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Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Israel-Gaza Conflict

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An eviction in East Jerusalem lies at the center of a conflict that led to war between Israel and Hamas. But for millions of Palestinians, the routine indignities of occupation are part of daily life.

By David M. Halbfinger and Adam Rasgon

JERUSALEM — Muhammad Sandouka built his home in the shadow of the Temple Mount before his second son, now 15, was born.

They demolished it together, after Israeli authorities decided that razing it would improve views of the Old City for tourists.

Mr. Sandouka, 42, a countertop installer, had been at work when an inspector confronted his wife with two options: Tear the house down, or the government would not only level it but also bill the Sandoukas $10,000 for its expenses.

Such is life for Palestinians living under Israel’s occupation: always dreading the knock at the front door.

six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem set off a round of protests that helped ignite the latest war between Israel and Gaza. But to the roughly three million Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 war and has controlled through decades of failed peace talks, the story was exceptional only because it attracted an international spotlight.

For the most part, they endure the frights and indignities of the Israeli occupation in obscurity.

Even in supposedly quiet periods, when the world is not paying attention, Palestinians from all walks of life routinely experience exasperating impossibilities and petty humiliations, bureaucratic controls that force agonizing choices, and the fragility and cruelty of life under military rule, now in its second half-century.

Underneath that quiet, pressure builds.

If the eviction dispute in East Jerusalem struck a match, the occupation’s provocations ceaselessly pile up dry kindling. They are a constant and key driver of the conflict, giving Hamas an excuse to fire rockets or lone-wolf attackers grievances to channel into killings by knives or automobiles. And the provocations do not stop when the fighting ends.

No homeowner welcomes a visit from the code-enforcement officer. But it’s entirely different in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians find it nearly impossible to obtain building permits and most homes were built without them: The penalty is often demolition.

shot and killed a teenager who was wandering among the rock-throwers and spent tear-gas canisters.

Al Mughrayyir was one of the few villages still mounting regular Friday protests. They began after settlers cut off access to some of the villagers’ farmland. The boy’s death became a new rallying cry.

The army says it raids Palestinian homes at night because it is safer, and ransacks them to search for weapons, in routine crackdowns aimed at keeping militance in check.

But the raids also inspire militance.

Mr. Abu Alia seethed as he described seeing his son outside in the dark, “afraid, crying because of the soldiers, and I can do nothing to protect him.”

“It makes you want to take revenge, to defend yourself,” he went on. “But we have nothing to defend ourselves with.”

Stone-throwing must suffice, he said. “We can’t take an M-16 and go kill every settler. All we have are those stones. A bullet can kill you instantly. A little stone won’t do much. But at least I’m sending a message.”

Settlers send messages, too. They have cut down hundreds of Al Mughrayyir’s olive trees — vital sources of income and ties to the land — torched a mosque, vandalized cars. In 2019, one was accused of fatally shooting a villager in the back. The case remains open.

For Majeda al-Rajaby the pain of occupation never goes away. It slices straight through her family.

A twice-divorced teacher, Ms. al-Rajaby, 45, is divided from her five children by the different ways Israel treats Palestinians depending on where they are from.

She grew up in the West Bank, in Hebron. But both her ex-husbands were Jerusalem residents, allowing them to travel anywhere an Israeli citizen may go. The children were entitled to the blue IDs of Jerusalem residents, too. Hers remained West Bank green.

Both her husbands lived in Shuafat refugee camp, a lawless slum inside the Jerusalem city limits but just outside Israel’s security barrier. West Bankers are not allowed to live there, but the rule is not enforced.

She had thought she was marrying up. Instead, she said her husbands “always made me feel inferior.”

After the second divorce, she was left on her own, with her green ID, to raise all five children with their blue IDs. The distinction could be life-threatening.

When a daughter accidentally inhaled housecleaning chemicals, Ms. al-Rajaby tried to race her to the closest hospital, in Jerusalem. Soldiers refused to let her in. As a teacher in Shuafat, she had a permit to enter Jerusalem, but only until 7 p.m. It was 8:00.

Her children are older now, but the distinction is just as keenly felt: Ms. al-Rajaby allows herself to be excluded from joyful moments and rites of passage so her children can enjoy advantages unavailable to her.

She stays behind on the Palestinian side of the security barrier while they head off to Jaffa or Haifa, or on shortcuts to Hebron through Jerusalem, a route forbidden to her. “West Banker,” they tease her, waving goodbye.

One daughter is 21 now and engaged and goes on jaunts into Israel with her fiancé’s mother. “I should be with them,” Ms. al-Rajaby said.

Last summer, Ms. al-Rajaby moved out of Shuafat to a safer neighborhood just outside the Jerusalem city limits, in the West Bank. That means her children could lose their blue IDs if Israel determined that their primary residence was with her.

“I’m not allowed to live there,” she said of Shuafat, “and my daughters are not allowed to live here.”

Constrained as she is, Ms. al-Rajaby wants even more for her children than freedom to move about Israel.

In 2006, her daughter Rana, then 7, was burned in a cooking accident. An Italian charity paid for treatment at a hospital in Padua. Mother and child stayed for three months.

