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The Senate on Tuesday passed the long-stalled $95.3 billion package of aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, along with legislation that could lead to a ban on TikTok, clearing the measure and sending it to President Biden for his signature. Total 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Note: Three senators did not vote. […] More
After President Biden signs the bill to force a sale of the video app or ban it, the legislation will face court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers and Beijing’s hostility.A bill that would force a sale of TikTok by its Chinese owner, ByteDance — or ban it outright — was passed by the Senate on Tuesday and is expected to be signed quickly into law by President Biden.Now the process is likely to get even more complicated.Congress passed the measure citing national security concerns because of TikTok’s Chinese ties. Both lawmakers and security experts have said there are risks that the Chinese government could lean on ByteDance for access to sensitive data belonging to its 170 million U.S. users or to spread propaganda.The proposed law would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States if ByteDance sold it within 270 days, or about nine months, a time frame that the president could extend to a year.The measure is likely to face legal challenges, as well as possible resistance from Beijing, which could block the sale or export of the technology. It’s also unclear who has the resources to buy TikTok, since it will carry a hefty price tag.The issue could take months or even years to settle, during which the app would probably continue to function for U.S. consumers.“It’s going to be a royal mess,” said Anupam Chander, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard and an expert on the global regulation of new technologies.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
In a city still struggling to recover from the pandemic, Mayor London Breed hopes giant pandas will lift the spirits — and the economy — of San Francisco.Facing a tough re-election fight in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has already proposed building a soccer stadium in place of an underused mall, adding a college to the hollowed-out downtown and filling the city’s quiet streets with lively night markets.But now, Ms. Breed has a new idea to reverse the city’s post-pandemic woes: giant pandas.She returned Sunday from China wheeling a luggage cart through San Francisco International Airport with stuffed toy pandas brimming from the tops of her bags. Her biggest coup overseas was securing an agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association to have pandas take up residence at the San Francisco Zoo for the first time. “Everyone is truly excited about pandas,” Ms. Breed said at the airport. “It represents so much joy.”The arrival of the black-and-white superstars could be an economic boon for a city hit hard by the pandemic.They could also give Ms. Breed a personal boost as she tries to shore up support among the frustrated electorate in San Francisco. Voters, particularly those of Asian descent who make up about 37 percent of the population, have told pollsters that they do not approve of the job the mayor is doing, and Ms. Breed and her challengers are fighting hard to win them over.Securing the pandas would also be a marked contrast from last year, when two adult pandas and their 3-year-old cub were moved out of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and flown back to China aboard a FedEx Boeing 777 called the Panda Express.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
The congressional breakthrough on security assistance to Ukraine and Israel will let the president finally deliver arms to match his words. But it could be only a temporary respite.Finally, President Biden had good news to share with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. When Mr. Biden picked up the telephone at his home in Wilmington, Del., to call Mr. Zelensky on Monday, the two rejoiced over the congressional breakthrough that will result in the first significant new U.S. military aid for Ukraine in 16 months.Mr. Biden used the 30-minute call to “underscore the United States’ lasting commitment to supporting Ukraine” against Russian invaders and promise that arms will start flowing again “quickly,” according to a White House statement. For a grateful Mr. Zelensky, the timing was propitious. A Russian missile attack, he told Mr. Biden, had just destroyed the television tower in Kharkiv.The House passage of a landmark $95 billion foreign aid package gives Mr. Biden much-needed momentum at a time when his credibility and American leadership have been questioned on the world stage. For months, the president has vowed unstinting support for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan without being able to deliver on Capitol Hill. Now, at last, he has planeloads of artillery rounds, air defense missiles and other munitions to back up his words.“This was a historic win for President Biden and for America’s global leadership,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said in an interview. “This was a moment when both our allies and our adversaries were watching to see if we would deliver for the people of Ukraine in their moment of need.”Michael Allen, a former national security aide to President George W. Bush, said the aid would counter international worries about the United States for now but added that Mr. Biden should use it to press American allies to take more of a leadership role.“It’s a win for the U.S. after months of talk about America’s lost its way, beset by populism and isolationism,” he said. “Biden now has new political capital, if he’ll use it, to browbeat more Europeans into more assistance for Ukraine and NATO.”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
Israeli leaders expressed alarm about the possible action by the Biden administration over rights violations in the West Bank.The United States is considering imposing sanctions on one or more Israeli battalions accused of human rights violations during operations in the occupied West Bank, according to a person familiar with the deliberations.Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on Saturday called the possibility of the Biden administration’s placing such sanctions “the peak of absurdity and a moral low” at a time when Israeli forces are fighting a war in Gaza against Hamas. Mr. Netanyahu said in a social media post that his government would “act by all means” against any such move.The news about the possible sanctions, reported earlier by Axios, came only a day after the House approved $26 billion for Israel and humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones, including Gaza. The sanctions, if imposed, would not hold up the military aid that was just approved in Congress.On Sunday, Palestinians in the West Bank went on a general strike to protest a deadly Israeli military raid at a refugee camp. At least 10 people were killed in the raid on Saturday, the latest operation in a sweeping economic and security clampdown in the Israeli-occupied territory.Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and detained in raids in the West Bank, which Israeli officials describe as counterterrorism operations against Hamas and other armed groups.The strike on Sunday “paralyzed all aspects of life” in the West Bank, with shops, schools, universities and banks shuttered, according to the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa. Public transportation also was halted.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
