Southern Baptists oust Saddleback Church over woman pastor


 Pastor Rick Warren speaks during the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif., Tuesday, June 14, 2022. On Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023, the Southern Baptist Convention ousted its second-largest congregation — Saddleback Church, the renowned California megachurch founded by Warren — for having a woman pastor. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

PETER SMITH
Tue, February 21, 2023 at 12:58 PM MST·6 min read

The Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday ousted its second-largest congregation — Saddleback Church, the renowned California megachurch founded by pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren — for having a woman pastor.

The vote by the convention's Executive Committee culminates growing tension between the nation's largest Protestant denomination — which officially opposes women as pastors — and a congregation whose story has been one of the biggest church-growth successes of modern times.

The committee cited Saddleback's having “a female teaching pastor functioning in the office of pastor," an allusion to Stacie Wood, wife of the current lead pastor of Saddleback, Andy Wood.

But the controversy began in 2021, when Warren ordained three women as pastors, prompting discussions within the denomination about possibly expelling the megachurch.

Warren retired last year after more than 42 years at Saddleback. He made an emotional speech in June 2022 at the Southern Baptists’ annual convention in Anaheim, standing by his ordination of women. He told delegates who debated the issue, “We have to decide if we will treat each other as allies or adversaries.”

But the Executive Committee took the vote Tuesday without public discussion after meeting in executive session.

It voted to approve a recommendation from the denomination's Credentials Committee that Saddleback be deemed “not in friendly cooperation with the Convention" — the terminology used for ousting a church. While Southern Baptists' statement of faith officially opposes women as pastors, each congregation is self-governing, so the main enforcement mechanism is to oust it from membership.

The Executive Committee's motion said that Saddleback “has a faith and practice that does not closely identify with the Convention’s adopted statement of faith, as demonstrated by the church having a female teaching pastor functioning in the office of pastor.”

In a statement late Tuesday, the church didn’t indicate whether it planned to exercise its right to appeal the decision at the Southern Baptists' next annual meeting, scheduled for New Orleans in June.

“We love and have always valued our relationship with the SBC and its faithful churches,” Saddleback elders said in a statement. "We will engage and respond through the proper channels at the appropriate time in hopes to serve other like-minded Bible believing SBC churches. Meanwhile, we remain focused on following God’s leadership to love and serve our church family and the communities around our campuses."

Mike Keahbone, an Executive Committee member and Oklahoma pastor, said an appeal “appears likely.”

“This was the heart of the room; to let the messengers (delegates) of the SBC decide,” Keahbone tweeted Tuesday.

With its main campus in Lake Forest, south of Los Angeles, Saddleback Church has grown over four to 14 locations in Southern California, with an average weekly attendance of 30,000. There are four international campuses —in Hong Kong, Germany, the Philippines and Argentina.

Wood told The Associated Press last year that the Bible “teaches that men and women were given spiritual gifts by God.” His wife has served as teaching pastor for Saddleback.

“The church should be a place where both men and women can exercise those spiritual gifts,” Wood said. “My wife has the spiritual gift of teaching and she is really good. People often tell me she’s better than me when it comes to preaching, and I’m really glad to hear that.”

The Executive Committee also voted to oust five other congregations -- four over the issue of women as pastors and one over the issue of sexual abuse.

When Southern Baptists last updated their official statement of belief — The Baptist Faith and Message — in 2000, they added this clause: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

The five churches ousted for having women as pastors “have been valued, cooperating churches for many years, and this decision was not made lightly,” Committee Chairman Jared Wellman said in a statement. "However, we remain committed to upholding the theological convictions of the SBC and maintaining unity among its cooperating churches.”

Warren, with a social media following in the millions, has written multiple books, including the widely successful “The Purpose Driven Life.” In 2005, Time magazine named Warren one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” and he delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009.

The church grew from a startup by Rick Warren and his wife, Kay Warren. With his charisma and easy, informal preaching style, Warren attracted thousands to the megachurch. Over the past decade, Warren also launched an ambitious plan to expand the church’s reach across Southern California as well as globally, a vision his successor has promised to complete.

Warren, in a tweet, said he and Kay would “respond to #SBC in OUR time & way thru direct channels" such as social media and newsletters.

Warren remains listed as founding pastor on the Saddleback website.

The SBC has in recent years authorized the ouster of churches that don't conform to its statement of faith. This includes churches with women pastors, LGBTQ-inclusive polices, support for racism or failure to respond adequately to child sexual abuse, such as employing offenders as pastors.

In some cases, the committee has ousted churches for allegedly failing even to cooperate in answering to such allegations, as reflected in some of the motions approved on Tuesday.

