Europe’s new liquified gas infrastructure puts climate targets in question

In a race to stop buying Russian natural gas, European countries are building new infrastructure that many fear could lead to a fossil-fuel “lock-in.” Germany houses six of the nearly dozen liquified natural gas import facilities across Europe.

Port cranes load a climate friendly LNG, liquefied natural gas, powered container ship at the import and export harbor in Hamburg, Germany, March 19, 2022.
Martin Meissner/AP/File photo

May 12, 2022 · 

By Carolyn Beeler

In a quest to wean off of Russian natural gas, European countries are racing to build new infrastructure to be able to accept liquified gas from producers further afield.

Analysts are tracking nearly a dozen liquified natural gas (LNG) import facilities across Europe that have been proposed since the beginning of the war in Ukraine — with Germany alone housing six of them.

“This is the scenario that will make us independent,” German Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck said, while in the North Sea port town of Wilhelmshaven last week, where he went to sign lease agreements for four new floating natural gas storage facilities.

Gas produced in places like Qatar and the US can be cooled and shipped to these floating facilities, then regassified and distributed into Germany’s network.

Related: As Germany reckons with Russian energy, this village is caught in the crossroads

Before the war in Ukraine started, Germany got more than half of its gas from Russia. It’s knocked that down to about a third in the past few months, but says the new liquefied natural gas infrastructure is necessary to meet its energy needs in the medium-term.

During his visit to Wilhelmshaven, Habeck said the first two floating facilities will start operating up by the beginning of next year, providing about a quarter of the gas that Germany got from Russia before the war, with the rest coming online by May 2023. The government is also planning two permanent facilities to import LNG.

But the plans are not without controversy.

Germany aims to become carbon neutral in 2045, a goal that was enshrined into law last summer. And many environmentalists fear that this new infrastructure will lock-in use of fossil fuels longer than necessary.


“We need to get rid of fossil fuels and we should not build new fossil infrastructure. We see it as moral and economic and ecological madness.”Reinhard Knof, operates statewide environmental group in Schleswig-Holstein

“We need to get rid of fossil fuels and we should not build new fossil infrastructure,” said Reinhard Knof, who runs a statewide environmental group in Schleswig-Holstein, where one of the floating terminals and a permanent LNG facility. More than half-funded by the federal government is planned in the town of Brunsbüttel.

“We see it as moral and economic and ecological madness,” Knof said, while standing on a tall earthen dike near the mouth of the Elbe River, at an industrial port where the terminal will be built.

Reinhard Knof near the site of the planned natural gas terminal in Brunsbüttel, Germany.
Credit: Carolyn Beeler/The World

Knof was quoting UN Secretary General Antoinio Guterres, who said last month that “investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”

The move came after the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found that using only existing and previously planned fossil fuel infrastructure for the rest of its lifespan would put the most ambitious Paris climate agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius out of reach.

New investments, Guterres said, “will soon be stranded assets, a blot on the landscape and a blight on investment portfolios.”

The German government says natural gas will be phased out in the medium-term, and new gas infrastructure will be built to eventually switch over to handle hydrogen fuel.

Related: Germans turn down the heat, drive less and take cold showers to use less Russian energy

Hydrogen produced by renewable energy is considered a small but important, low-emissions energy source for hard-to-decarbonize industries and transport sectors.

It’s not yet clear how much this kind of retrofit would cost, or how quickly it could happen.

Already, Reuters has reported that Qatar is balking at Germany’s desire to sign shorter-term contracts for LNG.

“For us,this seems to be kind of a fossil trap,” said Constantin Zerger, head of energy and climate protection at Environmental Action Germany.

“We are building a new fossil infrastructure in Germany, which is connected to fossil infrastructure overseas, which is connected to new extraction projects. And this will all add up to additional greenhouse gas emissions all around the world.”Constantin Zerger, head of energy and climate protection at Environmental Action Germany

“We are building a new fossil infrastructure in Germany, which is connected to fossil infrastructure overseas, which is connected to new extraction projects,” Zerger said. “And this will all add up to additional greenhouse gas emissions all around the world.”

The White House has pledged to more than double LNG exports from the US to Europe by 2030.

And planned gas liquefaction projects have been moving forward faster than they were before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, said S&P Global Commodity Insights natural gas analyst Jack Winters.

“There has been a lot of activity that has picked up,” he said.

Related: A massive security flaw exposed in Germany — then a criminal investigation

Winters said that in the next five years, capacity for liquifying natural gas in the US will jump 60%.

“You would need a production increase from the US producers to be able to feed this … LNG export capacity expected to come online,” he said.

This all brings Constantin Zerger to say something surprising for an environmental activist — that it might be better for Germany to keep burning coal a bit longer than planned, than to spur this kind of natural gas development.


