Chris Hedges's Blog, page 68

Indians Rise Up Against Hindu Supremacy

India’s government has pushed through a dangerous new bill that has provoked a mass uprising. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) offers a fast-track to legalization for Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Parsi, Buddhist and Jain immigrants from bordering nations while explicitly denying one religious group the same privileges. For years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been chipping away at the rights of Muslims in India, but the world’s largest democracy may have finally overplayed its hand on the deepest question in any country: who belongs and who does not.

Before the passage of the CAA, the BJP tested an equally ominous policy in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, which shares lengthy borders with numerous nations, including Myanmar and Bangladesh. The National Register of Citizens (NRC), mandated by a law passed years earlier, was implemented in Assam and required Indians to prove their ancestry with hard documentation in order to be considered citizens—a mean feat in a poor state with high levels of illiteracy.

Nearly 2 million Assamese were unable to meet the qualifications, and fears abounded that they would be held in detention camps being built under the Home Ministry’s oversight. Now, the Modi government has announced that the NRC will be implemented in all 29 Indian states. Taken together with the CAA, it’s no wonder that India’s 200 million Muslims fear this could be the first step toward their country declaring them illegal immigrants.

Modi is often compared to President Donald Trump—and with good reason. In addition to the strong affinity the two leaders seem to share for one another, both came to power in secular democracies as populists promising economic prosperity and crackdowns on immigrants and Muslims. The NRC/CAA debacle in India parallels the legal fight that Trump provoked when he signed an executive order requiring the U.S. census to add a citizenship question.

Just as the Trump administration has claimed that its xenophobic policies are about combating human trafficking, the Modi government maintains it’s actually looking out for immigrants’ welfare. The CAA was purportedly written to offer refuge to persecuted minorities in nations bordering India, yet the group that best fits that definition would be Myanmar’s Rohingya—a population that has become a target of genocidal policies precisely because it is composed of Muslims living in a Buddhist-majority nation. Now it appears as though predominantly Hindu India has shut its doors to Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar’s pogroms.

About 14% of India’s population is Muslim—similar to the percentages of African Americans or Latinos in the U.S. More than 10% of the world’s entire Muslim population resides in India, which is second only to Indonesia for the largest Muslim population in the world. For years under BJP rule, Indian Muslims have faced lynch mobs attacking them for their religious beliefs under the guise that they were enforcing beef-eating bans. These mobs are directly linked to the right-wing Hindu nationalist government, and almost all the recorded instances of Muslim persecution have occurred since Modi assumed office in 2014.

Despite all this, Modi’s party earned a second five-year term after claiming a resounding reelection victory earlier this year. An unconstitutional crackdown on Kashmir this past summer and a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing Hindus to build a temple over the ruins of an ancient mosque site claimed by both Hindus and Muslims have only added to the tensions that have erupted with the CAA’s passage.

With this new law, Modi may have finally overplayed his hand. Mass protests have broken out all over India, leading to a violent police crackdown, and Human Rights Watch has warned the government to stop using “unnecessary lethal force against demonstrators.” University campuses have become battlegrounds, police have been documented beating dissenting students with batons. Peaceful protests have resulted in mass arrests of thousands of people at a time.

The state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), which has a large Muslim population, has been an epicenter of resistance and corresponding police violence. A majority of the 25 people killed in protests so far were from UP, and the state government has threatened to confiscate the property of dissenters in retaliation. An Indian Muslim actress and activist named Sadaf Jafar was beaten and arrested in UP’s capital, Lucknow, while filming the protests.

The BJP has also resorted to the dictatorial tactic of shutting down internet access in areas where protests are taking place. India has earned the distinction of having the largest number of government-ordered internet shutdowns in the world—more than Pakistan, Syria or Turkey—in its ongoing response to protests.

Whether the protests will translate into a loss of political power for the BJP is not yet clear. But if recent elections in the state of Jharkhand are any indication, there is hope that its stranglehold on India could be weakened. (The ruling party won only 25 out of 81 seats in late December.)

Seemingly flabbergasted by the response to the CAA, Modi tweeted earlier this month: “Violent protests on the Citizenship Amendment Act are unfortunate and deeply distressing.” He made no mention of the violence emerging from police or from the Gestapo-like militants wielding sticks and marching in formation through the streets of Indian cities pledging allegiance to Modi’s government.

Echoing the paranoia and false claims of persecution that we have become familiar with from Trump in the U.S., Modi has declared in Orwellian terms: “People who are trying to spread lies and fear, look at my work. If you see any trace of divisiveness in my work, show it to the world.” He has accused protesters of “trying every tactic to push me out of power.”

Far from being deterred by the police crackdowns and internet shutoffs, the CAA and the Modi government’s response to dissent appears to have given protesters renewed energy. Promisingly, it is not just Indian Muslims who are protesting, but people of all religions in the multi-faith nation. Twenty thousand people marched in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, the day after Christmas. One government official told Reuters, “I really did not see the protests coming”—by which he meant that he did not expect non-Muslims to care as much.

One Hindu woman who was an ardent Modi supporter told The New York Times, “I used to see Modi as a strong leader, as the person India had been waiting so long to get.” She added, “Now, I see him as a monster.”

Amy McGrath Files to Challenge McConnell in Senate Race

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Calling her party’s victory in the Kentucky governor’s race a jolt of momentum for her own bid to unseat a Republican incumbent, Democrat Amy McGrath on Friday officially filed to challenge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in what looms as a bruising, big-spending campaign next year.

McGrath, a retired Marine combat pilot, touted many of the same issues — health care and good-paying jobs — that Andy Beshear highlighted in ousting Republican incumbent Matt Bevin in last month’s election for governor. Beshear ran a “great campaign” that focused on issues that hit home for Kentuckians, McGrath said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

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“It absolutely gives us momentum because it shows that against an unpopular Republican incumbent, a Democrat can win,” McGrath said. “And we win by talking about those bread-and-butter issues that Kentuckians really care about.

“And that’s what I’m going to be talking about over and over again,” she said. “With Mitch McConnell, we’re not going to get any progress on these things.”

