A lesbian lost her son to his sperm donor. Should other gay parents be concerned?

Matt Lavietes
Fri, February 17, 2023 


A court ruling this week that rejected an Oklahoma woman’s petition of custody over the son she raised for two years with her estranged wife should serve as a cautionary tale for same-sex parents, some legal experts say.

Kris Williams and Rebekah Wilson were legally married in June 2019, before Wilson gave birth to a boy that August, according to court documents. Shortly after the couple separated in November 2021, Wilson moved in with the child’s sperm donor, taking the boy with her and prompting Williams to petition for custody.

If Williams were a man, there would have been a “presumption of paternity” under Oklahoma state law, which says: “A man is presumed to be the father of a child if … He and the mother of the child are married to each other and the child is born during the marriage.”

Kris Williams, right, and Rebekah Wilson with their son. (Courtesy Kris Williams)

But a judge on Monday ruled against Williams, stating in her decision that the law does not apply to parents in same-sex relationships, because the state parentage law predates the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state.

The ruling surprised some legal experts, who noted the decision is an outlier when compared to similar cases across the country, and caused them to advise same-sex couples to take extra steps to ensure their parental rights.

“It’s a reminder for same-sex couples that we do continue to live in a legal system and a society that is not always fair and doesn’t always follow the law,” Shannon Minter, an attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said. “Those couples may face unfair and even unlawful obstacles to having their parental rights secured and protected, and that’s just a reality.”

The Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, Obergefell v. Hodges, found that same-sex couples are entitled to “civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.” Some legal experts, like Minter, argue that this decision alone should be enough to guarantee gay married couples the same parental rights as their straight counterparts.

Two years later, in June 2017, the high court ruled in Pavan v. Smith that states must extend equal treatment to same-sex parents, mandating the issuance of two-parent birth certificates for children born to same-sex spouses to recognize parentage.

Wilson was initially listed on the child’s birth certificate when he was born in 2019, according to court documents. However, Oklahoma County District Judge Lynne McGuire argued that Williams could not claim parentage rights over the child because Oklahoma’s parentage act predates the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state.

“[The act] does not take into account same-sex marriage, and there is no presumption that the wife of the mother is automatically presumed the parent of a child born during the marriage,” McGuire ruled.

Douglas NeJaime, a professor of family law at Yale Law School, disagrees with McGuire’s ruling. He argued that even if states have gender-specific parentage rules that were drafted in a time when same-sex couples could not marry, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell and Pavan decisions mandate that state law applies to married same-sex couples.

“It’s not like you’re looking at two statutes,” NeJaime said, referring to the comparison of the state’s parental act and the Supreme Court decisions. “You’re looking at a statute and a constitutional precedent that now tells you, ‘You have to apply that statute consistent with this constitutional precedent.’”

In the Monday ruling, McGuire wrote that the only way Williams could have claimed parentage legally was if she had adopted the child she was raising.

“The reality is that the law provides a legal remedy available to Williams,” McGuire wrote, referring to adoption. “She knowingly chose not to pursue it.”

Williams, 51, vowed to appeal the judge’s decision and expressed dismay that her sexuality played a role in her rights as a parent.

“As a queer person, being invisible, being erased is one of those traumas we have,” she said, at times choking up. “So on that level, going through this as a queer person, it’s a recurring trauma of being erased: ‘You’re not important, go away.’”

Williams said she and Wilson started dating in June 2014. The pair began looking for sperm donors to have a child in 2018, she added, finding Harlan Vaughn through the website Known Donor Registry, and connecting with him on Facebook. In September 2018, according to court documents, Wilson entered a “Known Sperm Donor Agreement” with Vaughn before the nonmedical insemination of Wilson took place in December of that year.

The pair chose Vaughn to be their sperm donor because they believed he was gay, and he had a boyfriend at the time, Williams said. She said she had hoped Vaughn could have a “guncle” (gay uncle) relationship with the child.

“I felt extremely safe,” Williams said. “I couldn’t have guessed in a million years that it would be two people in our community that were going to take these steps, and especially one that I very much was in love with.”

In October 2021, not long after the child’s second birthday, Vaughn moved to Oklahoma City and began spending time with the boy, according to court documents. The following month, Wilson left the couple’s shared home, taking their son, and moved in with Vaughn. Wilson and Vaughn have been raising the boy together and have since had a second biological child, court documents show. Williams has not seen the boy, now 3, since November 2021.

Vaughn declined an interview request from NBC News but issued a statement on behalf of himself and Wilson: “We remain focused exclusively on our child’s protection and well-being. We are grateful for the court’s validation.”

Minter and NeJaime said that most custody cases involving the children of estranged same-sex spouses or those who have already divorced have ended with the nonbiological parent maintaining their parental rights, with the exception of the Oklahoma ruling and an Idaho case, Gatsby v. Gatsby, in 2021.

However, they said that with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and the surge of anti-LGBTQ state legislation being introduced across the country this year, same-sex parents should do whatever they can to protect themselves. When possible, they both suggested, nonbiological same-sex parents should adopt their own children or apply for a judgment from a court to ensure their legal rights as parents.

“It should not be necessary, and it’s a shame, but it is a reality in many places,” Minter said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Water crisis in West: Massive reservoir Lake Powell hits historic low water level


Colorado River Basin water levels drop to historic low, states mandated to cut use


Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
Fri, February 17, 2023

Lake Powell, the nation's second-largest reservoir and one that provides water and power to millions of people in southern California, has reached its lowest levels since its first filling in the 1960s.

Its companion reservoir, Lake Mead, is at levels almost as low.

