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    Key Solar Panel Ingredient Is Made in the U.S.A. Again

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    REC Silicon says it will soon start shipping polysilicon, which has come mostly from China, reviving a Washington State factory that shut down in 2019.A factory in Moses Lake, Wash., that shut down in 2019 will soon resume shipping a critical ingredient used in most solar panels that for years has been made almost exclusively in China.The revival of the factory, which is owned by REC Silicon, could help achieve a longstanding goal of many American lawmakers and energy executives to re-establish a complete domestic supply chain for solar panels and reduce the world’s reliance on plants in China and Southeast Asia.REC Silicon reopened the factory, which makes polysilicon, the building block for the large majority of solar panels, in November in partnership with Hanwha Qcells, a South Korean company that is investing billions of dollars in U.S. solar panel production. As part of the deal, Hanwha this month said it has become the largest shareholder in REC Silicon, which is based in Norway.Executives at the companies say they reopened the factory in part because of incentives for domestic manufacturing in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature climate law. They expressed hope that their decision would also encourage other companies to revive production of a technology that was created in the United States about 70 years ago.“As a whole, the United States was No. 1,” said Kurt Levens, chief executive of REC Silicon. “People forget that. You need more cell manufacturing that is outside China.”Factories in China and Southeast Asia produce more than 95 percent of the solar panels that use polysilicon and most of the components that go into those devices. Chinese manufacturers are so dominant that most manufacturers in the United States had stopped producing polysilicon, including REC Silicon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Homeless Voters in Georgia Could Face New Hurdles Under New Law

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      After more than 40 years of struggling with drug addiction and homelessness, Barry Dupree has a distinct memory of a milestone in his recovery: casting a ballot in the 2020 election.“I felt like a human being, I felt like I was part of the world,” Mr. Dupree, 64, said. He had gotten sober and found shelter at Gateway Center in Fulton County. “I felt as though my word was listened to, my suggestion of who I wanted was heard.”There are thousands of voters like Mr. Dupree across Georgia and the country, those experiencing homelessness who are able to vote with the proper identification. They receive election related-mail at shelters, relatives’ addresses, temporary locations or P.O. boxes, and the vast majority vote in person.A single-sentence provision in a new election bill in Georgia could complicate voting for some of the state’s homeless population. The bill, which has passed both chambers of the State Legislature and is awaiting Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature, would require all election-related mail for those “homeless and without a permanent address” — such as registration cards, sample ballots and absentee ballots — to be sent to the county registrar office.“I felt like a human being, I felt like I was part of the world,” Barry Dupree, 64, said of voting. Mr. Dupree, who now lives in his own apartment, voted in the 2020 election while living at Gateway Center.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesThe full impact of the change is unclear. Under the bill, voters who are homeless would need to go to the county registrar’s office to see if their registration was up-to-date, to learn about a change in a polling location or request and receive an absentee ballot. Voters with a permanent residence would receive information like this at their homes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Exclusive: Georgia lawmaker runs secret election-conspiracy Telegram channel

