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Scoop
2 days ago
- Health
- Scoop
Marshall Islands Nuclear Legacy: Report Highlights Lack Of Health Research
A new report on the United States nuclear weapons testing legacy in the Marshall Islands highlights the lack of studies into important health concerns voiced by Marshallese for decades. Giff Johnson, Editor, Marshall Islands Journal / RNZ Pacific correspondent A new report on the United States nuclear weapons testing legacy in the Marshall Islands highlights the lack of studies into important health concerns voiced by Marshallese for decades that make it impossible to have a clear understanding of the impacts of the 67 nuclear weapons tests. 'The Legacy of US Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands,' a report by Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, was released late last month. The report was funded by Greenpeace Germany and is an outgrowth of the organization's flagship vessel, Rainbow Warrior III, visiting the Marshall Islands from March to April to recognize the 40th anniversary of the resettlement of the nuclear test-affected population of Rongelap Atoll. Dr Mahkijani said among the 'many troubling aspects' of the legacy is that the United States had concluded, in 1948, after three tests, that the Marshall Islands was not 'a suitable site for atomic experiments' because it did not meet the required meteorological criteria. 'Yet testing went on,' he said. 'Also notable has been the lack of systematic scientific attention to the accounts by many Marshallese of severe malformations and other adverse pregnancy outcomes like stillbirths. This was despite the documented fallout throughout the country and the fact that the potential for fallout to cause major birth defects has been known since the 1950s.' Makhijani highlights the point that, despite early documentation in the immediate aftermath of the 1954 Bravo hydrogen bomb test and numerous anecdotal reports from Marshallese women about miscarriages and still births, US government medical officials in charge of managing the nuclear test-related medical program in the Marshall Islands never systematically studied birth anomalies. The US deputy secretary of state in the Biden-Harris administration, Kurt Cambell, said that Washington, over decades, had committed billions of dollars to the damages and the rebuilding of the Marshall Islands. 'I think we understand that that history carries a heavy burden, and we are doing what we can to support the people in the [Compact of Free Association] states, including the Marshall Islands,' he told reporters at the Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting in Nuku'alofa last year. 'This is not a legacy that we seek to avoid. We have attempted to address it constructively with massive resources and a sustained commitment.' Among points outlined in the new report: Gamma radiation levels at Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, officially considered a 'very low exposure' atoll, were tens of times, and up to 300 times, more than background in the immediate aftermaths of the thermonuclear tests in the Castle series at Bikini Atoll in 1954. Thyroid doses in the so-called 'low exposure atolls' averaged 270 milligray (mGy), 60 percent more than the 50,000 people of Pripyat near Chernobyl who were evacuated (170 mGy) after the 1986 accident there, and roughly double the average thyroid exposures in the most exposed counties in the United States due to testing at the Nevada Test Site. Despite this, 'only a small fraction of the population has been officially recognized as exposed enough for screening and medical attention; even that came with its own downsides, including people being treated as experimental subjects,' the report said. 'In interviews and one 1980s country-wide survey, women have reported many adverse pregnancy outcomes,' said the report. 'They include stillbirths, a baby with part of the skull missing and 'the brain and the spinal cord fully exposed,' and a two-headed baby. Many of the babies with major birth defects died shortly after birth. 'Some who lived suffered very difficult lives, as did their families. Despite extensive personal testimony, no systematic country-wide scientific study of a possible relationship of adverse pregnancy outcomes to nuclear testing has been done. It is to be noted that awareness among US scientists of the potential for major birth defects due to radioactive fallout goes back to the 1950s. Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivor data has also provided evidence for this problem. 'The occurrence of stillbirths and major birth defects due to nuclear testing fallout in the Marshall Islands is scientifically plausible but no definitive statement is possible at the present time,' the report concluded. 'The nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands created a vast amount of fission products, including radioactive isotopes that cross the placenta, such as iodine-131 and tritium. Radiation exposure in the first trimester can cause early failed pregnancies, severe neurological damage, and other major birth defects. This makes it plausible that radiation exposure may have caused the kinds of adverse pregnancy outcomes that were experienced and reported. However, no definitive statement is possible in the absence of a detailed scientific assessment.' Scientists who traveled with the Rainbow Warrior III on its two-month visit to the Marshall Islands earlier this year collected samples from Enewetak, Bikini, Rongelap and other atolls for scientific study and evaluation.