The experience opened Ms. al-Rajaby’s eyes. She saw green parks, children in nice clothes, women driving cars.

“It was the moment of my liberation,” she said. “I started thinking: ‘Why do they have this? Why don’t we?’”

Today, she urges all her children to see the world, and holds out hope that they might emigrate.

“Why,” she asked, “should someone keep living under the mercy of people who have no mercy?”

Try as they might to make their accommodations with Israel, Palestinians often find themselves caught in the occupation’s gears.

Majed Omar once earned a good living as a construction worker inside Israel. But in 2013, his younger brother was spotted crossing through a gap in Israel’s security barrier. A soldier shot him in the leg.

Mr. Omar, 45, was collateral damage. Israel revoked his work permit just in case he had ideas about taking revenge — something Israel says happens too often.

He sat unemployed for 14 months. When Israel reissued his permit, it only allowed him to work in the fast-growing West Bank settlements, where workers are paid half as much, searched each morning and supervised by armed guards all day.

Which is how he came to be the foreman on a crew that remodels Jewish homes and expands Israeli buildings on land the Palestinians have long demanded as part of their hoped-for state.

In a small way, it’s like digging his own grave, Mr. Omar said. “But we’re living in a time when everyone sees what’s wrong and still does it.”

Violence is often sudden and brief. But the nagging dread it instills can be just as debilitating.

Nael al-Azza, 40, is haunted by the Israeli checkpoint he must pass through while commuting between his home in Bethlehem and his job in Ramallah.

At home, he lives behind walls and cultivates a lush herb and vegetable garden in the backyard. But nothing protects him on his drive to work, not even his position as a manager in the Palestinian firefighting and ambulance service.

Recently, he said, a soldier at the checkpoint stopped him, told him to roll down his window, asked if he had a weapon. He said no. She opened his passenger door to take a look, then slammed it shut, hard.

He wanted to object. But he stopped himself, he said: Too many confrontations with soldiers end with Palestinians being shot.

“If I want to defend my property and my self-respect, there’s a price for that,” he said.

His commute is a 14-mile trip as the crow flies, but a 33-mile route, because Palestinians are diverted in a wide loop around Jerusalem along a tortuous two-lane road of steep switchbacks. Even so, it ought to take less an hour — but often takes two or three, because of the checkpoint.

The Israelis consider the checkpoint essential to search for fleeing attackers or illegal weapons or to cut the West Bank in two in case of unrest. Palestinians call it a choke point that can be shut off on a soldier’s whim. It is also a friction point, motorists and soldiers each imagining themselves as the other’s target.

Idling and inching along, Mr. al-Azza compared traffic to blood flow. Searching one car can mean an hour’s delay. The soldiers are so young, he said, “They don’t feel the weight of stopping 5,000 cars.”

He thinks only of those delayed. “When they impede your movement and cause you to fail at your job, you feel like you’ve lost your value and meaning,” he said.

A few nights each week, delays force him to sleep at work and settle for video calls with his three children.

On weekend outings, the checkpoint takes a different toll on his family.

“I try to keep my kids from speaking about the conflict,” he said. “But they see and experience things I have no answer for. When we’re driving, we turn the music on. But when we reach the checkpoint, I turn it off. I don’t know why. I’ll see them in the mirror: All of a sudden, they sit upright and look anxious — until we cross and I turn the music back on.”

Deadly scenarios constantly play out in Mr. al-Azza’s head: What if a tire blew out or his engine stalled? What if a young soldier, trained to respond instantly, misconstrued it as a threat?

“It’s not possible to put it out of mind,” he said. “When you’re hungry, you think about food.”

No Palestinian is insulated from the occupation’s reach — not even in the well-to-do, privileged “bubble” of Ramallah, where Israeli soldiers are seldom seen.

Everyone Sondos Mleitat knows bears the scars of some trauma. Her own: Hiding with her little brother, then 5, when Israeli tanks rolled into Nablus, where she was raised.

In the dark, she said, he pulled all his eyelashes out, one by one.

Today, Ms. Mleitat, 30, runs a website connecting Palestinians with psychotherapists.

Instead of reckoning with their lingering wounds, she said, people seek safety in social conformity, in religion, in the approval gleaned from Facebook and Instagram likes. But all of those, she said, only reinforce the occupation’s suffocating effects.

“This is all about control,” she said. “People are going through a type of taming or domestication. They just surrender to it and feel they can’t change anything.”

After her uncle was killed by Israeli soldiers at a protest, she said, his younger brother was pushed into marriage at 18 “to protect him from going down the same path.”

But a nation of people who reach adulthood thinking only about settling down, she said, is not a nation that will achieve independence.

“They think they’re getting out of this bubble, but they’re not,” she said.

Mr. Sandouka earns about $1,800 in a good month. He hoped the lawyer could quash the demolition order. “I thought they would just give us a fine,” he said.

Then he got another panicked call from home: “The police were there, making my family cry.”

Khalas, he said, enough. He would tear it down himself.

Early on a Monday, his sons took turns with a borrowed jackhammer. They almost seemed to be having fun, like wrecking a sand castle.

Finished, their moods darkened. “It’s like we’re lighting ourselves on fire,” said Mousa, 15.

