Trump Confidant Roger Stone Says He Saw Swirling 'Demon Portal' Above White House

Mary Papenfuss

Thu, December 15, 2022 

Long-time Donald Trump confidant and informal adviser Roger Stone insists he has witnessed a momentous phenomenon: A “demon portal” above President Joe Biden’s White House.

It’s “swirling like a cauldron,” he claimed in an interview earlier this week with conservative radio host Eric Metaxas — who pointed out that the observation by his guest “sounds insane.”

The portal — apparently a direct connection to hell and Satan — was first spotted months ago and even captured on film, according to Stone. “It’s still there,” he declared.

“I think that…a portal, a demonic portal, opened above the White House around the time that the Bidens moved in,” Stone said. “This was brought to my attention by a Christian who lives in north Florida who sent me a bunch of photos, a bunch of documents and also a bunch of notations from the Bible about portals.”

Stone said he was initially skeptical. But he has examined photos of the spot and scrutinized “live cam where you can actually see it in real-time, and there does appear to be something above the White House.”

He also insisted that a police friend of his had examined the spot above the White House, and told him: “You’re not going to believe this, but there’s definitely something there.”

Stone criticized the lack of coverage of the demon portal by the media, which “doesn’t cover a lot of things that are true.”

“The point of course is, prophets, who I do believe, and other holy men, have told me that only prayer can close the demonic portal,” he added. (Stone has said at rallies that God speaks directly to him about politics.) So he prays for that every night, he said.

“But there’s something going on there, there’s no question about it,” Stone emphasized.

Stone critics on social media had a very different take on the “portal.” One commenter on Reddit said the “demon hole” was Stone.

Stone was pardoned by Trump after he was convicted in 2019 of seven felonies, including obstruction of justice and witness tampering during the investigation into Kremlin interference in the 2016 presidential election. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison.

He’s now being investigated for his role in the violent Jan. 6 insurrection, and is furious Trump didn’t grant him a preemptive pardon in the event he’s charged with a crime linked to the storming of the Capitol last year.

He has admitted advising the violent Proud Boys for years.

Stone told the crew of the documentary “A Storm Foretold” a day before the 2020 election that he was ready for violence. “Fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence,” he’s heard saying in footage obtained by CNN from filmmakers Christoffer Guldbrandsen and Frederik Marbell. “Shoot to kill. See an antifa? Shoot to kill. Fuck ’em. Done with this bullshit.”

Despite his dark past, Stone has increasingly evoked God — and warned of his version of evil — in appearances at MAGA rallies.

  

DC disciplinary counsel says Rudy Giuliani's law license should be revoked because his 'misconduct' was 'so serious that it should never be allowed to happen again'

Sonam Sheth
Thu, December 15, 2022 


Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A prosecutor for the DC bar's Office of Disciplinary Counsel said Giuliani should be disbarred.

Hamilton Fox said Giuliani's "misconduct" after the 2020 election was "so serious that it should never be allowed to happen again."

The DC Board of Professional Responsibility made a preliminary finding that a lawsuit Giuliani filed in 2020 violated ethics rules.

A prosecutor for the Washington DC bar's Office of Disciplinary Counsel said Thursday that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's law license should be revoked.

Giuliani's "misconduct" after the 2020 election was "so serious that it should never be allowed to happen again," disciplinary counsel Hamilton Fox said.

The comments capped several days of disciplinary proceedings in which the Washington DC Board of Professional Responsibility debated imposing sanctions on Giuliani in connection to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The hearings stem from an ethics case brought by the ODC, which focuses on Giuliani's efforts to invalidate the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania, when he was then-President Donald Trump's personal attorney.

The ODC accused Giuliani of violating Pennsylvania's Rules of Professional Conduct by filing a "frivolous" lawsuit seeking to throw out millions of votes in Pennsylvania and engaging in "conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice."

The Board of Professional Responsibility determined in a preliminary finding Thursday that Giuliani violated at least one ethics rule by filing the legal challenge in Pennsylvania. The decision is not binding, and the hearing committee will release consider alternative sanctions proposals before putting out a report with a final recommendation.

"The lawsuit's asking courts to deprive voters of the right to vote, that's not common politics in this country," Fox said at the hearing. "This is not politics. They're trying to ignore the will of the voters. They're trying openly to ask a judge to disqualify, at minimum, 680,000 voters."

He added that "somebody has got a put a stop to" the "notion that anything goes, it's just politics. Anything goes, you just gotta win it."

"We are trying to deter people from engaging in this kind of misconduct," Fox said, referring to the ODC's request that Giuliani be disbarred. "And this miconduct is so serious that it should never be allowed to happen again."

"The one thing we can do to try to deter it is to impose the most serious sanction that can be imposed," he continued. "It's not politics. It is part of our duty as lawyers to make sure that people don't use their law licenses to undermine the Constitution of the United States, and disbarment is the only sanction for that."

Giuliani vehemently defended himself after Fox made his comments, accusing the disciplinary counsel of engaging in a "personal attack" without presenting proper evidence.

He also told Robert Bernius, the chairman of the panel overseeing the proceedings, that Fox's statements were an "outrage."

"Mr. Chairman, I would like to personally object to Mr. Fox's attack on me as having tried to undermine American democracy, when there's not a single fact in the record for that argument," Giuliani said. "He has raised no such argument to give us a chance to rebut it during this case. It is a typical or unethical cheap attack not supported by anything in the record, far more so than anything I alleged that you are questioning."

The former mayor struck a similar tone earlier in the proceedings, saying last week that he was "shocked and offended this is happening to me."

