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      What is Trump’s Crypto Reserve Plan?

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      The prospect of using taxpayer money to stockpile cryptocurrencies in a national reserve has drawn criticism from lawmakers and investors.The crypto market gives and takes: After President Trump’s plan for a national crypto reserve drew backlash from both Republicans and investors, the prices of digital tokens that would be involved soared higher — and then tumbled. (Bitcoin was trading at about $83,800 early on Tuesday, down nearly $10,000 from a day ago.)The plan has spurred a lot of questions about how it would work and the risks that would be involved.How would a national reserve work?Mr. Trump campaigned last summer on creating a federal Bitcoin stockpile and appointed the venture capitalist David Sacks as his crypto czar. Advisers have suggested holding on to any Bitcoin the government has already seized from criminals, recently estimated at about $17 billion.A bill proposed by Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, would direct the government to buy about 200,000 Bitcoin a year over five years, for a value of about $90 billion. (To help pay for that, the bill proposes taking $4.4 billion out of the Federal Reserve’s surplus, cutting into the Treasury Department’s coffers.) Of course, the digital token’s prices would probably rise in anticipation of those federal purchases.One unknown is whether Mr. Trump, in the face of divisions among Republican lawmakers on the idea of a reserve, would seek to test legal limits on his authority and create one unilaterally.Would taxpayer money be involved?That prospect drew the most criticism. Joe Lonsdale, a financier and Trump supporter, said it was “wrong to tax me for crypto bro schemes.” Another investor called the proposal an “unforced error” that would “enrich the insiders and creators of these coins at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Vast Storm Knocks Out Power in North Texas

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      The storm is expected to intensify, bringing the threat of blizzards, tornadoes and damaging winds across the central and southern United States.More than 380,000 customers in North Texas were without power on Tuesday morning as a powerful storm with strong winds swept across the region.The storm, part of a system that stretched from Iowa to Texas, was expected to strengthen as it moved east on Tuesday. Warnings were in place for blizzards in the Plains and severe storms across the South, with damaging gusts, hail and possible tornadoes forecast from eastern Oklahoma to Alabama.Flights into Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport were briefly halted, and about 10 percent of departing flights out of the airport were canceled as of Tuesday morning, according to FlightAware, which tracks flight data.A severe thunderstorm warning was in effect in Texas until 8:30 a.m. local time, including for the cities of Palestine, Fairfield and Buffalo, according to the National Weather Service.In southern Oklahoma, more than 20,000 customers were without power, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us. A mobile home in Ada, Okla., was destroyed after a possible tornado hit, according to KOCO-TV, a television station in Oklahoma City. More

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      Harper Lee’s Early Short Stories to Be Published for the First Time

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      Before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Lee had written short stories in which she explored some of its themes and characters.For years before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee wrote short stories with themes that she would later explore in that now-classic novel: small town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations.She tried and failed to get them published. Scholars and biographers have long thought the stories were lost or destroyed.But Lee was a meticulous archivist. She stashed the typescripts of the stories, along with the rejection letters, in her New York City apartment, where her executor discovered them after her death in 2016.This fall, those stories will be published for the first time in a collection titled “The Land of Sweet Forever.” The book, out on Oct. 21 from Harper, includes eight previously unreleased stories and eight pieces of nonfiction that Lee published in various outlets between 1961 and 2006, including a profile of her friend, the writer Truman Capote, a cornbread recipe and a letter to Oprah Winfrey.Lee’s nephew, Edwin Conner, said that he and other members of her family were thrilled that the stories were preserved, and can now reach a wide audience. The estate decided to publish them in 2024, according to Harper.“She was not just our beloved aunt, but a great American writer, and we can never know too much about how she came to that pinnacle,” Conner said in a statement released by Harper.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chinese Architect Liu Jiakun Wins Pritzker Prize