McGrath became the latest in a crowded field of candidates from both parties to file for McConnell’s seat. McGrath, who lost a hotly contested congressional race last year, has shown her mettle as a fundraiser, raking in nearly $11 million in her first few months as a Senate candidate, giving her a huge advantage over other Democratic candidates. McConnell has his own bulging campaign fund.

Another Democrat, Mike Broihier, also filed Friday as a U.S. Senate candidate. Broihier is a political newcomer with a broad resume as a Marine officer, farmer and small-town newspaperman.

Broihier also listed health care and the need for more good-paying jobs as key issues.

“Voters are energized,” he said in an interview, adding that the coalition that put Beshear in the governor’s office is “raring to go again” in the Senate race.

As the most powerful Republican in Congress, McConnell enters the race as a strong favorite in his pursuit of a seventh Senate term in 2020. The Republican senator touts his leadership position and his ability to deliver federal money for the Bluegrass State. This week, McConnell said he had a direct hand in securing $400 million for a new veterans hospital in Louisville, $25 million to fight Asian carp in western Kentucky and coal miner pension and health benefits.

McGrath tried to blunt that advantage of incumbency.

“Kentuckians know that his job is more than just bringing a check to Kentucky,” she said Friday. “Where is his leadership on saving health care? Where is he at with the rising cost of prescription drugs? Why hasn’t he done anything to stop the trade war that’s hurting farmers and businesses in Kentucky? Where’s he at with raising the minimum wage?

“It’s nice that he’s getting money for Kentucky, but the rest of the job is so important,” she added. “And it’s actually bigger and broader and he’s failing at all of these other things.”

McConnell campaign manager Kevin Golden fired back, saying: “Amy McGrath knows she can’t possibly make a cogent argument that she could do a fraction of the good Mitch McConnell does for Kentucky, so she’s left with this disjointed, half-baked justification for her candidacy that is simply not ready for prime time.”

McGrath said Friday she would work to strengthen the Affordable Care Act. She said she supports adding a public option to the health care law to give people “the choice of buying a government plan, much like I do as a military retiree.” She also stressed the need for action to lower prescription costs.

In another jab at McConnell, McGrath said she supports term limits. She said there’s “a real disconnect” between McConnell and “every day Kentuckians.”

On the issue of impeachment, McGrath accused McConnell of shirking his “constitutional duty.” She was referring to McConnell’s comments that there would be “total coordination” between the White House and the Senate over the upcoming presidential impeachment trial.

McGrath said it was premature to say whether she would support the president’s acquittal or conviction when the trial takes place. Senators should review the evidence and then make a judgment, she said.

Trump won Kentucky by a landslide in 2016 and will be a prohibitive favorite in the state next year when McGrath tries to dislodge McConnell. The Republican senator touts his close ties with Trump — from passing a tax overhaul to confirming conservative federal judges picked by the president.

But McGrath sees an opportunity to win over Trump supporters drawn to a political outsider.

“If you want more of the same, Mitch McConnell is your guy,” McGrath said. “He is the ultimate insider. He is the epitome of dysfunction in Washington. You can’t drain the swamp, as President Trump has touted doing, without getting rid of Mitch McConnell.”

Proof Oil Companies Own America’s Political System

This article was produced in partnership with The Times-Picayune and The Advocate, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, while stranded New Orleanians flagged down helicopters from rooftops and hospitals desperately triaged patients, crude oil silently gushed from damaged drilling rigs and storage tanks.

Given the human misery set into motion by Katrina, the harm these spills caused to the environment drew little attention. But it was substantial.

Nine days after the storm, oil could still be seen leaking from toppled storage tanks, broken pipelines and sunken boats between New Orleans and the Mississippi River’s mouth. And then Hurricane Rita hit. Oil let loose by Katrina was pushed farther inland by Rita three weeks later, and debris from the first storm caused damage to oil tankers rocked by the second.

All told, the federal agency overseeing oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico reported that more than 400 pipelines and 100 drilling platforms were damaged. The U.S. Coast Guard, the first responder for oil spills, received 540 separate reports of spills into Louisiana waters. Officials estimated that, taken together, those leaks released the same amount of oil that the highly publicized 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster spilled into Alaska’s Prince William Sound — about 10.8 million gallons.

The Oil Pollution Act, passed by Congress in response to the Valdez incident, requires that federal and state agencies work with the companies that spilled the oil to conduct a preliminary assessment of damage to natural resources. Once a comprehensive report is finalized on the value of the affected plants, soil, water and wildlife, those so-called responsible parties must pay for restoration efforts.

Fourteen years later, not one assessment of the damage to natural resources after the two 2005 hurricanes has been completed. None of the 140 parties thought to be responsible for the spills has been fined or cited for environmental violations. And no restoration plans have been developed for the impacted ecosystems, fish, birds or water quality, a review by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate and ProPublica has found.

The extent of the damage to the environment may never be known.

Even small spills have impacts, said Darryl Malek-Wiley, an organizer with the environmental conservation organization Sierra Club. Oil seeps into the marsh mud and affects the worms and snails. Birds that eat those animals are affected, as are the fish and the fishermen who bring them home. Then the marsh plants start to die, and saltwater intrudes to push them over. The coastline recedes. The next storm churns closer.

“I think it’s an outrage that they haven’t made any progress,” Malek-Wiley said. “Here we are 14 years later and they haven’t done anything. A year after Katrina, things had settled down significantly. I think the oil response team should have been moving forward with environmental damage claims.”

Over the same period, some of the very same companies responsible for spills have gotten reimbursements totaling $19 million from a federal trust fund that allows private parties to submit claims for expenses incurred cleaning up their spilled oil. In order to get their money back, companies have to file papers saying how much oil they spilled, why it spilled and what they did to capture it. They often describe the spill as the result of an “unforeseeable act of God.”

By failing to hold anyone accountable for the spills, Louisiana is likely leaving on the table hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental remediation money. When BP spilled 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the company agreed to pay $8.8 billion to help restore the natural environment. If the companies responsible for the Katrina and Rita spills paid up at the same rate, Louisiana would add more than $700 million to its restoration budget — money that Steve Cochran, associate vice president for coastal resilience at the Environmental Defense Fund, said is desperately needed.