It deemed Freedom Church in Vero Beach, Florida, to be not in friendly cooperation “based on a lack of intent to cooperate in resolving concerns regarding a sexual abuse allegation." The denomination has been roiled by allegations in recent years of sexual abusers remaining in ministry, prompting the convention to vote for stricter policies. A task force focused on the issue this week announced the hiring of a firm to oversee a new database of credibly accused ministers.

Freedom Church's pastor, Richard Demsick, told the AP that the SBC has sent conflicting messages to the church. In a letter to national, state and local Southern Baptist entities, church leaders disputed any allegation of abuse, asked for additional information and said they planned to appeal any ouster.

The Executive Committee ousted New Faith Mission Ministry of Griffin, Georgia, and St. Timothy’s Christian Baptist in Baltimore, citing their “lack of intent to cooperate in resolving a question” arising from the churches having women senior pastors.

And it ousted Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and Calvary Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, both for having female lead pastors, indicating they have a “faith and practice” at odds with the convention's.

The SBC has 13.7 million members, but has seen net declines over more than a decade in members and baptisms, its key metric for spiritual vitality.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Scientists develop ‘spontaneous’ antidote to toxic fumes from building fires

Vishwam Sankaran
Tue, 21 February 2023 

Scientists develop ‘spontaneous’ antidote to toxic fumes from building fires


Researchers have developed a “breakthrough” synthetic compound that they say could potentially be used as a fast-acting antidote against toxic fumes in building fires.

The study, published on Monday in the journal PNAS, has demonstrated that the compound – hemoCD-Twins – is a “very effective,” “rapid” antidote against carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen cyanide (HCN) poisoning in mice models.

Both CO and HCN gases from burning materials in building fires can be fatal upon inhalation.

These compounds have been shown to bind strongly to the blood molecules hemoglobin, cytochromes, and iron containing compounds known as “hemes”, and block normal respiration.

When an individual is exposed to toxic fumes containing these compounds, it can be impossible to remove them from the body, especially when there is simultaneous CO and HCN poisoning.

This creates significant challenges in saving the lives of those exposed to toxic gases in building fires, scientists say.

Now, researchers, including those from Doshisha University in Japan, have shown that their new “breakthrough” synthetic compound captures CO very strongly and scavenges cyanide in saline solution.

It was also demonstrated to result in an 85 per cent survival rate and rapid recovery in mice.

Apart from showing an immediate antidotal effect, a high degree of safety, and storage stability, researchers say the compound also exhibited very low toxicity and rapid elimination via urinary excretion.

“This antidote will limit damage from gas poisoning caused by sudden fires and can be tested for the treatment of various symptoms caused by gas poisoning,” study co-author Hiroaki Kitagishi from Doshisha University said in a statement.

In 5–10 years, scientists hope to complete non-clinical and clinical trials to show that hemoCD-Twins can be incorporated in ambulances, emergency hospitals, and other facilities.

“This way, future generations will have no need to fear sudden fire gas poisoning. We will proceed with non-clinical and clinical trials in cooperation with medical doctors in order to implement this compound as a therapeutic agent in the world,” Dr Kitagishi said.

Why a pipeline project in Houston is raising concerns over environmental racism

Nada Hassanein, USA TODAY
Tue, February 21, 2023 

Days before the new year, Angela King woke up to a nauseating scent of rotten egg wafting through her neighborhood in southwest Houston.

The smell was a reminder of how close she lives to a storage facility bearing 300,000 gallons of liquid propane. And now, CenterPoint Energy plans to install natural gas pipeline transmission lines 4 feet underground. Initial construction will be just 50 feet from her home, King said.

King has lived in Southwest Crossings, a mostly Black and brown neighborhood, for two decades, and she and her neighbors have protested the construction, fearing for their health and safety. Propane and natural gas are highly flammable and come with risks of leaks, fires and explosions at facilities and pipelines.

And their neighborhood – situated in the energy capital of the nation – isn’t alone.

Evidence shows that throughout the U.S., communities of color are more likely to be burdened by various industry infrastructure, disproportionately jeopardizing the health of Black and brown people. Experts say Houston and the pipeline project are microcosms of the nation’s persistent environmental racism that subjects people of color to hazards.

Angela King poses for a portrait at her home in Southwest Crossings in Houston, Texas. CenterPoint Energy plans to install a natural gas pipeline transmission lines 4 feet underground in her neighborhood with initial construction just 50 feet from King's home.

Black people are 75% more likely to live near industrial facilities in “fence line” communities, according to Fumes Across the Fence-Line, a 2017 Clean Air Task Force and NAACP report on air pollution from oil and gas facilities.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has taken an unprecedented approach to center environmental justice as part of its agenda to acknowledge how industry, climate and disaster has a disproportionate impact on communities of color.

