Experts fear ancient Cyrene ruins could collapse after Libya floods

“If water continues to flow in and remains trapped in the site, the retaining wall could collapse, taking with it a large chunk of the ruins,” Claudia Gazzini, Libya specialist at the International Crisis Group think tank, said.

Friday 22/09/2023

A view of ruins at the site of the ancient Greco-Roman city of Cyrene (Shahhat) in eastern Libya, about 60 kilometres west of Derna , in the aftermath of the devastation brought about the previous week by the Mediterranean storm Daniel. AFP

BENGHAZI Libya

Floods that killed thousands in the Libyan city of Derna also inundated one of the country’s premier ancient sites, threatening its UNESCO-listed monuments with collapse, a recent visitor and a leading archaeologist said.

The immediate damage to the monuments of Cyrene, which include the second century AD Temple of Zeus, bigger than the Parthenon in Athens, is relatively minor but the water circulating around their foundations threatens future collapses, the head of the French archaeological mission in Libya, Vincent Michel, told AFP.

Settled from the Greek island of Santorini around 600 BC, Cyrene was one of the leading centres of the Classical world for nearly a millennium before being largely abandoned following a major earthquake in 365 AD.

Its name lives on in Cyrenaica, the historical name for eastern Libya.

UNESCO declared its surviving monuments a World Heritage Site in 1982. When the overthrow of long-time ruler Muammar Gadhafi in a NATO-backed uprising ushered in years of conflict and neglect, UNESCO added the site to its World Heritage in Danger list in 2016.

According to Claudia Gazzini, Libya specialist at the International Crisis Group think tank, who recently visited the site, much of it remains waterlogged days after the torrential rains triggered by Storm Daniel on September 10 to 11.

In places, ancient walls have collapsed, blocking the water courses that would normally drain the sprawling site, which also boasts a necropolis outside its walls as large as the city itself.

“There’s a street lined by ancient walls that connects the upper and lower levels down which rainwater would normally escape but large boulders have fallen in, blocking the flow,”, Gazzini told AFP by telephone from Libya’s main eastern city of Benghazi.

“On the lower level, there’s also dirty water continuously bubbling out of the ground in the middle of the ruins,” she said, adding that neither residents of the adjacent village of Shahat nor an official from local antiquities division that she met there, could tell her where it was coming from.

“If water continues to flow in and remains trapped in the site, the retaining wall could collapse, taking with it a large chunk of the ruins,” she said.

• Foundations weakened

French archaeologist Michel, who knows the site well having worked ten years in another part of the area, said he had been able to analyse pictures of the monuments taken after the floods.

“For the moment, there’s no major destruction at Cyrene, the monuments are still standing,” he said.

“But the torrents of water, earth and rock have created gullies in the ancient streets, particularly the Royal Road, and the main damage is still to come as the water has spread over a wide area and has weakened the foundations of the monuments.

“Since the stone in the region is of poor quality, the monuments risk falling apart due to lack of good foundations,” he added.

The adjacent necropolis has been inundated by “hundreds of cubic metres of water which has shifted and submerged some of the tombs,” he added.

Michel said he was also concerned about the risks of looting in the aftermath of the floods, which killed more than 3,000 people and left tens of thousands homeless.

The site in the Jebel al-Ahkdar mountains, inland from the Mediterranean coast, is normally popular with visitors for its panoramic views. But Libyans have more pressing worries after the deadly floods.

Michel said his concerns had been partially allayed by the rapid mobilisation of Libya’s antiquities department, which had already sought help from the Italian archaeological mission in protecting Cyrene and from the French mission he heads in protecting two nearby sites.

The aim is to “join forces with the local authorities in coordination with UNESCO to raise the main points of weakness in the monuments and record any deterioration,” Michel said.

Actions should then be taken to repair the drainage of the site and shore up the monuments’ foundations.

PROFILE: Michal Simecka, leader of Progressive Slovakia

Michal Simecka: "Let us vote for the future".

By Robert Anderson in Bratislava September 22, 2023

 / bne IntelliNews

Michal Simecka was called back from Brussels by his Progressive Slovakia party to try to stop what looked like the inevitable return to power of populist strongman Robert Fico at next week’s election – and polls show that he might really pull it off.

Three-time premier Fico had looked down and out when he resigned after massive demonstrations following the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancé in 2018. His leftist Smer party, accused of presiding over a completely corrupted state apparatus, then split and failed to come first at the 2020 general election for the first time since 2006.

But the incompetence of the election winner, centre-right populist Igor Matovic, during the COVID-19 pandemic, together with coalition infighting and the ongoing cost of living crisis have brought Fico roaring back into first place in opinion polls with around 20%.

The liberal pro-EU Progressives, who narrowly failed to enter parliament in 2020, are now benefiting from not being part of that “coalition of chaos” and are just a few percentage points behind Smer in the latest opinion polls. There is a real hope that a late surge of support from the estimated one quarter of undecided voters could push the Progressives into first place on September 30, just like Matovic’s OLaNO last time around.