Together, these reservoirs, fed by the mighty Colorado River, provide the water 40 million Americans depend on. Despite the storms that brought heavy rain and snow to California and other Western states in January, experts say it would take years of such weather to replenish the West's water resources.

“In the year 2000, the two reservoirs were 95% full. They’re roughly 25% full now,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. "It’s hard to overstate how important the Colorado River is to the entire American southwest.”

What to know about the West's ongoing water crisis:

An abandoned and once-sunken boat sits along the shoreline of Lake Powell in this May 2022 file photo. The white ring above shows how high the water level was when the lake was full.
What is Lake Powell?

Lake Powell is the nation's second-largest reservoir. It was created by blocking the Colorado River at Glen Canyon in southern Utah and northern Arizona.

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READ MORE: Latest climate change news from USA TODAY

It stores water as part of the Colorado River Compact and produces electricity through the hydroelectric turbines in Glen Canyon dam.

Work on the dam that created Lake Powell began in 1956 and was finished in 1966. It took 16 years for it to fill. At its highest, in 1983, the lake was 3,708 feet above sea level.

Today it stands at 3,522 feet.
What happens if the water level goes lower?

Lake Powell hasn't been this low since June of 1965, just two years after it began to fill with water.

The biggest worry: If the lake’s level falls much lower, it won’t be possible to get water out of it.


Why? Tubes that run water out of the lake and into two hydroelectric turbines could soon be above the water. There are bypass tubes available below that point, but they weren’t designed for continuous use, so it’s not clear how they would fare.


Important quote: “If you can’t get water out of the dam, it means everyone downstream doesn’t get water,” said Udall. "That includes agriculture, cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix."


Will water stop flowing? "That's a doomsday scenario," said Bill Hasencamp, Colorado River resources manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Before things get to that point the Department of the Interior will require reductions in use.


How long until water stops flowing downstream? If the lake falls another 32 feet – about the amount it fell in the past year – power generation concerns become more urgent, Udall said. Snowmelt this spring is forecast to bring levels up somewhat.
Why is the water level so low?

The water in Lake Powell is low because the amount of water in the Colorado River has been falling for decades. At the same time, demand has risen due to increased population growth in the West.

Overall, the river's flow is down 20% in this century relative to the 20th century.

BACKGROUND: Western water crisis looms as California complicates critical water deal

More than four scientific studies have pinned a large part of the decline on human climate change. It's partly that there's less rain and snow, partly that as temperatures rise, plants use more water and more water evaporates out of the soil which would otherwise have ended up in the river. In addition, the river itself experiences more evaporation.

"It’s unfortunate that the largely natural occurrence of a drought has coincided with this increasing warming due to greenhouse gases," said Flavio Lehner, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. "That has brought everything to a head much earlier than people thought it would."
What about Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam?

Lake Mead is the nation's largest reservoir, a companion to Lake Powell. Mead was created when the Hoover Dam was completed in 1935. It supplies water and power to Arizona, California, New Mexico and Mexico.

Lake Mead's level is 1,047 feet above sea level. You would have to go back to April of 1937, also two years into its initial filling, to find levels that low. It is forecast to have a new record low next summer, said Hasencamp.

The lake isn't low enough yet to cause concerns about getting water out, but any hope of it refilling is years away, if ever, due to lowered rain and snow and increasing evaporation.

Some of America’s largest cities depend on the water from Lake Mead. “It’s 90% of the water supply to Las Vegas, 50% to Phoenix, effectively 100% to Tucson and 25% to Los Angeles,” said Udall.

What will happen if water levels keep dropping?

The Department of the Interior had asked the seven states of the Colorado River Compact to come up with a plan to cut between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water by January. They weren’t able to come up with an agreement.

Because of that, it’s expected that the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water management, will mandate one sometime next year.

"This is apparently a decent (water) year, but still, if it turns dry again there are some pretty big reductions on tap and every state could be affected," said Hasencamp.

It will be painful but it doesn't mean the area can't thrive.

"The West might look different," said Hasencamp. "You might not see the lush lawns of today and endless fields of alfalfa, but you will see thriving communities and agricultural regions."
Dig deeper on climate change:

DEFINITIONS: Is climate change the same thing as global warming? Definitions explained.


CAUSES: Why scientists say humans are to blame.


EFFECTS: What are the effects of climate change? How they disrupt our daily life, fuel disasters.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lake Powell water level at historic low: Drought, water crisis in West

For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a U.S. Forest

Gabriel Popkin
Fri, February 17, 2023 

A hand-planting crew plants poplar trees in Vidalia, Ga., Feb. 13, 2023. (Audra Melton/The New York Times)

On Monday, in a low-lying tract of southern Georgia’s pine belt, a half-dozen workers planted row upon row of twig-like poplar trees.

These weren’t just any trees, though: Some of the seedlings being nestled into the soggy soil had been genetically engineered to grow wood at turbocharged rates while slurping up carbon dioxide from the air.

The poplars may be the first genetically modified trees planted in the United States outside of a research trial or a commercial fruit orchard. Just as the introduction of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 introduced a new industry of genetically modified food crops, the tree planters Monday hope to transform forestry.

Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that produced the poplars, intends for its trees to be a large-scale solution to climate change.

“We’ve had people tell us it’s impossible,” Maddie Hall, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said of her dream to deploy genetic engineering on behalf of the climate. But she and her colleagues have also found believers — enough to invest $36 million in the 4-year-old company.

The company has also attracted critics. The Global Justice Ecology Project, an environmental group, has called the company’s trees “growing threats” to forests and expressed alarm that the federal government allowed them to evade regulation, opening the door to commercial plantings much sooner than is typical for engineered plants.

