Prosecutor appointed by Trump Justice Department used claims from Russian intelligence to obtain emails from a George Soros aide: NYT


John Durham and Donald Trump.Associated Press; Getty Images

John Durham used Russian intelligence claims to obtain a US citizen's emails, per The New York Times.

Durham was appointed by former Attorney General Bill Barr to examine the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.

But Durham pursued a dubious claim from Russia involving Hillary Clinton and an aide to George Soros.

John Durham, former US Attorney for the District of Connecticut, was supposed to be investigating the investigators, charged with looking into the origins of what former President Donald Trump often termed a "hoax": the FBI's examination of his campaign's dealings with the Russian government.

In the course of his hunt for wrongdoing, culminating in two failed prosecutions, the veteran prosecutor relied on dubious claims from the Kremlin to pursue a conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton, Democratic donor and right-wing boogeyman George Soros, and the former head of the Democratic National Committee, according to an investigation by The New York Times published Thursday.

Durham, appointed as US special counsel by former Attorney General Bill Barr, had been told by a federal judge that his evidence was shoddy. As The Washington Post reported in 2017, a Russian intelligence document, obtained by the US, had claimed there was a plot to shield Clinton from an ongoing investigation into her email storage.

That and other Russian intelligence assessments were provided to Washington by Dutch intelligence, which had infiltrated their Russian counterparts and the specific group responsible for hacking the DNC and laundering the emails it stole through Wikileaks and friendly journalists during the 2016 presidential campaign; the Dutch even caught the hackers doing the job, on video.

The memos were not to be taken at face value, according to those who reviewed them. They "were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims," the Times reported, "and some US analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation." A federal judge, reviewing the claims, deemed them insufficient to subpoena a US citizen's communications.

But Durham pursued them anyway. And he got them, according to the Times, going around the judge's veto by threatening the target with a subpoena from a grand jury, a lower bar to clear (it is not clear if an actual subpoena was obtained).

As Russian intelligence analysts themselves had told it, Moscow had hacked Leonard Benardo, executive vice president of Soros' Open Society Foundations, and in doing so uncovered a plot at the highest level to sway the 2016 election. Specifically, Democratic lawmaker and former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz was charged with discussing — over an email to Benardo — a promise, from then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, that the Obama-era Department of Justice would make sure to limit the investigation into Clinton's private email server to avoid any political fallout.

Although Durham succeeded in obtaining Benardo's emails, he never found any evidence to support the Russian claims, The Times reported, and his investigation ended with fewer successful prosecutions than Special Counsel Robert Mueller's own investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the "hoax" that some hoped he would debunk.

Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Russia Investigation. It Didn't Go Well.

Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner

The New York Times
Thu, January 26, 2023 

The veteran prosecutor John Durham was given the job of determining whether there was any wrongdoing behind the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's ties to Russia. (Samuel Corum/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.

Egged on by Trump, Attorney General William Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John Durham and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Trump left office.

But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep-state plot alleged by Trump and suspected by Barr.

Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

Interviews by the Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Trump and Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

— Barr and Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in autumn 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Durham brought no charges over it.

— Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Durham used grand-jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

— There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics.

Now, as Durham works on a final report, the interviews by the Times provide new details of how he and Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.

Barr, Durham and Dannehy declined to comment. The current and former officials who discussed the investigation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal, political and intelligence sensitivities surrounding the topic.

‘The Thinnest of Suspicions’

A month after Barr was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, special counsel Robert Mueller ended the Russia investigation and turned in his report without charging any Trump associates with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow over its covert operation to help Trump win the 2016 election.

Trump would repeatedly portray the Mueller report as having found “no collusion with Russia.” The reality was more complex. In fact, the report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and it established both how Moscow had worked to help Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference.

That spring, Barr assigned Durham to scour the origins of the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, telling Fox News that he wanted to know if “officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” in deciding to pursue the investigation. “A lot of the answers have been inadequate, and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” he added.

At the time Barr was confirmed, he told aides that he already suspected that intelligence abuses played a role in igniting the Russia investigation — and that unearthing any wrongdoing would be a priority.

In May 2019, soon after giving Durham his assignment, Barr summoned the head of the National Security Agency, Paul Nakasone, to his office. In front of several aides, Barr demanded that the NSA cooperate with the Durham inquiry.

Referring to the CIA and British spies, Barr also said he suspected that the NSA’s “friends” had helped instigate the Russia investigation by targeting the Trump campaign, aides briefed on the meeting said.

Durham spent his first months looking for any evidence that the origin of the Russia investigation involved an intelligence operation targeting the Trump campaign.

Durham’s team spent long hours combing the CIA’s files but found no way to support the allegation.

Durham and Barr had not yet given up when a new problem arose: In early December, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael Horowitz, completed his own report on the origins of the Russia investigation.

The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an FBI lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light.

But the broader findings contradicted Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Durham’s inquiry. Horowitz found no evidence that FBI actions were politically motivated. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails — had been sufficient to lawfully open it.

The week before Horowitz released the report, he and aides came to Durham’s offices to go over it. Durham lobbied Horowitz to drop his finding that the diplomat’s tip had been sufficient for the FBI to open its “full” counterintelligence investigation, arguing that it was enough at most for a “preliminary” inquiry, according to officials. But Horowitz did not change his mind.

