British royal discrimination comes to an end

(Reuters) – Centuries of British royal discrimination came to an end Friday after Commonwealth leaders agreed to drop rules that give sons precedence as heir to the throne and bar anyone in line for the crown from marrying a Roman Catholic.

The 16 countries that have Queen Elizabeth as their monarch agreed to the changes put forward by British Prime Minister David Cameron, who had called the rules of succession outdated.

“The idea that a younger son should become monarch instead of an elder daughter simply because he is a man, or that a future monarch can marry someone of any faith except a Catholic, this way of thinking is at odds with the modern countries that we’ve all become,” Cameron told reporters.

The agreement came on the sidelines of a Commonwealth summit presided over by the Queen in the remote west Australian city of Perth. Current succession rules dating back to 1688 and 1700 were designed to ensure a Protestant monarchy, and bar anyone in line to the throne from marrying a Catholic. Only a Catholic link is barred. There are no restrictions on marrying members of other religions or atheists.

The leaders also agreed to drop the practice of giving precedence to male over female heirs to the throne, regardless of age. The issue has been brought into focus by this year’s wedding of Prince William, second-in-line to the throne, and Kate Middleton. Without a change, their first son would eventually become king even if he had an older sister.

A group will now be set up to coordinate the necessary legislation for the changes.

Chemical weapon stockpile destroyed in Oregon

(from LA Times)

The last of the chemical weapons stockpile at the U.S. Army’s Umatilla Chemical Depot has been successfully incinerated. For nearly 50 years, it was the deathtrap next door: 3.7 tons of nerve gas and blister agent, a big part of America’s chemical weapons arsenal, stored at a depot near the little town of Hermiston, Ore.

On the last Tuesday of every month, 76 large sirens mounted on 50-foot poles across three counties would emit a blast of sweet-sounding Westminster chimes, followed by a reassurance that this was only a drill — if not, a loud blare would have sounded instead and residents would have known that a plume of some of the deadliest poison on Earth was headed their way.

On Tuesday, the sirens sounded for the last time — only hours after the final chemical agents there were destroyed. The end of the three-year disposal effort marked one of the closing chapters for the United States’ once-massive buildup of weapons of mass destruction.

The last ton of mustard agent at Umatilla was successfully torched at 9:17 a.m., leaving the U.S. with just three of nine original chemical weapons storage sites, the last of which is scheduled for full disposal by 2023. Even deadlier caches of VX and sarin nerve agent were destroyed earlier at the northern Oregon facility.

“It’s a great thing for a community to have that hazard gone, and we can have one less thing to worry about,” Jodi Florence of the Umatilla County Emergency Management Agency, part of the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness program, said in an interview.

“Today, the employees of the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility made their mark on history by completing agent destruction operations,” Gary Anderson, site project manager, said in a statement. “More than 1,000 dedicated Army and contractor employees have made Oregon safer for its citizens.”

Umatilla had sheltered 12% of the nation’s original chemical arsenal since 1962. But with the end of the Cold War and a 1993 international convention outlawing the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons, work to destroy the deadly agents began in 2004.

US’s most powerful nuclear bomb being dismantled

(from AP)

AMARILLO, Texas (AP) — The last of the nation’s most powerful nuclear bombs — a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — is being disassembled nearly half a century after it was put into service at the height of the Cold War.

The final components of the B53 bomb will be broken down Tuesday at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, the nation’s onlynuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility. The completion of the dismantling program is a year ahead of schedule, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, and aligns with President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing the number of nuclear weapons.

Thomas D’Agostino, the nuclear administration’s chief, called the bomb’s elimination a “significant milestone.”

Put into service in 1962, when Cold War tensions peaked during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the B53 weighed 10,000 pounds and was the size of a minivan. According to the American Federation of Scientists, it was 600 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, killing as many as 140,000 people and helping end World War II. The B53 was designed to destroy facilities deep underground, and it was carried by B-52 bombers.

The B53’s disassembly ends the era of big megaton bombs, he said. The bombs’ size helped compensate for their lack of accuracy.  Many of the B53s were disassembled in the 1980s, but a significant number remained in the U.S. arsenal until they were retired from the stockpile in 1997.