Domino Park along the East River in Brooklyn.
Letting beavers permanently colonize denser parts of the city—and asking New Yorkers to live in peace with a large rodent—would definitely come with growing pains. But maybe those growing pains are the point. Spaces like Prospect and Central parks were designed in the 19th century by Frederick Law Olmsted, whose landscaping philosophy was not so much to foster nature as to mimic it. The landscapes in each park are not holdovers from a pre-urbanized New York City, but rather carefully curated gardens designed as a facsimile of the ecosystem—a way for people to pantomime a wilderness experience without risking contact with any of the entropy that defines real wilderness.
What if, instead of trying to manage around our local ecosystems, we let our ecosystems manage us for a change? What if we let some beavers chop down a few trees, creating little glades of open sky next to our ponds? What if we embraced some flooding around our parks as biodiverse wetlands and vernal pools replaced sterile, trimmed lawns? What if, as Fairfax suggested, we reconnected Prospect Park to New York harbor by digging a canal through Brooklyn toward the East River or the bay?
Four hundred years ago, beavers covered New York City, building dams and engineering wetlands that shaped and nourished the local ecosystem. In our own efforts to manipulate and control nature, we’ve driven countless species toward extinction and pushed the world into climate crisis. Beavers are, in Dittbrenner’s words, ‘chaos-makers.’ But maybe it’s time to stop separating ourselves from the chaos that is ecology, and instead embrace something disorderly, bold, and revolutionary—something, dare I say, bucktoothed.
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Two Penza teenagers jailed for trying to sell drugs
Penza, 15 May 2015. PenzaNews. Two Penza teenagers, 17 will spend 3.5 and 2.5 years in a penal colony respectively after they were detained during an attempt to sell a batch of “spice” synthetic drug.
“The court and the investigation found that one of the teenagers agreed with an unknown person online to work as a drug stash refiller in January 2015, trying to earn big money from this illegal activity. Afterwards, he received a message that pointed at a location of a large batch of over 51 grams of ‘spice’ and 17 grams of ‘speed.’ He took the drugs and offered his friend, 17, to help him in distributing,” Lyudmila Fomina, Senior Assistant of the Head of the Investigative Department of the city Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, informed PenzaNews agency.
The jailed teenagers managed to successfully refill five secret stashes of “spice” in various areas of Penza city.
“They failed to complete their task, as they were detained by the Penza Federal Drug Control Service officers,” the speaker explained.

domain: law


If you’ve ever seen herding dogs, like an Australian Shepherd or Border Collie, compete in agility competitions, you know how remarkably athletic they can be. That comes from a combination of natural evolution and intentional breeding as working dogs. But that kind of agility is difficult to replicate artificially in robotics — mostly for mechanical reasons. That’s why a team from the Stanford Student Robotics Club’s Extreme Mobility team used clever programming to make their Doggo robot perform more like a real dog.
Animals have evolved over millions of years to adapt to their environments. Dogs in particular are unique, because they were the first animal to be domesticated — a process that occurred sometime between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago. Their agility comes from their muscular and skeletal structure, which combines power with fast-twitch muscles, while ligaments, tendons, and bones are able to absorb shocks with ease. Those kinds of biological systems are extremely complex, and difficult to construct using artificial materials like metal and rubber.
Instead of even trying to recreate that biology mechanically, the Stanford team turned to sophisticated programming. The Doggo robot is mostly rigid, and each of its four legs are four-bar linkages driven by belt pulleys. When a real dog jumps up to grab a Frisbee and then lands, the muscles and tendons in its legs act like springs to absorb the shock. Doggo takes a different approach. It’s sensors and motor controller are updated 8,000 times per second, and perform like virtual springs by turning at the appropriate rate to allow the robot to land smoothly. Because those motors are powerful and Doggo is lightweight, it can even perform acrobatic feats like back flips.


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Les Peupliers, is a large family friendly 3 bed detached stone cottage. On the ground floor there is a large kitchen and breakfast bar, a dining area which can seat 8, and a large fully furnished living room. Upstairs we have two bedrooms and a mezzanine bedroom. There is a family bathroom, utility room and games area. There are two toilets on different floors. Outside we have a large garden patio and BBQ.The cottage is located near to Josselin in rural South Brittany.This classic Breton gite sleeps up to 10 and is available for rental all year round. It comes fully equipped with everything you need for a comfortable and entertaining family holiday. The nearest beach at Lac au Duc is 15 mins by car. The superb beaches of the Golfe du Morbihan are a short drive away. We offer cycling packages from our stock of ten well maintained bikes. The area is excellent for cycling. There are many excellent local golf courses in pleasant surroundings. There are many lovely chateaux to visit. Lots to see and do!The cottage has been sympathetically restored preserving various original features. Interior stone walls and wooden beams. There are two wood burning stoves.See what this amazing region has to offer by looking at the website picture galleries on the following pages. SPECIAL OFFERS - reductions available for two week bookings. Les Peupliers is situated in Morbihan, the warmest departement of Brittany. The cottage is close to Josselin, famous for its impressive chateau by the river. Many secluded sandy beaches within easy reach.The owners have fitted out the cottage with the needs of families in mind.
Discounts on remaining two week holidays
|Size||Sleeps up to 6, 3 bedrooms|
|Rooms||3 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms of which 1 family bathroom, 1 en suite, 1 shower room and 1 toilet only|
|Check in time:||15:00|
|Check out time:||10:00|
|Nearest beach||Lac au Duc 25 km|
|Will consider||House swap|
|Nearest Amenities||3 km|
|Nearest travel links||Nearest airport: Dinard 80 km, Nearest railway: Vannes 30 km|
|Family friendly||Great for children of all ages|
|Notes||No pets allowed, No smoking at this property|
|Luxuries||Fireplace, Internet access, DVD player|
|General||Central heating, TV, Video player, CD player, Pool or snooker table, Table tennis, Games room, Satellite TV, Wi-Fi available|
|Standard||Kettle, Toaster, Iron, Hair dryer|
|Utilities||Clothes dryer, Dishwasher, Cooker, Microwave, Fridge, Freezer, Washing machine|
|Furniture||Double Beds (3), Single Beds (4), Cots available (1), Dining seats for 10, Lounge seats for 10|
|Other||Linen provided, Towels provided, High chair available|
|Outdoors||Private garden, BBQ, Bicycles available, Swing set|
|Access||Parking, Suitable for people with restricted mobility, Not suitable for wheelchair users|
Les Peupliers is situated in Morbihan, the southernmost departement of Brittany. The cottage is close to Josselin, famous for its fairytale chateau overlooking the river. There are many secluded sandy beaches within easy reach. The area is ideal for cycling and we have a stock of 10 bikes which are available for use. There are a number of excellent golf courses in the vicinity. Les Peupliers been sympathetically restored, carefully preserving its special features. The floors are of ceramic tiles whilst the ceilings are constructed of wood beams which have been left exposed throughout. Rooms on the ground floor have wood burning fires, and electric heating is also available. The gite has been equipped especially to suit the needs of families with young children.