“It’s pretty clear what the value of money is in a place like Louisiana, where we have these restoration needs,” Cochran said. “Every dollar that’s not collected [in fines] is a dollar that we can’t spend on this work.”

Indeed, most of the coastal restoration work going on in Louisiana is being funded with the BP settlement. When reached by phone, Cochran was just leaving a meeting with state natural resource managers about coastal resilience projects slated for next year, funded with about $750 million of money from the BP spill.

“It’s a lot of work that’s desperately needed but that is only possible because that [BP settlement] money became available,” Cochran said.

With no statute of limitations on assessing oil spills in Louisiana, officials at the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office, or LOSCO, say they are still working their way through a complex process of using computers to model the damage. But Stephanie Morris, a lawyer for the agency, says that even if they complete that work, it will be difficult to fine responsible parties or otherwise hold them accountable for damages caused 14 years ago.

“The [oil companies] always fight with us,” Morris said. “Their position with us is always: ‘Louisiana has a lot of spills. You have a degrading coast. Are you trying to say these injuries are from my little spill?’”

Charlie Henry, a member of the regional National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration response team, oversees the damage assessment process for spills in Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma and has worked with LOSCO on oil spill response for 30 years. If the 2005 spills had not been signed over to LOSCO, assessing them would likely have fallen to Henry’s group.

He says it’s common for five years to pass before a spill assessment and remediation plan is complete. He thinks that the fact that LOSCO is still working on the 2005 hurricane spills shows diligence, not fecklessness.

“Some states would have given up on [the hurricane spills] — just moved them to a cold-case file like a police department would when they can’t solve it,” Henry said.

Since the 2005 spills, little action has been taken to help prevent something similar from recurring. Neither Patrick Courreges, communications director at the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, nor Greg Langley, the press secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, were aware of any new regulations since Katrina to protect against storm-related oil spills or the associated damage to the environment.

“The thing about Katrina was, it came to shore as a Cat 3 but really it still had a Cat 5 storm surge with it,” Langley said. “When you get that much water rushing in on you at that velocity, it’s going to knock things down. That’s like, an act of God.”

At the federal level, the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill prompted some reforms. The Obama administration decided that it was problematic to have the same agency oversee oilfield leasing and offshore safety, and those functions were split between new divisions within the Interior Department. The administration also imposed a series of more stringent well safety regulations. However, many of them have been rolled back by the Trump administration.

While hurricanes gain speed due to the effects of climate change, the push for oil leasing in the Gulf of Mexico shows no sign of slowing down. In 2014, the Obama administration opened up 40 million new acres in the Gulf for oil and gas development. Four years later, the Trump administration announced plans to open up most of the rest, in what would be the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas drilling in U.S. history. Many of these 76 million acres are to be offered at reduced royalty rates to encourage additional near-shore drilling in Louisiana waters.

Meanwhile, scientists expect that future storms will exacerbate oil damage to the environment.

“In the Gulf, storms are predicted to be less frequent but more intense when they do come,” said Sunshine Van Bael, an ecologist at Tulane University who evaluated damage to marsh ecosystems from the BP oil spill. “One thing that storms do is, if oil has been buried underneath the marsh because it wasn’t rehabilitated, a storm could come along and whip that back up to the surface. So, the aftereffects of the oil spills might be greater [with climate change] since the storms are predicted to be more intense.”

The Regulatory Pipeline: The Way It’s Supposed to Work

In 1967, a 37 million gallon spill of crude oil from the tanker Torrey Canyon caused massive environmental damage off the coast of England, prompting the U.S. to develop a national strategy the following year to guard against a similar outcome. The Oil Pollution Act, passed in 1990, established the framework for state and federal oil spill response that is still used today.

When oil spills into water, it sets into motion a complex series of events. The spiller, or someone who notices oil in water, calls the U.S. Coast Guard, which gives the spill an identification number and logs it into the National Response Center database. In Louisiana, the state police are also notified. They assign each spill a different number and relay information to LOSCO. Depending on the size of the spill and the resources affected, as many as 12 other state and federal agencies are notified.

To create clearer jurisdiction, the Louisiana Legislature in 1991 created LOSCO to manage the process. Its deputy director, Karolien Debusschere, said, “I’ve been doing this a long, long time, and I feel it’s a pretty well-functioning system.”

Along with having to pay for cleanup and mitigation, the company that caused the spill could be subject to fines from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or the state DEQ. It might also face civil lawsuits from private parties and from LOSCO on behalf of state residents.

That’s how Louisiana’s system works. In theory, at least.

A Leaky Process

The reality is quite different and much more opaque.

An analysis of Coast Guard National Response Center data by ProPublica and The Times-Picayune and The Advocate shows that Louisiana out-spills every other state. In some years, it has as much as 10 times the number of crude oil spills into water reported as in other oil-producing states like Texas, California, Oklahoma and Alaska. This amounts to around 1,000 spills into Louisiana waters every year, though most are small. Nearly a quarter of these spills are due to an ongoing leak by Taylor Energy, reported every weekday, but even without these, the state still far outspills every other.

Since its creation in 1991, LOSCO has settled assessments for 24 spills. No method exists for the public to track individual spills through the assessment process, how many spills are being addressed, or at what stage they leak out of the system.

Unless citizens monitor the National Response Center database, or the Coast Guard announces the spill in a press release, the public only learns that a spill has occurred when a notice of intent to restore the habitats is released. That, in turn, only happens after a spill has made it through the damage assessment pipeline. If the spills never gets assessed, a public notice is never filed.

No such notices have been filed for the 2005 spills. A list of 407 spills from Katrina and Rita, down from the original count of 540 for unexplained reasons, sits cued up in a spreadsheet on Debusschere’s computer — unevaluated, unresolved and unremediated.

All these years later, the only way Debusschere figures she can still evaluate the impacts is to work with scientists to build a computer model to simulate damages. She says she has no idea when that effort might be complete.

LOSCO did complete preliminary assessments for at least some of the 2005 spills, as well as some modeling of the damage. But none of it has been released to the public and Morris declined to share it with a reporter, saying it was a work in progress.

