The Question
Are nonstick pans safe to cook with?
Talking Points
- MH17 prosecutors laid blame at the feet of Vladimir Putin
- Russia pressed its bloody offensive in eastern Ukraine
- Rishi Sunak pondered sending fighter jets to Ukraine
- Met rapist David Carrick was jailed for life
- France to require a 'digital certificate' to view online pornography
- Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf died
- Wikipedia was briefly blocked in Pakistan
- Hong Kong's national security trial opened
- Nissan and Renault tore up Carlos Ghosn's legacy
- Twitter struggled to remove child abuse material
Deep Dive
Entire regions of Turkey and Syria lie in ruins after Monday's catastrophic earthquakes. As the death toll soars, the clear gap is opening in how the world responds to these beleagured nations.
A perfect industrialist
Seismologists knew this quake was coming. They knew it would hit Turkey’s Hatay, Kilis, and Gaziantep provinces, as well as Syria’s Aleppo, Idlib, and Latakia governorates. The dazzling topography of the broader region is a result of the glacial violence below the crust. Here the Arabian and Anatolian plates collide; grinding against one another as the plates move horizontally. The friction is constant. The pressure builds inexorably. And roughly once every 150 years, it is released. When the Eastern Anatolian Fault Zone unclenches, the surface convulses. It has been reported that the energy released on Monday was equivalent to 8 million tonnes of TNT: double the cumulative explosive power of every bomb dropped in the Second World War.
The first earthquake — a 7.8 magnitude monster — struck at 4:17am. Everyone was asleep, save for the bakers, shift workers, and strolling insomniacs. It burst shallow — just 11km below the surface, not even an hour's drive from Gaziantep. That's a city of 2 million, a sprawl of cookie-cutter apartment blocks that anyone who's visited Turkey would be familiar with. The ubiquitous blocks, home to hundreds, were shaken in a death rattle. Entire communities were prised free from their foundations and brought to the ground in a burst of concrete dust and muffled screams. Cities pancaked. From the hilltop towns to the Mediterranean resorts, Turkey was throttled.
The second quake, the word aftershock doesn’t quite capture the ferocity of this 7.5 magnitude event, hit after lunch. The sun had risen on a cold winter day and the horror was clear. More buildings collapsed like sandcastles — this time caught for posterity by film crews and first responders.
As of Friday Turkey tallied 20,000 dead. It is the deadliest earthquake since Haiti in 2010 and Turkey’s worst in nearly a century. Tens of thousands of rescue workers are flooding into the region to pick through the wreckage amid freezing temperatures. They face a swathe of flattened civilisation that stretches over 450 km . The death toll will continue climbing. The few stories that we cling onto in a crisis — a newborn baby rescued from under the rubble, an elderly man stayed alive, pinned for 80 hours — are already sparse and petering out. After the 72 hour mark , without water, the likelihood of survival plummets.
A tale of two crises
Relief is flowing into Turkey. Its huge diaspora is marshalling shipments of blankets, tents, and clothing. The World Bank has pledged $1.78bn from member states. Turkey, despite its cratered economy and parlous politics, is still part of the community of nations. It’s a NATO member after all. Help is on the way.
Syria faces a markedly different response. 11 years of civil war have shattered the country into zones of control and competing insurgencies. In Aleppo and Idlib province, the devastation has been complete. Nature finished the demolition that Syrian barrel bombs, Russian airstrikes, and Turkish artillery started. The streetscapes, or what were streetscapes, are identical to those in Turkey, but here there are neither brightly coloured rescue crews, nor heavy machinery. The Syrians are left to dig out their children, siblings, parents, and neighbours with bare hands. What help can be called on by the Turkish-funded death squads that rule Idlib province?
There are, of course, good reasons why Damascus is a pariah. It is only just taking the tentative steps to normalise relationships with other Arab nations. The relationships are simply not there to facilitate a peaceful army of rescue workers. Millions of Syrians already reliant on foreign aid in the north receive it by truck over the Turkish border. Those border regions are now themselves looking like warzones.