The administration has launched efforts across multiple federal agencies, which includes the Justice40 Initiative that aims to invest 40% of federal climate, housing, clean water and other benefits in historically underserved communities.

And last month, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was awarding $100 million in environmental justice grants to communities overburdened by pollution.

The investments couldn't be more urgent for communities like King’s Houston, which was the subject of the widely cited environmental justice study by Robert Bullard, founder of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. The study, published 40 years ago, found waste disposal facilities were more likely to be in Houston’s Black communities.

And last year, the U.S. Justice Department started an investigation into the city for illegal dumping of solid waste in Black and Hispanic communities.

The “genesis of environmental justice research was in Houston," said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington and the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. "Now we're in 2023, we're still having this same conversation. This is the way that we've operated in the United States for a very long time.”

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What is propane? And why are pipelines dangerous?

Propane, which is derived from natural gas and oil refining processes, is considered a cleaner, low-carbon fuel when used to heat and cool buildings and for transportation, among other uses. But in high concentrations, it can cause suffocation and cardiac arrest. Natural gas can also cause suffocation, as well as gas poisoning.

Acute dangers are the biggest concerns. Because propane is heavier than air, when released it settles lower to the ground than natural gas, which leads to increased risk of ignition, fire and explosion. Even a small leak can pose a high risk of fire.

Natural gas is almost entirely methane gas, which contributes significantly to climate change.

CenterPoint told local media the smell King and her neighbors woke up to around Christmastime wasn’t a leak but a part of normal operations.

In response to a USA TODAY inquiry about the incident, a spokeswoman said that the company is "committed to the safe, reliable operations of our energy systems" and that "communication with the communities we have the privilege of serving is a top priority for our company."

Still, King fears future accidents.

Last year, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration reported 10 deaths and 24 injuries from pipeline incidents across the U.S.

Over two decades, an average of 640 incidents occur each year. Incidents are defined as leaks that result in at least $122,000 in property damage, gas loss of at least 3 million cubic feet, injury, death or emergency shutdown, according to federal regulations.

In 2011, a CenterPoint Energy gas line in Minneapolis exploded. No one was injured, but vehicles were destroyed and the city filed a lawsuit against the company.

In 2018, dozens of homes in northeast Massachusetts were destroyed and one man was killed in a natural pipeline explosion. Pressure readings showed 12 times normal standards, and the Leonel Rondon Pipeline Safety Act, named after the victim, was passed in 2020 in hopes of increasing safety standards.

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What's happening in Houston?

Texas is the top producer of natural gas in the country and has the most crude oil refineries of any state. The Houston metro area has more than 180 pipeline transmission systems.

Southwest Crossings residents have held protests at the site and have been pushing back since 2020, when King said homeowners were first notified of the storage facility project.

But residents say that COVID-19 interfered with timely correspondence and that the letters were in English despite many residents being Spanish speakers. Hispanic people make up more than 60% of the community, and roughly a third of residents are Black, according to estimates from the U.S. Census American Community Survey.

The company said it sent letters again the next year. And in July 2022, King received a letter from the company asking for her easement along with a $9,000 compensation offer for pipeline construction 50 feet from her fence. Two months later, she received a notice that the company would begin construction by eminent domain.

She worries for her son and two middle-school-aged nephews who live with her and the schools and churches in the subdivision.

"It makes me feel ignored, as if I am not even a human – that they're walking all over me as if I do not matter. That my voice is nonexistent," said King, 55, who is medical billing and coding worker.

She and community activist Brittney Stredic, 28, have met with city officials and the company to demand detailed safety plans. They’ve started a petition and website to spread awareness of their concerns.

CenterPoint said it has several safety strategies in place at the storage facility, and it shared them with residents. Those plans include an alarm system; smoke, gas and flame detection; and emergency shutdown protocols.

The pipeline project is set to be completed by the end of the year. The company proposes to install the pipelines at least 4 feet underground.

“We are following federal code to install the pipeline to meet or exceed the requirement established for this type of installation,” the company told USA TODAY in a statement. “CenterPoint Energy representatives have participated in multiple community meetings and have attempted to meet via phone and/or face-to-face with all the area residents.”

But Stredic said she felt the plans didn’t consider the neighborhood she has called home her whole life.

“To me, there was never a consideration about the community that they were placing it in,” she said. “That endpoint is a business.”

A spokesperson for CenterPoint Energy said the system will traverse many neighborhoods, "both affluent areas and underprivileged areas."