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      A Fulton county commissioner in Georgia has been operating a private Telegram channel for years, propagating debunked claims about the 2020 election, and spreading accusations of crimes by county employees, including Ruby Freeman, an election worker defamed by Rudy Giuliani in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2020 loss.Bridget Thorne, a Republican representing the relatively conservative cities of Fulton county north of Atlanta, indirectly identifies herself as the creator and administrator of the Fulton County Elections channel on Telegram, a mobile messaging platform, in multiple posts to its page. The channel uses the official logo of the Fulton county board of registration and elections.The channel, created in May 2021, had 133 subscribers as of Tuesday night. The Guardian learned of its existence from Marisa Pyle, an Atlanta-based political organizer.In a post from 14 February, the administrator of the page accused Freeman, a former Fulton county elections worker, of misconduct, despite a Georgia elections board finding that all of the conspiracy theories about her were “false and unsubstantiated”.“We clearly see her double scanning ballots,” the channel administrator wrote about Freeman, a regular target of attention on the Telegram page. “We see her incriminating Facebook posts. Yet, she is made to be a victim and given hero awards.”Rudy Giuliani repeatedly attacked Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, suggesting without evidence that they had committed crimes during the 2020 election. Investigators from the Georgia secretary of state’s office quickly debunked the accusations, but Giuliani continued to make them throughout his campaign to overturn the election, leading to a $148m defamation judgment against him in December. Freeman and Moss were the target of rampant harassment and threats because of the misinformation.View image in fullscreenThorne confirmed in an email to the Guardian that she started the Telegram channel in 2021 “initially for a private archive of events”, but said she is “no longer the primary administrator, nor do I regularly contribute to the conversations found within”. She said the channel was “made private for safety reasons (after receiving online death threats and threatening anonymous mail)”.“I have never stated that Ms Freeman committed any crime or election fraud,” Thorne said. She did not respond directly to a question about whether she posted the lines above. However, Thorne said: “It should be noted that last summer, the state board of elections provided a public reprimand and letter of instruction to Fulton county after the 2020 election specifically noting that ballots were double-scanned. My position has been and will remain that any concerns raised during any election should be thoroughly investigated.”The post about Freeman under the Telegram channel’s administrator account is dated 14 February 2024. A subsequent post in March is self-referential to Thorne: “Oh look! They must have had an earthquake in Union City. My picture along with Hall’s came crashing down in the election warehouse. Somehow in the crash, the actual picture was destroyed.” The March post accompanies an image of a wall of pictures of county commissioners – Thorne’s is the only photo missing in the picture.Thorne is one of two Republicans elected to Fulton county’s seven-member board of commissioners. She has a vote on appointments to the Fulton county board of registration and elections, election office budgeting and some county policies regarding elections administration.Pyle has been pseudonymously subscribed to the channel since its inception and saw Thorne’s posts. “After the 2020 election, I subscribed to as many election-denial channels on Telegram and other platforms as I could, to keep track of things,” she said.Pyle had until recently been the rapid response director for Fair Fight Action, a progressive voting-rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia representative. Fair Fight and rightwing groups claiming election fraud were mutually antagonistic in Georgia even before the 2020 election, a point Thorne herself has regularly noted in posts on the channel.View image in fullscreenThe Fulton County Elections channel went private after Thorne’s election in November 2022, Pyle said. Pyle, now the senior democracy defense manager with the voting rights group All Voting Is Local, exposed posts from the group on X last week after the unexpected resignation of Patrice Perkins-Hooker, the Fulton county elections board chair, who has taken a position as Atlanta’s interim city attorney.“The way in which she is consistently accusing Fulton county and election staff and the state and voters of malfeasance, she has very directly demeaned her own staff, she has accused people within the county of conspiring against her,” Pyle said.Though she can only identify a handful of other people who are following Thorne’s Telegram channel, every time Thorne posts something on the page, other election-conspiracy pages Pyle follows repost it, Pyle said. “She may have the first amendment right to do this, but that is not immunity from it causing repercussions and harm to democracy,” Pyle said. “That delegitimizes the position she holds.”The Guardian initially verified the authenticity of Thorne’s posts by examining Pyle’s device to access the Telegram channel directly.Thorne’s posts on the page level accusations of mismanagement against elections office staff and others. “Fulton Elections Director Nadine Williams and [elections board] Chair Patrice Perkins Hooker creating a hostile environment for anyone observing the polls. … why?” Thorne wrote. “Do they have something to hide? They should be rolling out the red carpet for observers.”Thorne has repeatedly called for the firing of previous and current elections office staff workers, including Williams.