That weekend, Barr and Durham decided to weigh in publicly to shape the narrative on their terms.

Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Barr issued a statement contradicting Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the FBI opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.”

But as Durham’s inquiry proceeded, he never presented any evidence contradicting Horowitz’s factual findings about the basis on which FBI officials opened the investigation.

By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the CIA had “stayed in its lane” after all.

An Awkward Tip

On one of Barr and Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.

Barr and Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Barr had Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Trump did not fall squarely within Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry, the people said.

Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Trump had remained secret until October 2019, when a garbled echo became public. The Times reported that Durham’s administrative review of the Russia inquiry had evolved to include a criminal investigation, while saying it was not clear what the suspected crime was. Citing their own sources, many other news outlets confirmed the development.

By the spring and summer of 2020, with Trump’s reelection campaign in full swing, the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” began to erode Barr’s relationship with Trump, Barr wrote in his memoir.

Trump was stoking a belief among his supporters that Durham might charge former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden. That proved too much for Barr, who in May 2020 clarified that “our concern of potential criminality is focused on others.”

Even so, in August, Trump lashed out in a Fox interview, asserting that Obama and Biden, along with top FBI and intelligence officials, had been caught in “the single biggest political crime in the history of our country,” and the only thing stopping charges would be if Barr and Durham wanted to be “politically correct.”

Against that backdrop, Barr and Durham did not shut down their inquiry when the search for intelligence abuses hit a dead end. With the inspector general’s inquiry complete, they turned to a new rationale: a hunt for a basis to accuse the Clinton campaign of conspiring to defraud the government by manufacturing the suspicions that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, along with scrutinizing what the FBI and intelligence officials knew about the Clinton campaign’s actions.

During the Russia investigation, the FBI used claims from what turned out to be a dubious source, the Steele dossier — opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — in its botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide.

The Durham investigation did something with parallels to that incident.

In Durham’s case, the dubious sources were memos, whose credibility the intelligence community doubted, written by Russian intelligence analysts and discussing purported conversations involving American victims of Russian hacking, according to people familiar with the matter.

The memos were part of a trove provided to the CIA by a Dutch spy agency, which had infiltrated the servers of its Russian counterpart. The memos were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims, and some U.S. analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation.

Durham wanted to use the memos, which included descriptions of Americans discussing a purported plan by Hillary Clinton to attack Trump by linking him to Russia’s hacking and releasing in 2016 of Democratic emails, to pursue the theory that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Trump. And in doing so, Durham sought to use the memos as justification to get access to the private communications of an American citizen.

One purported hacking victim identified in the memos was Leonard Benardo, the executive vice president of the Open Society Foundations, a pro-democracy organization whose Hungarian-born founder, Soros, has been vilified by the far-right.

In 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Russian memos included a claim that Benardo and a Democratic member of Congress, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had discussed how Loretta Lynch, the Obama-era attorney general, had supposedly promised to keep the investigation into Clinton’s emails from going too far.

But Benardo and Wasserman Schultz said they had never even met, let alone communicated about Clinton’s emails.

Durham set out to prove that the memos described real conversations, according to people familiar with the matter. He sent a prosecutor on his team, Andrew DeFilippis, to ask Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, for an order allowing them to seize information about Benardo’s emails.

But Howell decided that the Russian memo was too weak a basis to intrude on Benardo’s privacy, they said. Durham then personally appeared before her and urged her to reconsider, but she again ruled against him.

Rather than dropping the idea, Durham sidestepped Howell’s ruling by invoking grand-jury power to demand documents and testimony directly from Soros’ foundation and Benardo about his emails, the people said. Rather than fighting in court, the foundation and Benardo quietly complied, according to people familiar with the matter. But for Durham, the result appears to have been another dead end.

In a statement provided to the Times by Soros’ foundation, Benardo reiterated that he never met or corresponded with Wasserman Schultz, and he said that “if such documentation exists, it’s of course made up.”

As the focus of the Durham investigation shifted, cracks formed inside the team. Durham’s deputy, Dannehy, a longtime close colleague, increasingly argued with him in front of other prosecutors and FBI agents about legal ethics.

Now Dannehy complained to Durham about how Barr kept hinting darkly in public about the direction of their investigation. Dannehy urged Durham to ask the attorney general to adhere to Justice Department policy and not discuss the investigation publicly. But Durham proved unwilling to challenge him.

The strains grew when Durham used grand-jury powers to go after Benardo’s emails. Dannehy opposed that tactic and told colleagues that Durham had taken that step without telling her.

By summer 2020, with Election Day approaching, Barr pressed Durham to draft a potential interim report centered on the Clinton campaign and FBI gullibility or willful blindness.

On Sept. 10, 2020, Dannehy discovered that other members of the team had written a draft report that Durham had not told her about, according to people briefed on their ensuing argument.

Dannehy erupted, according to people familiar with the matter. She told Durham that no report should be issued before the investigation was complete and especially not just before an election — and denounced the draft for taking disputed information at face value. She sent colleagues a memo detailing those concerns and resigned.

Two people close to Barr said he had pressed for the draft to evaluate what a report on preliminary findings would look like and what evidence would need to be declassified. But they insisted that he intended any release to come during the summer or after the Nov. 3 election — not soon before Election Day.