"Regardless of the location in our service territory, our decisions when evaluating new construction projects or system enhancements are based on several key criteria: If CenterPoint Energy owns the property or has easement rights; proximity to area that will be served by our equipment or facility; technical and existing natural gas distribution system design considerations as outlined previously; and optimization of our system operations. We do our best to treat all our customers fairly and equitably," spokesperson Alejandra Diaz wrote.

City officials referred comments to CenterPoint Energy, but a spokeswoman confirmed the city "was made aware of the residents' concerns."
Residents’ concerns ‘based on science’

Experts say residents’ fears reflect the reality of a wide range of environmental hazards disproportionately faced by communities of color across the nation.

In a study published last year in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, Casey and a team of researchers found that formerly redlined neighborhoods were twice as likely to be oil and gas well sites and showed how federal policies continue to fuel structural racism.

“Their concerns are based on science. I wouldn't want this facility in my neighborhood,” Casey said.

Ryan Emanuel, an environmental justice expert and hydrologist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, has studied natural gas pipelines and their locations in relation to communities. The Great Plains are home to Indigenous communities often subjected to oil and gas industry infrastructure, but Emanuel also studied the issue in states like North Carolina, where he found a quarter of all American Indians in the state lived within the area of the Atlantic Coast pipeline project plan that folded in 2020.

In another study published in 2021 in the journal GeoHealth, Emanuel and his team found that counties with higher social vulnerability factors such as low income also had greater pipeline densities.

Researchers mapped pipelines and social vulnerability. Natural gas gathering and transmission pipelines in the mainland U.S., with social vulnerability index shown for each U.S. county. Yellow indicates high social vulnerability. One Alaska county is included in the statistical overview of the results but is not shown here.

“Those are places that don't have the ability to deal with disaster, public health issues or have limited resources to recover when things go wrong. These are the communities that are saddled with more of this harmful and polluting infrastructure,” he said.

Though that study focused on interstate natural gas pipelines, Emanuel said the findings echo the larger issue.

"It's a bigger picture that's related to the decisions that we make about energy and public participation in decision-making process,” he said. “It's not a collection of anecdotes. This is the result of our public policies and corporate policies, frankly, over many decades.”

Reach Nada Hassanein at nhassanein@usatoday.com or on Twitter @nhassanein_.

Mexico president takes aim at predecessor after U.S. court convicts drug czar


Mexico's President Lopez Obrador speaks on the third anniversary of his government in Mexico City

Wed, February 22, 2023

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Wednesday that one of his predecessors, Felipe Calderon, should explain whether he knew a former top law enforcement official took bribes from the infamous Sinaloa Cartel.

On Tuesday, a U.S. court convicted a former security official, Genaro Garcia Luna, on charges that he took bribes in exchange for protection from arrest, safe passage for drug shipments and tip-offs about law enforcement operations.

Garcia Luna, 54, is one of the highest-ranking Mexican officials ever accused of ties to drug trafficking. He led Mexico's Federal Investigation Agency from 2001 to 2005 and was public security minister for six years until 2012.

Calderon was president from 2006 to 2012.

"Yes, it's important to find out more: why did Calderon have (Garcia Luna) in place for six years?" Lopez Obrador said during his regular morning news conference. "He never saw anything strange? What were the agreements? What orders did he give?

Calderon issued a statement on Twitter after the conviction saying that his administration followed the law, and that security was not the responsibility of only one person but also the military, police and other officials.

(Reporting by Raul Cortes Fernandez and Ana Isabel Martinez; Editing by Richard Chang)

Canada says it thwarted recent air, maritime surveillance attempts by China



Wed, February 22, 2023 

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada is aware of recent air and maritime surveillance attempts by China and has thwarted such efforts since last year, the Canadian defense ministry said on Wednesday, after a newspaper reported Chinese floating devices were found in the Arctic in autumn.

The discovery of a suspected Chinese spy balloon, which flew over the United States and Canada before being shot down earlier this month, has hit already strained relations between Beijing and the West, and has intensified discourse about North American security.

The Globe and Mail newspaper reported on Tuesday the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) spotted Chinese monitoring buoys in the Arctic last year as part of an effort to provide early detection of threats to Canada's security.

A spokesperson for Canada's defense ministry declined to provide details but said authorities were aware of Chinese surveillance attempts using dual purpose technologies, which can have both commercial and military applications.

"The CAF are fully aware of recent efforts by China to conduct surveillance operations in Canadian airspace and maritime approaches," the spokesperson said, adding the forces had stopped attempts to surveil Canadian territory since 2022.

The Chinese embassy in Ottawa did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Over the weekend, China's top diplomat Wang Yi said the U.S. handling of the balloon incident had been "unimaginable" and "hysterical," an "absurd" act that had violated international norms.