Read the original article on Business Insider

UNEXPECTED AND UNUSUAL FOR CHINA
Chinese firms avert delisting as U.S. audit watchdog gets full inspection access


The flags of the United States and China fly in Boston

Thu, December 15, 2022 at 7:32 AM MST·4 min read
By Chris Prentice, Xie Yu and Susan Heavey

NEW YORK/HONG KONG/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. accounting watchdog on Thursday said it has full access to inspect and investigate firms in China for the first time ever, removing the risk that around 200 Chinese companies could be kicked off U.S. stock exchanges.

The statement from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) marks a victory for U.S. regulators and a relief for Chinese firms, including Alibaba, facing delisting amid rocky relations between the world's largest economies. Washington and Beijing have been locked in a heated trade and technology war.

"For the first time in history, we are able to perform full and thorough inspections and investigations to root out potential problems and hold firms accountable to fix them,” said PCAOB Chair Erica Williams.

"This falls into the category of a game changing view of Chinese companies because the threat of their delisting seems to have been eliminated," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Financial.

However, the relief was not seen in Thursday's trading for U.S.-listed shares of Chinese companies, which were higher amid the news, but gave up gains and some ended sharply lower.

U.S.-traded shares of Ecommerce giants Alibaba, JD.com as well as internet behemoth Baidu were down between 3-5% while music streaming provider Tencent Music was down 3.5%, more than the broader market where the S&P 500 Index was down 2.5%. The iShares MSCI China ETF was down 2.2%.

There were some concerns voiced about what issues the audits might uncover.

Tim Ghriskey, senior portfolio strategist at Ingalls & Snyder, said the move should take "one of the risks, theoretically off the table of investing in them."

However any issues uncovered due to the more stringent accounting oversight "could be very bad for the sector, especially if there is then no effort to correct it or come clean," he said.

In its statement, the PCAOB said it exercised sole discretion to select firms for audit and had selected two, KPMG Huazhen LLP in China and PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong.

PCAOB staff identified "numerous potential deficiencies" in their inspection work, PCAOB's Williams said, saying the inspection reports will be finalized and made public next year.

"Today’s announcement should not be misconstrued in any way as a clean bill of health for firms in mainland China and Hong Kong," she said.

She declined to specify the types of deficiencies, but said they are in line with those audit inspectors have seen during first-time inspections elsewhere.

PATH TO AUDIT

The PCAOB, which oversees registered public accounting firms around the world, said late last year said that Chinese authorities had prevented the watchdog from completely inspecting and investigating in mainland China and Hong Kong.

Washington and Beijing reached a landmark deal in August to settle a long-running dispute over auditing compliance of U.S.-listed Chinese firms. Authorities in China have long been reluctant to let overseas regulators inspect local accounting firms, citing national security concerns.

U.S. lawmakers in 2020 agreed to legislation that would oust Chinese companies from U.S. stock exchanges unless they adhere to American auditing standards.

The deal granted PCAOB full access to Chinese audit working papers with no redactions, the right to take testimony from audit company staff in China and sole discretion to select what companies it inspects.

Investors and attorneys have been awaiting news from the PCAOB on whether U.S. inspectors received the access promised.

Sources previously told Reuters U.S. officials had gained "good access" to all the information they requested during the seven-week inspection.

The determination announced on Thursday resets a three-year clock for compliance, said Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees the PCAOB.

In a statement, he said: "Chinese authorities will need to give PCAOB "full access for inspections and investigations in 2023 and beyond."

RENEWED COOPERATION

In separate news on Thursday, the Biden administration added Chinese memory chipmaker YMTC and 21 "major" Chinese players in the artificial intelligence chip industry to a trade blacklist, broadening its crackdown on China's chip industry.

But in a decision that signals renewed cooperation between Washington and Beijing, the Commerce Department also removed a subsidiary of Wuxi Biologics, a company that makes ingredients for AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine, and 25 other Chinese entities from the so-called unverified list, thanks to successful site visits.

The United States and China have been seeking to repair ties following an August visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi which produced a new fracture in relations and led China to cancel cooperation with the United States across a range of areas.

Since then, the two countries have gradually restored communications, first with a meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, followed by lower-level meetings and a resumption of talks on climate change and other topics.

(Reporting by Xie Yu, Chris Prentice and Susan Heavey, Additional reporting by Bansari Mayur Kamdar, Alex Alper Don Durfee and Chuck Mikolajczak, editing by Megan Davies, Nick Zieminski and Chizu Nomiyama)

New York bans selling dogs, cats, rabbits in pet stores to combat 'puppy mill' pipeline

IVAN PEREIRA
Thu, December 15, 2022

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation Thursday banning the sale of dogs, cats and rabbits in retail pet stores throughout the state.

Animal activists have been calling for such a ban for years contending that pet stores are often stocked with animals that are bred and abused in "puppy mills" and other mass breeding centers.

"Dogs, cats and rabbits across New York deserve loving homes and humane treatment," Hochul said in a statement.

PHOTO: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks on Dec. 12, 2022 in New York City. 

(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Under the law, which goes into effect in 2024, retail stores that previously sold pets can still operate and sell pet supplies and other accessories. They also have the option to charge shelters and rescue groups rent to use their space for adoptions.

Store owners face a $1,000 fine for violating the new rules.

MORE: Video Could Pet Sales Bans Curb Puppy Mills?

State Sen. Michael Gianaris, who co-sponsored the bill, said that puppy breeding mills have been known to keep animals in unsanitary conditions, where they're abused and neglected.

"Today is a great day for our four-legged friends," he said in a statement.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has pushed the governor and other state leaders to do more against the puppy mill pipeline and go after stores that sell animals from those facilities. A report released this year by the ASPCA found that 1 out of 4 of puppies shipped to New York state pet stores came from dog brokers who buy puppies from licensed and unregulated breeders and resell the animals to stores.

