Hazardous Waste Management | EMB XII

How ISO 14001 can enhance reIf you are acquainted with ISO 14001:2015 certification in Qatar, then you will understand that when the necessities of the preferred are applied efficaciously in an Environmental Management System (EMS), then the hazard of environmental impact and the amount of wastage are reduced. One area ISO 14001:2015 differs from ISO 14001:2004, however, is the requirement to think about things to do that make contributions to “the prevention of pollution,” the place “recycling” is especially mentioned. It consequently will become obvious, mainly in positive industries, how superb recycling can play a large part in certainly assembly environmental and legislative requirements. how can fulfillment of the ISO 14001 recycling necessities ensure that efficient recycling occurs? cycling overall performance
Why is recycling important?
In part 5.2 of ISO 14001:2015 services in Qatar, it is cited that an organization’s Environmental Policy ought to consist of a “commitment to the prevention of pollution,” as properly as a requirement to meet compliance tasks – you can study greater about applicable content material in the article How specified must the EMS be? While compliance duties might also differ from zone to region and place to region, the significance of recycling correctly stays constant. Imagine these eventualities and the implications if recycling was once now not carried out effectively, for example:
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• A tv producer has a “take back” scheme, however rather of wonderful recycling, components are disassembled, and some are illegally dispatched to a landfill.
• A battery vendor takes again a giant share of devices sold, however cuts corners and sells a share of returns to a scrap dealer, with no expertise of the vacation spot or consequence of these probably hazardous units.
• A private pc producer takes lower back aged product and chooses a recycling channel that is no longer up to date. The consequence is that elements that have been declared limited or hazardous in view that that unit’s manufacture has now been wrongly back to the public domain.

ISO 14001: What to word to assist your recycling process
ISO 14001 Certification in South Africa presents a structured strategy to managing waste. There are numerous clauses of the general that can assist factor your organization closer to making sure your recycling manner is effective. Let’s seem to be at what these clauses are and how they can provide preparation closer to this objective.
Leadership: The organizational leaders are accountable for the overall performance of the EMS; therefore, it is necessary that a declaration of air pollution prevention exists in the Environmental Policy. Similarly, it is vital that the top administration ensures that all small print is recognized and that the company’s recycling, whether or not carried out in-house or subcontracted, is accomplished correctly. The article How to exhibit management in accordance to ISO 14001 certification in Philippines can assist you research greater about this clause.
Planning: There are numerous sub-sections of clause 6 that are applicable – tremendous recycling has to be section of an organization’s compliance obligations, and phase of your planning to reap environmental objectives, one of which ought to be a hundred percent recycled product returns. It may additionally be prudent to spotlight your recycling system as an environmental aspect, or even as the challenge of an annual danger evaluation to make certain that you take the time to overview and enhance your process.
Improvement: As referred to previously, steady evaluate and motion is the finest way to make sure chronic enchantment in your EMS, and comparable overview of your recycling system can make certain that it meets stakeholder needs, complies with legislation, and always evolves and improves.
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Implementing a Quality Management System (QMS) using the necessities of the ISO 9001:2015 certification in South Africa standard is an internationally recognized way to focus your organization efforts on customer satisfaction and drive enhancements in your organization, but this process does not come without a cost. For this reason, many business professionals ask what the return on investment of implementing a QMS is. In different words – how do I make it profitable?
If yours is an organization that is looking to development a QMS and find a way to make it profitable, there are many necessities within the ISO 9001:2015 standard that will advise you to do this if you work to implement and use them properly. Below are some of the main necessities that can present you with some of the most profitable ways to use your QMS.
Making plans to address hazards and opportunities
An addition to the new ISO 9001:2015 certification in Qatar necessities is to understand and take action to address the hazards and opportunities for your QMS. This can be done however you want, and many organizations will perform a SWOT analysis as a way to identify business strengths and weaknesses, but the essential factor in realizing income is deciding what actions you will take.
By identifying the hazards and opportunities that are applicable to your organization, and deciding what actions you will take, if any, to address these, you will be able to find ways to maximum the negative impacts of potential problems and also capitalize on the opportunities that can lead you into new sales markets or product lines. Properly acting on hazards and opportunities can realize great profit for your organization.
Using quality objectives to drive improvements
The need of quality objectives to drive improvement is not new to the ISO 9001:2015 requirements. These objectives, which are one of the best ways to focus the improvement activities within your company, have been included in the QMS since the ISO 9001 Certification in Philippines update that happened in the year 2000. The objectives are your way of identifying what aspects of quality management and customer satisfaction you have chosen as your main improvement aims, with reasonable and timely targets, so that you This is far from the truth if it can make plans to make these developments and move your company strategy forward.
Find opportunities for improvement through internal audit
horribly, more business leaders see the internal audit program as a waste of resources that simply takes up the time of employees who would be better spent doing their jobs. This is long from the truth if the internal audit program is used properly. The idea of your internal audits is to have an objective and impartial person look at the outputs of the processes to ensure that these processes are meeting the planned arrangements that were set out for the process. The audits also provide information on the effective implementation and maintenance of the QMS.
By taking the opportunity to take an impartial look at a process, your internal auditors can not only identify problems that could go unnoticed during day-to-day activities, but also identify issues with the linkage between processes that can cause inefficiency and identify opportunities to improve the overall effectiveness of the QMS. Identifying development opportunities makes your company better and can lead to cost savings and better profitability
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Singapore is home to many species of snake, from tiny burrowing blind snakes just 15 centimetres long, which burrow through the soil and hunt insects, to huge pythons several metres in length, lurking in our drains and sewers in pursuit of rats and stray cats. While most of our snakes are quite harmless, our forests and mangroves have their fair share of coral snakes, kraits, and pit vipers, all of them highly venomous and capable of ruining a careless or unlucky person's day. The Equatorial Spitting Cobra is probably the most dangerous of our venomous snakes, since it is commonly encountered in more urbanised areas in close proximity to people. Yet these serpents, for all their deadly beauty, pale in comparison to a snake so feared and so iconic that it has become a symbol of the Asian forests, a true superstar among the snakes - the King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah).
The King Cobra is a diurnal snake that is mostly terrestrial, although it is also a capable climber and an excellent swimmer. It has a wide distribution that spans across much of tropical Asia, from the southwest, northern and eastern regions of the Indian subcontinent, to southern China, Indochina, and Thailand, the Andaman Islands, and south to Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, the Greater Sundas (Sumatra, Borneo, Java), all the way to Bali, Sulawesi, and the Philippines. While only a single species of King Cobra is recognised for now, there is some geographical variation in physical appearance. It is possible that future research will reveal that what we now call the King Cobra might actually be made up of several similar yet distinct species. Although the King Cobra and the so-called 'true' cobras (members of the genus Naja, such as the Equatorial Spitting Cobra, Indian Cobra, and Monocled Cobra) belong to the same family, the Elapidae, they are not each other's closest relatives. Instead, the King Cobra closest living relatives are the mambas of Africa (including the Black Mamba, another snake with a deadly reputation), with the cobras as more distant relatives. Other members of the Elapidae include the kraits, coral snakes, sea kraits, and sea snakes, as well as the many highly venomous snakes of Australia such as the brown snakes, taipans, and death adders.
With a recorded maximum length of 5.85 metres, the King Cobra is the world's longest venomous snake. In Singapore, only the Reticulated Python exceeds it in size. Like the smaller cobras, it rears up and expands its hood to face a potential threat, but its hood is narrower and lacks the markings seen in some Asian species of cobra. The key difference though is height; it is said that a large King Cobra is able to rear up as high as a person's chest, and look them in the eye. And while many snakes will hiss loudly to warn predators to back off, the King Cobra's warning hiss is often described as more like a low menacing growl. Certainly, coming face to face with a King Cobra, especially one actively trying to defend itself, must be a most intimidating experience.
This threatening display is not just an act. Like other elapids, the King Cobra has a pair of hollow fangs which are located at the front of its upper jaw, functioning like hypodermic needles. When it strikes, venom is pumped out of glands located at the back of the head, flows through these fangs, and is injected into the bite wound. The King Cobra packs a deadly punch, with venom full of neurotoxins that target the nervous system and heart. While the venom itself is not as deadly as that produced by several other snake species, it more than makes up for it in terms of the sheer volume that can be delivered. A single bite can kill a human within half an hour, and even fell elephants.
A meal fit for a king
However, the King Cobra uses its venom mostly to subdue its prey, which consists almost entirely of other snakes. When prey is encountered, the King Cobra sinks its fangs into its victim, often behind the back of the head, and clamps down hard. As the prey struggles, both snakes may end up getting entwined together. Defensive bites from prey don't seem to faze it at all. The neurotoxins in the venom work on the central nervous system, stopping the heart and paralysing muscles, and the lungs cease functioning. The victim eventually suffocates, and is then slowly swallowed whole, usually headfirst. In fact, the King Cobra has been assigned to its own genus, Ophiophagus, which translates to "snake-eater" in Greek, ophio- meaning "snake" and -phagus meaning "to eat". It is a very apt description of this species, which is unsurprisingly also known to be cannibalistic. Even other highly venomous snakes like cobras and vipers are no match for the king – it's been found to have evolved resistance to the venoms of its potential prey.
Even the largest snakes in the jungle are not immune to predation by the King Cobra; it will readily go for pythons, although it is obviously limited to smaller individuals. There were two fairly recent eyewitness accounts of King Cobras going after Reticulated Pythons in Singapore – one took place next to a road in NTU campus in August 2015 (albeit close to the forest edge), while the other was along the MacRitchie Nature Trail in May 2017. These encounters must be an awesome spectacle to behold; two of the largest snakes of Southeast Asia in combat, venom against constricting coils. Things don't always go the King Cobra's way though; if the python manages to fight back, the predator might find itself fighting for its own life, which appears to be what happened during the sighting at NTU; the Reticulated Python, despite being smaller, managed to throw a coil around the King Cobra's neck, and the latter snake was struggling, presumably waiting for the venom to take hold and incapacitate its prey. A more recent photo of unknown provenance has made its rounds online, depicting a King Cobra and a Reticulated Python, both dead – the cobra likely bit and successfully envenomated the python, but the python managed to coil around and constrict the cobra before succumbing.
Besides snakes, the King Cobra is also known to feed on monitor lizards. There is a video from January 2016 of one swallowing a young Malayan Water Monitor in Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. Birds and rodents have also been taken, although there are very few such records.
Royal Families
Reproduction in King Cobras seems rather straightforward at first: we know that the species is oviparous (egg-laying). However, there are some very interesting behaviours that make it stand out from other snakes.
Like many other species, male King Cobras will engage in ritualised combat, rearing up and attempting to pin each other to the ground. This sparring allows rival males to show off their strength and establish dominance, and minimise the risk of them injuring or even killing each other.
Courtship and mating can be a risky affair, especially since King Cobras routinely eat other snakes, and males typically grow larger than females. A receptive female leaves a scent trail that puts the male in the mood for sex instead of food, and he may pursue her through the forest for hours. Once he's caught up, and if she is slow to accept, he may headbutt her repeatedly until she relents. Mating may last for up to an hour, and the male will sometimes stay with her for several days, mating repeatedly, while at the same time warding off rivals.
The female King Cobra does something that has not been observed in any other snake species to date; she actively builds a nest for her eggs, using her body and tail to gather leaves and other debris, sweeping them into a pile and packing them together to create a large mound. Fallen leaves of bamboo plants are a favoured nesting material, and King Cobra nests are often located close to or even among bamboo clumps. Within this nest, temperature and humidity remain constant, providing suitable conditions for the growth and development of the embryos.
Guarding of young is not widespread among snakes, but after laying her eggs, the mother King Cobra will remain near the nest, fending off potential predators. A devoted mother, she may guard her brood for two to three months, fasting and living off her reserves. Only when the eggs are about to hatch does she leave the nest, probably to avoid triggering her predatory response and instinctively eating her own young.
Baby King Cobras, which measure up to 60 centimetres in length when they first emerge, look very different from their parents, being black with conspicuous narrow white or yellow bands. Without the protection of their mother, they are vulnerable to all sorts of predators, which may even include adults of the same species. However, one thing they share in common with the adults is that even at such a young age, their venom is already potent and deadly.
The King Cobra in Singapore
Although the King Cobra is usually thought of as being restricted to forests, it is quite adaptable and will sometimes live near people. In other parts of its range, the King Cobra may be found in rice paddies and farmland, in plantations, and even near villages, as long as there is enough forest cover nearby. In fact, such places may even ultimately attract King Cobras; since rodents are abundant in agricultural areas and settlements, snakes that eat rats are lured by the prospects of good feeding opportunities, which in turn provide a rich hunting ground for the King Cobra. King Cobras can even be found in forest patches near densely-populated urban areas. For example, the species still survives in parts of Hong Kong.
In mainland Singapore, the King Cobra is mostly restricted to forests, woodlands, and mangroves, although they are occasionally encountered in more developed areas. One stronghold is the Central Catchment Nature Reserve; a number of records have taken place in the vicinity of Rifle Range Road, MacRitchie Reservoir, and Upper Thomson. One male measuring 4.42 metres in length was found at the Singapore Island Country Club along Island Club Road in June 2002, but sadly, was beaten to death. That individual is now on display in the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum. They have also been seen in condominiums and military camps located along the forest fringes.
Wild King Cobras are sometimes encountered within the Singapore Zoo and Night Safari, with some sightings taking place in broad daylight and in areas crowded with visitors. King Cobras have also been seen at Bukit Panjang on at least two occasions; one was a juvenile about 60 centimetres long, found in the Segar area in March 2000, while the other measured 2 metres long, and was seen in a drain near Bukit Panjang Plaza in November that same year. Both individuals were caught and sent to the Singapore Zoo; over the years, the zoo has received and kept quite a few King Cobras, with some of them going on display. Oddly, the King Cobra has yet to be recorded from the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, although it is likely to be present there.
Another stronghold for the King Cobra is in the west of Singapore, encompassing the Western Catchment, Jalan Bahar, Lim Chu Kang, and Kranji areas. There have been quite a number of sightings of this species at Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve in recent years, which now appears to be the place where you have the higher chance of spotting this large but elusive snake.
The species is also present on Pulau Ubin and Pulau Tekong. Interestingly, an adult was even encountered somewhere in Sentosa in May 2007. More records of this species in Singapore can be found in this paper published in 2011.
Its majestic restraint
Despite the King Cobra's size and deadly venom, it is not an aggressive snake by nature; even though it is not uncommon in some parts of its range and can be found living close to people, reports of bites are rare in comparison to those of other venomous snakes. Yes, its bite should never be taken lightly, but as a whole, it seems like these snakes possess a relatively mild temperament and placid disposition. Some accounts describing the capture of King Cobras say that the snake did not attempt to strike even when it had every opportunity to do so; instead the snake appeared to be more intent on trying to escape, deploying its threat display without following up on the threat with its fangs. Still, there have been instances where the King Cobra does mean business and strikes, with dire consequences.
The King Cobra can be considered one of the more charismatic snakes; it's large, it has a fearsome reputation (not just because it's highly venomous, but also because it routinely eats other snakes), and as many people who have been close to one can testify, is a really majestic and unique creature. Filmmaker Janaki Lenin, who worked on a National Geographic documentary about the King Cobra, wrote:

