Tag: War

China cracks down on crypto-related providers in ongoing conflict on bitcoin

Post author By
Post date July 7, 2021

Budrul Chukrut | LightRakete | Getty Images

The Chinese central bank said Tuesday it had called for the closure of a company that was “suspected of providing software services for virtual currency transactions.” The statement issued by the Beijing Office of the People’s Bank of China also warned institutions not to offer other services related to virtual currency, including providing business premises or marketing.

The fight against digital currencies is nothing new to the authoritarian state.

In 2013, the country ordered third-party vendors to stop using Bitcoin. The Chinese authorities stopped selling tokens in 2017 and promised to continue targeting crypto exchanges in 2019.

But usually every time Beijing hit the crypto industry, Beijing has slacked off and the rules have eventually been relaxed.

This time, however, it seems to be different.

In May, China banned financial institutions and payment companies from offering crypto-related services. In June there were mass arrests in China of people suspected of shamefully using cryptocurrencies. In the same month, regulators increased pressure on banks and payment companies to stop providing cryptocurrency services, and Weibo, the Twitter of China, banned crypto-related accounts.

By July, half of the world’s bitcoin miners had gone dark after Beijing’s call for crackdown on bitcoin mining and trading.

“China’s government is doing everything possible to ensure that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies disappear from the Chinese financial systems and economy,” said Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings and a member of the Bitcoin Mining Council.

Why now?

So why did China essentially declare war on cryptocurrencies in 2021?

“We all wonder,” said Nic Carter, founding partner of Castle Island Ventures.

One theory suggests that it is part of a broader legislative and regulatory push ahead of the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary this year.

“They take action against all kinds of undesirable behavior,” Carter said.

Crypto has long been synonymous with crime on the mainland.

“The greatest Ponzi of all time in cryptocurrency was probably Plus Token, a Chinese project,” he said.

In this scheme, scammers tricked investors into $ 5.7 billion and arrested dozens. “You will remember that.”

Another theory is that China is clearing the runway for its own digital yuan, a central bank digital currency that has been in development since 2014.

“Part of it is to ensure the introduction of the Chinese central bank’s digital currency, and part of it is most likely to ensure that all economic activities can be captured by financial monitoring activities,” explained Thiel. The digital yuan could theoretically give the government more power to track spending in real time.

However, Carter argues that Bitcoin and the digital yuan are so different that they cannot really be viewed as direct competitors.

“That is certainly the most common reason given,” said Carter. “I just don’t know if I believe it. They are so different systems from each other. “

The most likely motivator, according to Carter, is that Beijing is trying to stem capital outflows via stablecoins and cryptocurrencies. “China stalling the flow of yuan to crypto is a big deal,” he said.

The price of bitcoin

When it comes to the price of Bitcoin, curbing all of China’s crypto retail “totally moves the needle,” Carter said.

“I think that actually explains a lot of the market weakness and sell-off,” he said. “The good news is that as the crackdown accelerated, Bitcoin stayed pretty flat, which suggests the market has digested that information.”

Thiel believes that the ban on Bitcoin and crypto will actually help Bitcoin in the long term.

“If China’s goal was to kill Bitcoin by shutting down 50% of its mining capacity and banning trading – plummeting its value to punish Chinese owners (a la Didi post-IPO and Ant Financial),” worked it not.
“Instead, Bitcoin has proven its resilience and trading has just moved overseas and miners elsewhere will fill the gap.”

Alyse Killeen, founder and managing partner of Bitcoin-focused venture firm Stillmark, points out that this whole conversation could be a moot point as a government’s ability to enforce a Bitcoin ban will continue to dwindle over time.

“I would expect this type of news to have less of an impact on Bitcoin’s exchange rate than it has in the past,” she said. “It is also true that this news has to some extent been inoculated by the industry – Bitcoin has been banned many times in many regions, yet adoption today is outperforming the Internet at a similar stage in its life cycle.”

Tags bitcoin, China, Cracks, cryptorelated, ongoing, services, War

World News

The Relics of America’s Battle in Afghanistan

Post author By
Post date July 3, 2021

BAGRAM, Afghanistan – For nearly 20 years, Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan was the anchor for America’s war, its two sprawling runways serving for bombing, homeward travel, medical evacuations, mail trips and USO shows.

But despite years of preparation for this moment, the departure of the Americans in Bagram last week was marked by little fanfare, apparently as incoherent as the Afghan government’s plan for the next steps.

For weeks the Taliban have been carrying out attacks across the country, killing members of the Afghan security forces and forcing hundreds to surrender. Across the country, warlords – power brokers from the 1990s civil war and new militia commanders – are calling on Afghan civilians to join their makeshift armies in defense of the country.

The clash of government forces, Taliban fighters, warlords and citizen militias signals that the violence will almost certainly worsen. The U.S. military is expected to leave the country entirely by September 11th as President Biden keeps his promise to bring the American forces home from the nation’s longest foreign war.

The new tenants in Bagram are the Afghan security forces, who will inherit the conflict the US built for them, as well as fields of military equipment, vehicles and weapons that will long represent the grim legacy of the war and the country’s uncertain future .

To continue the fight, the United States has left its tan and green pickups and Humvees behind, along with its Hesco barriers, the cube-shaped, dirt-filled boxes that were used to build and protect American, now Afghan, outposts.

But so many US-supplied weapons have been captured, bought, or stolen by the insurgents that it would be difficult to verify the facts if the Taliban said they had more American M16s than Russian Kalashnikovs. Even the U.S. Special Inspector General overseeing the war in Afghanistan isn’t sure how many American firearms have been sent into the country to support the security forces in the past two decades.

The physical objects left behind are reminiscent of decades of losses – appalling numbers of deaths on all sides, especially among Afghan civilians, as well as devastating injuries. Also, the failed strategies cobbled together by a number of American generals are now part of history who said everything was on schedule and everything was going well.

About a mile from the air force base that American forces left behind on Thursday evening is a squat row of brick and steel shops with Afghan vendors, the custodians of the physical relics that were dropped from trucks and recovered from piles of rubbish. A black coffee mug labeled “Been there… done that, Operation Enduring Freedom” is just one of thousands of items that tell a story from what was once considered “the good war”.

Hashmatullah Gulzada was behind the counter in one of those stores, a closet-sized store he opened a year ago after working as a truck driver. The cramped spaces were filled from floor to ceiling with war relics, snacks, bags, and personal care products.