PHOTO: A puppy is on display at a pet shop on July 24, 2022 in New York.

 (View Press/Corbis via Getty Images)

California was the first state to ban the sale of pets in 2019 and four other states, Washington, Maine, Maryland and Illinois, have followed suit.

"We are hopeful that this enormous step by New York State may encourage other states to take similar action to stop the cruel commercial breeding industry from supplying pet stores within their borders," Matt Bershadker, the president and CEO of the ASPCA, said in a statement.

Some pet shop owners, however, criticized the governor and state legislature for the bill, saying the move hurts their businesses without going after the root problem.

MORE: Puppy Mill Ads Banned From Facebook Marketplace

"We have policies like this where everybody just makes the assumption that every single breeder that a pet store works with looks like the ones you see on TV that are filthy and the [dogs] are dying, and that just simply isn't the case," Emilio Ortiz, the manager of the New York pet store CitiPups, told NY1.

A man feeds a puppy in a pet shop on July 24, 2022 in New York, July 24, 2022. 

(View Press/Corbis via Getty Images)

Gianaris, however, argues that there isn't a single New York pet store that hasn't been touched by the puppy mill industry.

"That's why we should ban it outright. There is no such thing as a responsible retail sale of animals in New York," he told WABC, ABC News' New York station.

New York bans selling dogs, cats, rabbits in pet stores to combat 'puppy mill' pipeline originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

TikToker fact-checks news anchor at American Girl store, makes ‘sickening’ discovery

Cassie Morris

Thu, December 15, 2022 

A news anchor was allegedly caught lying about American Girl dolls, and the footage is going viral.

The clip, recorded by producer and reporter @MannyFidel and uploaded by @MSNBC, quickly gained over 730,000 views and 5,000 comments.

Newsmax anchor Rob Finnerty, host of the show “Wake Up America,” claims in a clip from Dec. 12 to have visited the American Girl store in Rockefeller Center in New York City in search of a doll that looked like his little daughter.

However, according to the anchor, he couldn’t find a single doll that resembled his “cute little 6-year-old white girl.” “The whole place was, like, wokeified,” Finnerty reported.

This claim prompted MSNBC reporter Manny Fidel to visit that same American Girl store to see if he could find a “white girl doll” — and his findings are now going viral across TikTok.

Almost immediately, Fidel noticed that the store was brimming with white dolls — not only on display but in boxes stacked high on shelves and in animated videos on the wall.

“The literal first doll that you see when you walk into the store,” Fidel says, zooming in on a smiling white doll with blond pigtails.

Fidel continues to walk around the store, recording the multitude of white dolls on shelves and in boxes. He remarks that, while the store has “thrown in some other races,” a “great portion” of the dolls on display are white.

Since its broadcast, the Newsmax clip has made waves online, appearing in viral threads across Reddit and Twitter. “Since I was a little girl you’ve been able to order an American Girls doll that looks exactly like you,” one Reddit user commented.

Customers in search of a fully customized American Girl doll can visit the online “create your own” module, where skin tone, face shape, hairstyle and extras such as braces, hearing aids and glasses can all be personalized.

“That ‘news anchor’ is absolutely the worst!”

Over 5,200 TikTokers shared their feelings about the Newsmax segment in the comments section.

“Great investigative reporting,” one user wrote, in praise of Fidel’s segment.

“Thank you for fact checking him. That ‘news anchor’ is absolutely the worst!” another user wrote.

“American Girl needs to reach out to that network. That really is straight up lying,” commented one user.

“This is so annoying because little Black girls (like me) ACTUALLY had to grow up with little representation. It’s not some joke 🙄,” wrote another user.

“Omg. This man trying to claim the average wealthy white child doesn’t have representation is sickening. Wtf?” one user commented.

“Seeing one black doll means there are no white dolls to the racists of the world,” wrote another.

American Girl has yet to make an official statement in response to Finnerty’s claim, or MSNBC’s TikTok.

In The Know is now available on Apple News — follow us here!

The post TikToker fact-checks news anchor at American Girl store, makes ‘sickening’ discovery appeared first on In The Know.

Report shows Katrina victims in poorer areas were shorted thousands in federal rebuilding relief

Chanelle Chandler
·Reporter
Thu, December 15, 2022 

New Orleanians stranded on a roof in the aftermath of

 Hurricane Katrina, Aug. 30, 2005. 

(Vincent Laforet/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

A recent report from ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization, reveals data showing that some of the hardest-hit victims of Hurricane Katrina were shortchanged tens of thousands of dollars on average by a federal program meant to help residents to rebuild.

ProPublica, in partnership with New Orleans media outlets the Times-Picayune, the Advocate and WWL-TV, investigated almost 92,000 statewide grants from the Road Home program. The program was funded by the federal government to provide grant money to aid Louisiana residents, with New Orleans the biggest beneficiary, in rebuilding or selling homes severely damaged by the 2005 storm. A total of $3.3 billion was awarded citywide.

According to the National Weather Service, at least 80% of New Orleans was under floodwater on Aug. 31, 2005, days after the hurricane made landfall, largely as a result of levee failures from Lake Pontchartrain. The disaster damaged about 70% of the city’s occupied housing, with an estimated 134,000 units destroyed by the storm.

The report exposes how the lowest-income households — those with a median income of $15,000 or less — missed out on an average of $18,000, which meant that while some households were able to rebuild quickly, others never recovered.

It says residents in the most impoverished areas in New Orleans had to cover 30% of their rebuilding costs after Road Home grants, Federal Emergency Management Agency aid and insurance. In areas where the median income was more than $75,000, households were responsible for 20%.

Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters cover a portion of New Orleans. (David J. Phillip/AP)

The analysis points to one major culprit: the faulty grant calculation formula. Each federal grant was based on a home’s pre-storm value or on the repair costs — whichever was less. The report shows that this method did not fare well for those living in poorer areas because the value of most of the homes was lower than the cost of rebuilding them, which resulted in the grants not being sufficient to cover all repairs. But for people in wealthier areas, the cost to rebuild was lower than their home values, so the grants they received covered most of their rebuilding costs.

The method disproportionately hurt Black residents — who resided predominantly in the poorer areas — because their homes tended to be valued for less. Housing advocates say the program’s shortcomings stem from its failure to prioritize people’s needs and acknowledge systemic bias in U.S. housing policy.

“When the state officials and outside consultants went to design the program, they didn't recognize their underlying bias,” Andreanecia Morris, the president of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance, told Yahoo News. “They started from a place of ‘Well, we want to get you back in your house. We acknowledge that this is damaging and it's horrible that it happened to you, but we don't want to give you too much.’ It's rooted in the stereotypes of the welfare queen and the model minority. These folks didn't understand that their bias was blinding them and telling them that what they were doing was good enough, when nothing could be further from the truth.”

The report notes the stark contrasts in two New Orleans neighborhoods: Lakeview, a predominantly white area with higher-income households and higher home values, and Gentilly Woods, an area where more than two-thirds of the residents are Black. The homes in both neighborhoods were situated below sea level on swampland near Lake Pontchartrain with similar post-World War II construction and were pummeled by floodwaters after the levees broke.

Kevin Lair at his damaged home in the Lakeview district of New Orleans. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

After the storm, the average Lakeview home was appraised by Road Home at $326,000, with an average repair cost of $286,000. According to the news organizations’ analysis, based on the repair cost the average homeowner received 83% of what was needed to rebuild.

The average property in Gentilly Woods was appraised at $121,000, with an average of $203,000 in rebuilding costs. Due to the grant formula, the average homeowner ended up with just 73% of what was needed to rebuild.

According to a state analysis in 2010, 25,000 New Orleans homeowners received a total of $1.2 billion less from Road Home because their grants were calculated using pre-storm values rather than the cost of damage. If properties in the lowest-income sections of the city had been covered at the same rate as the wealthiest, each of those households would have received about $18,000 more on average.

The report states that for a homeowner in impoverished areas in New Orleans, it would have taken more than 43 months with the average annual salary to pay the cost of repairs not covered by Road Home, FEMA and insurance, compared with less than eight months in more affluent areas.

As a result of the program’s inequities, activists and real estate experts demanded answers and action at meetings held by the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which designed and ran the Road Home program. Local and national civil rights groups and some African American homeowners in New Orleans filed a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the LRA in 2008, claiming that the program discriminated against African American homeowners in New Orleans.

Louisiana and HUD eventually settled the lawsuit, with the state agreeing to allocate $62 million for another program. That program was for people who made too much money to qualify for additional grants but needed more assistance, which ProPublica called “a drop in the bucket.”

Andy Kopplin, the LRA’s first executive director, defended the agency, saying state officials tried to steer more money to poorer homeowners through the second grant program. But he also acknowledged to ProPublica and its partner news organizations in a written statement that the analysis showed that low- and middle-income households should have received more. He called it “upsetting to those of us who were working to create more equitable outcomes and especially to those families who needed and deserved more resources for their recovery.”

New Orleans residents waiting to be rescued from the floodwaters of Katrina. (David J. Phillip/Pool via Reuters)

LRA board member Walter Leger told the news organizations that the state should seek more federal aid from Congress to fill the gaps — citing the findings of disparities in the analysis — and called the program’s method of using property values to determine rebuilding assistance a “misstep.”

Leger said he took complaints about the grant calculation method to HUD and asked it to use higher repair estimates instead, but the agency denied the request.

Louisiana state officials said changes were made to increase grants for all applicants after the program launched, like factoring land value into appraisals and increasing rates for repair estimates.

In 2007, state officials created another grant for less affluent homeowners whose initial grants didn’t meet their repair estimates, allowing Louisiana to meet a HUD requirement to pay at least half the grant money to low- and moderate-income households.

Rescue personnel search for victims in New Orleans's Eighth Ward in the wake of Katrina. (Dave Martin/AP)

Yahoo News contacted the Louisiana Recovery Authority for comment, but it has not yet responded.

The spotty recovery from Katrina, which caused a severe housing crisis in Louisiana, has changed the landscape of cities like New Orleans, with many areas still not redeveloped. Morris of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance described the housing crisis as a hole that New Orleans is still trying to dig itself out of.

“To this day, there are people who haven't been able to come home,” she said. “There are people who died. There are people who have lost homes that they owned for generations who are now going to be renters. There are people who are homeless now. There are people who were able to make a choice because they have the wherewithal and some additional resources to choose to go somewhere else, but they also lost their community.”

A Coast Guard helicopter passes over a flooded neighborhood east of downtown New Orleans, Aug. 30, 2005. (Dave Einsel/Getty Images)

Morris added that 60% of the homes owned by Louisiana residents pre-Katrina were worth $100,000 or less, which aligned with the household’s income. But today’s tumultuous housing market, due to inflation, rising interest rates and increased costs for building materials, creates even more challenges to bring the community of New Orleans back to the pre-Katrina era.

“Now we have a real estate market wildly out of whack with what people make, even in a way that’s different from a lot of other communities that are also struggling with affordable housing because of Katrina,” she said. “We still haven’t recovered from that. We’re no longer growing. We’re still down over a hundred thousand people, mostly African American. Now we’ve gotten to the point where we’re not growing anymore. We’re losing population.”

