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Shut It Down Affinity Group Blocks Traffic, Entrance at Vernon's Vermont Yankee
"Vermont Yankee is more deadly than Hiroshima," proclaims the banner eight women of the Shut It Down Affinity Group employed to block forty carsful of Entergy Vermont Yankee workers from reporting to their 5 pm shift for more than a half hour on Tuesday before Vernon police transported them from Entergy's gate after arresting them.
VERNON, Vermont
" Vermont Yankee is more deadly than Hiroshima," proclaims the banner eight women of the Shut It Down Affinity Group employed to block forty carsful of Entergy Vermont Yankee workers from reporting to their 5 pm shift for more than a half hour on Tuesday before Vernon police transported them from Entergy's gate after arresting them.
Shut It Downers acted on the 68th anniversary of the United States' destruction of Hiroshima, Japan with the world's first atomic bomb that resulted in more than a hundred thousand immediate deaths and far more deaths and debilitating illnesses from the effects of radiation. The United States is the only nation in the world to have employed atomic weapons, a practice continued today with US weapons tipped with depleted uranium.
Officer Albrey Crowley of the Vernon Police Department arrested, from Vermont, Linda Pon Owen, 74, of Brattleboro and Ulrike von Moltke, 69 of Sharon; from Massachusetts, Hattie Nestel, 74, and Marcia Gagliardi, 65, of Athol; Anneke Corbett, 70, of Florence; Frances Crowe, 94 and Susan Lantz, 72, of Northampton; and Ellen Graves, 72, of West Springfield. The women were released without charges pending further review.
Before blocking the Vermont Yankee gate, Shut It Downers vigiled legally from 4 to 5 pm across Route 142 from the power plant driveway as workers exited from a day shift. In addition to their main banner, Shut It Downers carried signs that read "Hiroshima Killed/Vermont Yankee Kills" and "Vermont Yankee is killing us all."
"I had to be here today," said Lantz. "Nuclear power is destroying the earth. We must end it before it ends us."
Pondering the dilemma of blocking workers from entering their job site, Nestel paraphrased Rabbi Abraham Heschel who marched in the front lines with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during civil rights activism fifty years ago in Selma, Alabama: "Justice is not important as an abstraction or value but for practical effects on people. It is not so much the ideal of justice but practical applications of injustice or oppression. The thing is to interfere in situations which, while not concerning us personally, must be regarded as instances of injustice."
"Today," Nestel said, "we interfered with the unjust operation of Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant on the anniversary of the United States bombing of Hiroshima. We shut Vermont Yankee down for a half hour and blocked forty carsful of people from going to work."
"If no one went to work at Vermont Yankee," added Gagliardi, "there would be no need for anyone else to shut it down."
During the legal vigil, 97 cars the women judged to be carrying Vermont Yankee workers exited the power plant. Separately, a vintage Lincoln Towncar slowed on Route 142. The elder driver rolled down his window to ask if anyone present had been to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. He identified himself as from nearby Hinsdale, NH, and said he had seen Nagasaki right after the bombing. "Horrible," he said. "Bless you, Ladies."
Nestel has walked from Hiroshima to Nagasaki several times with the Buddhist monastic order Nipponzan Myohoji which built and maintains the Peace Pagoda in Leverett, Massachusetts.
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‘A System Rigged’: Untaxed Wealth of Richest 0.1% Is More Than Assets of World’s Poorest Half
A decade after the Panama Papers, the global rich are still hiding more than $2.8 trillion in tax havens. Just a fraction of that money could end extreme hunger and provide clean water to everyone on Earth.
Apr 02, 2026
The richest 0.1% of people on Earth are hiding more than $2.8 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. That money alone is more wealth than is owned by the entire bottom half of humanity, more than 4.1 billion people.
These findings were published in a report released Thursday by Oxfam International on the 10th anniversary of the 2016 Panama Papers, which provided an unprecedented look at how the world's most powerful capitalists, financiers, political leaders, celebrities, and criminals exploited offshore tax havens to stash their money.
"Ten years on, the superrich are still sequestering oceans of wealth in offshore vaults,” said Christian Hallum, Oxfam International’s tax lead.
The percentage of untaxed wealth in offshore accounts has dropped in the past 10 years, in large part due to global reforms like the adoption of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Automatic Exchange of Information framework (AEOI), which allows revenue authorities around the world to easily share information and crack down on cheats.
