1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible sells for $38M at auction in New York

 

Sotheby's unveils the Codex Sassoon for auction, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, in the Manhattan borough of New York. The 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible that is one of the oldest surviving biblical manuscripts sold for $38.1 million, which includes the auction house's fee, Wednesday, May 17, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — A 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible that is one of the world’s oldest surviving biblical manuscripts sold for $38 million in New York on Wednesday.

The Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten parchment volume containing a nearly complete Hebrew Bible, was purchased by former U.S. Ambassador to Romania Alfred H. Moses on behalf of the American Friends of ANU and donated to ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where it will join the collection, Sotheby’s said in statement.

The manuscript was exhibited at the ANU Museum in March as part of a worldwide tour before the auction.

Sotheby’s Judaica specialist Sharon Liberman Mintz said the $38 million price tag, which includes the auction house’s fee, “reflects the profound power, influence, and significance of the Hebrew Bible, which is an indispensable pillar of humanity.”

It’s one of highest prices for a manuscript sold at auction. In 2021, a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution sold for $43 million. Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester sold for $31 million in 1994, or around $60 million in today’s dollars.

Mintz said she was “absolutely delighted by today’s monumental result and that Codex Sassoon will shortly be making its grand and permanent return to Israel, on display for the world to see.”

The Codex Sassoon is believed to have been fabricated sometime between 880 and 960.

It got its name in 1929 when it was purchased by David Solomon Sassoon, a son of an Iraqi Jewish business magnate who filled his London home with his collection of Jewish manuscripts.

Sassoon’s estate was broken up after he died and the biblical codex was sold by Sotheby’s in Zurich in 1978 to the British Rail Pension Fund for around $320,000, or $1.4 million in today’s dollars.

The pension fund sold the Codex Sassoon 11 years later to Jacqui Safra, a banker and art collector, bought it in 1989 for $3.19 million ($7.7 million in today’s dollars). Safra was the seller on Wednesday.

In Ancient Egypt, Severed Hands Were Spoils of War

Archaeologists offer a new explanation for one of the century’s grislier finds, “a carefully gathered collection of hands” in a 3,500-year-old temple.

Preserved, colored hands recovered from present-day Tell el-Dab’a, Egypt, discovered in 2011. They were likely buried during Egypt’s 15th dynasty, from 1640 B.C. to 1530 B.C.

Credit...Julia Gresky

By Franz Lidz
May 16, 2023

Aristotle called the hand the “tool of tools”; Kant, “the visible part of the brain.” The earliest works of art were handprints on the walls of caves. Throughout history hand gestures have symbolized the range of human experience: power, tenderness, creativity, conflict, even (bravo, Michelangelo) the touch of the divine. Without hands, civilization would be inconceivable.

And so the discovery in 2011 of the bones of a dozen right hands, at a site where the ancient Egyptian city of Avaris (today known as Tell el-Dab’a) once stood, was particularly unsettling. The remains were unearthed, most with palms down, from three shallow pits near the throne room of a royal palace. The hands, along with numerous disarticulated fingers, were most likely buried during Egypt’s 15th dynasty, from 1640 B.C. to 1530 B.C. At the time, Egypt’s eastern Nile Delta was controlled by a dynasty called the Hyksos, which means “rulers of foreign countries.”

Although the Hyksos were described by the Ptolemaic Egyptian historian Manetho as “invaders of an obscure race” who conquered the region by force, recent research has shown that they descended from people who had immigrated peacefully over centuries from southwest Asia, now Israel and the Palestinian territories. Eventually, a few rose to power as the Hyksos, basing their power in Avaris.

The Hyksos are widely believed to have introduced the Egyptians to the horse and chariot, glass-working and all sorts of weaponry, including battle axes and composite bows. A recent study published in the journal Nature proposes that the Hyksos had a custom known as the Gold of Valor, which involved taking the hands of enemy combatants as war trophies.

The ritual seems to have become standard practice in Egypt, with soldiers returning from combat and presenting the dismembered right hands of defeated foes to their pharaoh or military commander.

“The amputations were a safe means to count slain enemies,” said Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who collaborated on the paper. “They also made the dead enemy incapable of raising his hand again against Egypt in the Netherworld.”

Tomb inscriptions and temple reliefs describe the gruesome public ceremony, but the new study, conducted by a German and Austrian research team and drawn from an analysis of skeletal remains, offers the first physical evidence of it.

“Painstaking work was done on the surgical nature of the amputations,” said Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Flesh and nails are still attached to the hands, providing more information for a carefully gathered collection of hands.”

A carved relief in the temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu in Egypt shows the collection of severed hands after a battle.

Credit...via Manfred Bietak

In 2011, the fragile appendages were hardened with an acetone-soluble glue so that they could be removed from the ground in a block of plaster cast. Poorly preserved, the hands could not be genetically sampled; Julia Gresky, a paleopathologist from the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, determined their biological sex using a noninvasive measure that compares the length of the index finger with the length of the ring finger.