ITS DILBIT

Company reopens most of pipeline following Kansas oil spill

 

Oil from a Keystone pipeline rupture flows into Mill Creek in Washington County, Kansas, on Thursday, Dec 8, 2022. Vacuum trucks, booms and an emergency dam were constructed on the creek to intercept the spill. (Kyle Bauer/KCLY/KFRM Radio via AP)More

JOHN HANNA
Thu, December 15, 2022 

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The operator of a pipeline with the largest onshore crude oil spill in nine years has reopened all of it except for the stretch in Kansas and northern Oklahoma that includes the site of the rupture.

Canada-based T.C. Energy said in a statement Wednesday night that its Keystone system has restarted operations from Canada to southern Nebraska and from there to south-central Illinois. It also is operating the pipeline from northern Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast.

The Dec. 7 spill forced the company to shut down the Keystone system and dumped about 14,000 barrels of heavy crude oil into a northeastern Kansas creek running through rural pastureland in Washington County, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Kansas City. Each barrel is 42 gallons, the size of a household bathtub.

“The affected segment of the Keystone Pipeline System remains safely isolated as investigation, recovery, repair and remediation continues to advance,” the company said in a statement. “This segment will not be restarted until it is safe to do so.”

Last week’s spill was the largest on the 2,700-mile (4,345-kilometer) Keystone system since it began operating in 2010 and the largest onshore spill since a Tesoro Corp. pipeline rupture in North Dakota leaked 20,600 barrels in September 2013, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data.

The crude carried by the pipeline is extracted from tar sands in western Canada, can sink in water and can be harder to clean up than more conventional crude oil, according to experts and environmentalists. A 2016 National Academies of Sciences study said the tar sands oil has an “exceptionally high density” compared with other crude oils that can “pose particular challenges when they reach water bodies.”

Company and officials have said no drinking water supplies were affected, the oil didn't reach larger waterways and no one was evacuated. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Friday that four dead animals and 71 dead fish had been recovered.

The EPA also said the company has recovered 5,567 barrels of oil and water and 5,000 cubic yards of oil-contaminated soil, or enough to fill about 24,000 bathtubs.

Concerns that spills could pollute waterways spurred opposition to plans by TC Energy to build another crude oil pipeline in the same system, the 1,200-mile (1,900-kilometer) Keystone XL, across Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska. President Joe Biden’s cancelation of a permit for the project led the company to pull the plug last year.

___

Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna

Keystone pipeline break spilled diluted bitumen, complicating cleanup

Investigators, cleanup crews begin scouring oil pipeline spill in Kansas

Thu, December 15, 2022 
By Rod Nickel and Mrinalika Roy

(Reuters) -The oil spilled from TC Energy Corp's ruptured Keystone pipeline was diluted bitumen, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Thursday, adding complications to the cleanup.

The 622,000 barrels per day (bpd) pipeline was shut last week after it spilled 14,000 barrels of oil in rural Kansas, including into a creek. Bitumen tends to sink in water, making it harder to collect than oils that float.

The parts of the pipeline carrying oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois opened on Wednesday at reduced capacity. The ruptured portion that extends from south of Steele City, Nebraska, to a storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, remains closed.

Bitumen from Canada's oil sands is a dense, thick form of oil that shippers dilute with lighter oils so it can move through pipelines. The resulting product is called dilbit for short.

A 2016 National Academy of Sciences study for the U.S. Department of Transportation examined whether transporting dilbit carries different environmental risks than other oils, following a 2010 spill in Michigan.

The report said that when diluted bitumen spills, a thick, dense material forms as a residue after exposure to the environment. The residue tends to stick to surfaces, sometimes sinking to the bottom of a water body.

“For this reason, spills of diluted bitumen pose particular challenges when they reach water bodies,” the report said.

Crews are using equipment to skim oily water off the surface of Mill Creek in Kansas and to vacuum crude into trucks. Colder temperatures may hamper the cleanup, the EPA said.

Cleanup of the 2010 Enbridge Inc pipeline spill lasted years because of the difficulties collecting dilbit, said Keith Brooks, campaigns director at Environmental Defence, adding that recovery in Kansas may be no different.

"I would expect it's going to be a long, long time.

The Sierra Club, another environmental advocacy group, questioned why parts of the pipeline reopened before TC Energy had identified the leak's cause.

"How can we be assured that other segments of the pipeline aren't equally prone to failure?" said Zack Pistoria, Sierra's lobbyist in Kansas.

More than 400 people are involved in the cleanup including personnel from EPA, U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, state and local agencies, TC Energy and TC Energy contractors, the agency said.

The response team has so far recovered 5,567 barrels of oil-water mixture from Mill Creek.

The EPA said four dead mammals have been recovered, and 71 fish.

TC said in a statement that it has excavated around the ruptured pipeline segment, calling it a milestone in the repair and investigation process.

Enbridge meanwhile increased its rationing of space on its oil Mainline for January, in a sign that demand to ship Canadian barrels south is outpacing pipeline capacity after the Keystone outage.

(Reporting by Mrinalika Roy in Bengaluru and Rod Nickel in Winnipeg; additional reporting by Nia Williams, Deep K Vakil in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra, Bill Berkrot and Grant McCool)

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26062012/dilbit-primer-diluted-bitumen-conventional-oil-tar-sands-alberta-kalamazoo-keystone-xl-enbridge

A Dilbit Primer: How It's Different from Conventional Oil 

Jun 26, 2012 ... Dilbit stands for diluted bitumen. Bitumen is a kind of crude oil found in natural oil sands deposits—it's the heaviest crude oil used today.