There is limited baseline data on the natural, pre-spill state of the environment along Louisiana’s coastline, making it hard to accurately estimate the ecological damage.

And it’s even harder now. The oil that fouled Louisiana’s waters in the summer of 2005 has long since dispersed or settled into the marsh mud. The plants, pelicans, fish and otters that might have been affected are gone.

“You know, the natural environment is always changing,” Henry explained. “There’s some studies on turtles and marine mammals you can draw from, for example, but none of them are comprehensive. And none of them are current, because maybe they were all done five, 10 years ago.”

That’s not how it’s done in Alaska. According to Henry, after the Valdez spill, the state of Alaska started requiring oil companies to document the condition of the environment at the desired site before issuing a drilling permit, ensuring that if a spill does occur, the damage can be measured.

The outdated data available for Louisiana, on the other hand, has been collected at the state’s expense, most of it only after the latest massive disaster.

Knocked Off Track

Debusschere said that LOSCO was making progress before the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig gushed 134 million gallons of crude into the Gulf. She blames the BP spill for knocking the agency off track in processing the Katrina-era spills.

“It kind of sucked up the room,” Morris, the LOSCO attorney, said. “It’s the same folks on both sides, you know, all got engaged to work on Deepwater Horizon.”

Still, critics wonder why LOSCO hadn’t completed any of the 2005 work before the BP spill.

“There should have been some kind of action in the late 2006, 2007 period,” said Malek-Wiley of the Sierra Club. “A year after Katrina, things had settled down significantly. I think the oil response team should have been moving forward with environmental damage claims.”

During that 4 1/2-year lull between Gulf oil catastrophes, LOSCO did finish damage assessments for five small oil spills that occurred before Katrina. Two of them dated to the late 1990s. For one of these, remediation efforts are ongoing.

The BP disaster may have actually helped streamline the processing of both past and future spills at LOSCO by coalescing a network of experts who now have extensive experience evaluating oil damage to Gulf habitats, Morris said.

It also made a powerful argument for more resources. At the time Katrina hit, LOSCO only had five employees working response and damage assessment and an annual operating budget of just over $5 million. Today, LOSCO has 19 people handling those duties, and its budget has had a modest increase, to $7.5 million.

Resorting to Civil Litigation

Where LOSCO’s small team has failed to fully assess the harm caused by a single spill from Katrina or Rita, some damages from a 2005 spill have been resolved through civil litigation.

In 2009, a class-action lawsuit against Murphy Oil Corp. ended in a settlement requiring the company to pay $330 million to 6,200 claimants, including owners of about 1,800 homes in St. Bernard Parish. The damage occurred when one of Murphy’s storage tanks floated off its foundation during Katrina and dumped over a million gallons of crude oil into a square-mile segment of Meraux and Chalmette.

Paul Thibodeaux, the lawyer who represented Murphy Oil, called the incident “the largest environmental disaster [of Katrina] that affected people directly.”

Thibodeaux thinks that similar lawsuits against companies that spilled oil farther out along the coastline were never pursued because there weren’t enough plaintiffs in these rural areas to land a lucrative settlement.

But even in the areas affected by the Murphy Oil spill, many owners of damaged properties could not be located. In a flooded post-Katrina neighborhood, few left forwarding addresses.

In 2007, the EPA fined the same Murphy Oil facility $395,313 in civil penalties plus $1.5 million in cleanup costs after a large benzene leak. That case was settled in April 2019. But there has been no official accountability for the 1 million-plus gallon oil spill that occurred in 2005.

Debusschere says Murphy Oil’s million-gallon spill will be included in LOSCO’s modeling of Katrina and Rita damages.

Murphy Oil officials did not return several voicemail messages seeking comment.

Malek-Wiley notes that there are simple methods to secure an oil tank in place when a hurricane is on the way.

“If you know a hurricane is coming, you fill your tanks with additional water to make them heavier so they won’t shift. Murphy didn’t do that, and their tanks shifted, allowing the oil to come out,” Malek-Wiley said.

Murphy wasn’t the only company to make such a mistake.

The largest single spill of the 2005 hurricanes occurred when tanks owned by Bass Enterprises succumbed to strong winds and tides, spilling 3.8 million gallons of crude oil into Cox Bay, on the Mississippi’s east bank between Port Sulphur and Empire in Plaquemines Parish. It was four times larger than the Murphy spill.

The EPA’s database on environmental violation enforcement, ECHO, does not report any action against Bass Enterprises since the company paid a $1,760 fine for an unrelated violation in 2003. Bass Enterprises declined to comment.

Despite the hurricane danger, Louisiana doesn’t specifically mandate that oil companies weigh or bolt down their tanks. According to Dwight Bradshaw, a senior environmental scientist at the DEQ, you just can’t protect against some storm-related spills.

“Down at the Bass Cox Bay spill, you had 18 to 20 feet of water,” Bradshaw said. “It’s the laws of physics. Oil is lighter than water, so those tanks are gonna be lifted off their foundations. It’s an act of God. So, they’re not responsible.”

Under state and federal laws, oil companies are supposed to have risk management plans in place for so-called act of God events like hurricanes. But it’s not clear how many do have such plans. Bradshaw said that the DEQ makes site visits and can ask to see the written plans anytime, but that the companies are not required to file anything.

Environmental activists worry that the failure to hold anyone accountable for the 2005 spills sends the wrong message.

“To the extent that fines are supposed to be disincentives for behavior, it’s a failure of the system,” Cochran of the Environmental Defense Fund said. “If I get a speeding ticket but I don’t have to pay it, I probably won’t slow down.”

“Acts of God”

While natural resource damage assessments stagnate and civil cases fail to find plaintiffs, some claims from oil companies have moved more quickly.

To date, more than $19 million has been paid out from the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to reimburse at least two oil companies for costs they incurred cleaning up oil they spilled during Katrina and Rita. According to U.S. Coast Guard documents, those expenses include $38,000 for an oil recovery barge that succumbed to hurricane turbulence and $16.5 million in oil recovery costs that resulted when debris from a hurricane-damaged drilling platform punctured an oil transport tank.

