The Biden administration’s support for the mine follows the president’s 2022 determination invoking the Defense Production Act, which ordered an increase in domestic mining of “critical” materials sufficient to create a large-scale battery supply chain and move the nation away from fossil fuels and foreign production lines. Manganese was singled out as critical. Congressional passage of the Inflation Reduction Act also called for increased domestic mining in the name of green energy.⁠ ⁠ The Patagonia Area Resource Alliance and several of the region’s environmental organizations alleged a series of Forest Service violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, resulting in the rushed release of two permits for exploratory drilling projects in the Patagonias in May. ⁠ ⁠ PARA and its supporters called on the court to declare that the Forest Service broke the law and quash the agency’s authorizations. The moment demands urgency, they argued: “Drilling could begin at any time.”⁠ ⁠ Read more from Ryan Devereaux via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Photos: Molly Peters for The Intercept

As the Ukraine war drags on, the Biden administration is now reportedly in the final stages of deciding whether to send more cluster bombs to the Ukrainian military. The decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine would likely be seen as a setback to nonproliferation efforts aimed at stopping use of the weapon.⁠ ⁠ A new report by Human Rights Watch analyzing the impact of previous cluster munition attacks carried out last summer by the Ukrainian military found that “Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 15 more,” adding that the true number of casualties was likely greater, as many wounded people had been taken to Russia for medical care and not returned.⁠ ⁠ The move to transfer cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military comes on the heels of other U.S. initiatives to train Ukrainians on advanced fighter aircraft, and possibly provide them long-range missiles capable of striking deep into Russian-held territory. The transfer of cluster bombs to the Ukrainians would be much more ethically fraught.⁠ ⁠ Cluster munitions are controversial due to the manner in which “bomblets” are scattered around a targeted area, creating secondary explosions that can cause death and injury even long after a conflict has ceased.⁠ ⁠ The bombs are currently at the center of an international campaign to ban their use in armed conflict. More than 100 states have signed an international convention on cluster munitions vowing not to employ them in war, produce them domestically, or encourage their use in foreign conflicts. Despite public pressure to join, the U.S. has not become a signatory to the convention.⁠ ⁠ “Cluster munitions used by Russia and Ukraine are killing civilians now and will continue to do so for many years,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, in the report. “Both sides should immediately stop using them, and not try to get more of these indiscriminate weapons.”⁠ ⁠ Read more from Murtaza Hussain via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Photo: Pierre Crom/Getty Images

The FBI’s primary tool for monitoring social media threats is the same contractor that labeled peaceful Black Lives Matter protest leaders DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie as “threat actors” requiring “continuous monitoring” in 2015.⁠ ⁠ The contractor, ZeroFox, identified McKesson and Elzie as posing a “high severity” physical threat, despite including no evidence that McKesson or Elzie were suspected of criminal activity. ⁠ ⁠ The FBI, which declined to comment, hired ZeroFox in 2021, a fact referenced in the new 106-page Senate report about the intelligence community’s failure to anticipate the January 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol. The June 27 report, produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, shows the bureau’s broad authorities to surveil social media content — authorities the FBI previously denied it had, including before Congress. It also reveals the FBI’s reliance on outside companies to do much of the filtering for them.⁠ ⁠ In testimony before the Senate in 2021, the FBI’s then-Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Jill Sanborn flatly denied that the FBI had the power to monitor social media discourse.⁠ ⁠ Sanborn’s statement was widely publicized at the time and cited as evidence that concerns about federal government involvement in social media were unfounded. But, as the Senate report stresses, Sanborn’s answer was false. ⁠ ⁠ In an interview with The Intercept, Elzie stressed how incompetent the FBI’s analysis of social media was in her situation.⁠ ⁠ “I don’t think [ZeroFox] should be getting $14 million dollars [from] the same FBI that knocked on my family’s door [in Missouri] and looked for me when it was world news that I was in Baton Rouge at the time,” Elzie told The Intercept. “They’re just very unserious, both organizations.”⁠ ⁠ Read more from Ken Klippenstein via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Photo: Jeff Roberson/AP