“We will have coal, which is from an environmental point of view, of course, terrible. But it might buy us some time to get the renewables in place."Constantin Zerger, head of energy and climate protection at Environmental Action Germany

“We will have coal, which is from an environmental point of view, of course, terrible. But it might buy us some time to get the renewables in place. And this might be a better option than building new LNG terminals,” he said, citing a concern over a fossil-fuel “lock-in” with expensive and long-lived infrastructure.

Germany already missed its greenhouse gas reduction targets last year, and the economy and climate minister Robert Habeck has said that it’s likely to also miss them this year and next. But, he insists, the new gas infrastructure doesn’t put the country’s longer-term targets at risk.

The mayor of Brunsbüttel, the North Sea town where both a floating and permanent facility are planned, supports the new infrastructure and the jobs and revenue it will bring to his town.

But he acknowledges that Germany is in a tough spot with conflicting goals, as it tries to transition away from Russian energy.

Related: 'We are not alone': Volunteers provide critical support for Germans struggling in the aftermath of deadly flood

“It’s indescribably difficult,” Martin Schmedtje said. But he also believes the new natural gas terminal is necessary to keep the German economy growing, and give nearby chemical companies time to transition to renewable energy.

“We need this terminal,” he said, voicing an opinion that’s grown widely across Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.

Afghan women say Taliban's new rules aim to make them 'disappear from public life'

The Taliban in Afghanistan have announced new rules requiring women to cover their faces when in public. The decree also says that women should only leave home when necessary. This is the latest in a series of restrictions imposed on women since the group came to power last summer.


An Afghan woman waits to receive a food ration distributed by a South Korea humanitarian aid group, in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 10, 2022.
Ebrahim Noroozi/AP

May 13, 2022 · 

By Shirin Jaafari

A few days after the fall of Kabul, in Afghanistan, 18-year-old Aghela Amiri was randomly stopped by a Taliban fighter.

He complained that her sleeves were too short and that her hair was showing —he told her it was unacceptable for a Muslim woman. Before she could say anything, the man whipped her arms.

She took pictures of the bruises when she got home. She said that she felt humiliated, scared and angry.


“This type of fanatical thinking is the root cause of all our misery in this country.” Aghela Amiri, Kabul resident

“This type of fanatical thinking is the root cause of all our misery in this country,” she said.

Related: Amid chaos, young Afghan refugees find something familiar in St. Louis — soccer

Since that incident last August, Amiri has stopped wearing colorful outfits in public. These days, she wears a long, black, loose cloak. She makes sure that her hair is not showing.

Last August, when Kabul, Afghanistan, fell, Aghela Amiri, 18, was whipped by a Taliban fighter who criticized the length of her sleeves and the fact that her hair was showing. She took photos of the bruises when she got home.
Credit:Courtesy of Aghela Amiri

But now, the Taliban are imposing even stricter rules. Over the weekend, Taliban officials issued a decree listing several new restrictions. Among them, women must wear a burqa, the head-to-toe covering that has mesh across the eyes.

The decree also requires that women only leave home when absolutely necessary. If they don’t follow these rules, their male relatives will be punished.

“I was shocked. They’ve imposed so [many] restrictions on women I don’t know what else is left,” Amiri said.

In response to the Taliban's decree, small groups of women in Kabul and other cities are going out to protest.

Julia Parsi, a women’s rights advocate, was an organizer of one of the protests this past week.

Related: As Canada prioritizes expedited arrivals for Ukrainians, at-risk Afghans remain trapped abroad

“We marched in the streets, but the Taliban stopped us and told us to go home,” she said from Kabul.

Parsi said that she and others tried to reason with the men. They told them they are upset about the new restrictions, and that women in Afghanistan are observant Muslims and they already dress modestly in public.

“I will never agree to cover my face,” Parsi said. “I won’t be able to breathe.”

Julia Parsi, a women’s rights advocate, organized a protest in response to the Taliban’s new rules requiring women to wear a burqa, and to stay home.
Credit: Courtesy of Julia Parsi

Women protesters in Afghanistan have paid a heavy price since the Taliban took control of the country nine months ago. One woman with whom The World spoke said that she was arrested and detained for several weeks for protesting, and that her family was threatened as well. So, she has paused her activism for now.

The dress code is just one of many restrictions the Taliban have imposed on women. They have also limited access to education and employment.

Parsi, who has two daughters, said that her heart breaks when she sees them at home instead of school.

“They have no future in this country,” she said. “That’s why I risk my life to protest. I’m scared, but what other choice do I have?”

For Zahra Rahimi, watching all this from outside of Afghanistan is painful.

Related: 6 months after evacuation, thousands of Afghan families are waiting to reunite

She was a reporter for a TV program in Afghanistan. She said that when the Taliban came to power, she and her family were threatened, leaving her with no choice but to flee. She is now living in Canada.