There's something uncanny about the way a king cobra looks you in the eye. It's an indescribable feeling, an encounter with a sentient being. It's about making contact with an entity so utterly different from anything one knows and normally relates to. Keepers say that when they open the door to the king cobra cage, the snake is so perceptive of what's going on; it knows whether the keeper is planning to feed it or whether he is just checking up on it. But it is its majestic restraint that reveals its personality. For the 6 months it took to shoot the film, we were all in such close proximity to king cobras I marvel that no accident took place. And this is more due to the tolerance of the snake than anything else. The more closely we work with an animal, the more we take it for granted. We flaunted our own security protocol several times; each time the king cobra just warned us, mock charging but never carrying it through. This made us respect the creature more than any other.

There are a number of observations stating that in comparison to other snakes, King Cobras come across as being very alert, observant, and intelligent. Some people have asserted that captive King Cobras recognise their owners, and can be trained to some degree. But it's important to remember that these are still unpredictable, potentially deadly animals; ironically, quite a number of King Cobra bites involve people that were deliberately handling the snake, such as snake charmers and reptile hobbyists. All it takes is a moment of carelessness and bad luck, and a person with years of experience in handling highly venomous snakes could still end up in a life-threatening situation.
Vanishing kingdom
In Singapore, the King Cobra's survival depends on the continued protection of its habitats. Areas such as the Central Catchment Nature Reserve and Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve are already protected, but development of other areas displaces King Cobras and other wildlife, and forces them to roam in search of new territories to occupy. Conflict with people is a major issue; a snake wandering into an urban area risks getting seen by frightened humans, and may end up seriously injured or killed. The roads that run alongside many of our forests and wooded areas present another hazard; some recent sightings of this species were of roadkills. Deforestation, persecution, and hunting threaten wild populations of King Cobras elsewhere, but exploitation for the tourist trade is another serious threat to the species in some locations.
In several other parts of Asia, King Cobras are often caught for their meat and to make traditional medicines; the species is on the menu in the snake soup restaurants in Hong Kong. At the same time, it is revered in some cultures, and involved in snake charming performances. However, some unethical snake charmers are known to render their potentially deadly captives harmless, either by pulling out the fangs, or stitching the snakes' mouths shut.
The King Cobra is among several species of snakes raised on so-called snake farms in several countries in the region, such as Thailand and Vietnam. Some farms raise snakes for meat, skins, and traditional medicines, while others operate under the guise of extracting venom for research and production of antivenom. Many of these farms, as well as too many awful zoos, are marketed as tourist attractions, and incorporate shows featuring King Cobras and other snakes being provoked and prodded for gawking visitors. Many captive snakes are not kept in suitable conditions and suffer injuries, or catch diseases and parasites, slowly wasting away and eventually dying while being made to perform for gawking crowds. Sometimes the snakes are taxidermised, or immersed in jars of rice wine to be sold to tourists. It's also not always clear whether these King Cobras were bred in captivity, or wild-caught; it's likely that a lot of these organisations simply replace those that die with more King Cobras captured from the wild. In some places, overhunting appears to have all but wiped out King Cobra populations.
Due to the decline in wild populations in many parts of its range, the King Cobra is considered globally vulnerable to extinction.
In many ways, the plight of the King Cobra illustrates the common challenges of conserving large predators: this species is constrained by ever-shrinking forests and encroachment, and individuals wander into inhabited areas where they come into conflict with people. It is hunted and consumed for meat, and also used in traditional medicines. Captives are often exploited, kept in substandard conditions, abused and subjected to the stress of performing for tourists. Yet at the same time, it is supposedly respected and revered by some of these very same cultures. If there is another iconic predator of the Asian forests that shares the very same problems faced by the King Cobra, it is the Tiger.
Previous edition: Sunbirds

30 March 2020 — Report to the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee
Introductory Statement: All but two powers have been delegated by the President under the Bayanihan Act. The delegated powers mainly involve: (1) Providing Emergency Assistance to Affected Sectors, (2) Securing Facilities and Resources for the Health Sector and (3) Perfoming Fiscal and Monetary Actions for the Economy [p 2, pars. 3–4]
Specifically:
Sec. 4(a) authorizes the President to adopt and implement measures to suppress further transmission and spread of COVID–19 through effective education, detection, protection and treatment:

1. Bureau of Immigration — Further immigration formalities for passengers arriving from China, Hongkong, Macau, Taiwan, South Korea, Iran and Italy (p. 1)
2. Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) — All facilities are in total lockdown; visitation privileges temporarily suspended; alternatives such as E-dalaw & tele-conferencing have been adopted; no mass congregation activities; no “mask no entry” policy. Expenses are at PhP 47, 363, 816.47 (p. 2)
3. Department of Foreign Affairs — Repatriated 1806 Filipinos; 4800 Filipinos in the next two weeks (p. 2)
4. DILG —
5. Activated the National and Regional Emergency Operation Centers;
6. Bureau of Local Government Supervision has issued 2 Memorandum Circulars (MC) in implementing the Luzon Enhanced Community Quarantine;
7. Advisory Opinions have also been released on the unrestricted movement of food supplies, cargo and business
8. PNP — Establishment of the National Joint Task Force Corona Virus Shield (JTF CV SHIELD) composing of the PNP, AFP and Coast Guard to set-up strategic quarantine control points and implement protocol on unhampered movement of cargo and essential personnel
9. POEA — 28 advisories and 5 memorandum circulars disseminating information on (a) information re: COVID—19, (b) travel and trade advisories from the WHO; (c) guidelines re: restriction and deployment of returning workers; (d) guidelines on POEA transaction; (e) monitoring and assistance of OFWs affected by COVID–19
10. PCOO — employed communication strategies to promote public awareness and understanding concerning COVID–19
11. Office of the Presidential peace Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP) – facilitated requests for the transportation of PPEs, testing kits and other Medical Supplies to the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM)
12. Department of Transportation (DOTr) — studying deployment of floating quarantine hospitals
13. Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) –
14. Assisted via its field units to provide disinfection and sanitation services; 336 decontamination tents and 76 gantries have been installed, with 415 convergence areas (checkpoints, gov’t facilities, schools, hospitals, and markers); provided 1 technical personnel to assist PGH and 18,000 surgical masks to 3 major hospitals;
15. Created a task force to facilitate the conversion and utilization of different public buildings and 110 evacuation centers as health facilities, emergency operation centers or food hubs—at the moment there are 19 of them as health facilities, 15 as food hubs
16. Department of Info and Communications Technology (DICT) —
17. Assisted DOH in extending communication dispatch capabilities, designing and implementation of Executive Information Dashboards, expanding the DOH’s call center expansion and Telemedicine Initiative; additional protocols for tracking COVID–19 patients
18. Launched the Laging Handa Website with the PCOO
19. Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) — 90 special permits issued to transport pathological and infectious wastes
20. DOST — launched a public information drive on (a) proper nutrition during ECQ and (b) to dispel fake news,
21. National Transmission Corporation (TransCo.) — agreement with Lung Center of the PH to use TransCo dormitory facilities

Section 4(b) authorizes the President to expedite and streamline the accreditation of testing kits and facilitate prompt testing by public and designated private institution of PUIs and PUMs and the compulsory and immediate isolation of patients

1. DOST —
2. Php 53.2 Million funding for the test kits developed by the UP National Institutes of Health (UP NIH). Field Validation will be finished by April 1, Wednesday. Field Implementation for 26,000 kits will be conducted from April 04 to 25 in 5 hospitals
3. Partnership with Ateneo de Manila University enhance the Feasibility Analysis of Syndromic Surveillance Using Spetio–Temporal Epidemiological Modeler (FASSSTER) for Early Detection of Diseases, an application for visualizing spread of diseases and outbreaks.
4. Studies on The Clinical Characteristics and Transmission Patterns of COVID–19,

The Efficacy of Lauric Acid and its Derivatives against COVID –19 in partnership with Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU),
The use of RxBox for telemetry monitoring of cases with the team from UP–PGH, UP Diliman Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute (UP–EEI), UP Manila National Telehealth Center (UP–NTHC) and IONICS EMS Inc. Production of 500,000 reusable, washable, and re-wearable by the DOST–Philippine Textile Research Institute
Section 4(c) authorizes the President to provide an emergency subsidy to low income households

1. IATF–EID — Approved a Joint Memorandum Circular on the implementation of the Emergency Subsidy Program (ESP), which includes a provision of cash or non–cash subsidy for low income household beneficiaries amounting from Php 5,000 to PhP 8,000 per month for 2 months
2. DOF —
3. Will provide the DSWD technical assistance in forming a database to host COVID–19 social amelioration programs
4. Currently coordinating with the IATF–Technical Working Group for the submission of budget augmentation requests to the DBM
5. DOLE – distributed to 8641 beneficiaries PhP 5000.00 pursuant to DOLE–COVID–19 Adjustment Measures Program (CAMP), and the payout of the remaining beneficiaries will be in batches (March 30, April 06, and April 07). The total amount disbursed is PhP 95,430,782.00; current beneficiaries are at 51, 293

Section 4(d) authorizes the President to provide special risk allowance to the health workers in additional to hazard pay

1. DBM —
2. Drafting an executive issuance to cover the COVID–19 special risk allowance for all public workers
3. Issued Budget Circular No. 2020–1 to guide implementation of the Hazard Pay grant.