A top adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny. “As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the Covid origins debate. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone,” he added, “but not my NIH computer.” Morens is a 25-year veteran of NIH who serves as a senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position held by Fauci until his retirement late last year. After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, Morens wrote to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with the group instead. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.” The email with Morens’s statements was part of a broader exchange in which Morens and his scientist correspondents denounced media coverage by The Intercept and other publications concerning the origins of Covid and harshly criticized those who take seriously the possibility that the virus emerged from a research accident in Wuhan, China. They also laid out their own arguments in favor of a natural origin for the virus. Ethics experts consulted by The Intercept expressed concern about Morens’s comments on FOIA compliance. “When you evade laws that are meant to make government more transparent and accountable, that is very bad,” said Delaney Marsco, the senior legal counsel for ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “It is bad for public trust in government. It is bad for agency culture. The ethical implications are bad.” Read more from Jimmy Tobias via the link in our bio. Screenshot: The Intercept

Swedish engineer Erik Andersson set out on a marine expedition to prove that Seymour Hersh’s narrative about the Nord Stream bombing was correct. What he found was very different.⁠ ⁠ Last September, a series of explosions rocked the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea off the coasts of Sweden and Denmark, sparking a major geopolitical debate over which country ordered the bombings.⁠ ⁠ On February 8, Hersh published a story on his Substack, charging that President Joe Biden had personally authorized the attack against the Russian-controlled gas pipelines. Andersson had never heard of Hersh, but his gut instinct was that the veteran journalist’s story was “probably true.” He spent days and nights poring over news footage and exchanging analyses with a wide cross section of people on Twitter.⁠ ⁠ In March, Andersson began looking for a captain with a ship willing to take him on his own expedition. He spent $10,000 on the boat charter and another $10,000 on an underwater drone with a high-resolution camera and other equipment. He began his expedition on May 22, declaring the mission an act of “popular oversight,” as he wanted to prove that private investigations of major world incidents could serve as a guardrail against media outlets spinning false narratives or governments covering up crimes.⁠ ⁠ Hersh has been adamant that the bombs were placed by American divers and that it was a highly complex task necessitating not only U.S. Navy specialists, but also the support of Norwegian maritime forces. Andersson’s findings challenge Hersh’s assertions as well as the narrative preferred by analysts who believe Russia carried out the bombing.⁠ ⁠ In short, while his findings do not rule out any suspects, including the U.S., they do bolster the case that Ukraine — or private actors — could be responsible for the attack.⁠ ⁠ Read more from Jeremy Scahill via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Screenshot: The Intercept, Video: Agnes Andersson⁠ Graphic: The Intercept / Sonar images by Patrik Juhlin of the Baltic Explorer and Erik Andersson

Raymond Mattia was killed in a hail of gunfire last month, after stepping outside to find nearly a dozen Border Patrol agents and at least one tribal police officer advancing on his property on the Tohono O’odham Nation.⁠ ⁠ Last week, a tensely awaited medical examiner’s report ruled the case a homicide, finding that Mattia was shot nine times. Border Patrol body camera footage released at the same time confirmed that what the authorities thought was a gun was in fact Mattia’s cellphone.⁠ ⁠ “We feel after watching the video that he was trying to comply the best he could,” Mattia’s niece, Yvonne Nevarez, told The Intercept. “If they’re allowed to get away with this now, it’s not going to stop.”⁠ ⁠ For Mattia’s family, more questions arose from the body camera videos than answers, hardening their resolve to find accountability for the loss of a beloved father, brother, and uncle. Though Customs and Border Protection had confirmed that all 10 agents involved in the incident were wearing body cameras, the family was shown the same 28-minute edited video the agency released to the public last week, which only included video from the three agents who opened fire.⁠ ⁠ “We were under the impression that we were going to watch raw footage,” Nevarez said. “The way they put it together feels like a cheap attempt to justify what they did, and it feels like none of them are on our side. It feels like they’re just trying to defend themselves, instead of defending my uncle Ray.”⁠ ⁠ Read more from Ryan Devereaux via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection via AP⁠