Living Carbon has yet to publish peer-reviewed papers; its only publicly reported results come from a greenhouse trial that lasted just a few months. These data have some experts intrigued but stopping well short of a full endorsement.

“They have some encouraging results,” said Donald Ort, a University of Illinois geneticist whose plant experiments helped inspire Living Carbon’s technology. But he added that the notion that greenhouse results will translate to success in the real world is “not a slam dunk.”

🌳🌳

Living Carbon’s poplars start their lives in a lab in Hayward, California. There, biologists tinker with how the trees conduct photosynthesis, the series of chemical reactions plants use to weave sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into sugars and starches. In doing so, they follow a precedent set by evolution: Several times over Earth’s long history, improvements in photosynthesis have enabled plants to ingest enough carbon dioxide to cool the planet substantially.

While photosynthesis has profound impacts on the Earth, as a chemical process it is far from perfect. Numerous inefficiencies prevent plants from capturing and storing more than a small fraction of the solar energy that falls onto their leaves. Those inefficiencies, among other factors, limit how fast trees and other plants grow, and how much carbon dioxide they soak up.

Scientists have spent decades trying to take over where evolution left off. In 2019, Ort and his colleagues announced that they had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently. Normally, photosynthesis produces a toxic byproduct that a plant must dispose of, wasting energy. The Illinois researchers added genes from pumpkins and green algae to induce tobacco seedlings to instead recycle the toxins into more sugars, producing plants that grew nearly 40% larger.

That same year, Hall, who had been working for Silicon Valley ventures like OpenAI (which was responsible for the language model ChatGPT), met her future co-founder Patrick Mellor at a climate tech conference. Mellor was researching whether trees could be engineered to produce decay-resistant wood.

With money raised from venture capital firms and Hall’s tech-world contacts, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, she and Mellor started Living Carbon in a bid to juice up trees to fight climate change. “There were so few companies that were looking at large-scale carbon removal in a way that married frontier science and large-scale commercial deployment,” Hall said.

They recruited Yumin Tao, a synthetic biologist who had previously worked at the chemical company DuPont. He and others retooled Ort’s genetic hack for poplar trees. Living Carbon then produced engineered poplar clones and grew them in pots. Last year, the company reported in a paper that has yet to be peer reviewed that its tweaked poplars grew more than 50% faster than non-modified ones over five months in the greenhouse.

The company’s researchers created the greenhouse-tested trees using a bacterium that splices foreign DNA into another organism’s genome. But for the trees they planted in Georgia, they turned to an older and cruder technique known as the gene gun method, which essentially blasts foreign genes into the trees’ chromosomes.

In a field accustomed to glacial progress and heavy regulation, Living Carbon has moved fast and freely. The gene gun-modified poplars avoided a set of federal regulations of genetically modified organisms that can stall biotech projects for years. (Those regulations have since been revised.) By contrast, a team of scientists who genetically engineered a blight-resistant chestnut tree using the same bacterium method employed earlier by Living Carbon have been awaiting a decision since 2020. An engineered apple grown on a small scale in Washington state took several years to be approved.

“You could say the old rule was sort of leaky,” said Bill Doley, a consultant who helped manage the Agriculture Department’s genetically modified organism regulation process until 2022.

On Monday, on the land of Vince Stanley, a seventh-generation farmer who manages more than 25,000 forested acres in Georgia’s pine belt, mattock-swinging workers carrying backpacks of seedlings planted nearly 5,000 modified poplars. The tweaked poplars had names like Kookaburra and Baboon, which indicated which “parent” tree they were cloned from, and were interspersed with a roughly equal number of unmodified trees. By the end of the unseasonably warm day, the workers were drenched in sweat and the planting plots were dotted with pencil-thin seedlings and colored marker flags poking from the mud.

In contrast to fast-growing pines, hardwoods that grow in bottomlands like these produce wood so slowly that a landowner might get only one harvest in a lifetime, Stanley said. He hopes Living Carbon’s “elite seedlings” will allow him to grow bottomland trees and make money faster. “We’re taking a timber rotation of 50 to 60 years and we’re cutting that in half,” he said. “It’s totally a win-win.”

Forest geneticists were less sanguine about Living Carbon’s trees. Researchers typically assess trees in confined field trials before moving to large-scale plantings, said Andrew Newhouse, who directs the engineered chestnut project at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “Their claims seem bold based on very limited real-world data,” he said.

Steve Strauss, a geneticist at Oregon State University, agreed with the need to see field data. “My experience over the years is that the greenhouse means almost nothing” about the outdoor prospects of trees whose physiology has been modified, he said. “Venture capitalists may not know that.”

Strauss, who previously served on Living Carbon’s advisory board, has grown some of the company’s seedlings since last year as part of a field trial funded by the company. He said the trees were growing well, but it was still too early to tell whether they were outpacing unmodified trees.

Even if they do, Living Carbon will face other challenges unrelated to biology. While outright destruction of genetically engineered trees has dwindled thanks in part to tougher enforcement of laws against acts of ecoterrorism, the trees still prompt unease in the forestry and environmental worlds. Major organizations that certify sustainable forests ban engineered trees from forests that get their approval; some also prohibit member companies from planting engineered trees anywhere. To date, the only country where large numbers of genetically engineered trees are known to have been planted is China.

The U.S. Forest Service, which plants large numbers of trees every year, has said little about whether it would use engineered trees. To be considered for planting in national forests, which make up nearly one-fifth of U.S. forestland, Living Carbon’s trees would need to align with existing management plans that typically prioritize forest health and diversity over reducing the amount of atmospheric carbon, said Dana Nelson, a geneticist with the service. “I find it hard to imagine that it would be a good fit on a national forest,” Nelson said.