Small groups of women in Afghanistan have taken to the streets to protest the Taliban’s latest restrictions on women. 
Credit: Courtesy of Julia Parsi

Rahimi said that sometimes Taliban leaders claim that women’s rights is a Western concept and that only the elite in Kabul care about issues like women’s education and employment.

“My own father comes from a remote area in Afghanistan. He used to take me and my sister to school every day on a motorcycle. The trip was two hours long but he wanted us — his daughters — to be educated.” 

Zahra Rahimi, Afghan in Canada

“My own father comes from a remote area in Afghanistan,” she said. “He used to take me and my sister to school every day on a motorcycle. The trip was two hours long but he wanted us — his daughters — to be educated.”

Rahimi’s family is still in Afghanistan, and she is most worried about her 15-year-old sister.

“Every night, when I talk to her, I tell her to be careful,” Rahimi said. “I tell her to wear whatever the Taliban have ordered. Don’t risk your life.”

“My sister is very upset but there is nothing I can do,” Rahimi added.

Related: A long journey from Kabul brings one family to New Bedford

Rahimi and other critics of the Taliban restrictions on women say the group has one goal — to make women disappear from public life.

The Taliban might have weapons and political power, but many Afghan women still say that they won’t stop fighting for their basic rights.

ABOLISH ICE
Immigrant students settle with govt over fake university

Six years after ICE revealed a university was a sting operation, the students caught in the middle say they still haven’t fully recovered.


A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer watches during an operation in Escondido, California, July 8, 2019.
Gregory Bull/AP

On Course
The World
May 12, 2022 

By Max Rivlin-Nadler

When Monica Zheng came to the US from China in 2011 to study journalism, she had high hopes for a new life in the country.

Instead, for years now, she’s been mired in legal proceedings. She’s one of hundreds of foreign students who banded together in a lawsuit after they learned that the New Jersey university that they attended was fake — set up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of a sting operation.

Related: Colorado law students gain ‘powerful’ lessons providing free legal services to immigrants

Last week, Zheng and hundreds of former students reached a settlement agreement in their class-action lawsuit against the government in a federal court in New Jersey.

Zheng, who eventually obtained a green card and is now working in the tech industry in Texas, said that the settlement isn’t enough to make up for the disruption to her life and career that resulted from the ICE sting operation.

“I literally did everything by the book, but it ended up, they used this sting operation on poor students. I pay taxes, I do everything by the book. It feels pretty crappy for a couple of years.”Monica Zheng, former student of the sham ICE university who is part of the class-action lawsuit against the US government

“I literally did everything by the book, but it ended up, they used this sting operation on poor students,” she said. “I pay taxes, I do everything by the book. It feels pretty crappy for a couple of years.”

Under the settlement’s terms, the government will pay over $450,000 in legal fees but isn’t admitting to any wrongdoing.

There isn’t any financial compensation for the former students, but they will be able to receive expedited processing of new visa applications, have their immigration records wiped clean of fraud accusations, and be able to reenter the United States if they leave the country.
Zheng’s story

After two years at college, Zheng graduated, but she was still on a student visa, which only allowed her to stay in the United States for one more year.

She found a job in information technology in Texas, and her employer wanted her to keep working for them.

Related: Despite flurry of efforts to recruit immigrants with medical experience, many remain sidelined

Zheng had plans to go back to school to get a PhD, but wanted to make some more money before then.

So, Zheng did what many students do — she enrolled in a master’s program that allowed her to get credit for working, also known as curriculum practical training.

That way, Zheng would be able to get another student visa, and earn money.

To get that visa, Zheng used a visa broker, who are often called on to help foreign students navigate these types of visas that are enmeshed in bureaucracy. It was through that broker that Zheng found out about the University of Northern New Jersey.

Zheng checked out the university and did her usual due diligence: “I called the person and then I checked multiple times because I’m a very cautious person,” Zheng said. “So, I check everywhere. I double-check on the DHS website, I check everywhere, and everything seemed legit. Even my employer checked and saw it was authorized.”

Related: 'Hidden discrimination': California university joins national trend to protect against caste bias on campus

Zheng attended the school for a few months and then switched to a different graduate program at another university, one that she attended in person, where she could study information technology.

At the University of Northern New Jersey, she was only doing curricular practical training, which gave her school credit for working. After leaving UNNJ, she thought nothing was suspicious about her experience — thousands of other students use similar arrangements each year.

Then, one day in April 2016, two years after she had left UNNJ, Zheng received a letter from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services informing her that her visa had been canceled. It said that she had committed fraud, but gave her no further information.


“It [felt] horrible. I am pretty sure I had a panic attack when I opened the letter.”Monica Zheng, former student of the sham ICE university who is part of the class-action lawsuit against the US government

“It [felt] horrible,” she said. “I am pretty sure I had a panic attack when I opened the letter.”