The gite is situated in a quiet hamlet. In the village you will find the local baker, butcher, bars, post office, restaurant, and church. In Josselin there are supermarkets, branches of leading banks, shops, and an excellent selection of restaurants and bars. There is also a large traditional market in the town most Saturday mornings throughout the year.The Morbihan area is one of rolling wooded countryside rich in flora and fauna including deer and red squirrels. There are chateaux to visit and the historic walled city of Vannes is a 20 minute drive away. There are beautiful beaches at Lac au Duc, Carnac and along the Quiberon Peninsula within easy reach as is the Presquile de Rhys and other attractive beaches at Sarzeau, Damgan, and St. Gildas. The popular resort of La Baule is about an hour away. There are also many interesting sites as evidence of the area's rich Celtic heritage. The area is ideal for cycling ( we are able to provide inexpensive bike hire ) and walking.

domain: travel


New Scotland manager Gordon Strachan believes the national team should emulate Germany if they are to become an international threat.
Making particular reference to current German coach Joachin Low’s methods, Strachan continued: “I think German football is terrific. They play three up front, but it’s three strikers. When we try it, it’s a winger who never scores or a midfielder on the other side who doesn’t have a clue about coming inside or whatever.” The former Celtic also made reference to Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, saying United’s methods are “all about winning.”
Scotland are struggling in their World Cup qualifying group, currently bottom of Group A and without a win in their opening four games, having scored just two goals. The last major tournament the Scots qualified for was the 1998 World Cup. Germanay, on the other hand, are cruising in Group E, top of the group and undefeated through four games.
While Strachan would ultimately like to see his team emulate the European powerhouse, he is also aware things cannot happen overnight. Strachan said: “The Germans do it brilliantly. I’ve studied them. But we haven’t developed players to do that. They don’t have a sitting midfield player, they have [Mesut] Ozil who goes in a channel. That’s the perfect way of playing football but you need these players who allow you to do it.”
See what the expert tipsters are tipping on OLBG


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Celebrations Wine Club Review – Valentines Day Offer
One of our favorite wine clubs is the Celebrations Wine Club. We rank them #2 on on our Top 10 Italian Wine Clubs list and in the top 10 on our California Wine Clubs list. The wines they find and deliver are awesome! We especially like that the owner of this wine club personally finds each and every one of the wines she sends out.
If you’re not already member, then you probably don’t get their email updates. Thus, here’s the latest news from the Celebrations Wine Club:
Make Valentine’s Day memorable with a gift membership to Celebrations Wine Club. You can order just one package for the occasion. Or you can send a series of packages and create a mini Valentine’s Day once a month for as long as you like.
This Month from California
In December 2019, Coombsville became the 16th and newest American Viticulture Area (AVA) in Napa County. About 25 small wineries occupy the appellation, and the oldest is Tulocay Winery, owned by Napa’s master of sardonic wit, Bill Cadman. ‘You can always tell when people are from Napa Valley,’ he says, ‘because the back left shoulder of their jackets is worn thin from constantly patting themselves on the back.’ Bill is not a back-patter, he is enormously proud of the delicious wines that we’re featuring this month. We’ve chosen the Tulocay 2019 Chardonnay and the 2019 Syrah, both made from Haynes Vineyard grapes, and the 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon from Rancho Sarco Vineyard, all three from the new Coombsville AVA. The Tulocay 2002 Merlot is made from fruit that was harvested at Sierra Oaks Vineyard in El Dorado County.
This Month from Italy
The three wineries that we’re featuring this month are all farming organically with natural, sustainable methods. Sassotondo is located in the Maremma zone and is credited with restoring the reputation of ancient Ciliegiolo, thought to have arrived from Spain. We’ve chosen the Sassotondo 2010 Tuforosso, the 2019 Ciliegiolo Rosso, and the 2019 Ciliegiolo Riserva San Lorenzo. Le Fonti is located in the Chianti Classico zone, a tiny 24-hectare estate that claimed Gambero Rosso’s most prestigious Tre Bicchierri award for two of its current vintages, one of which is included in this month’s shipment, the Le Fonti 2006 Fontissimo. We’re also sending the Le Fonti 2008 Chianti Classico. Our lone white wine choice for this month comes from across the Tuscan border in Le Marche. Ciu’Ciu’ cultivates the traditional grapes of the zone, especially the red Rosso Piceno and the whites Passerina, Pecorino, and Trebbiano. We’ve chosen the Ciu’Ciu’ 2010 Evoe’ Passerina Offida.
We invite you to become a regular member and receive our two-bottle packages, ranging from $34 to $112. Or give a gift membership for any number of months, including one. Learn more about the Celebrations Wine Club today.

domain: hobby


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Art. Education. Technology.
Hey Art GuyThanks for the fun video. You made me laugh here in Massachusetts and I appreciate that (for what it is worth).KevinPS -- I will try an audio comment, too. Video ... some other time.
Woohoo! I was hopeful that my strange brand of humor would make someone out there smile. :)Also, I think that's the shortest amount of time I've ever had between posting something here and getting a response. Congrats! :D
Aaron...Just as funny as I remember from meeting you in Silver Spring last summer. Thanks for the laugh...enjoyed it!! I'm hoping that Steve cringes that you are 'bringing it on!'
Aaron,Great video! I just discovered your site and am looking forward to reading? hearing? watching? your observations in the future. Keep up the good work, the site looks greatBrian Grenierhttp://bumpontheblog.etowns.net
Thanks guys - the positive comments are much appreciated, and I'll try to not let them go to my head.
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Highlights of Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons
Highlights of Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons
By David Albright with Sarah Burkhard and the Good ISIS Team
August 24, 2021
Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons chronicles the Islamic Republic of Iran’s effort to acquire nuclear weapons. It started slowly, building to a crash nuclear weapons program in the early 2000s to create five nuclear weapons and an industrial complex to produce many more. Under international pressure, fearful of military attack, the program was driven to downsize and deeper secrecy. Nonetheless, Iran remains on the brink of becoming a nuclear weapons power; its nuclear material production capabilities stronger than ever, its weaponization capabilities lurking under the surface.
But just how close did Iran get to nuclear weapons during its crash program and how close is it today? Up until the events of a cold, clear night in January 2018, the world could only guess. In a dramatic nighttime raid, the Israeli Foreign Intelligence Service Mossad broke into a warehouse in Tehran and seized a large cache of documents detailing Iran’s darkest and long-denied secret. The Amad Plan, the codename for its crash nuclear weapons program, was far larger and made much more progress than previously known. Containing many top secret details, the seized documents offer unprecedented insights into Iran’s progress—and the hurdles it faced in building nuclear weapons. With what Iran learned about building nuclear weapons during the Amad Plan, combined with its subsequent accomplishments, the Islamic Republic has developed a sophisticated capability to make nuclear weapons.