Living Carbon is focusing for now on private land, where it will face fewer hurdles. Later this spring it will plant poplars on abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania. By next year Hall and Mellor hope to be putting millions of trees in the ground.

🌳🌳🌳

To produce an income stream not reliant on venture capital, the company has started marketing credits based on carbon its trees will soak up. But carbon credits have come under fire lately and the future of that industry is in doubt.

And to head off environmental concerns, Living Carbon’s modified poplar trees are all female, so they won’t produce pollen. While they could be pollinated by wild trees and produce seeds, Mellor says they’re unlikely to spread into the wild because they don’t breed with the most common poplar species in the Southeast.

They’re also being planted alongside native trees like sweet gum, tulip trees and bald cypress, to avoid genetically identical stands of trees known as monocultures; non-engineered poplars are being planted as experimental controls. Hall and Mellor describe their plantings as both pilot projects and research trials. Company scientists will monitor tree growth and survival.

Such measures are unlikely to assuage opponents of genetically modified organisms. Last spring, the Global Justice Ecology Project argued that Living Carbon’s trees could harm the climate by “interfering with efforts to protect and regenerate forests.”

“I’m very shocked that they’re moving so fast” to plant large numbers of modified trees in the wild, said Anne Petermann, the organization’s executive director. The potential risks to the greater ecosystem needed to be better understood, she said.

Ort of the University of Illinois dismissed such environmental concerns. But he said investors were taking a big chance on a tree that might not meet its creators’ expectations.

“It’s not unexciting,” he said. “I just think it’s uber high risk.”

© 2023 The New York Times Company

Decision to shoot down balloons puts spotlight on hobbyists
 

TODD RICHMOND and HARM VENHUIZEN
Fri, February 17, 2023 

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Decisions to shoot down multiple unidentified objects over the U.S. and Canada this month have put a spotlight on amateur balloonists who insist their creations pose no threat.

Over the last three weeks, U.S. President Joe Biden has ordered fighter jets to shoot down three objects detected in U.S. air space — a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the South Carolina coast as well as smaller unidentified objects over Alaska and Lake Huron. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week ordered another object to be shot down over the Yukon; a U.S. fighter jet carried out that mission.

U.S. government officials have yet to definitively identify the objects, but Biden said Thursday that they were probably balloons linked to private companies, weather researchers or hobbyists.

Tom Medlin, the owner of the Tennessee-based Amateur Radio Roundtable podcast and a balloon hobbyist himself, said he's been in contact with an Illinois club that believes the object shot down over the Yukon was one of their balloons. No one from the club responded to messages left Friday, but Medlin said the club was tracking the balloon and it disappeared over the Yukon on the same day the unidentified object was shot down.

The incidents have left balloonists scrambling to defend their hobby. They insist their balloons fly too high and are too small to pose a threat to aircraft and that government officials are overreacting.

“The spy balloon had to be shot down,” Medlin said. “That's a national security threat, for sure. Then what happened is, I think, the government got a little anxious. Maybe the word is trigger-happy. I don't know. When they shot them down, they didn't know what they were. That's a little concerning.”

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday that the Biden administration wasn't able to confirm reports that the object belonged to the Illinois club. He said the debris has yet to be recovered and “we all have to accept the possibility that we may not be able to recover it.”

U.S. officials said Friday that they've stopped searching for debris from the objects shot down over Alaska and Lake Huron after finding nothing. Search efforts for debris from the Yukon object are ongoing.

Kirby pushed back at the notion that Biden's decision to use missiles costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot down what were most likely balloons that cost less than $20 was an overreaction.

“Absolutely not,” Kirby said. “Given the situation we were in, the information available, the recommendation of our military commanders — it was exactly the right thing to do at exactly the right time.”

Medlin said the balloons he's flying right now cost about $12 and are about 32 inches in diameter.

The balloons carry solar-powered transmitters that weigh less than 2 grams and that broadcast a signal every 10 minutes or so that ham radio operators around the world can use to track the balloons' locations, he said. He has a balloon up right now that’s been in the air for 250 days and has circled the globe 10 times, he said.

The fun is watching the balloon circle the globe and building the tiny transmitters, said Medlin, adding that the devices are so small he needs a microscope to construct them. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been collecting data from ham radio operators to track wind patterns, he said.

The balloons are so light that the Federal Aviation Administration doesn't regulate them and doesn't require balloonists to file flight plans, Medlin said. He inflates his balloons with enough hydrogen to ensure they'll fly at about 50,000 feet. That is well above most commercial aircraft, he said.

Current regulations posted on the FAA’s website state that no one can operate an unmanned balloon in a way that creates a hazard, and agency regulations apply only to balloons that carry a payload of more than four pounds.

Medlin speculated that after U.S. officials detected the suspected Chinese balloon, they adjusted their radar to pick up very small objects. But the hobbyists' balloons don't pose a threat to aircraft, he said.

“We're following FAA rules and regulations,” Medlin said. “They're the experts on whether this should or should not be done. Take a cork and drop it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Is a ship going to hit it? Probably not. And if it did it wouldn't do any damage to the ship.”

Ron Meadows co-founded San Jose-based Scientific Balloon Solutions with his son, Lee. He said the company produces balloons as large as 8 1/2 feet in diameter for university and middle school science students. He said those balloons carry a payload weight of around 10 to 20 grams, with transmitters the size of a popsicle stick. Some balloons feature a 20-foot (6-meter) antenna, he said.