Section 4(g) authorizes the President to ensure that all LGUs are acting within the letter and spirit of all the rules, regulations and directives issued by the National Government pursuant to RA No. 11469, including the implementation of the community quarantine, and authorizes LGUs to use more than 5% of the amount allocated for their calamity fund subject to additional funding from the National Government

1. NBI is investigating and filing charges against officials
2. CHED has issued guidelines re: use of SUCs as quarantine centers
3. DepEd has issued guidelines for use of school facilities as quarantine centers

Section 4(i) empowersed the President to continue to enforce measures to protect the people from pernicious practices affecting the supply, distribution and movement of food, clothing, hygiene, and sanitation products, medicine and medical supplies, fuel, fertilizers, chemicals, building materials, implements, machinery equipment and spare parts required in agriculture, industry and other essential services and other articles of prime necessity, whether imported or locally produced or manufactured.

1. DTI —
2. Issued Joint Memorandum Circular 2020–01 to ensure compliance of the Price Act and Consumer Act, to implement a price control and prevent hoarding, panic buying and profiteering
3. Conducted joint marketing inspections with the DA
4. DA — reactivated the Local Price Coordinating Councils to monitor prices and implement the price freeze
5. DPWH – deployed 402 vehicles nationwide to serve as transportation facilities

Section 4(j) authorizes the President to ensure that donation, acceptance and distribution of health products intended to address the COVID–19 public health emergency are not unnecessarily delayed

1. DFA – facilitated donations from 4 foreign governments, 1 international organization and 12 private companies
2. DICT – coordinating with DFA for an accessible website re: information on International Humanitarian Assistance to promote transparency
3. DPWH – provide local assistance to the DSWD and National Housing Authority in tranporting manpower, equipment, foods for foodpacks to Western Visayas and La Union
4. Bureau of Customs (BOC) – provided online filing of required documents to ensure unhampered processing of shipments of medical and other emergency supplies.

Section 4(n) authorizes the President to ensure the availability of credit to the productive sectors of the economy especially in the countryside.

1. DTI – preparing for the implementation of the PhP 1 Billion P3 Enterprise Rehabilitation Financing (ERF) which includes restart and restock of businesses to avoid foreclosure of business assets

Section 4(p) authorizes the President to ensure availability of essential goods by adopting measures to facilitate and/or minimize the disruption of the supply chain

1. DA – formulated the Food Resiliency Action Plan; reported that the basic food requirements nationwide are sufficient with the national rice inventory this quarter enough to last for the next 75 days
2. DICT – coordinating with the DOST to create RapidPass.Ph to expedite community access passes for cargo, authorized vehicles and authorized persons outside residence

Section 4(r) authorizes the President to regulate and limit the operation of all sectors of transportation through land, sea or air, whether private or public;

1. DOTr –
2. has established the DOTr Emergency Operations Center to respond to transportation related queries
3. Has established a coordination mechanism with relevant agencies for the repatriation of Filipinos

Section 4(t) authorizes the President to continue to authorize alternative working arrangements for employees and workers in the Executive Branch, and whenever it becomes necessary, in other independent branches of government and constitutional bodies, and the private sector;

1. All Executive Offices have adopted alternative working arrangements
2. DOLE – noted that 3082 establishments with 137,496 affected workers implemented flexible work arrangements and 6060 establishments with 190,932 workers opted for temporary closure.

Section 4(u) authorizes the President to adopt temporary emergency measures to conserve and regulate the distribution and use of power, fuel, energy and water, and ensure adequate supply of the same;

1. DENR – with the National Water Resources Board, ordered all water utilities and water service providers to refrain from disconnecting water supplies

Section 4(v) authorizes the President to direct the discontinuance of appropriated programs, projects or activities (P/A/P) of any agency of the Executive Department, including government-owned or -controlled corporations (GOCC), in the FYs 2019 and 2020 General Appropriations Act (GAA), whether released or unreleased the allotments for which remain unobligated, and utilize the savings generated therefrom to augment the allocation for any item directly related to support operations and response measures, which are necessary or beneficial in order to address the COVID-19 emergency.,

1. DBM has noted that no appropriated programs, projects or activities have been discontinued. The advice of the DBM is to utilize all existing released allotments for COVID–19 response activities. The following agencies have been directed to re-utilize the following appropriated funds for COVID–19 response activities: a. DSWD – PhP 108.765 Billion appropriated and released for the 4Ps; PhP 23.184 Billion appropriated and released for Social Pension for Indigent Filipino Citizens; PhP 6.08 Billion released (appropriation is at PhP 8.733 Billion) for Quick Response Fund (QRF) b. DOH – PhP 9.44 Billion released (appropriation is at PhP 10.483 Billion) for Medical Assistance to Indigent persons; PhP 500 Million released (appropriation is at Php 600 Million) for QRF c. DOLE – PhP 4.357 Billion released (appropriation is at PhP 6.787 Billion) for TUPAD–GIP

Section 4(w) authorizes the President to consider abandoned the purpose of any unutilized or unreleased balance as of the date of declaration of State of Emergency, and all such funds, including future collections and receipts, shall be deemed appropriated for measures to address COVID–19
NOTE: No Special Purpose Funds (PhP 372.719 Billion) have been utilized except the PhP 500 Million replenishment of the DOH QRF, charged against the NDRRM Fund.

1. DOTR – remitted dividends in advance of over PhP 10 Billion from PPA, MIAA and CAAP
2. DBM – currently preparing a masterlist of unreleased appropriations under Special Purpose Funds (PhP 372.719 Billion).

Section 4(x) authorizes the President to reprogram, reallocate, and realign from savings on other items of appropriations in the FY 2020 GAA in the Executive department, as may be necessary and beneficial to fund measures that address and respond to the COVID-19 emergency, including social amelioration for affected communities, and the recovery of areas, sectors and industries severely affected. All amounts so reprogrammed, reallocated or realigned shall be deemed automatically appropriated for such measures to address the COVID-19 situation
NOTE: No funds have been reprogrammed yet pending the submission of the IATF–EID of its final budgetary requirements.
Section 4(y) authorizes the President to allocate cash, funds, investments, including unutilized or unreleased subsidies and transfers, held by any GOCC or any national government agency in order to address the COVID-19 emergency as declared in Section 3 hereof;

1. The DOF and BTr added PhP 300 Billion to its cash reserves via a repurchase agreement facility with the BSP. The National Government will be allowed to convert PhP300 Billion government securities to cash on the condition that it will repurchase the securities at a predetermined period of not more than 6 months

Section 4(z) authorizes the President to move statutory deadlines and timelines for the filing and submission of any document, the payment of taxes, fees, and other charges required by law, and the grant of any benefit, in order to ease the burden on individuals under Community Quarantine;

1. BIR — extended the deadlines for filing 2019 ITR from April 15 to May 15
2. MIAA & CAAP — extended to airport concessionaires a rental holiday for one month
3. NWRB — extended validity of temporary water permits issued to MWSS for 1 month

Section 4(aa) authorizes the President to direct all banks, quasi-banks, financing companies, lending companies, and other financial institutions, public and private, to implement a minimum of a thirty (30)-day grace period for the payment of all loans falling due within the period of the enhanced community quarantine without incurring interests, penalties, fees, or other charges.

1. DTI – 127,000 micro enterprises have benefitted from the moratorium
2. Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development GOCCs – 3 month moratorium on the payment of loan amortizations
3. Landbank – relief packages created

Section 4(cc) authorizes the President to implement an expanded and enhanced Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program and to provide other assistance programs

1. DSWD
2. Implemented a 2 month Expanded Pantawid Pamilya Program
3. Distributed Food and Non Food Items to 473 clients, costing PhP 22,314,982.38.
4. Delivered food packs to different LGUs

Section 4(dd) authorizes the President to lift the thirty percent (30%) cap on the amount appropriated for the quick response fund, as provided for in Republic Act No. 10121 or the “Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act of 2020”, during the existence of the state of national emergency due to COVID-19;

1. NEDA – assisted LGUs in interpretation and implementation of this provision

Section 4(ee) authorizes the President to undertake such other measures as may be reasonable and necessary to enable the President to carry out the declared national policy subject to the Bill of Rights and other constitutional guarantees.

1. LGUs are instructed to fast track and simplify procedures on
2. Extending validity of permits, licenses, certifications and other similar authorizations
3. Electronic submissions and approvals
4. Suspension of notarization requirement
5. Reduction of signatories and requirements
6. Employment of online payment schemes
7. Submission of reguilatins by email
8. OWWA — provided transport, food and accomodation assistance to returning and departing OFWs under the Hatid Sundo Program. Total number of serviced OFWs is currently at 1,957
9. National Prosecution Service — introduced Electronic Online Inquest
10. CHED and DepEd —
11. issued guidelines on alternative modes of instruction, completion of school requirements, computation of final grades and graduation
12. Facilitated return of students and personnel stranded during the ECQ
13. Fast tracked release of salary and benefits

For the first time in decades, I am facing the most challenging and dreadful event I have ever experienced. It feels like I am living in a completely new world, stuck in the midst of this pandemic –– the COVID-19. Whenever I look out from my window, I wonder how people are doing these days, especially the healthcare workers who do the exact opposite–– instead of locking themselves down for safety, they will bravely go to hospitals, risking their lives to save another life. I have seen a lot of posts by healthcare workers about their experiences, describing the physical and mental exhaustion they are suffering during this pandemic. Despite the sacrifices, they still face abuse, stigma, shortage of PPEs, and underpay.
It is a sad truth that the government is not ready for what is currently happening. As the patients infected with the virus are accelerating, the healthcare workers are getting in the state of higher risks of being infected as access to better facilities and PPEs, is becoming a significant problem. Consideration of PPEs is essential, aside from hand hygiene and waste management, because it dramatically reduces the risk and exposure to infections and other hazards. It serves as a barrier between the person and the viral and bacterial contaminants. Furthermore, this may also protect people with a high risk of acquiring infections such as those who are immunodeficient. There have been photos that are circulating the social media showing the images of healthcare workers wearing rubbish bags and motorcycle helmets as alternative protection due to lack of PPEs. Some even started to make their DIY PPEs.
As of April 22, 2020, the DOH announced that there are more than 1000 healthcare workers in the Philippines who turned out positive for COVID-19, and 26 are dead (Sabillo, 2020). Even the president of the Philippines Alliance of Young Nurse Leaders and Advocates (AYNLA), Reigner Antiquera, believes that the death of health professionals because of the COVID-19 could be prevented if the government provided them with sufficient PPEs. On account of this, I agree that this high number is caused by the crisis within the Philippines' healthcare system, mainly the lack of sense of urgency to protect our healthcare workers.
In President Rodrigo Duterte's national address recently, he addressed the healthcare workers saying, "It's an honor to die for the country." While it is apparent that most of the healthcare workers have found it insensitive and offensive, it gained so much hate and backlash from the people against the president. From that, I don't think anyone wants to die from the virus, and one does not have to die to honor the country. The statement was just wholly a romanticization of their deaths, sugarcoating, and covering it up with patriotism. Healthcare workers deserve more.
Moreover, despite facing the shortage of PPEs, testing capacity, workforce, and the threat of the pandemic every day in the hospital, healthcare professionals still suffer abuse and stigma. The rising number of COVID-19 patients is not the only dilemma healthcare workers have been facing, but also discrimination. It is apparent that anxiety has widely spread among the people of this country that they even see our front liners as the enemies, thinking that they might spread the infection as well. On March 27, a hospital worker, surrounded by five men, was doused with bleach on the face while walking to the hospital. An ambulance driver was also attacked by people, believing that he had been carrying people with the virus (Antiquera, 2020). It came into my realization that our government's incompetency is not only the problem but also our own people's lack of understanding and humanity among them. They have been suffering from physical and mental exhaustion after 24/7 work in the hospital, the pain of losing patients in front of their eyes, and even the anxiety that they might as well spread the infection to their families. It is genuinely heartbreaking how healthcare workers have been receiving the treatment they do not deserve. They are silent as they act as people's protectors, but they need help from us too. Sufficient PPEs is not enough; they also need rest, psychological support, increase in pay, and especially the support from the people. We, as the people of this country, are the only answer for humanity. Instead of seeing them as the enemy just because we are anxious about getting infected, we should fight not against them, but with them. Nothing can match the sacrifices they have been serving our country.