Chicago Tribune
01-06-2025
- Automotive
- Chicago Tribune
Rand McNally maps helped travelers find their way
Now is the time of year when families start thinking about a summer vacation. In the pre-internet era, that meant getting out the creased, dog-eared maps from the car's glove compartment. Spread across a kitchen table, the maps fueled dreams of cross-country travel, unburdened by the reality of endless hours in an overstuffed vehicle. Those vacation planners are indebted to Rand McNally. The Chicago area-based publisher pioneered road maps that were distributed at gas stations, beginning with Gulf Oil, in 1920. From time to time, the company had stores stocked with maps, atlases and guide books Road maps were a logical extension of Rand McNally's business plan. It had published railroad maps since 1872. Still, it had to learn a new trick to produce road maps. It isn't difficult to match a railroad map to a railroad. Its freight and passenger cars carry the line's logo. Stations and freight depots bear its name. But America's early highways weren't lined with numbered signs. So how would a motorist know where they were by following a wiggly line on a map? John Brink, a Rand McNally cartographer, came up with a solution: Creating symbols for highways that were printed on the road maps and also put on signs attached to electrical and telephone poles along those roads. He won $100 in a contest the company ran for employees to develop new map products. The company advertised Brink's creation with the slogan 'Follow the Blazed Trail,' Janice Petterchak reported in 'Mapping A Life's Journey, The Legacy of Andrew McNally III.' The original cardboard signs were damaged by the weather. Others were pilfered by vandals, prompting a revised method: Painting the telegraph poles and advertising: 'Follow the Painted Poles.' If a map user got on a highway to their destination, the painted poles kept them headed the right way. But towns might have several highways, so a map user could choose the wrong one. Because of that, another system of road identification was created by H. Sargent Michaels. His 'Photographic Automobile Maps' provided pictures of intersections and turning points along a route. Rand McNally purchased the rights to it and in 1909 issued 'The Rand McNally Photo-Auto Guides.' 'My mother and father took a busman's honeymoon to Milwaukee,' Andrew McNally III, the company's leader from 1948 to 1974, told the Tribune in 1982. 'They took pictures of every turnoff from here to there. So came the Chicago-to-Milwaukee guide.' A newspaper clipping in the family's scrapbook continued the story: 'He also took pictures of puzzling intersections, and when his company — Rand McNally & Co. — printed the road map resulting from his trip, white arrows in the pictures the honeymooners had taken showed which route to follow.' Around 1917, numbers were substituted for symbols and painted poles, eventually leading to the numbering of all major roads in the United States. Andrew III's great-grandfather was Andrew McNally, an apprentice from Ireland hired in the late 1850s by William H. Rand who had a small print shop on Lake Street. At first, they did printing for the Chicago Tribune. But with an increasing number of railroad lines coming to Chicago, the partners decided to concentrate on the railroad industry. The Tribune predicted, 'It cannot but at once attain a wide circulation.' But on Oct. 8, 1871, their building was destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire. McNally had the foresight, according to company lore, to bury two of their printing machines in the sand at Lake Michigan. When the fire ended, the company was able to resume business with the salvaged equipment and within a short time were printing 100,000 tickets a day. In 1872, their first map appeared in the company's 'Railroad Guide.' Theirs was the first American company to produce maps from wax engravings — a method McNally learned in Ireland. Instead of creating new plates for updates, they could patch existing plates, dramatically reducing production costs. Shortly, they added a touch of class by including verses by poet Robert Browning in the timetables of the Chicago and Alton Railroad. They also inspired another artist. Helen Beck did a striptease act at Chicago's 1933 World's Fair. Cecil B. De Mille, the famed Hollywood director, said she needed a catchier name. Spotting a Rand McNally map on her agent's wall, the stage name 'Sally Rand' was