The quiet resignation of shopkeepers like Mr Gulzada has been reverberating for some time in Bagram, a city of vines and an economy that depends on the garbage from an airport that has been used by two superpowers for the past 40 years.

Even with some of the last American cargo planes to depart on that day in late June, Mr. Gulzada was still not entirely sure that the United States would depart in full.

“If they leave, business will be bad,” said Mr Gulzada.

Near the windowsill was a single red rip-it, the sugar- and caffeine-rich energy drink that kept thousands of US and NATO troops awake on patrol or in the cabs of armored vehicles so big the Afghans saw them Call tanks.

Mr Gulzada says Rip It costs 120 afghanis, about $ 1.50, a high price linked to the love of energy drinks that Afghan youth developed after the 2001 US invasion. (A billboard from Rip It in Kabul, the capital, testifies to this devotion).

On the floor of his shop, in a pile of knickknacks and shampoo bottles, lies a weathered black stripe with wide Velcro straps known as a “combat application tourniquet”. Almost every American soldier and contractor traveling through Afghanistan carried one with them as its ease of use has saved many lives.

More than 20,000 US soldiers were wounded in Afghanistan. (Another 1,897 were killed in combat and 415 died of “non-hostile” reasons.) The combat tourniquet was in many cases, a staple in the roadside bomb slaughter or armed attack, fumbled out of a pouch and slipped hastily up some mutilated limb and tightened until the bleeding stopped.

Mr Gulzada sells the tourniquet for about 25 cents less than Rip It. Medical vendors buy it, shopkeepers say, along with the foldable American stretchers that carried the wounded and dead across the battlefield that are now for sale. They merge with a few artificial Christmas trees from the pedestal that found their way into stores.

The Christmas decorations probably adorned the corners of a staff office at the airfield in one place or another. Bagram Air Force Base ballooned from a partially destroyed former Soviet military airfield when the Americans arrived in a mini-town in 2001 at the height of the war in 2011. It had tens of thousands of residents, fast food restaurants, shops, and an infamous military prison that was later turned over to the Afghans.

But Bagram, as it was then, was dismantled, slowly at first, as the U.S. presence waned. As they left, the Americans destroyed things like armored cars and more than 15,000 other pieces of equipment that were considered surplus property, a collective term that allows U.S. forces to destroy items so they won’t be sold for profit by Afghans.

Farid, another shopkeeper on the Strip who uses a name like many Afghans, said most of the material that has left the base in recent weeks has been destroyed and disposed of as trash, which helped the scrappers, but little available posed to fill its shelves.

Not everything was dismantled or ruined. Under a cot in another store lay a pair of used brown combat boots, a trademark of the nearly 800,000 US soldiers who have rotated around Afghanistan in the past two decades.

Their distinctive prints enabled the Taliban to track down American patrols in the desert-covered south. In the inexorable terrain of the east, such as the Korengal Valley, boots quickly broke when soldiers made strenuous climbs and forged ice-cold streams.

To Americans, the boots were what they saw as they stared at the earth one step at a time, one patrol after another, wondering if their weight would set off a roadside bomb buried underneath.

After all these years of fighting, many of the places where US and international troops marched are in the hands of the Taliban. This is especially true now as the insurgent group draws closer and closer to Kabul and districts are falling one by one by military force or other means. The Afghan forces have recaptured some, but not nearly enough to break the momentum of the offensive.

Even today, the Taliban are less than 80 kilometers away from Bagram, which can be clearly felt in the shops near the base. A shopkeeper who refused to give his name pointed to a bulletproof plate used in body armor and said it was no longer for sale.

“This is for us,” he said. “Tomorrow will be war.”

Fatima Faizi contributed to the coverage.

Tags Afghanistan, Americas, Relics, War

Politics

The Struggle on Historical past Is a Struggle on Democracy

Post author By
Post date June 29, 2021

In March 1932, the cover of Fortune magazine featured a painting of Diego Rivera’s Red Square. A multitude of faceless men marched with red banners and encircled a locomotive with a hammer and sickle. This was the image of communist modernization that the Soviets wanted to convey during Stalin’s first five-year plan: the achievement was impersonal, technical, undeniable. The Soviet Union transformed itself from an agricultural hinterland into an industrial power through a mere disciplined understanding of the objective realities of history. Its citizens celebrated the revolution, as Rivera’s painting suggested, while shaping them into a new breed of people.

But by March 1932 hundreds of thousands were starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the country’s breadbasket. Rapid industrialization was financed by the destruction of traditional agricultural life. The five-year plan had brought about “deculakization”, the deportation of peasants who were considered more affluent than others, and “collectivization”, the appropriation of agricultural land by the state. The result was a mass hunger attack: first in Kazakhstan, then in southern Russia and above all in Soviet Ukraine. The Soviet leaders were aware of this in 1932, but still insisted on requisitions in Ukraine. Grain that humans needed to survive was forcibly confiscated and exported. Writer Arthur Koestler, who was living in Soviet Ukraine at the time, recalled propaganda depicting the starving as provocateurs who preferred to see their own bellies puff out rather than accept Soviet gains.

After Russia, Ukraine was the most important Soviet republic, and Stalin saw it as headstrong and disloyal. When the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine did not produce the yields Stalin expected, he blamed local party authorities, the Ukrainian people and foreign spies. Since food was mined during the famine, Ukrainians in particular suffered and died – around 3.9 million people in the republic, according to best estimates, well over 10 percent of the total population. In communicating with trusted comrades, Stalin did not hide the fact that he was pursuing a specific policy against Ukraine. Residents of the republic were forbidden to leave it; Farmers were prevented from going into the cities to beg; Communities that failed to meet grain targets were cut off from the rest of the economy; Families were robbed of their cattle. In particular, grain from Ukraine was ruthlessly confiscated, far beyond common sense. Even the seeds were confiscated.

The Soviet Union took drastic measures to ensure that these events went unnoticed. Foreign journalists were banned from Ukraine. The only person reporting the famine in English under his own byline, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, was later murdered. Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, Walter Duranty, declared famine to be the price of progress away. Tens of thousands of hunger refugees made it across the border to Poland, but the Polish authorities refrained from making their plight public: a treaty with the USSR is being negotiated. In Moscow, the disaster was portrayed at the 1934 party congress as a triumphant second revolution. The deaths have been rearranged from “hunger” to “exhaustion”. When the next census counted millions fewer people than expected, the statisticians were executed. Residents of other republics, mostly Russians, moved into the abandoned houses of the Ukrainians. As beneficiaries of the calamity, they were not interested in its sources.