In any case, in late September 2020, about two weeks after Dannehy quit, someone leaked to a Fox Business personality that Durham would not issue any interim report, disappointing Trump supporters hoping for a pre-Election Day bombshell.

© 2023 The New York Times Company

Pope Francis Condemns Anti-Gay Laws Around the World: 'Being Homosexual Is Not a Crime'

Jason Duaine Hahn
Wed, January 25, 2023 

Pope Francis leaves the Syriac Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation (Sayidat al-Najat) in Baghdad

AYMAN HENNA/AFP via Getty Pope Francis

In a new interview, Pope Francis spoke out against the criminalization of homosexuality and asked Catholic bishops who support anti-gay laws to welcome the LGBTQ+ community into their churches.

While speaking to the Associated Press this week, the pontiff, 86, called laws that criminalize homosexuality "unfair" and said, "being homosexual isn't a crime."

"We are all children of God, and God loves us as we are," Francis told the AP in Vatican City.

According to Human Rights Watch, at least 67 countries have national laws that criminalize same-sex relations between adults. Another nine countries have national laws criminalizing forms of gender expression aimed at transgender and gender nonconforming people.


Francis admitted there were Catholic bishops that support laws that discriminate against members of the LGBTQ+ community or criminalize homosexuality, and he asked that they reconsider their stance.

RELATED: Pope Francis Says He May Need to Consider 'Stepping Aside' Following Trip to Canada

"These bishops have to have a process of conversion," he said. "[They should apply] tenderness, please, as God has for each one of us."

pope francis

Though Francis voiced his support for the decriminalization of homosexuality, he said he still viewed it as a "sin." But, Francis explained, he does not want "sin" and "crime" to be synonymous in relation to homosexuality.

"It's not a crime. Yes, but it's a sin," he told the AP. "Fine, but first, let's distinguish between a sin and a crime."

Francis added: "It's also a sin to lack charity with one another."

Francis, who became head of the Catholic Church in 2013, has often made statements supporting the LGBTQ+ community.

In 2020, he said he supported civil unions for same-sex couples, which was a break from the official teaching of the Catholic Church.

That same year, he told parents of LGBTQ+ youth that "God loves your children as they are."

Yet, in 2021, the Vatican announced that the Catholic Church could not bless same-sex unions because God "does not and cannot bless sin."

The Church explained that its teachings say marriage should be between a man and a woman to create new life. The statement was approved by Francis.

It shouldn't seem so surprising when the pope says being gay 'isn't a crime' – a Catholic theologian explains

Steven P. Millies, Professor of Public Theology and Director of The Bernardin Center, Catholic Theological Union

Thu, January 26, 2023

Pope Francis leads the second vespers service at St. Paul's Basilica on Jan. 25, 2023, in Rome. Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis via Getty Images

Once again, Pope Francis has called on Catholics to welcome and accept LGBTQ people.

“Being homosexual isn’t a crime,” the pope said in an interview with The Associated Press on Jan. 24, 2023, adding, “let’s distinguish between a sin and a crime.” He also called for the relaxation of laws around the world that target LGBTQ people.

Francis’ long history of making similar comments in support of LGBTQ people’s dignity, despite the church’s rejection of homosexuality, has provoked plenty of criticism from some Catholics. But I am a public theologian, and part of what interests me about this debate is that Francis’ inclusiveness is not actually radical. His remarks generally correspond to what the church teaches and calls on Catholics to do.

‘Who am I to judge?’

During the first year of Francis’ papacy, when asked about LGBTQ people, he famously replied, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” – setting the tone for what has become a pattern of inclusiveness.

He has given public support more than once to James Martin, a Jesuit priest whose efforts to build bridges between LGBTQ people and the Catholic Church have been a lightning rod for criticism. In remarks captured for a 2020 documentary, Francis expressed support for the legal protections that civil unions can provide for LGBTQ people.

And now come the newest remarks. In his recent interview, the pope said the church should oppose laws that criminalize homosexuality. “We are all children of God, and God loves us as we are and for the strength that each of us fights for our dignity,” he said, though he differentiated between “crimes” and actions that go against church teachings.

Compassion, not doctrinal change

The pope’s support for LGBTQ people’s civil rights does not change Catholic doctrine about marriage or sexuality. The church still teaches – and will certainly go on teaching – that any sexual relationship outside a marriage is wrong, and that marriage is between a man and a woman. It would be a mistake to conclude that Francis is suggesting any change in doctrine.

A rosary march in Warsaw in 2019 ended with a prayer apologizing to God for pride parades in Poland. Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Rather, the pattern of his comments has been a way to express what the Catholic Church says about human dignity in response to rapidly changing attitudes toward the LGBTQ community across the past two decades. Francis is calling on Catholics to take note that they should be concerned about justice for all people.

The Catholic Church has condemned discrimination against LGBTQ people for many years, even while it describes homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered” in its catechism. Nevertheless, some bishops around the world support laws that criminalize homosexuality – which Francis acknowledged, saying they “have to have a process of conversion.”

The “law of love embraces the entire human family and knows no limits,” the Vatican office concerned with social issues said in a 2005 compilation of the church’s social thought.