Decades ago, Mark Schleifstein and his colleagues exposed environmental threats coming out of industrial plants all along the Louisiana section of the Mississippi River. A lot of those plants never went away, and even more are moving in.

Since 2000, at least 28 hurricanes or tropical storms have made landfall in Louisiana — an average of more than one per year. But still they are treated by the state as unforeseeable events.

Adam Babich, former director of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, said Louisiana has had a more liberal application of the act of God defense than other states or federal courts. He explained that while the act of God defense does not usually release oil companies from liability, it can weaken arguments to hold them accountable.

“We don’t normally penalize [companies] for act of God events,” Greg Langley of the DEQ said. “We just get right to remediation.”

Don Imus, Made and Betrayed by his Mouth, Dead at 79

COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Disc jockey Don Imus, whose career was made and then undone by his acid tongue during a decades-long rise to radio stardom and an abrupt public plunge after a nationally broadcast racial slur, has died. He was 79.

Imus died Friday morning at Baylor Scott and White Medical Center in College Station, Texas, after being hospitalized since Christmas Eve, according to a statement issued by his family. Deirdre, his wife of 25 years, and his son Wyatt, 21, were at his side, and his son Lt Zachary Don Cates was returning from military service overseas.

Imus survived drug and alcohol woes, a raunchy appearance before President Clinton and several firings during his long career behind the microphone. But he was vilified and eventually fired after describing a women’s college basketball team as “nappy headed hos.”

His April 2007 racist and misogynist crack about the mostly black Rutgers squad, an oft-replayed 10-second snippet, crossed a line that Imus had long straddled as his rants catapulted him to prominence. The remark was heard coast to coast on 60 radio stations and the MSNBC cable network.

Despite repeated apologies, Imus — just 10 years earlier named one of Time Magazine’s 25 most influential Americans — became a pariah for a remark that he acknowledged was “completely inappropriate … thoughtless and stupid.”

His radio show, once home to presidential hopefuls, political pundits and platinum-selling musicians, was yanked eight days later by CBS Radio. But the shock jock enjoyed the last financial laugh when he collected a reported multimillion dollar settlement of his five-year contract with the company.

Imus’ unsparing on-air persona was tempered by his off-air philanthropy, raising more than $40 million for groups including the CJ Foundation for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He ran a New Mexico ranch for dying children, and often used his radio show to “solicit” guests for donations.

A pediatric medical center bearing Imus’ name was opened at the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey.

Imus, born on a Riverside, California cattle ranch, was the oldest of two boys — his brother Fred later became an “Imus In the Morning” show regular. The family moved to Flagstaff, Ariz., where Imus joined the Marines before taking jobs as a freight train brakeman and uranium miner.

Only at age 28 did he appear on the airwaves. His caustic persona, though it would later serve him well, was initially a problem: Imus was canned by a small station in Stockton, Calif., uttering the word “hell.”

The controversy only enhanced his career, a pattern that continued throughout the decades.

Imus, moving to larger California stations, earned Billboard’s “Disc Jockey of the Year” award for medium-sized markets after a stunt where he ordered 1,200 hamburgers to go from a local McDonald’s.

His next stop was Cleveland, where he won DJ of the year for large markets. By 1971, he was doing the morning drive-time show on WNBC-AM in New York, the nation’s largest and most competitive radio market. Imus brought along a destructive taste for vodka, along with a growing reputation for irascibility.

In 1977, Imus was ignominiously dismissed by WNBC and dispatched to the relative anonymity of Cleveland. Within two years, though, he turned disaster into triumph, returning to New York and adding a new vice: cocaine. While his career turned around, his first marriage (which produced four daughters) fell apart.

Imus struggled with addiction until a 1987 stint at a Florida alcohol rehabilitation center, coming out just as WNBC became the fledgling all-sports station WFAN — which retained Imus’ non-sports show as its morning anchor.

Imus’ career again soared. Time Magazine named Imus one of the 25 Most Influential People in America, and he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. His show began simulcasting on cable’s MSNBC in September 1996.

In the decade before his “nappy headed hos” debacle, Imus redefined his show by mixing his comedy segments with A-list guests: politicians (Sen. John Kerry and Sen. John McCain), journalists (NBC-TV’s Tim Russert and The New York Times’ Frank Rich), musicians (Harry Connick Jr. and John Mellencamp).

A book plug on Imus’ show guaranteed sales, and authors were soon queuing up for a slot on the show.

But he rarely missed a chance to get in trouble, even in the good times. He engaged in a long-running feud with shock jock Howard Stern, who usurped Imus’ position as the No. 1 morning host in New York City.

And he outraged guests at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner in 1996, cracking wise about President Clinton’s extramarital activities as the first lady sat stone-faced nearby. “We all know you’re a pot-smoking weasel,” Imus said at another point about Clinton.

A White House spokesman called Imus’ bit “fairly tasteless.”

One year later, he was sued by a Manhattan judge after ripping the jurist on air as a “creep” and “a senile old dirtbag.” Critics carped over the show’s content, with Imus’ claim that he was an all-inclusive offender deflecting most complaints — although one show regular was fired in 2005 after a particularly vile crack about cancer-stricken singer Kylie Minogue.

A February 2006 profile in Vanity Fair contained the quote that might best serve as Imus’ epitaph.

“I talk to millions of people every day,” he said while riding home in a limousine after one show. “I just like it when they can’t talk back.”

Imus remarried in December 1994, to the former Deirdre Coleman. They had one son, Wyatt.

NYC Ups Policing in Jewish Areas After Spate of Attacks

NEW YORK — New York City is increasing its police presence in some Brooklyn neighborhoods with large Jewish populations after a string of possibly anti-Semitic attacks during the Hanukkah holiday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said after the latest episode happened Friday.

Besides making officers more visible in Borough Park, Crown Heights and Williamsburg, police will boost visits to houses of worship and some other places, the mayor tweeted.

“I feel pained that in this society, a place that is supposed to be of respect for everybody, a season when we’re supposed to be respecting everybody, we see hate rearing its very ugly head. We will not accept it,” the Democrat said during a visit later Friday to Crown Heights, where he met with some representatives of the local Jewish community.