Tags Democracy, history, War

World News

A Tradition Struggle Between Hungary and Europe Escalates Over L.G.B.T. Invoice

Post author By
Post date June 25, 2021

BRUSSELS – A culture war between Hungary and the European Union escalated on Wednesday after a senior bloc official said she would use all her resources to thwart a new Hungarian law that critics say will target the LGBT community.

The law banning the representation or promotion of homosexuality in persons under the age of 18, an addition to the laws against pedophiles, was passed by the Hungarian parliament but has yet to be approved by the country’s president.

The law was sharply criticized on Wednesday by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

“This Hungarian bill is a shame,” Ms. von der Leyen said in a statement. “This law clearly discriminates against people based on their sexual orientation. It contradicts the basic values of the European Union: human dignity, equality and respect for human rights. “

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who defended the law, will come under pressure to withdraw it at a meeting of EU leaders on Thursday and Friday. It is the most recent confrontation between the European Union and Mr Orban, who describes himself as an advocate of an “illiberal democracy” that can sometimes run counter to the democratic values of the bloc.

Ms von der Leyen described the European Union as a place “where you can be free who you are and love whoever you want” and added: “I will use all the powers of the Commission to protect the rights of all EU citizens are guaranteed. Whoever they are and wherever they live in the European Union. “

European ambassadors denounced the law on Wednesday in background information before the summit and said it violated the treaties of the European Union and crossed red lines. They expressed the hope that Mr Orban would withdraw from challenging Brussels in the way he has sometimes done in the past.

There is no quick fix if Hungary enforces the law, said the diplomats. But the Commission, which is officially the guardian of compliance with the Treaties, could refer Hungary to the European Court of Justice for a violation. The court could act relatively quickly if it wanted to, and Hungary has respected its decisions in the past.

The proposed law prohibits the distribution of homosexuality or gender affirmative surgery content to anyone under the age of 18 in school sex education programs, films, or advertisements. The government says it aims to protect children, but critics of the law say it combines homosexuality with pedophilia.

In a response on Wednesday, the Hungarian government issued a statement saying that Ms. von der Leyen’s statements were “based on false allegations” and reflected “a biased political opinion without a prior, impartial investigation”.

The statement continues: “The recently passed Hungarian law protects the rights of children, guarantees the rights of parents and does not apply to the rights of those over 18 with regard to sexual orientation, so it does not contain any discriminatory elements.”

Mr. Orban has portrayed himself as a defender of traditional Christian and national values which he believes are being undermined by new concepts of sexual identity and behavior. His government is also under pressure for its performance, particularly its response to the coronavirus. As a result, Mr Orban has used such cultural issues to strengthen his conservative base ahead of next year’s elections.

A European Union official said Ms. von der Leyen wanted to send a political message to Hungarians and planned to speak privately with Mr. Orban about the issue.

On Tuesday, when European ministers met in Luxembourg, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said the law is only aimed at pedophiles and does not restrict adult sexual freedom. “The law protects children in such a way that it is the exclusive right of parents to educate their children about sexual orientation up to the age of 18,” he said. “This law says nothing about the sexual orientation of adults.”

Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands issued a joint statement condemning the law as a violation of the right to freedom of expression and as a “blatant form of discrimination based on sexual orientation”.

Ireland’s European Minister Thomas Byrne said: “I am very concerned – it is wrong what happened there.” Mr Byrne called it “a very, very dangerous moment for Hungary and also for the EU”.

Germany’s European Minister Michael Roth spoke of concerns that both Hungary and Poland are violating the rule of law by restricting the freedoms of the courts, academics and the media, as well as the rights of women, migrants and minorities.

“The European Union is not primarily a single market or a monetary union,” said Roth. “We are a community of values, these values bind us all,” he said. “There must be no doubt that minorities, including sexual minorities, must be treated with respect.”

In an effort to get a public response, the city of Munich promised to light up its stadium in the rainbow colors of the Pride flag when Germany meets Hungary at the European Football Championship on Wednesday evening, but was refused by the game’s board. UEFA, who said the game must be kept free of politics.

The passionate soccer fan Orban has decided to cancel a visit to the Bavarian capital Munich for the game and instead to travel directly to Brussels, according to the German press agency dpa. The Hungarian government said it had never commented on Mr Orban’s “private program”.

Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder said Germans should “stand up against exclusion and discrimination,” while the Munich gay community said rainbow flags would be distributed to fans outside the stadium. A number of other stadiums in Germany should shine in rainbow colors.

Monika Pronzcuk contributed to the reporting.

Tags Bill, Culture, Escalates, Europe, Hungary, LGBT, War

Politics

Home votes to repeal 2002 Iraq Conflict authorization

Post author By
Post date June 21, 2021

US President George W. Bush (L) speaks prior to signing the Joint Congressional Resolution to Authorize US Use of Force against Iraq if necessary, October 16, 2002, at the White House in Washington, DC. From L are House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Joyce Naltchayan | AFP | Getty Images

The House of Representatives voted Thursday to revoke the 2002 war permit in Iraq as Congress seeks to limit the president’s discretion in the use of military force.

The chamber passed the measure by a margin of 268 to 161. Forty-nine Republicans backed them except for one Democrat.

The bill goes to the Senate, where the GOP is split over whether to support them. The Chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee plans to proceed next week with its own plan to revoke authorization for the use of military force.

CNBC policy

Read more about CNBC’s political coverage:

President Joe Biden supports the House Bill of Representatives to Repeal the Iraq War. His Office of Management and Budget said this week that “the United States has no ongoing military activities relying solely on the 2002 AUMF as its domestic legal basis, and repeal of the 2002 AUMF would likely have minimal impact on ongoing military operations to have.”

Legislators from both parties have feared that leaving the approval in place will give the presidents legal backing to justify independent military strikes. The Iraq war ended almost a decade ago.

The House of Representatives voted to lift the measure in January 2020 after the US launched an air strike in Iraq that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The Senate, then held by Republicans, did not pass the bill. The Trump administration named the approval measure as the legal basis for the air strike.

(R) Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) hold a critical press conference at the U.S. Capitol on October 4, 2017 in Washington . Direct current.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-California, spearheaded legislation that the House of Representatives passed Thursday. Lee, a longtime anti-war advocate, was the only House MP who voted against the war permit in Afghanistan in 2001.