In 2006, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops recognized that LGBTQ people “have been, and often continue to be, objects of scorn, hatred, and even violence.” And expressing care for other human persons – “especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted” by the indifference or oppression of others – represents obligations for all Catholics to embrace.

As the Francis papacy now nears the end of its 10th year, it is becoming more and more common to hear Catholic leaders attempting to make LGBTQ people feel included in the church. Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich has called on pastors to “redouble our efforts to be creative and resilient in finding ways to welcome and encourage all LGBTQ people.” New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan has welcomed LGBTQ groups in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, against the wishes of many New York Catholics.

In this most recent interview, Francis emphasized that being LGBTQ is “a human condition,” calling Catholics to see other people less through the eyes of doctrine and more through the eyes of mercy.

A new ‘political reality’

The rapid change that has happened in prevailing social attitudes about the LGBTQ community in recent decades has been difficult to process for a church that has never reacted quickly. This is especially because the questions those developments raise touch on a gray area where moral teaching intersects with social realities outside the church.

For decades, church leaders have been working to reconcile the church with the modern world, and Francis is stepping in places where other Catholic bishops have already trodden.

In 2018, for example, German bishops reacting to the legalization of gay marriage acknowledged that acceptance of LGBTQ relationships is a new “political reality.”

An LGBTQ couple embraces after a pastoral worker blesses them at a Catholic church in Germany, in defiance of practices approved by Rome.

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

There are signs that parts of the church are moving even more quickly. Catholics in Germany, in particular, have called for changes to church teaching, including permission for priests to bless same-sex couples and the ordination of married men.
The next chapter

But those actions are outliers. Francis has criticized the German calls for reform as “elitist” and ideological. When it comes to the civil rights of LGBTQ people, the pope is not changing church teaching, but describing it.

I believe the challenge the Vatican faces is to imagine the space that the church can occupy in this new reality, as it has had to do in the face of numerous social and political changes across centuries. But the imperative, as Francis suggests, is to serve justice and to seek justice for all people with mercy above all.

Catholics – including bishops, and even the pope – can think, and are thinking, imaginatively about that challenge.

Portions of this article originally appeared in a previous article published on Oct. 22, 2020.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. 

It was written by: Steven P. Millies, Catholic Theological Union.

Read more:

Calls for Pope Benedict’s sainthood make canonizing popes seem like the norm – but it’s a long and politically fraught process

Orthodox Judaism can still be a difficult world for LGBTQ Jews – but in some groups, the tide is slowly turning

Group of Peruvian lawmakers submits motion seeking to impeach new president

Anti-government protests in Lima


Wed, January 25, 2023

LIMA (Reuters) -A group of Peruvian lawmakers on Wednesday submitted a motion seeking to impeach President Dina Boluarte after a little over a month in power citing "permanent moral incapacity".

The bid to remove Boluarte comes in the midst of violent protests following the impeachment and arrest last month of her predecessor, Pedro Castillo, in which dozens of people have been killed.

The motion, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, was signed by 28 leftist members of congress who support Castillo. A minimum of 20%, or 26 signatures, was required to file the motion.

The motion must now be approved by 52 votes before it can be debated in Congress where it must win two-thirds of the chamber's support.

"Never in the history of Peru has a government in so little time - a month in governance - killed more than forty people in protests," the motion said, accusing Boluarte of allowing the abuse and disproportionate use of force, among other accusations.

Boluarte's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

She has blamed Castillo, who is in pretrial detention, for promoting political polarization during his nearly 17 months in power.

On Tuesday, Boluarte called for a "political truce". She has also accused drug traffickers and others of stirring up the violence on the streets.

Peru's ombudsman office said there were more than 90 blockades across the country on Wednesday and one person was killed in Cusco city.

At least 47 people have died in clashes since the protests began in December, according to the office, including one police officer, while hundreds have been injured.

Human rights groups accuse police and soldiers of using excessive force, including live ammunition and dropping tear gas from helicopters.

Security forces say protesters, mostly in Peru's southern Andes, used homemade weapons and explosives.

(Reporting by Marco Aquino and Carolina Pulice; Writing by Sarah Morland and Valentine Hilaire; Editing by Robert Birsel)

MINING IS NOT GREEN

We May Not Actually Need All That Lithium

Molly Taft
Wed, January 25, 2023

Lithium mining in Chile’s Atacama desert.

Read any article about the clean energy revolution, and chances are you’ll run into some staggering numbers about how demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other minerals and metals is projected to rise over the next few decades.

But the future isn’t set in stone. The U.S. may need up to 90% less of these materials if it simply prioritizes things like public transit, urban walkability, and smaller cars, according to groundbreaking new research from the Climate and Community Project and University of California, Davis.

The International Energy Agency predicts that demand for lithium could rise by as much as 40 times by 2040; the U.S. alone by 2050 could need three times as much lithium as is currently produced on the global market. Transportation and electric vehicle batteries are a huge factor in these staggering numbers.

But there are some big problems with these materials and their production, from environmentally destructive mining practices to child and forced labor in supply chains to geopolitical conflict. A recent analysis found that over half of the world’s supply of these materials is on Indigenous lands, signaling some significant upcoming conflicts with corporations looking to profit from the increased demand.