(Reporting by Ismail Shakil and Steve Scherer in Ottawa; Editing by Chris Reese)

Bahamas announces crackdown on undocumented migrants, saying it’s affected by Haiti crisis


Courtesy of Marvin J. Thompson

Jacqueline Charles
Wed, February 22, 2023 

The Bahamas is vowing to step up repatriations to a crisis-wrecked Haiti, its prime minister declaring in a national address that “The Bahamas is for Bahamians” and the country has to defend its 180,000 square miles of territory.

“We have a comprehensive plan to disrupt the flow of migrants to our islands and to actively pursue the identification and repatriation of those who have entered our nation illegally,” Prime Minister Philip Davis said over the weekend during a speech that outlined a new security and migration policy for the country while laying out its challenges with irregular migration, especially from neighboring Haiti.

Davis’ statement, which was followed by a debate about immigration in the Parliament on Monday, came 48 hours after he and other Caribbean Community leaders ended a meeting in Nassau where leaders of the 15-member regional trade bloc known as CARICOM met privately among themselves, as well as with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Haiti Prime Minister Ariel Henry and officials in the Biden administration to discuss what to do about Haiti’s ongoing crisis.

Henry and members of the U.S. delegation had hoped that CARICOM and Canada would take the lead in the deployment of an international force to Haiti, a member state of the bloc. Instead, Canada declared it would continue to provide support to the embattled Haiti National Police and would deploy Naval warships in the waters off Port-au-Prince for deterrence and intelligence gathering for the force.

In October, Davis went on record saying he would provide Bahamian troops and police to a multinational force if asked by the United Nations; last month, Jamaica Prime Minister Andrew Holness, with support from his country’s opposition party, also told his nation’s Parliament that he was open to doing the same.

But instead of sending a force to Haiti or moving ahead with a previously agreed-on decision to visit the country to see for themselves the impact of the spiraling gang violence, leaders agreed to endorse a plan that focuses on strengthening the Haiti National Police, election preparations and inviting Haitian politicians to Jamaica to address the turmoil.

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Though the Caribbean heads of government presented their decision on Haiti as taking their “moral and political obligations” to help a fellow member-state address its multifaceted and complex crisis, Davis characterized it as steps to deal with Haitian migrants during his national address. He called it “the pillars of the CARICOM plan to address the Haitian migration crisis.”

He announced the launch of “Operation Secure,” an aggressive collaborative security campaign between the Royal Bahamas Police Force, the Defense Force and the Department of Immigration to go after undocumented migrants, those who employ them and the illegal structures where they live, also known as shantytowns.

Davis said that the burden of Haitian migration is the reason why last June at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles he declined to sign a pledge that included a commitment to take on refugees, even though 21 other countries in the hemisphere, including fellow Caribbean nations like Barbados and Jamaica, signed on to the agreement.

“Our small nation cannot possibly shoulder any more of a burden. We are standing strong on this position,” Davis said. “Despite pressure, earlier this year, when the United Nations called for countries in our region to halt deportations to Haiti, once again, I decided to continue repatriations.”

At the center of Operation Secure is a crackdown on shantytowns and their landowners.

“Documented migrants living in unregulated communities will be required to relocate at their expense or their employer’s expense or face repatriation,” Davis said of the illegal communities, whose residents include some Bahamians but are overwhelmingly Haitian.

The harder tone on the shantytowns were in stark contrast to Friday’s softer tone. When asked about a court decision clearing the way for the government to deal with the unregulated structures, Davis told journalists that shantytowns are “a challenge and a problem in this country,” and moving quickly to demolish them could create a homeless problem in The Bahamas.

“People are living in these buildings and in the shantytowns, so taking down shantytowns could create the other problem of leaving hundreds or thousands of persons homeless,” he said. “There is no sense responding to a crisis to create another crisis.”

By Sunday, he had changed his mind, declaring in his address that “even wealthy nations like the United States, with all resources at their disposal, struggle to put a complete stop to the inflow of undocumented migrants across their borders. But the difficulty of the task will not deter us from doing all that we can to intercept undocumented vessels in our waters.”

Last year, The Bahamas repatriated a record 4,748 people. Already this year, they have returned 1,024 individuals, Immigration Director Keith Bell told Parliament on Monday.

“If present irregular migration trends continue... we will experience another record-breaking year,” Bell said, adding that “our aggressive efforts to protect our borders and deport those who enter our country illegally has not ceased in 2023.”

During the debate in Parliament, Bell endorsed Davis’ position but also tried to show that the crackdown wasn’t just aimed at Haitian nationals. The Bahamas, he said, currently has 180 Cubans and 97 Haitians in its main immigration detention centers, along with 33 other people of various nationalities.