“They want the land,” said Muataz, 22. “They want all of us to leave Jerusalem.”

In 2020, 119 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem were demolished, 79 of them by their owners.

When all was rubble, Mr. Sandouka lit a cigarette and held it with three beefy fingers as it burned. His pants filthy with the dust of his family’s life together, he climbed atop the debris, sent photos to the police and contemplated his options.

Moving to the West Bank, and sacrificing Jerusalem residency, was unthinkable. Moving elsewhere in Jerusalem was unaffordable.

A friend offered a couple of spare rooms as a temporary refuge. Mr. Sandouka’s wife demanded permanency.

“She told me if I don’t buy her a home, that’s it — everyone can go their separate ways,” he said.

He turned his eyes uphill toward the Old City.

“These people work little by little,” he said. “It’s like a lion that eats one, and then another. It eventually eats everything around it.”

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Odometer Rollbacks: A Hard-to-Spot Nuisance for Car Shoppers

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A web search for “vehicle mileage correction” revealed a number of enterprises that offer rollback services. The companies, at least superficially, discourage illegal tampering, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it. The website of one says, “We require that all customers seeking mileage correction services have a legitimate reason for concern, as it is illegal to alter your car’s mileage and not disclose that information to potential buyers.”

The mileage adjustment costs $120 on one site. The instrument cluster must be removed and shipped to the supplier, which alters the reading and sends it back.

Odometer mileage can also be altered with a tool that plugs into the OBD2 port — a connector that enables mechanics to read service codes reporting failed components.

To determine how difficult it might be to trim vehicle miles, I bought a $120 odometer rollback tool — the least expensive of those offered on eBay — to give it a try.

The device was for G.M. vehicles, so I tested it on a 2014 Equinox. The tool is meant solely for altering an odometer’s reading — once powered up, it goes right to a screen that says “Cluster Calibrate.”

The tool correctly read the mileage as 78,624 kilometers, or roughly 48,855 miles, but two attempts to reset the odometer were unsuccessful. Tampering may be relatively easy, but it apparently requires a quality device. After the test, we disabled and discarded the tool, as advised by a law enforcement official.

There are ways to help detect odometer tampering, although they’re not foolproof. For example, a check for excessive wear on the car’s frequently touched parts can provide clues to true mileage. The pedals are good indicators: Be suspicious if those in a car showing moderate mileage, say 45,000, show extreme wear or, because pedals can be changed, no wear. Either might indicate something awry. Also look at the inside of door handles, the steering wheel, armrests and anything else that is touched regularly.

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Ford F-150 Lightning Is a Major New E.V. Contender

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Ford Motor is about to open a major new front in the battle to dominate the fast-growing electric vehicle market, and it’s banking on one of the world’s most powerful business franchises.

In a splashy presentation Wednesday night at a Ford plant in Dearborn, Mich., the automaker will unveil an electric version of its popular F-150 pickup truck, which will be called the Lightning. Ford’s F-Series trucks, including the F-150, make up the top-selling vehicle line in the United States, and typically generate about $42 billion a year in revenue, according to a study commissioned by Ford — or more than twice what McDonald’s brought in last year.

It is one of the most anticipated introductions of a new car and invites comparisons to Ford’s Model T, the car that made automobiles affordable to the masses. Ford has a lot at stake in the new vehicle’s success. If it can turn the F-150 Lightning into a big seller, it could accelerate the move toward electric vehicles, which scholars say is critical for the world to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Tailpipe pollution from cars and trucks represents the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and one of the largest in the world. But if the Lightning does not sell well, it could suggest that the transition to E.V.s will be a lot slower than President Biden and other world leaders need to achieve climate goals.

auto industry’s E.V. push, which has been aimed at niche markets so far. Tesla has grown rapidly for the last several years by selling flashy sports cars to the affluent and early adopters. It sold close to 500,000 cars globally last year, a little more than half as many F-Series trucks Ford sold. Other electric models that have sold well have been small cars, such as the Chevrolet Bolt and Nissan Leaf, that appeal to environmentally minded consumers.

The F-150 Lightning, in contrast, is aimed at small businesses and corporate customers such as building contractors and mining and construction companies that buy lots of rugged pickups. These buyers typically care not just about the sticker price of a truck but also how much it costs to operate and maintain. Electric vehicles tend to cost more to buy but less to own than conventional cars and trucks because they have fewer parts and electricity is cheaper than gasoline or diesel on a per mile basis.

“There are a lot of big fleets who have been looking for green solutions but haven’t had any answers until now,” William C. Ford Jr., the company’s chairman and a great-grandson of Henry Ford, said in an interview.

General Motors and start-ups like Rivian are also working on electric pickups. Rivian has said it will start delivering its truck, the R1T, this summer and G.M. is expected to sell the GMC Hummer pickup truck later this year.

many people will buy them. Beyond commercial buyers, trucks like the F-150, Chevrolet Silverado and the Ram tend to be bought by people who have a lot of stuff to haul or by people — usually men — who like driving trucks.

“There will probably be some initial raised eyebrows, but once we get people to experience the driving dynamics and the extra room, the skepticism will abate,” Mr. Ford said.