“It will be very narrow,” says Milan Nic, senior fellow at the German Council of Foreign Relations (DGAP). “It could be decided in the last two weeks.”

“There is a real chance of a bandwagon effect,” says Professor Tim Haughton of Birmingham University, who has just visited the country. “I would not be surprised if they do better than the polls indicate.”

Bratislava is currently full of billboards of the Progressives’ youthful (39-year-old) bearded leader and his wholesome family, urging Slovaks “to vote for the future”.

“In the final stretch it is a political confrontation of two visions of where Slovakia should be headed,” Simecka told bne IntelliNews in an interview in his Bratislava office. “Fico is promising a return to the past, retribution, a potential threat to the rule of law and international isolation.”

Simecka – who built up his profile in Slovakia while vice-president of the European Parliament through punchy interventions on social media – has performed better than expected in television debates, even if his sober style of argument often clashes with tub thumping political rivals (Matovic and Smer’s Robert Kalinak even thumped each other at a recent rally).

There now appears to be real excitement among the city’s liberal and relatively affluent young voters that Progressive Slovakia could win, even if many also fear that Simecka could be outfoxed by the veteran Fico, who has dominated the country’s politics for nearly 20 years.

Beefy populism

Simecka is an unlikely politician not just because of his relative youth but because of his background and politics. In a country that over the past 34 years of democracy has habitually backed beefy populists who claim to stand for the ordinary man, his liberal views and academic experience stand out. He comes from a famous family of dissident writers, has a PhD from Oxford, and worked as a foreign policy wonk and journalist before entering politics (full disclosure: he was my colleague 20 years ago).

He also does not dominate his party as Slovak leaders customarily do, and only became chairman and the Progressive candidate for premier in May last year as the party had no-one else who fancied the job.

“One of his weaknesses is that he does not have any executive experience,” says Haughton. “Vice president of the EU parliament counts for virtually nothing here. Is he up to being PM will be the question on many people’s minds.”

Another weakness is that his party is widely dismissed as a Bratislava liberal club with little reach outside the capital. Slovakia suffers from deep regional inequalities and booming Bratislava is a world away from the grim towns and dusty villages in central and eastern parts of the country.

Slovaks in those regions have recently been hit by first the pandemic and then soaring prices, and have long had a weakness (worsened by disinformation) for populist strongmen promising stability, order, and a strong state.

“There is a problem that Progressive Slovakia is seen as very much a Bratislava party and a party of the young,” says Haughton. “Its appeal outside these groups is more limited.”

Nic argues that its free market economic programme has little appeal for poorer voters, and the inclusion of promises such as registered same-sex partnerships does not go down well in the more conservative rural areas. The party also has a strong green focus, and some members have publicly backed liberalisation of drugs.

“They are limiting their appeal to urban areas,” says Nic. “They are playing into the hands of Fico and Smer who are framing them as radicals”.

Michal Vasecka, head of the Bratislava Policy Institute think-tank concurs. “Honestly they are too modern for Slovakia,” he says. “Progressive Slovakia is viewed as too radical.”

Simecka is unapologetic. “We are a liberal party and that is the way it is. We believe in [sexual] equality and that is who we are,” he says. “The thing that people need to realise is that Slovakia is an outlier in the EU. Many EU states have not just civil partnerships but same-sex marriages.”

Binary choice

Even the party’s closest potential allies have turned on them in the heat of the campaign, damning them as too radical, as their own ratings dribble away.

Christian Democrat leader Milan Majerský said the Progressives were "in many ways" a threat because of their gender policies.

The libertarian Freedom and Solidarity Party (SaS) has also recently attacked the “neo-Marxist” Progressives. A top SaS party official told bne IntelliNews that there were deep economic policy differences between the parties that were not always reflected in the Progressives’ programme.

“We don’t know what to expect from them,” he said, casting doubt on their pledge not to raise taxes to close the yawning budget deficit. “They don’t mean it. Their experts say there must be tax hikes. We will ask for more budget cuts but they will not be willing to do this.”

The smaller centre-right parties blame Simecka for trying to make the election a binary choice between the Progressives and Fico. This could firm up Smer’s support and push the smaller parties below the 5% threshold, leaving the Progressives bereft of allies.

“Progressive Slovakia is playing on the fear of Fico and portraying themselves as the alternative,” says Nic. “The strong polarisation between Smer and PS is not good for small parties.”

Even if the seats are there to form a government, and the Progressives can reach a compromise with the Christian Democrats and SaS, they are likely to need at least two more parties to achieve a majority. Building and holding such a government together will be a huge test of Simecka’s leadership skills, and could end in another fiasco for the Slovak centre-right, which is riven with personal antagonisms.

Simecka puts on a brave face. “My experience is from the European Parliament, where you have to work with people who you don’t necessarily agree with…. It’s about dialogue and respect for your partners. Of course it’s not going to be easy but I think it is the best possible path for our future.”