The Kansas Keystone pipeline spill isn't an ordinary oil spill. Here's why.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen
Thu, December 15, 2022

In this photo taken by a drone, cleanup continues in the area where the ruptured Keystone pipeline dumped oil into a creek in Washington County, Kan., 

Friday, Dec. 9, 2022.

The spill in Kansas is now the second-largest spill of tar sands crude on U.S. soil. And scientists say this stuff comes with major complications for containing and cleaning it.

Each day that passes, the hundreds of thousands of gallons of sludgy oil coating Mill Creek in north-central Kansas become harder to clean up.

That’s because the pipeline that busted just outside the town of Washington on Dec. 7 doesn’t carry conventional crude oil. It carries a product of the Canadian tar sands called diluted bitumen that changes dramatically in chemical composition and behavior soon after escaping from pipes.

More:As pipeline operator searches for cause of Kansas oil spill, residents await cleanup

A National Academies of Sciences study found that transformation means the crude oil can start sinking below the water’s surface in a matter of days.

The Kansas spill occurred eight days ago and is now the second-largest spill of tar sands crude on U.S. soil.

The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged Thursday morning that the crude was diluted bitumen, also known as dilbit. But the agency wouldn’t respond to questions about the implications of that fact for cleaning and containing the notoriously elusive crude oil.

And it wouldn’t disclose what methods were being used to verify the material is truly contained, even as Mill Creek continues to flow downstream.

TC Energy won’t answer those questions either.

Diluted bitumen found to have unique environmental risks

The same 2016 National Academies of Science study of diluted bitumen — a deep dive ordered by Congress in the wake of the nation’s largest inland spill of the stuff in Michigan in 2010 — found that bitumen’s peanut butter-like consistency poses special risks to the environment.

“When a significant fraction of the spilled crude oil” sinks below the water’s surface, the scientists concluded, “the response becomes more complex because there are few proven techniques in the responder ‘tool box’ for detection, containment, and recovery.”

Once it escapes its pipe, diluted bitumen also becomes far stickier than other types of crude oil.

In Michigan, the gunk proved so gluey that it was easier to haul rocks away that had been coated with it along the Kalamazoo River than to scrub the bitumen off of them, said Steve Hamilton, a biologist who advised the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the cleanup.

“It’s almost impossible to clean from surfaces,” said Hamilton, a professor at Michigan State University and member of the National Academies of Sciences committee that wrote the 2016 report on diluted bitumen. “We tried hot water sprays and detergent and so on. … It’s extremely sticky once it has been exposed to air for a while.”

Of the estimated 14,000 barrels that spilled — nearly 600,000 gallons — out of the three-foot-wide Keystone pipeline, most has not yet been recovered.

In the 2016 report, scientists concluded that once the bitumen starts sinking, detecting it and retrieving it becomes very difficult. So does containing it.

“It ultimately took four years to clean up the Kalamazoo River spill,” Hamilton said Wednesday, “And you could argue that three and three-quarters of those years were all about (removing) submerged oil.”

One silver lining: The 2016 report suggests that although bitumen spills may harm water quality more than conventional crude oil spills, as the substance weathers, it may pose less risk of contaminating groundwater (as opposed to surface water such as creeks) and drinking water.

On Tuesday, the Kansas News Service asked TC Energy which specific detection techniques the company is using to verify whether the crude oil spilled in Kansas has been entirely contained within a four-mile stretch of Mill Creek.

The News Service also asked which specific cleanup techniques are being used to address the concerns of scientists that traditional crude oil cleanup approaches have limited success on diluted bitumen spills.

TC Energy wouldn’t offer specifics.

“We have the people, expertise, training and equipment to mount an effective response and clean-up, and that’s what we’re doing,” the company said in an email.

It repeated previous public statements that it has deployed booms at the site and said it sees “no indication” that the oil is passing its barriers.

“Our approach in any incident is to respond and clean up the site as quickly as possible,” it said, “reducing the opportunity for any type of crude oil, including diluted bitumen, to have a lasting impact on the environment.”

It also noted that its containment efforts were monitored by the EPA.

Cause of the spill remains unknown

The EPA says the spill has been contained to the 4 miles of creek that lie downstream from the pipeline break, and that the spill didn’t affect drinking water supplies, including wells.

The agency has coordinators at the site to oversee the cleanup.

Two underflow dams have been built, but they allow the stream to keep flowing under the water’s surface, where dilbit could already be present.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Transportation decided it would allow the stretch of Keystone pipeline that runs from Nebraska through Kansas to Oklahoma to eventually operate at a higher pressure than is otherwise allowed because it would be made of stronger steel. It gave the final go-ahead a decade later.

On Thursday, the EPA said workers had pulled about 5,600 barrels of fluid from Mill Creek, though that fluid is a combination of oil and water. It says 5,000 cubic yards of oil-contaminated soil have been removed, and nine cubic yards of oily solids.

Tar sands oil, or bitumen, is far too thick to travel through pipelines. So companies in Canada force it into a more moveable state by mixing it with lighter volatile compounds.

But if a pipe breaks and the oil escapes, the diluted bitumen soon reverts to its original, sludgier consistency. The additives largely evaporate, leaving the ultra sticky, thick bitumen residue.

Bitumen doesn’t float on water, the way crude oil does. And that leaves a short time to capture diluted bitumen from the surface of rivers, creeks and lakes before the sludge disappears from view.

“This situation is highly problematic for spill response,” the National Academies report concluded, because “there are few effective techniques for detection, containment, and recovery of oil” once it has begun sinking.

And once it reaches the bottom of the water body, finding and cleaning it remains complicated. Retrieving generally involves dredging.

“Given these greater levels of concern,” the report concluded, “spills of diluted bitumen should elicit unique, immediate actions.”