The F-Series trucks have been the top-selling model line in the United States for the last 44 years. A 2020 study by the Boston Consulting Group found the truck supports 500,000 jobs at Ford, parts suppliers and dealerships.

Ford’s introduction of the Lightning got a major boost from Mr. Biden, who on Tuesday visited the company’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center where the pickup will be made. Before a pool of White House reporters gathered at the plant, Mr. Biden pulled up behind the wheel of a prototype covered in black-and-white camouflage sheeting used to conceal the shape of the truck ahead of the Wednesday event.

“This sucker’s quick,” Mr. Biden said, and let slip that the truck can zoom to 60 miles an hour in 4.4 seconds, a detail that wasn’t supposed to be released until Wednesday. Mr. Biden then zoomed off, reaching a top speed of 80 m.p.h.

The Secret Service normally does not allow presidents to drive. Ford officials were not sure Mr. Biden would drive the truck until he arrived at the Rouge center, but it’s not a surprise he did.

Mr. Biden is a well known car enthusiast and owns a green 1967 Corvette that was given to him by his father as a wedding present. In 2016, he and his Corvette appeared on an episode of “Jay Leno’s Garage,” in which he drove the car at an enclosed Secret Service training facility.

with union labor closely aligns with the Biden administration’s goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, increase domestic manufacturing, support unions and accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

The administration’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal includes money to help build half a million charging stations and incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles.

Ford has said it plans on spending $22 billion to develop electric vehicles over a five-year period ending in 2025.

Other automakers are moving in the same direction. G.M. is spending a similar sum and has said it aims to produce only electric vehicles by 2035, setting a target date for phasing out the internal combustion engine, which has powered the auto industry for more than a century.

G.M. recently introduced an updated version of its electric car, the Chevrolet Bolt. It also plans to make an electric version of its popular Silverado pickup truck, which is one of the biggest competitors to the F-150.

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Electric Pickups Could Make or Break Biden’s Infrastructure Plans

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“The F-150 is generally driven by guys who have a certain image of driving around in a truck — and that image includes noise, gasoline, a muscle engine. We don’t know anything about consumer uptake of eclectic trucks. We don’t know if they’ll want to drive this.”

A study published this year found that about 20 percent of people who purchased electric passenger vehicles were dissatisfied with them — in part because they worried about the lack of electric vehicle charging stations — and returned to driving traditional vehicles.

But White House officials say the pickup Mr. Biden drove on Tuesday could help tip that calculation. The F-150 “has really been a high-performing work vehicle and leisure vehicle, and now you can get it without the expense of all of that gasoline,” Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate adviser, said in an interview.

So far, only Tesla has sold electric models in high volume, but Ford typically sells about 900,000 F-Series vehicles a year. Earlier this year, Ford began selling the Mustang Mach E, a battery-powered sport-utility vehicle styled to resemble the company’s famous sports car.

“We’re not just electrifying fringe vehicles,” the company’s chairman, William C. Ford Jr., said. “The Mustang and the F-150 are the heart of what Ford is, so this is a signal about how serious we are about electrification.”

Autoworkers have expressed concerns over the electric transition, which American automakers are increasingly embracing, because the production of an electric vehicle requires about one-third less human labor than a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine.

But union leaders offered cautious support of the president’s cheerleading for the electric pickup.

“It is no secret that the U.S. auto industry is at a crossroads, as sales of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are poised to become more and more common on our roads and highways in the years ahead both at home and abroad,” said Rory L. Gamble, the president of the United Auto Workers. “Taxpayer dollars should be spent in support of U.S.-built vehicles, not imports. ”

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Crackdown on Emissions ‘Defeat Devices’ Has Amateur Racers Up in Arms

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SEMA frames the federal position as a frightening recipe for overreach, in which the E.P.A. doesn’t allow any street car to become a racecar. That would end amateur racing, and in turn all racing, because there would be no path for developing new pro racers.

“It would be like trying to sustain Major League Baseball without sandlot games, Little League or minor league teams,” said David Goch, SEMA’s general counsel.

Modifying road car exhausts can be made legal in a few ways, most prominently by getting an executive order exclusion from the California Air Resources Board, better known as CARB. The E.P.A. relies on CARB to certify that products conform to Clean Air Act regulations. Between fees and independent testing, an application costs about $6,500 to $9,000 per device, and takes two to nine months to process, the board said.

CARB does offer an automatic exception for racecars, but shops must keep detailed records. Anyone who makes, sells, installs or uses a racing part is liable if that part is illegally used on a public road.

CARB has used that rule to sue out-of-state companies that sold defeat devices in California, including Mr. Willis, the Louisiana shop owner, who faces a criminal CARB suit.

“People who produce devices or programs that modify to the point where it is rolling coal, that is where lines are drawn between civil and criminal,” said Allen Lyons, division chief of the Emissions Certification and Compliance Division of CARB. Some parts companies avoid risk by not selling in California.

Actions against emissions tampering may increase beyond California and the E.P.A. In Utah, an environmental group successfully sued the men who host the Discovery show “Diesel Brothers,” establishing a template for others to follow.

