The State Department said on Tuesday that it is monitoring “Iran’s attempts to have a military presence in the Western Hemisphere,” putting the Biden administration in an increasingly difficult position as it balances anti-regime protests, Iranian military escalation, and collapsing diplomacy over a revamped nuclear deal.

A State Department spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon that it is tracking a recent announcement by the commander of Iran’s navy indicating that warships will establish a presence in the Panama Canal as soon as next month. Already, two Iranian warships—including one equipped with “anti-ship cruise missiles, torpedoes, and naval cannons”—were granted permission to dock in Brazil earlier this week, according to documents published by the Brazilian Navy.

“We are aware of these claims by Iran’s navy,” the State Department spokesman told the Free Beacon. “We continue to monitor Iran’s attempts to have a military presence in the Western Hemisphere.” The official would not preview any potential action the Biden administration may take in response, or answer questions about how it views Iran’s growing military presence in Latin America.

Iran’s increasing influence in Latin America poses a unique problem for the Biden administration as it navigates diplomacy in the region amid a growing number of dictatorships that view an alliance with Tehran as beneficial. Venezuela, for instance, recently inked a massive foreign policy agreement with the Iranian government that will see Tehran increasing its role in the country’s lucrative energy sector. Iranian vessels have more frequently voyaged into the Latin American region, and this month’s announcement by the Iranian Navy indicates the hardline regime is seeking to protect its interests with force.

Iran has posed a challenge for President Joe Biden since he entered office with the goal of negotiating a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal. Since that time, Iran has increased its global terrorism operations, including those targeting American interests. Now, with anti-government protests gaining momentum, the Biden administration has refused to admit diplomatic defeat and continues to try to cajole the hardline regime into rejoining the nuclear pact, which will provide it with billions of dollars in cash windfalls and solidify its grip on power.

The latest military announcement marks a major escalation by Tehran’s war forces to establish a military threat in America’s backyard, with the help of anti-American dictatorships in Latin America. It also sets up a potential showdown with the Biden administration, which is already being pressured to take action.

Joseph Humire, a national security analyst who focuses on Latin American issues as executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society think tank, said that with Iranian war ships already docked in Brazil, the Biden administration has an opportunity to sanction Tehran’s Latin American networks.

“The Iranian warships ported in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, are about one to two weeks away or more from entering the Canal Zone, giving the Biden administration time to leverage and enforce U.S. sanctions,” Humire said. “Integrated deterrence, which is the defense posture of the Biden administration, requires ‘integration across the spectrum of conflict to prevent competitors from altering the status quo in ways that harm U.S. vital interests.’”

Iran, Humire explained, “is literally testing the waters for further provocations in the near future. This cannot be allowed. And our defense posture is designed to deal with this.”

The two Iranian warships are expected to depart Brazil on Jan. 30 and head to Venezuela before entering the Panama Canal around Feb. 7, when President Joe Biden will be delivering his State of the Union address, according to Humire.

Iranian rear admiral Shahram Irani, the commander of Iran’s navy, said in recent remarks that the placement of warships in the Panama Canal is part of an effort by Iran to “strengthen our maritime presence in international waters.” Irani indicated that Iran’s navy is prepared for the long voyage and that “there is no scientific barrier to grow in that field.”

Iran’s footprint in the region has steadily grown for decades, bolstered by the hardline regime’s alliance with Russia and China—which also have prioritized relations with Latin American countries they see as a counterweight to U.S. influence in the region. Iran has helped Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed resistance group, increase ties with regional drug cartels that smuggle weapons and arms across Latin America.

Amid this growing threat in America’s backyard, Iran also says that it could take steps to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane in the Persian Gulf that is frequently the site of scuffles between the U.S. military and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force.

The State Department spokesman told the Free Beacon that Iran’s parliament is considering a measure that would restrict European commercial movement through the shipping lane. This would mark a major deterioration in ties between Europe and Iran as the European Union’s own parliament debates whether it will designate the IRGC as a terror group.