“The ring fingers of males tend to be longer than their index fingers,” Dr. Gresky said. “The opposite is usually true for females.”

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Although some critics consider the tool simplistic and unreliable, Dr. Gresky is confident that at least 11 of the 12 hands were male. “Those 11 hands were large and robust,” she said. “The 12th was much smaller and possibly female. I’m quite optimistic that a woman was attached.”

Dr. Cooney notes that there are no records of women being soldiers in ancient Egypt. “This was a male sphere of action,” she said. However, Egyptian texts from the reign of Rameses III, from about 1186 B.C. to 1155 B.C., indicate that there were women in the Libyan Army.

All of the bones dug up in Avaris were fully formed but showed no signs of age-related degeneration, suggesting that the hands had belonged to individuals roughly between the ages of 14 and 30. Some Egyptologists had theorized that the dismemberment was a barbaric punishment for criminals, but Dr. Gresky said the location, level of care and perhaps the positioning of the severed hands argued for war trophies.

Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo who was not involved in the project, said that the new analysis “raises interesting questions about the origins of traditions showing dominance over enemies, not only in Egypt, but throughout the ancient world.”
‘Fish in baskets’

The ancient Egyptians are venerated for their achievements in art, architecture, and technology. But their brutal tradition of maiming criminals and adversaries predates the Hyksos by more than a millennium. Perjurers were sometimes disciplined by slicing off their ears and noses; insurgents, by impaling the bodies at the ribs until death. The Narmer Palette, a ceremonial engraving that dates to the time of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt about 5,000 years ago, shows the beheading and mutilation of what were apparently rival chieftains.

On one side of the palette, King Narmer holds a mace aloft in his right hand while with his left he yanks a kneeling captive by the hair. “The smiting motif would have been a public display of King Narmer’s power over his enemy, smashing the skull to bloody bits,” Dr. Cooney said.

On the reverse side, the king inspects rows of bound, decapitated corpses with their heads between their legs, and their castrated penises atop their heads. “Dismemberment was anathema to the ancient Egyptians, who wanted their bodies whole for a materialized afterlife existence,” Dr. Cooney said.

A relief in the mortuary temple of Rameses III, at Medinet Habu, shows the pharaoh standing on a balcony after a victory not far from heaps of his enemies’ severed phalluses (12,312, according to one translation of zealous army scribes) and hands (24,625). In the temple of Amun at Karnak, a chronicle of a 13th century B.C. battle details prisoners being brought back to the pharaoh Merneptah with “donkeys before them, laden with uncircumcised penises of the Land of Libya, with the hands of [every] foreign land that was with them, as fish in baskets.” If the tally of fatalities is to be believed, the Egyptians collected the penises of 6,359 uncircumcised enemy dead and the hands of 2,362 circumcised enemies. “The stink must have been awful, and thus the ‘fish in baskets’ comment,” Dr. Cooney said.

An overview of a dozen right hands in two pits in Hyksos-period temple in the ancient Egyptian city of Avaris.

Credit...Julia Gresky

The wrong hand

Except for especially heinous offenses such as robbing the tombs of pharaohs, the severing of hands was a rare punishment in ancient Egypt, which is why Dr. Bietak said it was unlikely that the hands found in Avaris were from criminals. But such severings were a relatively common theme in military scenes of the New Kingdom, which began in the 16th century B.C. and lasted for nearly 500 years.

Dr. Bietak, who has led excavations at Tell el-Dab’a since 1966, said that the Egyptians appear to have adopted the custom some 50 to 80 years earlier than the inscriptional and pictorial evidence. A relief in the temple of Ahmose I in Abydos features a pile of detached hands on the battlefield. Ahmose I was the king who conquered Avaris and defeated the Hyksos.

Were the Avaris hands severed from living victims or from the recently deceased? “When placed in the pits, the hands must have been soft and pliable enough to be stretched into a presentable position,” Dr. Gresky said. “This implies they were put there before rigor mortis set in or after it had passed.” Probably after, she said; the hands would have been collected and stored for some time before they were put in the pit. “If before,” Dr. Gresky said, “then the amputations took place just prior to or even during the offering ceremony.”

Dr. Gresky said the more likely scenario was that the hands were cut off roughly one to four days after death. She noted that the pits would have been visible from the palace throne room, indicating a public ceremony and buttressing the notion that the hands were spoils of war.

So why cut off the right hand? “The right is generally the dominant hand for activity — for writing, working, and fighting,” Dr. Cooney said. “Removing it from a living person is a method of imposing violent control and potentially leaving the living victim of such excision alive for all to see, a walking advertisement not to cross the powers-that-be.”

In the tomb of an army officer named Ahmose, son of Ibana, a narrative describes how after each skirmish with the Hyksos at Avaris and Sharuhen, he reported his new haul of enemy hands to the pharaoh, who rewarded him with the Gold of Valor. Dr. Bietak speculates that the showy regalia involved necklaces of golden beads and pendants in the shape of flies.