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Biden Signs Executive Order to Bolster Federal Government’s Cybersecurity

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WASHINGTON — As the East Coast suffered from the effects of a ransomware attack on a major petroleum pipeline, President Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday that placed strict new standards on the cybersecurity of any software sold to the federal government.

The move is part of a broad effort to strengthen the United States’ defenses by encouraging private companies to practice better cybersecurity or risk being locked out of federal contracts. But the bigger effect may arise from what could, over time, become akin to a government rating of the security of software products, much the way automobiles get a safety rating or restaurants in New York get a health safety grade.

The order comes amid a wave of new cyberattacks, more sophisticated and far-reaching than ever before. Over the past year, roughly 2,400 ransomware attacks have hit corporate, local and federal offices in extortion plots that lock up victims’ data — or publish it — unless they pay a ransom.

The most urgent fear is an attack on critical infrastructure, a point made clear this week to Americans, who were panic-buying gasoline. A ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline’s information systems forced the company to shut down a critical pipeline that supplies 45 percent of the East Coast’s gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for several days.

SolarWinds hack, in which Russia’s premier intelligence agency altered the computer code of an American company’s network management software. It gave Russia broad access to 18,000 agencies, organizations and companies, mostly in the United States.

The new order also requires all federal agencies to encrypt data, whether it is in storage or while it is being transmitted — two very different challenges. When China stole 21.5 million files about federal employees and contractors holding security clearances, none of the files were encrypted, meaning they could be easily read. (Chinese hackers, investigators later concluded, encrypted the files themselves — to avoid being detected as they sent the sensitive records back to Beijing.)

Previous efforts to mandate minimum standards on software have failed to get through Congress, notably in a major showdown nine years ago. Small businesses have said the changes are not affordable, and larger ones have opposed an intrusive role of the federal government inside their systems.

But Mr. Biden decided it was more important to move quickly than to try to fight for broader mandates on Capitol Hill. His aides said it was a first step, and industry officials said it was bolder than they expected.

Amit Yoran, the chief executive of Tenable and a former cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland Security, said the question on everyone’s mind was whether Mr. Biden’s order would stop the next Colonial or SolarWinds attacks.

“No one policy, government initiative or technology can do that,” Mr. Yoran said. “But this is a great start.”

Government officials have complained that Colonial had poor defenses, and while it established a hard shell around its computer networks, it had no way of monitoring an adversary who got inside. The Biden administration hopes the standards set out in the executive order, requiring multifactor authentication and other safeguards, will become widespread and improve security globally.

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the order but said it would need to be followed by congressional action.

Mr. Warner said recent attacks “have highlighted what has become increasingly obvious in recent years: that the United States is simply not prepared to fend off state-sponsored or even criminal hackers intent on compromising our systems for profit or espionage.”

The new order is the first major public part of a multilayered review of defensive, offensive and legal strategies to take on adversaries around the world. This executive order, however, focuses entirely on deepening defenses, in hopes of deterring attackers because they fear they would fail — or run a higher risk of being detected.

The Justice Department is ramping up a new task force to take on ransomware, after the discovery in recent months that such attacks are more than just extortion, they can bring down sectors of the economy.

Mr. Biden announced sanctions against Russia for the SolarWinds hack, and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has said there will also be “unseen” consequences. So far, the United States has not taken similar action against China’s government for its presumed involvement in another attack, exploiting holes in a Microsoft system used by large companies around the world.

The executive order was first drafted in February in response to the SolarWinds intrusion. That attack was especially sophisticated because hackers working for the Russian government managed to change code under development by the company, which unsuspectingly distributed the malware in an update to its software packages. It was discovered during Mr. Biden’s transition and led him to declare he could not trust the integrity of federal computer systems.

The review board created under the executive order will be co-led by the secretary of homeland security and a private-sector official, based on the specific episode it is investigating at the time, in an effort to win over industry executives who fear the investigations could be fodder for lawsuits.

Because it was created by an executive order, not an act of Congress, the new board will not have the same broad powers as a safety board. But officials are still hopeful it will be valuable in learning of vulnerabilities, improving security practices and urging companies to invest more in improving their networks.

Much of the executive order is focused on information sharing and transparency. It aims to speed the time companies that have been victimized by a hack or discover vulnerabilities share that information with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

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Lordstown Motors Shares Plunge as Investors See Problems

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Mr. Burns’s tenure at Workhorse was decidedly mixed. Workhorse has lost money for years, and its annual revenue was never more than $10 million when Mr. Burns ran the company. One of his initiatives was a bid to supply delivery vehicles to the U.S. Postal Service. While the company was a finalist, it lost to another bidder in February.

Workhorse paid Mr. Burns $1.24 million from 2015 to 2018, according to Equilar, a firm that analyzes corporate compensation. He probably forfeited his stock options at Workhorse by resigning in 2019, but the company gave him a consulting agreement with stock options that Equilar valued at $10.7 million.

What really propelled Mr. Burns and Lordstown was the merger with DiamondPeak.

Backed by some of the principals of the New York investment firm Silverpeak, DiamondPeak raised $250 million from investors when it went public in March 2019, about a year before special purpose acquisition companies became the hottest thing on Wall Street. In securities filings, DiamondPeak said it would probably acquire a real estate business, which made sense because it was led by David Hamamoto, a former Goldman Sachs banker who specialized in that industry.