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Around the city, police have gotten at least six reports this week — and eight since Dec. 13 — of attacks possibly propelled by anti-Jewish bias.

“It’s something that’s very alarming, and we treat it very seriously,” police Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison said at a news conference Friday.

The attacks have happened as Jewish communities in the New York City metro area were already on edge after a deadly Dec. 10 shooting rampage at a northern New Jersey kosher market. New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said the attack was driven by hatred of Jews and law enforcement.

“The persistent and violent anti-Semitic attacks on Jews in the New York area has reached a crisis level,” Eric Goldstein, the CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, said Friday. The organization is a large Jewish charity.

The latest incident happened around 12:40 a.m. Friday, when a woman slapped three other women in the face and head after encountering them on a Crown Heights corner, police said. The victims, who range in age from 22 to 31, suffered minor pain, police said.

Tiffany Harris, 30, was arrested on a hate-crime harassment charge. She was awaiting arraignment Friday. It wasn’t clear whether she had a lawyer who could comment on the charges, and no working telephone numbers for Harris could immediately be found.

Her arrest came hours after a hate crime assault arrest in Brooklyn’s Gravesend neighborhood. There, according to police and court documents, a woman was hit in the head with a bag by an attacker who jumped in front of her, made anti-Semitic comments and vowed that “your end is coming to you” Thursday afternoon. The victim, 34, was with her 3-year-old son.

The suspect, Ayana Logan, 42, was freed on supervised release after being arraigned Friday.

Her lawyer, Lauren Katzman, said she believed authorities were overreaching in casting the case as a hate crime.

“Ms. Logan is not guilty, and I look forward to fighting the case for her in court,” Katzman said.

On Monday, a Miami man was charged with hate-crime assault after police said he made an anti-Semitic remark and attacked a man in midtown Manhattan. The 65-year-old victim was punched and kicked, suffering cuts, police said.

He had been wearing a yarmulke, according to former state Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who has founded a group dedicated to combating anti-Semitism.

Steven Jorge, 28, is being held without bail, and a judge ordered a psychiatric exam for him, court records show. A message was left Friday for Jorge’s lawyer.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo told a state hate crimes task force to help police investigate the attack, calling it “a horrific and cowardly act of anti-Semitism.”

“It’s even more despicable that it occurred over the holidays,” the Democratic governor said in a statement Wednesday. Hanukkah began Sunday.

The New York Police Department’s Hate Crime Task Force is also investigating some other episodes this week as possibly motivated by anti-Semitism:

— Officers were told that two boys, ages 6 and 7, were accosted by a group of people while getting off an elevator in a Williamsburg apartment building Monday night, and one of the boys was hit, Harrison said. The attackers fled.

— A 25-year-old man told police he was walking on a Crown Heights street early Tuesday when a group of people started yelling anti-Semitic slurs at him and one threw a beverage at him. The suspects fled.

— Later Tuesday in Crown Heights, a 56-year-old man said that a group of people approached him, and that one of them punched him, while he was walking. No arrests have been made.

___

Associated Press writer Michael R. Sisak contributed to this report.

William Greider’s Blistering Critiques of Capitalism Will Be Sorely Missed

In 1981, William Greider, who died this week, wrote “The Education of David Stockman,” an essay for The Atlantic that, as Katherine Q. Seeley wrote in her New York Times obituary, “caused a national uproar.” Greider, through his own analysis, and careful, direct questioning over a series of interviews, got Reagan’s budget director, David Stockton, to admit that the president’s vision of low taxes for corporations and the rich had caused immense confusion, even within Reagan’s own administration. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” Stockton admitted to Greider.

The quote, Stockton later admitted, got him “taken to the woodshed” by Reagan, who was unsurprisingly dismayed to read his close adviser admitting to flawed economic policies. It also cemented Greider’s reputation as an incisive, clear-eyed journalist willing to speak truth to power. It was a role he’d continue to play for years, as a writer and editor for multiple outlets, including Rolling Stone, The Nation and The Washington Post, where he was, at various times, national correspondent, an assistant managing editor for national news and a columnist.

Greider died Wednesday, leaving a legacy of articles, books and documentaries that revealed the inner workings of political and economic power in America, offering sharp criticism of our capitalist system, and even more importantly, a vision for how to improve it.

In the year after the Atlantic essay, Greider wrote a book, “The Education of David Stockman and Other Americans” (1982), using the essay as a jumping-off point for a broader critique of Reaganomics. Since the 2016 election Reagan has received a rosy reception among establishment Democrats; perhaps his style of slashing social programs for the poor is more palatable to them than Trump’s. Even former President Obama called Reagan a patriot, and said in 2008 that “Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” Greider’s work is a stark reminder of the perils of that revisionist history.

Other well-known Greider books include “One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism” (1997), an early look at the perils of globalization; “Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country” (1987), which challenged the idea that the Federal Reserve should relentlessly fight inflation; “Who Will Tell The People: The Betrayal of American Democracy” (1993), which Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel called “the bible for small-d democrats”; and “The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy” (2003).

Perhaps Greider was able to challenge conservative orthodoxy so well because he once was one. “I grew up a conservative Republican in the Robert Taft mold,” Greider told the Princeton Alumni Review in 2009. “What changed me was after graduation, when I went out as a reporter and quickly began to experience the broader world. That led me to appreciate things I had once despised, such as the New Deal and liberal economics.”

Annie Shields, who edited Greider’s blog at The Nation, called him “a political early alert system,” who saw clearly, when others didn’t, how Trump could easily beat Hillary Clinton, in an article whose title suggested just that. Within that piece, as he did many times, Greider warned Democrats of the dangers of relying on the centrism of the Third Way and New Democrats popular during the Clinton administration:

The nation’s circumstances cry out for bold and radical departures from the past. So far, Hillary has mostly stayed with careful, baby-step gestures. She has only a few months to clean house and change all that. New Dems have passed their sell-by date.

In her tribute to Greider, vanden Heuvel offers addition examples of that “early alert system” foresight:

He was prescient in forecasting the disasters of corporate globalization, the financial crisis of 2008, the ramifying influence of Occupy. He was early, and clearthroated, in calling for banksters to be held accountable; he laid out realistic and visionary alternatives to capitalism; he argued against endless wars, always understanding that America’s role as global policeman undermined democracy at home.

