Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
US planning to hold sale of oil, gas leases at refuge in Alaska
JUNEAU, Alaska — The U.S. Bureau of Land Management plans to hold an oil and gas lease sale for Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge next month — two weeks before President-elect Joe Biden, who has opposed drilling in the region, is set to take office.
Conservation groups criticized Thursday’s announcement as rushed and based on environmental reviews that are being challenged in court as flawed.
“Today we put the oil industry on notice. Any oil companies that bid on lease sales for the coastal plain of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should brace themselves for an uphill legal battle fraught with high costs and reputational risks,” Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement.
Alaska’s Republican congressional delegation celebrated the passage of legislation in 2017 allowing for drilling in the refuge’s 1.5 million-acre coastal plain, seeing it as a way to boost oil production, create jobs and generate royalties. The legislation called for at least two lease sales to be held within 10 years.
Alaska political leaders for years pushed for opening the area for exploration in a state that relies heavily on oil. But the Indigenous Gwich’in people have opposed development within the refuge, citing concerns about the effects on a caribou herd that they have relied on for subsistence. Conservation groups also have fought drilling in the refuge.
The agency said a notice that solicits bids would be published at least 30 days ahead of the sale, which it expects to hold on Jan. 6. However, the comment period was not set to end until Dec. 17.
The Bureau of Land Management did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Separated families: A court-appointed committee has yet to find the parents of 628 children separated at the border early in the Trump administration, according to a court filing Wednesday that also said the government last week provided additional phone numbers to aid the longrunning search.
Parents of 333 children are believed to be in the United States, while parents of the other 295 are believed to be outside the U.S.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the parents and children are still separated, only that the committee has been unable to locate the parents.
The committee has found other family members for 168 of the 628 children whose parents have yet to be located.
The joint filing by attorneys for the Justice Department and families offers the latest snapshot of efforts to reunite families under a “zero tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings that resulted in thousands of separations when parents were criminally prosecuted.
More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents in June 2018 when U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego ordered an end to the practice under the “zero-tolerance” policy. He ordered them reunited within 30 days.
Ivanka Trump deposed: President Donald Trump’s daughter and senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump said Thursday that she was deposed for more than five hours by attorneys alleging that the president’s 2017 inauguration committee misused donor funds.
The Washington, D.C., attorney general’s office has filed a lawsuit alleging the committee made more than $1 million in improper payments to the president’s Washington, D.C., hotel during the week of the inauguration almost four years ago.
Trump’s inaugural committee spent more than $1 million to book a ballroom at the Trump International Hotel as part of a scheme to “grossly overpay” for party space and enrich the president’s own family in the process, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, Karl Racine, alleges.
Ivanka Trump, who was deposed Tuesday, tweeted that she gave attorneys from the D.C. attorney general’s office an email she wrote on Dec. 14, 2016, where she instructed the Trump hotel to charge a “fair market rate,” which she said the the hotel did.
“This ‘inquiry’ is another politically motivated demonstration of vindictiveness & waste of taxpayer dollars,” she tweeted.
China moon probe: A Chinese spacecraft lifted off from the moon Thursday with a load of lunar rocks, the first stage of its return to Earth, the government space agency reported.
Chang’e 5, the third Chinese spacecraft to land on the moon and the first to take off from it again, is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious missions for Beijing’s space program, which also has a orbiter and rover headed to Mars.
The Chang’e 5 touched down Tuesday on the Sea of Storms on the moon’s near side. Its mission: collect about 4 pounds of lunar rocks and bring them back to Earth, the first return of samples since Soviet spacecraft did so in the 1970s.
Earlier, the U.S. Apollo astronauts brought back hundreds of pounds of moon rocks.
Egypt rights workers: Three Egyptian rights workers who were arrested and slapped with terrorismrelated charges last month were freed Thursday after an outcry.
The government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has been relentlessly silencing dissent and clamping down on independent organizations for years, with arrests and restrictions. But the release of the staffers suggested authorities had grown worried over international criticism of the crackdown on the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, or EIPR.
The three members of the group, including its executive director Gasser Abdel-Razek, were arrested in0 November after it hosted foreign diplomats for 13 West000000ern countries to discuss the human rights situation in Egypt.
They were charged with belonging to a terrorist group and spreading false information.
Abdel-Razek, along with EIPR’s criminal justice director Karim Ennarah and administrative director Mohammed Basheer, were freed, said Hossam Bahgat, who founded the organization 18 years ago.
It was not immediately clear if the release meant charges against the three had been dropped.
Ethiopia conflict: Ethiopian forces on Thursday blocked people fleeing the country’s embattled Tigray region from crossing into Sudan at the busiest border crossing point for refugees, Sudanese forces said.
Their account follows allegations by refugees in previous days of Ethiopian forces stopping people from fleeing the month-old deadly conflict in Tigray between Ethiopian forces and Tigray regional forces.
Tensions have been rising at the border as the flow of Ethiopians crossing has slowed to hundreds per day. People continue to flee Ethiopia days after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed declared victory in the conflict, amid reports of fighting in the Tigray region.