Zheng was bewildered. She sought help from the international office at her then-school in Texas, where she was getting a doctorate. The office pulled up an article from The New York Times, with the headline: “New Jersey University Was Fake, but Visa Fraud Arrests Are Real.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been running UNNJ for three years, as a front for a sting operation against visa brokers. Zheng and over a thousand other students, had “attended” the fake university, almost all of them doing curricular practical training without having any idea that the school wasn’t real.

Related: Echoing WWII rescue efforts, ethnic Russian researchers in the US support Ukrainian scholars

Seeing the article, Zheng realized that there were other people in the same position that she was, many of them Chinese nationals, and she began reaching out to them. Soon, they came together on the lawsuit in the hopes that they get their visas restored. That was in 2016.

Elizabeth Montano, an attorney for the students from the Miami-based firm Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli & Pratt, said in the New Jersey Monitor that the government did not provide any information about how many foreign nationals are still in the country and how many went back to their home countries.

The 100 people whom she’s been in touch with about the settlement live near New Jersey, according to Montana.

 
A case of ‘gross overreach’

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency set up the fake university in New Jersey as a part of a sting operation to crack down on brokers who were taking kickbacks from schools. In total, 22 visa brokers were arrested.

A screenshot from the fake school, University of Northern New Jersey, or UNNJ, set up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of a sting operation. The school has been shut down and the website is archived.
Credit: Screenshot from the archived site for UNNJ

ICE also ran a similar operation in Michigan, which led to the arrests of 161 students and the deportation of 600 people.

ICE shut down UNNJ in 2016 after the academic brokers were arrested for fraud, and immediately terminated all related student F-1 visas based on “fraudulent enrollment,” the suit states.

Many of the students had paid thousands of dollars to brokers and thousands more to the school in tuition. Some of the students were threatened with deportation, and many left the country as a result.

The civil lawsuit bounced around the federal courts system for years as the students argued they had been unfairly targeted by the government.

At one point, an appeals court castigated the government, saying it went to great lengths to create this fake university — with a campus, logo and ICE agents posing as school officials.

“In a case of gross overreach, [the federal government] said, ‘Well, let’s just assume all the students committed fraud,” attorney Ira Kurzban said.

He represents a group of these foreign students, including Zheng, who sued the government.

“[The government] had no basis to do that. They hadn’t interviewed or even spoken to any of those students.”Ira Kurzban , attorney for the students

“[The government] had no basis to do that. They hadn’t interviewed or even spoken to any of those students.”

On top of that, ICE’s fake university seemed so real, that even a judge noted “that the only thing left out was their rankings in the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association],” Kurzban recalled.

Today, the website for UNNJ is still archived on the internet, showing smiling faces of students and proclaiming that the university offered “the highest quality of undergraduate and graduate education for students throughout New Jersey, the United States, and the world.”

The World asked ICE for a response but the agency said it doesn’t comment on litigation proceedings or outcomes. An ICE spokesperson said it was tasked with enforcing all immigration laws, including those impacting student visas.

 
The hoops that many students and former students have to jump through to stay in the United States has made situations like the UNNJ sting possible, explained Jill Welch, with the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, an advocacy group of university leaders.

“International students are very closely monitored and regulated and they’re very limited in what they can do workwise while in the United States,” Welch said.

She said that she believes that the fact that students educated in the United States can’t then easily get work permits doesn’t make much sense as a policy goal.

“You think when someone gets a full degree here, they can stay and contribute their skills and talents in the US economy, but there’s no direct path to do that,” Welch said.

Other countries, like Canada, have a clear path for foreign students to then join its workforce, she said.

Alito Calls Landmark Supreme Court Decision Expanding LGBTQ Worker Rights ‘Indefensible’

 Associate Justice Samuel Alito 

(Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)

By Kate Riga
TPM
May 13, 2022 

Justice Samuel Alito is evidentially toting around an old grudge.

At a Thursday night event at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, he had harsh words for the two conservative justices who joined the majority in Bostock v. Clayton County.

The 2020 opinion said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex-based discrimination, extends to gay and transgender workers. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, in which he was joined by the liberals and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Speaking via a video feed Thursday, Alito called Gorsuch a “colleague and friend,” but said that grounding the decision in the text of the 1964 law was “in my view indefensible,” according to the Washington Post.

“It is inconceivable that either Congress or voters in 1964 understood discrimination because of sex to mean discrimination because of sexual orientation, much less gender identity,” Alito said. “If Title VII had been understood at that time to mean what Bostock held it to mean, the prohibition on discrimination because of sex would never have been enacted. In fact, it might not have gotten a single vote in Congress.”

His disdain for the opinion has long simmered.

