By JACQUES BILLEAUD (Associated Press)

PHOENIX (AP) — Authorities revealed Friday the conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges filed against an ex-aide of former President Donald Trump and four attorneys in Arizona’s fake elector case, but the names of former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawyer Rudy Giuliani remained blacked out. The Arizona attorney general’s office released a copy of the indictment that revealed nine felony counts had been filed against Mike Roman, who was Trump’s director of Election Day operations, and attorneys John Eastman, Christina Bobb, Boris Epshteyn and Jenna Ellis. The lawyers were accused of organizing an attempt to use fake documents to persuade Congress not to certify Joe Biden’s victory.

The office had announced Wednesday that conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges had been filed against 11 Arizona Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring that Trump won in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election. They included a former state GOP chair, a 2022 U.S. Senate candidate and two sitting state lawmakers.

The identities of seven other defendants, including Giuliani and Meadows, were not released on Wednesday because they had not yet been served with the indictments. They were readily identifiable based on descriptions of the defendants, but the charges against them were not clear. Roman, Epshteyn, Bobb and Ellis declined to comment, did not respond or could not be reached. Representatives of Eastman, Meadows and Giuliani have attacked the prosecution as political.

Trump himself was not charged but was referred to as an unindicted co-conspirator.

With the indictments, Arizona becomes the fourth state where allies of the former president have been charged with using false or unproven claims about voter fraud related to the election.

Those charged in the Arizona case are scheduled for their initial court hearing on May 21.

The 11 people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claiming that Trump carried the state. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.

Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes.

By DAVID KOENIG (AP Airlines Writer)

DALLAS (AP) — Southwest Airlines is studying changes to its quirky boarding and seating policies as it searches for ways to raise more revenue.

Airline officials say they are studying possible changes but won’t have anything to announce until September. That tease is leading to speculation about whether Southwest might ditch some longstanding traditions, including the practice of passengers picking their own seats only after they board a plane.

CEO Robert Jordan says he is proud of Southwest’s “product,” but it was developed when flights weren’t as full as they are today, and customers’ preferences change over time, prompting the “deep dive” into “transformational options” in boarding and seating.

“Early indications, both for our customers and for Southwest, look pretty darn interesting,” he told analysts and reporters Thursday.

Every other major U.S. airline sells first- or business-class seats with more room and amenities. They assign seats long before passengers arrive at the airport. And increasingly, they charge extra if economy-class passengers want to pick a particular seat, such as one in an exit row or near the front of the cabin.

Those policies generate significant “ancillary revenue.” Delta Air Lines took in $4.4 billion in “premium products” during the first quarter.

Southwest doesn’t have a first-class cabin or assigned seats. Passengers line up in the gate area in an order determined partly by who checked in first and – increasingly – who paid extra to move up in line. The lucky or high-paying ones get in the “A” boarding group, followed by the middling “B” crowd and finally the dreaded “C” group, whose unfortunate inhabitants usually wind up in a middle seat, maybe in the back of the plane.

Over the years, Southwest customers learned to check in online exactly 24 hours before departure to get the best shot at grabbing the seat they wanted. In 2009, the airline began charging an extra fee — called EarlyBird — to move up in the boarding line. The fee starts at $15 per flight but goes up when planes are full.

Jordan said any changes must generate significant new revenue and can’t slow down flights. Beyond that, he was deliberately and repeatedly vague, but executives did indicate that two possible changes have been ruled out already.

Ryan Green, Southwest’s chief commercial officer, said the airline won’t impose baggage charges — it’s the only U.S. carrier that lets passenger check one or two bags for free. He said Southwest also won’t install curtains like those that separate premium cabins from the economy-class section on other airlines.

Savanthi Syth, an airlines analyst with Raymond James Financial, said the lack of assigned seating is “a huge pain point for passengers,” although a shrinking contingent still likes it. Syth thinks passengers would prefer the ability to select a seat in advance to trying to get a better spot in the boarding line.

“More importantly, I think it opens you up to a greater pool of passengers that would not consider (Southwest) because of the stress of the current process,” she said. “This is particularly important now that Southwest has lost the differentiation of no change or cancellations fees.” Southwest’s closest rivals dropped change fees too during the pandemic.

Syth is less convinced that Southwest needs a first-class cabin, but she thinks adding extra-legroom seats could be attractive. “There are plenty of tall people who could use the extra space,” she said.

Southwest executives are frequently asked about changes in their policies around baggage, seating and first-class cabins. At an industry conference in November, Jordan said there was nothing in the works.

What changed?

Southwest’s financial results have become more dismal. The company reported Thursday that it lost $231 million in the first quarter, which was worse than analysts expected and a wider loss than a year ago.

The Dallas-based airline faces sharply rising labor costs — up 19% or $462 million from a year ago, and that was before flight attendants ratified a new contract with sharply higher wages. Spending on maintenance and airport fees are rising by double-digit percentages. And Southwest can’t add as many flights as it would like because a production crisis at Boeing means there are fewer new planes.

The company is freezing hiring other than critical positions, and it will take the rare step of pulling out of four airports in August to cut costs. Even with revenue rising on strong travel demand, the airline needs more to offset inflation.