He understands that government officials are trying to keep people safe, he said, but they don't understand that the balloons are totally benign and there's no question they're overreacting. Jet engines likely ingest far larger objects, such as birds, and most pilots probably wouldn't even know it if they hit a balloon, Meadows said.

He said he has tried to contact the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to educate officials about the balloons, but that his calls went to voicemail.

“It would have been nice to get our government the information they needed,” he said.

Meadows said he anticipates that after this month's incidents, the FAA will come out with tighter restrictions on balloons. He said he's not overly concerned, since his balloon business is a side job; he also runs a swimming pool repair service.

“We are in this (balloon) business more for the students, not for making money,” he said. “This is for education. When we build these things, the time it takes to build them, we can make more at our day job.”

Medlin said balloons can reach speeds of up to 130 mph (210 kmh) if they get caught up in the jet stream. But Bob Boutin, a Chicago flight instructor, said its unlikely that such balloons pose much of a threat to aircraft.

Most commercial jets fly between 25,000 and 45,000 feet, below the balloons' level, he said. Some corporate jets climb higher than 50,000 feet, but at that altitude skies are typically clear with visibility of 20 to 40 miles, Boutin said.

The White House's Kirby said that the objects shot down were traveling low enough to pose a risk to civilian aircraft, but Boutin said even at lower altitudes, a small balloon wouldn't merit a military strike.

“Birds and planes are a heck of a lot more issue than a balloon would be,” he said. Even if the balloon were to enter a jet engine, “most jets have two engines, and if you lost one, technically it’s an emergency but not one that means the plane is going crash,” Boutin said.

___

Associated Press reporter Aamer Madhani in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

___

Harm Venhuizen is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Harm on Twitter.

- In this image released by the U.S. Navy, sailors assigned to Assault Craft Unit 4 prepare material recovered off the coast of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the Atlantic Ocean from the shooting down of a Chinese high-altitude balloon, for transport to the FBI, at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek in Virginia Beach, Va., on Feb. 10, 2023. U.S. officials say the military has finished efforts to recover the remnants of the large balloon, and analysis of the debris so far reinforces conclusions that it was a Chinese spy balloon. (Ryan Seelbach/U.S. Navy via AP, File)

Adani's deals involving a power plant and a port have soured


Niharika Sharma
Fri, February 17, 2023 

Image: Reuters (Reuters)

After canceling a mega share sale, India’s Adani group has now abandoned its plans to buy a coal plant in India for $850 million.

It has decided not to pursue the deal with Chhattisgarh-based DB Power after a deadline to finalize it expired on Feb. 15, Bloomberg reported.

The Adani group was expected to step back on spending following a stock drubbing triggered by a report that accused the company of market misdemeanor. The Jan. 24 report by the US-based Hindenburg Research has so far eroded over $120 billion in Adani’s market cap.

The group has received another jolt with state-run Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) disputing its claim of another deal, involving Andhra Pradesh’s Gangavaram port which was to be used to unload imported liquified petroleum gas.

In an unusual move on Feb. 15, IOC took to Twitter to dismiss its claim, made during its recent quarterly earnings announcement, that Adani Ports had signed a “take-or-pay liability” deal with the oil marketing firm.

A take-or-pay deal makes it mandatory for buyers to pay up even if they later decide against using the goods or facilities.

Earlier this month, French firm TotalEnergies halted its plan to join the Indian firm’s $50 billion bet on hydrogen. Adani is also struggling with projects involving foreign governments. Bangladesh’s state-run power firm, for instance, is reportedly seeking a revision of a deal with Adani Power.

CALIFORNIA

‘Until we can’t no more.’ Immigrants on hunger strike at two Central Valley facilities



Yesenia Amaro
Fri, February 17, 2023

FRESNO BEE

Gustavo Adolfo Flores Coreas recalls being subjected to “abusive pat-downs” by guards every time he left his dorm at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield.

The 31-year-old on Thursday told The Bee he began to skip meals to avoid the uncomfortable pat-downs by the guards employed by The GEO Group, which operates Mesa Verde and the Golden State Annex in McFarland for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“It was awful,” Coreas, who is now housed at the Golden State Annex, told The Bee during an interview about the pat-downs at Mesa Verde. “I didn’t want to be excessively touched.”

Another detained immigrant, 25-year-old Rigoberto Hernandez Martinez, arrived at Mesa Verde in winter and recalled how cold it was inside the facility. He also remembers being given a blanket with holes in it.

“It was really freezing in here,” Martinez told The Bee during an interview.

Coreas and Martinez are among about 77 immigrants at the two Central Valley immigration detention facilities who are taking part in a hunger strike they began Friday. The hunger strike comes after a 10-month-long, ongoing labor strike to protest getting paid $1 per day to work to maintain the facilities.

In July 2022, a group of nine immigrants sued The GEO Group over the $1 wage.

The immigrants and the ACLU of Northern California told The Bee the hunger strike also comes amid “abhorrent” and “soul-crushing” living conditions at both facilities. They say, at times, immigrants have been given expired and cold food, and are not treated in a timely manner when a medical condition arises.

Plus, since the labor strike began, the ACLU of Northern California said it has received reports of retaliation.
The GEO Group denies strike happening; ICE puts off comment

A GEO Group spokesperson on Friday said the company “strongly rejects these baseless allegations.” The spokesperson also said currently there are no hunger strikes at either of the two facilities.

ICE defines a hunger strike as nine consecutive meals missed. The hunger strikes at both Central Valley facilities began Friday.