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      Liu, known for understated structures that respond to their surroundings, has been awarded the profession’s highest honor.At 17, Liu Jiakun was sent to labor in the countryside as part of China’s “re-education” efforts during the Cultural Revolution.“I didn’t see a clear future for me — a lot of things were quite meaningless,” Liu said through a translator (his son, Martin) in a recent phone interview from his office in Chengdu, China. “I thought at the time that life was inconsequential.”Eventually, Liu, now 68, found meaning in architecture, a pursuit that has earned him the profession’s highest honor: the Pritzker Prize.Having founded his own practice, Jiakun Architects, in his native Chengdu in 1999, Liu has built more than 30 projects in China — including academic buildings, cultural institutions and civic spaces. He also designed the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion Beijing in 2018 and has been featured in Venice Biennales.His work is not flashy or full of flourishes. Instead, the architect said, he aims to honor existing conditions, to use local materials that are “regular, contemporary, cheap and local” and to elevate the human spirit.“Through an outstanding body of work of deep coherence and constant quality, Liu Jiakun imagines and constructs new worlds, free from any aesthetic or stylistic constraint,” the jury said in its citation announcing the award on Tuesday. “Instead of a style, he has developed a strategy that never relies on a recurring method but rather on evaluating the specific characteristics and requirements of each project differently. That is to say, Liu Jiakun takes present realities and handles them to the point of offering a whole new scenario of daily life.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Mamma Mia!’ Is Returning to Broadway This Summer

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      The musical’s original run was the ninth-longest in Broadway history; a six-month return engagement will start in August.“Mamma Mia!” is returning to Broadway this summer after a decade away.The big-hearted musical, which combined Abba songs and abs to become a huge hit onstage and then on film, is scheduled to start previews on Aug. 2 at the Winter Garden Theater — where it spent much of its original run. The opening date is set for Aug. 14, and the run is expected to last at least six months.“I hope it will be a bit of an end-of-summer treat for New York,” said Judy Craymer, the British producer who initially commissioned the musical and has transformed it into a global business.The musical’s first New York engagement, with 5,773 performances from 2001 to 2015, made it the ninth-longest-running show in Broadway history. Its 50 productions around the world, in 16 languages, have been seen by more than 70 million people and have grossed more than $7 billion, the show’s publicists said.The musical’s mother-daughter story is set on a fictional Greek island, where family and friends have gathered for a wedding. The daughter is determined to use the occasion to figure out which among three of her mother’s ex-boyfriends is her father, whose identity she has never known.The plot, for many fans, is largely a scaffolding for an extremely popular set of Abba tunes and a lot of upbeat dance numbers (performed by actors in exuberant, and sometimes skimpy, costumes) that prompted occasional dancing by patrons in the aisles.“It’s the idyllic Greek holiday,” Craymer said, “and everyone wants to be on that island, cellphone free, having a fun time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Street Style Look of the Week: Textured Clothes

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      With flavors of both a bow tie and a cravat, the ribbed scarf knotted around the neck of Evan Naurais immediately stood out when we crossed paths in Paris on a Saturday in early February. It was a dapper finishing touch to a tactile outfit that also involved a fuzzy, olive green jacket and stylishly rumpled dark jeans.Mr. Naurais, 24, who works at an art gallery in Paris, had the type of considered look that suggested a certain amount of thought went into putting it together. So I was surprised when he told me that, on his days off, he paid little mind to his clothing choices.“The weekend is for me to clean my head,” he said.

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      Europe Warily Watches U.S.-China Trade War