“The Court’s opinion is like a pirate ship,” he wrote in his dissent. “It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Jus­tice Scalia excoriated — the theory that courts should ‘update’ old statutes so that they better reflect the current val­ues of society.”

Alito wasn’t the only conservative enraged by the decision, and by Gorsuch and Roberts’ defections.

“All those evangelicals who sided with Trump in 2016 to protect them from the cultural currents, just found their excuse to stay home in 2020 thank to Trump’s Supreme Court picks,” seethed conservative radio host Erick Erickson on Twitter.

“Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards. This was not judging, this was legislating — a brute force attack on our constitutional system,” bemoaned Carrie Severino, president of the right-wing Judicial Crisis Network.

While Alito was relitigating the old disagreement, protesters were posted up outside of the event to either celebrate or condemn a much fresher battleground: the justice’s leaked draft majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.


Kate Riga (@Kate_Riga24) is a D.C. reporter for TPM and a contributor to the Josh Marshall Podcast.

Where Things Stand: A Link Between Backsliding Democracies And Abortion Bans

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 03: Flyers that read "My Body, My Choice" are seen in front of the U.S. Supreme Court May 3, 2022 in Washington, DC. In a leaked initial draft majority opinion obtained by Politico 

By Nicole Lafond
TPM

There’s lots of brilliant think pieces from reporters, scholars and political observers to consume today to help wrap one’s head around the gravity of the last 24-hours. Here’s another take to add to the list this evening.

New York Times writer Max Fisher flagged a piece he published back in September 2021 here:

You should read the piece in full, but his global perspective helps string together a unique birds-eye-view correlation between developed nations, increasingly polarized politics, attacks on democracies and the roll-back of abortion rights. As Fisher notes in the piece, in the last two decades, we’ve seen more than 30 countries around the globe (some with a socially conservative and/or Christian-dominated populous) enact some form of legal expansion of abortion access for citizens. Only the United States, Poland and Nicaragua have done the opposite (as of his September 2021 writing).

Fisher spoke to several legal scholars to highlight the role a strong democracy plays in the longevity and strength of human rights laws in a given nation, specifically on the issue of abortion. But one particularly striking section of the article focuses on the growing phenomenon of minority rule in highly polarized societies.

While the makeup of high courts in democratic nations are, at least by design, meant to reflect public opinion, the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court obviously throws that ironclad rule out of whack. (And, as we know, public opinion on abortion is overwhelmingly in support of not overturning Roe, this Washington Post-ABC News poll on the issue just last week demonstrates that well.)

Citing Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University scholar on democracy, Fisher points out that the manipulation of certain systems that have perhaps long been controversial parts of a country’s grand experiment in democracy — like the U.S.’s Electoral College — have ultimately helped make the shift toward minority rule possible. And oftentimes the party with more populist or precedent-breaking voices in their ranks are more likely to manipulate the systems or the scraps of a manipulated system to their advantage (it’s obvious, but think: McConnell’s grand Merick-Garlanding).

This section gets into it far more eloquently than I can:

Electoral College and Senate maps have always tilted American elections to favor certain voters over others, for instance by granting rural states outsized representation. For the first time in American history, demographic groups that tend to support one party, the G.O.P., overwhelmingly cluster in the areas that receive disproportionate voice.

As a result, Supreme Court justices are increasingly likely to be appointed by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a Senate elected by a minority. Republicans won the national popular vote in only one out of the last eight presidential elections, but have appointed six of the nine current Supreme Court justices.

In democracies, a drift toward minority rule can feed a sense that power does not flow from the will of the people as a whole. Such leaders and institutions often become likelier to overrule the majority on issues important to the minority that put them in power. …

In societies with high polarization, he (Levitsky) has found, parties often fight bitterly for control of the courts. These contests tend to send a message, intended or not, that courts exist to serve partisan interests, rather than guard against them.

Rulings at odds with public opinion, Dr. Levitsky said, can become “very likely in a period of polarization and hardball politics.”

AUSTRALIA
Trauma, disbelief and plenty of ideas shared at NSW flood inquiry hearing in Lismore

Residents of Lismore speak during the first public hearing of the 2022 NSW flood Inquiry in Lismore on Tuesday evening.

 Photograph: Jason O’Brien/AAP


Northern rivers residents make their voices heard at first community hearing into devastating events they say could have been avoided

Christine Tondorf

Tue 3 May 2022 23.25 BST

Megan James, who lives near Nimbin, was the first of many speakers to take the microphone at a university lecture theatre in Lismore for the first community hearing of the 2022 New South Wales flood inquiry on Tuesday evening.

“I’m the voice in the hills, but we’re no longer heard,” James said.

She told of how farmers once phoned Lismore to warn that their rain gauges were filling and a flood was on the way; now the town relied on official forecasts that weren’t always accurate.