The scientists expressed concern that federal policies that govern spill planning and response fell short of properly considering the special conundrums posed by diluted bitumen.

“Broadly, regulations and agency practices do not take the unique properties of diluted bitumen into account, nor do they encourage effective planning for spills of diluted bitumen,” the report said.

Most methods for trying to detect sunken bitumen don’t seem to work well, the report said.

The cause of the pipeline break in Kansas remains unknown, and a third-party analysis of the matter could take up to three months, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation administration that regulates oil pipelines.

The Michigan spill involved upward of 840,000 gallons (20,000 barrels) of oil. That contaminated more than 30 miles of the Kalamazoo River, plus nearby woodlands and wetlands. The sheer scale of the disaster was exacerbated by heavy rains.

It took four years and more than $1.2 billion to retrieve as much of the oil as was deemed feasible. Some amount was left because getting at the sludge is itself so damaging to the affected ecosystems.

Thousands of animals coated in oil were caught, treated and released.

In Kansas, TC Energy has said one beaver has been caught and is being treated.

The EPA added Thursday morning that four dead mammals and 71 dead fish have been found. It says biologists from the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks are assessing injured and dead animals.

TC Energy has put its initial estimate of the Kansas spill at about 588,000 gallons.

The region saw some rain this week, but TC Energy says it built a second earthen underflow dam in recent days to brace the initial containment dam for the anticipated rain, and that containment remains successful.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Kansas Keystone pipeline spill is harder to clean up, experts say

Qatar’s $300 Billion World Cup Is Headed for an Epic Comedown









Giles Turner and David Hellier
Thu, December 15, 2022 

(Bloomberg) -- When Qatar was drawn out of the envelope as a future host of the World Cup back in 2010, it was doubtful the majority of football fans would have been able to find it on a map.

A dozen years, $300 billion and a raft of controversy later, one of the most expensive marketing campaigns in history will culminate with the tiny Gulf state hosting a final on Sunday between Argentina and France that’s expected to be watched by half the planet.

The inevitable question is whether the extravaganza was all worth it — even for a host with a seemingly bottomless pit of money. The organizers — particularly FIFA — see the event as an outright success: a record TV audience, happy fans and a burnished brand. But however much soft power Qatar has gained from the tournament, the return to normality will be an epic comedown.

After a month when over 700,000 fans descended on Doha, Qatar will go back to being relatively empty. The fans have already started to return home, and so too will vast numbers of migrant workers. Real estate agents are concerned apartments will remain unfinished, while hotels will have a glut of rooms and some stadiums will never be used again.

Then there’s Qatar’s international standing, even as it supplies almost a quarter of the liquefied natural gas imports Europe is relying on to get through the winter. Before the focus of the World Cup turned to drama and upsets on the pitch, the country faced criticism about the rights of migrant workers and an aversion to LGBTQ pride symbols. That’s unlikely to go away.

This week, Qatar has also been the subject of non-World Cup headlines — a European Union corruption scandal involving bribery allegations.

And next month will put the spotlight back on how one of the biggest sporting events was handed to a tiny city-state in one of the world’s hottest regions as a court case gets underway. An indictment filed in the US accuses several officials of receiving payments to back Qatar’s bid. The country denies paying anyone for the hosting rights.

“There will be some long-term benefits for Qatar’s local population,” said Christina Philippou, a senior lecturer in sports finance at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. “However, if the whole purpose was to showcase Qatar to the world, in that sense I think there have been some less reputation-enhancing aspects. It’s been a very expensive ad campaign and I’m not sure it’s been an especially successful one.”

There’s no doubt Qatar made progress on workers rights after scrutiny from activists. A month before the tournament kicked off on Nov. 20, the ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, told local lawmakers some of the criticism was useful for the country’s development. But he also hit back at what he called an “unprecedented campaign,” full of “fabrications and double standards” with dubious motives.

The World Cup preparations shone a light on the Gulf region’s “kafala” sponsorship system for foreign workers, and although some of the controversy around human rights in Qatar has faded since the event began, some groups advocating for migrant workers say the pressure must continue.

“The end of the tournament must not signal the end of scrutiny,” said Isobel Archer, Gulf program manager at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre in London. “Although FIFA and the Qatar government have repeatedly pushed the narrative that the labor reforms were the end goal, we know from workers themselves implementation is still severely lacking.”

Qatar’s long-term quest was for the tournament to modernize its image and make it a tourism and business destination on a par with regional rival Dubai. It’s not without precedence. Major sporting events have long been seen as a catalyst to transform cities.

The Barcelona 1992 Olympics were seen as the archetypal sporting success story, bringing much needed infrastructure and tourism to the then-struggling Spanish city. As the hype faded — just as it did following the Athens Olympics and the European football championships in Portugal years later — criticism over cost overruns and the exaggeration of social benefits grew.

The economic benefit of hosting the quadrennial World Cup may also be a myth, with no evident boost in the immediate aftermath of the event, according to a recent paper from the University of Surrey in the UK.

Qatar is no different. Even before the World Cup has finished, empty buildings dot its business and residential districts. Around 765,000 fans visited Qatar over the first two weeks of the tournament, according the organizers, short of the 1.2 million Qatar hoped would show up.

Many of those who made the journey weren’t disappointed, though. Shock results — Saudi Arabia beating Argentina, the early departure of Germany, Brazil’s quarter-final loss to Croatia and Morocco’s progress to the semi-finals — added to the convenience of the competition being played in one city.

“It’s great to be able to see all the different cultures and people, and it’s much more family friendly,” said Jason Daley, an American who has attended every World Cup since 2006 and runs social media accounts that provide fan information about the tournament. “Compared to the last couple of World Cups, the ease of getting through security and into the stadiums has been incredibly smooth.”

