Day: July 2, 2024

The Department of Energy is set to give a $400 million loan to a financially troubled battery company that admitted to defrauding the federal government in 2022, according to court records.

Eos Energy—whose board includes a personal friend of Department of Energy loan czar Jigar Shah—was forced to pay a $1 million settlement to the government two years ago for evading tariffs on Chinese battery imports.

But the company is still on track to receive the nine-figure loan from Shah’s office, despite its past violation and other financial concerns.

Last August, Eos Energy’s stock plummeted after a report from short-seller operation Iceberg Research, which claimed the company was inflating its $500 million backlog of customer battery orders.

Iceberg’s report prompted a class action lawsuit, which is ongoing, against Eos for “wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company’s securities.”

The news could increase scrutiny of the DOE’s loan office, which is already facing pushback from Congress over multiple loan decisions. Lawmakers last year started probing the Loan Program Office’s $3 billion loan to Sunnova Energy, a solar company, after the Washington Free Beacon reported on allegations that it pressured elderly, dementia-ridden customers into entering long-term solar contracts.

KORE Power, another company set to receive an $850 million LPO loan, is co-owned by a Chinese battery-maker, the Free Beacon reported.

The DOE inspector general said last year that she was investigating Shah’s loan department for potential conflicts of interest with loan recipients. Before joining the Biden administration, Shah founded a trade organization that has helped connect loan-seekers with what is now his office.

Several companies that have received or are slated to receive LPO loans also have prior connections to Shah. One of Sunnova’s board members, Anne Slaughter Andrew, also served on the board of the trade group founded by Shah.

Before joining the Biden administration, Shah was also a major investor in Plug Power, a hydrogen company that received a conditional $1.6 billion loan commitment from his office in May.

Audrey Zibelman, a board director at Eos Energy, served on the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority with Shah.

In a LinkedIn post two months ago, Zibelman said she and Shah were “friends.” She told the GridTalk podcast last year that she and Shah “know each other from New York” and have “been talking about transactive grids for a really long time.”

Zibelman owns over 100,000 shares in Eos Energy, over 30,000 of which she purchased in April, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records.

In 2019, a former Eos Energy consultant filed a qui tam False Claims Act lawsuit against the company on behalf of the U.S. government. The consultant alleged that Eos Energy undervalued the dry batteries it imported from China by over $6 million, defrauding the federal government out of over $1 million in tariffs, according to court records.

The company allegedly imported thousands of dry batteries from China that it claimed were worth only $185 each, when they were actually worth around $2,800 each.

“Eos’s top management knew that Eos was undervaluing the dry batteries of the [Customs and Border Protection] entry documents, and had this fact brought to their attention by an employee who was Eos’s Logistics Manager,” the lawsuit said.

“Yet,” the lawsuit went on, “Eos’s management did nothing to correct the undervaluation, but instead continued knowingly to cause Eos to import dry batteries from China using entry documents containing the same undervaluation, and thus knowingly to underpay customs duties.”

Eos Energy admitted to undervaluing the Chinese imports in 2022 and agreed to pay a $1.02 million settlement to the federal government.

But the company has continued to face financial questions. Last July, Iceberg Research released a report accusing Eos Energy of falsifying its $500 million backlog of customer battery orders—the company’s most significant asset.

“We are 100% confident that the backlog is fake,” wrote Iceberg, noting that half of Eos’s pending orders are attributed to one customer, Bridgelink Commodities, which recently had its assets auctioned off by creditors.

“We wonder how Eos can still present Bridgelink as a major client. The batteries ordered by Bridgelink were intended for renewable energy assets which have now been auctioned off,” wrote Iceberg. “Yet, Eos continues to include Bridgelink in its backlog, and is likely to have made the same representations when applying for the Department of Energy loan.”

Eos downplayed the report, saying Bridgelink “continues to build pipeline and is actively seeking financing for energy storage projects covered by Eos’s multi-year [supply agreement].”

But the response failed to stop the fallout, with Eos’s stock plunging 24 percent immediately and 15 percent the next day, according to reports.