Land swaps, relocations or rebuilds: Lismore community grapples with its future

The lack of warning from authorities of the impending floods, on 28 February and 30 March, was one of the most prevalent themes at the town hall-style meeting, at which the inquiry’s leaders, Professor Mary O’Kane, an engineer and scientist, and Mick Fuller, the former NSW police commissioner, explained they had come to listen, not provide answers.

In the words of another speaker: “There was no real clear warning that it was going to be as bad as it was.”

One northern rivers resident said he hadn’t come to blame State Emergency Service volunteers or the local council, but their modelling systems appeared to be failing.

An array of ideas was proffered from the floor. Blocks and tackles could be used to secure houses in flood plains and wetlands of native flora planted to divert water away from residential areas, because “lots of people still want to stay in this place”.

Professor Mary O’Kane (right) and Mick Fuller listen during the NSW flood inquiry in Lismore. Photograph: Jason O’Brien/AAP

Flood mitigation could include dredging Lismore Wilsons River and restoring it to the deep channel once used by ships – today it’s barely fit for a dingy. First Nations land management practices needed to be adopted.

The myriad of potholes in the region should be highlighted by white paint, because they were impossible to see at night on wet roads, and there were also calls to investigate whether the upgraded Pacific Highway had exacerbated flooding in some places.
I’d just like a cupboard for my undies, a pantry for my food.Displaced flood victim

Some suggested flood-zone houses should have mandatory roof hatches, like skylights, to prevent people in attics being drowned by rising waters. There were multiple calls for the insurance system to be overhauled, community communications systems to be strengthened with satellite, and a testimony about the impact on wildlife.

There were callouts for improved drainage and building flood-proof, because “clearly our infrastructure can’t handle this” and “disaster planning must be incorporated into regional planning”.

There were stories of trauma – the neighbours were screaming; children saw their pets drown. One woman referenced a friend who perished while trying to be saved on Facebook, and a miraculous rescue tale – someone was pulled from a strong torrent by a string of Christmas lights.

An image taken on 28 February shows two Lismore residents and their dog stranded on the roof of a home during major flooding.

 Photograph: NSW Rural Fire Service

There was even laughter when Byron Bay councillor Mark Swivel lamented the national media’s focus on Byron’s inundation– “the flood came to Byron because apparently water likes linen”.

The only agitation was when a woman spoke about being traumatised by the floods, which she attributed to climate change and a reliance on fossil fuels. She was met with applause and a couple of boos.

Stories were told from an array of perspectives. Helen Coyle, who lives with a disability, described being stuck in Ballina, unable to return to her Lismore home because the roads were cut. She went to the Ballina hospital for help but said staff chastised her for travelling with insufficient money.

She is calling for hospital staff to be kitted with the phone numbers for organisations that can support people with disabilities displaced by severe weather events.

A subsequent indignity, she said, was that the floods have robbed Lismore of public disabled toilets, only portaloos. Are the disabled expected to “shit themselves”?

Another Lismore resident called on flood clean-up volunteers to be trained in what is salvageable because well-intentioned volunteers had thrown away her son’s two prosthetic legs.

Flooding in Lismore on 28 February.

 Photograph: Jason O'Brien/AAP

Bruno Ros, a vet specialising in large animals, spent the first post-flood days on helicopters looking for stranded livestock and visiting isolated farming properties.

“Plenty of people were on the ground, barking, screaming and pleading for help,” he said after the inquiry, “and for me as a vet the Department of Primary Industries was just inaccessible. I begged for assistance. It arrived seven days after the floods, seven days too late.”

Dr Cam Hollows, a doctor on the ground in Coraki, recounted working for 40 hours and treating 60 patients in the aftermath.

“We’ve repeated every single mistake of the bushfires,” he said.

Lismore Labor MP Janelle Saffin agreed: “Government agencies weren’t prepared, and they need to ramp up really quickly because that’s what disasters need, but they haven’t done that.”

The NSW flood inquiry went for more than two hours in Lismore on Tuesday evening. Photograph: Jason O’Brien/AAP

Mark O’Toole, from Bungawalbin, said he asked members on a community Facebook page if anyone had been successful in securing a government business grant: “So far I’m up to 890 comments and nobody has got one”.

There are around 100 farmers just in his town, he said, and “the money needs to start flowing now, not in six months or 12 months.”

A woman fought back tears as she described families with children still camping in backyards. Another outlined simple wishes: “I’d just like a cupboard for my undies, a pantry for my food.”

For more than two hours the Lismore crowd listened in near silence – a demonstration of forbearance and patience from a community that had already endured so much.

The NSW flood inquiry will hold its next public hearing at the Tumbulgum Hall in the Tweed Shire on Wednesday. It is required to report to the premier by 30 September and is open to submissions from any member of the public, which can be made online, via email, post or phone.