Lithium and other minerals are also likely to become big targets for Republicans and politicians opposed to EV tax credits and other clean energy incentives. On Wednesday, Senator Joe Manchin, who has voiced opposition to EV tax credits in the past, introduced a bill mandating that all materials in an EV battery eligible for a tax credit under the Inflation Reduction Act be mined either in the U.S. or in a country the U.S. has a free trade agreement with. Automakers say there’s a chance that, given all these requirements, no electric vehicle would actually be eligible for a tax credit.

But most of the forecasts that say we’re going to need huge amounts of materials like lithium are based on a future “that looks like the present except it’s electrified,” said Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College and one of the authors of the report. This one-to-one trade of gas vehicles for EVs—a vision that assumes Americans, especially, keep up with their big car obsession—is “easier, it feels more politically feasible, and it’s realistic” to the organizations doing the forecasting.

Riofrancos explained that industries that would stand to gain from a boom in electric vehicles—industries that are also producing their own forecasts—have a vested interest in seeing a car-heavy future.

“Auto companies and mining companies, the last companies on earth anyone would think of as being part of the climate solution, now have the opportunity to present themselves as climate saviors,” she said.

Riofrancos said the idea for this research was born from her own search for different modeling for a less car-heavy future. When she tried to find projections of pathways with different priorities in the U.S.—where there are fewer and smaller cars, denser and more easily navigable residential areas, and more public transit—she discovered they hadn’t yet been modeled in the context of demand for these minerals.

“Auto companies and mining companies... now have the opportunity to present themselves as climate saviors”

To do the modeling, Riofrancos and her research partners put together four scenarios for the U.S. to achieve net-zero emissions through 2050: a business-as-usual scenario, where electric vehicles simply replace the current supply of fossil fuel-dependent cars, and increasingly dramatic scenarios in which more people live in dense, walkable and bikeable areas; take improved public transit; and own fewer and smaller cars, while the government also implements aggressive recycling policies for electric car components. They then calculated the amount of lithium and other metals all these scenarios demand.

The results were surprising, even to Riofrancos. Policies that made cities more walkable and public transit better and more accessible could lower lithium demand between 18% and 66%, while simply limiting the size of EV batteries could cut demand by up to 42%. In the best-case scenario, where multiple types of these policies were implemented, demand for lithium in the U.S. could be more than 90% lower than current estimates.

The situations they lay out aren’t some sort of unrealistic utopian vision. Riofrancos stressed that even in their most aggressively low-car scenario, there are still electric vehicles on the road. “We were trying to keep this within the bounds of what could actually happen over the next 25 years,” she said. Limiting battery size, meanwhile, meant just limiting them to the types of cars popular in other developed nations. “The U.S. is going off on its own to be super big” when it comes to electric vehicles, Riofrancos said. (Ironically, the day before I spoke to Riofrancos, I had a conversation with a friend about the electric Hummer—which he was incredibly excited about, despite its absolutely gargantuan battery size.)

Ultimately, Riofrancos said, she hopes that the research at the very least shows that we have more options to get to net-zero carbon emissions than just over-reliance on EVs and the supply chain problems they bring.

“With just some federal or state level transit money, we could make a big difference in reducing the carbon emissions of transportation,” she said. “There are political challenges around getting Americans out of cars, but we should agree that the science says that that would help a lot to reduce emissions from transportation.”

Gizmodo

Here's a plan for cutting US demand for lithium by up to 90%



Lylla Younes
Thu, January 26, 2023 
This story was first published by Grist.

The effort to shift the U.S. economy off fossil fuels and avoid the most disastrous impacts of climate change hinges on the third element of the periodic table. Lithium, the soft, silvery-white metal used in electric car batteries, was endowed by nature with miraculous properties. At around half a gram per cubic centimeter, it’s the lightest known metal and is extremely energy-dense, making it ideal for manufacturing batteries with long lifespans.

The problem is that lithium comes with its own set of troubles: Mining the metal is often devastating for the environment and the people who live nearby since it’s water-intensive and risks permanently damaging the land. The industry also has an outsize impact on Native American communities — three-quarters of all known U.S. lithium deposits are located near tribal land.

Solutions for soaring lithium demand

Demand for lithium is expected to skyrocket in the coming decades (by up to 4,000 percent, according to one estimate), which will require many new mines to meet it (more than 70 by 2025). These estimates assume the number of cars on the road will remain constant, so lithium demand will rise as gas guzzlers get replaced by electric vehicles. But what if the United States could design a policy that eliminates carbon emissions from the transportation sector without as much mining?

A new report from the Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate-policy think tank, offers a fix. In a paper out on Tuesday, the researchers estimate that the U.S. could decrease lithium demand by up to 90 percent by 2050 by expanding public transportation infrastructure, shrinking the size of electric vehicle batteries and maximizing lithium recycling. The group claims this report is the first to consider multiple pathways for getting the country’s cars and buses running on electricity and suppressing U.S. lithium demand at the same time.

“Conversations [about the dangers of mining] can lead folks to think that there’s a zero-sum trade-off: Either we address the climate crisis or we protect Indigenous rights and biodiversity,” said Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College and the lead author of the report. “This report asks the question: Is there a way to do both?”