It would not take Iran long to build nuclear weapons today. The challenge rests in stopping the Islamic Republic from building them and sparking a regional nuclear arms race. Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons is a valuable resource for discussions and decisions on creating effective ways to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
- Seizure of the Nuclear Archive and its Contents
- The Amad Plan
- Achievements of Amad
- Status of Amad in 2003
- Downsizing but Not Ending Nuclear Weapons Program
- Uranium Enrichment and Fordow
- Mohsen Fakhrizadeh
- Killing of Key Amad Leaders
- Nuclear Weapons Today
- Time to Build or Test Nuclear Weapons
- Iran’s Violations of Its Non-Proliferation Commitments
- Eliminating Iran’s Nuclear Weapons’ Pillars
What’s New in a Nutshell?
Iran had accumulated enough information and experience by the end of the Amad Plan to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device. This device benefited from a relatively compact high explosives initiation system, the shock wave generator, and a specialized neutron initiator. The nuclear weapon design has a diameter roughly the same as a car tire.
By the end of the Amad Plan, Iran was preparing to conduct a cold test of a nuclear explosive, typically the last step before building a prototype nuclear explosive and then making nuclear weapons.
About half of the facilities in the Amad Plan were undiscovered or unknown until after the seizure of the Iranian Nuclear Archive in 2018.
Iran decided under the Amad Plan that it would use low-enriched uranium from Natanz for further enrichment to weapon grade uranium at what is now known as the Fordow site.
Iran’s decision to halt the Amad Plan merely served as a tactical retreat, not an abandonment of its nuclear weapons ambitions or activities, a step taken earlier by other countries, notably Taiwan and South Africa.
A major part of the halt was a series of “intensive meetings” over eight days in August and September 2003. The meetings were dominated by carrying out official orders to downsize and not build nuclear weapons but preserve the assets and many of the activities of the Amad Plan.
After the closure of the Amad Plan, other organizations continued work on nuclear weapons. The evidence suggests that Iran not only maintained the capability to produce nuclear weapons, but actively worked on efforts to advance that capability in case Iran’s leaders made a decision to build them.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, from 1998 until his murder in November 2020, was the undisputed leader of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He was the Leslie Groves of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, someone who brought great managerial skills and political clout to the task of shepherding various pieces and talents into a nuclear weapons effort.
Three of the five key leaders of the Amad Plan and post-Amad organizations have died violent deaths. Two others narrowly escaped death.
The post-Amad reorientation strategy shines a new light on controversial Atomic Energy of Iran (AEOI) nuclear activities that followed after 2004, particularly the Fordow enrichment plant, which was originally the Amad Plan’s intended facility to produce weapon-grade uranium and was repurposed to low enriched uranium production after its discovery in 2009. Similarly, recent AEOI uranium metal production activities may be follow-on activities of the Amad Plan.
Unlike in 2003, Iran now has a robust capability to make weapon-grade uranium, a capability that will eventually grow more than ten-fold if the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) limits expire.
Former President Hassan Rouhani was key in deciding to build nuclear weapons in the Amad Plan, reduce it in scope, and cover it up. The current head of the IRGC Aerospace Force, Amir Hajizahdeh, was deeply involved in building Amad’s underground site to make the nuclear cores of nuclear weapons, weapons small enough to fit on several of Iran’s ballistic missiles.
Iran has a long history of hiding nuclear weapons activities and assets.
An unanswered question is whether Iran has conducted a cold test or built a nuclear weapon prototype, as called for by Fakhrizadeh in 2003. Based on the available information and residual Amad Plan capabilities, either or both may have occurred.
The existence and maintenance of a secret archive containing nuclear weapon design and manufacturing data is not compatible with Iran’s legally binding nuclear non-proliferation commitments.
Today, Iran does not appear to have a program focused on the actual building of nuclear weapons. At best, its intentions remain unclear. But it does appear to have a program to be prepared to make nuclear weapons and to do so on short order. Rather than a crash nuclear weapons program, Iran threatens the world with a program ready to produce nuclear weapons “on-demand.”
Today, Iran is closer to being able to build nuclear weapons than it was in 2003.
A reinstated JCPOA, combined with less than vigorous IAEA verification of Iran’s military sites, of the type that existed from 2015 until 2018, appears particularly unstable and dangerous, likely leading to a worsening Middle East security situation, more violence against nuclear sites and personnel, and greater missile and nuclear proliferation.
Seizure of the Nuclear Archive and its Contents
The Mossad’s secret nighttime raid into a warehouse complex in a Tehran neighborhood in early 2018 is one of the most successful seizures of a nation’s secret nuclear weapons information in the nuclear age.
The Iranian Atomic or Nuclear Archive contained previously unavailable data on the “Amad Plan,” Iran’s code name for its crash nuclear weapons program in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The Nuclear Archive contained an immense level of detail about Iran’s Amad Plan: its scope, secret facilities, equipment, personnel, theoretical calculations, results of scores of tests, progress reports, and minutes of meetings involving senior personnel. The files contained designs, charts, blueprints, and many photos of nuclear activities, equipment, and personnel, videos and PowerPoint presentations, all of tremendous value in understanding the Amad Plan. Documents from late 2003 described the subsequent reorientation of Amad Plan into a more clandestine effort. Other files charted Iran’s efforts to deceive the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over several years, with documents that stretch into about 2006. They also show that, at times, Iran knew in advance the inspectors’ questions and the facilities they wanted to visit.
The Amad Plan
The Amad Plan, approved in 1999 or early 2000, was a crash nuclear weapons program—the Islamic Republic of Iran’s dramatic scaling up of its nuclear weapons efforts of the preceding decade and an attempt to dash to the possession of an arsenal of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in four short years. Amad, led by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, fully embraced the three pillars of a nuclear weapon: 1) encompassing the means to make nuclear explosive material, 2) weaponize that material into a warhead or an underground test device, and 3) deliver nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles. The plan aimed to reach its immediate goal of producing five nuclear weapons by early 2004, building four deliverable warheads for the Shahab 3 missile, and another one reserved for testing underground.
To achieve this goal, the program was building a nuclear weapons production complex on a scale of India’s, Pakistan’s, and South Africa’s early nuclear weapons efforts, enabling the ongoing production of many more nuclear weapons in subsequent years.
The program preferred military sites for its own facilities and used existing military industries for many of its needs. Amad ran in parallel to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran’s nuclear programs but also coordinated with them, creating secret channels between the two major programs, connections that likely continue today.
Achievements of Amad
Nuclear Weapons Production Complex
The Amad Plan established and used a variety of facilities necessary for a manufacturing complex to research, develop and manufacture nuclear weapons. The existence of approximately half of these facilities was not known prior to the analysis of archive documents.
The sites discussed in the archive, including their location, include:
- A uranium mine and mill;
- A small-scale uranium conversion plant, with plans to build a production-scale plant;
- Four interrelated facilities, acting as a unit, to develop and test nuclear weapon subcomponents, conducting well over one hundred tests, many involving high explosives in specially designed, easily hidden high explosive chambers, built with the help of a former member of the Soviet nuclear weapons complex;
- Facilities to make the high quality high explosive material needed to detonate a nuclear weapon;
- A small-scale facility to develop and manufacture the weapon-grade cores of nuclear weapons;
- A tunnel complex for a production-scale facility to manufacture the weapon-grade cores of nuclear weapons;
- A uranium enrichment plant near Qom called the Al Ghadir project, designed to make weapon-grade uranium; and
- A project to establish an underground nuclear test site in a remote part of Iran.
