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When Nakamura Kiyoshi’s adult son discovered a bump on his back, she thought it was just a rash.

Still, she urged him to go to the hospital.

Her second son, Hiroshi, was born in 1948, three years after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. As a bombing survivor, Nakamura has long feared that she might convey health issues to her children.

In 2003, at the age of 55, Hiroshi went to the hospital. Two days passed without a word from him. Next is 3. It’s been a week since then.

Finally Nakamura went to the hospital, where his son told her: “They’ll do more tests,” she told CNN.

The results showed that he exhibited stage 4 leukemia, a progressive stage of blood cancer that spread to other parts of his body. According to Nakamura, the doctor told her he gave her son cancer — suggesting radiation that caused breastfeeding when he was a baby.

When Hiroshi died six months later, his mother was left to believe that she essentially killed him. The thoughts have been bothering her for over 20 years.

“I was overwhelmed by guilt and suffering. I still believe that what the doctor said, I caused it. That guilt still lives within me,” said Nakamura, now 101.

People exposed to nuclear radiation are generally encouraged to stop breastfeeding immediately after an atomic bomb. However, experts say there is no concrete evidence that the first-generation “Hibakusha” (WWII atomic bomb survivors) can hand over the cancer-causing materials to children a few years after the exposure.

As the 80th anniversary of the US bombings that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are approaching, aging survivors (some like Nakamura, more than 100 years ago, share stories of suffering and resilience, but they can still be done.

Many of them were young women, either pregnant or birth age, who had lived much of their lives under the heavy shadow of fear and stigma, when bombs fell.

They were told by practitioners, neighbors, friends, and even friends and family that exposure to nuclear radiation could lead to children with illness or disabilities.

Even if infertility or child disorders had nothing to do with radiation exposure, Hibakusha women were often criticized and shunned.

Those with visible wounds from the explosion faced barriers to marriage. The physical wounds were difficult to hide – and more clear evidence of exposure.

And in a society where women’s values were closely linked to marriage and motherhood, this stigma was particularly damaging.

It caused many female survivors (PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)) to “conceal the fact that they are Hibakusha,” according to Nakajimajima, a professor of radiation research at Nagasaki University.

“In a society like Japan where gender discrimination and male domination are deeply rooted, women were particularly affected by radiation,” Nakajima told CNN.

Radiation exposure affected some second-generation survivors, depending on the timing of their pregnancy.

The embryonic stage generally ranges from 5th to 15th week, and is particularly sensitive to brain and organ development. Women exposed to radiation during this window are at high risk of giving birth to children with intellectual disability, neurological problems, and microcephaly, and are marked by small brain and brain dysfunction.

Other studies have shown that Hibakusha faces long-term health risks.

A 2012 RERF study found that radiation exposure from an atomic bomb increases the risk of cancer in the rest of the lives of the people. The rate of solid cancers in women at age 70 increased by 58% for each gray color of radiation absorbed by the body at age 30. Gray is a unit that measures how much radiation energy a body or object takes. For men, solid cancer rates increased by 35%.

Nakamura was 21 years old and was doing laundry outside around 11am when the bomb fell into Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. She was five kilometers (3.1 miles) from the epicenter.

The young mother saw the bright light, followed by a huge boom and a powerful gust of wind that threw her into the air. When she regained consciousness, her home was destroyed – furniture was scattered everywhere, with shards of glass covering the floor. She called out to her mother. She was helping Nagamura take care of her eldest son.

Reassured that they had not been physically injured, the family fled to an air raid shelter. Nakamura didn’t know the scale of the destruction until the next day. All relatives who live near Nagasaki University, near the blast, have died.

Nakamura says he was not affected by radiation exposure. She removed the uterus four years later, and at age 70, doctors discovered a tumor in their abdomen, but her doctors told her that neither of the issues were related to the bombing.

However, psychological trauma has been with her ever since.

Shameful of her own exposure, she feared that she would give Stigma to her grandson as well.

“If people knew that my son had died of leukemia, others might not want to marry them, especially before (my grandchild) got married. My children made sure they understood that.

However, encouraged by other survivors, she finally spoke publicly about her son’s cancer in 2006, three years after his death.

“I’ve received it on phone calls and even from people who heard me. It really made me realize how serious the issues with inherited health impacts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are,” she said.

She knows that she is now unlikely to cause cancer in her son, but as a mother, she says that guilt is a burden she carries forever.

“I’m still very sorry. I’ll continue to apologize to him. I’ll say ‘Forgive me’,” she said.

The unique burden of Hibakusha’s motherhood was something that Yoshimura Kousuko, now 102 years old, had not been carried.

She was separated from her parents and sister at a young age, and she was always looking forward to her family. She moved to Nagasaki for a good job at Mitsubishi Salary Bureau. Just a few months before the US dropped the bomb, it turned the city into hell of Earth.

