Under pressure, Hezbollah weighs scaling back its arsenal
The remains of a building are cleaned up after an Israeli strike in Tehran, Iran, June 13, 2025. President Trump spent the first months of his term holding back Israel's push for an assault on Iran's nuclear program. With the war underway, his posture has gyrated as he weighs sending in the U.S. military. (Arash Khamooshi/The New York Times)
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Mint
26 minutes ago
- Mint
The moment the clean-energy boom ran into ‘drill, baby, drill'
Southern Energy Management is bracing for whiplash. The Raleigh-based home-solar-panel installation company grew steadily in recent years, thanks in part to tax credits in former President Joe Biden's landmark 2022 climate law. Now, Chief Executive Will Etheridge says his 190-person company's residential solar sales could plunge in 2026 by as much as half. President Trump's megabill, which he signed into law Friday, ends the subsidies later this year. Etheridge's plans to buy more supplies from factories in North Carolina and elsewhere are on hold. 'Now, I'm not thinking about that at all," he said. 'I'm trying to think about how to save North Carolina jobs." A wave of government spending that swept through the U.S. economy in recent years is about to recede. Biden's climate law threw subsidies behind wind and solar power, electric vehicles and other green projects that federal forecasters said would total nearly $400 billion. Outside analysts projected the ultimate spending would be even greater. Investors jumped into renewables stocks, while local governments and labor unions clamored for new projects. Trump's 'big, beautiful bill" will turn off that spigot as part of a push to extend the tax cuts enacted in his first term. Credits for EVs and home solar panels are slated to end in the coming months. Incentives to develop or produce renewable energy will wind down within years. The legislation, meanwhile, boosts the prospects for fossil-fuel production on public lands, a boon to oil-and-gas drillers that are pumping record supplies and posting bumper profits. Biden's law tried to build a bridge to an economy more oriented around renewable energy, said Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society, a group that aims to protect public lands. 'What [Trump's] is doing is blowing the bridge up," said Stone-Manning, who was director of the Bureau of Land Management in the Biden administration. The clashing visions have left many developers and workers around the country in a lurch. Clean-energy executives expected regulatory changes under any new administration. Some warn, though, that the swift rollback of much of a previously passed law will create a new level of uncertainty for future investment and raise financing costs down the road. 'You're going to strand a lot of capital, and you're going to put a lot of people out of business by changing the chessboard right in the middle of the game," said Reagan Farr, chief executive of solar developer Silicon Ranch. 'That's something as a country that we've been good about until now." Trump's spending bill—which the Congressional Budget Office expects will cut more than half a trillion dollars in tax incentives over the next decade—isn't as extreme as some renewables advocates feared. A proposed tax on wind and solar projects was stripped by the Senate. Lawmakers also extended through 2027 a phaseout of credits for renewable energy investment and production. That could give some ongoing construction runway to continue. But deals still in negotiation or in the early stages of development could be caught in no-man's-land, said Farr, whose company's projects include several solar arrays in Georgia and Tennessee to power Meta Platforms data centers. 'They're not things that you just throw up in six months and you're done," he said. The policy changes could reduce investment by about $500 billion across electricity and clean fuels production by 2035, according to preliminary estimates by the Princeton University-led REPEAT Project. Renewables proponents fear the upshot will be higher bills for Americans living through a once-in-a-generation surge in power demand tied to the mania over artificial intelligence. Although Trump's campaign pledged to lower Americans' energy costs, some oil-and-gas executives have said privately that they understood his 'drill, baby, drill" rallying cry as an economic organizing principle, rather than a push to bore more wells through shale rock. Analysts say the new legislation will have limited immediate impact on already record-breaking U.S. fossil-fuel production. The new bill would help protect fossil fuels from more competition. Oil drillers last week operated 12% fewer rigs than they did at the start of the year, according to Baker Hughes. Pointing to languishing commodity prices and new tariffs on imported steel, nearly half of the oil-and-gas executives polled by the Dallas Fed in June said they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than initially expected. Longer term, however, measures such as expanded federal leases, cheaper royalties and the end of Biden-era tax credits will help shield fossil fuels from more competition. That could be particularly beneficial to producers of natural gas, who are jockeying with renewables developers to fuel the power-hungry AI boom. If 'repealing these subsidies will 'kill' their industry, then maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place," Tom Pyle, president of the pro-oil-and-gas group American Energy Alliance, said in a statement. Already, renewable stocks have been thrashed in recent years by inflationary shock and stubbornly high interest rates. Arduous permitting processes and supply-chain