“We are aware of this discussion among some members of Iran’s Majles,” the State Department spokesman said, referring to Iran’s parliament. The official would not preview any potential reaction by the United States if Iran follows through on this threat.

Mohammad Hassan Asfari, vice chairman of the Internal Affairs and Councils Commission in Iran’s parliament, said the decision to block the Strait of Hormuz is meant as payback for Europe’s tough line on the IRGC.

“We will definitely not remain silent either,” Asfari was quoted as saying earlier this week in Iran’s state-controlled press. “Closing the Strait of Hormuz is on the agenda of the parliament.”

“If the Europeans are going to treat our armed forces and official forces like this, we will also put other options on the table, including restricting the traffic of European commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz,” Asfari said.

Iranian leaders also said on Tuesday that they will soon unveil new sanctions on the European Union and United Kingdom. These measures are also meant as payback for efforts in Europe to crack down on Iran’s terrorism enterprise.

The post US Monitoring Iranian Bid To Establish ‘Military Presence’ in Panama Canal appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

When China’s largest solar companies faced costly U.S. tariffs, they turned to industry veteran Jigar Shah to lobby on their behalf. Now, President Joe Biden is handing that same man hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to invest in green energy companies, prompting concern that the money could benefit Beijing.

Shah in late 2011 partnered with three Chinese solar giants to form the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy, a nonprofit that mounted an aggressive campaign to kill U.S. tariffs on Chinese solar panels. As the group’s president, Shah said evidence that his Chinese clients accepted illegal subsidies from Beijing was merely part of an “anti-China crusade.” He also argued that American consumers could not afford solar panels without cheap Chinese goods, stressing the need for the two nations to “work together to solve our planet’s energy and environmental crisis.”

Years later, China could again stand to benefit from Shah’s work. Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in March 2021 tapped Shah to run the department’s Loan Programs Office, which is expected to flood the China-dominated green energy industry with billions of taxpayer dollars in the coming months. Shah’s leading role in distributing that money—and the Biden administration’s history of supporting Beijing-backed companies—have China hawks concerned that Biden’s push to usher in a “clean energy economy” will ultimately benefit America’s top adversary.

Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, for example, highlighted one loan application Shah’s office is considering from Lithium Americas. The Canadian company—which plans to mine tens of thousands of tons of lithium from a site in northern Nevada—counts a Chinese mineral giant with ties to the Chinese Communist Party as its largest shareholder, the Washington Free Beacon reported in September. Still, at an industry conference three months later, Lithium Americas expressed confidence that it will secure a loan from Shah’s office to fund the mine, according to a conference attendee. For Pompeo, that possibility is a troubling one.

“It should concern all Americans that a Biden administration political appointee at the Department of Energy once had deep ties to CCP-backed firms,” Pompeo told the Free Beacon. “It’s no secret that the CCP wants to control America’s domestic rare earth mineral supply, and now the Biden administration might just give it to them along with American tax dollars. This is a serious threat to our national security.”

An Energy Department spokesperson said Shah is “working to deliver on President Biden’s goal to build clean energy technologies at commercial scale in the United States, restore supply chains, and strengthen domestic manufacturing.” The spokesperson did not return detailed questions on Shah’s time as Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy president.

As Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy president, Shah minimized the group’s work with Chinese solar companies. The coalition’s website, which is no longer live, claimed that the group represented “the largest companies in the U.S. solar industry” and worked to protect “the affordability of solar energy and the American workforce.” As part of that domestic-focused messaging, Shah’s group opted to name the U.S. subsidiaries of its three Chinese partners on its online member list, rather than naming the companies’ Chinese parents.