The GEO Group referred questions by The Bee about the hunger strike, and whether it calls for nine meals to be missed for it to be considered a hunger strike, to ICE. The federal immigration agency said it would respond on Tuesday.

According to a policy revised in 2016, any detainee who doesn’t eat for 72 hours should be referred to the medical department for an evaluation.

Detainees should be delivered three meals per day regardless of their response to the offered meals, the policy says.

The GEO spokesperson said allegations are “part of a long-standing radical campaign to attack ICE’s contractors, abolish ICE, and end federal immigration detention by proxy in the state of California.”

“We also note that certain detainees take actions that are instigated and coordinated through a politically motivated and choreographed effort by outside groups,” the spokesperson said in an email to The Bee.

In 2020, ICE made similar claims and denied that a hunger strike was taking place at Mesa Verde when attorneys and detainees said a strike was underway.
Detained immigrants have faced retaliation after labor strike

Minju Cho, a staff attorney with the Immigrants’ Rights Program at the ACLU of Northern California, said detained immigrants have already been met with significant retaliation since their labor strike began.

The forms of retaliation, she said, have included being placed in solitary confinement, being threatened with transfer to an out-of-state facility, being written up, and “perhaps, most shocking” at Mesa Verde, “they have been subjected to sexually abusive pat-downs.”

Before the labor strike, immigrants were patted down as necessary, but not excessively.

“Once the labor strike began, we started hearing a lot of reports about people being groped, rubbed, made to feel very uncomfortable, having their private parts touched unnecessarily, and being subjected to comments by the guards about their bodies,” Cho told The Bee on Thursday.

That prompted the ACLU of Northern California to file a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, she said.

In the wake of a hunger strike at an immigration facility in Tacoma, Wash., earlier this month where strikers were met with violence in retaliation, Cho urged caution by The GEO Group. Guards at the Tacoma facility used smoke bombs and pepper spray on the first day of the strike.

“The hunger strike is a peaceful, constitutionally-protected expression, and the hunger strikers have the constitutional rights to express themselves this way without interference from GEO or ICE,” she told The Bee. “They have first amendment rights that they did not shed when they walked through the detention facility doors.”
‘No other choice, but to put our lives on the line to be heard’

Coreas and Martinez say they are taking part in the hunger strike to call for their release and for the facilities to be shut down.

At one point, Martinez said he became “really sick” and it took seven days to be seen by medical personnel. Then, he says, it took about five months to seen by a specialist.

“They’re supposed to at least provide us with the minimum, yet they fail to do so,” Martinez told The Bee.

Martinez said the facilities have failed to provide them with basic necessities, and don’t acknowledge their grievances.

“Now, we have no other choice, but to put our lives on the line to be heard,” he told The Bee of the hunger strike. “We are willing to continue over to the end ... until we can’t no more. Until we get released. These facilities need to be shut down.”

Coreas, who also had medical needs at one point, said he has filed several grievances over the living conditions. He was initially housed at the Golden State Annex before being moved to Mesa Verde, and then back to the Golden State Annex where he is now.

He described Mesa Verde as “way worse” than the Golden State Annex, and “horrible.” He said even the ICE agent who checks on him offered to transfer him back to the Golden State Annex.

“He was like, ‘Hey man, I know this place sucks,’ and those were his words...” Coreas told The Bee. “’But if you want I can move you back to State Annex.’”

Coreas said he has had a “horrible experience.”

“I don’t wish this predicament that I find myself in, which is, you know, immigration detention, on anyone,” he told The Bee.

Martinez said immigrants deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

“They get paid millions of federal dollars to take care of us immigrants in their custody, but they fail to do so,” he said of The GEO Group. “Somebody needs to be held accountable for everything that’s been taking place.”

Dangerous working conditions, the organization says, such as exposure to black mold, have prompted state regulators to carry out an inspection that resulted in six violations, and $104,000 in fines.

ACLU supports hunger strike, immigrants’ demands for improvements

Cho said her organization supports the hunger strike for various reasons.

“First, we believe that immigration detention is inhumane,” she told The Bee. “While it continues to exist in California, we are committed to doing our part to ensure conditions are safe and as humane as possible which is exactly what the strikers are calling for.”

The strikers’ demands include the immediate release of people in detention, for detained immigrants to be paid California’s minimum wage of $15.50 per hour , safer working conditions, prompt medical attention, and access to fresh and high quality food, among other requests.

“They articulated their specific demands to the facility and to ICE, and none of them have been met..” she said. “That’s why they are escalating to a hunger strike.”

China takes top spot in global refining capacity but output lags U.S.


A worker walks past oil pipes at a refinery in Wuhan

Thu, February 16, 2023 

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's oil refining capacity overtook the United States as the world's largest in 2022, an industry official said on Thursday, though its production of fuel products lagged the United States due to low utilisation rates.

Total refining capacity in China expanded to 920 million tonnes per year, or 18.4 million barrels per day (bpd), in 2022 Fu Xiangsheng, vice president of the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Association, told reporters.

That compares with U.S. refining capacity as of December at 17.6 million bpd, according to the International Energy Agency's latest oil market report.

China's recent wave of refinery expansions has been led by state-run PetroChina and large private firms such as Zhejiang Rongsheng group and Jiangsu Shenghong Petrochemical, mainly to fill a supply gap in petrochemicals rather than transportation fuels.

China's total refined products output last year was less than 700 million tonnes (5.1 billion barrels), at an average plant utilisation rate of around 70%, the association said, compared with more than 800 million tonnes in the United States, where average utilisation exceeded 90%.