chosen. The company's influence went well beyond helping vacationers navigate the nation's roads. Charles Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean, used Rand McNally railroad maps to navigate when flying over land. During World War II, a boatload of refugees fled Japanese-occupied Java and made it to Australia by charting the thousands of miles of their escape with a Rand McNally Pocket Atlas. As the company prospered, Andrew III, whose father Andrew McNally II ran the company from 1933 to 1948, came of age thinking nothing of taking off for faraway places. During his freshman year at North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, he visited an uncle in England. Subsequently he and a chum returned there. They had an audience with the prime minister and the prince of Wales. The lord mayor of London hosted a luncheon where they met authors and artists interested in British-American relations, according to Petterchak's book. During World War II, Andrew III volunteered, and, after a quickie officer's training course was commissioned a lieutenant in the Army Map Service. He was mildly surprised we won 'with maps primarily based on outdated British cartography,' he told a reporter. Andrew III succeeded his father as Rand McNally's president in 1948. The company expanded greatly during his tenure at the top. Upon taking over, he decided to move the headquarters from their cramped building at Clark and Harrison streets to a spacious campus in Skokie. It became the largest mapmaker in the United States, printing tickets for airlines and publishing books, atlases and globes and even later expanded into storefronts. The McNallys had majority control of the company and didn't have to answer to stockholders with different ideas. Ward, the company's founder, died in 1890, having been in ill health and selling his share of the business to the McNallys, and they never made a public stock offering. In 1994, Andrew III said, tongue in cheek, that 'the reason the business stays in the family, is that we never got rich enough to neglect it.' But printed maps were becoming a thing of the past as computers became prevalent, and Andrew III's successors didn't share his reservations about selling the company piecemeal. In 1997, the family divested itself of the business. Its corporate offices in Skokie were sold in 2008 to Ida Crown Jewish Academy.
Time of India
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Subhash Ghai drops priceless throwback memory of 'Karz' as he remembers Rishi Kapoor
As fans commemorate Rishi Kapoor's death anniversary, let's take a look at a black-and-white throwback picture shared by filmmaker Subhash Ghai in 2018 from the sets of ' Karz ' (1980). The photograph, taken nearly four decades earlier, features Rishi Kapoor alongside director Subhash Ghai and actress Simi Garewal , rekindling nostalgia for one of Bollywood's most memorable reincarnation thrillers. A picture that's 'still as fresh as yesterday' The vintage still was originally shared by the filmmaker on October 24, 2018, marking the 40th anniversary of the film's launch. In his tweet, Subhash Ghai thanked Rishi Kapoor for sharing the photograph and reminisced about the moment the project began. 'Thank u @chintskap [Rishi Kapoor] for sending me this nostalgic pic of Karz on set with three of us in action... Still as fresh as yesterday on its 40th year,' wrote Ghai. The image, in stunning grayscale, captures the creative energy on set and the chemistry between the trio that helped bring Karz to life. The Legacy of 'Karz' Released in 1980, 'Karz' featured Rishi Kapoor as Monty, a rock star who discovers that he is the reincarnation of a murdered man, Ravi Verma (played by Raj Kiran). Simi Garewal played the chillingly poised Kaamini Verma, whose betrayal and ambition drove the central conflict of the story. With its compelling storyline, memorable music by Laxmikant–Pyarelal, and stylish execution, Karz became the ninth highest-grossing film of its release year and solidified Rishi Kapoor's standing as a versatile leading man. 'Karz'- the trend setter 'The Karz' (1980) soundtrack became a trendsetter in Indian disco music, with iconic tracks like "Ek Haseena Thi", "Om Shanti Om", and "Dard-E-Dil." Its background score, particularly the signature tune, remains one of the most memorable in Hindi cinema. Notably, "Ek Haseena Thi" was heavily inspired by George Benson's "We As Love." Family and friends attend Rishi Kapoor's funeral