Insiders say that comparing the European Parliament to the snake pit of Slovak politics is naïve.

“Michael Simecka does not know what he has got himself into and what to do about it,” one former senior official in the recently collapsed centre-right government told bne IntelliNews. “He will come face to face with the thick wall of Slovak political reality.”

Nasty compromises

That reality is that he will need at least two parties from what he says are not his preferred partners, each with their own drawbacks.

Matovic’s OLaNO should be an obvious partner but his erratic behaviour as premier will make him virtually the last choice.

Boris Kollar’s rightwing populist We are Family party is even more traditional on “family issues” than the Catholic Christian Democrats, despite Kollar’s 13 children from 11 different women. Kollar has said that joining with Progressive Slovakia would be his last option and that Simecka would be a “disaster” as premier.

The fate of Slovakia may come down to former premier Robert Pellegrini’s centre-left Hlas party, which is running third in the opinion polls at around 13%.

Pellegrini, who took over as premier from Fico when he resigned but then formed his own party before the election, had indicated he would prefer to work with the Progressives but he has been more ambivalent in recent weeks as his poll support has weakened. "We are fundamentally different and it's probably hard to come to an agreement," he said recently.

Political analysts suggest that Hlas could split if Pellegrini forms a coalition with the centre-right, who distrust him anyway, and he might therefore choose to ally again with Fico, perhaps in return for a clear run for the presidency next year.

“I still have a hidden hope that Progressive Slovakia will win,” says Beata Balagova, editor of the Sme daily. “But if Fico loses it will be a nasty compromise,” she warns, “and we will be in the hands of Pellegrini

Russia May Be About to Get a New Friendly Leader in Europe

Andrea Dudik and Daniel Hornak
Sun, September 24, 2023 



(Bloomberg) -- When Slovakia’s longest-serving prime minister was forced out of office in 2018 following the biggest mass protests since the communist era, he grinned and vowed that he’d be back. Few, though, took him seriously.

Robert Fico saw his closest ally defect to form a new party, prosecutors seek to put him and his associates behind bars for alleged corruption and his Smer party collapse to a record low in opinion polls. Yet reaction to the war in Ukraine has created a path back to power that would further test the European Union’s ability to remain united against Russian belligerence, even more so after Poland’s recent spat with Kyiv.

Slovaks will vote on Sept. 30 in a tight election, and Fico has tapped into concerns over the fallout from the conflict. In a country of 5.4 million people who are the most pro-Russian in the region, he has vowed to end military aid to Ukraine, called Slovakia’s president an “American agent” and opposes NATO membership for its war-ravaged neighbor.

“Fico has no problem crossing red lines,” said Boris Zala, a Smer co-founder who now works on policy papers for think tank Progressive Forum in Bratislava. “He will do anything to win more votes.”

A member of the 27-nation EU, the euro region and NATO, Slovakia matters politically. It’s also sandwiched between Hungary, run by disruptor-in-chief Viktor Orban, and Poland, whose ruling nationalist Law & Justice Party is aiming to win a third-straight election on Oct. 15.

The three countries have angered Kyiv by pushing to extend a ban on Ukrainian grain imports to protect their farmers, something Fico said last week he would continue if he were to win power. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki had escalated the quarrel by saying his country halted arms shipments to Ukraine, before government officials walked back the remarks.

Slovakia has generally remained steadfast on its support for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, even as successive surveys showed that more than half of Slovaks blame the West or Ukraine for the war.

The country still sent weapons eastward, accommodated more than 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and backed all sanctions on Russia even though the move had a direct effect on its energy supplies.

The return of Fico, 59, could quickly change that, bringing into question Slovakia’s cooperation with NATO given his fierce criticism of the alliance and the US. It would also boost the influence of Orban, who has opposed sanctions and weapons deliveries.

Fico hasn’t always been such a wildcard for Europe. Under his leadership, Slovakia joined the euro in 2009, its economy underpinned by an automotive industry that made the country one of the world’s biggest per-capita car producers. He also considered former German Chancellor Angela Merkel an ally.

The question is whether the next incarnation of his premiership would see a throwback to when Slovakia was more in the European wilderness, especially as he may have to bring in the far-right to form a majority government.

“Fico’s goals will trigger opposition and dissent abroad, and that could lead to Slovakia’s isolation,” said Grigorij Meseznikov, the president of the Institute for Public Affairs think tank, who has followed the nation’s politics for over 30 years. While still remaining in the EU, he will pull Slovakia “outside the European mainstream,” he said.

Victory isn’t a done deal. Smer has about 20% support in opinion polls, giving it an advantage of three percentage points over its main rival, the Progressive Slovakia party led by Michal Simecka. That lead — in a fragmented political landscape where smaller parties will ultimately play kingmaker — has gradually narrowed from five points points in March.