Much-needed munitions like artillery shells could start arriving relatively quickly, but experts say it could take weeks before U.S. assistance has a direct impact on the war.The Ukrainian lieutenant was at a firing position on the eastern front, commanding an artillery unit relying on American-provided M777 howitzers and other big guns, as U.S. lawmakers gathered in Washington to decide if his cannons would be forced to go silent for lack of ammunition.But when the lieutenant returned to his base on Saturday night, he got the news that he and millions of Ukrainians had been praying to hear.“I had just entered the building after a shift change when the guys informed me that the aid package for Ukraine had finally been approved by Congress,” said the lieutenant, who is identified only by his first name, Oleksandr, in line with military protocol. “We hope this aid package will reach us as soon as possible.”The decision by American lawmakers to resume military assistance after months of costly delay was greeted with a collective sigh of relief and an outpouring of gratitude across a battered and bloodied Ukraine. It may have been late in coming, soldiers and civilians said, but American support meant more than bullets and bombs.It offered something equally important: hope.Immediately after the vote passed in Congress, Ukrainian citizens took to social media to offer thanks and express joy, posting American flag memes blending Ukrainian imagery with American symbols like the Statue of Liberty.“I have tears in my eyes,” Anton Gerashchenko, the founder of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, a research group, said in a message. “So much suffering, so much pain. So many lost friends and wonderful people in these horrible years of war. Now there is hope to save more lives of those who are still alive.”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
This is an extraordinarily dangerous time for the United States and our allies. Israel’s unpreparedness on Oct. 7 shows that even powerful nations can be surprised in catastrophic ways. Fortunately, Congress, in a rare bipartisan act, voted early Saturday to reauthorize a key intelligence power that provides critical information on hostile states and threats ranging from terrorism to fentanyl trafficking.Civil libertarians argued that the surveillance bill erodes Americans’ privacy rights and pointed to examples when American citizens got entangled in investigations. Importantly, the latest version of the bill adds dozens of legal safeguards around the surveillance in question — the most expansive privacy reform to the legislation in its history. The result preserves critical intelligence powers while protecting Americans’ privacy rights in our complex digital age.At the center of the debate is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Originally passed in 1978, it demanded that investigators gain an order from a special court to surveil foreign agents inside the United States. Collecting the communications of foreigners abroad did not require court approval.That line blurred in the digital age. Many foreign nationals rely on American providers such as Google and Meta, which route or store data in the United States, raising questions as to whether the rules apply to where the targets are or where their data is collected. In 2008, Congress addressed that conundrum with Section 702. Instead of requiring the government to seek court orders for each foreign target, that provision requires yearly judicial approval of the rules that govern the program as a whole. That way, the government can efficiently obtain from communication providers the calls and messages of large numbers of foreign targets — 246,073 in 2022 alone.Since then, Section 702 has supplied extraordinary insight into foreign dangers, including military threats, theft of American trade secrets, terrorism, hacking and fentanyl trafficking. In 2022 intelligence from 702 helped the government find and kill the Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, one of the terrorists responsible for Sept. 11. Almost 60 percent of the articles in the president’s daily intelligence briefing include information from Section 702.Although Section 702 can be used only to target foreigners abroad, it does include Americans when they interact with foreign targets. Not only is such incidental collection inevitable in today’s globalized world; it can be vital to U.S. security. If a terrorist or spy abroad is communicating with someone here, our government must find out why.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
Intelligence, politics and personal considerations converted the Republican speaker, who had largely opposed aid to Ukraine as a rank-and-file member, into the key figure pushing it through Congress.Speaker Mike Johnson successfully defied the anti-interventionalist wing of the Republican Party and got the House to approve a $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesFor weeks after the Senate passed a sprawling aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, Speaker Mike Johnson agonized over whether and how the House would take up funding legislation that would almost certainly infuriate the right wing of his party and could cost him his job.He huddled with top national security officials, including William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, in the Oval Office to discuss classified intelligence. He met repeatedly with broad factions of Republicans in both swing and deep red districts, and considered their voters’ attitudes toward funding Ukraine. He thought about his son, who is set to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in the fall.And finally, when his plan to work with Democrats to clear the way for aiding Ukraine met with an outpouring of venom from ultraconservatives already threatening to depose him, Mr. Johnson, an evangelical Christian, knelt and prayed for guidance.“I want to be on the right side of history,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, recalled the speaker telling him.Mr. Johnson’s decision to risk his speakership to push the $95 billion foreign aid bill through the House on Saturday was the culmination of a remarkable personal and political arc for the Louisiana Republican. It was also an improbable outcome for a man plucked from relative obscurity last fall by the hard right — which had just deposed a speaker they deemed a traitor to their agenda — to be the speaker of a deeply dysfunctional House.As a rank-and-file hard-liner, Mr. Johnson had largely opposed efforts to fund Kyiv’s war effort. And early in his speakership, he declared he would never allow the matter to come to a vote until his party’s border demands were met.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