“Flies are in the thick of battle, they never give up, and keep returning to the fray, just as good soldiers should,” Dr. Ikram said. “Thus, comparing a warrior to a fly was a high compliment.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2023, Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: To Victors, Severed Hands. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Hamas calls on Palestinians to confront Israeli victory parade in Jerusalem

By FARES AKRAM

AP

yesterday

 Israelis wave national flags in front of Damascus Gate outside Jerusalem's Old City to mark Jerusalem Day, an Israeli holiday celebrating the capture of the Old City during the 1967 Mideast war, Sunday, May 29, 2022. The ruling Hamas militant group in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, May 17, 2023, called on Palestinians to confront a flag-waving parade planned by Jewish nationalists through the main Palestinian thoroughfare in Jerusalem’s Old City.(AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — The ruling Hamas militant group in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday called on Palestinians to confront a flag-waving parade planned by Jewish nationalists through the main Palestinian thoroughfare in Jerusalem’s Old City.

The comments by Hamas added to the already heightened tensions ahead of Thursday’s march and threatened to reignite fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza, just days after a cease-fire took hold. Two years ago, an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas erupted during the annual march.

While Hamas stayed out of the latest round of fighting, officials with the ruling Islamic militant group urged Palestinians to oppose Thursday’s parade.

“We ask the people of Jerusalem to mobilize the masses to confront the march of the flags in Jerusalem tomorrow,” said Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas official in Gaza.

Hamas also urged Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and inside Israel to “clash with the occupation” and said it would hold a demonstration with Palestinian flags along Gaza’s heavily fortified frontier with Israel.

The parade is meant to mark “Jerusalem Day,” Israel’s annual celebration of its capture of east Jerusalem, including the Old City and its holy sites, in the 1967 Mideast war.

Israel considers the entire city to be its eternal capital. But the international community does not recognize Israel’s annexation of east Jerusalem, and the Palestinians claim the area as the capital of a future state.

In a speech marking Jerusalem Day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel has broken “new horizons” since capturing east Jerusalem.

“We are committed to safeguarding the security of Jerusalem, to ensuring its prosperity and to continuing its momentum,” he said. “We are also doing this against all of the threats around us.”

Each year, thousands of Israeli nationalists participate in the march, waving blue and white Israeli flags and singing songs as they walk through the Muslim Quarter and toward the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray.

Israelis describe the parade as a festive event. But in past years, it has been marred by anti-Arab racist chants and violence toward local Palestinians by some of the marchers.

Adding to the combustible atmosphere, large numbers of Jews are expected to visit Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site early Thursday before the parade.

The hilltop compound is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, home to the biblical Jewish Temples, and is the holiest site in Judaism. Palestinians call it the Noble Sanctuary, and today it is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

Under longstanding agreements, Jews are permitted to visit the compound but not pray there. But an increase in such visits in recent years, along with scenes of some Jews quietly praying, have raised concerns among Palestinians that Israel is trying to alter the status quo — a charge Israel denies.

The competing claims to the site lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and often spill over into violence.

Chief Supt Yoram Segal, a senior police official in Jerusalem, said police would deploy some 2,500 officers on Thursday to ensure the day passes without violence.

“We are going to deal harshly with anyone who tries to disturb the peace,” he told reporters.

The march comes less than a week after Israel and the Islamic Jihad militant group in Gaza reached a cease-fire that ended five days of heavy fighting.

Hamas, the de facto government in Gaza responsible for the plight of the territory’s 2.3 million people, stayed out of the fighting, while Israel avoided attacking the militant group.

Reham Owda, an independent Gaza-based analyst, said that neither side appears interested in resuming cross-border violence.

“No one is interested in fierce escalation,” she said, but she said the parade could trigger “limited, symbolic” firing of rockets that could in turn spark Israeli airstrikes in retaliation.

If violence erupts in Jerusalem, Hamas could jump into the fray, as it did two years ago.

“The resistance is ready to protect Al-Aqsa Mosque and prevent the Judaization of Jerusalem,” al-Masri said.

___

Associated Press writer Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Ecuador’s president  DIKTATOR dismisses legislature as it tries to oust him, in a move that promises turmoil

Lasso can now govern for up to six months by decree under the oversight of Ecuador’s Constitutional Court.

By REGINA GARCIA CANO and GONZALO SOLANO

AP

yesterday

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Security forces guard the National Assembly in Quito, Ecuador, Wednesday, May 17, 2023. Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso on Wednesday put an end to impeachment proceedings against him by dissolving the opposition-led National Assembly, which had accused him of embezzlement.

(AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa)

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — The president of Ecuador dismissed the legislature Wednesday in a move that promised more turmoil around a conservative leader who has been unable to enact a business-friendly agenda as the South American country experiences an alarming rise in crime.