Investors filed a class action suit against Eos in August, claiming that the company’s “backlog was overstated” and “that such overstatement negatively impacts Eos’s ability to secure a loan from the Department of Energy.” The suit is still pending.

Eos and the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment.

The post DOE Poised To Dole Out $400 Million to Energy Company on Brink of Financial Collapse—After Evading Tariffs on Chinese Imports appeared first on .

Eloise Maybank is accustomed to luxury. A London native, Maybank attended high school at a private French academy in London, the renowned Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle de Londres, and then at Milton Academy, an elite Massachusetts boarding school where tuition runs $76,000 a year. Then she enrolled at Columbia.

Maybank was among approximately 100 people arrested at Columbia University in late April for storming and occupying a campus building. Of those arrested, 45 were charged with third-degree criminal trespassing, public records show. At a hearing last month, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office dismissed cases against 31 of those people. Prosecutors told the 14 others that charges against them would be dropped if they avoided arrest for the next six months, but the defendants rejected that offer and will return to court in late July.

A Washington Free Beacon review of those charged shows they included several Columbia University, Barnard College, and New York University students and recent graduates, a City University of New York professor, and a wealthy outside activist also facing charges for setting an Israel supporter’s flag aflame during the April protest.

Maybank is not the only student arrested in April who comes from wealth and privilege.

Eloise Maybank

Julia Jackson

Madelyn McGuigan

Also arrested were Julia Jackson, an alumna of New York University and New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy—tuition $70,000 a year—as well as Barnard College graduate Madelyn McGuigan, the daughter of finance executive Chris McGuigan, the owner of a picturesque home valued at $2.2 million in the beachside town of Rumson, New Jersey, the Free Beacon found. Both McGuigan and Jackson will return to court in late July after rejecting the deal offered by prosecutors.

Then there is Columbia graduate student and self-described “medievalist” Grant Miner, the son of veteran California lobbyist and former Arnold Schwarzenegger aide Paul Miner, the owner of a $1.8 million Sacramento home, real estate records show. In October, just two days after Hamas’s terror attack on the Jewish state, Grant Miner was photographed at a New York City rally holding a sign that read, “Resistance against occupation is a human right.”

Grant Miner

Others came from less privileged backgrounds and attended Columbia thanks to the generosity of others. That was the case for Sebastian Jimenez, who graduated from Columbia in May. He was the recipient of a scholarship underwritten by Columbia alumni that paid his tuition. Jimenez, who was booted from campus after his April 30 arrest, also sued Columbia to regain access to his campus dorm.

CUNY professor Elizabeth Reade is also among those who still face charges. The Department of Education said last month that CUNY was one of two schools that had failed to protect Jewish students, and the school has spent the past several years grappling with campus anti-Semitism. The school drew criticism after putting its chief diversity officer, Saly Abd Alla, a former director of a regional branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations, in charge of a series of “diversity dialogues.”

Reade is represented in the case by Victoria Marie Ruiz, a former New York public defender who resigned from the job in November 2023 after she was filmed tearing down posters of Israeli hostages in New York City. Ruiz went on to raise tens of thousands of dollars through a GoFundMe she launched to “help out with legal fees” and “living costs between jobs.”

“Our incredible friend is under attack,” a member of Ruiz’s punk rock band wrote on the fundraising page.

One of the leaders behind the Hamilton Hall occupation, the 40-year-old professional agitator James Carlson, is the son of prominent advertising executives Richard Tarlow and Sandy Carlson Tarlow, the New York Post reported last month. In 2019, he bought a three-story townhouse in Brooklyn’s Park Slope for $2.3 million. Carlson is also facing criminal mischief and arson charges after he was caught on video setting an Israeli flag on fire outside of Columbia’s campus. During the ordeal, another activist hit a pro-Israel demonstrator in the face with a rock.

Others arrested include Columbia graduate student and fellow protest leader Aidan Parisi, the son of longtime State Department official Elizabeth Daugharty. Columbia suspended Parisi over his involvement in a pro-terror “Palestinian Resistance 101” event held on campus in March, barring him from campus. But Parisi refused to leave his university apartment, saying that doing so would require him to find “housing that would accept his emotional support rabbit,” and later emerged as a constant presence in the encampment that plagued campus for weeks. Police arrested Parisi during their April 30 campus sweep.