For the purposes of illustration it is assumed that a war resulted in mid-1988 from military conflict between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. This is in some ways a worst-case scenario (total numbers of strategic warheads deployed by the superpowers peaked about this time; the scenario implies a greater level of military readiness; and impact on global climate and crop yields are greatest for a war in August). Some details, such as the time of attack, the events leading to war, and the winds affecting fallout patterns, are only meant to be illustrative. This applies also to the global geopolitical aftermath, which represents the author's efforts at intelligent speculation.
There is much public misconception concerning the physical effects of nuclear war--some of it motivated by politics. Certainly the predictions described here are uncertain: for example, casualty figures in the U.S. are accurate perhaps to within 30% for the first few days, but the number of survivors in the U.S. after one year could differ from these figures by as much as a factor of four. Nonetheless, there is no reasonable basis for expecting results radically different from this description--for example, there is no scientific basis for expecting the extinction of the human species. Note that the most severe predictions concerning nuclear winter have now been evaluated and discounted by most of the scientific community.
Sources supplying the basis for this description include the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency manual on nuclear weapon effects, scientific papers describing computer simulations of long-term effects published by groups ranging from the U.S. government to left-leaning scientific organizations, and research by a similar variety of groups on weapons characteristics and strategy.
1 July 1988: Gorbachev is killed when his plane is attacked by a Stinger surface-to-air missile in East Germany; military heads take control in Moscow, accuse the CIA of responsibility for the assassination, impose a news blackout in the U.S.S.R., and send troops to East Germany and Poland to impose martial law.
15 July 1988: West Germans propose intervention in East Germany following reports of violence there; clashes occur along the border between the two Germanys; NATO puts its forces in West Germany on alert.
19 July 1988: A massive Soviet invasion of West Germany begins: NATO airfields are attacked by missiles with chemical warheads as tanks pour across the border. U.S. nuclear forces are put on alert: Bergstrom Air Force Base (AFB) near Austin receives 4 B-52 bombers dispersed from their home base.
31 July 1988: With Soviet forces 200 kilometers (km) (120 miles) inside northern West Germany, NATO issues a vague ultimatum to the U.S.S.R.
1 August 1988: NATO nuclear weapon depots are attacked by conventional and chemical weapons; ongoing naval combat claims a Soviet ballistic missile submarine in the Arctic Ocean.
4 August 1988: NATO threatens the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Soviet forces advancing towards urban areas in western West Germany.
6:00 AM CDT 5 August 1988: Soviet attacks begin against U.S. military satellites: two ground-based laser facilities are used to disable intelligence satellites in low Earth orbit and damage or harass sensors on those in higher orbits. "Killer" satellites are launched and will reach target satellites over the next few hours. Some of the Soviet civilian population is being moved to bomb shelters, subway tunnels, and out of cities. In West Germany invading Soviet forces launch some tactical nuclear weapons against NATO forces.
10:00 AM CDT 5 August 1988: NATO forces begin launching tactical nuclear weapons against Soviet forces in West Germany and bases in East Germany. North Korea invades South Korea while launching chemical weapon strikes against U.S. and South Korean forces.
12:00 noon CDT 5 August 1988: Nuclear hostilities on a global scale begin as the U.S.S.R. launches a preemptive strike. Over 1,000 Soviet missiles--carrying 5,400 warheads--are launched as a counterforce strike against the U.S. and its NATO allies.
Current population figures are: Rio Grande Valley--690,000; Travis County--550,000; Texas--16,800,000; the United States--245,000,000; the world--5,150,000,000.
12:05 PM CDT: Nuclear weapons are detonated aboard several Soviet satellites in low Earth orbit over the U.S. and other areas, generating electromagnetic pulses (EMP). This devastates electronics in these areas. Most unhardened computers and related equipment are rendered useless, destroying communication, information, and power supply networks on a nationwide scale. Transportation vehicles using electronics are inoperable. Many satellites are disabled. While few human casualties have occurred so far, much of the civilian elements of a continent- spanning society are devastated. For most American civilians this is the only warning of the coming attack they will receive: no effective civil defense program exists.
U.S. strategic bombers begin leaving their bases. This includes 25 B-52s and 5 B-1Bs in Texas, with four of these B-52s leaving Bergstrom AFB near Austin. These 30 bombers are carrying 400 nuclear bombs and missiles.
12:10 PM CDT: NATO missiles in Europe (U.S., British, and French weapons) are launched against Warsaw Pact targets. This includes U.S. Pershing II and Gryphon missiles, most of which were not yet retired under the INF treaty.
Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) warheads begin reaching targets in Texas and other parts of the U.S. Over the next 15 minutes 55 SLBM warheads succeed in reaching targets in Texas out of 74 launched (the rest were on missiles that malfunctioned early in flight). In Travis County, a 1.5-megaton (1 mt equals the explosive energy of 1,000,000 tons of TNT) warhead detonates 2.5 km (1.5 miles) over Bergstrom AFB. Over the next few minutes ten warheads, each between 200 kilotons and 500 kilotons (1,000 kt equals 1 mt) detonate over Bergstrom and in a pattern extending 100 km (60 miles) to the north, west, and east--this in an attempt to destroy the four escaping bombers.
Each explosion produces a fireball which radiates intense light (flash) for about 10 seconds: all exposed combustible material ignites up to ranges of 3 to 9 km (2 to 5.5 miles); second degree burns to exposed skin and fires are produced up to 6.5 to 18.5 km (4 to 11.5 miles) away. The atmospheric shock wave (blast) from each explosion causes partial or complete destruction of all buildings within 1.5 to 4.5 km (1 to 3 miles) and causes moderate damage and 50% injuries or deaths at 5.5 to 15 km (3.5 to 9.5 miles) in the 10 to 40 seconds following detonation. (These figures represent the variation among 200-kt to 1.5-mt warheads exploded in the air or on the ground.) Severe damage and fires result in much of Austin.
Immediate nuclear radiation from the weapons being used is generally absorbed by the atmosphere before it reaches people surviving the flash and blast. (This radiation is only important with small nuclear weapons such as the bombs dropped on Japan in World War II or the tactical nuclear weapons being used in Europe. Delayed radiation from fallout is a different matter, however.)
12:15 PM CDT: The U.S. launches intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) against the U.S.S.R. These are launched from underground silos in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Missouri. Some SLBMs are launched at this time as well.
12:25 PM CDT: The U.S.S.R. launches most remaining nuclear forces, attacking cities and other targets in the U.S. and Western Europe as well as mainland China.
Antiballistic missiles (ABMs) with nuclear warheads are being launched to defend Moscow from incoming warheads. Throughout the U.S.S.R. several types of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) are also being used against incoming nuclear warheads--occasionally with success.
12:30 PM CDT: Soviet ICBM warheads begin reaching U.S. targets. NORAD headquarters near Colorado Springs receives a few 20-mt warheads: the ground shock produced by each one attains 7.3 on the Richter scale. U.S. submarines begin launching SLBMs against the U.S.S.R. In Texas, 80,000 people have already died.
Altogether, over 1,000 tons of debris from Soviet ballistic missiles will fall over the U.S.; much will burn up in the atmosphere, but some larger objects will hit the ground with energy equivalent to their own weight in TNT.
12:35 PM CDT: Another wave of Soviet warheads arrives in Texas: 45 of the 53 ICBM warheads targeted in Texas actually detonate successfully. In Travis County, a 550-kt warhead detonates on the ground at the former site of Bergstrom AFB, adding to the devastation in Austin. In the Rio Grande Valley, a 550-kt warhead detonates on the ground at the Raymondville Coast Guard station and a second one two minutes later; Raymondville is destroyed.
With Soviet warheads minutes away, Israel launches nuclear missiles and nuclear-armed aircraft against capitals and military targets of most other Middle Eastern nations.
12:50 PM CDT: A massive barrage by U.S. SLBMs mostly overwhelms the Moscow ABM system; American, British, French, and Chinese nuclear warheads targeted within 100 km (60 miles) of Moscow total over 500. About 200 reach their targets (although only about 40 were lost to ABMs): while most Soviet leaders in underground shelters survive (the primary goal of the local ABM system), most civilians in the subway tunnels and other shelters will die over the next few hours.
The Moscow area ranks with the six ICBM fields in the U.S. as the hardest hit areas of the world. An average of 350 warheads detonate in each ICBM field, each producing a crater 350 m (400 yards) across; a total of 100,000 sq. km (40,000 sq. mi.) is devoid of life. Out of 1,000 ICBM silos, 100 still had ICBMs; now six are left usable.
The nuclear weapons that have reached Texas so far were directed against U.S. military forces and capabilities. Although this attack did not specifically target the civilian population, it has so far killed 800,000 and injured 3,000,000 people in Texas.
1:00 PM CDT 5 August: A third strike reaches Texas, with 146 warheads launched. Two 750-kt warheads detonate over Austin. In the Rio Grande Valley, a 1.1-mt warhead detonates over Brownsville, three 350-kt warheads detonate around McAllen, and 550-kt warheads are groundburst in Harlingen and at Cameron County Airport. Massive fires and severe blast damage occur throughout all of these metropolitan areas.
This concludes most of the nuclear war in Texas: 273 warheads were fired at 233 targets, and 215 detonated successfully, with a total yield of 128 megatons (about 40 times the explosive force of all conventional bombs and shells used in World War II). In addition, about 5 off-course warheads struck randomly in Texas. At this point 3,500,000 Texans have been killed.
2:00 PM CDT: About 5% of the land area in Texas is burning. In a few areas conditions permit firestorms to develop. In contrast to the World War II atomic bombings in Japan, continuous fire areas sometimes cover hundreds of square km (or sq. mi.), preventing survivors from escaping. Fires cover about 700,000 sq. km (270,000 sq. mi.) in the United States, 250,000 sq. km (100,000 sq. mi.) in the U.S.S.R. and 180,000 sq. km (70,000 sq. mi.) in Europe. Scattered or continuous fires rage across more than one-third of the area of several states, including North Dakota, Ohio, New Jersey, Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
3:00 PM CDT: Intense naval combat between U.S. and Soviet ships and submarines includes the use of tactical nuclear weapons. U.S. naval superiority has been offset by Soviet naval nuclear superiority: U.S. ships are being destroyed by nuclear cruise missiles and nuclear torpedoes. By the end of the day the superpowers will have lost over 100 vessels altogether.
Since most major dams in the U.S. have been destroyed by nuclear explosions, flooding is progressing downstream from these reservoirs. Some rivers particularly affected are the Missouri, Colorado, and Tennessee Rivers.
5:00 PM CDT: The mushroom clouds from nuclear explosions have drifted 100 to 300 km (60 to 180 mi.) downwind, frequently forming the leading edge of large smoke plumes. In the darkness beneath these plumes, temperatures have dropped noticeably.
Vaporized soil and other material, mixed with radioactive bomb residues, settles to the ground in areas where mushroom clouds pass overhead: this is fallout. Immediately downwind of groundbursts, radiation from fallout may be severe enough for exposed persons to already suffer ill effects. The black rain occurring beneath many clouds is radioactive-- sometimes enough to burn the skin after prolonged contact.
Smoke downwind of urban fires is also hazardous. The blasts and fires have consumed 70% of the world's industrial capacity. Toxic chemicals have been released in large amounts.
7:00 PM CDT: Soviet bombers are delivering weapons against U.S. cities and other targets, including high-yield bombs and long-range cruise missiles. None of these targets are in Texas, however. The largest individual weapons used in the war are a couple of 50-mt Soviet bombs dropped in China: craters 2 km (1.3 mi.) across are produced, and severe or moderate damage is produced in an area up to 100 km (60 miles) across.
NATO and Warsaw Pact tactical nuclear weapons are being used by the hundreds along the front in West Germany. Missiles and aircraft have been launched against most cities and military targets in Europe, and nuclear combat has degenerated to disorganized use of short-range systems, especially missiles and nuclear artillery shells. U.S. Green Berets are crossing enemy lines carrying the smallest nuclear weapons to be used: these atomic demolition munitions are used to destroy bridges and similar targets and have explosive yields as low as 10 tons of TNT equivalent (somewhat more than the truck bomb that destroyed the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983).
9:00 PM CDT: Some bombers from Texas are delivering their weapons to Soviet soil, having survived Soviet air defense forces (many using nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft missiles). About half of the weapons carried by Texas bombers actually reach their targets (amounting to 200 warheads with a total yield of 40 mt). Nearly all of these weapons have selectable explosive yields, and usually a yield much lower than the maximum option is used. Only ten of these bombers manage to reach friendly territory afterwards, and they are generally forced to make emergency landings: the U.S., for instance, has less than 100 surviving runways capable of handling B-52s.
12:00 midnight CDT 5/6 August 1988: The nuclear exchange is generally over. In the U.S. 5,800 warheads detonated totaling 3,900 mt. Soviet and NATO weapons successfully used in Europe numbered 3,300 (1,200 mt) (excluding tactical weapons). About 6,100 warheads (most of them American, but some Chinese, British, and French) exploded in the
U.S.S.R. with a total yield of 1,900 mt. Mainland China (P.R.C.) received 900 (detonating) warheads (1,300 mt) from its northern neighbor. Other areas receiving at least a dozen warheads include Canada, North and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Greenland, Puerto Rico, India, Israel, Australia, Guam, Cuba, Syria, and Egypt. Hundreds of other nuclear weapons have been used in naval combat, in troop combat in West Germany and along the U.S.S.R./P.R.C. border, and in defending the Soviet Union from nuclear attack. About 50% of the global strategic and theater nuclear arsenal has been used. About 10% was launched but did not reach a target and 30% was destroyed on the ground. Altogether, World War III has involved the detonation of 18,000 warheads with a total yield of 8,500 mt. Including tactical weapons, there were 67,000 nuclear weapons in the world a day ago; now, there are 10,000 left.
In Texas 6,400,000 have been killed (38% of its original population). Of the 10,400,000 survivors, 3,000,000 have severe injuries and 2,000,000 have lesser injuries. In the Rio Grande Valley 340,000 have been killed (49%) and 90,000 injured (13%); in Travis County over 400,000 are dead (75%). In the U.S. about 110,000,000 people have died altogether, with the 135,000,000 survivors including 30,000,000 injured. In the U.S.S.R. about 40,000,000 have been killed out of a pre-war population of 285,000,000. Mainland China has had 100,000,000 killed out of a population of 1,090,000,000. Examples of other countries: United Kingdom, 20,000,000 killed (out of 57,000,000); Denmark, 2,700,000 killed (out of 5,100,000); Australia, 3,000,000 killed (out of 16,000,000). In Mexico over 3,000,000 have been killed, mostly in cities on the border with the U.S. Throughout the world about 400,000,000 have died.