China has 32 refineries with at least 200,000 bpd capacity each, according to the association, citing the launch of a new facility built by PetroChina in Jieyang in Guangdong province as a recent example of the country's growing capacity.

(Reporting by Andrew Hayley; Editing by Sonali Paul)

Turkey rages at shoddy construction after 'earthquake-proof' homes topple


Aftermath of the deadly earthquake in Adiyaman

Fri, February 17, 2023 
By Ali Kucukgocmen

HATAY, Turkey - Residents of a luxury housing complex in southern Turkey thought their apartments were 'earthquake-proof' until the structure toppled like a domino in last week's devastating earthquake, leaving hundreds feared dead.

Now the wreckage of the Ronesans Rezidans, which was advertised as "a piece of paradise" when it opened a decade ago, has become a focus of public anger.

Survivors stand by the pile of debris that was the 249-apartment block waiting for news of loved ones as hopes of their survival fade.

"My brother lived here for ten years... It was said to be earthquake safe, but you can see the result," said 47-year-old jeweller Hamza Alpaslan.

"It was introduced as the most beautiful residence in the world. It's in horrible condition. There is neither cement nor proper iron in it. It's a real hell," he added.

Eleven days after the quake that killed more than 43,000 in Turkey and Syria and left millions homeless, outrage is growing over what Turks see as corrupt building practices and deeply flawed urban developments.

Turkey's Urbanisation Ministry estimates 84,700 buildings have collapsed or are severely damaged.

While the Ronesans Rezidans, which translates as "Renaissance Residence", crumbled, several older buildings near the block still stood.

"We rented this place as an elite place, a safe place," said Sevil Karaabduloglu, whose two daughters are under the rubble.

Missing Ghanaian international footballer Christian Atsu who played for local team Hatayspor is also believed to have lived in the complex.

Dozens of people Reuters interviewed in the city of Hatay, where the complex stood, accused contractors of using cheap or unsuitable material and authorities of showing leniency towards sub-standard building constructions.

"Who is responsible? Everyone, everyone, everyone," said Alpaslan, blaming local authorities and building inspectors.

The developer of the complex, Mehmet Yasar Coskun, was arrested at Istanbul Airport as he prepared to board a plane for Montenegro last Friday evening, according to Turkish state news agency Anadolu.

"The public is looking for a criminal, a culprit. My client was picked as this culprit," Coskun's lawyer Kubra Kalkan Colakoglu told prosecutors, according to court documents seen by Anadolu, adding he denied any wrongdoing.

According to Anadolu, Coskun told prosecutors the building was solid and held all necessary licences.

ERDOGAN'S CONSTRUCTION BOOM

Turkey has vowed to probe the collapse of buildings and is investigating 246 suspects so far, including developers, 27 of whom are now in police detention.

"No rubble is cleared without collecting evidence," said Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag.

"Everyone who had a responsibility in constructing, inspecting, and using the buildings is being evaluated."

President Tayyip Erdogan's ruling AK Party has put great emphasis on construction, which has helped drive growth during its two decades in years in power, although the sector suffered in the last five years as the economy struggled.

Opposition parties accused his government of not enforcing building regulations, and of mis-spending special taxes levied after the last major earthquake in 1999 in order to make buildings more resistant to quakes.

In the 10 years to 2022, Turkey slipped 47 places in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index to 101, having been as high as 54 out of 174 countries in 2012.

Erdogan claims the opposition tells lies to besmirch the government and obstruct investment.

Three kilometres away from the Renaissance Residence is a damaged state building connected to Turkey's Urbanisation Ministry and where locals and activists said vital documents relating to building safety and quality control were scattered among the debris.

Omer Mese, a lawyer from Istanbul, said he had been keeping watch over the rubble and is trying to save what could be vital evidence although some documents had been destroyed as people left homeless looked for anything they could burn for warmth.

"There were a lot of official documents with original signatures. It was essential to save and protect them... so that those responsible for this disaster can be brought to justice," he said, adding the papers included data on concrete and earthquake resistance tests.

"I read the news about contractors arrested after the earthquake but when we think about this destruction and its extent... there should be more," he added.

The Urbanisation Ministry said documents would be moved to the ministry archive in the city and were stored digitally.

BUILDING AMNESTY

Sector officials have said some 50% of the total 20 million buildings in Turkey contravene building codes.

In 2018 the government introduced a so-called zoning amnesty to legalise unregistered construction work, which engineers and architects warned could endanger lives.

Some 10 million people applied to benefit from the amnesty and 1.8 million applications were accepted. Property owners paid to register the buildings, which were then subject to various taxes and levies.

The government said it was needed to remove disagreements between the state and citizens and legalise structures.

"Unfortunately the zoning amnesty in our country is somehow

considered a public blessing," Mese said.

"We have become a society that lives by considering it a plus to put something off for a day, but we end up being crushed by the consequences of that. That is the problem."

(Writing by Alexandra Hudson; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Christina Fincher)

Turkey earthquake: Anger grows over building standards in wake of deadly disaster

Fri, 17 February 2023 



Treading carefully but quickly around her family home, Simge Ozdel is packing up her life.

She moves from room to room picking up urgent medicine for her diabetic father, as well as anything she can recover from her flat in Adana that was torn apart by the earthquake.

Simge was in her childhood bedroom when the tremors started.


"I realised the building was falling on top of me. Then I fled to the hallway and shut the door and when I did, the whole wall came down," she tells us.

The family has been told by inspectors the building will be reinforced and at some point, they can return.

But for now, the three of them will live in Istanbul.

Anger rising

With every day, public anger is intensifying. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has struggled to defend his response to the earthquake.