The available Nuclear Archive documents discuss several key facilities, either already in existence during Amad or planned, but do not reveal their physical location:
- Facilities to integrate the nuclear warhead into the re-entry vehicle of a Shahab 3 ballistic missile;
- The nuclear weapon final assembly building;
- The manufacturing site of the neutron source or initiator.
This complex employed hundreds of specialized personnel and established secret links to several technical universities.
Figure 1 describes the role of these sites in making Iranian nuclear weapons.
Figure 1. Pathway to Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear Weapon Design
By the end of 2003, the Amad Plan had arrived at a final, rather mature, design for a warhead – one that was 55 centimeters in diameter and required less than 25 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium. The diameter was small enough for the warhead to fit inside the nose cone of the re-entry vehicle of the Shahab 3 ballistic missile. Figure 2 shows a schematic of this design from the archive.
Iran’s design for nuclear weapons rested on a levitated nuclear core arrangement with miniaturization relying upon an innovative “shock wave generator” and uranium deuteride neutron initiator, called a neutron source in the archive documents.
Figure 2. A schematic, and translation, of a levitated nuclear weapon design, e.g. one with an air gap and flyer plate to increase compression of the core, based on the use of weapon-grade uranium. Schematic from the Nuclear Archive; translation by the Institute.
Thinking long term, Iran created robust nuclear weapons design capabilities, based on extensive theoretical and experimental work, developing many innovations that aided miniaturization and reduced the need to replenish key limited life nuclear components. This design was not a copy, but the product of a sophisticated nuclear weapons team, backed by sophisticated computer codes, and able to make further refinements to the design, including additional miniaturization or more powerful nuclear weapons.
By the end of the Amad program, Iran was preparing to conduct a cold test of a nuclear explosive, the final step before assembling a prototype of a nuclear weapon, which in turn is the last step before building them.
The inescapable conclusion is that Iran had accumulated enough information and experience by the end of the Amad Plan to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device. This device benefited from a relatively compact high explosives initiation system, the shock wave generator, and a specialized neutron initiator of the fission chain reaction made from uranium and deuterium.
Status of Amad in 2003
While Iran learned how to build nuclear weapons, there were several steps to accomplish before their actual construction. The biggest constraint was that Iran did not yet have a means to make weapon-grade uranium by the time of the Amad Plan’s closure in 2003. Excluding this issue, the available documents in the archive further answer the question of why the Amad Plan could not yet build nuclear weapons in late 2003. The program faced organizational issues, slowing progress. It may have encountered resource limitations. It also had more technical work to do, in particular conducting a cold test, wrapping up some theoretical work, finishing its neutron initiator, and producing the nuclear weapon prototype. Its work on integrating a warhead into a ballistic missile was also incomplete. These were significant challenges, but Iran did not stop working on overcoming them after 2003. However, none of the problems seemed insurmountable—there is no evidence that these tasks were not implemented in subsequent years by Amad’s successor organizations.
Downsizing but Not Ending the Nuclear Weapons Program
In the fall 2002, the news broke that Iran was secretly building nuclear sites at Natanz and Arak, raising concern that Iran was building nuclear weapons. However, many, if not most, of the activities and facilities in the Amad Plan were undetected.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 evidently caused serious consternation with Iranian leadership. U.S. forces were already in Afghanistan, following the 2001 invasion to overthrow the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda. If seeking nuclear weapons could justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iran had a lot to worry about. By the end of 2003, international pressure and fears of military strikes worked to dissuade Iran from proceeding to construct nuclear weapons.
However, that did not mean that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program. The regime’s concern led to a series of actions, aimed at defusing the situation without revealing the Amad facilities while laying the groundwork for further advances in its nuclear weapons program.
Iran’s downsizing decision merely served as a tactical retreat, not an abandonment of its nuclear weapons ambitions, a step taken earlier by other countries, notably Taiwan and South Africa. By late summer 2003, the Amad Plan had entered a period where its senior leaders had to make decisions about reducing the scale of the program and better hiding it, while still making progress on building nuclear weapons, if a decision were made to resume the crash effort.
The beginning of this shift is captured in a series of notes by the Amad Plan Technical Committee, which held a series of “intensive meetings” over eight days in August and September 2003. The meetings were dominated by carrying out official orders to downsize but preserve the assets and activities of the Amad Plan. Discussions were multi-faceted, encompassing goals of better camouflaging their remaining activities, preserving the number of project personnel, and maintaining a capability to build nuclear weapons, in order to someday finish building them.
A document in the archive that summarizes a discussion among senior Amad leaders, outlines several organizational issues facing the nuclear weaponization pillar in the fall of 2003. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh reminded the meeting participants that they wanted to “produce a product with the title Saqib-1,” the fundamental nuclear explosive. He emphasized that the “main goal is to make an industrial prototype,” signifying Iran’s post-Amad commitment to building a nuclear weapon prototype.
A 69-page Iranian document from late 2003 outlines in detail the changes in the nuclear weaponization project that resulted from the meetings and the Defense Minister’s new measures concerning Amad. According to the document, “The work is divided into two parts: non-contaminated and contaminated work. In the contaminated part, which is intended to be done after the non-contaminated work, the team’s efforts focus on portability to be safe from espionage activities and to avoid detectable contamination.” The document is an explicit plan laying out how to transform the Amad Plan and carry the redesigned project into the future. Every major component in the nuclear weapon is analyzed and discussed in the context of its place in the future effort.
In late 2003, during Iran’s decision-making process about the future of the Amad Plan, certain projects were viewed as too important to downsize or halt. One would later become known as the Fordow gas centrifuge uranium enrichment project.
Uranium Enrichment and Fordow
The Amad Plan project was creating the capability to make weapon-grade uranium in the Al Ghadir project and was building an enrichment facility near Qom. This project was not known outside of Iran prior to the seizure of the nuclear archive in early 2018.
After the end of the Amad Plan in 2003, Iran continued building this secret site. Western intelligence agencies eventually identified it by early 2009, although they did not learn its original purpose at the time. However, IAEA inspectors who visited the site just after its discovery assessed independently that the plant’s likely purpose was to make weapon-grade uranium. Iran repurposed the site, denied any military purpose, and allowed the IAEA to place it under safeguards. This enrichment plant is now known as the Fordow enrichment plant.
This plant was designed to be a secret, deeply buried site even more protected from military attack than the Natanz site, which was also buried but not under a mountain, making it more vulnerable to aerial destruction.
The Al Ghadir site is relatively small compared to the Natanz facility, limiting its production of weapon-grade uranium. To overcome this problem, Iran decided to link the Al Ghadir and Natanz facilities; the production of weapon-grade uranium would occur in the Al Ghadir plant, but would utilize low enriched uranium from the AEOI’s centrifuge plants. In this way, although the Al Ghadir enrichment plant was to have less than one-tenth the number of centrifuges of Natanz, it would be able to make enough weapon-grade uranium for a small nuclear arsenal.