“We have repatriated to Cuba, Haiti, Guyana, Dominica, America, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Brazil,” Bell said.

Still, Haitians account for the leading number of migrants, and the leading cause of the government’s angst. Its hardline tone echoed that of the neighboring Turks and Caicos, whose immigration minister, Arlington Musgrove, a week earlier announced a similar crackdown on undocumented Haitian migrants in its territory.

Turkey earthquake: New tremor ends homeless family's dream of recovery

Tue, 21 February 2023 


They thought it couldn't get more terrifying. They were wrong. Just when they thought it was all over, it wasn't.

More than two weeks on, families were again running for their lives. Some had only just returned to their homes, or still clung to hope they could return.

But overnight that dramatically changed with another two significant earthquakes - one of them in the heart of one of the already worst-affected areas.

The Goncagul family moved into a tent just three days ago in Antakya, Hatay. Mehmet, Fatima and their four young children had been sleeping in their car since the first set of earthquakes hit just over two weeks ago.

They couldn't leave the area until they'd try to locate their dead and missing relatives. We think we've misheard him when Mehmet tells us he's lost about 80 relatives.

"Eight you mean?" I inquire. "No, EIGHTY," he says, "More than 80. I've lost count now," he says.

He and his immediate family of six are huddled round a fire which they're feeding with broken up bits of furniture. Their furnishings, or what were once furnishings, are now only fit for firewood.

"I went back to the house this morning. Before the latest set of earthquakes, the home was liveable in. But now the roof has gone and there are big cracks throughout," Mehmet explains. He swipes through pictures on his phone showing room after room of devastation.

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His wife Fatima tells us: ''Before we had some hope of returning to the home. But its gone now. We have no hope now."

Antakya is changed beyond recognition. Guldenay Sonumut, our Turkish colleague, keeps pointing former landmarks and restaurants we used to visit on the many occasions we visited this region and this once historic and beautiful city.

"Do you remember that's where we used to sit in the outside garden," she says, "And there, that was where you could enter the old market."

None of it looks recognisable any more. There just seem streets and streets or rubble and piles that were once people's lives and belongings.

And seismologists are warning there could still be more tremors and aftershocks to come for weeks, and potentially months ahead.

Alex Crawford was reporting with cameraman Jake Britton, specialist producer Chris Cunningham and Turkey producer Guldenay Sonumut

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/02/another-earthquake-hits-turkey-syria.html

The Buried Secrets Behind the Worst Earthquake of the Decade

Tom Mutch
Wed, February 22, 2023


ANTAKYA, Turkey—Hassan Hassan had been keeping vigil outside of his family’s destroyed apartment block for days now. “Three of my family members are under there,” he said, motioning to the huge expanse of rubble that thousands of people had called their home until just over a week ago.

Rescue workers usually refer to a “golden period” of 72 hours where the vast majority of survivors are found. When The Daily Beast visited Antakya, a city in Hatay province in south Turkey on the border with Syria, many people had long given up. But although it was 10 days after the original 7.8 magnitude quake hit Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6—killing upwards of 41,000 people—orange diggers and men and women in hard hats and high-vis jackets were still pulling through the rubble looking for any sign of survivors.

Around 90 different search and rescue teams have been sent from around the world in one of the most desperate efforts of the 21st century. When they—as is almost inevitable—find a corpse, they put it into a black body bag, and it is driven away by a waiting hearse.

Yet another earthquake aftershock has hit near the city of Iskenderun at the time of writing. It kills more, forces yet more evacuations and upends the lives of the survivors, who have no idea when their nightmare is going to end. Faced with the numbing scale of the tragedy, it is sometimes easy to forget the individual lives destroyed.

Hidden toll

Galal, a doctor who teaches at Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University and is now volunteering to help with disaster relief, says on the outskirts of the town that “this is the worst-affected place in the country. It’s absolutely horrible in there… the government says that there are only 30,000 dead, but that’s nonsense. There must be 30,000 dead in this city alone.” The rescuers are all gaunt-faced, with heavy bags under their eyes and dirty clothing, having worked without respite for over a week.

Three rescue workers in discussion outside a building being demolished in Antakya.

They have a grisly methodology to come to this sum: multiply the amount of destroyed buildings by the average number of people living there and work out the percentage who we know were rescued. These are not official statistics, and would be very hard to independently verify, but a visit to the area led Martin Griffiths, the UN’s chief emergency relief coordinator, to say that the most horrible part of the recovery will be when we learn the true death toll. In Hatay province, people believe the earthquake will have claimed 200,000 victims throughout Turkey and Syria once it is totalled up.