“This authority remains on the books and is prone to abuse as Congress failed to act to remove it,” Lee said in the House of Representatives on Thursday.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., said Wednesday that he would vote on revoking the Iraq warrant this year. He said the revocation of the permit would “remove the risk of a future government resorting to the legal dustbin to be used as a justification for military adventure”.

Minority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Signaled Thursday that he would oppose the war permit being lifted, despite support for his faction.

U.S. Army Soldiers from 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, Task Force Iraq, man a defensive position on Forward Operating Base Union III in Baghdad, Iraq, December 31, 2019.

US Army | Reuters

“The fact is that the legal and practical application of the 2002 AUMF goes well beyond the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s regime,” he said. “To throw it aside without answering real questions about our own efforts in the region is reckless.”

Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., And Todd Young, R-Ind., Led efforts to overturn the measure in the Senate.

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Tags authorization, House, Iraq, repeal, votes, War

Business

Warfare footing wanted to appropriate economists local weather change failings

Post author By
Post date May 24, 2021

Economic projections that predict the potential impacts of climate change have grossly underestimated reality and delayed global recovery efforts by decades, according to a senior professor.

Mainstream economists “purposely and completely” ignored scientific data and instead “compiled their own numbers” to fit their market models, Steve Keen, a fellow at University College’s London Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security, told CNBC on Friday .

Now a “state of war” is required to repair the damage, he said.

“Basically, economists have completely misrepresented and ignored science, where it contradicts their tendency that climate change is not a big deal because they think capitalism can handle anything,” Keen told Street Signs Asia.

We play with forces that go far beyond what we can actually tackle.

Steve Keen

Fellow at University College London

Keen said the effects of climate change were predicted in the 1972 publication “The Limits to Growth” – a divisive account of the devastating effects of global expansion – but economists ignored their warnings then and since, preferring to rely on market mechanisms .

“If their warnings had been taken seriously and we had done what they suggested and changed our trajectory from 1975 onwards, we could have done so gradually, using things like the carbon tax, etc.,” he said. “Because economists have delayed it by another half a century, we as a species put three to four times the pressure on the biosphere.”

Icebergs near Ilulissat, Greenland. Climate change is having profound effects in Greenland as the glaciers and the Greenland ice cap retreat.

NurPhoto | Getty Images

As a result, he said, “The only way to reverse this is effectively to mobilize a war-induced foundation to reverse the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere in order to drastically reduce our consumption.”

Referring specifically to a report by economists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was instrumental in outlining global climate goals, including those presented in the Paris Agreement COP21, Keen said even their most serious estimates were a “trivial underestimation of the”. Damage we expect. “

That’s because they “completely and deliberately ignore the possibility of turning points,” a point at which climate change can cause irreversible changes in the environment.

“I think we should throw the economists completely out of this discussion and sit the politicians with the scientists and say that these are the possible outcomes of such a big change in the biosphere. We are playing with forces far beyond what we can . ” actually address, “he said.

Keen’s comments come as world leaders conclude their final day of meetings in the Arctic Council – an intergovernmental forum that addresses wide-ranging geopolitical issues from climate to trade.

Tags change, Climate, correct, Economists, failings, Footing, needed, War

Politics

Threat of Nuclear Struggle Over Taiwan in 1958 Stated to Be Higher Than Publicly Identified

Post author By
Post date May 22, 2021

WASHINGTON — When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was.

American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release.

The document was disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a classified history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago. Mr. Ellsberg said he had copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not disclose it then. He is now highlighting it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan.

While it has been known in broader strokes that United States officials considered using atomic weapons against mainland China if the crisis escalated, the pages reveal in new detail how aggressive military leaders were in pushing for authority to do so if Communist forces, which had started shelling the so-called offshore islands, intensified their attacks.

The crisis in 1958 instead ebbed when Mao Zedong’s Communist forces broke off the attacks on the islands, leaving them in the control of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Republic of China forces based on Taiwan. More than six decades later, strategic ambiguity about Taiwan’s status — and about American willingness to use nuclear weapons to defend it — persists.

The previously censored information is significant both historically and now, said Odd Arne Westad, a Yale University historian who specializes in the Cold War and China and who reviewed the pages for The New York Times.

“This confirms, to me at least, that we came closer to the United States using nuclear weapons” during the 1958 crisis “than what I thought before,” he said. “In terms of how the decision-making actually took place, this is a much more illustrative level than what we have seen.”

Drawing parallels to today’s tensions — when China’s own conventional military might has grown far beyond its 1958 ability, and when it has its own nuclear weapons — Mr. Westad said the documents provided fodder to warn of the dangers of an escalating confrontation over Taiwan.

Even in 1958, officials doubted the United States could successfully defend Taiwan using only conventional weapons, the documents show. If China invaded today, Mr. Westad said, “it would put tremendous pressure on U.S. policymakers, in the case of such a confrontation, to think about how they might deploy nuclear weapons.”

“That should be sobering for everyone involved,” he added.

In exposing a historical antecedent for the present tensions, Mr. Ellsberg said that was exactly the takeaway he wanted the public to debate. He argued that inside the Pentagon, contingency planning was likely underway for the possibility of an armed conflict over Taiwan — including what to do if any defense using conventional weapons appeared to be falling short.

“As the possibility of another nuclear crisis over Taiwan is being bandied about this very year, it seems very timely to me to encourage the public, Congress and the executive branch to pay attention to what I make available to them,” he said about what he characterized as “shallow” and “reckless” high-level discussions during the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis.

He added, “I do not believe the participants were more stupid or thoughtless than those in between or in the current cabinet.”

Among other details, the pages that the government censored in the official release of the study describe the attitude of Gen. Laurence S. Kutner, the top Air Force commander for the Pacific. He wanted authorization for a first-use nuclear attack on mainland China at the start of any armed conflict. To that end, he praised a plan that would start by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese airfields but not other targets, arguing that its relative restraint would make it harder for skeptics of nuclear warfare in the American government to block the plan.

“There would be merit in a proposal from the military to limit the war geographically” to the air bases, “if that proposal would forestall some misguided humanitarian’s intention to limit a war to obsolete iron bombs and hot lead,” General Kutner said at one meeting.

At the same time, officials considered it very likely that the Soviet Union would respond to an atomic attack on China with retaliatory nuclear strikes. (In retrospect, it is not clear whether this premise was accurate. Historians say American leaders, who saw Communism as a monolithic global conspiracy, did not appreciate or understand an emerging Sino-Soviet split.)