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter being made aware of the contents of the Telegram page, Williams said she had never heard Thorne call for her firing directly before, and is concerned about the impact Thorne may have had on recruiting and retaining poll workers. “It does make for an environment that people are uncomfortable in our department, knowing that that person is not working with Fulton but is working against Fulton,” Williams said.Much of Thorne’s ire targets temporary elections workers contracted through Happy Faces, a staffing firm the Fulton county elections board ultimately dropped, and other temporary workers. She pointedly and repeatedly noted the apparent Nigerian citizenship of an IT staffer. The IT staffer Thorne referred to is an American citizen, county officials confirmed Thursday.“Current Georgia law requires poll workers to be United States citizens,” Thorne said in an email Thursday. “I think this is a perfectly reasonable policy and I wish it would have passed last year. To that end, I think I am well within bounds to question whether Fulton county can comply with that law once it takes effect.”Thorne, a Republican, has presented in public statements her concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election in Fulton county as a nonpartisan matter, and avoided describing the election as stolen or fraudulent. “It just seems like every year, Fulton county is a mess,” she said in comments before the Fulton county board of elections in March 2022. “I just want to reiterate that I’m not here as a partisan figure. I’m just listening to anyone who will hear my concerns.”Her comments on the private Telegram channel are not so restrained.Thorne has regularly posted articles during the last three years from fringe and far-right publications like the Epoch Times claiming election fraud in Fulton county and elsewhere around the country. Between the inception of the page in May 2021 and her election in November 2022, Thorne reposted videos and articles by VoterGa, an activist group founded by Garland Favorito, a far-right conspiracy theorist who continues to press debunked claims about the 2020 election in court and the media.Thorne also sought to recruit poll workers through her contacts on the page, using claims of fraud as a rallying cry. “We are in a pivotal time in our country, and we need YOU to stand up NOW,” she wrote. “Voting is not ENOUGH. Freedom is not FREE. YOU can help end the corruption, illegal conduct, and incompetence in Fulton County Elections and restore trust and faith in our system again.”In a 21 March 2022 post, Thorne – as administrator of the channel – wrote a first-person post describing the reasons for her candidacy for the Fulton county commission: “I decided that maybe I could be more effective in fighting for election integrity by running for District 1 Commissioner. Instead of fighting them from the outside, I can fight from the inside. I can ask the tough questions. I can force them to be transparent. I hope that you can help me.” The post is followed by a link to Thorne’s campaign website.Later in May 2022, Thorne posted a recruiting document from Fight Voter Fraud, a Connecticut-based rightwing election advocacy group seeking to raise a “secret army” in Georgia to conduct research on voters the group has “deemed questionable”.Thorne rose to political prominence as an employee of the Fulton county elections office during the 2020 election. A software engineer, she was a Fulton county precinct manager and Dominion-trained poll worker who helped test and set up election equipment in 2020. She claimed that ballots had been mishandled, and before the November 2020 election reported her observations first to elections staff in Fulton county, then to the secretary of state’s office.She then went on social media with rightwing Tea Party organizations and appeared on Fox News to describe a “haphazard” process for handling absentee ballots, and to argue that elections officials were ignoring mistakes. On 3 December 2020, Thorne testified to her observations at a hearing at the Georgia state senate, the same one at which Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani had been pressing a case to overturn the election.Giuliani’s arguments to overturn the 2020 election at this hearing are one element of the racketeering case for election interference brought against him, Trump and 17 others in Fulton county.After the testimony, Richard Barron, the Fulton county elections director, ordered that Thorne and Suzi Voyles, another elections office employee who had been publicly critical of the election, not be rehired for the runoff election in January 2021 – effectively firing them. Barron’s office said the women had committed infractions like taking prohibited cellphone photographs and improperly showing ballots to a poll monitor. But Republican political figures across the state – including Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state – exploded at the firing of two whistleblowers, issuing condemnations of Fulton county and demanding they be rehired.Lawmakers subsequently appointed Carter Jones as an outside observer to review the county’s elections processes. County commissioners eventually fired Barron. Jones declared in June 2021 that Fulton county’s elections operation was rife with sloppiness, mismanagement and disorganization, but wasn’t engaged in malfeasance, dishonesty or fraud. More