But those three companies—Wuxi-based Suntech Power, Changzhou-based Trina Solar, and Baoding-based Yingli—have close relationships with China’s government. The companies relied on “direct government support” to fund their operations, Reuters reported in 2013, and Suntech founder Shi Zhengrong in a 2010 speech credited two senior CCP officials with the company’s rise. “Suntech,” Shi said one year later, “is a seed sown by the Communist Party of the Wuxi government.” It’s unclear how much money Shah’s Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy took from the three Chinese companies.

Shah’s bid to sink the tariffs was ultimately unsuccessful—then-president Barack Obama’s Commerce Department announced them in early 2012, though at a lower level than expected. Still, Shah’s Chinese partners would go on to fight with federal regulators for years. In December 2022, for example, Biden’s Commerce Department found that Trina Solar illegally circumvented U.S. trade laws and failed to show its independence from the CCP. U.S. Customs and Border Protection in June also seized shipments of Trina Solar equipment over concerns that the equipment was made with slave labor, according to Reuters.

Shah is now attempting to revive the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, which was largely dormant under former president Donald Trump after the Obama administration faced criticism over failed loans to green energy companies that went bankrupt. When Shah joined the office in 2021, it had roughly $44 billion in its coffers. Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act, however, gave the office hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning Shah now has nearly $400 billion at his disposal. Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), who is set to serve on a new House select committee meant to counter the CCP, told the Free Beacon he expects “many” of those billions to go to “communist China.”

“Chairman Xi couldn’t have written a more pro-China tax and spend bill,” Banks said of the Inflation Reduction Act. “The Biden administration will always put our Chinese competitors ahead of American workers.”

The post Meet the Biden Energy Official Who Fought To Shield China From US Solar Tariffs appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

A draft law aimed at strengthening animal rights in Spain is exposing divisions within the ruling Socialist Party’s electoral base amid warnings it risks outlawing hunting with dogs.

The proposed law would overhaul the treatment of domesticated and wild animals in captivity, with plans to ban the sale of pets in shops, convert zoos into wildlife recovery centres and impose prison sentences for abusers.

However, Spain’s ruling Socialist party, which introduced the draft in 2022, was forced to back pedal last month after an outcry in rural areas that have historically represented a key voter base ahead of elections at the end of this year.

The Royal Spanish Hunting Federation, which represents 337,000 hunters, has argued sections of the bill, aimed at cutting the number of abandoned animals, would effectively legislate hunting out of existence.

Fearing the issue could push rural voters toward right-leaning parties in a general election later this year, the Socialists in December defied their coalition partner, the far-left Podemos, and submitted a last-minute amendment to exclude hunting dogs and other animals involved in traditional rural activities.

In Spain, dogs are used to track or catch animals such as deer, wild boar and rabbits. The hunting industry generates more than 5 billion euros ($5.42 billion) a year in economic activity, figures from Deloitte show.

“We care a lot about the countryside, we understand hunting,” Socialist lawmaker Begoña Nasarre, who is also the mayor of a village in northeastern Spain, said in a committee session in parliament. “We want to legislate for everyone.”

Backers of the bill say most dog abandonments occur in the countryside. About 167,000 dogs were abandoned in Spain in 2021, many following the end of the hunting season, according to the Affinity Foundation, a Barcelona-based non-governmental organisation.

Spain’s Socialists have traditionally enjoyed strong support in rural areas. Alongside their historical rivals, the People’s Party, they have secured the majority of votes in towns and villages with less than 2,000 inhabitants, according to official electoral data.

But the Socialists must also compete with Podemos for left-leaning urban voters concerned about animal welfare.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s party relies on votes from junior coalition partner Podemos – as well as from Catalan and Basque nationalist parties – to push through legislation in parliament.

Sergio Garcia Torres, a Podemos official who drafted the bill, said the Socialists must retract the amendment, arguing that it could fail to pass in a February parliamentary session because the exclusion of working animals means it no longer addresses the root causes of animal abandonment.

“We expect the Socialist party to return to the consensus,” Garcia Torres said. “There is no guarantee of parliamentary support to take the law forward if you exclude hunting dogs.”