But American military officials preferred that risk to the possibility of losing the islands. The study paraphrased Gen. Nathan F. Twining, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as saying that if atomic bombings of air bases did not force China to break off the conflict, there would be “no alternative but to conduct nuclear strikes deep into China as far north as Shanghai.”

He suggested that such strikes would “almost certainly involve nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and possibly against Okinawa,” the Japanese island where American military forces were based, “but he stressed that if national policy is to defend the offshore islands then the consequences had to be accepted.”

The study also paraphrased the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, as observing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “nobody would mind very much the loss of the offshore islands but that loss would mean further Communist aggression. Nothing seems worth a world war until you looked at the effect of not standing up to each challenge posed.”

Ultimately, President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed back against the generals and decided to rely on conventional weapons at first. But nobody wanted to enter another protracted conventional conflict like the Korean War, so there was “unanimous belief that this would have to be quickly followed by nuclear strikes unless the Chinese Communists called off this operation.”

Mr. Ellsberg said he copied the full version of the study when he copied the Pentagon Papers. But he did not share the Taiwan study with reporters who wrote about the Vietnam War study in 1971, like Neil Sheehan of The Times.

Mr. Ellsberg quietly posted the full study online in 2017, when he published a book, “Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” One of its footnotes mentions in passing that passages and pages omitted from the study are available on his website.

But he did not quote the study’s material in his book, he said, because lawyers for his publisher worried about potential legal liability. He also did little else to draw attention to the fact that its redacted pages are visible in the version he posted. As a result, few noticed it.

One of the few who did was William Burr, a senior analyst at George Washington University’s National Security Archive, who mentioned it in a footnote in a March blog post about threats to use nuclear weapons in the Cold War.

Mr. Burr said he had tried about two decades ago to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a new declassification review of the study — which was written by Morton H. Halperin for the RAND Corporation — but the Pentagon was unable to locate an unabridged copy in its files. (RAND, a nongovernmental think tank, is not itself subject to information act requests.)

Mr. Ellsberg said tensions over Taiwan did not seem as urgent in 2017. But the uptick in saber-rattling — he pointed to a recent cover of The Economist magazine that labeled Taiwan “the most dangerous place on Earth” and a recent opinion column by The Times’s Thomas L. Friedman titled, “Is There a War Coming Between China and the U.S.?” — prompted him to conclude it was important to get the information into greater public view.

Michael Szonyi, a Harvard University historian and author of a book about one of the offshore islands at the heart of the crisis, “Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line,” called the material’s availability “hugely interesting.”

Any new confrontation over Taiwan could escalate and officials today would be “asking themselves the same questions that these folks were asking in 1958,” he said, linking the risks created by “dramatic” miscalculations and misunderstandings during serious planning for the use of nuclear weapons in 1958 and today’s tensions.

Mr. Ellsberg said he also had another reason for highlighting his exposure of that material. Now 90, he said he wanted to take on the risk of becoming a defendant in a test case challenging the Justice Department’s growing practice of using the Espionage Act to prosecute officials who leak information.

Enacted during World War I, the Espionage Act makes it a crime to retain or disclose, without authorization, defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Its wording covers everyone — not only spies — and it does not allow defendants to urge juries to acquit on the basis that disclosures were in the public interest.

Using the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers was once rare. In 1973, Mr. Ellsberg himself was charged under it, before a judge threw out the charges because of government misconduct. The first successful such conviction was in 1985. But it has now become routine for the Justice Department to bring such charges.

Most of the time, defendants strike plea deals to avoid long sentences, so there is no appeal. The Supreme Court has not confronted questions about whether the law’s wording or application trammels First Amendment rights.

Saying the Justice Department should charge him for his open admission that he disclosed the classified study about the Taiwan crisis without authorization, Mr. Ellsberg said he would handle his defense in a way that would tee the First Amendment issues up for the Supreme Court.

“I will, if indicted, be asserting my belief that what I am doing — like what I’ve done in the past — is not criminal,” he said, arguing that using the Espionage Act “to criminalize classified truth-telling in the public interest” is unconstitutional.

Tags Greater, Nuclear, Publicly, Risk, Taiwan, War

World News

Gaza Warfare Deepens a Lengthy-Working Humanitarian Disaster

Post author By
Post date May 19, 2021

Gaza War Deepens a Long-Running Humanitarian Crisis

GAZA CITY – The nine-day battle between Hamas fighters and the Israeli military has damaged 17 hospitals and clinics in Gaza, destroyed the only coronavirus test laboratory, sent stinking sewage onto the streets and water pipes for at least 800,000 people destroyed the humanitarian crisis that affects almost every civilian touched in the crowded enclave of about two million people.

Sewage systems in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed. A desalination plant, which was used to supply 250,000 people in the area with fresh water, is offline. Dozens of schools were damaged or closed, forcing around 600,000 students to miss classes. Around 72,000 Gazans had to flee their homes. At least 213 Palestinians were killed, including dozens of children.

The scale of destruction and death in Gaza has underscored the humanitarian challenge in the enclave, which had suffered from an indefinite blockade by Israel and Egypt even before the recent conflict.

As the crisis deepened, there were increasing international calls for a ceasefire on Tuesday.

President Biden, who had publicly supported Israel’s right to defend itself, privately warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he could no longer deter growing pressure from the international community and American politicians, according to two people familiar with the call . The private message indicated a time limit on Mr. Biden’s ability to provide diplomatic cover for Israel’s actions.

All but one member of the European Union, Hungary, called for an immediate ceasefire in an emergency meeting on Tuesday. They supported a statement condemning Hamas missile attacks and supporting Israel’s right to self-defense, but also warned that this must be done “proportionally and in compliance with international humanitarian law,” according to the bloc’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell Fontelles.

Israel and Hamas were embroiled in ceasefire negotiations brokered by Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations. However, no progress was reported on Tuesday as Israeli planes continued to hit Gaza with rockets and Hamas and its Islamist affiliates fired rockets at Israel.

At least 12 Israeli residents were killed in the conflict. No later than two Thai citizens were hit by a rocket attack on a food packaging facility on Tuesday afternoon, the Israeli police said.

Within Israel and the Occupied Territories, the Palestinians held one of the largest collective protests in memory. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians went on general strike in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Israel to protest the Gaza War, Israeli occupation, discrimination and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel and the eviction of Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem.

The demonstrations began peacefully but led to clashes in some places in the West Bank. Outside Ramallah, a group of Palestinians who had gathered separately from the demonstrators set fire to a main thoroughfare and later exchanged shots with Israeli soldiers. Three Palestinians were killed.