In disbanding the National Assembly, Guillermo Lasso made first use of the Ecuador presidency’s nuclear option under the constitution in conflicts with the legislative branch. His first move was to push a package of tax cuts, but criticism was swift and an appeal to stop him was filed hours after he announced his decision in a televised message in which he accused lawmakers of focusing “on destabilizing the government.”

“This is the best possible decision,” he said after describing his move as a way to give Ecuadorians “the power to decide their future in the next elections.”

Armed soldiers then surrounded the National Assembly in the capital. Lasso had been locked in a showdown with legislators who wanted to impeach him for not stopping a deal between the state-owned oil transport company and a private tanker company, accusations he denies.

Hours later, the president of the National Electoral Council, Diana Atamaint, said that its office will set the date for the next elections in no more than seven days. She anticipated that Ecuadorians would go to the polls to elect a new president and a new Assembly in no more than 90 days.

Lasso’s Wednesday decision prompted Ecuador’s top military leader to warn that the armed forces would crack down on any violence.

The president appeared to have the support of the armed forces but faced opposition from Indigenous Ecuadorians. Protests by the powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities have nearly paralyzed the country in recent years, and the group’s leader appeared outraged.

Lasso “launched a cowardly self-coup with the help of the police and the armed forces, without citizen support,” Leonidas Iza Salazar said.

Lasso can now govern for up to six months by decree under the oversight of Ecuador’s Constitutional Court.

Lawmakers had accused Lasso of not having intervened to end a contract between the state-owned oil transport company and a private tanker company. They argued Lasso knew the contract was full of irregularities and would cost the state millions in losses.

During a legislative session Tuesday, Lasso noted that the contract predated his administration. He also said that the state-owned company experienced losses of $6 million a year before he took office, and that it has seen $180 million in profits under his watch. something he has rejected as untrue.

Called the “crossed death” because it cuts short the mandate of both the assembly and the president, the option to disband the congress and temporarily rule by decree was established in Ecuador’s constitution in 2008 as a means of avoiding protracted periods of political paralysis.

His move can be appealed to the Constitutional Court, which has traditionally taken a long time to resolve any petition it receives. The Social Christian Party, which supported impeachment proceedings, filed a petition Wednesday arguing that there are no grounds for the dissolution of the Assembly.

After Lasso announced his decision, the head of the Joint Command of the Armed Forces, Gen. Nelson Proaño, called on Ecuadorians to maintain respect for the law and warned against rupturing the constitutional order through violence.

If violence erupts, the armed forces and police “will act firmly,” he said.

In neighboring Peru, conflicts between the opposition-led legislature and president also led to attempts to oust each other last year. Then-President Pedro Castillo tried to dissolve Congress and head off his own impeachment in December. Lawmakers quickly voted him out of power and law enforcement arrested him, which resulted in months of deadly protests carried out for the most part by Indigenous peoples and peasants.

The National Electoral Council now has seven days to call presidential and legislative elections, which must be held within 90 days. Those elected will finish the terms of Lasso and the lawmakers he ousted, which had been set to end in May 2025. Lasso can choose to run in the election.

Lasso, a former banker, was elected in 2021 and clashed from the start with a strong opposition in the 137-member National Assembly. He defended himself before Congress on Tuesday, insisting there was no proof or testimony of wrongdoing.

Dismissed Assemblywoman Paola Cabezas told the Ecuavisa television network that her party, which was a main force behind the impeachment process, “will abide by the decree.”

“We will go home ... This is an opportunity for us to get out of this crisis,” she said.

Lasso’s governing powers are now limited. Constitutional attorney Ismael Quintana explained that the president can only address economic and administrative matters, and the Constitutional Court will have to approve his decisions.

Shortly after dissolving the Assembly, Lasso announced that he signed his first emergency decree, reducing taxes for hundreds of thousands of families.

Ecuador has experienced an increase in drug-related violence, including several massacres in prisons over the past two years. Kidnappings, extortion and petty crime are also on the rise. angering Ecuadorians across the country who feel the government has not done enough to stop this.

Will Freeman, fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said mass protests are likely in the coming days.

“It’s also hard to imagine Lasso is making this move without the tacit support of top brass in the military,” he said. “In the past, protests have tended to turn destructive quickly — and security forces have also cracked down.”

The U.S. State Department in a statement said it supports “Ecuador’s democratic institutions and processes” and urged “government institutions, civil society, and citizens to ensure democratic processes are carried out for the benefit” of Ecuadorians.

___

Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City. Associated Press writer Gisela Salomon contributed to this report from Miami.

Democrat Cherelle Parker wins primary for Philadelphia mayor

By BROOKE SCHULTZ

AP

YESTERDAY

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Philadelphia mayoral candidate Cherelle Parker takes part in a Democratic primary debate at the WPVI-TV studio in Philadelphia, April 25, 2023. A Democratic primary on Tuesday, May 16, that will likely determine who becomes Philadelphia’s next mayor could boost a progressive cause struggling to make a comeback after national setbacks, but with no clear front-runner it's just as likely to fortify the city's existing Democratic machine. 

(AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

Cherelle Parker, a Democrat with a long political history in Pennsylvania, won Philadelphia’s mayoral primary on Tuesday, likely setting her up as the city’s 100th mayor and the first woman to serve in the role.

Her win was a disappointment to progressives who rallied around Helen Gym, who was backed by Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Parker, 50, who served for 10 years as a state representative for northwest Philadelphia before her election to the city council in 2015, asserted herself as a leader whose government experience would allow her to address gaping problems with public safety and quality of life in the nation’s sixth-largest city. She will go up against Republican David Oh in the Nov. 7 general election.

Parker emerged from a crowded field of five front-runner Democratic candidates vying to replace Democrat Jim Kenney, who is term-limited. She beat out other former city council members who resigned from their seats to throw their hats in the ring; a state representative; a former city controller and a political outsider businessman.

The Philadelphia race serves as the latest barometer of how residents of some of the nation’s largest cities hope to emerge from the pandemic, which heightened concerns about crime, poverty and inequality. The results have sometimes been tumultuous in other parts of the country, leading to the defeat of the incumbent mayor of Chicago in February and the ouster of San Francisco’s district attorney last year.

Parker pledged to “stop the sense of lawlessness that is plaguing our city” by putting hundreds more officers on the street to engage in community policing. Parker pushed for officers to use every legal tool, including stopping someone when they have “just cause and reasonable suspicion.”

She received support from members of the Philadelphia delegation in the House, as well as members of Congress. She was also backed by labor unions and a number of wards in the city, and Kenney said he had cast his ballot for her.

In another race Tuesday, Voters in Allegheny County, which encompasses the state’s second largest city of Pittsburgh, picked sitting state lawmaker Sara Innamorato as their Democratic nominee to face the lone Republican contender, Joseph Rockey, in the November general election. Unlike in the Philadelphia mayor’s race, the primary winner will not necessarily be the person most likely to fill the county executive’s seat.

“Allegheny County, I’m going to make one promise to you: I will build a team of leaders who will usher in the future of this region and build a more equitable and just county,” she said at a campaign event Tuesday, asking supporters to enjoy the victory and recharge. “We better get ready, because we have a lot of work to do.”

Our Revolution, a movement born during Sanders’ 2016 presidential race and now one of the largest progressive organizations in the country, had endorsed Innamorato — a win for the movement, even with its loss in the mayoral primary.

__

Associated Press video journalist Tassanee Vejpongsa in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M POLLUTER PAYS

BP subsidiary agrees to record $40M penalty and pollution-cutting steps at Lake Michigan refinery

By JOHN FLESHER

yesterday

 The BP Whiting refinery in East Chicago, Ind., stands on Sept. 21, 2017. A BP subsidiary will pay a $40 million penalty and install technology to control releases of benzene and other contaminants at its Whiting oil refinery on the Indiana shoreline of Lake Michigan, Biden administration officials said Wednesday, May 17, 2023. (DroneBase via AP, File)

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) —

A BP subsidiary will pay a $40 million penalty and install technology to control releases of benzene and other contaminants at its Whiting oil refinery on the Indiana shoreline of Lake Michigan, Biden administration officials said Wednesday.

The actions will settle a civil case against BP Products North America Inc. filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency, which described the penalty as the largest ever under the Clean Air Act for pollution from a structure. Additionally, the company will invest around $197 million in improvements.

“This settlement will result in the reduction of hundreds of tons of harmful air pollution a year, which means cleaner, healthier air for local communities,” said Larry Starfield, acting assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

The 134-year-old refinery, located between Hammond, Indiana, and Chicago, is the biggest in the U.S. Midwest and sixth largest nationally. It processes about 440,000 barrels of crude oil daily, making a variety of liquid fuels and asphalt.

It has a record of pollution rule violations, reaching settlements in 2019 and 2022 over releases of sooty “particulate matter” linked to asthma and other respiratory diseases.

A new federal complaint accused the BP unit of breaking rules limiting benzene in refinery wastewater streams and emissions of hazardous and volatile air contaminants.

In addition to causing cancer, long-term inhalation of benzene is linked to blood disorders and reproductive problems for women, the EPA said. Volatile organic compounds help create smog-produce ozone, implicated in various lung ailments.

Under the agreement, BP will add equipment to strip benzene from wastewater streams flowing to its lakefront treatment plant.

The company also promised a $5 million project to reduce diesel emissions in nearby communities.

Additionally, it will step up pollution surveillance, placing one monitoring device on the refinery grounds, three at the fence line and 10 beyond.

The control measures “will greatly improve air quality and reduce health impacts on the overburdened communities that surround the facility,” said Todd Kim, assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division.

The settlement, which also involves the state of Indiana, requires court approval after a public comment period.

“With this new agreement, we are committing to additional, robust steps — including significant capital investments — to monitor and mitigate wastewater emissions at Whiting Refinery,” BP spokesperson Christina Audisho said in a statement.