Long before he plunged Russia into its most significant political crisis in three decades, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin caterer turned mercenary warlord and then mutineer, had built a profitable empire interfering in the politics and crises of countries around the world.⁠ ⁠ Prigozhin’s businesses include not only the Wagner mercenary group that became a household name when it joined Russian forces in Ukraine — before launching an armed insurrection against Moscow last week — but also an online army that has fought information wars from Sudan to the United States, where Prigozhin remains under federal indictment over his alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.⁠ ⁠ Prigozhin’s brief rebellion and ongoing rhetoric against the government of his once close associate Vladimir Putin played out online as much as on the ground, as he successfully utilized the messaging service Telegram to communicate with the public. ⁠ ⁠ Social media’s prominent role in the rebellion echoed Prigozhin’s earlier online battles, where he often seized on a vacuum of reliable information to seek to control the narrative or actively worked to sow doubt and chaos around what was happening.⁠ ⁠ “The misinformation piece is a huge part of the narrative,” Raphael Parens, a fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program who has long researched Prigozhin and Wagner, told The Intercept. He added that influencing public discourse is one of Wagner’s “top tools.”⁠ ⁠ Read more from Alice Speri via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Photo: Wagner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Last June, Martha Ann Bomgardner Alito, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, entered into a lease agreement with Citizen Energy III in Oklahoma. If extraction on her 160-acre plot of land proves fruitful, the company will pay her 3/16ths of all the money it makes from oil and gas sales.⁠ ⁠ Because Citizen Energy III isn’t implicated in any cases before the Supreme Court, Alito’s holding in Oklahoma doesn’t appear to pose any direct conflicts of interest. But it does add context to a political outlook that has alarmed environmentalists since Alito’s confirmation hearing in 2006 — and cast recent decisions that embolden the oil and gas industry in a damning light. ⁠ ⁠ In May, Alito penned a majority decision in Sackett v. EPA which radically scaled back the Clean Water Act, reducing its mandate by tens of millions of acres. The plaintiffs’ position in the case was backed by the American Gas Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association.⁠ ⁠ Prior to targeting the Clean Water Act, Alito joined the courts’ other conservative justices in attacking another set of EPA powers under the Clean Air Act in West Virginia v. EPA. The 2022 ruling gutted the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. ⁠ ⁠ “There need not be a specific case involving the drilling rights associated with a specific plot of land for Alito to understand what outcomes in environmental cases would buttress his family’s net wealth,” Jeff Hauser, founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, told The Intercept. “Alito does not have to come across like a drunken Paul Thomas Anderson character gleefully confessing to drinking our collective milkshakes in order to be a real life, run-of-the-mill political villain.”⁠ ⁠ Read more from Daniel Boguslaw via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Photo: Alex Wong via Getty Images

Yevgeny Prigozhin is a dead man walking. But so is Vladimir Putin, writes James Risen.⁠ ⁠ In an insane series of events over the weekend, Russian mercenary leader Prigozhin launched what appeared to be a coup against Putin’s regime, marching his Wagner Group mercenaries from their positions in Ukraine, where they had been fighting alongside the Russian military, into Russia. They seized control of Rostov-on-Don, a key military hub, before marching north to Moscow. Prigozhin and his troops met little resistance from the Russian military; he seemed poised to enter the capital and seize power. Nothing would stop him, he said, vowing that “we will go to the end.”⁠ ⁠ But his bravado didn’t last long. Just as Wagner forces were closing in on Moscow Saturday, Prigozhin suddenly reversed himself. He cut a deal with the Russian president, brokered by Alexander Lukashenko — Belarus’s autocratic leader and a close Putin ally — and announced that his troops would turn back. ⁠ ⁠ It is still not certain what Saturday’s deal really means and whether it represents an end to the crisis or merely a short-term tactical shift in an ongoing duel between Prigozhin and Putin. But one thing is clear: Prigozhin lost his nerve on Saturday. He had a golden opportunity to seize power at a moment when Putin was surprised and vulnerable. The Russian military had many of its resources in Ukraine rather than Russia, and Wagner’s heavily armed forces had at least the potential to outgun the remaining Russian security services guarding Moscow.⁠ ⁠ But Prigozhin’s moment was fleeting. Now the odds are good that Putin will have his rival murdered. ⁠ ⁠ But Putin is a dead man walking, too, because his tenuous hold on power has now been exposed to the world. Prigozhin’s rebellion has revealed that Putin’s regime is a hollow shell and doesn’t really have a monopoly on violence in Russia.⁠ ⁠ Read more from James Risen via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Photo: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