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      Georgia prosecutors urge court to reject Trump attempt to disqualify Fani Willis

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      Fulton county prosecutors asked the Georgia state court of appeals on Monday to reject Donald Trump’s request to consider his claim that the district attorney should be disqualified over a relationship with her deputy, arguing that the matter was correctly settled by the lower court judge.“The present application merely reflects the applicants’ dissatisfaction with the trial court’s proper application of well-established law to the facts,” prosecutors wrote in a 19-page filing.Trump was charged alongside more than a dozen associates last year with racketeering over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. As part of their bid to dismiss the case, Trump and his co-defendants alleged the district attorney Fani Willis’s relationship meant she should be recused from the case.The effort to have Willis disqualified – which could have also resulted in the entire Fulton county district attorney’s office being disqualified – failed after the presiding judge decided, following days of evidentiary hearings, that Trump and his co-defendants did not prove a conflict of interest.The judge nonetheless ruled the relationship gave the appearance of a conflict, which needed to be addressed. For Willis to continue bringing the case, the judge ordered, her deputy Nathan Wade needed to resign from the district attorney’s office. Wade resigned later that evening.Trump and his co-defendants challenged the ruling last week, arguing to the Georgia state court of appeals that it should clarify the standard for forensic misconduct standard that would require Willis to step down and that the lower court judge should have found there was actual conflict of interest.The Georgia state court of appeals does not have to hear the case and prosecutors on Monday contended that Trump had failed to establish sufficient cause because he did not convincingly show his claims met several specific conditions.Broadly, an order from a lower court is deemed reviewable if the issue at hand is dispositive for the case, if the order appears wrongly decided on the facts and would adversely affect a defendant’s rights, or if it was a novel issue for which the appeals court should create a precedent.The filing from prosecutors argued Trump’s motion was deficient since the lower court found there was no evidence that the Willis-Wade relationship meant they had a “disqualifying personal interest” in bringing or continuing the Trump case, meaning there was also no due process violations.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt also argued the Georgia state court of appeals has previously decided that in the absence of an “actual” conflict, as opposed to the appearance of one, a lower court could not be deemed as having made a clearly unreasonable or erroneous ruling by deciding not to disqualify a defense attorney.The filing added that even if there was some conflict, the issue had been resolved because the lower court allowed Willis to continue prosecuting the case as long as Wade resigned. “This court has sanctioned this same remedy as a cure for the potential appearance of impropriety,” prosecutors wrote. More

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      Senator Raphael Warnock: ‘The Bible doesn’t need Trump’s endorsement’

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      Donald Trump’s decision to sell Bibles branded under his name is “risky business”, the Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock said on Sunday, as the former president stands accused of having few moral scruples in four separate criminal indictments pending against him.“The Bible does not need Donald Trump’s endorsement,” Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist church, said to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Speaking on Easter, one of Christianity’s holiest celebrations, Warnock added: “It’s a risky bet because the folks who buy those Bibles might actually open them up, where it says things like thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not bear false witness, where it warns about wolves dressed up in sheep’s clothing.“I think you ought to be careful. This is risky business for somebody like Donald Trump.”Warnock’s comments to CNN came days after the Republican who is running against Joe Biden for a second presidency in November presented an offer for the public to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles for $59.99. “Let’s Make America Pray Again”, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, a clear reference to the “Make America Great Again” slogan that he rode to the White House in 2016.But indeed more than 80 criminal charges filed against Trump over the previous 12 months – including in Warnock’s home state of Georgia – charge the former president with behaving in ways that many true Bible devotees would frown upon.Trump has pleaded not guilty to allegations that he tried to unduly overturn the outcome of the 2020 election that he lost to his Democratic rival Biden, improperly retained classified government materials after his presidency, and illicitly covered up hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has claimed to have engaged in extramarital sex with him.He is also facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties for business practices deemed fraudulent and an allegation that he raped a woman – a claim that a judge has determined to be substantially true.Warnock on Sunday said he wasn’t surprised Trump had turned to selling Bibles to help raise funds for his soaring legal bills as well as his presidential campaign. The senator alluded to Trump’s history of hawking – among other things – Trump-branded steaks, non-accredited business school degrees and, more recently, $399 gold sneakers.“Now he’s trying to sell the scriptures,” said Warnock, who was first elected to the US Senate in 2020. “At the end of the day, I think he’s trying to sell the American people a bill of goods.”Warnock went out of his way to mention that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but recognized that his tact allowed him to triumph in the electoral college. But Warnock remarked: “It did not work in 2020,” when Trump lost both the popular and electoral college votes.“And,” the senator said,” I don’t think it’s going to work in 2024.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDuring his interview on CNN, Warnock also addressed criticism from Trump and his Republican allies that Biden recognized Transgender Day of Visibility – which falls annually on 31 March – as scheduled on Sunday, even though this year it coincided with Easter.The Republican US House speaker, Mike Johnson, notably asserted that Biden had “betrayed the central tenet of Easter”, something that he called “outrageous and abhorrent”.Warnock, who is part of a succession of Ebenezer Baptist church pastors that includes the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, said the fabricated controversy was another instance of people “who do not know how to lead us trying to divide us”.“Apparently, the speaker finds trans people abhorrent, and I think he ought to think about that,” Warnock said. “The fact of the matter is … March 31 has been a day to lift up transgender people who endure violence and bigotry.“But this is just one more instance of folks … who do not know how to lead us trying to divide us. And this is the opposite of the Christian faith. Jesus centered the marginalized. He centered the poor. And in a moment like this, we need voices, particularly voices of faith, who would use our faith not as a weapon to beat other people down, but as a bridge to bring all of us together.” More

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      A Georgia Town Basks in Bountiful Filming. The State Pays.