Following the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, Slovakia diverged from the rest of the region initially. The first governments after communism ended ignored the rule of law, preventing the country from joining NATO in 1999 along with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The then US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, referred to the nation as “the black hole” of Europe.

At that time, Fico was in his early 30s and he consolidated the country’s center-left in a power grab, winning followers with passionate speeches on fighting corruption and promoting EU integration. His Smer party won its first general election in 2006. His popularity peaked at 44% in 2012 as he vowed to give more money to the underprivileged.

Inspired by Orban’s ability to shift narrative to stay in power, Fico started to backtrack on issues he once supported. He and his party also faced allegations they allowed corruption to flourish, peaking in 2018 with the contract killing of a young investigative reporter, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée.

Fico became the face of that public resentment and stepped down after pressure from his coalition partners. He said in an April interview with Bloomberg that he was the scapegoat, that he immediately knew the murder, “which has nothing to do with Smer, will be misused.”

The incoming governments targeted him and his closest allies with graft allegations. Dozens of high-ranking police officers, secret service agents and former officials were convicted in related cases.

Fico refuted allegations his party fostered a mafia-style state as “fabricated and laughable.” But the issue became the main focus of the 2020 election, the first in 14 years that Fico lost.

Read More: Zelenskiy Is Showing the Strain as His Allies Turn Up the HeatThe Far Right Is Advancing in a Vulnerable Europe Again After Weaponizing Immigrants, Europe’s East Finds It Needs Them Ukraine Support Faces New Hurdle as Slovak Leader Eyes Return

As Fico’s popularity hit the rock bottom, he reinvented himself, becoming the voice against everything from coronavirus lockdowns and vaccines to immigration and green policies. Much like Orban, he rails against the EU as a dissenting voice within the bloc rather than to lead his country out of it.

“Fico has certainly changed,” said Bela Bugar, the leader of a former coalition party that was part of a Smer administration from 2016 to 2020. “When you are being hunted, you change.”

It’s Slovakia’s support for Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s invasion that has been his most bountiful political seam to mine. Fico, who agreed to the purchase of F-16 fighter jets from the US in 2018, has been particularly about the nation’s NATO partners. He compared German troops coming to Slovakia with the Nazi-era Wehrmacht.

Smer’s vice-chairman, Lubos Blaha, roused the crowd at a party event last month: “War and fascism have always come from the West, and freedom and peace from the East,” he said.

Polls show Slovak support for EU and NATO membership has been slipping. Diplomats stationed in Bratislava have slammed Smer for repeatedly spreading misinformation about the Russian invasion. Like Orban, one of Fico’s tropes is that billionaire philanthropist George Soros is interfering in Slovak politics and liberal opponents are serving foreign interests.

“I don’t want to supply deadly weapons to Ukraine just for the sake of a good image among the Western countries,” Fico said in the April interview in Bratislava. “It is irrational to think that Russia will withdraw from Crimea. This approach of the West will destroy Ukraine at some point.”

Smer has recovered enough to give Fico a route back to the premiership with support from smaller groups. It would be his fourth time in office. His main challenger, Simecka, also would need cooperation from other parties should he upset the polls and come first. He has been urging Slovaks to not buy Fico’s narrative. He said this month that the prospect of a government with extremist parties is a risk for Slovakia.

Indeed, Fico could be hard to stop, according to his former ally Zala: “He’s spreading conspiracy theories without any restraints and is able to use them to his advantage.”

Coming Soon: Get the Eastern Europe Edition newsletter, delivered every Tuesday, for insights from our reporters into what's shaping economics and investments from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans.

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Brazilian Indigenous people celebrate after Brazil's Supreme Court ruled against efforts to restrict native peoples' rights 

September 22, 2023 
Agence France-Presse

BRASÍLIA, BRAZIL — 

A lopsided majority on Brazil's Supreme Court ruled Thursday against an effort to restrict native peoples' rights to protected reservations on their ancestral lands, in a win for Indigenous activists and climate campaigners.

Indigenous leaders in bright feather headdresses and body paint exploded in celebration outside the high court building in Brasilia as Justice Luiz Fux became the sixth on the 11-member court to side with the native plaintiffs in the landmark case, giving them victory.

The judges voted one by one and in the end, the tally was a 9-2 win for Indigenous people opposed to the restriction.

"Justice is on the side of Indigenous peoples," said Joenia Wapichana, the head of the government's Indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI.

"Today is a day to celebrate the death of the 'time-frame argument.'"

The so-called "time-frame argument" at the center of the case held that Indigenous peoples should not have the right to protected reservations on lands where they were not present in 1988, when the country's current constitution was ratified.

The plaintiffs argued that violated their rights, given that many native groups were forced from their ancestral lands, including during the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from the 1960s to 1980s.

'Impossible debt'

Indigenous activists had dubbed the case the "trial of the century."

After Fux's ruling, Justice Carmen Lucia also sided with the majority, as did two more judges, bringing the final vote to 9-2.