Riofrancos and the other researchers modeled four scenarios for public transportation in the U.S. that would lead to different levels of lithium demand. In the baseline, the country follows the path it’s currently on, swapping out all gas cars for electric ones by 2050, with few other changes.

Fewer cars, more mass transit and personal mobility options

The other three scenarios consider what happens when more people are walking, biking or taking trains and buses. Cities grow denser, commutes shorten and public transportation expands and is electrified. Governments take away subsidies for owning cars, such as free parking, and limit on-street parking and lots. Assuming that the average battery size stays the same and eight-year battery warranties remain in place, lithium demand drops by 66 percent in the most ambitious scenario as compared to the U.S. staying on its current path. But even the more modest scenarios bring 18 and 41 percent drops in demand for the metal, respectively, largely thanks to expanding mass transit and denser urban areas that allow families to live without cars.

“The scenarios were really informed by what already exists in certain places,” said Kira McDonald, a Princeton University researcher. She and her colleagues used real-life examples for their estimates, looking at success stories in cities such as Vienna, which has slashed car use in recent years through car-free zones, bike-sharing and improvements to pedestrian comfort and safety. London, Lyon and Amsterdam have also all seen steep declines in vehicle ownership after rolling out low-emission zones and adding more bike lanes; in Paris, car use has fallen by about 45 percent since 1990.

Smaller EV batteries and more recycling

The researchers experimented with other variables that could influence lithium demand and were surprised to find that by reducing average battery sizes to 54 kilowatt-hours, close to the capacity of the Nissan Leaf, lithium demand fell as much as 42 percent, even when car use stayed on its current trajectory. While the global average battery is small, with a capacity of around 40 kWh, the bigger batteries used in the United States have an average capacity of around 70 kWh, and the report notes a trend toward even bigger batteries with higher capacities like the 130 kWh models found in some electric trucks and SUVs.

Riofrancos said there’s a way around building big batteries, while allowing that there are reasonable concerns about the availability of charging stations and the need for longer battery ranges in certain areas. “But the solution to that is to build more charging stations, not make enormous electric vehicles.”

Battery recycling — a nascent industry in the U.S. — could also reduce lithium demand, but it’s unlikely to help much for at least a decade, according to experts. Currently, there just aren’t a lot of electric-car batteries to recycle, as most of the early EVs are still on the roads, and some of the batteries that do putter out get reused for solar and wind energy storage. While the European Union will soon require new lithium-ion batteries to use some recycled parts, and China requires battery manufacturers to collaborate with recycling companies, the United States has no such requirements.

The Climate and Community Project report points out that recyclers have also had little reason to recover lithium, as it’s cheaper to mine. Even a fully up-and-running industry that recovers 98 percent of EV battery material could only meet about a third of lithium demand by 2050 if the country continues to rely on cars the way it does now — two-thirds would still come from the earth.

Getting Americans out of their cars, even their electric ones, would require sweeping changes to the country’s infrastructure, the fabric of urban areas and the very culture. Some have described the level of transformation required as unrealistic. But the researchers found examples of successful efforts in big cities around the world, even in the United States. Riofrancos pointed to free bus lines in Providence, Rhode Island, e-bike subsidies in Denver and efforts in other cities to scale back parking lots.

“The conversations are happening, but they’re not connected with congressional funding priorities at all,” Riofrancos said. She added that the Biden administration’s recently released transportation blueprint, with its focus on public transit and land-use planning, is out of step with its emphasis on promoting EVs and domestic lithium mining in the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate legislation Biden signed into law last August.

“I think at this point the question is not whether we decarbonize, but how,” she said. “That’s still an open question, and I think we should be having a broader...social and political debate over the different ways forward on this.”

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/01/capitalim-is-not-sustainable-revealed.html

How China Is Transforming Africa’s Economies

Editor OilPrice.com

Thu, January 26, 2023 

In 2000, China was the leading source of imports for only a few African countries: Sudan, Gambia, Benin and Djibouti.

But as Statista's Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below, 20 years later, the Asian superpower is now the top supplier of goods for over 30 nations on the continent.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The China-Africa connection has been fostered intensely over the last two decades. As reported by Statista's research expert for Angola, Kenya and Tanzania, Julia Faria:

"The value of Chinese exports to African countries jumped from five billion U.S. dollars to 110 billion".

It's not just a one-way street, however:

"African exports to China also increased, though at a slower pace. In 2020, total export value to China reached nearly 62 billion U.S. dollars, a slowdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The growing Chinese demand for raw materials has found a strong supplier in Africa, with exports valued at around 14 billion U.S. dollars in 2020."

Far beyond being a simple trade relationship, China has been the largest foreign investor in Africa for a number of years now. Additionally, the country was the source of 25 percent of infrastructure funding in the continent in 2018 - the second highest share that year and only second to the financial commitments from national African governments.

By Zerohedge.com

GLOBALIZATION IS FORDISM

Yellen lauds Ford's 100-year history in South Africa, flags more investments





U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visits South Africa

Thu, January 26, 2023
By Andrea Shalal

SILVERTON, South Africa (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday lauded the Ford Motor Co's 100-year history of assembling vehicles in South Africa and underscored Washington's resolve to expand trade ties with countries that it "can count on," including South Africa.