Videos from a few years ago have emerged showing him praising one of the housing projects in Maras that crumbled, killing thousands of people.

On one, taken during a campaign stop ahead of Turkey's March 2019 elections, Mr Erdogan said: "We solved the problem of 144,156 citizens of Maras with zoning amnesty."

Critics say the amnesties, which forgave faults in millions of buildings and the lack of enforced safety measures likely contributed to the soaring death toll.

'We are always going backwards'

In Iskenderun, we meet Mustafa Onal who is loading up his motorbike with supplies. It is the first time he will step inside his flat since the earthquake.

He is scared of aftershocks and invites us to see his home. There are deep cracks on the inside and outside of the building.

Mustafa sees greed.

"In Turkey, there is no progress," he says.

"We're always going backwards. Architects, contractors, they're just looking at how they can steal, how they can gain."

Read more:
Before and after images highlight earthquake devastation
Syrian refugees fleeing back from Turkey after earthquake

President of Adana Chamber of Architects, Sedat Gul, meets us in the city, next to a building completely ripped apart by the earthquake. He is angry.

"There has been a void in the inspection process," he says.

"Local administrations like municipalities and contractors, void of any ethics, have cut corners and tried to make money.

"They've used loopholes in the law for their personal gain."

There were warnings about the infrastructure of the buildings not being up to standard.

Last year, the Turkish environment minister said 6.8 million homes in the country were considered risky and 1.5 million needed to be torn down urgently.

What is striking across the region are these buildings standing side-by-side that face completely different fates, one obliterated and the other completely intact.

There are lots of buildings like this with huge cracks in them and now they'll have to be inspected. If there is structural damage they'll have to be torn down.

A hellish landscape

In the port city of Iskenderun, Fatma is desperate to get back into her home.

She says her daughter and grandson are still in the burnt-out building.

"They're gone, they're gone," she cries. "I cannot breathe."

She is consoled by a relative who cradles her. It is a hellish landscape.

In those rare, still moments, this feels like a museum of mourning.

No one chose to visit of course, and yet so many will struggle to leave.

SHE IS MORE ARYAN THAN COULTER
Ann Coulter tells Nikki Haley to ‘go back to your own country’ in racist rant against new GOP presidential candidate

Sakshi Venkatraman
Thu, February 16, 2023 

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter is under fire for a racist tirade against new Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley.

In an appearance on the "The Mark Simone Show" podcast this week, Coulter made several xenophobic comments about Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who was born in the U.S. to Indian immigrant parents. "Why don't you go back to your own country?" Coulter said.

Coulter, known for her racist and anti-immigrant stances, attacked India, as well.

"Her candidacy did remind me that I need to immigrate to India so I can demand they start taking down parts of their history," she said. "What's with the worshipping of the cows? They're all starving over there. Did you know they have a rat temple, where they worship rats?"

Haley did not respond to a request for comment.

Coulter also called Haley a "bimbo" and a "preposterous creature," criticizing her for having advocated removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse in the wake of the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

"This is my country, lady," she said. "I'm not an American Indian, and I don't like them taking down all the monuments."

Haley announced her candidacy Tuesday, making her the first Republican opponent for former President Donald Trump, for whom Coulter has been a vocal proponent.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

George Soros says Narendra Modi must answer for Adani row

Harish Pullanoor
Fri, February 17, 2023 

Image: Lisi Niesner (Reuters)

US billionaire investor George Soros this week publicly criticized Indian prime minister Narendra Modi for his ties with the crisis-hit Adani group, and also went after the leader’s democratic credentials.

The Hungarian-American philanthropist said he believes Modi will have to answer questions regarding the Adani group since their fates are “intertwined.”

“Adani is accused of stock manipulation and his stock collapsed like a house of cards. Modi is silent on the subject, but he will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in parliament,” Soros said Feb. 16 at the Munich Security Conference.

“This will significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms,” he said. “I may be naive, but I expect a democratic revival in India.”

Soros, 92, was speaking in the context of allegations — made by US-based financial forensic analysis firm Hindenburg Research — that Adani is involved in a massive and “brazen stock manipulation” and “accounting fraud scheme.” Adani has denied the charges.

The company, led by Gautam Adani, has lost close to $120 billion in market value since New York-based firm published its report on Jan. 24. The crisis sparked a furor in India and made many foreign observers and investors skeptical about the group’s financial stability.

The Indian prime minister is a close associate of Gautam Adani and is accused of helping the tycoon secure his ascension in recent decades, during a good part of which Modi was the chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat.

Soros also castigated Modi for his government’s human rights abuses.

“India is an interesting case. It’s a democracy. But its leader, Narendra Modi, is no democrat. Inciting violence against Muslims was an important factor in his meteoric rise,” he said, referring to Modi’s tenure in Gujarat. A recent high-profile BBC documentary criticized the prime minister’s role in the violence that ripped through the state in 2002.

Soros spoke about Modi’s global ties, too.

“Modi maintains close relations with both open and closed societies. India is a member of the Quad (which also includes Australia, the US, and Japan), but it buys a lot of Russian oil at a steep discount and makes a lot of money on it,” Soros said.

The US billionaire has spoken out against the rise of nationalism in India before. Modi is the leader of the Hindu nationalist outfit, known as Bharatiya Janata Party.

“Democratically elected Narendra Modi is creating a Hindu nationalist state, imposing punitive measures on Kashmir, a semi-autonomous Muslim region, and threatening to deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship,” Soros had said in January 2020 while pledging a billion dollars “to fight the erosion of civil society” by “would-be and actual dictators.”