"Brazilian society has an impossible debt to pay to native peoples," Lucia said in her ruling.

The only two justices to rule in favor of the "time-frame argument" so far were appointed by former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro (in office 2019-22), who fulfilled his vow while in office not to create "one more centimeter" of protected Indigenous reservations in Brazil.

Bolsonaro is an ally of Brazil's powerful agribusiness lobby, which backed the "time-frame" limitation.

He presided over a surge in the destruction of the Brazilian Amazon during his presidency, when average annual deforestation increased by more than 75% from the previous decade.

Environmentalists had joined Indigenous activists in pressing for the court to reject the “time-frame" argument. Numerous studies have found protected Indigenous reservations are one of the best ways to fight deforestation and, with it, climate change.

Brazil's constitution makes no mention of a cutoff date in relation to Indigenous reservations, which currently cover 11.6 percent of Brazil's territory, notably in the Amazon region.

Leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro in elections last year, has resumed creating Indigenous reservations since taking office in January, and also created Brazil's first ministry of Indigenous affairs.

Brazil has more than 700 recognized Indigenous lands, though around a third are still awaiting official designation as reservations.

Payment issue

The case was brought by the Xokleng, Guarani and Kaingang peoples of the Ibirama-Laklano indigenous reservation in southern Brazil, part of which lost protected status when a lower court ruled the groups were not living on the land in question in 1988.

They say that is because Brazil's military dictatorship forcibly removed them.

The Supreme Court ruling will set legal precedent nationwide.

It came as Congress was debating legislation that would have enshrined the 1988 cutoff date into law. A bill to that effect already passed the lower house and was working its way through the Senate.

Further legal battles remain for Indigenous activists.

The Supreme Court majority must still decide the touchy subject of whether damages should be paid to property owners who lose land to newly created Indigenous reservations.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who sided with the Indigenous plaintiffs, proposed the payment of such damages in his ruling.

Indigenous leaders condemned the proposal.

"We're not against damages for small landholders but that should not be part of this case... otherwise, a lot of conflicts could erupt," said Kreta Kaingang of the Association of Brazil's Indigenous Peoples.

Int’l Warnings of Catastrophe if Conflict in Yemen Continues

Food rations are being prepared in Sanaa to be distributed to distressed families. (EPA)

Sanaa: Asharq Al Awsat
25 September 2023 AD ـ 11

 Rabi’ Al-Awwal 1445 AH

Several international organizations have warned of a catastrophe on all levels if the conflict in Yemen continues

The World Health Organization revealed that countries such as Yemen still suffer from prolonged conflict, fragile health systems, and weakness towards the climate crises and the pandemics’ destructive impact.

Seventeen million people are food insecure. Nearly 15.4 million people require access to safe water and sanitation. Up to 20.3 million people lack access to healthcare.

The WHO said “every two minutes, a woman dies during pregnancy or childbirth.”

World Bank Country Director for Egypt, Yemen and Djibouti, Middle East and North Africa Stephane Guimbert said on his X account, "Yemen, at war for eight years, calls for support.”

He noted that 17.7 million need protection stressing that “Yemen is a priority for SDGs at GlobalGoalsUN.”

“Yemen's shattered economy showcases the immense challenges faced by its people daily. Their determination deserves our 100 percent attention and action.”

More than 98 international and local aid organizations affirmed in a joint statement that “Yemen stands at the historic opportunity for a shift towards lasting peace. The humanitarian community is committed to supporting this shift.”

“The people of Yemen need and want to look into the future and move away from humanitarian assistance towards self-reliance and rebuilding their country,” read the statement.

“Already exhausted by more than eight years of war, over 21.6 million people, 75 percent of the Yemeni population, are grappling with humanitarian needs.”

“Today, we are still faced with 17 million people who are food insecure. This includes 6.1 million people in the emergency phase under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which signifies extreme food shortages and acute malnutrition, especially affecting women and children, with a risk of hunger-related deaths.”

They added that "Yemen faces critical water shortages for both agricultural production and human use."

The statement urged the donor Member States to urgently consider “upscaling of quality and flexible humanitarian funding, in line with the 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan.”

Case Studies

How Journalistic Teamwork Uncovered Years of Regulatory Failure in Texas

by David Leffler and Savanna Strott, 

SEJournal • August 16, 2023

This post was originally published on the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) website through SEJournal Online and is reprinted here with permission. Its authors, David Leffler and Savanna Strott, are reporters for Public Health Watch that conducted an investigation into what caused one of largest fires in Texas history.

“Everybody freaked out when ITC happened. We were all waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Suddenly, environmental justice was at the forefront of local politics.

It was July 2022, and our investigation into the US Environmental Protection Agency’s reputed ineffectiveness in Texas — a state ravaged by petrochemical pollution — was in its infancy. At the time, our story’s direction was hazy at best. Everything changed after we heard those two sentences from a longtime employee at the EPA’s Region 6 office in Dallas.