In Turkey, earthquakes are commonplace, but are also intensely political, and could prove fatal to President Erdogan’s attempts to tighten his grip on power in the upcoming May elections. After a previous terrifying earthquake in 1999, which killed around 17,000 people in Istanbul, Erdogan’s AKP capitalized by promising reform and anti-corruption measures to make buildings safe and earthquake-proof. Citizens paid billions of liras in “earthquake taxes” to improve construction, but government critics say that much of this money was pocketed by corrupt officials.

Meanwhile, in a parking lot in Antakya, we found a sofa with a family’s photographs and personal documents lying around. They record the lives of the family’s young son, starting in the womb with photos of his ultrasound. Then we find a birth certificate, a baby’s birthday party, and what look to be family vacation photos. We were unable to find out whether the family was alive.

An ultrasound and family photo pulled from the wreckage of a destroyed apartment in Antakya.

Yet miracles are still occurring. The previous day, a 12-year-old girl had been dug out alive from an adjacent apartment building, giving Hassan some small hope. His family’s odds are low, however—one exhausted rescue worker estimated that they now pull out 500 corpses for every one person they find alive.

“Don’t expect to find any more,” one local official in the nearby city of Kahramanmaras told The Daily Beast privately, although they are reluctant to give up the search until the last possible moment. “We can’t talk right now, we’ve lost too many people, it’s too painful,” one Syrian family says as they sit around a fire made from abandoned clothing stacked in a rubbish bin. Rescuers and survivors alike have been using these for heat throughout the city, as utilities like electricity and running water have been completely cut off by the quake.

It is difficult to find words to portray the level of damage in this city—an ancient port town home to one of the contenders for the world’s oldest Christian church, the road to which has been blocked by debris. Possibly a third of buildings in this city, originally home to around 400,000 people, are completely flattened, with many others partially collapsed, or their foundations broken beyond repair.

Cranes searching for a family believed buried under rubble in Kahramanmaras.

On the central Inonu Boulevard is a cruel monument to the whims of fate. The buildings to the left are pristine and look completely untouched. To the right, they are almost all in ruins. Whether you lived or died that day might have depended on simply which side of the street you were in. Turkish authorities now estimate that 84,000 buildings have collapsed or sustained irreparable damage. Shopping malls, historic castles, places of worship and scores of apartment blocks are in pieces, with an unknowable number of bodies lying beneath them.

‘Open-air prison’

Millions of people have been displaced, and the safer parts of the cities away from high rise buildings are filled with camps of tents run by AFAD, Turkey’s disaster management agency. Several shipping companies are donating containers that are being rapidly converted to temporary shelters. Turkish authorities have promised to quickly build another 200,000 apartments in the region—but it was the rapid pace of building the original structures, and the corners cut in construction, that led to so many preventable deaths in the first place. Driving past fields near the cities, you can see large gravesites being hurriedly dug for the dead, who are far too many for local cemeteries to handle.

Rubble of destroyed apartment buildings in Antakya.

For many of the survivors, this is not their first brush with death. Martin Hijazi, a 26-year-old Syrian from Aleppo who works for a development NGO, said that “at least one third of the city of Gaziantep is Syrians. This has really inflamed tensions between Turkish people and the Syrian refugees. Many of the Turks hate us now, and Syrians started to get scapegoated for anything that went wrong. In one refugee camp in Mersin province, a rumor went around that Syrians were stealing food from the camp. So at midnight, they made everyone who was Syrian leave the camp, in the middle of the night, with no food and nowhere to go.”

Under Turkey’s temporary protection status for Syrian refugees, many cannot leave the province they claimed refuge in, so they are forced to stay in earthquake-prone areas. Tremors continue throughout the days; I was woken up twice by my hotel room in Gaziantep shaking.

“Even though I speak Turkish, I have citizenship, I’m still treated second-class,” says Martin, “For many of us, Turkey feels like an open-air prison.”

PHOTOS: Tom Mutch

 The Daily Beast.

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Fighter jets, quakes, NATO stakes: Are US-Turkish ties on a reset?

Leela JACINTO
Tue, 21 February 2023 

© Burhan Ozbilici, AP

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Monday came in the wake of the devastating earthquakes that have rattled the Turkish leader’s projection of his country as a regional hegemon. With Turkey turning into a recipient of generous US humanitarian aid, will Ankara play the role of Washington’s friend rather than foe?

Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey and head of the powerful US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, took the floor on December 19 to deliver a scathing inventory of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s domestic and foreign policy misdeeds.

“The United States must take the Turkish president’s actions seriously,” Menendez told the Senate. “We need to hold Erdogan accountable for his behaviour when he violates international laws, or challenges democratic norms, or allows his forces to commit human rights abuses,” the US senator continued before hitting the objective of his speech.