Jose Maria Mancheño, the president of the federation of hunting associations in Andalusia in southern Spain, said the failure to understand the role hunting plays in the countryside demonstrates how some Socialists have evolved into a more urban force.

“The Socialists in my village see it as normal for me to go hunting on Sunday, but a Socialist in Madrid might not see it as normal,” he said.

The bill proposes that owners must train pets, including dogs, to avoid harming other animals. It also obliges owners to acquire permits for breeding animals – clauses hunters and dog breeders say would be almost impossible for them to comply with.

Spain’s main veterinarians’ association said the bill also asks too much of pet owners by, for example, preventing an animal from being put down if the possibility of palliative treatment exists.

“As it stands, it is easier to euthanise a person than an animal,” Maria Luisa Fernandez, president of the association, said.

($1 = 0.9222 euros)

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More movie theaters this weekend will be showing “The Fablemans,” “Tar” and “Women Talking,” a move to capitalize on the films’ Oscar nominations at a time when dramas are struggling to draw people to cinemas.

After moviegoing plunged during the pandemic, audiences have returned in droves to action-packed blockbusters such as “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water.” The “Avatar” sequel has raked in more than $2 billion, ranking as the sixth-highest grossing film of all time.

Many of the Hollywood dramas targeted at adult viewers have not fared nearly as well.

Some older moviegoers simply have not returned to the local megaplex, industry executives told Reuters. Others have decided to wait to stream movies that do not have a visual spectacle that pops off a big screen. Studios are now making movies available to watch at home as soon as 17 days after their theatrical debut.

But filmmakers hope the publicity leading up to the Oscars in March will lure some moviegoers back to their neighborhood cinema. Box office receipts can rise as much as 75% in the weeks following a best picture nomination, according to Comscore data.

Best picture nominee “Women Talking,” about a religious colony grappling with a series of rapes, will expand from 153 theaters to more than 700 this weekend, according to a person familiar with the film’s rollout. Its ticket sales so far total less than $1.3 million.

The distributor, United Artists Releasing, planned the release strategy to coincide with this week’s Oscar nominations, with the hope the movie would benefit from a box-office bounce. The move was a gamble, the person said, since nominations are never guaranteed.

“Tar,” a best picture contender starring Cate Blanchett as a manipulative orchestra conductor, will expand to 535 theaters from 100. The movie has collected about $7.2 million at global cinemas to date.

Even legendary director Steven Spielberg has had trouble drawing crowds to best picture nominee “The Fabelmans,” his autobiographical story about family strife and anti-Semitism he faced as a teenager.

Since its release in November, the film has brought in $21.8 million worldwide. “The Fabelmans” will play in 1,800 cinemas this weekend, nearly double the number from a week ago, according to a source familiar with the plans.

Spielberg told Reuters earlier this month that he was concerned about the dwindling turnout for adult dramas.

“But there’s been some bright spots this year, some very, very bright spots where films for older people are actually getting older people out to see those films in motion picture theaters,” he said. “So I’m kind of optimistic about it.”

One drama that has bucked the trend is Sony Corp’s (6758.T) “A Man Called Otto” starring Tom Hanks as a grumpy older man grieving the loss of his wife. The film has pulled in more than $57 million at theaters since its late December debut.

Best picture nominee “Elvis” became a hit last summer by aiming to entertain viewers of all ages, incorporating music from contemporary artists such as Doja Cat and Diplo alongside the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s classic recordings.

“We held very passionately the idea that we had to get volumes of young and old back into the theaters,” director Baz Luhrmann said in an interview.

“Elvis” has collected $287.3 million at theaters. Warner Bros is re-releasing the film in movie houses this weekend after it landed eight Oscar nominations including best picture and best actor.