“When I got out onto the road, there was someone gushing blood from my head. Those with skin peeled off my back,” she recalled.

With only a kilometre (0.6 miles) away from the epicenter of the explosion, her survival was nothing but a miracle. In the months that followed, she stayed behind to help the injured. However, her body also suffered.

“My hair fell off. Every time I tried to comb my hands, the strands came out little by little,” Yoshimura said. She also regularly vomited blood for months after the explosion.

Still, she endured. She got married a year after the war ended. Her husband, like herself, is an atomic bomb survivor, and their marriage marked a fresh start for the couple.

But the children they never followed never followed. She had two miscarriages and a stillbirth.

Yoshimura lives alone now. Her husband passed away many years ago. In her home in Nagasaki where photos of her children and grandchildren are there are dolls – a quiet substitute for what’s lost, she said.

At their amazing age, Nakamura and Yoshimura know that both of them don’t last long to live. But it gives them greater urgency to educate the younger generation about the sacrifices of nuclear war.

“People need to think really carefully. What does winning or losing bring? We want to expand our country’s territory, we want the country to gain more power, and then what do people want?” Nakamura asked.

“I don’t understand that, but what I feel deeply is the complete stupidity of war,” she said.

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The Trump administration doubled the fee for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s arrest by $50 million, accusing him of being one of the world’s biggest narcotic traffic and collaborated with the cartel to kill the cocaine he added to fentanyl to the United States.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, Maduro will not escape justice and will be held responsible for his sly crimes,” Attorney General Pam Bondy said Thursday in a video announcing his compensation.

Maduro was indicted in Manhattan Federal Court in 2020 during the first Trump presidency, along with several close allies in federal charges of narcoterrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. At the time, the US offered a $15 million reward for arrests. It was later raised to $25 million by the Biden administration. This is the same amount that the US provided for the capture of Osama bin Laden following the attack on September 11, 2001.

Despite his great bounty, Maduro remains entrenched after denialing the US, the European Union, and several Latin American governments that denounced reelection in 2024 as fakes and recognized his opponents as Venezuela’s officially elected president.

Last month, the Trump administration signed a contract to secure the release of 10 Americans in the capital Caracas in exchange for Venezuela, who was deported to El Salvador under Trump’s immigrant crackdown, to score a score for immigrants who were deported to El Salvador. Shortly afterwards, the White House reversed the course, allowing oil producer Chevron to resume drilling in Venezuela after being previously blocked by US sanctions.

Bondi said the Justice Department seized more than $700 million in assets related to Maduro, including two private jets, and nearly 7 tons of seized cocaine was directly traced to the left-wing leaders.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ivan Gill issued a statement characterizing the compensation as “pathetic” and accused the bond of orchestrating “crude political propaganda.”

“We’re not surprised. Where did it come from? Just like someone who promised Epstein’s nonexistent “secret list” and was caught up in scandal due to political favor,” Gill said the same person the Justice Department mentioned after facing the face after facing the last month. “Her show is a joke and a desperate distraction from her own misery.”

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Every year when the Michelin Guide announces its starry restaurant selection in France, journalist Nora Bouzauni receives a gust of anger and resentment messages.

It was an unexpected result of her burgeoning reputation as one of the most influential whistleblowers in the French restaurant industry.

The message comes from the discouraged restaurant staff. This is full of watching you see the abusive and toxic chef who has elevated his life to hell by awarding one of the highest ads in the industry.

“It’s really straw that breaks a camel’s back,” Bouazzouni tells CNN.

Since 2017, French food journalists have reported on the toxic restaurant culture in kitchens across France. But her latest book, “Violence,” published in May, was blown the lid off the story and revealed the scope of physical, emotional and psychological abuse in kitchens across France.

Through testimony gathered from industry workers since 2020, the book tells of chefs who erupt into violent tantrums, deliberately burn staff, or throw pots in their faces if they make mistakes while serving. For people of color, it endures race-based harassment, abused and abused. For women, it is always sexually sexualized. Tapping the bottom every day, boobs say things about their appearance, and in more serious cases, raped by a walk-in cooler by a colleague.

In short, few people appear unharmed.

“The testimony that hit me the most was a very quick aim to dehumanize the people in the kitchen,” says Bouazzouni. “Because dehumanizing the people in the kitchen can potentially be exploited.”

The toxic kitchen culture is not unique to France and has been exposed and condemned for years in English-speaking countries and in European countries.

But Bouazzouni’s work sparked the national calculations in France, reaching the ears of the nation’s top lawmakers. On July 7, a move was submitted to the French National Assembly to create a committee on investigating violence in the kitchen.