“ITC” was Intercontinental Terminals Company, a storage facility for millions of barrels of volatile chemicals.

On March 17, 2019, a fire had consumed the Houston-area compound, shooting flames 150 feet into the air and sending out billows of ink-black smoke. The blaze burned for three days, spurring shelter-in-place warnings across the region and making headlines across the country.

ITC was one of the biggest chemical fires in Texas history — so big that it shifted the political priorities of Harris County, the third-most-populous county in the United States and the epicenter of North America’s petrochemical industry.

Following the disaster, county leaders allocated nearly $12 million to track and fight industrial pollution. Suddenly, environmental justice was at the forefront of local politics.

But how much did ITC matter three years later? A lot, our source told us.

Retired Regulators Provide Crucial Roadmap

That was the beginning of what became a two-part investigation into federal and state regulatory failure and previously unknown public health threats connected to the chemical fire.

Public Health Watch and its partner, The Texas Tribune, discovered that the EPA and Texas had ignored warning signs at ITC for nearly two decades prior to the 2019 catastrophe. After the fire was extinguished, dangerous levels of the carcinogen benzene infused nearby neighborhoods for weeks while residents unknowingly went about their daily lives.

Our investigation was built on the backs of a small group of retired regulators who tried to sound the alarm about ITC years ago and decided to speak up in hopes of preventing similar disasters.

Finding these regulators took dozens of calls to advocates, experts and government insiders. Earning their trust took dozens more.

Over the course of 10 months, these regulators took us into their world — one of hazardous chemicals, complex science, and labyrinthine air pollution rules.

They helped us understand the nuances and limitations of the EPA’s power, especially in places like Texas, where federal intervention is often akin to a declaration of war. They also explained the intricate pollution-tracking technologies and convoluted processes needed to pinpoint and analyze chemical leaks.

Smoke is visible from the storage facility fire in Deer Park, Houston. Image: Shutterstock

Most important, these regulators gave us a roadmap leading to thousands of pages of state and federal documents we wouldn’t have found otherwise.

With their help, we crafted Freedom of Information Act and state open-records requests that unearthed never-before-seen facility inspection reports and pollution data going back to 2002.

These documents exposed years of negligence by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, and the EPA’s Region 6, which oversees federal environmental regulations in Texas and four other states.

Recurring Issues Ignored for Years

“Something bad was going to happen at ITC. It was just a matter of time.” — Ken Garing, former EPA chemical engineer

The documents were damning. Both agencies had inspected ITC several times. Both had identified significant problems, including recurring mechanical issues within the cluster of large, white chemical tanks that ultimately caught fire in 2019.

“I remember thinking, ‘Holy cow.’ They had by far the highest benzene numbers we’d ever seen inside a facility,” Ken Garing, a chemical engineer who spent 30 years with the EPA’s National Enforcement Investigations Center, told us. “Something bad was going to happen at ITC. It was just a matter of time.”

Neither agency took meaningful action against the facility, though there had been ample opportunity to do so.

From 2002 until the 2019 fire, ITC was penalized only $270,728 by the TCEQ, the EPA, and Harris County combined. That was barely a blip on the balance sheet for ITC’s owner, the Japan-based Mitsui Group, which recorded $7.2 billion in profits in 2018 alone.

These regulatory failures had flown under the radar for years, but the damage they helped inflict was extraordinary.

For three days, the ITC fire blanketed the Houston area with fine particulate matter, which can settle deep into lungs and wind up in bloodstreams. Chemicals lingered in the air for weeks in Houston suburbs including Deer Park, where ITC is located.

Cancer Concerns, Memories of Terror

It was one thing to sift through pages of EPA data showing that residents were exposed to startling levels of benzene following the ITC fire. It was another to find people to bring that experience to life.

Many Deer Park residents still aren’t aware of what they breathed in during the 2019 fire.

Deer Park isn’t your typical environmental justice community. It’s comfortably middle class and predominantly white. It’s a town of 30,000 whose neighborhoods feature clean streets, large yards, and spacious two-story homes.

The petrochemical industry, which has been intertwined with Deer Park for nearly 100 years, is the largest local employer and a major philanthropic supporter of civic activities. The industry has especially close ties to Deer Park’s highly-rated schools, which, along with well-paying industry jobs, are draws for families.

Those factors made Deer Park an intriguing place to profile. But they also presented challenges.

There are no local advocacy groups, and residents tend to have a pro-industry perspective. Noxious odors are often described as “the smell of money” — a saying long evoked by Texas politicians boasting about the petrochemical industry’s economic benefits.

We started going door-to-door in search of people to speak with about the fire. Many seemed surprised to see strangers on their doorsteps. That feeling sometimes shifted to discomfort or anger after they learned we were journalists. A few threatened to call the police.

But those experiences were outliers. The more we knocked, the more we were greeted with enthusiasm.