For his prescience, his willingness to speak truth to power, and the unparalleled interviewing skills that got a Reagan adviser in trouble, William Greider is our (sadly departed) Truthdigger of the Month.

Bernie Sanders Faces the Democratic Establishment’s Wrath

A central premise of conventional media wisdom has collapsed. On Thursday, both the New York Times and Politico published major articles reporting that Bernie Sanders really could win the Democratic presidential nomination. Such acknowledgments will add to the momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign as the new year begins—but they foreshadow a massive escalation of anti-Sanders misinformation and invective.

Throughout 2019, corporate media routinely asserted that the Sanders campaign had little chance of winning the nomination. As is so often the case, journalists were echoing each other more than paying attention to grassroots realities. But now, polling numbers and other indicators on the ground are finally sparking very different headlines from the media establishment.

From the Times: “Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat.” From Politico: “Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win the Nomination.”

Those stories, and others likely to follow in copycat news outlets, will heighten the energies of Sanders supporters and draw in many wavering voters. But the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign’s chances will surely boost the decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority.

For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of disparaging and minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn’t work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore attacks.

Along the way, the corporate media will occasionally give voice to some Sanders defenders and supporters. A few establishment Democrats will decide to make nice with him early in the year. But the overwhelming bulk of Sanders media coverage—synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party—will range from condescending to savage.

When the Bernie campaign wasn’t being ignored by corporate media during 2019, innuendos and mud often flew in his direction. But we ain’t seen nothing yet.

With so much at stake—including the presidency and the top leadership of the Democratic Party—no holds will be barred. For the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it’ll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign.

While reasons for pessimism are abundant, so are ample reasons to understand that a Sanders presidency is a real possibility. The last places we should look for political realism are corporate media outlets that distort options and encourage passivity.

Bernie is fond of quoting a statement from Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it is done.”

From the grassroots, as 2020 gets underway, the solution should be clear: All left hands on deck.

The Mega-Rich Accumulated an Outrageous Sum in 2019

The 500 richest people in the world, all of whom are billionaires, gained a combined $1.2 trillion in wealth in 2019, further exacerbating inequities that have not been seen since the late 1920s.

That’s according to a new Bloomberg analysis published Friday, which found that the planet’s 500 richest people saw their collective net worth soar by 25 percent to $5.9 trillion over the last year.

“In the U.S., the richest 0.1 percent control a bigger share of the pie than at any time since 1929,” Bloomberg noted. “The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg ranking added $500 billion, with Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg up $27.3 billion and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates [rising] $22.7 billion.”

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, eight of the 10 richest people in the world are from the U.S.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos lost nearly $9 billion in wealth in 2019, according to Bloomberg, but he will still likely end the year as the richest man in the world with a total net worth of $116 billion.

The analysis comes as 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, particularly Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have made tackling inequality a key component of their policy platforms.

Warren has proposed an annual two percent tax on assets over $50 million and a three percent tax on assets above $1 billion.

Sanders, who has said he does not believe billionaires should exist, is calling for a wealth tax that would slash the fortunes of U.S. billionaires in half over 15 years, according to his campaign.

“A small handful of billionaires should not be able to accumulate more money than they could spend in 10 lifetimes,” Sanders said in September, “while millions of Americans are living in poverty and dying because they can’t afford healthcare.”

‘Mame,’ ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Composer Jerry Herman Dies at 88

Tony Award-winning composer Jerry Herman, who wrote the cheerful, good-natured music and lyrics for such classic shows as “Mame,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage aux Folles,” died Thursday. He was 88.

His goddaughter Jane Dorian confirmed his death to The Associated Press early Friday. He died of pulmonary complications in Miami, where he had been living with his partner, real estate broker Terry Marler.

The creator of 10 Broadway shows and contributor to several more, Herman won two Tony Awards for best musical: “Hello, Dolly!” in 1964 and “La Cage aux Folles” in 1983. He also won two Grammys — for the “Mame” cast album and “Hello, Dolly!” as song of the year — and was a Kennedy Center honoree. He had three original Broadway productions playing at the same time from February 1969 to May 1969.

Tributes poured in Friday from Broadway royalty, including from Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book of “La Cage aux Folles” alongside Herman’s songs. “We lost one of the greats,” Fierstein tweeted. “A collaborator and friend for almost 40 years. I cannot thank him enough for his love, trust, encouragement, support and laughter.” Writer and host Seth Rudetsky honored Herman for writing “quintessential Broadway songs. Beautiful melodies and fantastic lyrics.”

Herman wrote in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition, an optimistic composer at a time when others in his profession were exploring darker feelings and material. Just a few of his song titles revealed his depth of hope: “I’ll Be Here Tomorrow,” “The Best of Times,” “Tap Your Troubles Away,” “It’s Today,” “We Need a Little Christmas” and “Before the Parade Passes By.” Even the title song to “Hello, Dolly!” is an advertisement to enjoy life.

Herman also had a direct, simple sense of melody and his lyrics had a natural, unforced quality. Over the years, he told the AP in 1995, “critics have sort of tossed me off as the popular and not the cerebral writer, and that was fine with me. That was exactly what I aimed at.”

In accepting the Tony in 1984 for “La Cage Aux Folles,” Herman said, “This award forever shatters a myth about the musical theater. There’s been a rumor around for a couple of years that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway. Well, it’s alive and well at the Palace” Theatre.

Some saw that phrase — “the simple, hummable show tune” — as a subtle dig at Stephen Sondheim, known for challenging and complex songs and whose “Sunday in the Park with George” Herman had just bested. But Herman rejected any tension between the two musical theater giants.

“Only a small group of ‘showbiz gossips’ have constantly tried to create a feud between Mr. Sondheim and myself. I am as much of a Sondheim fan as you and everybody else in the world, and I believe that my comments upon winning the Tony for ‘La Cage’ clearly came from my delight with the show business community’s endorsement of the simple melodic showtune which had been criticized by a few hard-nosed critics as being old fashioned,” he said in a 2004 Q&A session with readers of Broadway.com.