However, many nations in the Global South are excluded from this system, even though they need the tax revenue the most.
Oxfam found that a staggering $3.5 trillion, more than 3.2% of the global gross domestic product, still remains in untaxed accounts. That's more than the entire GDP of France and is more than twice the combined wealth of the world's 44 poorest nations.
And while the percentage of untaxed wealth is shrinking, that doesn't mean inequality has shrunk.
On the contrary, the December 2025 "World Inequality Report" found that the richest 0.001% of humanity—fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires and billionaires—now have three times as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population combined.
Inequality has surged around the world in part due to taxation policies and pandemic recovery packages that overwhelmingly favor the rich. The most glaring was adopted in the world's financial hub, the United States, last year.
The megabudget passed by Republicans and signed into law by President Donald Trump handed a $1 trillion tax cut to America's wealthiest 1% while slashing more than $1 trillion in spending from Medicaid, food assistance, and other safety net programs. It has been described by some economists as the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history.
While the global top 0.1% holds about 80% of untaxed offshore wealth, an even smaller group of uber-wealthy individuals does most of the cheating. The world's richest 0.01%, who hold at least $50 million apiece, control about half of all money in global tax shelters—$1.7 trillion.
According to the Tax Justice Network's Corporate Tax Haven Index, Caribbean islands under UK ownership, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda, are among the worst offenders. Other notable tax havens include Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
A February Oxfam report on Elon Musk, who is well on his way to becoming the world's first trillionaire, found that his company, Tesla—which managed to pay zero dollars on its $2.3 billion income in 2024—has not published a country-by-country report on its taxes and that it has subsidiaries in many countries considered to be tax havens.
Big Pharma companies, including AbbVie and Merck, also used tax shelters to lower their total tax expense in 2025 by more than $1 billion, according to a report released earlier this month by the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition.
"This isn’t just about clever accounting—it’s about power and impunity," Hallum said. "When millionaires and billionaires stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens, they place themselves above the obligations that bind the rest of society."
"The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating," he continued. "We see our public hospitals and schools starved of funds, our social fabric shredded by rising inequality, and ordinary people forced to shoulder the costs of a system rigged to enrich a tiny few.”
Even a fraction of the money currently stashed away by the world's wealthiest could alleviate untold amounts of suffering.
In November, the United Nations' World Food Program estimated that extreme hunger, which currently affects more than 318 million people around the world, could be eradicated by 2030 with investments of about $93 billion per year, but that global hunger programs instead remain “slow, fragmented, and underfunded."
According to a 2021 UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, investments of around $114 billion per year would similarly be enough to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
Oxfam called on governments around the world to increase coordination to prevent the wealthy from hiding their riches from tax authorities. It also urged them to adopt more aggressive policies to tax the 1%'s wealth at home, including taxes on income and on extreme wealth.
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Amazon Cites Oil Price Spike Caused by Trump's Iran War to Justify New 3.5% Surcharge
The retail giant said the surcharge was needed due to "elevated costs in fulfillment and logistics" that "have increased the cost of operating across the industry."
Apr 02, 2026
Americans having been paying more for gasoline since the start of President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran, and now it seems the war's costs are spreading to other areas of the economy.
Amazon announced on Thursday that, beginning April 17, it would add a "3.5% fuel and logistics-related surcharge" to vendors that use its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service in the US and Canada.
The company said that it needed to add the surcharge due to "elevated costs in fulfillment and logistics" that "have increased the cost of operating across the industry."
"We have absorbed these increased costs so far," Amazon said. "However, similar to other major carriers, when costs remain elevated, we implement temporary surcharges on our fulfillment fees to recover a portion of the actual cost increases we are experiencing."
Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told CNBC that the company's surcharge will be "meaningfully lower" than rival carriers, and insisted that "we remain committed to our selling partners' success and to maintaining broad selection and low prices for customers."
Tahra Hoops, director of economic analysis at Chamber of Progress, said that Amazon's surcharge is "yet another example of more increased costs to come," as "the ongoing supply shock" caused by the Iran war "has lasted longer than expected."
Amazon isn't alone in adding surcharges due to the war's impact on fuel costs.
According to a Tuesday report in The New York Times, fresh food distributors across the US have been adding surcharges to deliveries to make up for the increased fuel costs caused by the Iran war, with the result being that "grocery stores, restaurants, hospitals, and even schools are most likely seeing costs for their food shipping climb."