Another archive document gives the capacity of the Al Ghadir plant as 45 kilograms per year of weapon-grade hexafluoride. This translates to about 30 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium (uranium mass). Assuming 20 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium would be needed per weapon, the plant’s output would be enough to make three nuclear weapons every two years.
Without the AEOI’s aid, the Al Ghadir output may have not been able to produce only 10 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium annually—not enough for one nuclear weapon per year.
Natanz, Fordow, and associated centrifuge manufacturing facilities are now the bulwark of Iran’s nuclear explosive material pillar and contain a formidable breakout capability to produce weapon-grade uranium in short order, with or without the JCPOA. With its sunsets in nuclear enrichment limits, the JCPOA legitimizes the eventual multi-fold expansion of Iran’s nuclear explosive material pillar. Unlike 2003, Iran now has a robust capability to make weapon-grade uranium, a capability that will eventually grow more than ten-fold if JCPOA limits expire.
The archive reveals that Iran’s overarching nuclear ambitions did not change with the halt to the Amad Plan, only that some elements of the plan were altered and the timeframe was extended. The post-Amad goals are among the most critical revelations of the archive. They provide logic and context regarding the questions of why some facilities were still constructed, others were kept in standby mode, yet others were never finished. They provide context for controversial, publicly declared nuclear facilities and controversial non-nuclear military activities that followed the Amad Plan. Today, we know only that Iran did not achieve its original goal under the Amad Plan to build five nuclear weapons. There is no evidence that Iran did not make significant progress or achieve its post-Amad goals.
After the closure of the Amad Plan, other organizations continued work on nuclear weapons. They all possessed capabilities in nuclear weaponization, and were all headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and staffed by many Amad personnel. The evidence suggests that Iran not only maintained the capability to produce nuclear weapons, but actively worked on efforts to advance that capability in case Iran’s leaders made a decision to build them.
The Nuclear Archive documentation supports the European and Israeli assessments that the nuclear weapons program continued after 2003, but without the key decision to build nuclear weapons, an important dimension but not the only critical component of a more encompassing definition of a nuclear weapons program, and reminiscent of Taiwan’s nuclear weapons program, whose goal it was to be able to build a nuclear weapon within a few months if needed.
For the last decade, Iran’s nuclear weaponization work has involved the Ministry of Defense’s organization known by its Farsi acronym, SPND. According to a senior European intelligence official, SPND is charged with “developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce nuclear weapons, should Iran choose to do so.” Iran’s nuclear weaponization pillar is part of SNPD’s purview.
The U.S. government first sanctioned SPND in August 2014, calling it an entity “primarily responsible for research in the field of nuclear weapons development,” led by Fakhrizadeh.
According to a March 2019 U.S. Treasury announcement sanctioning SPND organizations, SPND is “engaged in proliferation-sensitive research and experiments on behalf of SPND organizations, which spend millions of dollars each year on a broad spectrum of defense-related projects.”
Continued SPND-related sanctions designations highlight ongoing Western government concerns about Iran’s nuclear weapons-related activities. Iran’s lack of cooperation with the IAEA up until today has increased concerns that a subset of SPND’s activities have remained focused on preserving or carrying forward the activities of the Amad Plan. Without access or meaningful declarations from Iran, and with SPND personnel out of reach to the IAEA, the nature of SPND’s activities have remained a dangerous mystery, engendering near-universal suspicion.
Because of the Nuclear Archive, the Amad Plan’s former personnel are much better known today than before. According to a group of scholars from Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which also received a detailed briefing on the archive from Israeli officials in Tel Aviv, “Israeli officials estimate that about 70 percent of the staff who once worked in Project Amad transferred to SPND.”
SPND has also established itself as a bulwark in Iran’s resistance economy, in turn benefiting from international sanctions.
SPND’s current structure continues to indicate that it is a repository of Iran’s nuclear weaponization capabilities, including high explosives, electronics, metallurgy, materials science, neutronics, nuclear physics, and diagnostics. There are no indications that the post-Amad weaponization strategy has ended, although judging its exact status and scope remains challenging.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was the undisputed leader of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. His killing in late 2020 was a major blow to SPND and Iran’s nuclear weapons readiness. In the short to medium term, his loss may be felt the most during any nuclear breakout to build or test nuclear weapons.
Until his death, much less was known about Fakhrizadeh’s role in creating and expanding the entire indigenous nuclear program of Iran, where he exercised his influence behind a curtain of secrecy. Few, if any, had his breadth of knowledge and experience about Iran’s nuclear weapons efforts. He has often been viewed publicly as the Robert Oppenheimer of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but a more realistic characterization is General Leslie Groves, the leader of the U.S. Manhattan Project who brought great managerial skills and political clout to the task of shepherding various pieces and talents into a nuclear weapons production complex, a test site, and deliverable nuclear weapons.
Regardless of the exact details of Fakhrizadeh’s death, the attack was far more sophisticated than earlier ones that had killed his colleagues. The attack once again demonstrated that an enemy had deeply penetrated Iran, armed with enough intelligence and resources to kill Iran’s most important defense scientist, the father of its nuclear program.
After decades of living in the shadows, Fakhrizadeh was buried as a national hero in one of Iran’s holiest shrines, near his colleague Shahriari’s grave. To Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, who knew him for 33 years and originally hired him at the Ministry of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Fakhrizadeh’s “expertise and everything about him was nuclear.”
Fakhrizadeh led the same department in the Ministry of Defense for 22 years, according to Abbasi-Davani, who was also a senior leader in Amad. Fakhrizadeh started in that position in 1998, when he assumed leadership of the Physics Research Center, and ended at SPND. His organizations’ names changed, but Fakhrizadeh’s role remained the same. Abbasi-Davani put it succinctly, “While Ministers of Defense came and went, Fakhrizadeh remained in the same position.”
Killing of Key Leaders of Amad Plan and Post Amad
Of the five prominent leaders of Amad who also played key roles in Amad’s reorganization and reorientation in late 2003, three have met violent deaths; two others escaped murder attempts. Masoud Alimohammadi, a senior member of the Amad Plan and its successor organizations and a university professor, was killed by a car bomb in 2010 just after leaving his house. Later that year, on November 29, 2010, Majid Shahriari, then listed publicly as a professor at Beheshti University but also a leader of Amad and post-Amad activities, was killed in his car by a limpet mine attached to the vehicle by two motorcyclists. On that same day, Abbasi-Davani narrowly escaped death. After surviving an earlier attempt, Fakhrizadeh was killed in late 2020. Rumors surfaced after Fakhrizadeh’s death in late 2020 that a few weeks earlier there had been an assassination attempt against Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, another key participant in the 2003 key reorganization meetings.
Although not known to have been part of the Amad effort, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a senior Natanz official involved in overseas illegal procurements for Iran’s centrifuge program was killed in 2012.
Nuclear Weapons Today
The Nuclear Archive illuminated the initial methods used by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh to keep critical parts of Iran’s nuclear weapons efforts intact post-Amad. Fakhrizadeh orchestrated a careful parsing of many of Amad’s programs into covert and overt nuclear weapons-related activities, preserving key capabilities and personnel, while seeking progress on all three nuclear weapons pillars: nuclear explosive material, nuclear weaponization, and delivery.