snafus busted project timelines. Costs spiraled. Local officials have feared a pullback in tax credits—and in turn a disappearing customer base for new manufacturers—for the better part of a year. Businesses ended or scaled back an estimated $15.5 billion worth of clean-energy projects in the first five months of the year, according to advocacy group E2. Among those affected were a Georgia battery plant, a Washington-state solar supplier and an offshore-wind-cable factory in Massachusetts. The cancellations spanned projects that promised to create roughly 12,000 jobs. Executives and labor leaders fear turbulence ahead will leave more Americans, including Cierra Pearl, out of work. The 29-year-old Mainer started an apprentice program last year with her local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union and was soon building racks and installing panels on solar arrays. At $23.18 an hour plus overtime, the paychecks were her biggest ever. But Pearl was laid off in early May after developers hit pause. Now, with dimming hope for future projects, she is burning some of her $595 in weekly unemployment benefits on gas to drive to job interviews. 'I've felt hopeless a lot lately," Pearl said. It is not just financial stability that she lost, she added. 'It's dignity." Write to David Uberti at
India Today
40 minutes ago
- India Today
US sends 8 deported migrants to South Sudan after Supreme Court clearance
Eight men deported from the United States in May and held under guard for weeks at an American military base in the African nation of Djibouti while their legal challenges played out in court have now reached the Trump administration's intended destination, war-torn South Sudan, a country the State Department advises against travel to due to 'crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.'advertisementThe immigrants from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan arrived in South Sudan on Friday after a federal judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to relocate them in a case that had gone to the Supreme Court, which had permitted their removal from the US Administration officials said the men had been convicted of violent crimes in the US.'This was a win for the rule of law, safety and security of the American people,' said Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin in a statement Saturday announcing the men's arrival in South Sudan, a chaotic country in danger once more of collapsing into civil war. The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the transfer of the men who had been put on a flight in May bound for South Sudan. That meant that the South Sudan transfer could be completed after the flight was detoured to a base in Djibouti, where they men were held in a converted shipping container. The flight was detoured after a federal judge found the administration had violated his order by failing to allow the men a chance to challenge the court's conservative majority had ruled in June that immigration officials could quickly deport people to third countries. The majority halted an order that had allowed immigrants to challenge any removals to countries outside their homeland where they could be in danger.A flurry of court hearings on Independence Day resulted a temporary hold on the deportations while a judge evaluated a last-ditch appeal by the men's before the judge decided he was powerless to halt their removals and that the person best positioned to rule on the request was a Boston judge whose rulings led to the initial halt of the administration's effort to begin deportations to South Friday evening, that judge had issued a brief ruling concluding the Supreme Court had tied his men had final orders of removal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said. Authorities have reached agreements with other countries to house immigrants if authorities cannot quickly send them back to their homelands.- Ends
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First Post
41 minutes ago
- First Post
Iran's Khamenei makes first public appearance since onset of conflict with Israel, attends mourning event
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has appeared in public for the first time since the conflict with Israel began, ending weeks of speculation over his absence during rising regional tensions. read more Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made his first public appearance on Saturday, 5 July, since the conflict between Iran and Israel began, according to state media. The 86-year-old leader had been out of public view during weeks of growing regional tensions. State TV showed Khamenei greeting worshippers at the Imam Khomeini Mosque in central Tehran during a ceremony marking the eve of Ashura, an important Shia Muslim observance. He appeared on stage dressed in black, while the crowd raised their fists and chanted slogans like 'The blood in our veins for our leader!' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The moment when the Leader of the Islamic Revolution entered the Imam Khomeini Hussainiyah to attend the fourth night of mourning ceremonies on eve of Ashura, July 5, 2025. — Khamenei Media (@Khamenei_m) July 5, 2025 Khamenei, who has held power since 1989 and has the final say on all state matters, had not been seen publicly since before Israel launched surprise air strikes on 13 June. His last public engagement was a meeting with members of parliament two days before the Israeli attacks. Although Khamenei released a recorded video statement last week in which he claimed Iran had dealt 'a slap to America's face' by striking a US airbase in Qatar and warned against further attacks, Saturday's event was his first live public appearance since the 12-day conflict began.