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      When movies are made in Thomasville, Ga., it welcomes celebrities and an infusion of cash. But the financial incentives that attract studios have cost the state billions.It is no wonder that moviemakers saw potential in Thomasville, Ga., as a stand-in for Main Street U.S.A. Cobblestone streets and mom-and-pop stores speckle the downtown of this city of 18,000 that is caked in red clay soil and nestled among rolling hills.Just as attractive to some of those producers are Georgia’s lavish filming incentives, which have made Thomasville a cost-effective place to make modest pictures with major stars. Dustin Hoffman came for the rom-com “Sam & Kate.” A children’s book adaptation, “The Tiger Rising,” brought Dennis Quaid and Queen Latifah to town.But what is good on the ground for local economies — Thomasville says each of the six movies filmed there has provided an economic boost of about $1 million — can simultaneously be a drain on state coffers.Some Georgia lawmakers wondered whether it might be wise to put some limits on an uncapped tax incentive program that has given billions of dollars to Hollywood studios, scrambling this week in hopes of passing a bill that would modify the program. More

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      The election deniers relentlessly hounding Georgia officials

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      In December, a Texas man named Kevin Moncla emailed Georgia election board members in response to their decision not to investigate the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, over bogus election fraud claims. Moncla made a vague threat that he was willing to take things outside the bounds of his increasingly frustrated emails.The communication alarmed members of the state election board (SEB) enough to contact federal law enforcement.Moncla’s email was one among hundreds of communications sent by a small but aggressive group of election deniers since former president Donald Trump’s loss in Georgia in 2020 as part of a relentless pressure campaign directed at Georgia officials to investigate unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud – and to implement policies based on those claims that will affect how elections are run in Georgia.“We can address these matters publicly or privately – but make no mistake, they will be addressed,” Moncla told members of the board in the email that prompted Georgia election officials to ask the FBI to investigate him.Moncla is among a small group of election deniers who have relentlessly hounded the Georgia SEB and other officials on a weekly and sometimes daily basis to investigate mostly unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud. He has been joined in his pursuit of conspiratorial election fraud claims by Joe Rossi, a teacher at a technical college in Macon, and David Cross, a self-described financial adviser who is second vice-chair of the Georgia GOP. The trio have made a name for themselves in election denier circles, with their work being cited across a rightwing ecosystem of influential websites, social media accounts and even within prominent political circles.Since November 2020, Moncla and his fellow election deniers have emailed the SEB to file complaints based on technical glitches, human errors and in many cases outright false claims of widespread election fraud in Georgia. The complaints follow the playbook of rightwing activists and citizens across the state who have been inundating local election offices with public records requests in attempts to prove conspiracies about widespread voter fraud.The Guardian obtained hundreds of pages of their communications, which span from just after Trump’s 2020 loss through January. The emails show not only the length to which the trio of election deniers have gone in pressuring officials to investigate claims of voter fraud, but how those efforts have succeeded in lending those claims an air of credibility.In one case, Rossi found 36 “inconsistencies” on ballots processed by election workers in Fulton county, home of the state’s largest city, Atlanta. Those errors were substantiated by Governor Brian Kemp’s office and, eventually, the SEB, which found the erroneously counted ballots “were a fractional number of the votes counted and did not affect the outcome” of the 2020 election. The SEB found Fulton county in violation of state election law for the errors.Moncla, Rossi and Cross did not respond to requests for comment.View image in fullscreenThe emails obtained by the Guardian also show kind words for one of the SEB’s newest board members, Dr Janice Johnston, who is a critic of election management in Fulton county and nominee of Republican state lawmakers.