U.S. News

A solar panel maker in Georgia that has booked $230 million in federal tax credits stands to collect hundreds of millions more as it pursues plans to create the first end-to-end solar manufacturing chain in the US, easing reliance on China and related concerns about the use of forced labor.

But at least through the end of this year, the Qcells solar plant, which South Korea’s Hanwha Solutions Corp. opened in Dalton, Georgia, in 2019 and almost doubled in capacity last year, is making panels with base components from China. And previously unreported Chinese filings show that two of Hanwha’s Chinese suppliers have received a portion of the polysilicon they used in such components from companies that appear on a list of sanctioned entities the US government designates as using forced labor. Those subsuppliers’ inputs are barred from entry into the US under federal law.

There’s no evidence that components containing the banned polysilicon have turned up in Qcells panels. Nonetheless, amid an industrywide scramble to comply with US import restrictions, questions persist about how well any solar-panel maker can police its supply chain in China. In the case of Qcells, which is key to the Biden administration’s plans to develop a fully onshore solar industry, the company offers assurances but no public details of its polysilicon sourcing, as some other manufacturers have provided to researchers.

In the words of Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican from Plano, the goal is to “provide the full support and resources of the state government … to come alongside of these thousands of women and their families who might find themselves with unexpected, unplanned pregnancies.”

But an investigation by ProPublica and CBS News found that the system that funnels a growing pot of state money to anti-abortion nonprofits has few safeguards and is riddled with waste.

A former Florida police officer who relocated to Moscow is one of the key figures behind it.

Dozens of bogus stories aimed at influencing US voters and sowing distrust ahead of November’s election. Some have been roundly ignored but others have been shared by influencers and members of the US Congress.

For example, one of these stories was published on a website called The Houston Post – one of dozens of sites with American-sounding names which are in reality run from Moscow - and alleged that the FBI illegally wiretapped Donald Trump’s Florida resort.