Rocket fire from Palestinian militants has also damaged Israeli infrastructure, damaged a gas pipeline and disrupted operations at a gas rig and at two major Israeli airports.

But the damage was incomparable to that in Gaza.

Until Monday evening, the Al Rimal Health Clinic in the center of Gaza City housed the only coronavirus test laboratory in Gaza. There, doctors and nurses administered hundreds of vaccinations, prescriptions and checkups to more than 3,000 patients every day.

But on Monday evening, an Israeli air strike hit the street outside, sending splinters to the clinic, shattering windows, tearing up doors, furniture and computers, baking rooms to rubble and destroying the virus laboratory.

Vaccinations have been canceled and doctor’s appointments postponed. The pharmacy was closed and the delivery of medicines was interrupted.

More than 1,000 Gazans were wounded in the Israeli offensive, making the damage to hospitals and clinics particularly dangerous.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Updated

May 19, 2021, 4:02 p.m. ET

“During wartime, people need more treatment than usual,” said Mohammed Abu Samaan, a senior administrator of the clinic, on Tuesday. “Now we can no longer give people medicine.”

The humanitarian situation in Gaza was dire even before the war. Unemployment was around 50 percent. The Israeli and Egyptian governments control what flows in and out of the strip, as well as most of its electricity and fuel. Israel also controls the birth register, airspace, maritime access and cellular data in the Gaza Strip and restricts Palestinian access to farmland adjacent to the edge of the strip.

An Israeli army spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, did not deny that Israel’s air strikes damaged civil infrastructure, but said Israeli military leaders did their best to avoid it.

“Of course, health facilities, mosques, schools, water facilities and the like in our system are marked as sensitive infrastructure that must not be attacked and influenced by our fire,” he said. “Obviously we are taking precautions.”

The high civilian death toll and damage to civilian infrastructure have raised questions about Israel’s compliance with international war laws, which prohibit targeting purely civilian sites and limit acceptable collateral damage to what is appropriate for military advantage.

However, William Schabas, professor of international law and former chairman of a United Nations commission that investigated allegations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza in 2014, said: “Proportionality is a subjective term.”

Hamas fighters operate from an extensive network of tunnels under Gaza. As Israeli warplanes drop bombs to destroy this network, it is the people trapped between them who suffer the most catastrophic losses.

Hamas, which has fired more than 3,000 rockets at Israeli cities, is clearly committing war crimes, according to legal experts, even though its weapons are far less effective and their toll is far smaller.

In southern Israel schools within range of Hamas rocket fire have been closed and many families have left the border areas. Wailing sirens warning of missile attacks shape daily life in Israel, especially in the south, and repeatedly send Israelis to shelters.

But the Hamas attacks also appear to be contributing to the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

When a convoy of 24 trucks with urgently needed international aid from Israel tried to enter the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, they came under mortar fire, according to Israeli and UN representatives of Palestinian militants. Only five of the trucks got through the intersection before the rest were turned back.

The trucks contained medical equipment, animal feed and fuel tanks for use by international organizations in Gaza, Israeli officials said.

Since 2007, Hamas has had three major conflicts with Israel and several minor skirmishes. After every outbreak of violence, Gaza’s infrastructure was in ruins.

According to a report by the United Nations, the wars and the blockade left Gaza with the “highest unemployment rate in the world” last year and more than half of the population lives below the poverty line.

As of Monday, Israeli bombs had destroyed 132 residential buildings and rendered 316 residential units uninhabitable, according to the Gaza Housing Ministry.

An air strike essentially destroyed Hala al Shawa clinic in northern Gaza, which also provides basic health care and vaccinations, while another damaged four ambulances nearby, the Ministry of Health said.

The explosion of a third airstrike broke windows in operating rooms, forcing the clinic to move surgical patients to other hospitals, said Abdelsalam Sabah, the ministry’s hospital director. A separate air strike caused structural damage to the nearby Indonesian hospital, he added. A piece of splinter flew into the emergency room at Gaza Eye Hospital and almost wounded a nurse, he said.

The strike at Al Rimal Clinic in Gaza City also damaged the administrative offices of the Hamas-led health ministry, said Dr. Majdi Dhair, Director of the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Ministry.

A ministry official was hospitalized and in serious condition after being hit in the head by a splinter, said Dr. Dhair on Tuesday in a telephone interview.

“This attack was barbaric,” he said. “There’s no way to justify it.”

The coverage was contributed by Patrick Kingsley and Myra Noveck of Jerusalem; Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel; and Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Tzur Hadassah.

Tags Crisis, Deepens, Gaza, humanitarian, longrunning, War

Politics

Biden’s Plan to Finish Afghanistan Struggle Offers Some Detainees Hope for Launch

Post author By
Post date April 21, 2021

Biden’s Plan to End Afghanistan War Gives Some Detainees Hope for Release

However, this left unanswered the question of what it would mean if Afghanistan were no longer an active zone of armed conflict, even if the fighting raged thousands of kilometers away elsewhere.

Mr Haroon’s case could be stronger because he is an Afghan national, unlike other detainees who the government says went to Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden’s Islamist movement. There is only one other Afghan in Guantánamo, Muhammad Rahim, 55, but he presents a more complex case.

He was originally held in CIA custody as a “high-quality prisoner”, and his 2016 intelligence profile describes him as a courier and mediator for al-Qaeda – including bin Laden – who had already been informed of the 9/11 attacks. He was never charged with war crimes.

If the evidence is strong that Mr. Rahim worked directly for al-Qaeda, the government can argue that war violence persists to prevent him from returning to battle even after the war between the United States in Afghanistan is over. But his attorney, Cathi Shusky, a federal defender in Ohio, argued that the evidence was weak.

“There is a reasonable explanation that he was not part of either al Qaeda or the Taliban,” said Ms. Shusky, who said many details of his case have been classified, which prevented her from delving into it. “The narrative is a bit twisted. I think when the facts are fully revealed it will show that his continued detention is not lawful. “

A U.S. military representative for Mr. Rahim told a management review committee in March 2016 that Mr. Rahim regretted his past and wanted to return to his two wives and seven children in Afghanistan. His motives are not ideological, said the representative, but “he only did what he had done for money so that he could support his family.”

His federal court release was on hold for years while he sought release from the board, which repeatedly declared his detention a national security requirement. But Ms. Shusky said she and another lawyer planned to revive his habeas corpus case in light of the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.