DiamondPeak decided to buy Lordstown after Mr. Hamamoto was introduced to Mr. Burns in June by Goldman bankers. The deal prospectus said Goldman had known Mr. Burns because of a prior investment banking relationship with him at Workhorse.

Both sides were eager. Lordstown and its backers needed more money, and DiamondPeak was on a deadline to complete a merger to comply with the terms of its initial public offering.

The merger included a fresh investment of $500 million from BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, Wellington Management and others.

Shares of DiamondPeak, later renamed Lordstown Motors, took off even before the merger closed. Some of the sponsors of DiamondPeak were registered in a prospectus late last year to allow them to sell some of their shares in the combined company, along with other investors in the financing deal. Included in the prospectus were some of the bankers at Brown Gibbons Lang, an investment bank, and lawyers with BakerHostetler, a Cleveland-based law firm that reviewed the financing package. Altogether, insider sales have totaled $11 million since the end of December.

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Everything Was Canceled in 2020. What About 2021?

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Early last year, as international lockdowns upended daily life, they took with them, one by one, many of the major cultural and sporting events that dot the calendar each year. The N.B.A. suspended its season, the French Open was postponed for several months and the Tokyo Olympics were delayed a year. The future of the Glastonbury Festival and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival were in doubt. It was a bleak time.

Recently, as conditions in many places around the world have slowly begun to improve, and as countries have begun mass vaccination campaigns, some events and cultural staples have made plans to return, albeit with modifications. While few events, if any, have plans to go ahead free of restrictions this year, some are taking a hybrid approach. Others remain postponed or canceled.

Here’s the status of some of the major events around the world.

scheduled to begin on July 23 with an opening ceremony. The bulk of the athletic events will begin the next day. The first round of Wimbledon begins on June 28 and will run through mid-July. Officials said they were working toward a spectator capacity of at least 25 percent.

scheduled for Oct. 11, and the 50th New York City Marathon is set for Nov. 7.

The 105th Indianapolis 500 will go on as planned on May 30. Officials will allow about 135,000 spectators in — 40 percent of the venue’s capacity. The event was organized with state and local health officials and was approved by the Marion County Public Health Department, race officials said.

The French Open, one of the premier tennis competitions, has been postponed one week to a new start date of May 24. The decision was made in agreement with the authorities in France and the governing bodies of international tennis, said officials, who want the tournament played in front of the largest possible number of fans.

is canceled again this year.

it would not take place this summer.

The Essence Festival of Culture, which usually draws more than a half million people to New Orleans over the Fourth of July weekend every year, will host a hybrid experience this year over two weekends: June 25-27 and July 2-4.

Headliners like Billie Eilish, Post Malone and ASAP Rocky will take the stage at the Governors Ball Music Festival, which is scheduled for Sept. 24-26 at Citi Field in Queens. Organizers say the event will return to its typical June dates in 2022.

Burning Man, the annual countercultural arts event that typically draws tens of thousands of people to Black Rock Desert in Nevada, has been canceled again this year because of the pandemic. It will return in 2022, organizers said.

After being canceled last year, the Austin City Limits Music Festival, the event in the capital of Texas, is scheduled to return to Zilker Park on Oct. 1-3 and Oct. 8-10.

on Sept. 13. A second event is scheduled for May 2022.

NYC Pride 2021 will move forward in June with virtual and in-person events. The Pride March, which was canceled last year, will be virtual this time. (San Francisco Pride, also in June, is planning similar adjustments, while Atlanta Pride is planning to hold an in-person event in October.)

from Aug. 10. In order to keep concertgoers safe, organizers said events will not have intermissions and its venue will have a limited number of available seats. Similarly, the Salzburg Festival in Austria kicks off in mid July with modifications.

The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase for world theater, dance and music in the Scottish city since 1947, will run Aug. 7-29. Performances will take place in temporary outdoor pavilions with covered stages and socially distanced seating.

E3, one of the video game industry’s most popular conventions where developers showcase the latest news and games, will be virtual this year from June 12-15.

The New York International Auto Show, which showcases the newest and latest automobiles from dozens of brands, will run Aug. 20-29. The event last year was postponed and eventually canceled because of the pandemic.

The Cannes Film Festival in the South of France, one of the movie industry’s most revered and celebrated events, has been postponed to July 6-17 from mid-May. The 2021 edition of the event, which was canceled last year, is currently scheduled to be in person.

After more than a year of no theater performances, Broadway shows will start selling tickets for full-capacity shows with some performances starting on Sept. 14. (Some West End shows will resume as early as May 17.)

After being virtual last year, New York Comic-Con will return with a physical event Oct. 7-10 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. The convention will run at reduced capacity to ensure social distancing, organizers said. This year’s Comic-Con International event, which is normally held in July in San Diego, has been postponed until summer 2022. There are plans for a smaller event called Comic-Con Special Edition however, that will be held in person in November.