 The endangered California condor has returned to the skies over the state's far northern coast redwood forests for the first time in more than a century.

Navy launching investigations into USS George Washington and shipyard life

By Geoff Ziezulewicz
Tuesday, May 3

Sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier George Washington await orders in August during a simulation of an underway replenishment. (Navy)


The Navy parent command of the aircraft carrier George Washington is commencing investigations into both the three crew suicides last month and the unique stressors that come with operating in a shipyard maintenance environment, where the carrier and its crew currently find themselves.

GW has been undergoing a refueling and complex overhaul, or RCOH, maintenance period since August 2017, but it was supposed to wrap up last year.

Speaking with reporters Tuesday, the head of Naval Air Force Atlantic, Rear Adm. John Meier, said the ship will now not leave Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia until March of next year.

Meier said one investigation, expected to wrap this week, will look at whether there were any immediate triggers or linkages in the April suicides of Master-at-Arms Seaman Recruit Xavier H. Mitchell-Sandor, Interior Communications Electrician 3rd Class Natasha Huffman and Retail Services Specialist 3rd Class Mika’il Rayshawn Sharp.

“To lose three sailors in such a short time is devastating,” Meier said. “We don’t take that lightly.”

Turkey imposes systematic religious discrimination on minorities: Report

Ankara [Turkey], May 4 (ANI): After more than a hundred years of its supposed secular foundations, the institutionalised religious intolerance and racism in Turkey has continued to persist and has even accelerated in recent times, a report said.

Ankara has been brainwashing its population with the ‘Turkish Migration Routes’ map, which since Turkish independence, has been used to decorate all primary school walls during the single-party Republican People’s Party (CHP) period, International Forum for Rights and Security (IFFRAS) said in a report.
This map was made in order to prove that the Turkish race migrated from Central Asia to the four corners of the world and carried civilization and that the tribes that founded the old civilizations in Anatolia were essentially Turks, the report said.
Turkey has also been promoting and exporting this idea through professionally made Turkish serials of international standards which focus on that racist and Islamic conquest, the report further said, adding that, in an environment where the masses are conditioned in this way, religious intolerance is but natural the logical end product.
Turkey is known to have a history of religious repression and mass massacres in the name of Islamization with the Armenian genocide that took place more than 100 years ago in 1915 being one of the most brutal examples.
The genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people during World War and was implemented primarily through mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and forced Islamization of Armenian women and children, the report said.
Though the genocide took place hundred years ago, the Armenians and Assyrians, who are very few in Turkey, continue their search for rights and justice till today.
According to the report, even today, a child’s freedom of religion, the right to participate, and the right of parents to raise their children according to their own philosophical or religious views are subject to systematic interference within the education system in Turkey.
The Turkish government has also been trying to lay the groundwork to make religious education (Islamic Sunni) compulsory for children in the age group 4-6 years, the report said.
In addition, the parents and students belonging to the atheists, deists and agnostics groups do not have the right to be exempted from compulsory Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge courses, the report further said.
Those who criticize religion or belief in general, especially Islam, or certain interpretations of that religion or belief, are at risk of being prosecuted under the Turkish Penal Code (TCK), the report added.
Furthermore, the non-Muslim foundations in Turkey cannot elect their board of directors even today. Elections for the board of directors of these foundations have been prevented since 2013. As a result, the functioning of community foundations and the communities that benefit from them are paralyzed and weakened, the report said.
Highlighting that there also exists a striking disparity in terms of resource allocation to different religions by the Turkish government, the report said that, most of the resources from the public budget are meant only for the Sunni Muslim community for religious services.
Religious communities such as the Alevi community, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, the Armenian Patriarchate and the Protestant community are unable to provide even training to their religious officials because of a paucity of resources, the report added.
The report went on to call on Ankara to take measures without delay in order to prevent religious violations by fulfilling the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judgments and the Opinions of the Human Rights Committee in cases concerning freedom of religion or belief. (ANI)

 

The scientific meltdown over a controversial discovery of ‘biblical Sodom’

The remains of a city’s fiery demise near the Dead Sea have archaeologists at odds.

People participate in the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project at Tall el-Hammam, an ancient settlement near the Dead Sea, in western Jordan. The Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project is a joint venture by Trinity Southwest University and Veritas International University. Photo via tallelhammam.com

April 20, 2022

By 

Jerry Pattengale

(RNS) — What everyone agrees on is that something unusual happened at Tall el-Hammam, an ancient settlement near the Dead Sea.

In a layer of ancient earth, archaeologists claim to have found evidence of an apocalyptic event: Melted rooftops. Disintegrated pottery. Unusual patterns in the rock formations that can be associated with intense heat. For another three to six centuries after 1650 B.C., the settlement’s 100 acres lay fallow.