Yellen spoke after touring Ford's plant in Silverton, a suburb of Pretoria, where she got behind the wheel of bright yellow new Ranger pickup truck and spoke with workers and company officials. This is the third leg of her three-country trip across the African continent that is aimed at expanding U.S. economic ties and countering China's influence on the continent.

The plant, which employs 4,000 people, is an example of how deeper ties between the United States and Africa could produce good jobs and boost economic growth for both sides, Yellen told workers and company officials.

"Africa will shape the future of the global economy," she said. "We know that a thriving Africa is in the interest of the United States. A thriving Africa means a larger market for our goods and services. It means more investment opportunities for our businesses."

About 600 U.S. companies operate in South Africa, employing about 220,000 people and generating revenue equivalent to about 10% of South Africa's entire gross domestic product, U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Reuben Brigety said at the event.

Ford, a major U.S. investor in South Africa, is investing $1 billion to expand output at the plant there by 20%, adding 1,200 new jobs, and aims to develop a freight rail link with a seaport 700 miles (1,126.54 km) away.

Yellen said other U.S. companies, including Cisco, General Electric, and Visa also planned big investments, attracted by expanding markets fueled by a demographic boom that will see Africa account for a quarter of the world’s population by 2050.

The U.S. Treasury chief said South Africa had been the biggest beneficiary of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which grants eligible Sub-Saharan countries duty-free access to the U.S. market, but did not spell out what would happen when the legislation expires in 2025.

Yellen said South Africa also had a role to play in U.S. efforts to shift supply chains away from over-reliance on China and other non-market economies to more like-minded countries, an approach she has dubbed "friendshoring."

As in her comments to South Africa's finance minister earlier on Thursday, Yellen did not address South Africa's refusal to take sides over Russia's war in Ukraine or Washington's concern over military exercises it plans with China and Russia.

The massive economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's war against Ukraine underscored the need for resilient supply chains, she said.

"We are addressing the over-concentration of the production of critical goods in certain markets — particularly those that may not share our economic values," Yellen said. "To do so, we are deepening economic integration with the many countries that we can count on. That includes our many trusted trading partners on this continent — like South Africa."

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)

Yellen says Africa to shape world economy as US reengages

MOGOMOTSI MAGOME and GERALD IMRAY
Thu, January 26, 2023 

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen watched Ford cars and pickup trucks being assembled at a plant in South Africa on Thursday, citing it as an example of cooperation between Washington and Africa as she begins the Biden administration's big push to reengage with a continent that has 1.3 billion people and an abundance of economic potential.

“The United States’ strategy towards Africa is centered around a simple recognition that Africa will shape the future of the global economy,” Yellen said at the Ford plant in the suburb of Silverton in the South African capital, Pretoria.

“We know that a thriving Africa is in the interest of the United States. A thriving Africa means a large market for our goods and services. It means more investment opportunities for our businesses like this Ford plant, which can create jobs in Africa and customers for American businesses.”

The 76-year-old Yellen, smiling widely, got behind the wheel of one of the shining new vehicles at one point, and gripped the steering wheel firmly with both hands.


Yellen is nearing the end of a three-country tour of Africa that began in Senegal on the continent's west coast and also took in Zambia. Her visit is the start of the Biden administration's efforts to rebuild ties with Africa in the light of China's rapidly increasing economic presence on the world's second-largest continent, and Russia's military and diplomatic foothold in parts of it.

South Africa, Africa's most developed economy and pivotal to the U.S. plan, has deep ties with both Russia and China, and raised concern at the White House when it announced last week it would host Russian and Chinese warships next month and take part in joint naval drills with them off its east coast. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made an official visit to South Africa on Monday, a day before Yellen touched down.

Yellen has avoided mentioning the naval drills during her trip, or South Africa's neutral stance over the war in Ukraine and decision not to side with the West in condemning Russia. She did say Russia's invasion is to blame for increasing some of Africa’s problems.

“Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine has raised energy prices and exacerbated food insecurity,” she said.

Africa is the world's largest single trade area by number of countries. It has a young population, a burgeoning middle class and is expected to be home to one quarter of the world's population by 2050.

It also has a myriad of problems, and Yellen focused on one of them earlier Thursday when she held morning talks with South African Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana. The talks partly dealt, Yellen said, with transitioning South Africa from its heavy reliance on coal to greener energy sources.

South Africa relies on coal-fired plants to generate about 80% of its electricity. As well as being a huge polluter, the coal plants have proved unable to meet the country's needs. South Africa is currently embroiled in an electricity crisis, with scheduled rolling blackouts hitting businesses and households and its 60 million people for up to 10 hours a day because of diesel shortages and breakdowns at the state-owned electricity provider’s aging coal plants.

South Africa plans to reduce its reliance on coal to 59% of its electricity production by 2030 and is targeting zero carbon emissions by 2050. The U.S. and other Western nations have committed to help, pledging $8.5 billion in loans to fund South Africa's energy transition.

"South Africa is the first country with a just energy transition partnership to which the United States was proud to commit as a partner,” Yellen said. “This partnership represents South Africa’s bold first step towards expanding electricity access and reliability and creating a low-carbon and climate-resistant economy.”