Iran’s nuclear weapons design and development activities have likely oscillated since Amad, both over time and in their level of effort, where some months or years witness increased activities, and others little or no activity. Such a pattern undermines the value of any snapshot of highly classified activities, when a snapshot is ultimately of limited worth in judging the overall status and readiness of Iran to build nuclear weapons.
The Nuclear Archive showed that Iran thinks holistically about building nuclear weapons, sustaining and strengthening each nuclear weapon pillar. In response, assessments of Iran’s nuclear weapons program should look holistically, avoiding narrower assessments such as those limited to determining whether the nuclear weaponization program is developing or building key components. To do otherwise is to increase the risk of missing the forest for the trees.
At a minimum, Iran has a coordinated set of activities related to building a nuclear weapon. At worst, the weaponization team has already conducted a cold test, fulfilled its post-Amad goal of building an industrial prototype, and is regularly practicing and improving their nuclear weaponization craft under various covers or in clandestine locations. It has developed a roadmap and schedule for building them, harnessing all three pillars in order to do so.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program has suffered numerous setbacks and delays, including the premature closure of the Amad Plan, the discovery of the Qom/Fordow enrichment plant, ongoing leaks about nuclear weapons efforts, at times tough IAEA inspections, killings of its key scientists, Stuxnet cyberattacks, increased sanctions against its programs, threats of military strikes, and widespread international opprobrium. Arms control in the shape of nuclear freezes and the JCPOA limited and increased monitoring of its declared fuel cycle activities. Iran’s personnel know they have been, and remain, under intensive surveillance by multiple intelligence agencies and have been targets of espionage, or worse. The nuclear weapons program’s current state is bound to be complex and highly camouflaged.
On the other hand, Iran persisted. Its nuclear weapons capabilities appear far more formidable today, particularly those that support the two more visible nuclear weapons pillars: production of weapon-grade uranium and nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.
Its experience also means that no one should be surprised if more is hidden. Iran has a long history of hiding nuclear weapons activities and assets, such as the Amad Plan, other sensitive nuclear activities such as the Natanz and Fordow enrichment plants, the Nuclear Archive, and Turquz-Abad with its shipping containers filled with nuclear-weapons related equipment and materiel. Against this background, the onus is much more on those who argue that the absence of evidence means that there are no secret nuclear weapons activities or that Iran is not currently engaged in key activities related to the design and development of a nuclear weapon. A far more credible view is that those activities may very well be happening or have been organized and carried out differently than might appear on the surface.
Today, Iran does not appear to have a program focused on the actual building of nuclear weapons. At best, its intentions remain unclear. But it does appear to have a program to be prepared to make nuclear weapons and to do so on short order. Rather than a crash nuclear weapons program, Iran threatens the world with a program ready to produce nuclear weapons “on-demand.”
Time to Build or Test Nuclear Weapons
Debates about Iran building nuclear weapons too often focus on the time needed for Iran to field a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile. Iran is more likely to have an initial goal of conducting an underground test. When states conduct an underground nuclear test, the political and strategic effect is usually profound, even without any clear indication of them having deployed nuclear weapons. In the case of Iran, we would be left to ponder: how many nuclear weapons does Iran have? Where are they? The uncertainty would buy time for Iran to eventually, but inevitably, deploy nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
Despite some unfinished tasks, Iran appears to be ready to build nuclear weapons, if it decided to do so. But how long would it take? It cannot be argued today that Iran is several years from building nuclear weapons. At the end of the Amad Plan in 2003, that was the case. The biggest bottleneck then, the production of weapon-grade uranium, is no longer a bottleneck. Today, Iran may only be months from being able to test a nuclear weapon underground.
Iran is assessed in the book as being able to conduct an underground nuclear test in six to nine months, assuming late 2020 breakout timelines of three to four months, and build deliverable nuclear weapons in a year or two. Much of the work on weaponization would occur in parallel with the production of weapon-grade uranium. These estimates assume that while much of the weaponization work has been accomplished, a few significant tasks remain. However, these remaining tasks could be completed in a matter of several months. Moreover, with enriched uranium stocks at early 2021 levels, a second nuclear device would soon follow the first one.
Iran’s Violations of Its Non-Proliferation Commitments
The existence and maintenance of a secret archive containing nuclear weapon design and manufacturing data is not compatible with Iran’s legally binding nuclear non-proliferation commitments. It is not difficult to see that secretly storing and curating an extensive archive focused on developing and building missile-deliverable nuclear weapons is in violation of Iran’s JCPOA pledge that “under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”
Before Israel’s seizure of a portion of the Nuclear Archive, the fact that Iran was building both a pilot and production-scale plant to develop and make cores of nuclear weapons as part of the Amad project was unknown to the IAEA. These sites have never been inspected, and Iran is not known to have discussed them with the IAEA. By themselves, these activities have made a mockery of Iran’s commitment under the NPT to never build nuclear weapons.
Iran signed the CTBT in 1996, obligating it to refrain from carrying out any nuclear weapons tests. However, the country embarked on a multi-year project to build a nuclear test site, under Project Midan.
The Islamic Republic was building in secret a uranium enrichment plant to make weapon-grade uranium for nuclear weapons. This deeply buried enrichment plant, exposed by Western intelligence in 2009, is now called the Fordow plant and continues to operate under IAEA safeguards. But converting it to weapon-grade uranium production would take only a few weeks.
Based on materials in the archive, the IAEA has so far discovered five locations with undeclared uranium: Lavizan-Shian, Parchin, Marivan, the Tehran Plant, and Turquz Abad. The first four are all Amad facilities; the fifth is suspected to have been a secret site to store equipment and materials of the Amad project in easy-to-move shipping containers. According to the IAEA, Iran’s explanations about undeclared uranium lack technical credibility.
The IAEA reported in late 2015 in its Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues Regarding Iran’s Nuclear Programme, that it had not found additional evidence of nuclear weapons work after 2009; however, in the same report, the IAEA stated that it was also unable to conclude with certainty that the program ended in 2009. It still cannot answer the fundamental question of whether Iran’s nuclear program is a peaceful one or whether Iran continues working on nuclear weapons. The IAEA’s ignorance about Iran’s nuclear weapons efforts reflects Iran’s better camouflaging of its programs, its incessant lying about its nuclear program, and lack of adequate IAEA access to military sites and personnel.
In retrospect, the West deceived itself in thinking that its knowledge of Amad, which was limited, could substitute for Iran’s full cooperation with the IAEA. Instead, this approach turned out to be an illusion playing to Iran’s deceptions, while undermining continued IAEA investigation of Iran’s possible military nuclear work, one of the most effective methods to ensure Iran is not maintaining and building secret nuclear weapons capabilities today.
The AEOI learned that the IAEA’s efforts to establish transparency can be subverted by subjecting clandestine facilities to safeguards after they are discovered, while falsely and fiercely denying any military intent. Iran also learned that simply by agreeing to negotiate with the IAEA over contested access or provision of information, it could diffuse pressure from the Board of Governors – in essence negotiations were rewarded instead of substantive progress. Iran learned to wear down the inspectors and their member state supporters on the Board of Governors.