Families welcomed us into their homes and described to us the terror they’d experienced during the 2019 fire. Parents wondered if the school district had moved too quickly to open campuses once the flames were extinguished. Some children wondered if they’d someday be diagnosed with cancer because of the fumes they were forced to breathe.

Sharing these residents’ stories gave our project more heft and humanity. By pairing their accounts with hard data and shocking evidence of regulatory failure, we ensured that our project would be neither bogged down by scientific jargon nor larded with narrative fluff.

An Unfinished Story

Our aim, however, was accountability. As journalists, our responsibility isn’t just to tell a good story. It’s to give readers an outlet for their anger and anxiety: Who dropped the ball? What new laws need to be enacted? Which politicians need to step up?

At the direction of our editor, Susan White, we never write a story like this and think, “We’re done.” Follow-up pieces are critical to keeping readers engaged and holding people in power to account. To that end, we’ve written several stories about ITC since our two-part investigation came out in late April — an effort we’ll expand upon in the coming months.

Many Deer Park residents still aren’t aware of what they breathed in during the 2019 fire. And too little has been done to safeguard against the next catastrophe in the four years since ITC burned. The Texas Legislature has not taken substantive action to punish even the most egregious polluters. ITC is operating as usual and recently applied to renew its operating permit. The facility’s only pending Clean Air Act violations rest with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was recently impeached by the Texas Legislature for alleged bribery and abuse of public trust.

In short, there’s a lot more work to do.

Additional Resources

Investigating Environmental Crimes and Climate Change

Aggressive Reporting, Fierce Writing, and FOI Requests: How a Small Town Editor Won a Pulitzer

Investigating Toxic Military Bases and Their Links to Cancer

David Leffler is an investigative reporter for Public Health Watch covering chemical pollution and environmental health issues, based in Austin. He is a finalist for the 2023 Livingston Awards.

Savanna Strott is a contributing reporter for Public Health Watch, where she covers chemical pollution and environmental health issues. She is a finalist for the 2023 Livingston Awards.

Study finds views of German voters shifting to the right

The latest study, released on Thursday, found that the proportion of Germans with far-right extremist views is now 8.3%, a substantial increase from the 2% to 3% found in previous years

22 September 2023

Фото: Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

According to a new study, far-right extremist attitudes have increased sharply in Germany since 2021, with the researchers determining that one in 12 adults now hold an extreme right-wing worldview, writes German news agency DPA.

The study, conducted by researchers at Germany’s Bielefeld University, was commissioned and published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is closely tied to the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

The survey, which is conducted every two years, examines right-wing extremist attitudes among German voters.

The latest study, released on Thursday, found that the proportion of Germans with far-right extremist views is now 8.3%, a substantial increase from the 2% to 3% found in previous years.

The study’s authors said that extreme right-wing attitudes were found across the political spectrum and not only among supporters of far-right politicians.

“Among those who clearly position themselves as ‘left-wing,’ there are more people who share an established right-wing extremist worldview (12%) than is the case in the political centre (7%),” noted the researchers, who were led by social psychologist Andreas Zick.

The telephone survey, conducted between January 2 and February 28 by the Duisburg-based UADS Institute, asked 2,027 to position themselves in response to various statements, such as whether they would support a dictatorship.

Based on the total sample, the authors said the survey carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.

The study’s authors define the central characteristic of right-wing extremism as “an ideology of inequality and violence or the approval of violence to implement the ideology.”

Polls of German voters have found a similar shift toward the right, with the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) surging in support while the SPD and Greens tumble.

Study co-author Beate Küpper said the results suggest that the AfD is succeeding in winning over “particularly xenophobic non-voters.”

Compared to previous years, significantly more survey respondents said they felt their freedom of expression has been curtailed.

The study also found more people sharing the far-right view that “different peoples should not mix with each other.”

The survey also found more Germans now consider themselves politically right-of-centre, rising to 15.5% from just under 10% in the most recent survey.

Voters who back the centre-right CDU/CSU bloc, the party of former chancellor Angela Merkel, are comparatively unlikely to support far-right views. Küpper said pundits in mainstream debate in Germany seem to underestimate the commitment of CDU/CSU voters to democratic values.

The survey found that 30% agreed with the statement, “The ruling parties are deceiving the people” – almost twice as many as two years earlier. The proportion of those who approve of political violence more than doubled from 5.3% to 13.2%.

This year’s survey also asked Germans what worries them most in connection to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The study found that while concerns about an expansion of the war are relatively dominant (62%), worries about rising energy prices top the list (66%). Women were generally more concerned about the effects of war than men.

There are also significant differences between people living in the former West Germany and the former East Germany. According to the data, around 45% of people in the former West Germany fear that they will not be able to maintain their own standard of living in the long term as a consequence of this war.