Playwright Paul Rudnick on Friday praised Herman for providing “such joy.” And director and choreographer Matthew Bourne said Herman’s “feel-good shows full of melody and joy will live forever.” Bernadette Peters, Elaine Paige and Carolee Carmello also mourned his passing.

Herman was born in New York in 1931 and raised in Jersey City. His parents ran a children’s summer camp in the Catskills and he taught himself the piano. He noted that when he was born, his mother had a view of Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre marquee from her hospital bed.

Herman dated his intention to write musicals to the time his parents took him to “Annie Get Your Gun” and he went home and played five of Irving Berlin’s songs on the piano.

“I thought what a gift this man has given a stranger. I wanted to give that gift to other people. That was my great inspiration, that night,” he told The Associated Press in 1996.

After graduating from the University of Miami, Herman headed back to New York, writing and playing piano in a jazz club. He made his Broadway debut in 1960 contributing songs to the review “From A to Z” — alongside material by Fred Ebb and Woody Allen — and the next year tackled the entire score to a musical about the founding of the state of Israel, “Milk and Honey.” It earned him his first Tony nomination.

“Hello, Dolly!” starring Carol Channing opened in 1964 and ran for 2,844 performances, becoming Broadway’s longest-running musical at the time. It won 10 Tonys and has been revived many times, most recently in 2017 with Bette Midler in the title role, a 19th-century widowed matchmaker who learns to live again.

“Mame” followed in 1966, starring Angela Lansbury, and went on to run for over 1,500 performances. She handed him his Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, saying he created songs like him: “bouncy, buoyant and optimistic.”

In 1983 he had another hit with “La Cage aux Folles,” a sweetly radical musical of its age, decades before the fight for marriage equality. It was a lavish adaptation of the successful French film about two gay men who own a splashy, drag nightclub on the Riviera. It contained the gay anthem “I Am What I Am” and ran for some 1,760 performances. Three of his shows, “Dear World,” “The Grand Tour” and “Mack and Mabel,” failed on Broadway.

Many of his songs have outlasted their vehicles: British ice skaters Torvill and Dean used the overture from “Mack and Mabel” to accompany a gold medal-winning routine in 1982. Writer-director Andrew Stanton used the Herman tunes “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment” to express the psyche of a love-starved, trash-compacting robot in the film “WALL-E.”

Later in life, Herman composed a song for “Barney’s Great Adventure,” contributed the score for the 1996 made-for-TV movie “Mrs. Santa Claus” — earning Herman an Emmy nomination — and wrote his autobiography, “Showtune,” published by Donald I. Fine.

“There has been no other music which took our breath away, that made us hum and cheer and respect ourselves more than a majestic Jerry Herman musical,” said Dorian.

He is survived by his partner, Marler, and his goddaughters — Dorian and Dorian’s own daughter, Sarah Haspel. Dorian said plans for a memorial service are still in the works for the man whose songs she said “are always on our lips and in our hearts.”

___

AP reporters Lynn Elber in Los Angeles and Mallika Sen in New York contributed to this report.

12 Killed, Dozens Hurt After Jetliner Crashes in Kazakhstan

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — A jetliner with 98 people aboard struggled to get airborne and crashed shortly after takeoff Friday in Kazakhstan, killing at least 12 people, authorities said.

The Bek Air jet, identified as a 23-year-old Fokker 100, hit a concrete wall and a two-story building soon after departing from Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city and former capital, airport officials said.

The aircraft’s tail also struck the runway twice during takeoff, indicating that it struggled to get off the ground, Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar said.

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Fifty-four people people were reported hospitalized with injuries, at least 10 of them in critical condition, officials said.

The cause of the predawn crash was unclear. Authorities quickly suspended all Bek Air and Fokker 100 flights in Kazakhstan while the investigation got underway.

One survivor said the plane started shaking less than two minutes after takeoff.

“At first, the left wing jolted really hard, then the right. The plane continued to gain altitude, shaking quite severely, and then went down,” Aslan Nazaraliyev told The Associated Press by phone.

Government officials said the jet underwent de-icing before the flight, but Nazaraliyev recalled that its wings were covered in ice, and passengers who used emergency exits over the wings slipped and fell. The weather in Almaty was clear, with temperatures just below freezing. The plane was flying to Nur-Sultan, the capital formerly known as Astana.

Video footage showed the front of the broken-up fuselage rammed against a building and the rear of the plane lying in a field next to the airport.

Passengers who survived may have been saved by the fact that the plane crashed at a lower speed and from a lower altitude because it was taking off, and it came down in terrain that may have eased the impact.

“The lower the speed, the lower the energy, and the fact that it lands on things that might not tear it up so much” all play a role, said Adrian Young, senior aviation consultant at the To70 consultancy in the Netherlands.

Cold weather may have helped prevent fire, Young said.

The plane built in 1996 included safety features that have increased passenger survival chances since the mid-1980s. Those features include stronger cabins less likely to crush or break apart and interior materials less apt to catch fire or emit toxic smoke.

“The more modern the aircraft you are sitting in, the better chance you have of escaping the accident,” Young said.

Local authorities initially put the death toll at 15, but the interior ministry later revised the figure downward.

Officials in the Almaty branch of the health ministry could not explain why the figure was revised. They attributed the confusion to “agitation” at the site of the crash.

In a statement on its Facebook page, the airport said there was no fire, and a rescue operation began immediately.

Around 1,000 people were working at the snow-covered crash site. Dozens more in Almaty lined up at a local blood bank to donate for the injured.

The government promised to pay families of the dead around $10,000 each.

The Fokker 100 is a mid-sized, twin-engine jet. The company that manufactured it went bankrupt in 1996, and production stopped the following year.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev ordered an inspection of all airlines and aviation infrastructure in the country. Eighteen passenger airlines and four cargo carriers are currently registered in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic.

Kazakhstan’s air-safety record is far from spotless. In 2009, all Kazakh airlines — with the exception of the flagship carrier Air Astana — were banned from operating in the European Union because they did not meet international safety standards. The ban was lifted in 2016.

___

Litvinova reported from Moscow. Associated Press Writer David McHugh contributed from Frankfurt, Germany.