The improvements will be made “over the next several years,” Audisho said.

The Environmental Integrity Project, an advocacy group that previously sued BP over Whiting refinery emissions, praised the latest settlement “for holding BP accountable for its illegal emissions and for the tough new cleanup standards” it imposes.

Energy storage farm could replace Hawaii coal-fired power plant

AP
yesterday

The AES Corporation's coal-fired power plant is shown in Kapolei, Hawaii during a ceremony to mark the closure of the facility, Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022. AES Corporation said potential new uses for their 8.5-acre property in Kapolei include battery storage, solar and even wind power, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Wednesday, May 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones, File)

HONOLULU (AP) — An energy storage farm could replace Hawaii’s last coal-fired power plant that closed in 2022 after 30 years.

The AES Corporation coal plant produced up to one-fifth of the electricity on Oahu — the most populous island in the state. Taking it offline meant an end to the 1.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases that were emitted annually, then-Gov. David Ige said as it was about to shutdown in September.

The company said potential new uses for the 8.5-acre property in Kapolei include battery storage, solar and even wind power, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Wednesday.

Energy storage farms are increasingly taking the place of old coal plants.

Nearby, the largest stand-alone energy system in the state has been under construction since last year. The project has an energy storage capacity of 565 megawatt-hours and is being developed by San Francisco-based Plus Power.

Storage projects allow utility operator Hawaiian Electric to accept and use more intermittent power from renewable sources, including rooftop solar.

Electricity generated by burning oil remains the largest source of power for Hawaiian Electric, which serves Oahu, Hawaii Island, Maui, Molokai and Lanai. The utility company reported that 32% of power generation in 2022 was from renewable sources.

Like other Pacific islands, Hawaii has suffered the cascading impacts of climate change. The state is experiencing the destruction of coral reefs from bleaching associated with increased ocean temperatures, rapid sea level rise, more intense storms and drought that is increasing the state’s wildfire risk.

In 2020, Hawaii’s Legislature passed a law banning the use of coal for energy production by the start of 2023. Hawaii has mandated a transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045 and was the first state to set such a goal.

EPA rule would force clean-up of toxic coal ash dumped in landfills, ponds near power plants

By MATTHEW DALY

AP

yesterday

 The Richmond city skyline can be seen on the horizon behind the coal ash ponds along the James River near Dominion Energy's Chesterfield Power Station in Chester, Va., Tuesday, May 1, 2018. The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to strengthen a rule aimed at controlling and cleaning up toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. A proposed rule announced Wednesday, May 17, 2023, would require safe management of so-called coal ash dumped in areas that currently are unregulated at the federal level. 

(AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is strengthening a rule aimed at controlling and cleaning up toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. A proposal announced Wednesday would for the first time require safe management of so-called coal ash dumped in hundreds of older landfills, “legacy” ponds and other inactive sites that currently are unregulated at the federal level.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the plan would hold polluters accountable for controlling and cleaning up coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal in that can pollute waterways, groundwater, drinking water and the air. Coal ash contains contaminants such as mercury, chromium and arsenic associated with cancer and other health problems.

“Ensuring the health and safety of all people is EPA’s top priority, and this proposed rule represents a crucial step toward safeguarding the air, groundwater, streams and drinking water that communities depend on,” Regan said in a statement.

If finalized, the rule would help protect underserved and minority communities already overburdened by pollution, reflecting the Biden administration’s commitment to environmental justice, Regan said.

“Many of these communities have been disproportionately impacted by pollution for far too long,″ he said, noting that power plants, chemical plants and other large industrial sites are commonly located in poor and minority neighborhoods.

The proposed rule follows an EPA proposal last week to impose new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants — the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector, the nation’s second-largest contributor to climate change.

The agency also has proposed rules to crack down on polluted wastewater from coal-burning power plants and limit emissions of mercury and other harmful pollutants from coal-fired power plants, updating standards imposed more than a decade ago.

The coal ash rule follows a legal settlement between the agency and public interest groups, including the National Association for Advancement of Colored People, Sierra Club and Clean Water Action.

The groups said in a lawsuit that a 2015 EPA rule on coal ash failed to regulate a large portion of coal ash pollution in the United States.

Earthjustice, an environmental group that represented the coalition that sued EPA, called the new proposal a major win for communities near coal-fired power plants. The revised rule extends federal coal ash regulations to most coal ash disposed at power plants and extends federal monitoring, closure and cleanup requirements to hundreds of older landfills, ponds and dump sites that previously were excluded, the group said.

“This is a really big deal, said Lisa Evans, senior counsel for Earthjustice. “The Biden administration is standing up for people near hazardous coal waste sites around the country. For far too long, a large portion of toxic coal ash around the U.S. was left leaching into drinking water supplies without any requirement that it be cleaned up.″

The EPA proposal tightens a loophole that allowed many power-plant owners to avoid “cleaning up the toxic mess they created,″ Evans said. “Power plants will finally lose their hall pass to leave coal ash wherever they dumped it.″

Based on analysis of industry data provided to the EPA, Earthjustice identified 566 landfills and ponds at 242 coal plants in 40 states that were excluded from the 2015 federal regulations, Evans said.