Of the 46 protesters arrested over the occupation of Hamilton Hall, 3 have ties to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), the Free Beacon found.

Catherine Curran-Groome, a University of Vermont graduate, interned for Sanders as a student before joining People’s Action, a left-wing advocacy group working to “curb climate change and end our dependence on fossil fuels.” University of Virginia graduate Raiya Al-Nsour also interned for Sanders in 2019 before working as a legislative project specialist for the United Postal Workers Union.

Catherine Curran-Groome

Raiya Al-Nsour

Jackson, the NYU and Phillips Exeter graduate, volunteered for Sanders’s presidential campaign as a canvasser from Oct. 2019 to April 2020, according to her LinkedIn profile. Before that, she interned in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office under George Soros-backed prosecutor Larry Krasner, who called the Columbia arrests “stupid.”

Jackson, McGuigan, Miner, and Al-Nsour did not respond to requests for comment. Parisi declined to comment. Maybank, Carlson, and Curran-Groome could not be reached.

Other Columbia arrestees have similar backgrounds in left-wing advocacy.

Columbia graduate student Marianne Almero, for example, interned at the Urban Indigenous Collective, where she engaged in “social justice advocacy to decolonize education institutions, climate justice, incarceration and police systems, and health accessibility.” Rose Bottorf, an undergraduate philosophy student with the pronouns “they/she/he,” taught “critical race theory and activism to children ages 14-17” as an intern at City Mission Boston, a since-shuttered nonprofit that worked to “expose systemic barriers” and “use storytelling as a healing tool for social change.”

Marianne Almero

Rose Bottorf

In one case, an arrestee participated in the Hamilton Hall occupation roughly one year after Columbia honored her for her political activism. That arrestee, Andrea Salamanca, graduated from Columbia in 2023, when the university awarded her a Multicultural Graduation Cord, given to graduating students “who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to diversity, social justice, and multiculturalism.”

Columbia 2024 graduate and fellow arrestee Franziska Lee, an organizer with the Columbia Revolutionary Marxist Students Organization, said she chose to minor in race and ethnicity studies because “everyone was on board with, like, leftism and critical race theory.”

“Columbia has all these core required classes, so you end up with people from all different majors, which is cool in one sense,” Lee said last year.

“But if you’re trying to have a discussion about history or something, and people are like, ‘Well, I don’t think colonization is bad,’ or something like that … It’s like you can’t get far with that,” she continued. “So I like the Ethnic Studies department, because everybody is to an extent on board.”

Almero, Bottorf, and Reade did not respond to requests for comment. Salamanca, Lee, and Jimenez could not be reached.

The post Meet the Rich Kids, Professors, and Activists Arrested at Columbia in April appeared first on .

BUDAPEST — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was in Kyiv on Tuesday for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his first visit to the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Orbán’s press chief confirmed to Hungarian news agency MTI that the Prime Minister had arrived in the Ukrainian capital in the morning for the talks. Bertalan Havasi said the main topic of the rare meeting will be the opportunity for building peace as Ukraine fights off Russia’s invasion.

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Read More: Inside Andriy Yermak’s Quest for Peace in Ukraine

This visit comes the day after Hungary took over the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union, a position that has little real power but can be used to set the tone of the bloc’s agenda. Hungarian officials have indicated that they will act as “honest brokers” in the role despite worries from some E.U. lawmakers that Hungary’s democratic track record makes it unfit to lead the bloc.

Orbán, known as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest E.U. ally, has long been accused by his European partners of dismantling democratic institutions at home and acting as an obstinate spoiler of key E.U. policy priorities.

Read More: The E.U. Is United Against Russia—With One Notable Exception

The bloc has frozen more than $20 billion in funding to Budapest over alleged rule-of-law and corruption violations, and Orbán has conducted numerous anti-E.U. communications campaigns depicting it as an overcentralized, repressive organization.