John Ross, the chief executive of the Independent Grocers Alliance, told the Times that the increased shipping costs from the surge in diesel fuel costs have come at a particularly inopportune time since many Americans were already stretched thin financially before Trump attacked Iran.
"For people who spend every nickel they have on daily expenses, if grocery prices go up $5, that $5 has to come from something else," Ross said. "But it’s hard for the grocers to eat it also. For every $1 that consumers spend at the register, the grocery store is keeping about two pennies. There’s very little room there."
The price of fuel isn't the only factor seen driving food prices higher, as CNBC on Thursday reported that experts expect to see a spike in food prices later this year thanks to the Iran war's impact on fertilizer prices.
University of Minnesota economist Kjetil Storesletten told CNBC that "the price of food is going to move quite a lot" in the coming months, predicting that "all of the increased price in fertilizer is going to be passed through to food."
Storesletten said that food prices won't jump immediately, but warned that coming grocery sticker shock will grow more severe if Iran keeps its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz for the foreseeable future.
"Imagine [the strait] remains closed until the summer," the economist said. "We will see substantial increases in food prices."
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'The Most Anti-Veteran President in History': VA Families Losing Homes After Trump Killed Loan Program
"It's a struggle. Especially with everything else being inflated in the country," said one US Army vet, "you know, with groceries, gas... I'm like, what the hell?"
Apr 02, 2026
Just as President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress were warned would happen, close to 100,000 US veterans are currently behind on their mortgage payments or are in the process of foreclosure as a result of the White House's decision to shut down a Department of Veterans Affairs program that helped people with VA-backed home loans when they were behind on their monthly payments.
As NPR reported Thursday, more than 10,000 have already lost their homes, nearly a year after the Trump administration abruptly did away with the VA Servicing Purchase (VASP) program.
The program was rolled out during the Biden administration, after the VA ended a pandemic-era assistance program that had allowed VA home loan borrowers to gradually pay back mortgage payments that they had needed to skip.
Under VASP, the VA purchases home loans that were in default from mortgage services and then modified the loans.
In March 2025, a representative from the Mortgage Bankers Association told the House Veterans Affairs Committee that widespread foreclosures would result if the VASP program—which Republicans in Congress said had been created by former President Joe Biden for "political purposes... to undercut the VA Home Loan program—was not protected.
Despite the warning, the VASP program was halted two months later.
Nearly a year after the program's end, the VA is still developing a replacement to help veterans—many of whom are struggling to afford essentials just like the majority of other Americans as the cost of living crisis intensifies with rising fuel prices due to Trump's war on Iran.
Sources in the mortgage industry told NPR that many of the vets who have lost their homes so far had enough disability benefits or other income to avoid foreclosure, had the VASP program remained in operation.
NPR interviewed Leann Ledford, whose husband, a Marine veteran who served in Afghanistan, has a brain injury, experiences seizures, and suffers post-traumatic stress disorder. The family is one of tens of thousands who learned in October 2022 that the Biden administration had ended the earlier pandemic-era program and that they would have to pay a year's worth of back payments in one lump sum.
The Ledfords were also one of many veteran families who were unable to enroll in VASP before Trump abruptly shut it down.
Ledford told NPR that with her husband's $3,971 monthly disability check, they could have afforded mortgage payments under the VASP program.
Army veteran Jon Henry was also unable to enroll in VASP before it was shut down, and was forced to take a modified loan with payments that are $380 more per month than his original mortgage.
"It's a struggle," Henry told NPR. "Especially with everything else being inflated in the country, you know, with groceries, gas … I'm like, what the hell?"
NPR's reporting led Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), an Iraq War veteran, to denounced Trump as "the most anti-veteran president in history."
When Trump's new VA home loan assistance program is up and running—which isn't expected to happen for several more months, veterans will be able to move their missed payments to the back of their loan term. But in the current draft of the plan, reported NPR, "the VA is telling mortgage companies that if a new, modified loan at a higher interest rate only raises a veteran's monthly payment by up to 15%, they must place vets into that more costly loan."
"So a veteran with a $2,000 monthly mortgage payment could still be pushed into a modified loan that raises their payment by up to $300 a month. And they wouldn't be given the option of moving their missed payments to the back of their loan and keeping their original, lower-cost mortgage," reported the outlet.
Pete Mills of the Mortgage Bankers Association told the VA last month that under Trump's plan, "as drafted, veterans will continue to have worse options than similarly situated non-veterans."
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