Tags Afghanistan, Bidens, Detainees, hope, Plan, release, War

Business

Canadian Rivals in Bidding Struggle for U.S. Railroad: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date April 20, 2021

Canadian National Railway proposed a $33.7 billion deal to acquire Kansas City Southern, challenging an offer from Canadian Pacific.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Christinne Muschi/Reuters

The railroad barons are at it again.

Canadian National Railway on Tuesday offered to buy Kansas City Southern for $33.7 billion, topping a $29 billion bid put forward last month by a rival railroad operator, Canadian Pacific.

The competing offers underline the riches expected to come from trade flows after the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement was passed into law last year. A merger with either suitor would create a railroad line that stretches from Canada to Mexico. In the already consolidated railroad industry, few lines are left to bid on — let alone deals that will be approved by regulators.

Canadian National said in a letter to Kansas City board that the company had spent “considerable time and resources analyzing a potential combination of our two companies.” It argues its offer represents “an unparalleled opportunity to create a premier railway for the 21st century.”

The offer gives Kansas City Southern a valuation 21 percent higher than Canadian Pacific’s bid, which had been agreed on by the companies’ boards.

For Canadian National, the proposal would be a chance to stop its smaller domestic competitor from gaining significant scale. Unlike Canadian Pacific, Canadian National already has track agreements extending to the Gulf of Mexico.

The rival bid is one further challenge to Canadian Pacific’s offer, which was already facing regulatory scrutiny. The U.S. Department of Justice has urged the Surface Transportation Board — which must approve the offer — to examine the deal under tough industry guidelines put in place in 2001 and expressed concern over its use of a voting trust that would it allow it close the deal even before getting regulatory approval.

Canadian Pacific has argued that there should be no regulatory trouble, given the two railroads have no overlap and in some cases create new markets. It said its smaller size compared with other major North American railroads should exempt it from the guidelines.

Credit…Charles Platiau/Reuters

Three rival names in the European luxury sector have established a new blockchain consortium that will allow shoppers to track the provenance of their purchases and authenticate goods.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, which first unveiled plans for a global blockchain-based system in 2019, will be joined by Prada Group and Compagnie Financière Richemont in the Aura Blockchain Consortium, a nonprofit group that will promote the use of a single blockchain solution open to all luxury brands worldwide.

Many sectors are looking at the possibility of using blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Because blockchains are unchangeable and decentralized, the data stored on them is trustworthy and secure.

In this case, each product will be given a unique digital code during the manufacturing process that will be recorded on the Aura ledger. When customers make a purchase, they will be given login details to a platform that will provide the history of the product, including its origin, components, environmental and ethical information, proof of ownership, a warranty and care instructions.

Bulgari, Cartier, Hublot, Louis Vuitton and Prada are already using the system, with “advanced conversations” being held with a number of other luxury brands, according to a statement released Tuesday. Participating luxury brands pay an annual licensing fee and a volume fee. Aura, based in Geneva, was developed in partnership with Microsoft and ConsenSys, a blockchain software technology company in New York.

“The Aura Consortium represents an unprecedented cooperation in the luxury industry,” said Cartier’s chief executive, Cyrille Vigneron, adding that he invited “the entire profession” to join the consortium.

“The luxury industry creates timeless pieces and must ensure that these rigorous standards will endure and remain in trustworthy hands,” he said.

Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, called for cooperation and openness to an audience of business and financial leaders on Tuesday. He also had some warnings, presumably for the United States.

Speaking electronically to a largely virtual audience at China’s annual Boao Forum, Mr. Xi warned that the world should not allow “unilateralism pursued by certain countries to set the pace for the whole world.”

The audience included American business leaders including Tim Cook of Apple and Elon Musk of Tesla, as well as two Wall Street financiers, Ray Dalio and Stephen Schwarzman. Long a platform for China to show off its economic prowess and leadership, the Boao Forum is held annually on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. (Last year’s was canceled amid the pandemic.)

In recent years, Mr. Xi has used the forum to portray himself as an advocate of free trade and globalization, calling for openness even as many in the global business community have become increasingly vocal about growing restrictions in China’s own domestic market.

On Tuesday, he also reiterated his earlier message opposing efforts by countries to weaken their economic interdependence with China.

“Attempts to ‘erect walls’ or ‘decouple’” would “hurt others’ interests without benefiting oneself,” Mr. Xi said, in what appeared to be a reference to the United States and the Biden administration’s plans to support domestic high-tech manufacturing in the United States.

The White House held a meeting with business executives last week to discuss a global chip shortage and plan for semiconductor “supply chain resilience.” Speaking to executives from Google, Intel and Samsung, Mr. Biden said “China and the rest of the world is not waiting, and there’s no reason why Americans should wait.”

China is pursuing its own program for self-sufficiency in chip manufacturing.

Mr. Xi also pledged to continue to open the Chinese economy for foreign businesses, a promise that big Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have clung to even as foreign executives complain that the broader business landscape has become more challenging.

Credit…Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency started as a joke, now has a market value that can’t be laughed at: more than $50 billion. On Tuesday, traders of Dogecoin were trying to push up the price to coincide with 4/20, or April 20, a date associated with smoking cannabis.

On Twitter, the hashtags #DogeDay and #Doge420 were trending. Dogecoin’s price, which has surged lately, fluctuated between gains and losses on Tuesday, trading at about 40 cents, according to Coindesk. A month ago, it was about 5 cents.

The ripple effects of the boom in crypto markets are being felt far and wide. Coinbase, the cryptocurrencies exchange that went public last week and is helping the industry move into the mainstream, has a market value of $66 billion. Central banks have ramped up plans to explore digital currencies to offer people a secure alternative to cryptocurrencies, which are out of their control. On Monday, the Bank of England was the latest to announce it was looking into a central bank digital currency.

On Tuesday morning, prices of cryptocurrencies and related stocks slipped. Bitcoin fell 1 percent, trading just above $55,000. Shares in Coinbase and Riot Blockchain were slightly lower in premarket trading.

Elsewhere in markets

U.S. stocks followed European and Asian stock indexes lower. The S&P 500 index dropped 0.3 percent in early trading, but it’s still less than a percentage point away from the record high reached on Friday. The Stoxx Europe 600 index dropped 1.1 percent.
Oil prices rose. Futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, rose slightly to about $63.55 a barrel.
Shares in British American Tobacco dropped 8 percent on Tuesday, the worst performance in the FTSE 100, after The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the Biden administration is considering making tobacco companies cut the nicotine in cigarettes so they aren’t addictive. American tobacco companies saw their shares fall on Monday

Credit…Nick Carey/Reuters

Last year’s pandemic-induced production delays, combined with a continued shortage of computer chips and other automotive components, have tightened the supply of new models — especially popular sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks.