The airline promises that whatever it decides, it won’t change Southwest’s unique character. That could be a tricky balancing act in the view of its many loyal customers. They must wait out the next several months.

“We are committed to a set of new strategic initiatives. I have hinted at boarding and seating and the cabin, and we’re going to share those with you at investor day” in September, Jordan told analysts.

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded nearly $1.5 million to the University of Minnesota’s Natural Resources Research Institute to develop carbon-free methods of readying iron mined in the state for steelmaking.

NRRI, which has labs in Hermantown and Coleraine, received $575,000 as part of a $2.8 million grant to work with the University of Minnesota to develop a microwave hydrogen plasma process to replace blast furnaces. It also received $900,000 as part of a $3 million grant to work with Tufts University in Medford, Mass., to develop a method to directly reduce iron ore concentrates with ammonia.

Both processes would eliminate carbon emissions from that step in the steelmaking process. Reduction of greenhouse gases, namely carbon dioxide, is key in slowing or preventing the worst effects of a warming climate.

The global steelmaking industry accounted for approximately 7% of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“It’s a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions from just iron and steel alone,” said Matt Mlinar, research group leader for minerals processing and metallurgy at NRRI. “They (the Department of Energy) are trying to look for alternative ways to produce the same products while not emitting CO2.”

Both methods the NRRI will help research replace carbon with hydrogen, either through the microwave hydrogen plasma process or with ammonia, which is a nitrogen and hydrogen compound.

Typically, coal or natural gas is used to remove oxygen from iron before a traditional oxygen furnace or, increasingly, an electric arc furnace converts it to steel.

Carbon monoxide in fossil fuels can pick an oxygen atom off the iron oxide, removing it from the iron but forming carbon dioxide and other gases as a byproduct. Those gases are then released into the atmosphere. But if hydrogen is used instead, two hydrogen atoms can bond with one oxygen atom from the iron oxide and form water, and water vapor is a far more desirable byproduct than greenhouse gases.

“We want hydrogen to do the reduction, and not the CO (carbon monoxide) because then the CO2 (carbon dioxide) will form, and herein lies the problem,” said Brett Apigarelli, a senior research scientist at NRRI.

The projects were part of $28 million in funding announced last week by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, under the Revolutionizing Ore to Steel Impact Emissions, or ROSIE, program.

“Iron and steel production are among the most difficult industrial sectors to decarbonize, which is why ARPA-E is laser focused on accelerating game-changing technological breakthroughs to lower emissions from these critical sectors,” ARPA-E director Evelyn N. Wang said in a news release. “Today’s announcement will help the nation achieve President Biden’s ambitious clean energy and net-zero goals while also reinforcing America’s global leadership in clean manufacturing for generations to come.”

Separately, the NRRI last year received a $2.1 million grant from the Department of Energy to study different lower-carbon technologies for the iron and steel industries. That includes using biochar, wood heated to a high temperature in a low-oxygen setting, to replace coal in the steelmaking process.

Mlinar said ARPA-E, which is funding the hydrogen projects, is known for backing “moonshot” research.

“They fund a lot of really, really high-risk, high-reward projects that otherwise it’s hard to get funding for,” Mlinar said.

Eric Enberg, a volunteer for the Northland Chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, said carbon dioxide emissions from the iron ore and steelmaking industries were long considered difficult to abate.

But that’s changing.

“How do we ever decarbonize these things?” Enberg said. “Well, it’s turning out that it’s a lot easier than we thought. There’s a lot of things we can do — not as cheaply perhaps right now versus carbon-based fuels.”

Enberg said federal funding could help ideas advance beyond the so-called “valley of death” when new technologies under development putter out.

Citizens Climate Lobby has also been arguing for a price on carbon. Enberg if the industry sees traditional carbon-intensive methods and processes becoming cost-prohibitive, it could spur them to adopt lower-carbon or carbon-free processes.

“You need to have the push and the pull,” Enberg said.

If the hydrogen processes work, and are then scaled up, they could transform the state’s iron mining industry again.

First, high-grade was mined, and it could be added directly to a blast furnace. When that was depleted, processing lower-grade ores into concentrated pellets became the norm.

But lower-carbon or carbon-free methods could take pellets out of the equation.

Enberg said the industry should be quick to adopt new technologies in Minnesota because if pellets aren’t needed, there’s nothing stopping ore mined on the Iron Range from being shipped out of state for processing somewhere else.

“We really need to take advantage of this opportunity; otherwise, it’s going to be gone,” Enberg said. “And if it’s gone, then the Iron Range is going to be stuck with the technology from the last century. It will not have moved forward, and the technology and the jobs and all that are going to be somewhere else.”

 

If fears about “the bomb” permeated life in the mid-20th century, the video game “Fallout” takes that premise to its worst conclusion. In a post-nuclear wasteland, some survivors have been recreating their 1950s-era idyll underground in elaborate bomb shelters called vaults. Those less lucky have been eking out a life on the surface, where it is dusty and brutal, and nasty oddities abound in the form of ghouls, who exist in a liminal space between human and zombie. How the hell did we get here? The Amazon TV adaptation explains by toggling between two timelines: Los Angeles of 2077 and what remains of the place a couple of centuries into the future.