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The Lithium Gold Rush: Inside the Race to Power Electric Vehicles

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Atop a long-dormant volcano in northern Nevada, workers are preparing to start blasting and digging out a giant pit that will serve as the first new large-scale lithium mine in the United States in more than a decade — a new domestic supply of an essential ingredient in electric car batteries and renewable energy.

The mine, constructed on leased federal lands, could help address the near total reliance by the United States on foreign sources of lithium.

But the project, known as Lithium Americas, has drawn protests from members of a Native American tribe, ranchers and environmental groups because it is expected to use billions of gallons of precious ground water, potentially contaminating some of it for 300 years, while leaving behind a giant mound of waste.

“Blowing up a mountain isn’t green, no matter how much marketing spin people put on it,” said Max Wilbert, who has been living in a tent on the proposed mine site while two lawsuits seeking to block the project wend their way through federal courts.

Electric cars and renewable energy may not be as green as they appear. Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people.

That environmental toll has often been overlooked in part because there is a race underway among the United States, China, Europe and other major powers. Echoing past contests and wars over gold and oil, governments are fighting for supremacy over minerals that could help countries achieve economic and technological dominance for decades to come.

Developers and lawmakers see this Nevada project, given final approval in the last days of the Trump administration, as part of the opportunity for the United States to become a leader in producing some of these raw materials as President Biden moves aggressively to fight climate change. In addition to Nevada, businesses have proposed lithium production sites in California, Oregon, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina.

But traditional mining is one of the dirtiest businesses out there. That reality is not lost on automakers and renewable-energy businesses.

“Our new clean-energy demands could be creating greater harm, even though its intention is to do good,” said Aimee Boulanger, executive director for the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, a group that vets mines for companies like BMW and Ford Motor. “We can’t allow that to happen.”

assembled by Bloomberg, and a hint of the frenzy underway.

Some of those investors are backing alternatives including a plan to extract lithium from briny water beneath California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea, about 600 miles south of the Lithium Americas site.

At the Salton Sea, investors plan to use specially coated beads to extract lithium salt from the hot liquid pumped up from an aquifer more than 4,000 feet below the surface. The self-contained systems will be connected to geothermal power plants generating emission-free electricity. And in the process, they hope to generate the revenue needed to restore the lake, which has been fouled by toxic runoff from area farms for decades.

Businesses are also hoping to extract lithium from brine in Arkansas, Nevada, North Dakota and at least one more location in the United States.

The United States needs to quickly find new supplies of lithium as automakers ramp up manufacturing of electric vehicles. Lithium is used in electric car batteries because it is lightweight, can store lots of energy and can be repeatedly recharged. Analysts estimate that lithium demand is going to increase tenfold before the end of this decade as Tesla, Volkswagen, General Motors and other automakers introduce dozens of electric models. Other ingredients like cobalt are needed to keep the battery stable.

Even though the United States has some of the world’s largest reserves, the country today has only one large-scale lithium mine, Silver Peak in Nevada, which first opened in the 1960s and is producing just 5,000 tons a year — less than 2 percent of the world’s annual supply. Most of the raw lithium used domestically comes from Latin America or Australia, and most of it is processed and turned into battery cells in China and other Asian countries.

In March, she announced grants to increase production of crucial minerals. “This is a race to the future that America is going to win,” she said.

So far, the Biden administration has not moved to help push more environmentally friendly options — like lithium brine extraction, instead of open pit mines. The Interior Department declined to say whether it would shift its stand on the Lithium Americas permit, which it is defending in court.

Mining companies and related businesses want to accelerate domestic production of lithium and are pressing the administration and key lawmakers to insert a $10 billion grant program into Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill, arguing that it is a matter of national security.

“Right now, if China decided to cut off the U.S. for a variety of reasons we’re in trouble,” said Ben Steinberg, an Obama administration official turned lobbyist. He was hired in January by ​Piedmont Lithium, which is working to build an open-pit mine in North Carolina and is one of several companies that have created a trade association for the industry.

Investors are rushing to get permits for new mines and begin production to secure contracts with battery companies and automakers.

Ultimately, federal and state officials will decide which of the two methods — traditional mining or brine extraction — is approved. Both could take hold. Much will depend on how successful environmentalists, tribes and local groups are in blocking projects.

370 feet.

Mr. Bartell’s biggest fear is that the mine will consume the water that keeps his cattle alive. The company has said the mine will consume 3,224 gallons per minute. That could cause the water table to drop on land Mr. Bartell owns by an estimated 12 feet, according to a Lithium Americas consultant.

While producing 66,000 tons a year of battery-grade lithium carbonate, the mine may cause groundwater contamination with metals including antimony and arsenic, according to federal documents.

The lithium will be extracted by mixing clay dug out from the mountainside with as much as 5,800 tons a day of sulfuric acid. This whole process will also create 354 million cubic yards of mining waste that will be loaded with discharge from the sulfuric acid treatment, and may contain modestly radioactive uranium, permit documents disclose.

A December assessment by the Interior Department found that over its 41-year life, the mine would degrade nearly 5,000 acres of winter range used by pronghorn antelope and hurt the habitat of the sage grouse. It would probably also destroy a nesting area for a pair of golden eagles whose feathers are vital to the local tribe’s religious ceremonies.

a lawsuit to try to block the mine.