9:00 AM CDT 6 August: Survivors in urban areas are having little success at finding medical help. For the United States as a whole, hospital beds in surviving hospitals total 80,000, while severe injuries total 20,000,000. About 9,000,000 people in the U.S. have severe burns on much of their bodies, while only 200 beds in burn care facilities survive in the country. Many remaining hospitals lack even emergency power, due to the EMP attacks. The vast number of injuries force doctors and nurses to try to ignore patients that cannot be saved or have non-life threatening injuries. Many survivors in urban areas are in the process of fleeing to neighboring areas in search of medical care and to escape fires; this puts them in the open, often exposed to fallout.
Midnight CDT 6/7 August: Israel is being attacked by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. About one-third of Israel's military forces survived the Soviet nuclear attack; they are now occasionally using nuclear artillery shells against attacking troops. Other Arab states are preparing to join the campaign.
The situation is tense between India and Pakistan: both nations have a handful of small atomic bombs, and India was attacked with Chinese nuclear weapons. Meanwhile civil war is developing in South Africa and various other nations.
Early 7 August: Deposition of fallout in Texas is generally over with, and 80% of the radiation that will result from this fallout has already been emitted. Fire-produced pollutants are noticeable throughout the state-- including smoke, smog, and various hazardous chemicals--with urban areas still burning.
In those parts of Texas affected by fallout, radiation sickness is already evident in many survivors, including symptoms of nausea, vomiting, and skin burns. In a few small areas fallout has been severe enough to already have killed many of those exposed, by causing radiation damage to the central nervous system. Survivors are having difficulty dealing with injuries, lack of food and medical help, and emotional shock.
The U.S. government is essentially gone, as well as most state governments; only two state capital cities survive (the missiles targeted on them malfunctioned). The Rio Grande Valley is receiving refugees from Mexico--survivors of devastated areas seeking help.
10 August: The smoke clouds in the northern hemisphere are spreading to produce a band around the world covering the primary participating nations. Large amounts of particles in the atmosphere include 1,500 million tons of dust, 25 million tons of smoke from vegetation, and 80 million tons of smoke from cities and other manmade sources. This last type of smoke has the greatest impact: smoke from petroleum and petroleum products is particularly effective at absorbing sunlight. Altogether, about 0.4 cubic km (0.1 cu. mi.) of dust and smoke is in the stratosphere.
Typical sunlight levels in Texas are comparable to an overcast day; in some areas, smoke from large continuing fires reduces mid-day light levels to that of twilight. The average temperature in Texas is 22° C (72° F), compared to 29° C (85° F) a week ago.
12 August: About 90% of the radiation that will result from fallout in Texas has been emitted. The average radiation dose in Texas is about 500 rem; by comparison, a dose of 100 rem in less than a week causes radiation sickness in half of people exposed; 50% of people exposed to 450 rem in a short period will die within 30 days; and a dose of 1,500 rem will kill nearly all people exposed within 10 days. Persons who stayed indoors the whole week generally cut their dose by 70%; staying in designated areas of marked fallout shelters would reduce dosage by 99%.
For the entire U.S., the average dose in the open from fallout is 1,200 rem; by comparison the average for the Soviet Union is 150 rem. The difference comes from the larger average yield of Soviet weapons, the larger size of the Soviet Union, the frequently "dirtier" nature of Soviet weapons, and the fact that more Soviet warheads are exploded on the ground (increasing fallout). For Europe the average dose in the open is 500 rem. This fallout is of course unevenly distributed: in the U.S. the dose exceeds 1,800 rem in about 8% of the land area, and the dose exceeds 500 rem in about 1% of the U.S.S.R.
In most of the areas affected by fallout, radiation is diminished sufficiently to be of little concern to people there. However, areas downwind of nuclear strikes on nuclear power plants are still dangerous--
in some locations 100 km (60 mi.) downwind of such strikes, radiation levels are high enough to kill in 2 days. Radiation levels are still high enough to cause sickness from 2-days' exposure in areas up to 500 km (300 mi) downwind of the ICBM fields.
Delayed fallout is being deposited throughout the northern hemisphere: this is from radioactive material launched into the stratosphere, falling over a larger area for months to come. The health effect from this, however, will not be noticeable against the background of other problems.
20 August: In the northern hemisphere, smoke in the lower atmosphere is subsiding (although smoke in the upper atmosphere still absorbs much sunlight). Unusual weather includes windy conditions in some coastal areas. Fog has developed over the oceans and smog envelops the interior of North America and Eurasia. Fallout from the northern hemisphere is now reaching the southern hemisphere. Radiation levels there will peak at ten times the natural background levels--this will not pose a health risk, but it produces fear in many countries.
Many persons suffering radiation sickness are now showing additional symptoms: hair loss and leukopenia. (Those that survive to the end of the year will regrow their hair.)
Combat continues in central Europe, mostly without tactical nuclear weapons. The position of the front is little changed, with forces on either side unable or unwilling to budge.
25 August: The ozone layer has been cut in half over the northern midlatitudes. In spite of this, nearly all of the Earth's surface is receiving less solar ultraviolet radiation than before the war: smoke in the northern hemisphere blocks most sunlight, and as this smoke was initially injected into the atmosphere much ozone was displaced into the southern hemisphere. This situation will change.
Disorganized forces from Iraq, Iran, and Libya are beginning to join the Arab battle against Israel. North Korean forces have overrun many remaining cities in South Korea. Civil war has developed throughout China: with much of the government and military wiped out by Soviet nuclear attack, surviving communist forces are under attack and ethnic conflicts are developing. Tibet has declared independence. Ethnic conflict is also breaking out among surviving populations in some parts of the Soviet Union and Europe.
Naval combat between NATO and Soviet vessels has slackened. Before the war the U.S. had fifteen aircraft carriers; three were destroyed in port on the first day and five more have been destroyed by Soviet naval nuclear weapons. A number of submarines survive with ballistic or cruise missiles.
Hardly any satellites in Earth orbit are functioning. EMP bursts disabled most civilian satellites. Debris from anti-satellite attacks is dispersing and striking more satellites, while particle radiation from nuclear explosions above the atmosphere is trapped in the Earth's magnetic field, making near-Earth space lethal to men and satellites for months or years to come.
1 September: Light levels and temperatures in the northern hemisphere have reached their lows. Temperatures in the lower stratosphere (an altitude of 10 km/6 mi., where most atmospheric smoke is) are around 15° C (50° F)--this is 40° C (70° F) warmer than normal. At the ground, temperatures vary little with altitude (mountains are sometimes warmer than adjacent lowlands), but they vary significantly with distance inland. The interiors of North America and Eurasia are on average 10° C (18° F) cooler than normal--corresponding to normal temperatures for October or November. In west and north Texas temperatures are around 17° C (62° F); near the coast it is nearer 22° C (72° F). In the midlatitudes of the northern hemisphere sunlight is 25% or less of normal--sometimes insufficient for net plant growth. This helps reduce the formation of hurricanes this season.
At this point 9,000,000 Texans and a total of 140,000,000 Americans have died.
Mid-September 1988: Epidemics are developing among surviving populations, particularly food poisoning, dysentery, and typhoid. Displaced populations, including many injured, are particularly affected; those with radiation sickness are particularly vulnerable, since radiation sickness involves damage to the immune system: susceptibility to disease for those is increased by a factor of 2 to 5. In some locations outbreaks of disease are a consequence of the use of biological weapons.
Early October 1988: Many crops are withering throughout the midlatitudes in the northern hemisphere. Sunlight, temperatures, and rainfall are all below normal; in many areas concentrations of ozone, smog, and other pollutants in the lower atmosphere are still high enough to afflict plants; and in restricted areas plants have suffered from fallout. This is particularly true in the American Midwest. About 200,000 se. km (80,000 sq. mi.) in the U.S. is still radioactive enough to cause radiation sickness after two weeks' exposure.
At this point about 580,000 have died in the Rio Grande Valley (84% of the original population) and 40,000 are injured (6%); of Travis County's pre-war population, only 50,000 survive (9%)--most of whom have fled to neighboring areas. About 2,000,000 have died from fallout in Texas now, bringing the death toll to 10,000,000. Of the 6,800,000 survivors, 2,000,000 are injured and 2,000,000 are suffering radiation sickness (these two groups overlap). A total of 160,000,000 Americans have died, or 65% of the pre-war population; in the Soviet Union 90,000,000 have died. The death toll in the United Kingdom is 30,000,000 and in Denmark is 3,300,000. World population is now 4,300,000,000.
November 1988: The ozone layer in the southern hemisphere is now 5% depleted. The effect of this will not be noticed, however, since it is less than natural variations.
December 1988: Crop failures throughout the third world have caused famines in many areas and have also encouraged civil unrest. India has collapsed into civil war. Having devastated Israel, Arab nations are in chaos: the Middle East was heavily dependent on the Western nations economically. Surviving Taiwanese forces are participating in the civil war in mainland China.
Some third world countries, particularly Latin American countries, are launching raids on U.S. coastal areas by sea. These military task forces scavenge and steal what they can find, from raw materials and food to equipment for industrial, military, and agricultural use. Surviving industrial facilities on the coasts, particularly the Pacific and Gulf coasts, are targeted. A couple of raiding parties have visited the Port of Brownsville's former location and surrounding areas but found little of interest.
In the United States, exposure is a serious problem; the only source of heating for most survivors is wood fires.
March 1989: Temperatures in the northern hemisphere are 4° C (2° F) below normal on average. This will shorten growing seasons and prolong agricultural disruptions. Before the war Japan was heavily dependent on food imports; now even fishing in neighboring waters is still unproductive. In Japan 30,000,000 starved to death this winter. Surviving Japanese military forces have waged attacks as far as Australia in search of food sources.
The Midwestern U.S., formerly where most of the nation's grain was produced, received the greatest share of the fallout from strikes on ICBM fields; about half the rural population in this area escaped immediate effects but was killed by fallout. With modern farming technology unavailable, farming this year will be subsistence farming.
The Mississippi River now reaches the Gulf of Mexico 300 km (200 mi.) west of its former mouth. Over the next few years much of former New Orleans will sink below sea level.
Some peat bogs in the northern Soviet Union ignited by the nuclear war are still slowly burning; some will continue to burn for a couple of years.
April 1989: Hundreds of thousands of Mexican refugees have come north hoping to find food. The population of the southwestern U.S. was relatively concentrated in urban areas; with these destroyed, Mexicans will soon represent a majority of the area's population. Violence often occurs when they encounter communities of survivors. Communities in the U.S. faring better than average include survivalist communities in the Northwest and Mormon communities in the Utah area.
May 1989: Radiation hazards from fallout-stricken areas continue to diminish. In the U.S. about 10,000 sq. km (4,000 sq. mi.) is still radioactive enough for two weeks' exposure to cause radiation sickness. Over 90% of this area was contaminated by fallout from strikes on nuclear reactors. This includes about 400 sq. km (150 sq. mi.) in Texas.
July 1989: Wildfires are recurring in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Fires especially sweep through the vast areas where fallout killed vegetation. This includes strips of land extending hundreds of km (or mi.) from strikes on nuclear reactor sites, often carrying radioactivity into the air again.
Since the war, natural processes have begun to restore the ozone layer. In the northern hemisphere the ozone layer is 40% depleted, although localized depletions have sometimes been worse. The resultant increase in ultraviolet radiation has reduced plant growth and crop yields and made it easier to get sunburn. In the southern hemisphere ozone depletion is still around 5%.
August 1989: Disease has ravaged the surviving population in the U.S. About 30% of survivors have been afflicted with one or more of the following: dysentery, food poisoning, viral gastroenteritis, typhoid, influenza, and pneumonia. These diseases have killed about 10,000,000 in the past year. Bubonic plague has broken out, killing nearly 1,000,000 so far and spreading to Mexico. Starvation is also a major cause of death: total food production in the U.S. in the past year was about 2% of that for the previous year.
Famines are occurring throughout the third world--not from nuclear winter but from the social and technological collapse of agriculture. Much of the third world supplemented its agricultural capacity with fertilizers, insecticides, and food imports from the West. Political chaos in many areas and disruption of supply networks has also disrupted production. Food production in the third world in 1989 will be below half that of 1987.
Surviving Americans now number 45,000,000, including 4,000,000 Texans. A few million surviving Americans are permanently sterile due to radiation exposure. World population is now 3,300,000,000.
August 1991: The Earth's atmosphere has been quite nearly purged of soot and dust. Slightly cooler conditions persist due to large amounts of nitrogen oxides in the upper atmosphere. The primary impact is slightly shorter growing seasons in northern areas.
Now that third world countries are recovering agriculturally and beginning to reduce famine, they are being stricken by epidemics. Bubonic plague has spread to Latin America and is appearing in Europe. Africa, which has been particularly ravaged by war and famine, is now seeing the spread of various diseases going unchecked by modern medicine.
December 1992: Depletion of the ozone layer in the northern hemisphere is now only 15%, which is less than natural variations before the war.
2000: China, now under nationalist government, is trying to retake Manchuria (which had declared independence after the war) and Mongolia. Other nations are sufficiently secure internally to launch invasions to acquire various resources.
2010: Some people exposed to fallout after the war are now dying of cancer; however, cancer as a cause of death among the survivors is minimal compared to other causes: disease, starvation, and exposure.
Chinese forces are operating in Southeast Asia, Japan, the Philippines, and particularly Siberia, where there is an influx of Chinese settlers.
2040: Some areas that received fallout from strikes on nuclear power plants and above-ground nuclear waste storage facilities are still uninhabitable and will remain so for some time to come. Genetic defects are found in as much as a few percent of the population born in the northern hemisphere after the war; however, most are not noticeable or are not handicapping. The more profound physical deficiencies are due to malnutrition. Some of the surviving nations have emerged by now as major powers, including Australia, New Zealand, China, Argentina, and Brazil.
Source : http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nucleanuclearwar1.html