Inside Vault 33, the community’s cult-like tranquility is invaded by surface dwellers who kidnap the man in charge (Kyle MacLachlan) and this sets the story in motion. His daughter Lucy ventures outside for the first time on a mission to save him and learns some ugly truths about the inevitable consequences of end-stage capitalism along the way.

Played by Ella Purnell, Lucy is perky and naive but exceptionally skilled with a weapon. Her trek on the surface is one long rude awakening, but what do you expect? She’s literally been sheltered all her life. She’s more or less introduced as a character worthy of “Leave It to Beaver” who is unceremoniously yanked into a darker show by the end of the first episode. That’s typical of “Fallout’s” sense of humor, a lot of which comes through in the production design (which takes a page from the 1999 comedy “Blast From the Past” in amusing ways) and the intentional tonal discord that is irony-drenched and kitschy but not actually funny (a missed opportunity). Chris Parnell and Matt Berry show up separately, and briefly, for comic relief as well.

A scene from “Fallout,” the Prime Video series based on the video game franchise. (JoJo Whilden/Prime Video/TNS)

I haven’t played “Fallout,” but it came up when I wrote about Marvel’s “WandaVision” in 2021. I was curious if younger generations would understand its parodies of shows like “I Love Lucy” and Northwestern professor and screenwriter Brett Neveu was convinced many viewers would, thanks to this game specifically, where “only the pop culture from the 1950s has remained behind. So the jokes that are in the game, the references, they are all part of a culture that is long gone. And if you invest in this puzzle, you have to know these reference points.” Stylistically, the show has stuck with this idea to an extent, primarily through its old-school needle drops.

The hellscape on the surface is unpredictable and dangerous. This has left a power vacuum to be exploited by a brutal militia called the Brotherhood of Steel, in which knights don enormous metal exoskeletons and travel with lowly squires. One of those squires is Maximus (Aaron Moten), who is as out of his element as Lucy. Their individual journeys are the show’s weakest portions, but once they finally team up, the pair starts to feel like more than narrative conceits.

It is Walton Goggins, with his ever-present drawl, who gives “Fallout” its real reason for being. He is the third main character and arguably the most important because his arc serves as a through line. Before the nuclear apocalypse, he is a Hollywood star named Cooper Howard who is famous for his good-guy roles in Westerns. In the future, he has transformed into a leathery, noseless, centuries-old survivor who has shed the moral compass of his former self. His character in both timelines gets all the complexity that’s otherwise missing in the series (which has been renewed for a second season). Nothing is as interesting as when Goggins is on screen. The gory violence in “Fallout” isn’t my speed, and there’s far too much of it in the early going. But the show won me over when his ghoul forcibly asserts his will over someone who, mid-tussle, bites off his index finger. In return, he slices off their index finger: “Now that right there is the closest thing we’ve had to honest exchange so far.”

It’s such a wonderfully weird moment (don’t worry, they both somehow get their respective fingers reattached) and I wish there were more like it. When someone asks, “How do you live like this? Why keep going?,” he offers no answer. His quest is revealed late in the season, but his wanderings up to that point are fascinating all the same. When he stumbles into an abandoned store called Super Duper Mart (repurposed for nefarious doings), he finds a copy of an old movie he starred in that has somehow survived all these years on videotape and he sits there slack-jawed, watching footage of his former self.

Production designer Howard Cummings gives distinctive looks to each time and place, and the vaults in particular aim to recreate a sunny normality with a hermetically sealed twist. But nothing about the show, from creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, has a light touch. “Westworld” creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are executive producers here and you can sense some of that show’s DNA here as well.

The storytelling doesn’t fully gel at first. But if you’re patient, “Fallout” reveals itself to be a show with some potent things to say about where we’re headed if we allow corporate interests to dictate the future. Companies with a business model predicated on prepper-style scare tactics (like the show’s fictitious Vault-Tec) will always need to justify their existence. Where “Fallout” stumbles is what it leaves out. It paints a vision of a colorblind world but also introduces a eugenics plotline, which rings hollow considering the show erases the racism and other bigotries that have historically been used to justify this kind of mindset.

Before the apocalypse, Cooper Howard contemplates what it means to be a “pitchman for the end of the world.” Hollywood is over, a fellow actor tells him: “Hollywood is the past. Forget Hollywood. The future, my friend, is products. You’re a product, I’m a product, the end of the world is a product.”

Just don’t think too hard about the real-world corporate interests pushing us in that direction, including the one streaming this very series.

‘Fallout’

3 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Prime Video

Related Articles

‘Dead Boy Detectives’ review: Hardy Boys for the supernatural realm

Movie review: ‘Unsung Hero’ more like band merch than insightful biopic

Bon Jovi’s long career documented, warts and all, in new Hulu series

‘Fallout’ review: Walton Goggins as a swaggering, post-apocalyptic cowboy

‘One with the Whale’ review: Climate change and animal activists threaten an Indigenous Alaskan community