That means it may be challenging to find a new ride with the colors and features you want at a price you can afford, Ann Carrns reports for The New York Times. “It’s harder to get exactly what you want,” said Ivan Drury, senior manager of insights at Edmunds. “Don’t expect heavy discounts.”

So if new cars are too expensive, you can just buy a used car, right?

Yes, but deals may be elusive there as well. Fewer people bought new cars last year, so fewer used cars were traded in. And the short supply of new cars is pushing more buyers to consider used cars, raising those prices, analysts say. The average price paid for a used car is well above $20,000, Edmunds says.

On the plus side, if you have a car to trade in, its value is probably higher, especially if it’s a popular model. The average value for trade-ins, including leased cars turned in early, was about $17,000 in March, up from about $14,000 a year earlier, according to Edmunds. The average age of trade-ins was five and a half years.

Various online services, like Kelly Blue Book, TrueCar and Carvana, will supply a trade-in estimate based on your location and your car’s age, mileage and general condition, and offer more tailored appraisals if you provide details like the vehicle identification number. Some even offer to buy your car outright.

Lululemon said on Tuesday that it would introduce an apparel trade-in program in Texas and California in May, as clothing chains pay more attention to secondhand clothing. It will accept “gently used” Lululemon garments from customers at more than 80 stores and through the mail in exchange for gift cards to the retailer. The cards will range in value from $5 to $25, and a typical pair of leggings would fetch $10. The effort is part of a sustainability initiative called “Lululemon Like New,” and will expand to include a resale business in the same markets in June.
United Airlines said Monday that it lost nearly $1.4 billion in the first three months of the year, but added that a turnaround was close as bookings picked up. The airline said it had stopped spending more money than it collected in March from operations, investing and financing activities — losses known as its “cash burn.” United also said it expected to turn a profit sometime this year.
JPMorgan Chase’s role as the financial backer of the so-called Super League, a breakaway soccer league made up of top clubs from England, Italy and Spain, has made it a target for a storm of criticism. Soccer’s organizing bodies and domestic leagues, European heads of state, former players and supporter groups of the clubs involved were among those speaking out against the plan.
Tribune Publishing said Monday that it had ended talks to sell itself to Newslight, the company set up last month by the Maryland hotel executive Stewart W. Bainum Jr. and the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, after Mr. Wyss withdrew from a planned offer on Friday. Tribune Publishing’s special committee, which evaluates the bids, said in a news release on Monday that the Newslight bid could no longer “reasonably be expected to lead to a ‘superior proposal’” than the nonbinding agreement the company had reached in February with Alden Global Capital.

Credit…Bronte Wittpenn for The New York Times

HOUSTON — Under growing pressure from investors to address climate change, Exxon Mobil on Monday proposed a $100 billion project to capture the carbon emissions of big industrial plants in the Houston area and bury them deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

Exxon, the largest U.S. oil company, wants to create a profit-making business out of the capture of carbon emitted by petrochemical plants and other industries. But its plan would require significant government support and intervention, including the introduction of a price or tax on carbon dioxide emissions, an idea that has failed to attract enough support in Congress in the past.

The company already captures carbon, which it injects into older fields to produce more oil. Exxon now wants to use its expertise to store the carbon dioxide generated by other industries. But without a price on emitting carbon, many businesses would have little financial incentive to pay Exxon to capture and store their carbon.

The Obama administration failed to enact a cap-and-trade system, which raises costs for polluting companies by forcing them to buy tradable permits to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. California, the European Union and 11 states in the Northeast use versions of cap-and-trade. Other governments, including British Columbia and Britain, have imposed a per-ton tax on emissions.

Exxon wants to capture carbon from industrial plants along the Houston Ship Channel and pipe it offshore where it would stored up to 6,000 feet below the Gulf of Mexico. The effort would be paid for by industry and the government, and would eventually store 100 million tons of carbon annually — equivalent to the emissions of 20 million cars, according to Exxon.

The company has discussed its idea with national and Texas policymakers and Republicans and Democrats in Congress, Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, said in an interview. “They see the opportunity and appeal of this idea,” he said. “The question is, how do you translate the concept into practice?”

Exxon said its proposal complements President Biden’s climate efforts, but it would require the administration to embrace a price on carbon, something it has not done.

“The concept of a price on carbon is critical,” Mr. Woods said. “There has to be a way to incentivize the investment.”

Offshore storage has already gained traction in Europe, where governments have put carbon prices in place and lawmakers are more willing to spend taxpayer money to address climate change.

Mr. Woods said that, given the right policies, carbon capture projects could be a major business for Exxon around the world. “The potential for these markets is very, very large to the extent that demand continues to increase to decarbonize society,” he said.

Credit…Pool photo by Olivier Hoslet

Around the world, governments are moving simultaneously to limit the power of tech companies with an urgency and breadth that no single industry had experienced before.

Their motivation varies. In the United States and Europe, it is concern that tech companies are stifling competition, spreading misinformation and eroding privacy; in Russia and elsewhere, it is to silence protest movements and tighten political control; in China, it is some of both.

Nations and tech firms have jockeyed for primacy for years, but the latest actions have pushed the industry to a tipping point that could reshape how the global internet works and change the flows of digital data, Paul Mozur, Cecilia Kang, Adam Satariano and David McCabe report for The New York Times.

“It is unprecedented to see this kind of parallel struggle globally,” said Daniel Crane, a law professor at the University of Michigan and an antitrust expert. Now, Mr. Crane said, “the same fundamental question is being asked globally: Are we comfortable with companies like Google having this much power?”

Underlying all of the disputes is a common thread: power. The 10 largest tech firms, which have become gatekeepers in commerce, finance, entertainment and communications, now have a combined market capitalization of more than $10 trillion. In gross domestic product terms, that would rank them as the world’s third-largest economy.

Governments agree that tech clout has grown too expansive, but there has been little coordination on solutions. Competing policies have led to geopolitical friction. Last month, the Biden administration said it could put tariffs on countries that imposed new taxes on American tech companies.

Tech companies are fighting back. Amazon and Facebook have created their own entities to adjudicate conflicts over speech and to police their sites. In the United States and in the European Union, the companies have spent heavily on lobbying.

Tags Bidding, Canadian, Live, Railroad, rivals, Updates, War