By: Graham Peebles / NationofChange / Op-Ed - June 18, 2019
Read the article here: https://www.nationofchange.org/2019/06/18/zero-waste-the-global-plastics-crisis/
Plastic pollution is everywhere, it litters beaches, clogs up oceans, chokes marine life, is ingested by seabirds that then starve to death, and has even been discovered embedded in Arctic ice. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink (bottled and tap), and last year plastic was found in human stools for the first time. Friends of the Earth report that, “recent studies have revealed marine plastic pollution in 100% of marine turtles, 59% of whales, 36% of seals and 40% of seabird species examined.”
According to the United Nations Environmental Agency the world produces around 300 million tons of plastic each year, half of which is single-use items, food packaging mainly. Of this colossal total a mere 14 per cent is collected for recycling, and only 9 per cent actually gets recycled; 12 per cent is incinerated releasing highly poisonous fumes. The rest – nearly 80 per cent – ends up in landfill, or worse still, is illegally dumped or thrown into the oceans; around eight million tons of plastic finds its way into the oceans annually, and while some of the environmental damage plastics cause is clear the full impact on marine and terrestrial ecosystems is not yet apparent.
Plastic recycling rates are appalling and considerably lower than other industrial materials; recycling of steel aluminum, copper and paper e.g., is estimated to be 50 percent, and plastic doesn’t disappear it just gets smaller and smaller, reducing over hundreds or even thousands of years into tiny micro-plastics and nano plastics.