In a statement to Bloomberg News, a Qatari government official said: “Qatar has defied the sceptics who claimed that Qatar would not be able to host a successful World Cup. Some of those critics now admit that the Qatar World Cup has been the safest, most-family friendly and accessible World Cup yet for supporters around the world.”

It’s unclear how Qatar will remain that attractive to tourists. After the winners depart Qatar’s Hamad International Airport airport — replete with indoor tropical garden complex — the world’s attention will rapidly shift elsewhere.

Real Madrid football club is set to open a branded theme park next year, which will include rides, games, a museum and stores selling memorabilia. It’s a perfect post-World Cup attraction. But it will be in Dubai, not Doha.

Lacking a competitive local football league, many of the stadiums will be broken up or converted. Stadium 974 — derived from Qatar’s international dialing code — was constructed out of shipping containers and will be dismantled after hosting a fashion show and concerts.

About 170,000 seats from other stadiums have been promised to developing countries. The other six stadia will be re-purposed for hotels, shopping or made smaller for local football teams, adding to an already oversupplied real estate market.

“The infrastructure, such as the metro system, would have been built regardless of the tournament being hosted,” said Ross Griffin, assistant professor at Qatar University. “But it put a convenient finishing date on everything.”

--With assistance from Simone Foxman, Julia Fioretti, Verity Ratcliffe, Augusta Saraiva and Sam Kim.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

China calls US 'destroyer' of global trading system at WTO


Li China’s Ambassador to the WTO gestures in Geneva

Wed, December 14, 2022 
By Emma Farge

GENEVA (Reuters) - China accused Washington on Wednesday of using subsidies to prop up national industries and refusing to abide by the rules of the World Trade Organization.

China's ambassador to the WTO Li Chenggang said in a speech that he was disappointed in the U.S. trading record, saying it had not lived up to President Joe Biden's inaugural pledge to lead "by the power of our example".

"The United States puts 'America First' by prevailing its domestic laws over international rules and (the) laws of others, disregarding WTO rules and concerns of other members," he told a closed-door U.S. trade policy review at the Geneva-based WTO.

"Clearly, the United States is a destroyer to the multilateral trading system," he added, according to the text of his speech which was released in English by China's WTO delegation.

The U.S. ambassador to the WTO, Maria Pagán, defended U.S. policies, saying it was one of the most open and competitive economies in the world with some of the lowest tariffs. "For many decades, the United States has led by maintaining a fundamentally open economy," she said.

The U.S. trade policy review occurs every few years and allows members of the 164-member body to give feedback on Washington's track record.

China's remarks came days after it filed a WTO trade complaint against U.S. curbs on chip exports.

The United States has previously said China's industrial policies were skewed against imported goods and services. It has also called on the world's second-largest economy to carry out further liberalisation and open its vast markets.

The WTO's system for settling global trade disputes has been only partially functional since Dec. 2019 when Washington's repeated blockage of judge appointments under former President Donald Trump paralysed its top court. That means that any member, including the United States, can and has appealed decisions made by a lower court into a legal limbo.

Ambassador Li called Washington a "capricious rule-breaker" for not implementing rulings. The U.S. has repeatedly criticised the WTO dispute settlement system for overreach and is currently leading a consultation process with members on how to reform it.

Texas Republicans Aim to Censor Abortion Pill Websites


Susan Rinkunas

JEZEBEL
Wed, December 14, 2022 

Photo: OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty (Getty Images)

Anti-abortion advocates are very mad that abortion pills exist, because they allow people to end their pregnancies at home without having to face protesters—and circumvent state bans that have shuttered clinics. Anti-abortion activists have already filed lawsuits that could ban blue-state medical providers from prescribing medication abortions, and lawmakers plan to target abortion pills even harder in 2023, according to new reporting from the Washington Post.

One plan involves Texas lawmakers drafting legislation to censor abortion pill websites, including Aid Access, a service run by a Dutch doctor. The European-based site launched in 2018 due to dwindling access in the U.S. and, about a year ago, it started to offer “advance provision” of abortion pills to people in all 50 states before they’re pregnant.

The Post reports that Texas Republicans are preparing to introduce a bill for the January 2023 session that “would require internet providers to block abortion pill websites in the same way they can censor child [sexual abuse material].” John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, the state’s biggest anti-abortion group, told said the effort would target Aid Access as well as pharmacy sites not run by medical providers.

Beyond the fact that managing your own abortion with pills is not a crime, it’s deeply ironic that the self-professed party of freedom—one that rails against censorship in other countries like China—wants to block access to a website. The Post did note that “even antiabortion lawyers say that effort would raise free speech concerns.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, described abortion pills as a “cataclysmic problem.” She told the Post it’s the second question she asks Republicans who seem likely to run for president in 2024. (The first is about their comfort with advocating for a national abortion ban at either six weeks or 15 weeks.) “We don’t have to dictate their solution [for pills],” Dannenfelser said. “But they have to have one.” Dannenfelser said she’s also working with Republican governors, including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, on how to crack down on word-of-mouth networks where activists mail pills from countries like Mexico.

Another group, Students for Life, plans to focus on weaponizing environmental regulations and wants to create a team of “student investigators” to test wastewater in hopes of finding “contamination” from abortion pills. They plan to use that information to ask Republican Attorneys General to issue “statewide injunctions” on abortion pills, though it’s not clear how that would be enforced short of rifling through every resident’s mail.

These planned attacks aren’t surprising, as Greer Donley, associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, recently told Jezebel: “They’re trying to do whatever they can to go after pills.”

This feels like a great time to repeat the fact that Aid Access is trusted service that will ship abortion pills to anywhere in the U.S.!