As in many other cases of Iran’s secret, undeclared nuclear weapons efforts, openness was not consistently demanded. Its successful deception and concealment of activities and facilities allowed Iran to continue its dangerous progress. The world has grown anesthetized to Iran’s cheating, while the risk posed by Iran’s nuclear programs increases dangerously.
The Nuclear Archive has opened a door to press Iran for a complete and honest nuclear declaration and more cooperation with the IAEA’s verification of that declaration, steps key to ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful, any nuclear deal is meaningful, and a robust non-proliferation regime can be established.
Eliminating Iran’s Nuclear Weapons’ Pillars
By detailing so much of Iran’s past crash nuclear weapons program, really for the first time, the Nuclear Archive opens a new way of thinking about Iran’s future pursuit of nuclear weapons. It opens more doors to ensure Iran never builds nuclear weapons.
This book details how Iran’s nuclear weapons program is best understood by considering its three pillars—the means to make nuclear explosive material, weaponize that material into a warhead or an underground test device, and deliver nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles. This approach also provides a way to identify the best methods of stopping it and judge the merits of negotiated outcomes.
Ideally, all three pillars should be verifiably dismantled, or rendered unusable to support nuclear weapons, as was done in Taiwan in the late 1980s. In that case, a denuclearized Taiwan, free to pursue nuclear power reactors, has proven quite stable and productive, despite very real military tensions between Beijing and Taipei. It is also useful to keep in mind a simple lesson of the Taiwan case: what one does not want one’s ally doing, one definitely does not want an enemy doing.
In the case of Iran, the elimination of all three pillars should serve as the guiding vision of any effort to ensure that the country does not build nuclear weapons. While such a vision is undoubtedly hard to accomplish today, requiring a fundamental shift in the regime, it helps lay the basis for a path forward. What are the options? Which pillars are decisive in ensuring nuclear weapons cannot be built? What actions should be avoided so as not to further worsen the situation?
The most straightforward way to dramatically reduce Iran’s prospects of building nuclear weapons is to focus on the nuclear explosive production and nuclear weaponization pillars. The elimination of the delivery system pillar is more difficult to thwart because Iran has so many options for delivering nuclear weapons, ranging from ballistic missiles to cruise missiles to ships. Negotiations should aim to limit ballistic missiles, but it should be recognized that eliminating this pillar in its entirety is impossible.
The other two pillars are more promising. In fact, the path to do so is straightforward and well-trodden. If either pillar were effectively eliminated, Iran would be very hard-pressed to build nuclear weapons.
What if none of the three pillars is eliminated? Is an adequate substitute the weakening of each pillar? This can be done, but the chances of successfully preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons would then be greatly reduced. Certain outcomes should be avoided. A reinstated JCPOA, combined with less than vigorous IAEA verification of Iran’s military sites, appear particularly unstable and dangerous, likely leading to a worsening Middle East security situation and greater missile and nuclear proliferation.
A variety of steps are possible to strengthen the JCPOA’s deficiencies both within the deal and under a new deal, such as guaranteeing a breakout timeline of two years rather than one or extending the sunsets for the nuclear limitations. Section T of the JCPOA, which banned several key nuclear weapons-related activities and capabilities, and subjected certain key dual-use equipment to controls, could be vigorously monitored and enforced. Inspection efforts could be stepped up providing more assurance of the absence of undeclared nuclear activities and facilities, including underground nuclear test sites and work on nuclear-related re-entry vehicles. ICBMs could be banned.
It goes without saying that whatever deal shapes up—and there is no singular diplomatic path to success—this accord should have bipartisan backing in the United States and be able to endure through successive presidential administrations.
To further improve the chances of a successful negotiation, more nations in the Middle East need to be included in the negotiations. The region looks considerably different today than it did in 2015, much more polarized, with Iran on one side and Israel and most of the Arab world on the other. Iran is perceived as a much greater regional security threat, where possession of nuclear weapons capabilities deeply threatens its neighbors. With this new reality, any new Iran nuclear negotiations should include direct input from countries in the Middle East, and any deal must be able to gain their support.
Even without a change of heart by the Islamic Republic’s leadership, the Nuclear Archive has opened a door to press Iran for a complete nuclear declaration and more cooperation with the IAEA’s verification of that declaration, steps important to maintaining a robust non-proliferation regime but also to further disrupting Iran’s ability to develop or make nuclear weapons. The IAEA could accomplish so much more if it received the Board of Governor’s full support, support provided by only a portion of the Board during the last several years. Internationally, as of this writing, Board members have opted more for avoiding conflict than fully supporting the IAEA in receiving speedy access to Iranian sites or credible answers concerning undeclared nuclear materials and activities. With full support, however, the IAEA could greatly increase its chances of finally making progress on ensuring that Iran has no interest in obtaining nuclear weapons.
These partial efforts, while falling short of eliminating a major nuclear weapons pillar, have merit. However, they also contribute to maintaining an unstable situation. They all rest on the threat of the re-imposition or the increase of economic and financial sanctions, with up to three main triggering events: Iran refuses to cooperate on outstanding issues with the IAEA; Iran refuses to fix the nuclear deal; and Iran violates the limits of that deal. To this mix must be added Iran’s shifting views of the meaning of compliance with the JCPOA and its growing commitment to a resistance economy countering sanctions pressure. With this instability, the prospect of addressing all the major nuclear issues remains uncertain.
As a result, negotiators may be left with a mixed, unsatisfactory approach to curbing Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities. The full range of counterproliferation methods to set back Iran’s nuclear program are likely to be kept in play. The Iran situation is so risky and unstable that diplomacy and coercive methods will doubtless continue their uneasy coexistence.


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Still, more can be done to even further reduce the number of babies born with the disease, say pediatric HIV experts at the University of Florida who this week presented their work during the 18th International AIDS conference in Vienna, Austria.
"This is one of those diseases for which we learned how to prevent transmission. We need to make full use of this method and our energies need to be focused on the effort," said lead researcher Dr. Mobeen Rathore, a professor and chief of pediatric infectious diseases and immunology at the University of Florida College of Medicine-Jacksonville, and director of the UF Center for HIV/AIDS Research, Education and Service.
Around the United States, the decreasing number of pediatric infections is a direct result of the advent of powerful anti-HIV therapies in the mid-1990s and the establishment of protocols by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to treat pregnant women who are infected, and their babies.
Increased HIV-testing outreach and education efforts have also paid off. And CDC guidelines for "opt-out" HIV-testing for pregnant women mean testing is a routine part of their care, and women would have to specifically decline it. Rapid testing during labor and delivery gives one last chance to administer therapies that can prevent transmission.
In Florida, the Targeted Outreach for Pregnant Women Act of 1998 was enacted to help improve prenatal care and reduce the number of babies with HIV or prenatal drug exposure.
After New York, Florida has the second highest number of babies born to HIV-positive women. The state began monitoring the number of HIV-exposed babies in 2006. Up to 2008, a total of 2,374 cases of pediatric HIV/AIDS have been reported in Florida. So far this year, just one case has been reported.