A wakeup call

Levels of plastic waste vary from country to country; based on the 2018 report‘Plastic Pollution’, daily per capita plastic waste in the United States, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, Kuwait and Guyana is over “ten times higher than across countries such as India, Tanzania, Mozambique and Bangladesh.”
Unsurprisingly, given its huge population (1.3 billion) and large manufacturing sector, China produces the greatest amount of plastic waste in the world, 59.8 million tons per year. However, at just .12 kilograms (4 ounces) per capita per day, this equates to one of the lowest levels of per person plastic waste in the world. The USA (population 327 million – 25% of China) is responsible for 37.83 million tons per year, or .34 kilograms (12 ounces) per person per day, three times that of China. America also produces “more than 275,000 tons of plastic litter at risk of entering rivers and oceans annually.” Germany produces 14.48 million tons per year, which at .46 kilograms (just over a pound) per person per day is one of the highest levels in the world, but unlike the U.S., Germany has on of the highest recycling rates in the world – recycling an estimated 48% (US 9%) of its plastic waste.
Since the 1980s recycling has been regarded as the environmentally responsible way to deal with the colossal levels of rubbish humanity produces. Throughout developed countries collecting recyclable household waste has become widespread, but for decades the laborious job of actually recycling it has been exported, mainly to China. But on 31st December 2018, China announced it would no longer be the world’s garbage tip, stating, the Financial Times reports, “that large amounts of the waste were ‘dirty’ or ‘hazardous’ and thus a threat to the environment.” The “National Sword” policy introduced by the Chinese government has resulted in China and Hong Kong reducing plastic waste imports from G7 countries, from 60% in the first half of 2017, to less than 10% for the same period in 2018. Overall recovered plastic imports to China have fallen by 99%.
China now only wants waste that does not cause pollution and meets certain cleanliness criteria. It’s a massive change to the recycling model that was long overdue and has caused chaos on many countries in the west, with large amounts of waste that should have been recycled being burnt or stockpiled. Desperate to find an alternative distant dumping ground to China, huge amounts of plastic waste have been shipped to south-east Asia. Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, where the largest quantity has gone; according to Greenpeace, imports of plastic waste to Malaysia increased from 168,500 tons in 2016 to 456,000 tons in the first six months of 2018, most of the rubbish coming from U.K., Germany, Spain, France Australia and U.S.
The influx of such large quantities of toxic waste into these countries has led to contaminated water, crop death and respiratory illnesses. In May the Philippines forced Canada to take back “69 containers containing 1,500 tons of waste that had been exported in 2013 and 2014,” The Guardian reported. Other countries have responded in a similar way, with outrage: Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam have all introduced legislation to stop contaminated waste arriving in their ports. The Malaysian environment minister, Yeo Bee Yin, said, “Malaysia will not be the dumping ground of the world. We will send back [the waste] to the original countries.” Containers of illegal rubbish from Spain have been returned and a further 3,000 tons of illegally imported plastic waste from U.S., U.K., Australia, France and Canada has also been shipped back.
The steps China has taken and the understandable anger of south-east Asian countries should serve as a wakeup call to western states, whose complacency and arrogance is fueling the environmental crisis. It is time that developed countries stopped exploiting poorer countries and accepted responsibility for their own plastic (and other) waste. In addition to recycling their own rubbish, developed nations, who are largely responsible for the environmental crisis, need to be cooperating with poorer countries, where most mismanagement of waste occurs. Helping them to design efficient waste management systems and financially supporting such schemes.
If plastic pollution is to be reduced and effective recycling systems established, cooperation is essential. Recycling needs to be recognized as an environmental necessity, a social imperative and funded by government accordingly. As a business it is conditioned by business methods and motives; corruption and illegal practices abound, profit becomes the primary considerations and costs as obstacles to environmental sanity; it is a great deal cheaper e.g., to incinerate plastic waste, or dump it in a forest or the oceans, than it is to recycle it, which is labor intensive.

How to shop: Zero waste

The power to bring about fundamental changes through responsible policymaking, investment in green technologies and education rests with governments; they have a duty to act urgently and radically.
Certain fundamental steps need to be taken: drastically reduce plastic use; eliminate single-use plastics altogether; recycle more – 9% is shameful. Invest inhigh-tech recycling facilities/waste management systems; ensure plastic products can be recycled; introduce national recycling standards (in the U.K. e.g., what local authorities will/will not accept varies) as well as worldwide agreements, with countries that lead the way on recycling, like Germany and Sweden being widely consulted.
In a positive move last year at the G7 summit, five countries –U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the EU – signed the Ocean Plastics Charter. They pledged “to increase plastic recycling by 50% and work towards 100% reusable, recyclable or recoverable plastics by 2030.” The USA and Japan did not sign. Plastic is the third largest manufacturing industry in America, producing 19.5% of the world’s plastic; President Trump didn’t even attend the G7 climate change and environment talks.
Individuals also have a crucial part to play in dealing with plastic waste and making politicians enact the radical changes required.
We can all reduce the amount of waste we produce; aim at Zero waste, embrace simpler, environmentally responsible lifestyles, shop in Zero waste shops, where customers take their own containers and refill them from large dispensers. Western supermarket chains are responsible for colossal amounts of plastic waste and need to radically change the way their products are designed, packaged and sold; in the U.K., Waitrose, which has 5% market share, has introduced a pilot scheme in an Oxford branch where food dispensers are being trialed, encouraging customers to use refillable tubs and jars, their own or those freely provided by the shop.
It is a common-sense move that all supermarket chains in western countries need to adopt, it is the environmentally right way to shop and, logically, products not sold in plastic should be less expensive. Zero waste shopping should be the aim, plenty of customers want it, and the environment is demanding it. Plastic pollution is one aspect of the global environmental crisis, a crisis rooted in consumerism and a socio-economic system championed by developed nations, which promotes greed, selfishness and division. Radical systemic changes are required together with changes in lifestyle and values if the environmental vandalism is to come to an end and the planet is to be healed.

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 63%. (I'm a bot)

Canada broke international rules when it dumped more than 100 shipping containers of garbage disguised as plastics for recycling into the Philippines six years ago, a Victoria-based environmental law firm says.
The containers should have been shipped back to Canada within 30 days of the Canadian government being made aware of them under the convention, Ho said.
Canada's failure to take responsibility for the waste is another violation of the convention, Ho said, noting the law forbids the country of origin from transferring the obligation to properly manage the hazardous waste to the country importing it.
Canada amended the regulations in 2016 so that now it applies the convention as long as the country receiving the goods believes they are hazardous, even if Canada does not.
Ca, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, and the EcoWaste Coalition in the Philippines, sent the legal opinion to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week and urged him to finally order his officials to bring the containers back to Canada for disposal.
Caroline Theriault, director of communications for Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, said Wednesday that Canada is aware of the 2016 court decision and "Is strongly committed to collaborating with the Philippines government to resolve this issue."

Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: Canada^#1 Convention^#2 waste^#3 Philippines^#4 containers^#5
Post found in /worldnews and /JustBadNews.
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This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 63%. (I'm a bot)

Canada broke international rules when it dumped more than 100 shipping containers of garbage disguised as plastics for recycling into the Philippines six years ago, a Victoria-based environmental law firm says.
The containers should have been shipped back to Canada within 30 days of the Canadian government being made aware of them under the convention, Ho said.
Canada's failure to take responsibility for the waste is another violation of the convention, Ho said, noting the law forbids the country of origin from transferring the obligation to properly manage the hazardous waste to the country importing it.
Canada amended the regulations in 2016 so that now it applies the convention as long as the country receiving the goods believes they are hazardous, even if Canada does not.
Ca, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, and the EcoWaste Coalition in the Philippines, sent the legal opinion to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week and urged him to finally order his officials to bring the containers back to Canada for disposal.
Caroline Theriault, director of communications for Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, said Wednesday that Canada is aware of the 2016 court decision and "Is strongly committed to collaborating with the Philippines government to resolve this issue."

Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: Canada^#1 Convention^#2 waste^#3 Philippines^#4 containers^#5
Post found in /worldnews, /EcoInternet and /ShittyNewsCanada.
NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.

World War II was the central event of the twentieth century. It involved all six major continents, all three of the great oceans on the planet, scores of countries, and billions of people. It caused 57 million deaths and unimaginable human suffering. It brought about the redrawing of national boundaries in Europe and Asia, forced the relocation of many ethnic groups, made millions of families homeless, and led to the virtual annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe. By the time it was over in 1945, Tokyo, Berlin, Hamburg, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Hiroshima, Dresden, Dusseldorf, Nagasaki, Osaka, Manila, Cologne, and dozens of other great cities had been obliterated. And population centers that had mostly avoided the worst of the death and destruction continued to see poverty and hunger linger for years after the surrender documents had been signed. Meanwhile, the prisoners and the wounded, making their way back to wives, sweethearts, parents, and children, often after an absence of many years, would carry the cost of the conflict with them for the rest of their lives.
A WORLD AT WAR There is no one date that can be said to mark the beginning of the greatest of global conflicts. In 1931, the Japanese army invaded Manchuria, a northern province of China. In July 1937, the Japanese moved again, this time directly against the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek. The atrocities that followed shocked the world. Meanwhile, in 1936, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler moved aggressively into the Rhineland, previously a demilitarized zone, and in 1938, he incorporated Czechoslovakia and Austria into the Third Reich. By this time, the Western world was fully alert to the menace of the fanatically ambitious and confident Fuhrer. Then, in the early morning hours of September 1, 1939, Hitler sent his armies into Poland. Two days later, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. Within a matter of weeks the Soviet Union, which had recently signed a non-aggression treaty with Hitler, attacked Poland from the east. Within a month, Polish resistance collapsed, and Warsaw fell. World War II had begun.
In general, the American people did not want to have any part in a European war. They felt protected by great oceans on both sides of the North American continent. And they felt that, in World War I, American boys had fought and bled in France mostly to make fortunes for munitions makers and arms merchants. Moreover, the United States had allowed its armed forces to wither in the 1920s and 1930, so that when World War II broke out in Europe, its army of 190,000 men ranked about eighteenth in the global rankings, about on a par with Rumania and Bulgaria.
The United States might never have entered World War II if Germany, Japan, and Italy had stopped after their initial conquests. But the three Axis powers made astonishing gains in the years before the Pearl Harbor attack. After taking over Norway and neutralizing Sweden, the Nazis turned their attention to the big prize. Early in the morning of May 10, 1940, Hitler launched a blitzkrieg or lightning war against France, whose army had previously been considered the finest in the world. The revolutionary nature of the German offensive, generally credited to the brilliant strategist, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, was to concentrate all available tanks into a few specialized and highly mobile armored divisions rather than to spread them out evenly among infantry units. These panzer formations were to smash holes in the enemy line and then break out into the rear, creating havoc on the roads and, supported by Luftwaffe dive bombers, preventing the Allies from plugging the gaps. They did this by attacking through the dense Ardennes forests in Luxembourg and southern Belgium, crossing the Meuse River long before the Allied high command had thought possible. The British and French armies actually had more and better tanks than the attackers, but new strategic and tactical concepts carried the contest. The German tank columns swept everything before them, and the French defenses soon collapsed. In fact, the almost total collapse of the proud French army in May 1940 remains one of the most incredible events in all of military history. France sued for peace in June, and Hitler’s victorious troops marched past the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
The British Expeditionary Force, which had been sent in 1939 to help defend France from the Wehrmacht, was cut off when German panzer divisions cut west toward the English Channel, effectively isolating more than 300,000 Allied troops. Fortunately for Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Royal Navy was able to extricate his trapped soldiers from the port of Dunkirk. But at the end of June 1940, essentially all of western Europe was under the control of Berlin.
Hitler expected Great Britain, his only remaining foe, to recognize the superiority of German arms and to remove itself from active involvement in Europe. After all, he reasoned, Germany sought lebensraum or growing space in the east and had no intention of dismantling the British Empire. Why not just divide the world? Why would the Anglo-Saxons not be content with their vast holdings in Asia, on the other side of the world? When London refused to capitulate or to do the sensible thing, the Fuhrer unleashed the Luftwaffe on the English homeland, expecting that its heavy blows would bring Churchill to his senses. At about the same time, in a dramatic BBC radio address from London on June 18, 1940, General Charles de Gaulle called upon his French countrymen to resist their German conquerors. Meanwhile, Italy, not satisfied with its conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–1936, turned its attention toward Greece. And Japan expanded its military operations in China.
In 1941, however, Hitler made a colossal blunder. In fact, perhaps no event in human history can match in significance the Fuhrer’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in the early summer. He had not defeated Great Britain, and yet he was turning his armies to the east, initiating a two-front war. When his soldiers crossed the USSR frontier on June 22, the Nazis leader’s new opponent became Joseph Stalin, a dictator as ruthless and cunning as himself, and the head of both the largest country and the largest army on earth. The eastern front, which involved hundreds of combat divisions stretched over thousands of miles of windswept terrain, would turn out to be a human furnace that consumed soldiers as hungrily as steam engines consume coals. Germany essentially bled to death in Russia, as four-fifths of all Wehrmacht soldiers who perished in the war died while fighting the Red Army. For the Soviet Union, the carnage was even worse. A staggering 27 million USSR citizens died in what for them will always be “the Great Patriotic War.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt followed the news of fighting in Europe with obvious concern. He knew his countrymen did not want to be involved, and indeed he ran for an unprecedented third term in the White House with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.“ Isolationist sentiment was powerful, and no less a personage than Charles Lindbergh led an America First movement that aimed to avoid all foreign entanglements. Moreover, many ethnic Americans were not anxious to help the British. German Americans and Italian Americans, for example, while loyal to the United States, were also proud that Hitler and Mussolini had restored pride and confidence to their homelands, while Irish Americans, long hostile to the government in London, did not want to go to war to advance the interests of the hated English. On the other side of the interventionist divide, Jewish Americans were more aware of Hitler’s intense anti-Semitism and of the new regulations and laws that limited Jewish access to the professions in Germany. They also knew that when brown-shirted, Nazi thugs attacked Jewish businesses and synagogues, the Berlin government had done nothing to protect its Jewish citizens.
FDR was of course aware of these cross-currents. And he also knew that if Germany ever controlled all of Europe, its power would be colossal. So, sometimes quietly, sometimes forcefully, he moved his nation to a state of greater preparedness. On July 19, 1940, he signed into law the largest shipbuilding program in American history, one that would essentially double the size of the already impressive United States Navy. And the Army, directed by Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, began to grow to a size more appropriate to a great power. Also in 1940, the President took the momentous step of federalizing the National Guard of all the states. If the American republic was ever to be dragged into the conflict, Roosevelt wanted the nation to be ready.
JAPANESE AMBITIONS Japanese leaders felt that they were being unfairly held back by the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, which together controlled most of the natural resources, especially oil, to the south of Japan, in places now known as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Essentially, the Western powers said they would not send scrap iron and sell resources to the Japanese if their government did not remove its troops from China and renounce its ambitions there.
Why should the proud Japanese, with their centuries of tradition, their modern navy, and their ambitions for future glory, give up their dreams because those dreams did not fit with the wishes of white Westerners. They wanted their own empire and their own seat at the table among the great nations of the world.
So, the Tokyo government would have to seize the resources it needed, which meant certain war with the West. But in which direction would the Japanese move? Essentially, they had three options. The first was to aid Nazi Germany and to attack to the north against the Russian Far East from Japanese bases in Manchuria. Such a Japanese strike against the Soviets would have divided Soviet resources and probably resulted in a victory for Hitler over the USSR. But Japan needed oil and rubber quickly, and those resources were not easily available to the north.
A second option would have involved striking southwest against the British Empire in the Indian Ocean, taking Singapore, Malaysia, and French Indo-China and threatening to link up with German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at the Suez Canal. This strategy had a good probability of success, but the Japanese supply lines to the Indian Ocean would have to run past the US-controlled Philippine Islands.
Thus, the Rising Sun had to take the third and militarily worst option—a direct strike against the United States—the one country with the natural resources, the population size, and the industrial capacity to crush Japan. It would require a bold and audacious attack on the United States Pacific Fleet, which President Roosevelt had recently redeployed from its home port in San Diego to its forward operating base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Such an assault would require meticulous planning, intense training, absolute secrecy, and complete surprise. Fortunately for the Japanese, in Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, they had the perfect leader. His plan was to first cripple the American fleet and then to force a gigantic naval battle somewhere in the vast Pacific. The Japanese, according to Yamamoto’s plan, would win a decisive victory, and thus force President Roosevelt to yield to Tokyo’s territorial demands in its theater of influence.
By every military measure, Japan’s early morning attack on the great fleet anchorage at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was a success. Its aircraft carriers managed to cross the Pacific Ocean without being spotted, and its torpedo and dive bombers achieved complete surprise against the sleeping American fleet. All eight American battleships were disabled or sent to the bottom, as were dozens of smaller vessels. More than a thousand sailors died on the USS Arizona alone, and they represented less than half of the Navy losses that day. By contrast, the Japanese attackers lost only a few pilots and planes, and no ships. Admiral Yamamoto had every reason to be proud. He had only two reasons for immediate concern. First, the three large American aircraft carriers attached to the Pacific Fleet were not in Pearl Harbor, but were at sea on a practice mission, and the Japanese aviators could not find them. Second, Yamamoto had not thought to order his pilots to blow up the giant oil tanks and fuel storage facilities that dotted the area around Pearl Harbor.
But those were minor issues compared to the admiral’s greatest worry. Despite his great victory, he thought the Japanese had simply awakened a sleeping giant. Yamamoto expected the Japanese army and navy to run wild for six months, but then, he feared, the United States would gather its enormous human and material resources and hurl them against the admiral’s island nation. And in the case of a protracted war against the American republic, Japan’s most famous officer realized that the cause was almost hopeless.
THE UNITED STATES GOES TO WAR The great national debate about whether the United States should get involved in World War II essentially ended when the first bombs fell on the Hawaiian Islands. Few Americans had ever been to Japan, and fewer still cared about it one way or the other. But as radios across the land sent out the news of a sneak attack on the American base at Pearl Harbor, a gigantic nation, a “sleeping giant” as Admiral Yamamoto called it, was roused to fury. The next day, a Monday, President Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress. Referring to December 7 as “a day which will live in infamy,” he asked for a Declaration of War against the Empire of Japan, which was approved without debate and almost without dissent. Surprisingly, on December 10, Germany declared war on the United States even though Hitler’s treaty with Japan was a defensive arrangement that did not require him to act, because Japan had been the aggressor. The Fuhrer made many miscalculations during the war; perhaps this was his biggest mistake.
President Roosevelt was happy that the United States was in the war, and in fact, he had manipulated the Japanese into firing the first shot. But he had expected the initial Japanese attack to be against the Philippines, not on a presumably impregnable naval base in the middle of a huge ocean. He was shocked by what happened at Pearl Harbor, and was horrified by the destruction of his battleships and the devastating number of deaths on December 7. But the American nation could make up such human and material losses. And the President knew how to funnel national anger at Japan into a much more critical war against Germany. FDR understood better than his countrymen that Germany was the greater threat and that Japan could be dealt with almost at leisure. It was a sentiment shared by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. When he heard of the Pearl Harbor disaster, he actually breathed a sigh of relief, noting in his wartime diary: “So we have won after all.”
The United States had great military potential, but in December of 1941 it was still more potential than reality. Immediately, the nation launched the greatest industrial expansion in human history. Within months, new orders for munitions, uniforms, and combat vehicles absorbed the remaining unemployed workers from the Great Depression. Old factories were expanded and modernized, and giant new ones sprang up as if by magic, especially in the South and West. Outside Detroit, the Chrysler Tank Arsenal produced the tanks and armored vehicles that would become the spearheads of General George S. Patton’s Third Army.
In the skies American dominance was clear. In Washington State and in Kansas, Boeing built the great four-engine, strategic bomber fleets that destroyed entire cities. As early as 1942, American factories were already churning out 48,000 airplanes, more than Germany and Japan combined. By 1944, assembly lines in southern California, Seattle, and Long Island were producing almost 100,000 aircraft, a total greater than the combined output of Germany, Japan, and the British Empire. Statistics for trucks, jeeps, landing ships, artillery pieces, and self-propelled guns were almost as dramatic.
Perhaps the most incredible numbers were put up at sea. By 1945, the United States Navy was larger and more powerful than the navies of all other countries put together. The Bath Iron Works in Maine produced more destroyers than all of Japan, while the Kaiser shipyards in California proved able to build an entire Victory ship, from beginning to end, in a mere seventy-two hours. And the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with 71,000 employees working around the clock, seven days a week, became the busiest and most productive such enterprise anywhere.
In order the make the instruments of war, as well as uniforms, penicillin, light bulbs, and shoes, the need for manpower was great. Indeed, manpower became the wrong word. As millions of men joined the Army and as industrial production soared, women became the obvious source of labor. While many women remained at home with their children, and others worked in volunteer activities, the growth in female employment between 1942 and 1945 was staggering. At first, they took non-defense jobs as clerks, cabbies, truck drivers, waitresses, ambulance crews, streetcar conductors, and filling station attendants. Soon, however, opportunities in shipyards and aircraft factories opened up. One historian has estimated that a full one-third of aircraft industry employment in California was female.
Japanese Americans and African Americans had a harder time proving their importance and finding full citizenship. Prejudice against Asians on the West Coast had been a theme of American history for generations before World War II, but the Pearl Harbor attack meant that Japanese Americans, many of whom had been citizens of the United States since birth, were suspected of being enemy agents. In one of the more disgraceful aspects of American history, they were rounded up and sent to makeshift internment camps far from their homes and businesses. Yet not a single conviction ever resulted from an unpatriotic act by a Japanese American, and many served with courage and honor in the armed forces.
The color line has long been a defining part of the American experience, and World War II, despite being waged against two countries that celebrated racial homogeneity, did not bring immediate relief to the long-suffering black minority of the United States. In fact, blacks were not allowed in the Marine Corps and were inducted as sailors only to serve as cooks. Even in the Army, they served in segregated units under mostly white officers. Conditions were scarcely better at home. The worst incidents took place in Detroit in 1943, when Belle Isle became a site of racial warfare.
OVER THERE The tanks, artillery, ships, and trucks churned out by the arsenal of democracy would be useful only if brave men could be found to take them into harm’s way. In this respect, the United States proved to be exceptionally fruitful. After Pearl Harbor, induction centers across the nation were swamped with volunteers who were anxious to take a swing at the brash Japanese. Even so, by 1943 Washington had resorted to a draft of all able-bodied males between eighteen and forty. The Marine Corps expanded from one division to five, while the Navy put more than a thousand ships to sea. The Army was the largest of all the services, and its basic training facilities at Fort Benning, Georgia (infantry); Fort Bragg, North Carolina (airborne): Fort Sill, Oklahoma (artillery); and Fort Hood, Texas (armor), became small cities in their own right. By 1945, about sixteen million Americans had served in uniform, a figure that did not include the merchant marine, where responsibilities were as important and jobs as dangerous as those of any soldier, sailor, or airman.
As the war continued into 1942, 1943, and 1944, and as millions of newly minted soldiers and sailors joined the armed forces, separation and longing became the most common emotional experiences of the time. As long as the men were stateside, there was at least a chance of seeing a wife or a sweetheart for a stolen weekend somewhere far from home. The songs of the time—“Till We Meet Again” and “I’ll Be Seeing You, in All the Old Familiar Places,” among others—reflected the feelings of loneliness that were felt in every town and by almost every family.
Eventually, most soldiers and Marines were shipped overseas, and their last view of America was from the ports of embarkation—New York on the East Coast and San Francisco on the West. But before leaving, they typically spent a week or ten days at a final staging area—Camp Shanks and Camp Kilmer near New York City were the largest—where they received required inoculations and made out their last wills and testaments.
That last period in the United States often offered the opportunity for a few days of liberty. Because trains across the country were jammed and overloaded, there was no chance for a trip home. But the port of embarkation, especially Manhattan, was another story. There, among the bright lights, nightclubs, and stage-door canteens of the largest city in the world, they drank and laughed and at least pretended to be confident and happy.
The next step was to board a troopship. Whether they sailed on converted transatlantic liners like the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen Mary or ordinary transports, quarters were tight, pleasures were few, and danger was constant. Especially in the Atlantic Ocean, where German U-boats lurked beneath the surface, the most common way to get to Europe was in a convoy of about fifty or sixty similar ships, all protected by a screen of destroyers and maybe one cruiser. Mercifully, the Allied navies gained superiority over the Nazi submarines before most American soldiers crossed the ocean, and only 8,000 men were lost out of four million who made the journey aboard the defenseless cargo vessels.
By late 1942, the tide had turned against the Axis. In June, the United States Navy won its greatest victory ever in the Battle of Midway, in which an outnumbered American carrier force inflicted devastating losses on the then superior Japanese fleet. By September, American Marines were clawing back on Guadalcanal, and beginning an island-hopping campaign that required them to fight their way across the Pacific. The good news, however, was that after the Battle of Midway, the Japanese were no longer able to undertake offensive operations. It was just a matter of time before the Rising Sun was crushed by American air and naval superiority.
The German army was another matter. Generally regarded as the finest fighting force in the war, it had superbly trained and battle-hardened soldiers, sophisticated weapons, and brilliant tactical leaders, such as von Manstein, Rommel, and Heinz Guderian. Only an enormous sacrifice by many nations could bring it down. But it happened. In the fall of 1942, the British Eighth Army counterattacked against the Afrika Korps and soon sent Rommel scurrying home to Germany. Meanwhile, the Americans who had landed in Morocco and Algeria trapped thousands of Nazi soldiers who could not escape across the Mediterranean Sea. In 1943, a combined Anglo-American force invaded Sicily and then Italy, ultimately knocking that country out of the war. And in perhaps the most devastating battle of all time, at Stalingrad between August 1942 and February 1943, the proud German Sixth Army, conquerors of France, was systematically annihilated by a vengeful Red Army. Thereafter, Hitler’s legions were rarely able to attack. Instead, they were bludgeoned by enormous forces coordinated by the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.
After the successful Allied landings in 1943 in Sicily and Italy, General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army and probably the most important officer on the Allied side in the war, recommended to FDR that Dwight D. Eisenhower be made Supreme Commander of the Allied crusade in Europe. Marshall had wanted the job for himself, but President Roosevelt said he would not be comfortable if his right-hand man were not nearby in Washington.
So it fell to an obscure Kansan to take charge of the greatest invasion in history. Ike had been only a lieutenant colonel when the war began in 1939. But his good judgment, hard work, and devotion to duty were recognized early on by Marshall, who quickly promoted the affable staff officer over dozens of senior generals. By the early months of 1944, Eisenhower was in charge of all American and Allied ground, sea, and air forces in Europe and busy assembling a gigantic invasion force in England. His mission was to assault the Nazi Atlantic Wall, a network of artillery, beach hazards, and pillboxes that were designed to slaughter anyone foolish enough to come out of the water.
The story of D-Day, June 6, 1944, has been told many times. Suffice it to say here that General Eisenhower did four things that will distinguish him forever. First, he made a decision on June 5 that only he could make—to go forward with the invasion despite a terrible weather forecast. By contrast, Field Marshal Rommel, the commander of the Atlantic Wall, who no doubt saw the same predictions, decided that the weather would be so awful that he could safely go back to Germany to visit his wife and son. Eisenhower took a chance that the weather would break and allow the landings to go forward. Fortunately, his hunch proved to be correct.
Second, the Supreme Commander took personal responsibility for possible failure, preparing a statement for release to the press in case the invasion force was hurled back into the sea. In such a circumstance, General Eisenhower reported that his soldiers and sailors had done everything he or anyone else could have expected, and that his withdrawal from the beachhead was his fault alone. As it happened, his message never had to be released.
Third, Eisenhower, knowing that having given the order to attack, he could do nothing more of a supervisory nature on the afternoon and evening of June 5, visited the airfields where many thousands of American paratroopers were already making final preparations to be dropped into the midnight darkness behind German lines. With parachutes on their backs, they had blackened their faces and wore heavy camouflage as they stood in groups waiting to board their aircraft. Members of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, they would be the first invaders to land anywhere in Nazi-occupied France, and Ike knew that hundreds of them, maybe more, would be killed the next day. So the commanding general walked informally among the young men, many of them only teenagers, chatting about their hometowns, working his way through the throng, recognizing the perils they would all soon be facing.
Finally, as the thousands of ships of the main invasion force pushed away from piers and began to cross the English Channel for the short voyage to Normandy, General Eisenhower read a personal message to the troops who were about to go ashore:
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
THE END OF THE WAR The D-Day landings were successful, and despite bitter fighting over the coming months, the Allies used their heavy artillery, their enormous air armada, and their dozens of well-equipped infantry divisions to pulverize the once invincible German war machine. With the Red Army smashing into East Prussia from the east, the British and American heavy bombers raining destruction from the skies on German cities, and Allied armored columns crossing the Rhine River and encircling trapped Wehrmacht divisions, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. All resistance ceased within the week. Upon accepting the surrender of Nazi officials, General Eisenhower sent to his superiors what is surely the most succinct message ever sent by a victorious commander: “The mission of this Allied force was accomplished at 0241hours, May 7th, 1945.”
JAPANESE COLLAPSE Although the warlords in Tokyo could boast of brave and devoted soldiers, of airplanes (like the vaunted ”Zero”) that were as fine as any anywhere, and of ships and sailors that were world class, Japan never had a chance against the United States. It did not have enough of anything, except courage and fanaticism, to compete with a continental nation with almost infinite resources. At Tarawa, at Iwo Jima, and at Okinawa, the Japanese fought almost to the last man. It was no use. In desperation, they created an elite force of suicide pilots, called kamakazees, who took off with only enough fuel for a one-way trip. Their mission was to crash their aircraft into the ships of the United States Navy. They died in glory, but they were too few and too late. And after President Harry S. Truman (FDR had died in April 1945) ordered atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even the most fanatical Japanese militarist had to realize that further resistance was madness. On August 14, 1945, Truman announced over the radio that the war was over. On September 2, 1945, on the deck of the great battleship, the USS Missouri, representatives of the Japanese government signed the formal instrument of surrender. World War II had ended.
THE WAR IN RETROSPECT In many respects, the United States was the big winner in World War II. Relative to Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, its battle deaths were relatively few in number. Its great cities, like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, were never occupied by enemy armies or laid waste by falling bombs. Its factories and steel mills, farms and subdivisions, and stores and schools were unscathed by the conflict. Alone among major world capitals, Washington emerged from the war more confident than ever, and its airplanes, fleets, and armies, not to mention its atomic weapons, gave it military superiority over any potential opponent. By every measure, the United States led the world in 1945, and it was about to begin two generations of prosperity unmatched in history.
But no one in America who had lived as an adult through the Great Depression and the years of total mobilization and total war that followed it would claim that the experience had been easy or had been achieved without enormous sacrifice and cost. Indeed, those years of deprivation, fear, and longing would always be as central to their lives as they were to the century in which they lived.
Kenneth T. Jackson is the Jacques Barzun Professor in History and the Social Sciences and director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University. His publications include Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1987), Empire City: New York through the Centuries (2002), and The Encyclopedia of New York City (2nd ed., 2010).
Credit to www.gilderlehrman.org©