He has also routinely blocked, delayed or watered down E.U. efforts to extend assistance to Kyiv and to sanction Moscow over its war, frustrating both Zelensky other E.U. leaders. Orbán has long accused Kyiv of mistreating an ethnic Hungarian minority in Ukraine’s western region of Zakarpattia.

Orbán’s visit also comes as he seeks to recruit members into a new nationalist alliance that he hopes will soon become the largest right-wing group in the European Parliament. On Sunday, Orbán met in Vienna with the leaders of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party and the main Czech opposition party, announcing the formation of the new group, “Patriots for Europe.”

The trio would need to attract lawmakers from at least four more E.U. countries to successfully form a group in Europe’s new parliament, which held elections in June. Right-wing nationalist parties across Europe strengthened their position in the elections, but ideological differences over the war in Ukraine and cooperation with Russia have often prevented deeper cooperation among some of the parties.

The Fourth of July holiday can often be a great opportunity to visit the seaside for a sandy getaway. But local governments across the U.S. have issued warnings and closures to stay away from certain shores due to alarmingly high bacteria levels.

As of Monday afternoon, at least 29 beaches in Massachusetts have been reported closed due to “bacterial exceedance,” according to the state’s Department of Public Health Beach Water Quality Dashboard.

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In California’s San Diego County, one beach in the Coronado area has been closed since May as “bacterial levels exceed health standards,” according to its Department of Environmental Health and Quality’s Beach and Bay Water Quality Monitoring Program.

In New York’s Nassau County, Crescent Beach has been closed for swimming as of Monday evening due to high levels of enterococci bacteria found in samples.

Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy also reports that four beaches have been closed since last week, due to high bacterial levels. 

How should I interpret beach closures?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises those planning to visit the beach to heed closures and to stay out of closed bodies of water, as they are “unsafe” for swimming. 

And even if a beach or lake is not technically closed, if the water smells bad or looks discolored or cloudier than usual, there could be harmful contaminants in it. Those with open wounds are especially advised to stay away.

What bacteria has been found in beaches?

While officials have not clarified the bacteria present in the beaches in California and Michigan, Massachusetts officials monitor levels of enterococci or E. coli—called indicator organisms—to determine “bacterial exceedance.”

Enterococci and Escherichia coli, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), are bacteria that live in the intestines of warm-blooded animals like humans. While enterococci and most strains of E. coli are typically not considered harmful to humans, their presence in water can indicate possible contamination by fecal waste and may also signal that other disease-causing pathogens, such as viruses, bacteria, and protozoa, may also be present in the water.

Two Massachusetts beaches also cite “harmful cyanobacteria bloom” for their closures as of Monday night. The EPA says these cyanobacteria—also called blue-green algae—are often identified as “floating mats of bad-smelling, decaying and gelatinous scum in lakes” that are usually green in color.

How harmful are these bacteria?

When cyanobacteria degrade, they may release toxins that could be harmful to humans, the EPA says. Severe effects of cyanobacteria exposure are rare, but it can cause allergic reactions such as skin rashes, eye irritations, respiratory symptoms. In some cases it can cause gastroenteritis, liver and kidney failure or death.

The EPA says those who swim or come in contact with water with elevated levels of E. coli and other fecal indicator organisms are at an increased risk of getting sick because of potential exposure to fecal pathogens. Common symptoms of ingesting a harmful strain of E. coli include vomiting and diarrhea. Enterococci, meanwhile, is a common cause in hospitals of urinary tract infections, according to the National Institute of Health, and are highly resistant to antiseptics and antibiotics. Some enterococci, of which there are more than 50 different species, are also linked with more serious diseases like endocarditis and peritonitis.

What are other reasons for beach closures?

Bacteria isn’t the only cause of beach closures. The National Ocean Service says other common causes can include excessive rain that carries pollutants from storm drains to recreational bodies, harmful “algal blooms” such as “red tides,” and sewage or chemical spills.

Several beaches in Florida, Hawaii, and California have also been closed at various points this year following shark sightings or attacks.