European cities must do more to address the legacy of colonialism

Edgar Pieterse

September 22nd, 2023

The EU’s approach to Africa has done little to challenge exploitative power relations between Europe and the Global South, writes Edgar Pieterse. But could partnerships between European and African cities offer a better route to fostering solidarity?

What is the function of cities – arguably the apogee of cultural achievement – when an empire dies? What does a good death look and feel like? Can Europe’s cities become the midwives to usher in new sources of identity and pride that challenge defensive nostalgia for the continent’s fading “greatness”?

The slow death of the European imperial project has been delayed by stubborn cultural chauvinism; a hard-to-expunge belief that, ultimately, the future of the world is some form of liberal democracy, seen as an inheritance of European enlightenment. The subtext being that imperialism couldn’t have been all that bad if Europe endowed the world with its future.

Coming to terms with the Anthropocene and its runaway environmental dystopia should once and for all dislodge European chauvinism and confidence. But it won’t. Europe makes a lot of noise about its commitments to Africa’s sustainable development and more equitable trading relations, but its flagship EU Green Deal does little to challenge exploitative power relations between Europe and the Global South. Its carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), for example, sets out to reposition European firms as global leaders in an emerging low-carbon and circular economy, but fails to commit Europe to addressing the true cost of climate mitigation in the Global South and carries dire economic development impacts for many African countries.

Given the hard realities of geopolitical realpolitik, and in spite of the warm and fuzzy rhetoric of Europe’s just transition, might it be too much to wish for that European cities see a role for themselves to call out contradictory and unjust EU strategies? Might African and European cities forge direct agreements of solidarity and partnerships for just transitions? In this short reflection I want to hold on to a fictional European city with the audacity to figure out what it might mean to recover a Europeanness rooted in the values of freedom and solidarity. How might this city consider its role in relation to interdependent futures?

The decolonial current that is slowly but surely finding space and resonance in the Global North is perhaps a good starting point. European cities that want to acknowledge their culpability in the continued aftermath of colonialism and its distortionary effects in contemporary economic and political systems can proactively pursue three interwoven imperatives: (1) recognition; (2) reparations; and (3) redistribution.

Recognition

Most African cities reflect the original colonial imperative to have a base station to manage extractive industrialisation. Over time, divisions between the luxurious trappings of small colonial elites and the neglected dormitories for essential workers were fixed in space through racialised modernist design principles obsessed with functional division.

These regimes of control were designed to guarantee uninterrupted extraction of raw materials and minerals and required the erasure of languages, cosmologies, tacit knowledge systems and social values of reciprocity and interdependence. This cultural violence was mobilised by racialised norms in Europe that both justified the grand imperial projects and the establishment of international and trade relations that would safeguard the unfair technological and financial benefits accrued through intergenerational injustice.

Coming to terms with these deep, multi-generational and compounded forms of exploitation is the central focus of a politics of recognition. The much-publicised debates about returning African cultural artefacts, for example, the Benin Bronzes, is but the tip of the iceberg of what we need. What can European cities do to normalise recognition policies and practices and acknowledge both historical and contemporary wrongs?

Reparations

It is not especially viable for European cities to finance and effect reparations, but they can lend their political capital and voice to the symbolic importance of such action. At COP27, a report was tabled that clearly defined the investment needed for mitigation, adaptation, resilience, damage and natural capital.

The authors underscore that the US$100 billion per annum investment committed to at COP21 in Paris in 2015 had not yet been realised by 2022, demonstrating a shocking lack of commitment and follow-through. Furthermore, they suggest that in any case, the US$100 billion figure is a gross underestimation. “The world needs a breakthrough and a new roadmap on climate finance that can mobilise the $1 trillion per year in external finance that will be needed by 2030 for emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs) other than China.”

By raising the ambition and consistency of European governments and the EU, cities can generate powerful political pressure for progress. Reparations must go beyond financial investment to include technical know-how, technology and skills development for a new generation of low-carbon, circular cities. This would be consistent with the social justice values of the New Leipzig Charter that morally anchors the political ambitions of European cities.

Redistribution

A lot of work remains after reparations to ensure that uneven playing fields are systematically rebalanced. Cities will need capital, research and development, and institutional and digital learning to put into practice circular, regenerative built environments and explore new models of citizenship based not on consumption, but on generating public goods.

As the global community figures out post-carbon urban futures, learning and resources must be shared equitably in open-source forums. To be sure, practical approaches to redistribution are inconceivable without cultural work to shift norms, expectations, dispositions and demand structures inside European cities. The current framing and management of the so-called migration crisis is a powerful litmus test of whether European cities are ready for this heavy cultural lifting.

European cities are indeed the midwives for a zero-carbon, circular city of the near future. But this societal learning project must also incorporate a reckoning with the bloody history of extraction and pillage that enabled industrialisation and post-industrialisation.

This article is based on a contribution to Old Cities New Ambitions: The Future of Urban Europe, published by LSE Cities

Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Tayvay/Shutterstock.com


About the author

Edgar Pieterse is Founding Director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.