“Indeed, behind the smooth, idealized image of the profession presented in various entertainment programs, there is a rigid, almost military and brutal hierarchical structure hidden,” the movement reads. “The working conditions of kitchen ‘brigades’ are often degraded, stressful, and even violent. But silence reigns…”

The mention of “military and brutal hierarchical organizations” is noteworthy as it refers to a system codified by French chefs, restaurateurs and writers August Escofier in the late 19th century. Inspired by his time in the military, the Kitchen Brigade, as is known, was modelled on the army, where ranks and hierarchies determine command chains. At the top of the food chain are chef duijn and sou chefs, followed by certain stations (sauce, seafood, cold dishes, etc.), junior chefs and Comis and chefs departies who are in charge of trainees.

The accuracy of Escofie and the professional restaurant kitchen that he inspired is respected in French culture.

But in many ways, Bouazzouni points out that it is this top-down organization that promotes a toxic kitchen culture and allows chefs to abuse staff with immunity.

Additionally, the Kitchen Brigade System has been exported and replicated in fine dining and hotel kitchens around the world by a corps of international chefs who have come to train in the birthplace of autogastronomy for decades.

“When foreign chefs start learning in France, either in school or internships, they will return to work in other countries and continue to export this method,” Bouazzouni says.

In other words, it’s a vicious cycle.

But how do we revert the French system from a century ago, replicated in kitchens around the world?

Male-dominated kitchens and high pressure situations are known to contribute to a toxic work environment for a long time, but a 2021 paper published in the Journal of Management Studies offered one compelling but simple solution.

For this study, researchers at Cardiff University concluded that there was a sense of freedom from surveillance of isolated, closed, hidden spaces far from the public eye, and a sense of freedom that normal rules do not apply.

“What surprised us in our study was the importance of the locations where chefs worked in the context of cultures of bullying, violence and attack. The kitchen environment has effectively become a different moral universe for them,” researcher Robin Barrow said in a press release.

The study was based on interviews with 47 chefs from fine dining restaurants around the world.

The French celebrity Chefdam cult also contributes to the norm of silence that has long spurred the victims. Top chefs are often lionized in long fawn profiles, documentaries and cooking shows, Bouazzouni said, adding that food media is responsible for feeding the “myth” of French gastronomic cuisine.

But in the last five years, the post-pandemic world has turned the script upside down. France is no exception to the labor shortage and the “big resignation” phenomenon promoted by the labor shortage and the work and dissatisfied employees and younger generations of Western English-speaking countries. Today, 300,000 positions in the French restaurant and hospitality industry are met, says Thierry Marx, chairman of the French Federation of Hotel Trade and Industry (UMIH).

While an average of five new restaurants open every day, 23 restaurants have their doors closed forever.

Marx, who operates 10 high-end restaurants in Japan and France, including Michelin-starred Restaurant Honor and Eiffel Tower’s Madame Brasserie, explains that the brigade system is necessary to delegate tasks and maximize efficiency in stressful high-pressure environments. However, he also acknowledged that the system is flawed and pointed out that the best chefs don’t necessarily make the best leader.

“I think we need to acknowledge that adding management courses and being competent in specialized techniques doesn’t necessarily provide administrative know-how,” Marx said. “And that doesn’t mean you can act like an executioner.”

Over the past few years, the emergence of both the film’s #MeToo movement and the younger generation who are likely to oppose abuse has helped to advance the discourse of creating a safe kitchen in France.

Bondir.E, a nonprofit founded by French female chefs since 2021, organized violence prevention seminars at culinary and hospitality schools to raise awareness early and break the cycle of violence. This is because in France, enrollment in vocational training schools can start with students aged 15, who are still very impressive and easy to teach, for teenagers.

“When you’re 15 years old, You’re still a child,” says Vittoria Nardone, a spokesman for Bondir.E. Suffering is said to be normal and a necessary part of success. When you’re 15 years old and that’s the only example you have to continue, it’s easy to accept. ”

The group has also established a helpline to help victims of kitchen violence and offers specialized training courses on kitchen communication and management.

Both Nardone and Bouazzouni emphasize that while vulnerable individuals and minority groups are simple targets, violence and abuse can be carried out by both men and women of all ages and within all ranks.

Manon Fleury, 34, one of the group’s founding chefs, continues to open his own restaurant, Datil, in Paris, which has earned a Michelin star. As boss, Fleury made an effort to run the ship in a different way than her predecessors. The restaurant is closed over the weekend, promoting work-life balance. All new staff will be given a Code of Conduct Charter that emphasizes a spirit of mutual respect and cooperation, and will be provided with leadership training to managers. Communication is also an important part of the workplace, with preservation and postservice briefings and monthly one-on-one meetings. The restaurant is also led by women.

“When I opened the restaurant, I wanted to put women in a position of responsibility. My goal was to set an example to show that women can hold these positions,” Fleury said in a statement. “…Datil has men in the dining room and kitchen, but all managerial positions are held by women.”

Marx admits that times have changed. Workers retain more leverage and have a different relationship with their work.

“Bad management is a reflection of fear,” he said. “If you fall on the most fragile thing, it won’t work anymore.”