EPA estimates it would cost utilities more than $300 million a year to comply with the new rule, which is expected to become final next year.

The power industry has complained about an “onslaught” of EPA rules aimed at the power sector. The agency’s actions are “designed specifically to cause the premature closure of coal power plants,″ said Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of America’s Power, a lobbying group for industries involved in producing electricity from coal.

She urged EPA to modify its proposals “to avoid premature coal retirements, rather than speed up retirements and jeopardize grid reliability.”

 A drain pipe sticks out of a coal ash retention pond at the Dominion Power's Possum Point Power Station in Dumfries, Va., June 26, 2015. The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to strengthen a rule aimed at controlling and cleaning up toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. A proposed rule announced Wednesday, May 17, 2023, would require safe management of so-called coal ash dumped in areas that currently are unregulated at the federal level. 

(AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

Coal ash swirls on the surface of the Dan River following one of the worst coal-ash spills in U.S. history into the river in Danville, Va., Feb. 5, 2014. The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to strengthen a rule aimed at controlling and cleaning up toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. A proposed rule announced Wednesday, May 17, 2023, would require safe management of so-called coal ash dumped in areas that currently are unregulated at the federal level. 

(AP Photo/Gerry Broome, File)

Coal ash storage and disposal goes back decades, but went largely unregulated until a 2008 spill at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tennessee. A containment dike burst and flooding covered more than 300 acres (121 hectares), dumped waste into two nearby rivers, destroyed homes and brought national attention to the issue.

In 2014, an estimated 39,000 tons of coal ash spewed into the Dan River after a drainage pipe running below a waste dump collapsed at a Duke Energy plant in Eden, North Carolina. The toxic sludge turned the river gray for more than 70 miles (112 kilometers).

Biden administration invests in carbon capture, upping pressure on industry to show results

BY DREW COSTLEY

AP

 A liquid carbon dioxide containment unit stands outside the fabrication building of Glenwood Mason Supply Company, April 18, 2023, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. The Biden administration announced on Wednesday, May 17, $251 million for carbon capture and storage projects in seven states. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced $251 million for carbon capture and storage projects in seven states, aiming to reducing reduce planet-warming pollution from power plants and other industrial facilities.

The announcement represents a vote of confidence by the government in the nascent technology, which proponents, often from oil and gas industries, say could have a huge role in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, many environmentalists note that the technology is far from scale and argue that focusing on it distracts from established renewable energy solutions.

Between the direct investments announced Wednesday, billions more earmarked from legislation and public statements by President Biden and U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry, the government is increasing pressure on the carbon capture and storage industry to show that the technology can significantly help combat climate change.

“We’re trying to get commercial lift off in the carbon management industry as a whole,” said Noah Deich, deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Carbon Management.

Carbon capture and storage involves removing carbon dioxide, either from the source of pollution or from the air at large, and storing it deep underground. In some instances, the carbon dioxide is transported across states through pipelines and stored at facilities and used for other things.

The projects are funded through the U.S. Department of Energy, with funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which set aside $12 billion for carbon management projects. The awardees include universities, one major oil corporation, and come from several states, such as Texas, Illinois, Georgia and Wyoming.

The bulk of the money, $242 million, is going toward nine new or expanded large-scale carbon storage projects with capacity to hold at least 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, a tiny fraction of how much is put into the atmosphere. The U.S. released about 5.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2021, according to the Environmental Protection agency.

One of the awardees is BP, which is receiving $33.4 million for two sites along the Gulf Coast in Texas. The rest of funding is for three studies into how to transport carbon dioxide from power plants, ethanol facilities and other industrial operations to locations for reuse or permanent storage.

Deich said that the investments complement new rules on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants announced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA said that one way power plants can bring their emissions under the new limits is by deploying carbon capture technology.

Much of the cost of deploying carbon capture is the investment in the equipment to draw down the carbon dioxide, Deich said. Without somewhere to transport or store the carbon, it’s difficult for companies to justify adding the capabilities to plants. In expanding the transportation and storage options, the government investments aim at incentivizing companies to invest in carbon capture technology.

Under the Biden administration, the federal government has been encouraging companies to build infrastructure for capturing, transporting and storing carbon. A tax credit that was part of the Inflation Reduction Act has incentivized investments in carbon capture and storage projects in California, Wyoming and Alaska.

“Deploying the safe and permanent geologic storage of CO2 at scale is necessary to meet midcentury climate targets and today’s funding announcement wisely focuses on those projects that can store at least 50 million metric tons of CO2,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, in a statement.

While oil and gas corporations and carbon capture industry groups say the technology is crucial to America’s overall decarbonization efforts, opponents note that it’s far from scale, putting in doubt how much it can really help combat climate change. They also worry that large-scale investment in such technology will simply delay investment in renewable energy like solar and wind.