“I really enjoyed speaking with you this week,” Moncla wrote to Johnson in March 2022. “From our conversation I sensed a sincere interest and conviction to look into these matters and remedy them. I find it refreshing and believe you will be instrumental in reforming what has been simply unacceptable election practices.”In December, Johnston and fellow Republican appointee Ed Lindsey voted to investigate Raffensperger over claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – a hard-fought win for Moncla and his election denier cohorts. Raffensperger’s office warned that the vote was part of Georgia Republicans’ plans to lay “the foundation to discredit the next election”.In January, following the controversial vote, Republicans in the state legislature appointed an alleged election denier who has shared far-right memes on his Facebook page to the election board. With two new members who are apparently sympathetic to claims of election fraud, Moncla and others continued their pressure campaign into this pivotal election year.“Mr. Sterling for the 6th time, respectfully requesting a 1 hour meeting with you to discuss election facts,” Moncla wrote on 7 January to the Georgia state election official Gabriel Sterling, a frequent target of election denier complaints and harassment.“As stated previously, it’s easy for you to hide behind your little Twitter [post] and call me and millions of other GA patriot liars,” Moncla wrote after Sterling claimed that election deniers had spread “lies” about a supposed investigation of fraudulent votes.“It takes courage to sit down face-to-face,” Moncla said, demanding in repeated emails that Sterling meet him in person.Late last year, lawyers for Trump used Rossi’s work – in the form of a document called the “Risk Limiting Audit Spreadsheet Analysis” – in an appeal for presidential immunity in special counsel Jack Smith’s January 6 insurrection case. Rossi’s report reiterates claims of voter fraud that have been repeatedly debunked, according to the Washington Post.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso last year, Cross was chosen as second vice-chairman of the Georgia GOP as part of a takeover by far-right extremists and election deniers within the state party. Cross has championed a burgeoning movement for paper ballots and hand counts of all elections – a movement that has seen some success in at least one Georgia county, where election officials attended a hand count demonstration sponsored by Cross, as the Guardian previously discovered.Cross has led efforts to expose so-called “ballot mules” by obtaining and reviewing security camera footage from ballot drop box locations showing individuals he claimed were illegally submitting fraudulent ballots.“I am part of a volunteer team of citizens investigating irregularities in the November 2020 election,” Cross wrote in scores of complaints of instances of so-called “ballot harvesting”, which mirrored claims made in the widely debunked election denier documentary 2,000 Mules.Cross’s complaints are filled with assumptions about the men and women seen dropping ballots into ballot boxes. “This individual is clearly familiar with the ballot box and she takes a couple of pictures while inserting ballots and afterwards,” Cross wrote in an April 2022 complaint.View image in fullscreenAll of Cross’s complaints were investigated, according to Raffensperger’s office, which said in emails obtained by the Guardian that the individuals were dropping off ballots for members of their family, which is allowed under Georgia law.Even when an investigator with Raffensperger’s office, Dana Dewesse, found no wrongdoing on the part of voters highlighted in Cross’s ballot harvesting complaints, Cross questioned whether the investigator had done their job.“I don’t believe investigator Dewesse contacted this person and closed out the file in 48 hours,” Cross wrote to Johnston on 12 May 2022. “Can you please ask him for a copy of his notes / working file? I don’t need to see it but I would like to know if he actually interviewed this person.”Johnston did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, the SEB chair, John Fervier, said that all “complaints received by the board are taken seriously and given due consideration regardless of the number of complaints filed”.While many of the trio’s complaints are baseless, some have exposed problems in Georgia’s election system, said Marilyn Marks, who runs the Coalition for Good Government and is a plaintiff in the long-running lawsuit that seeks to expose flaws with the state’s machine-run voting system. Marks specifically pointed to Rossi’s complaint about inconsistencies found in ballot tabulation in Fulton county that warranted a request from Kemp’s office for the SEB to investigate.“While Moncla and Cross have a chronic history of recklessly filing irresponsibly inaccurate complaints, the report that Kemp’s office attached to the original Rossi complaint concerning the Fulton hand count audit merits serious objective investigation and deliberation by the state election board,” Marks tsaid. “Although the declared audit outcome (Biden win) would very likely be repeated in a careful post-election review, Georgians must not accept election review processes that Governor Kemp rightly calls ‘sloppy’ and ‘inconsistent’, noting that the results ‘do not inspire confidence.’”The offices of Kemp and Raffensperger did not respond to requests for comment. More

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      Yellen to Warn China Against Flood of Cheap Green Energy Exports

