This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Dispatch from north-west Syria

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, February 15th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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Humanitarian aid is finally trickling into Syria after last week’s earthquake. Our correspondent visited the region and found utter devastation.

Raya Jalabi
I’ve never seen a place that, where hope has been completely abandoned in such a dramatic way.

Marc Filippino
And in Turkey, the earthquake disaster has turned a spotlight on decades of lax building regulation. But first, the latest US inflation numbers. I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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US inflation continued to cool. The latest data out yesterday showed that consumer prices grew 6.4 per cent in January, year on year. That’s a bit slower than the previous month, but not what the Federal Reserve and many others would have liked to see.

James Politi
Inflation is quite sticky. It’s not falling quite as rapidly as I think the Fed would want or even the White House would want.

Marc Filippino
That’s the FT’s James Politi. He says as for those interest rate cuts that some starry-eyed investors had been talking about . . . 

James Politi
Right, I think that that seems farfetched at the moment based on what we’ve seen from the inflation report but also what we saw from the jobs report earlier this month, which showed big gains in employment over the course of January, which showed a strong labour market. It shows that the US is likely to avoid a recession, at least in the near term, isn’t really even close to a recession. But on the other hand, sort of the whole point of the policy at the moment was to try to cool the economy, get inflation down. And that’s, that process just isn’t quite happening as quickly or naturally as some economists and investors had expected.

Marc Filippino
Stock prices fluttered a bit after the report came out, and the S&P 500 ended Tuesday flat.

James Politi
These kind of knee-jerk reactions, then investors are then kind of second guessing themselves, and we’re seeing a bit of a see-saw. I think that they’re adjusting to sort of a new reality in which the Fed might have to keep interest rates at higher levels for a longer period of time. And it feels like investors don’t quite know what to make of that.

Marc Filippino
James Politi is the FT’s Washington bureau chief.

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The death toll in Turkey and Syria after last week’s earthquake has reached nearly 40,000 people. Aid only started arriving in Syria yesterday. The FT’s Middle East correspondent Raya Jalabi was in north-west Syria to see what was happening. She was in a town called Jinderes.

Raya Jalabi
Jinderes is completely destroyed. You’ve got buildings, enormous concrete structures that have been completely collapsed. Entire neighbourhoods have been razed. We haven’t been able to get into this part of Syria for a very long time. And I was (deep exhale), it’s hard to convey the absolute devastation, the abject misery that people are living in over there.

Marc Filippino
Raya, how are people there coping?

Raya Jalabi
I’ve never seen a place that, where hope has been completely abandoned in such a dramatic way. People just look completely grief-stricken and shell-shocked and dazed and confused, and they were walking around completely unaware of their surroundings. It seems as though they weren’t even able to grapple with the enormity of what they had lost. People were just coming up to me because they thought that I was an aid worker able to provide something that they could, you know, whatever they needed. And they were coming up to me asking me for baby formula and clothes and blankets because they had nothing. They’re so poor over there that all of the savings and everything that they had cobbled together over 12 years of escaping throughout Syria and ending up in this corner of the country was gone.

Marc Filippino
Do you know why it took so long for aid to get through?

Raya Jalabi
The UN can only distribute aid via one crossing point. And that crossing point was damaged during the earthquake. So it took four days for the repairs to get done. So for those four days, there was no aid being distributed at all. People said that they just felt completely abandoned by the west and completely abandoned by the world. They were even complaining that, you know, their Arab neighbours, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and others that hadn’t sent anything yet. And that felt like an ultimate betrayal to many of them.

Marc Filippino
Are there any images that stick out in your mind from your trip to Jinderes to give us a kind of a sense of what’s happening there?

Raya Jalabi
You know, driving in, you see, the area is sort of historically known for producing olive oil. And they have these beautiful olive groves all over the place. But since the earthquake, you’ve had reams of people just with nowhere to go, just sitting amongst the olive trees because it sort of provided them shelter. They don’t even have tents or anything. They’re just sitting under these trees. And if this were the summer, it would seem like they were there for, you know, working the fields. But instead they were just sort of cowering in fear.

Marc Filippino
Raya Jalabi is the FT’s Middle East correspondent.

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Meanwhile, in Turkey, many people say that shoddy building construction has added to the high death toll. People are increasingly angry at the government for tolerating poor construction practices. The FT’s Adam Samson is in Ankara, and he says Turkey’s government allowed developers to flout regulations for decades.

Adam Samson
There have been these amnesty programmes that they’ve basically allowed faults in buildings to be forgiven, going back all the way to the late 1940s. It’s been a very popular sort of pre-election measure. And what that has meant is something like 50 per cent of the housing stock in Turkey have some sort of fault, according to government estimate. So certainly it’s been a long, persistent problem. However, the Erdoğan government, just before the 2018 general elections, which he won, it had probably one of the broadest amnesties to date. The reason the government gave is they said, well, you know, half of Turkey’s housing stock has faults anyway. Let’s use this amnesty to kind of bring them into the fold in the hope that once they’re in it, basically they fix it. Certainly urban planners here that we talked to said they were worrying that this was a very, very dangerous idea even before it passed in 2018. And so certainly the government was warned repeatedly about this.

Marc Filippino
So, Adam, what do the experts say about how much this actually contributed to the death toll in the earthquake?

Adam Samson
Yeah, I think the people we talked to didn’t want to sort of make definitive statements on that. I think they’re waiting to see exactly how many of the buildings that fell down were subject to this amnesty. But everybody we’ve spoken to is very confident that it contributed to it. Turkey has other building-related issues anyway, things like not having sufficient inspections. Things like government loyalists getting building contracts for public building, that sort of thing. Some of the research we looked at also showed that two of the provinces that were worst hit were also among the provinces that filed the most applications for amnesties. So that’s a really, you know, strong early indication that these amnesties did play a role.

Marc Filippino
One opposition party leader said that the government has turned, quote, “houses into graves” because of the amnesty. It’s pretty strong language. How has the government responded to this?

Adam Samson
The government hasn’t said a huge amount directly in response. It’s been quite focused on its recovery effort, which it’s also been criticised for. So Erdoğan has come out over and over and said that the recovery effort is going well, that they’re doing absolutely everything they can to save the people. That should be the focus now. The opposition shouldn’t be turning this into a political moment, that sort of thing. But certainly, I think, this is gonna become a bigger and bigger political issue locally. And I think the government’s gonna have to explain, you know, in greater detail its rationale and indeed what it’s gonna do next because obviously this amnesty affected buildings all over the country, not just in the disaster area. And lots of parts of the country are very prone to earthquakes and particularly Istanbul, which is a city of 15mn people.

Marc Filippino
That’s the FT’s Adam Samson.

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Before we go, the global aviation industry just got a huge gust of wind under its wings. Air India has placed a jumbo order of 470 planes with Boeing and Airbus. Indians are taking to the skies again after the height of the pandemic. As for the price tag, Airbus is staying mum, but Boeing’s list price is $34bn. That would make Air India’s order the third largest sale in Boeing’s history.

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You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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