In general, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the best things to do are plan ahead for trips to the beach and monitor advisories, look out for swim spots that have good water circulation, and practice basic hygiene, including washing with clean water and soap after swimming.

Chiang Mai, Thailand — When Myanmar’s junta announced a conscription law to help crush a popular pro-democracy uprising, Khaing knew there was only one way to escape its clutches and she began planning her escape.

Weeks later the former teacher was hidden in a smuggler’s van heading into Thailand with little more than some clothes, cash and an ID card, not knowing when she would be able to return.

Now scraping a living in Bangkok without papers, Khaing worries constantly about a tap on the shoulder by Thai police and deportation back to the junta.

She is one of tens of thousands of young people rights groups estimate have fled Myanmar since the military introduced conscription in February to shore up its depleted ranks.

The junta is battling widespread armed opposition to its 2021 coup and its soldiers are accused of bloody rampages and using air and artillery strikes to punish civilian communities.

It says it wants to enlist 5,000 new people, each month, aged between 18-35, but details on how they will be chosen, and where and how they will serve are vague.

Media reports of young men being dragged off the streets and into the army, which the military denies,have further added to the panic.

“The conscription law means we have to kill each other,” said Wai Yan, 26, from eastern Karen state, who in May crossed into Thailand.

“We are not fighting a war against foreign enemies,” he said from the Bangkok restaurant where he works without documents.

“We are fighting each other.”

Smuggled for $220

Shortly after enacting the law, the junta tightened requirements for people crossing Myanmar’s land borders, and temporarily halted issuing foreign work permits for young men.

Yangon-based film critic Ngwe Yan Thun, a pseudonym, said he had “no choice” but to leave illegally.

Through friends he contacted a “broker” who said he could be smuggled over the border into Thailand for around $220.

Ngwe Yan Thun sold off all of his belongings, arranged for friends to look after his dog and bought an air ticket to Tachileik on the Thai border.

At the airport, he had to pay “tea money” to officials at the airport who were suspicious of why he was traveling to the remote provincial town.  

He was dropped at a safehouse near the border where around 30 others were waiting to be taken into Thailand.

Then, at short notice, he was crammed into a car with 11 others and they set off.

“I didn’t feel like a human being, I felt like I was black market goods,” Ngwe Yan Thun said from Thailand’s Chiang Mai.

‘Am I in Myanmar?’

Thailand has long been home to a sizeable Myanmar community, with a bustling market in Bangkok and towns along the border.

The conflict has made it difficult to conduct surveys or verify how many young people had fled abroad to escape conscription, said an official from the International Labour Organization.

But the organization said it had received estimates from ground sources that suggested “hundreds of thousands” had fled the law.

Wai Yan said he was surprised at how many people from Myanmar were in Thailand.

“I even joke with my friends ‘Am I still in Myanmar?’”

‘Cried every day’

After arriving in Bangkok, Khaing was unable to contact her parents as fighting around her home village cut internet and mobile networks.

“I was worried about getting caught by the Thai police. So, I didn’t dare to go outside when I arrived,” she told AFP.

“I cried every day in my first month here.”

She found part-time work at a friend’s shop and returns in the evenings to her sparse room where she sells medicine and beauty products on TikTok.

A large teddy bear gifted to her by a friend who knew she was feeling lonely takes up much of the bed.

The first batch of conscripts finished their training and would soon be sent to their posts, state media reported last week, as fighting rages in the west and north of the country.

Ngwe Yan Thun is grateful he is far away, but is kept up at night wondering what to do next.

“I think about what I should do if I don’t get a job and official documents to stay,” he said.

“I can’t go back to Myanmar. I feel overwhelmed by thoughts and worries all the time.”

That Covid Infection Years Ago Could Still Be Making You Sick, Science Suggests  The Wall Street Journal

UK court gives mixed ruling in Pfizer v Moderna COVID vaccine patents case  Reuters

That Covid Infection Years Ago Could Still Be Making You Sick, Science Suggests  The Wall Street Journal

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Healthcare system resilience and adaptability to pandemic disruptions in the United States  Nature.com