Comcast Corp’s (CMCSA.O) Universal Pictures made “Tar” and “The Fabelmans” available to rent at home via premium video-on-demand even as they continued to play in theaters. The company has not disclosed revenue from those sales, though its executives have credited this strategy with lifting some films into profitability.

Sarah Polley, the director of “Women Talking,” said that as a moviegoer she enjoys seeing “smaller, more intimate human dramas” in theaters.

“I really love the feeling of sensing an audience, and sensing someone’s breath or emotion, or the beginning of a laugh, or crying,” she said in an interview this month.

“Not being able to be attuned to the others in a room is something that would make me sad if that started to disappear,” she said. “It’s not looking great at the moment.”

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The amount of money sloshing around the U.S. economy shrank last year for the first time on record, a development that some economists believe bolsters the case for U.S. inflation pressures continuing to abate.

The Federal Reserve’s main measure of the nation’s money stock – known as M2 money supply – slid for a fifth straight month in December, dropping by a record $147.4 billion to a seasonally adjusted $21.2 trillion from the month before, data from the U.S. central bank released this week showed.

From a year earlier, the volume of cash, coins, checking and savings deposits, other small time deposits and cash parked in money market funds fell by nearly $300 billion and has fallen by more than $530 billion since last March when the Fed kicked off its aggressive – and ongoing – process to drain liquidity from the economy to combat high inflation.

M2 took off in March 2020 as the Fed slashed rates and started buying trillions of dollars in bonds to help support the economy as the coronavirus pandemic started, ultimately mushrooming by $6.3 trillion – a 40% increase – from its level right before the start of the crisis.

The recent decline in the money supply comes as the Fed has been aggressively raising rates to push inflation back to its 2% target. Since last June, it has also cut its holdings of Treasury and mortgage bonds by $400 billion to roughly $8.5 trillion to augment that process, further stripping the economy of financial liquidity.

Money-supply purists have long argued that the country’s ever-growing stock of money was an inflation powder keg. It’s an argument that lost credibility with policymakers in the record-long economic expansion before the pandemic when M2 rose by more than 80% but inflation never rose sustainably above the Fed’s 2% target and spent much of that decade notably below it.

That dynamic changed in the last two years, though, with money supply trends moving in roughly the same direction as inflation pressures: As money supply rose rapidly into early 2022, so did inflation; since M2 started a persistent decline last summer, inflation pressures have also receded.

Some Fed officials are now taking renewed interest.

M2 “exploded during the pandemic, and correctly predicted that we would get inflation,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard, an early proponent of policy tightening, said earlier this month. “Inflation is certainly a monetary phenomenon” and “when you get a huge movement in money, then you do get the movement in inflation,” as was seen in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

To be sure, measuring money supply is complicated, with no one way to do it. The Fed itself has altered its approach, scrapping the publication of an even broader measure, called M3, in 2006.

Bullard, acknowledging the cooling off of money supply, said this downshift in money “bodes well for disinflation,” which means the Fed is likely to face an enduring trend of lower price pressures.

A paper published this month by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University said that economists and policymakers would do well to keep an eye on money supply measures in the future.

“Money has all but disappeared from monetary policy analysis” given the economics profession’s emphasis on the view monetary policy works by managing expectations about the future path of interest rates, wrote Joshua Hendrickson of the University of Mississippi. Given money supply’s better-than-expected track record on recent inflation issues, ignoring these numbers has been “misguided,” he said.

Economists, meanwhile, are still taking on board whether money supply is something they need to pay greater mind to as they contemplate monetary policy and inflation.

“I think that what we are finding is that the relationship between changes in the money supply and inflation is far less linear” than had been previously understood, said Thomas Simons, economist with investment bank Jefferies.

Nevertheless, Simons said, it appears the Fed’s aggressive balance sheet expansion during the pandemic did have a bigger impact on inflation relative to recent decades.

Russia, which invaded Ukraine in February last year, repeatedly tried to delay the vote and called the decision “politically motivated”.