At the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation, anger over the project has boiled over, even causing some fights between members as Lithium Americas has offered to hire tribal members in jobs that will pay an average annual wage of $62,675 — twice the county’s per capita income — but that will come with a big trade-off.

“Tell me, what water am I going to drink for 300 years?” Deland Hinkey, a member of the tribe, yelled as a federal official arrived at the reservation in March to brief tribal leaders on the mining plan. “Anybody, answer my question. After you contaminate my water, what I am going to drink for 300 years? You are lying!”

The reservation is nearly 50 miles from the mine site — and far beyond the area where groundwater may be contaminated — but tribe members fear the pollution could spread.

hiring a lobbying team that includes a former Trump White House aide, Jonathan Slemrod.

Lithium Americas, which estimates there is $3.9 billion worth of recoverable lithium at the site, hopes to start mining operations next year. Its largest shareholder is the Chinese company Ganfeng Lithium.

CalEnergy, and another business, Energy Source, have tapped the Buttes’ geothermal heat to produce electricity. The systems use naturally occurring underground steam. This same water is loaded with lithium.

Now, Berkshire Hathaway and two other companies — Controlled Thermal Resources and Materials Research — want to install equipment that will extract lithium after the water passes through the geothermal plants, in a process that will take only about two hours.

Rod Colwell, a burly Australian, has spent much of the last decade pitching investors and lawmakers on putting the brine to use. In February, a backhoe plowed dirt on a 7,000-acre site being developed by his company, Controlled Thermal Resources.

“This is the sweet spot,” Mr. Colwell said. “This is the most sustainable lithium in the world, made in America. Who would have thought it? We’ve got this massive opportunity.”

unemployment rate of nearly 16 percent.

“Our region is very rich in natural resources and mineral resources,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle, which represents area farm workers. “However, they’re very poorly distributed. The population has not been afforded a seat at the table.”

The state has given millions in grants to lithium extraction companies, and the Legislature is considering requiring carmakers by 2035 to use California sources for some of the lithium in vehicles they sell in the state, the country’s largest electric-car market.

But even these projects have raised some questions.

Geothermal plants produce energy without emissions, but they can require tens of billions of gallons of water annually for cooling. And lithium extraction from brine dredges up minerals like iron and salt that need to be removed before the brine is injected back into the ground.

Similar extraction efforts at the Salton Sea have previously failed. In 2000, CalEnergy proposed spending $200 million to extract zinc and to help restore the Salton Sea. The company gave up on the effort in 2004.

opened demonstration projects using the brine extraction technology, with Standard Lithium tapping into a brine source already being extracted from the ground by an Arkansas chemical plant, meaning it did not need to take additional water from the ground.

“This green aspect is incredibly important,” said Robert Mintak, chief executive of Standard Lithium, who hopes the company will produce 21,000 tons a year of lithium in Arkansas within five years if it can raise $440 million in financing. “The Fred Flintstone approach is not the solution to the lithium challenge.”

Lilac Solutions, whose clients include Controlled Thermal Resources, is also working on direct lithium extraction in Nevada, North Dakota and at least one other U.S. location that it would not disclose. The company predicts that within five years, these projects could produce about 100,000 tons of lithium annually, or 20 times current domestic production.

Executives from companies like Lithium Americans question if these more innovative approaches can deliver all the lithium the world needs.

But automakers are keen to pursue approaches that have a much smaller impact on the environment.

“Indigenous tribes being pushed out or their water being poisoned or any of those types of issues, we just don’t want to be party to that,” said Sue Slaughter, Ford’s purchasing director for supply chain sustainability. “We really want to force the industries that we’re buying materials from to make sure that they’re doing it in a responsible way. As an industry, we are going to be buying so much of these materials that we do have significant power to leverage that situation very strongly. And we intend to do that.”

Gabriella Angotti-Jones contributed reporting.

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Volkswagen Earnings Show Reliance on Sales in China

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A spike in sales to Chinese customers helped Volkswagen rebound strongly from the disruption caused by the pandemic, the carmaker said Thursday, underlining China’s importance to the German economy.

Sales in the first three months of 2021 rose 13 percent compared to a year earlier, to 62.4 billion euros, or $75 billion, while profit rose nearly sevenfold to 3.4 billion euros, the company said. Vehicle sales in China, which is Volkswagen’s largest market, rose more than 60 percent.

The recovery in sales bodes well for the German economy. Vehicles are the country’s biggest export product. But Volkswagen also illustrates Germany’s dependence on China when tensions between Beijing and the European Union are rising because of the Chinese government’s treatment of minority groups and its crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong.

As is typical for Volkswagen, the company’s Audi and Porsche divisions generated most of the profit. The luxury vehicles have a higher profit margin than the more affordable cars that account for most of Volkswagen’s volume.

shortage of semiconductors that has afflicted all carmakers in recent months, but warned that the chip famine could become more acute in months to come.

Volkswagen sold 60,000 battery-powered vehicles out of a total of 2.4 million during the quarter. That may be a disappointment to the company, which has staked its future on a new line of electric cars, the first of which went on sale late in 2020.

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