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      The Treasury secretary, who plans to make her second trip to China soon, will argue that the country’s excess industrial production warps supply chains.The Biden administration is growing increasingly concerned that a glut of heavily subsidized green technology exports from China is distorting global markets and plans to confront Chinese officials about the problem during an upcoming round of economic talks in Beijing.The tension over industrial policy is flaring as the United States invests heavily in production of solar technology and electric vehicle batteries with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, while China pumps money into its factory sector to help stimulate its sluggish economy. President Biden and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, have sought to stabilize the relationship between the world’s two largest economies, but differences over trade policy, investment restrictions and cyberespionage continue to strain ties.In a speech on Wednesday afternoon, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen will lay out her plans to raise the issue of overcapacity with her Chinese counterparts. At the Suniva solar cell factory in Norcross, Ga., she will warn that China’s export strategy threatens to destabilize global supply chains that are developing around industries such as solar, electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries, according to a copy of her prepared remarks reviewed by The New York Times.“China’s overcapacity distorts global prices and production patterns and hurts American firms and workers, as well as firms and workers around the world,” Ms. Yellen will say. “Challenges for individual firms can lead to concentrated supply chains, negatively impacting global economic resilience.”The Treasury secretary is expected to make her second trip to China in the coming weeks. The South China Morning Post reported that she will visit Guangzhou and Beijing in early April. The Treasury Department declined to comment on her travel plans.In her speech in Georgia, Ms. Yellen will compare China’s investments in green energy technology production to what she described as its previous overinvestment in steel and aluminum, saying it created “global spillovers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fani Willis: ‘Train is coming’ for Trump despite efforts to derail Georgia case

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      The Georgia prosecutor overseeing Donald Trump’s election interference case in that state promised Saturday that “the train is coming” for him despite defense efforts to derail her office’s pursuit of charges against the former president and nearly two dozen co-defendants.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s remarks came after a court challenge centering on a romantic relationship that she had with a special prosecutor whom she appointed to the case, Nathan Wade. After the relationship was exposed, Wade stepped down from the prosecution to defuse any appearances of a potential conflict of interest and so Willis could stay on the case.“I don’t feel like we have been slowed down at all” by Trump’s efforts to use the relationship with Wade to disqualify her from prosecuting him, Willis told CNN on Saturday at a Georgia Easter egg hunt. “I think there are efforts to slow down the train, but the train is coming.”Willis’s case alleges a conspiracy to commit election fraud after Trump came up narrowly short in the state’s vote during the 2020 presidential race that he lost to Joe Biden. But it has been beset with complications.A little more than 10 days ago, Fulton county judge Scott McAfee dismissed six counts against Trump and his co-defendants relating to an infamous phone call in which the former president urged Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” more than 11,000 votes that would put Trump over Biden.Of the 13 counts Trump faces, three of them were thrown out. McAfee essentially agreed with defense lawyers that the charges “fail to allege sufficient detail” regarding what aspect of Raffensperger’s oath of office the defendants were allegedly trying to get him to break.But the attention on Willis, who had hired Wade to draw up the charges, continues to hang over the case. Earlier in March, McAfee held three days of hearings weighing motions to disqualify her.Wade and Willis admitted they had been in a relationship but said it did “not amount to a disqualifying conflict of interest”. They maintained that Willis had not benefitted financially, directly or indirectly, when they took several holidays and trips together.McAfee ruled there wasn’t sufficient evidence to prove the defense’s claims but rebuked Willis for what he called a “tremendous lapse in judgment”.Attorneys for Trump argued that Willis – who is Black – committed “appalling and unforgivable” forms of forensic misconduct by “stoking racial and religious prejudice” against the defendants after she claimed that the allegations against her had been motivated by race.The judge later agreed that attorneys for Trump’s co-defendants are free to appeal his ruling that she could stay on the case. That proceeding is almost certain to lead to a new set of legal challenges relating to prosecutorial impropriety, actual or in appearance, around the Willis-Wade affair.Willis told CNN that she did not feel that her professional reputation had been sullied or that she had done anything embarrassing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I’m not embarrassed by anything I’ve done,” Willis said. “I guess my greatest crime is that I had a relationship with a man, but that’s not something I find embarrassing in any way.”But some questioned her decision to speak to the media after the intense attention around her personal decisions around the case have come close to derailing it entirely.In a series of posts on X, Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis, who’s been following the case against Trump, noted that McAfee had previously threatened to impose a gag order on Willis.“If I were Fani Willis, I would simply not talk to the media at all at this point just out of an abundance of caution,” Kreis wrote. More