It’s natural to seek a silver lining to end a story like this. But the weight of human misery is profound. An earthquake should shake us enough to demand better, for those whom history and the international community has passed by.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you have the ability, you can find links to donate here .
Worldlywise
Winners and Losers
📈 Adult Harry Potter fans
It's been a banner week for one of the most annoying fandoms in existence. The voracious appetite for the live action role-playing game Hogwarts Legacy in its release week shows there is still juice to be squeezed from a rapidly-ageing audience that never quite left Hogwarts behind. One significant departure from the beloved novels and the fantasy of J.K. Rowling's world view is that trans people exist in it.
📈 Arsenal fans
The Premier League report into Manchester City's financial irregularities turned up 115 breaches across 14 seasons. The frequency and extent of the breaches could result in fines or docked points. The worst-case scenario for the Sky Blues is relegation. We can hear the gunners fans chortling over at Emirates Stadium.
📉 BP spin doctors
The British energy giant doubled its profit in 2022 : raking in £23bn thanks to the war in Ukraine. That figure has encouraged BP to decelerate its leisurely decarbonisation plans. The oil major had planned to halve Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030 (never you mind the other 90% of its carbon footprint in Scope 3 emissions). Now even this laughably unambitious goal could be at risk. Good luck to the external comms people whose job it is to justify, explain away, or simply glide over this obscenity.
📉 Globophobes
Many people live with an irrational fear of balloons. There are no completely reliable figures on the prevalence of globophobia but this week's news suggested at least 200 million of them in the continental United States. These poor people cannot tolerate being near a balloon for fear of it popping. Unfortunately, the United States Air Force revealed its globophobia blindspot when an F-22 pilot popped a giant Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. Sending our thoughts and prayers.
Highlights
The Image
The King rises. Photo supplied by A BC .
The Quote
"I've been thinking about what I've done in the past for a long time. To summarise it up in one sentence: I did it too quickly."
– He Jiankui reflects on the whole brouhaha around editing the genes of unborn twins. The mad scientist has had plenty of time to reflect while serving a three-year sentence for "illegal medical practices". In his first significant interview, He promised that Lulu and Nana were living "normal, peaceful, undisturbed" lives.
The Numbers
38,390 points
- When Kareem Abdul-Jabbar retired in 1989, he left a high bar behind. The one-that-got-away from the Bucks, Lakers icon, and moonlighting co-pilot, set a career scoring record of 38,387. This week LeBron James beat it . The boy anointed 'The Chosen One' in high school has somehow exceeded expectations. What's there left to say about the greatest (let's not bring MJ into this)? The King James bible is a 20-year testimony of relentless scoreboard pressure, preternatural skill, and swash.
$100bn whoopsie
- Google launched its own consumer-facing large language model this week but Bard fumbled its lines . The video promo for this ChatGPT-competitor gave an incorrect answer to a gimme question about the James Webb Space Telescope. Despite the fact that ChatGPT provides profoundly incorrect answers regularly, everyone briefly lost their minds: Google stock slid 9%.
The Headlines
"Church of England explores gender neutral God" — Reuters . Better give Plymouth Rock spruce.
"Jack could have survived, says Cameron as 'Titanic' re-released 25 years on"
— AFP . No duh.
The Special Mention
What the world needs now is Burt, sweet Burt .
The Most-Read Article
'The Real Obstacle to Nuclear Power'
The Best Long Reads
- Businessweek wants to have its peanuts and eat them too
- Foreign Policy digs in for a grisly assault
- Financial Times buys influence in the Central African Republic
Thomas Wharton
Senior Editor
The Answer...
The polyfluoroakyl substances (PFAS) used to manufacture that oh-so-satisfying lack of friction can be really, really, really bad for you . They don't really break down. The worst variants (PFOA and PFOS — science's answer to the question of whether there should be more cancer in the world) are no longer used in Teflon pans but the studies are inconclusive on other PFAS. The ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶ contextualising news is that PFAS is everywhere and has been for decades! There's not much point singling out your slippery skillet when it is already in your bloodstream.