“We are headed towards global catastrophe, and do not have the luxury of time or resources to squander on speculative solutions such as CCS, especially when proven solutions already exist,” said Basav Sen, the climate justice policy director for the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank.

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Drew Costley
Drew covers climate and environmental justice.drewcostleydcostley@ap.org
Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. 

ICYMI

The likelihood that Earth briefly hits key warming threshold grows bigger and closer, UN forecasts

By SETH BORENSTEIN

AP

yesterday

A demonstrator shows her hands reading "1.5 to survive" at a protest advocating for the warming goal at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov. 16, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. There’s a two-out-of-three chance within the next five years that the world will temporarily reach the internationally accepted global temperature threshold for limiting the worst effects of climate change, a new World Meteorological Organization report forecasts on Wednesday, May 17, 2023. 

(AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

There’s a two-out-of-three chance that the world will temporarily hit a key warming limit within the next five years, the United Nations weather agency said Wednesday.

But it likely would only be a fleeting and less worrisome flirtation with the internationally agreed upon temperature threshold. Scientists expect a temporary burst of heat from El Nino — a naturally-occurring weather phenomenon — to supercharge human-caused warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas to new heights. Temperatures are expected to then slip back down a bit.

The World Meteorological Organization forecasts a 66% likelihood that between now and 2027, the globe will have a year that averages 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the mid 19th century.

That number is critical because the 2015 Paris climate agreement set 1.5 degrees Celsius as a global guardrail in atmospheric warming, with countries pledging to try to prevent that much long-term warming if possible.

Scientists in a special 2018 United Nations report said going past that point would be drastically and dangerously different with more death, destruction and damage to global ecosystems.

“It won’t be this year probably. Maybe it’ll be next year or the year after” that a year averages 1.5 degrees Celsius, said report lead author Leon Hermanson, a climate scientist at the United Kingdom’s Met Office.

But climate scientists said what’s likely to happen in the next five years isn’t the same as failing the global goal.

“This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5 C level specified in the Paris Agreement which refers to long-term warming over many years. However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5 C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

“We haven’t been able to limit the warming so far and we are still moving in the wrong, wrong direction,” Taalas said at a Wednesday press conference.

Hermanson cautioned that “a single year doesn’t really mean anything.” Scientists usually use 30-year averages.

Those 66% odds of a single year hitting that threshold in five years have increased from 48% last year, 40% the year before, 20% in 2020 and 10% about a decade ago. The WMO report is based on calculations by 11 different climate science centers across the globe.

The world has been inching closer to the 1.5-degree threshold due to human-caused climate change for years. The temporary warming of this year’s expected El Nino — which starts with a warming of parts of the central Pacific Ocean and then sloshes across the globe — makes it “possible for us to see a single year exceeding 1.5 C a full decade before the long-term average,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t part of the WMO report.

“We don’t expect the longer-term average to pass 1.5 C until the early-to-mid 2030s,” Hausfather said in an email.

But each year at or near 1.5 matters.

“We see this report as more of a barometer of how we’re getting close, because the closer you get to the threshold, the more noise bumping up and down is going to bump you over the threshold randomly,” Hermanson said in an interview. And he said the more random bumps over the mark occur, the closer the world actually gets to the threshold.

Key in all this is the El Nino cycle. The world is coming off a record-tying triple dip La Nina — three straight years of El Nino’s cooler cousin restraining the human-caused warming climb — and is on the verge of an El Nino that some scientists predict will be strong.

The La Nina somewhat flattened the trend of human-caused warming so that the world hasn’t broken the annual temperature mark since 2016, during the last El Nino, a super-sized one, Hermanson said.

And that means a 98% chance of breaking the 2016 annual global temperature record between now and 2027, the report said. There’s also a 98% chance that the next five years will be the hottest five years on record, the report said.

Because of the shift from La Nina to El Nino “where there were floods before, there will be droughts and where there were droughts before there might be floods,” Hermanson said.

The report warned that the Amazon will be abnormally dry for a good part of the next five years while the Sahel part of Africa — the transition zone between the Sahara on the north and the savannas to the south — will be wetter.

That’s “one of the positive things coming out of this forecast,” Hermanson said. “It’s not all doom-and-gloom and heat waves.”

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said reports like this put too much emphasis on global surface temperature, which varies with the El Nino cycle, even though it is climbing upward in the long term.

The real concern is the deep water of oceans, which absorb an overwhelming majority of the world’s human-caused warming, leading to a steady rise in ocean heat content and new records set regularly.

“I think it’s important to realize that if we pass 1.5 degrees it’s not a reason to give up,” Hermanson said at a Wednesday news conference. “We have to continue working out how much we can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases as much as possible, even after that, because it will make a difference.”

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Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

Seth Borenstein
Seth is a science writer who covers climate change and other sciences.borenbearssborenstein@ap.org
Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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