Yellen's mission to promote American investment and ties comes in the face of China overtaking the U.S. in foreign direct investment in Africa. Trade between Africa and China surged to $254 billion in 2021, up about 35%.

Yellen's trip kicked off U.S. efforts to recover lost ground, while the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, is also on a tour to Africa, and President Joe Biden has said he intends to visit this year, as does Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Biden administration's plans were largely laid out at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington in December, when U.S. Deputy Commerce Secretary Don Graves said, “We took our eye off the ball so to speak (in Africa), and U.S. investors and companies are having to play catch-up.”

Before his meeting with Yellen on Thursday, Godongwana said that the U.S. still ranks among South Africa’s top trading partners.

“My hope is that this may continue,” he said.

___

Gerald Imray reported from Cape Town.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen looks into the interior of newly build vehicle during her tour at the Ford Assembling Plant in Pretoria, South Africa, Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023.

 (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

Anti-abortion protesters break into Walgreens AGM meeting room


Signage is seen outside of a Walgreens, owned by the Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc., in Manhattan, New York City

Thu, January 26, 2023 at 4:51 PM MST·2 min read

(Reuters) - Anti-abortion protesters broke into the room where Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc held its annual shareholders meeting in Newport Coast, California on Thursday for its decision to start selling abortion pills, the pharmacy chain said.

Walgreens and CVS Health Corp said on Jan. 4 that they plan to offer abortion pills following the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) decision to allow retail pharmacies to offer the drug in the country for the first time.

"Today, directly after the close of official business of our annual shareholders meeting, a small group of protesters entered the meeting room without authorization," Walgreens Senior Director for External Relations Fraser Engerman told Reuters.

"We are grateful that none of our shareholders, team members and event staff were harmed during this incident," Engerman said in a written statement.

The FDA on Jan. 3 finalized a rule allowing retail pharmacies to sell mifepristone. However, pharmacies must still weigh whether and where to offer the pill given political controversy surrounding abortion in the United States.

"It was a wild annual shareholders meeting," said Walgreens shareholder and AGM attendee John Chevedden. "The protesters knew what they were doing because they found a way to enter the room from behind the podium. It was a complete surprise."

"Upon leaving the meeting there were about 50 noisy protesters with signs just outside of the resort grounds," he said via email.

U.S. abortion rights were curtailed in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to terminating pregnancies when it scrapped a landmark ruling in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade case.

"We believe strongly in the right to peaceful protest, and an area was set aside for this purpose, but unfortunately some protesters took further disruptive actions," said Engerman.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein and Ross Kerber; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

Faculty calls on embattled Minnesota college head to resign


Hamline University Fayneese Miller during an interview Monday, Jan. 23. 2023 in St Paul Minn. The faculty at the Minnesota college is calling for its president to resign for her handling of a Muslim student's objection to a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad being shown in an ancient art course. Faculty leaders at Hamline University say members voted Tuesday, Jan. 24. 

Jerry Holt/Star Tribune 


Wed, January 25, 2023

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Faculty leaders at a Minnesota college that dismissed an art history instructor who showed depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in a course have overwhelmingly called for the university president to resign.

Faculty leaders at Hamline University said 71 of 92 members who attended a meeting Tuesday voted to call on President Fayneese Miller to resign immediately. They say they lost faith in Miller because of her handling of an objection lodged by a Muslim student who said seeing the artwork violated her religious beliefs.

The adjunct instructor who showed the artwork, Erika López Prater, sued the private liberal arts school last week after it declined to renew her contract.

“It became clear that the harm that’s been done and the repair that has to be done, that new leadership is needed to move that forward,” Jim Scheibel, president of the Hamline University Faculty Council, told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

The faculty objected to what they considered a violation of academic freedom.

“We are distressed that members of the administration have mishandled this issue and great harm has been done to the reputation of Minnesota’s oldest university,” the faculty council statement read. It later went on to say, “As we no longer have faith in President Miller’s ability to lead the university forward, we call upon her to immediately tender her resignation to the Hamline University Board of Trustees.”

After criticism from across the country, Miller conceded last week that she mishandled the episode, which sparked a debate over balancing academic freedom with respect for religion.

“Like all organizations, sometimes we misstep,” she said in a joint statement with the chair of the school’s trustees. “In the interest of hearing from and supporting our Muslim students, language was used that does not reflect our sentiments on academic freedom. Based on all that we have learned, we have determined that our usage of the term ‘Islamophobic’ was therefore flawed.”

A Hamline spokesman told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that Miller and her team were discussing how to respond to the faculty vote.

López Prater showed centuries-old artwork depicting the Prophet Muhammad in an October lesson on Islamic art. She said she knew that visual depictions of him violate many Muslims' faith, so she warned the class ahead of time.

The instructor alleges in her lawsuit that Hamline subjected her to religious discrimination and defamation, and damaged her professional and personal reputation.

The American Association of University Professors, which is devoted to academic freedom, has launched an inquiry and is planning a campus visit next month.

While leaders of some local Muslim groups have criticized López Prater, the national office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations disputed claims that her actions were Islamophobic. The group said professors who analyze images of the Prophet Muhammad for academic purposes are not the same as “Islamophobes who show such images to cause offense.”

LEFT WING MEME