“That is why, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I will not approve any F-16s for Turkey until he [Erdogan] halts his campaign of aggression across the entire region,” said Menendez.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee head was referring to a $20 billion sale of new F-16 fighter jets to Turkey.

"The Biden administration strongly supports the package to both upgrade the existing F-16s and to provide new ones," said Blinken, adding that as a defence ally, Turkey should have “full interoperability” with NATO systems.

‘Making climate crisis worse’: Greens blast Labor after Queensland coal seam gas expansion approved

Adam Morton and Josh Butler
Tue, 21 February 2023 

Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

The Greens have accused Labor of “making the climate crisis worse” and being more interested in opening new coal and gas mines than working together to improve climate policy after the government approved a new coal seam gas expansion in Queensland.

Documents posted on the environment department website show the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, on Friday approved a project by the oil and gas company Santos to open 116 new coal seam gas wells in Queensland’s Surat Basin.

The approval under national environment law, signed off by an official on Plibersek’s behalf, allows the company to construct and operate the wells at the Towrie gas development to feed a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility at Gladstone. It says the wells can have an operational life of about 30 years and the approval is valid until 2077.

The Greens attacked the decision, which comes as the minor party is negotiating with Labor over the design of the safeguard mechanism, a policy the government has promised to transform to cut emissions from Australia’s 215 biggest polluting industrial facilities.

Related: Safeguard mechanism: what is it, will it cut emissions and what role do carbon offsets play?

Adam Bandt, the Greens leader, has offered to support the policy, despite having other reservations about the design, if the government stops approving new fossil fuel developments. Labor has rejected the proposal, arguing it would breach an election commitment and decisions on new coal and gas developments were for investors.

In a Twitter thread, Bandt accused Labor of “wanting coal and gas corporations to keep polluting, profiting, and opening more mines”. He said Plibersek had granted the approval on Friday without issuing a media release or public statement, and Santos had donated at least $521,719 to Labor since 2015.

“For a government that likes to talk about integrity and transparency this is straight out [of] Morrison’s playbook,” Bandt said.

The independent MP Monique Ryan also focused on Santos’ donations to Labor. “You’d have to say they’ve received an excellent return on their investment,” she said in a tweet.

A spokesperson for Plibersek said Santos’ proposal was assessed on its merits. “It was subject to robust scientific assessments, and strict environmental approval conditions have been applied,” they said.

Santos already has a large coal seam gas operation in the Surat Basin, with more than 8,000 wells approved since 2010 connected to its GLNG export development. The company said it welcomed the government’s decision. A spokesperson said it would spend “more than a billion dollars this year alone” drilling new wells and developing infrastructure to supply long-term contracts in Korea and Malaysia.

Rod Campbell, research director with the Australia Institute, said while the latest development was not massive compared to others, the decision illustrated that major fossil fuel projects were often approved and expanded through a series of small decisions that added up to a significant impact.

“Our systems are entirely set up to approve these fossil fuel developments, sometimes piece by piece,” he said. “It really needs to change so the government is asking ‘do we need these any more?’”

The independent senator David Pocock who, like the Greens, is negotiating with the government over the safeguard mechanism design and a list of other policies, said scientists and the International Energy Agency had been “absolutely clear” that the world could not could not afford to keep opening new coal and gas facilities if they wanted to keep global heating to 1.5C or 2C above pre-industrial levels.

On the safeguard mechanism, Pocock said he had several concerns, particularly the government’s proposal to allow companies to buy an unlimited number of carbon offsets to meet emissions limits. “I think there is a number of measures to improve the integrity and ensure that we are actually driving down emissions,” he told the ABC.

He also backed the introduction of a climate trigger into the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act so emissions would have to be considered before developments were approved.

The climate change minister, Chris Bowen, said he believed the government had “the balance right” on the safeguard design, but acknowledged changes were possible following consultations with companies, interest groups and others in parliament.

“I’ll sit down with people in good faith across the parliament. What we do will be in keeping with, one, our election commitments and, two, what we need to do in the national interest,” he said.

Greens’ deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi said: “The Greens will continue negotiations, but Labor seems to want new coal and gas mines more than they want their safeguard mechanism.”

Under its proposed changes, Labor would set a new pollution limit, known as a baseline, for each big polluting site based on emissions intensity. Baselines would mostly be reduced by 4.9% a year. Companies could meet their limit through direct cuts or by buying carbon credits, meant to represent cuts made elsewhere.

Academics and activists have raised concerns over whether some carbon credit projects deliver real and new emissions reductions. A review of the carbon credit scheme commissioned by the government said the system had integrity, but critics have called for an evaluation of individual projects.