"The reduction of mother-to-child HIV transmission is one of the biggest success stories of the HIV epidemic," said Thomas Liberti, chief of the bureau of HIV/AIDS in the Florida Department of Health. "The question is, 'How low can we go?'"
The UF researchers teamed with colleagues in the Florida Department of Health Perinatal Prevention Division to review pediatric HIV data for the period from 2002-09, and found 102 cases.
Despite the many effective measures in place to help prevent HIV-transmission to babies, there are missed opportunities, the researchers found.
Mothers of half of the infected babies tested positive for HIV before becoming pregnant. But some refused or neglected to take the medications that could have kept their babies HIV-free. Some had no prenatal care, and so did not receive available treatments.
Some women were HIV-negative at the start of their pregnancy, but became infected afterward. Others were diagnosed with HIV only after the birth of their babies. Repeat testing during pregnancy and rapid testing during labor and delivery would have alerted health care providers.
The study shows that for some women, the issue might not be a lack of availability of medical services. Mental illness, intravenous drug use and incarceration and other risk factors associated with increased risk of HIV infection affected about one-third of the women who delivered infected babies. Mental health and substance abuse issues often prevent women from taking advantage of medical care or adhering to a treatment regimen prescribed by their physicians.
Finding creative ways to address issues such as the shortage of mental health-care providers will help women and their babies get needed care, the researchers said.
The health department has already begun discussions with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to discuss steps that can be taken to further reduce mother to child HIV transmission.
"Many of our patients have mental health and other life issues, so if we do not address them, the treatment protocol will not be effective," Rathore said. "This is an intervention that has the opportunity to work better."
Czerne M. Reid | EurekAlert!
WAKE-UP provides new treatment option for stroke patients | International study led by UKE
17.05.2018 | Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf
First form of therapy for childhood dementia CLN2 developed
25.04.2018 | Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf
The more electronics steer, accelerate and brake cars, the more important it is to protect them against cyber-attacks. That is why 15 partners from industry and academia will work together over the next three years on new approaches to IT security in self-driving cars. The joint project goes by the name Security For Connected, Autonomous Cars (SecForCARs) and has funding of €7.2 million from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Infineon is leading the project.
Vehicles already offer diverse communication interfaces and more and more automated functions, such as distance and lane-keeping assist systems. At the same...
A research team led by physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has developed molecular nanoswitches that can be toggled between two structurally different states using an applied voltage. They can serve as the basis for a pioneering class of devices that could replace silicon-based components with organic molecules.
The development of new electronic technologies drives the incessant reduction of functional component sizes. In the context of an international collaborative...
At the LASYS 2018, from June 5th to 7th, the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH) will be showcasing processes for the laser material processing of tomorrow in hall 4 at stand 4E75. With blown bomb shells the LZH will present first results of a research project on civil security.
At this year's LASYS, the LZH will exhibit light-based processes such as cutting, welding, ablation and structuring as well as additive manufacturing for...
There are videos on the internet that can make one marvel at technology. For example, a smartphone is casually bent around the arm or a thin-film display is rolled in all directions and with almost every diameter. From the user's point of view, this looks fantastic. From a professional point of view, however, the question arises: Is that already possible?
At Display Week 2018, scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research IAP will be demonstrating today’s technological possibilities and...
So-called quantum many-body scars allow quantum systems to stay out of equilibrium much longer, explaining experiment | Study published in Nature Physics
Recently, researchers from Harvard and MIT succeeded in trapping a record 53 atoms and individually controlling their quantum state, realizing what is called a...
25.05.2018 | Event News
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Posted by Nick Day on 08 Jul 2015
Budget Newsflash – Changes to Non-Domiciled Rules
In his 2015 Summer Budget, the Chancellor has announced changes to the rules that determine an individual’s domicile status. From April 2017 the current permanent non-domicile status will be abolished and any individual who has lived in the UK for 15 of the past 20 years will pay tax on the same basis as other UK citizens.
This is similar to a system that has long been in place for inheritance tax, whereby non-domiciled status cannot be held by a UK resident individual indefinitely, but extending the principle to other taxes will have wide-reaching consequences. Under the current rules it is possible for non-domiciled individuals to limit their exposure to UK taxation indefinitely by paying the remittance basis charge, keeping non-UK income and gains outside of the UK tax system.
It now seems that this will only be possible for a limited period of time. The precise details of this change have not yet been released and it is inevitable that there will be significant clarification forthcoming as to how the new rules will operate in practice.
Keep checking our website for details of this and other measures announced today. If you would like any advice regarding the above article or would simply like to discuss other ways in which we could help you or your business, please contact us on 01962 856 990 or firstname.lastname@example.org
- Personal Tax Relief For Residential Mortgages
- Big Changes For R&D Relief
- Incorporation of Property Portfolio
- Non-Resident CGT – April 2019 Changes
- UK Self Assessment Tax Return Filing and Penalties 2017/18


Young man dies during Phoenix Park run
A young runner who died of a suspected heart attack during the Dublin half-marathon on Saturday would have celebrated his 24th birthday yesterday.
John McHugh suffered a "cardiac event" and collapsed near the finishing line during the SSE Airtricity run in the Phoenix Park.
A number of participants rushed to his aid and began performing CPR before a St John's Ambulance team arrived.
Hundreds of runners witnessed the incident. Mr McHugh was taken to Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown but was pronounced dead a short time later.
He was school vice-captain during his final year in Belvedere College in Dublin, which he left in 2010.
The College Union paid special tribute to the former pupil, saying he was someone who was held in high regard by his peers.
A statement said the college had learned of his death with "great sadness".
"Due to turn 24 today, John has been taken from us all too quick, but those of us lucky enough to know him can consider ourselves truly privileged.
"John embodied all the qualities of a true man for others.
"A talented sportsman, artist and designer, John will be remembered for many things. He will be remembered most, however, as a friend."
The organisers of the race expressed their condolences to Mr McHugh's family and friends.


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text:
The Vikings really seem to have captured our eldest two boys' imagination. We came across them in our second son's history readings in "Our Island Story", and Grandpa followed this up with further stories, and a model Viking ship which they are constructing together from a kit. He and I are also reading Jennie Hall's 'Viking Tales' and our eldest son't enthusiasm for the 'How to Train Your Dragon' series by Cressida Cowell has tied in nicely. I often find in home education that things 'come together' in a wonderful way without any planning on my part. Our second son picked up the first 'How to Train Your Dragon' book yesterday, and read through it in an evening and a day. This morning, he sat curled up on the sofa with the sequel. His elder brother continues to work his way through the series, and I love to hear them discussing the books, the plot and the characters whilst travelling in the car. Is there a need for them to write down a description of a character, or to rewrite the plot on a worksheet, when their conversation show such understanding orally? A friend asked me recently how we 'assess' the boys' learning, but when we spend so much time with them and are able to listen to their conversations, their progress is evident. A discussion of the Norse Gods over breakfast this morning highlighted my own ignorance on the subject! All we need now is a week in Yorkshire to include a trip to Jorvik - the Viking centre in York. I'll have to see what can be arranged!
Viking figure, wire and clay.

domain: literature