After Ukrainian forces regained control of the port city of Kherson last November, following eight months of Russian occupation, some journalists entered the liberated city within hours. Without formal permission to be there, they documented the jubilant crowds welcoming soldiers with hugs and Ukrainian flags. Ukrainian officials, who tightly control press access to the front lines, responded by revoking the journalists’ press credentials, claiming that they had “ignored existing restrictions.” ⁠ ⁠ In the months since then, as Ukraine has sought to liberate more territory occupied by Russia, the Ukrainian government has intensified its efforts to control the narrative of the war by tightening journalists’ access to the conflict. “After that, things started getting worse. … They have tried to place more control on journalists,” Katerina Sergatskova, editor-in-chief of Zaborona Media, an independent Ukrainian publication, told The Intercept. ⁠ ⁠ Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion last year, Ukrainian authorities have threatened, revoked, or denied press credentials of journalists working for half a dozen Ukrainian and foreign news outlets because of their coverage, the news outlet Semafor reported earlier this month. In one recent example, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense did not renew the press credentials of a Ukraine-based photographer who accused the country’s security services of subjecting him to interrogations, a lie detector test, and accusations that he was working against Ukraine’s “national interest.” ⁠ ⁠ Government officials restored Anton Skyba’s accreditation last week, following a pressure campaign by colleagues and press freedom advocates, who have been denouncing tightening restrictions on media access to the front lines. But the episode put a spotlight on tensions between Ukrainian authorities and the journalists covering the conflict that have quietly escalated in recent months. Veteran war correspondents, for their part, are accusing Ukrainian officials of making reporting on the reality of the war, with rare exceptions, nearly impossible.⁠ ⁠ Read more from Alice Speri via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Photo: Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images

In a blistering attack on her Senate colleague last week, Sen. Tammy Duckworth warned independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema that a proposal to reduce the number of required in-flight training hours for pilots would result in “blood on your hands.” The attack from Duckworth was prompted by an amendment supported by Sinema and Sen. John Thune, that would allow pilots to meet training requirements by substituting hours spent in a flight simulator for actual flight time.⁠ ⁠ For Duckworth, who lost both of her legs to a rocket attack on the Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting in 2004 during the Iraq War, the issue is personal. “Now is not the time to put corporate profits ahead of the lives of our constituents who may want to board a commercial flight in the future,” Duckworth said. “A vote to reduce a 1,500-hour rule for pilot training will mean blood on your hands when an inevitable accident occurs as a result of an inadequately trained flight crew.”⁠ ⁠ The eleventh-hour amendment in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation comes as the September 30 deadline to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Act looms.⁠ ⁠ Sinema’s amendment is being opposed by pilot and flight attendant unions. “Any change to the rule must have sign off from the pilots or we don’t trust it,” Sara Nelson — president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, representing 50,000 flight attendants — told The Intercept. “It’s that simple.”⁠ ⁠ Sinema’s campaign received an influx of cash over the last year from the airline industry. The donations would be crucial to the senator as she strikes out as a newly christened independent during a challenging reelection bid. Without her Democratic Party affiliation, Sinema heads into the 2024 race without the political or financial backing of her former party. ⁠ ⁠ Read more from Daniel Boguslaw via the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP

As Georgia prosecutors pursue increasingly aggressive tactics against Cop City protesters, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr intervened to double down on domestic terrorism charges against a legal observer, previously unreported meeting minutes reveal. Thomas Webb Jurgens, a legal observer from the Southern Poverty Law Center, is facing charges of domestic terrorism after being swept up in arrests made back in March at the forest-turned-construction-site outside Atlanta where activists have been protesting a multimillion-dollar police training center for more than a year. But when DeKalb County’s district attorney called to drop charges against Jurgens, who was wearing bright green clothing to identify him as a legal observer at the time of his arrest, Carr, a conservative Republican with a Federalist Society pedigree, overruled the objections. Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Michael Register, an appointee of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, reported the exchange at a Georgia Board of Public Safety meeting in April. After confirming the state planned to pursue controversial racketeering charges against those arrested following a concert at the site on March 5, Register added that “Dekalb County wanted to drop the charges on the attorney from the Southern Poverty Law Center who was arrested from this incident, and the Attorney General said no.” Police charged 23 people after arrests at the event. Most are facing domestic terrorism and state racketeering charges, which are being prosecuted by the state attorney general’s office. Of the 23 people arrested by the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia State Patrol that night, only Jurgens and another protester, Jack Beaman of Decatur, were from Georgia, Register emphasized, according to the meeting minutes. Activists’ answer to this line of thought has been to suggest that police have deliberately targeted out-of-state protesters for prosecution, releasing people with local addresses after detaining them during demonstrations to inflate the perception of “outside agitators” spurring violence. Read more from George Chidi via the link in our bio. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images