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      Europe was not directly targeted in the wave of U.S. tariffs that took effect on Tuesday, but the effects are being felt here.Keyu Jin, a professor at the London School of Economics, said that tit-for-tat tariffs would not necessarily lead to less global trade, but a “fragmentation and regionalism” that forges new blocs aiming to be “nonaligned” in the intensifying trade war between the United States, its neighbors and China.She was speaking on a panel Tuesday in Barcelona at one of the world’s biggest tech trade shows, which runs this week. The annual event, known as Mobile World Congress, attracts more than 100,000 people for product pitches, fund-raising appeals and debates about the future of technology.The fresh U.S. tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico — the three largest U.S. trading partners and crucial cogs in many supply chains — were a common topic of conversation around the sprawling expo center. European companies are heavily represented at the event, and some executives tried to frame the rising trade tensions as an opportunity for Europe, whose sizable population and economy has often been held back by slow growth and a lack of competitiveness.The recent mobilization of European leaders to step up military support of Ukraine was cited as an example of deeper European integration that in the past has tended to fizzle out. But the suspension of U.S. aid and the urgency of Ukraine’s plight — Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain recently described it as “a crossroads in history” — could spur greater continental cooperation, executives said.Investors have piled into stocks of European defense companies that stand to benefit from stepped-up military spending. And European markets, in general, have outperformed U.S. stocks in recent weeks, even after slipping on Tuesday after the U.S. tariffs went into effect and some targeted countries retaliated.Some of the tech execs in Barcelona say this is not a coincidence: Companies with Europe-focused operations and supply chains may be seen by global investors as a sort of geopolitical hedge against the tariffs and trade tensions arising from the United States. Take, for example, the stock market index tracking European telecoms, long seen as a somewhat sleepy backwater, which is up about 12 percent this year alone.But this thesis will be tested soon, when President Trump plans to widen the scope of tariffs to cover all U.S. imports of steel, aluminum, copper and cars, as well as “reciprocal” tariffs against countries to address what he calls “unfair” relationships and to compel companies to move manufacturing to the United States. More

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      Trump’s Tariffs Hit Stock Markets

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      Global leaders are retaliating and investors have sold off stocks in Asia and Europe.Nowhere to hide as a new wave of U.S. tariffs sinks global stock markets.Franck Robichon/EPA, via ShutterstockNot just tough talk President Trump wasn’t bluffing, after all.Global markets plunged on Tuesday after U.S. tariffs went into effect on roughly $1.5 trillion worth of imports from Canada, Mexico and China, with another, and even broader, wave set to kick in as soon as next week.China and Canada have already responded, with Beijing targeting the American heartland with sweeping levies on imported food and halting log and soybean shipments from select U.S. companies. Mexico is expected to retaliate, too.The escalation has global business leaders increasingly worried about what will come next, as economists warn that consumers and companies will soon see higher prices. Warren Buffett offered a reminder of what the global economy is facing. “Tariffs,” the billionaire investor said this week, “are an act of war, to some degree.”Here’s the latest:Stocks in much of Asia and Europe fell on Tuesday, after the S&P 500 yesterday suffered its worst one-day decline this year. U.S. stock futures were down slightly on Tuesday.Hit especially hard on Tuesday were the shares of European automakers, including Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler Truck. Levies could slam the sector, which is highly dependent on a complex cross-border supply chain.The CBOE volatility index, Wall Street’s so-called fear gauge popularly known as the VIX, jumped, posting its biggest one-day spike this year, according to Deutsche Bank.The sell-off also extended to cryptocurrencies (more on that below), and, in a new twist, the dollar.If global investors weren’t spooked before, they seem to be now. “The market finally took the Trump administration at its word, and the realization that the tariff talk wasn’t just a negotiating tactic is starting to sink in,” Chris Zaccarelli, an investment strategist for Northlight Asset Management, said in a research note yesterday evening.How long will the trade battle last? Analysts see reason for cautious optimism — at least on China. “We view Beijing’s responses as still strategic and restrained,” Xiangrong Yu, Citigroup’s chief China economist, said in a research note on Tuesday. He said a trade deal was still “plausible.”The Shanghai composite index closed slightly higher on Tuesday.Market watchers warn of deep repercussions should the trade war drag on. Trump seems to be digging in, telling reporters yesterday that there is “no room left for Mexico or for Canada.” A protracted fight could dent global growth and accelerate inflation, all of which could “hamstring the Fed,” Mark Haefele, the chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More