But when Steven Collins, the principal archaeologist at Tall el-Hammam, considered the scientists’ evidence in an article that ran last year in the respected scientific journal Nature, he claimed that the incineration matched with the place and timing of the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah. This brought down on himself what in academic circles might be called hellfire.

That story of Sodom and its sister city Gomorrah is one of the Bible’s best-known stories. Abraham bargains with God to spare Sodom — even then synonymous with sin — to save its few righteous residents. The Lord was having none of it. “Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah,” the Book of Genesis says. Abraham looks back and sees “dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.”

---

RELATED: Earliest mention of ‘Yahweh’ found in archaeological dump

---

On the face of it, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see possible connections between Tell el-Hammam. But in a real sense you do.

Steven Collins. Photo via tallelhammam.com

Led by Collins, dean of the College of Archaeology at Trinity Southwest University, 21 experts from 19 research institutions weighed in on Tall el-Hammam’s remains, concluding that the nature of the destruction suggested a massive airburst or comet. 

“The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a 50-m-wide bolide” — a meteor that explodes in midair — “detonated with 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.”

These scholars, more than half with scientific posts, also claimed that the “destruction matrix,” which they put at around 1650 B.C., “is highly unusual and atypical of archaeological strata throughout the ancient Near East.”

What was unlike destruction caused by earthquakes or warfare were pottery shards with their outer surfaces melted into glass, some bubbled as if boiled, “bubbled” and melted building brick and plaster, suggesting some unknown high-temperature event. Objects of daily life, carbonized pieces of wooden beams, charred grain, bones and limestone cobbles were burned to a chalklike consistency.

But last month Steven Jaret, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, and R. Scott Harris, a space scientist at Atlanta’s Fernbank Science Center, challenged these conclusions of the 21 scholars, also in Nature, basically hinting that Collins’ group confused run-of-the-mill smelting and pottery processes with heat from an airburst.

A burgeoning group of scientists agree with these two, making much of the fact that Collins’ school is “an unaccredited Bible college.” Paul Braterman, blogging at Primate’s Progress, headlined his take, “an airburst of gullibility.”

“It certainly raises suspicions when an archaeologist makes dramatic claims like ‘this site is Biblical Sodom’ and that person is not credentialed as we expect,” said James Hoffmeier, emeritus professor of Near Eastern archaeology and Old Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, in an interview with Religion News Service.

But Hoffmeier added, “As we well know, however, there are highly qualified archaeologists whose minimalist presuppositions draw outrageous negative conclusions about the Bible and their work is rarely subjected to critical evaluation.”

In comments to RNS, Collins noted that most of the 21 authors of the paper are scientist peers who worked “six years” to produce their findings. But he conceded that “even if the two critics’ claims are valid about the failure to meet the crystalized criteria for extraterrestrial matter, it doesn’t even touch the melted room, plaster, humans, etc.”

The archaeological site of Tall el-Hammam in western Jordan. Photo by Deg777/Wikipedia/Creative Commons

He reiterated his agreement with the findings of the authors of the original paper, going a step further to claim it’s sure evidence of the biblical account of Sodom’s fall. In one of his many video clips he claims he’s walking through the mudbrick gate of the city, “We are now entering Sodom!”

But besides the causes of the destruction, Tall el-Hammam’s link to the biblical events has another test that is perhaps more difficult to prove — its date. The Bible chronology watchdog Answers in Genesis, along with many others such as Bryant Wood, editor of Bible and Spade, are rather candid in putting the fall of Sodom some two centuries off.

Furthermore, other details of the biblical narrative create issues. Simon Turpin, executive director and speaker for Answers in Genesis–U.K., argues, “The only way for proponents of Tall el-Hammam to synchronize it with biblical Sodom is to revise the biblical date of the Exodus, embrace a short Israelite sojourn in Egypt, and significantly reduce the lifespans of the patriarchs.”

---

RELATED: In time for Hanukkah, archaeologists reveal battle-scarred stronghold against Maccabees

---

Collins has gained traction, at least in the media, and a few scientists and some Bible scholars are telling him to keep looking. Tall el-Hammam, the largest known city of its era in the region, is the best candidate that has surfaced.

But the intense criticism from the larger fraternity of scientists includes assertions that some of the original papers’ authors have been too quick in the past to identify bolides. Science Integrity Digest pointed out that eight of the 21 authors are founders of the Comet Research Group, which has attempted “to show that ancient cities were frequently destroyed by comets, and to do something about comets before ‘your city is next.’”

But Hoffmeier reminds us that scientific debate can proceed without ridicule. “Walter Rast and Tom Schaub in the 1970s-’80s had advanced the idea that Bab ed-Dra and Numeira were associated with Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. “Their idea was evaluated by the discipline and rejected. I think Collins and his team should be afforded [such] a courtesy.”