Tag: U.S

U.S. and China wage war beneath the waves

Amel
U.S. and China wage war beneath the waves

SINGAPORE

It started out as strictly business: a huge private contract for one of the world’s most advanced undersea fiber-optic cables. It became a trophy in a growing proxy war between the United States and China over technologies that could determine who achieves economic and military dominance for decades to come.

In February, American subsea cable company SubCom LLC began laying a $600-million cable to transport data from Asia to Europe, via Africa and the Middle East, at super-fast speeds over 12,000 miles of fiber running along the seafloor.

That cable is known as South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 6, or SeaMeWe-6 for short. It will connect a dozen countries as it snakes its way from Singapore to France, crossing three seas and the Indian Ocean on the way. It is slated to be finished in 2025.

It was a project that slipped through China’s fingers.

A Chinese company that has quickly emerged as a force in the subsea cable-building industry – HMN Technologies Co Ltd – was on the brink of snagging that contract three years ago. The client for the cable was a consortium of more than a dozen global firms. Three of China’s state-owned carriers – China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), China Mobile Limited and China United Network Communications Group Co Ltd (China Unicom) – had committed funding as members of the consortium, which also included U.S.-based Microsoft Corp and French telecom firm Orange SA, according to six people involved in the deal.

HMN Tech, whose predecessor company was majority-owned by Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd,  was selected in early 2020 to manufacture and lay the cable, the people said, due in part to hefty subsidies from Beijing that lowered the cost. HMN Tech’s bid of $500 million was roughly a third cheaper than the initial proposal submitted to the cable consortium by New Jersey-based SubCom, the people said.

The Singapore-to-France cable would have been HMN Tech’s biggest such project to date, cementing it as the world’s fastest-rising subsea cable builder, and extending the global reach of the three Chinese telecom firms that had intended to invest in it.

But the U.S. government, concerned about the potential for Chinese spying on these sensitive communications cables, ran a successful campaign to flip the contract to SubCom through incentives and pressure on consortium members.

Reuters has detailed that effort here for the first time. It’s one of at least six private undersea cable deals in the Asia-Pacific region over the past four years where the U.S. government either intervened to keep HMN Tech from winning that business, or forced the rerouting or abandonment of cables that would have directly linked U.S. and Chinese territories. The story of those interventions by Washington hasn’t been previously reported.

SubCom had no comment on the SeaMeWe-6 battle, and HMN Tech did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement last year about infrastructure projects, the White House briefly noted that the U.S. government helped SubCom to win the Singapore-to-France cable

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Protests erupt throughout the U.S. amid internet shutdown in India and manhunt for activist

Amel
Protests erupt throughout the U.S. amid internet shutdown in India and manhunt for activist

Protests have emerged in key metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and New York in reaction to the Indian law enforcement research for Sikh activist Amritpal Singh. The demonstrations echo civil unrest in the Punjab condition of India, the place protests in several Punjab towns, which include Ajnala and Mohali, began Sunday and led the federal government to shut down web entry for 27 million people there. 

At protests outside the house Indian consulates and embassies in the U.S., individuals waved flags and chanted in aid of the Sikh separatist motion to make a country named “Khalistan,” which means “the land of Khalsa.” Equivalent demonstrations have also taken put in England, Australia and Canada.

The causes Sikh activists are gathering are several. In metropolitan areas like Chicago and Sacramento, California, they swiftly structured rallies to elevate recognition about India’s lack of transparency with its rule of law, its past human rights violations and the lookup for and achievable arrest of Singh.

Singh is a figurehead for a quantity of results in. He speedily became known in India for his potent anti-drug values, issue for Punjab’s drinking water crisis and denunciation of the governing administration. 

Police in Punjab are still exploring for him, according to Punjab Inspector Normal Sukhchain Singh Gill and Indian information outlets. Gill informed The Occasions of India that the Sikh activist is required on charges of “creating disharmony between lessons, endeavor to murder, attacking cops and blocking them from carrying out their responsibilities.”

Kunarveer Singh, an organizer for the Sikh advocacy team California Sikh Youth Alliance, claimed the diaspora has a accountability to mobilize.

“We’ve recognized if no one else is heading to discuss up for us, then you have to do it by yourself,” he explained. “There’s no media blackout here. So if they can not do it [in India], we quite significantly will in this article.”

He reported that the outrage goes further than Amritpal Singh and that protesters extra broadly oppose India’s remedy of minority religions. 

“Protests are us in the diaspora executing as a great deal as we can. Sikhs in the diaspora can only do so substantially on the floor, and that is protesting and producing positive that the Western Hemisphere is informed that the so-called democracy of India is not operating as a democracy,” he reported.

Kunarveer Singh stated protesters would most very likely continue to rally until finally Amritpal Singh is free. Several Sikhs have the very last name Singh, and those people named in this write-up are not immediately linked.

Harpreet Singh, a Sikh scholar of South Asian traditions and languages and a chaplain at Harvard University, reported the activist’s reputation is unsurprising.

“Amritpal Singh has been a voice from the drug epidemic in Punjab, and numerous of the people today that have been implicated in the drug epidemic have been aspect of the Indian federal government,” he stated. 

Singh of Harvard said he is also unsurprised by how the Indian governing administration has responded to Amritpal Singh’s notoriety, mainly

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Website designer opposed to gay relationship at heart of U.S. Supreme Courtroom clash

Amel
Website designer opposed to gay relationship at heart of U.S. Supreme Courtroom clash
  • Supreme Court to listen to arguments on Monday, rule by June
  • Situation pits LGBT rights versus no cost speech protections

WASHINGTON, Dec 2 (Reuters) – The wedding ceremony internet websites that Colorado-primarily based web designer Lorie Smith would like to develop for clients may possibly supply ceremony particulars, pictures, a story about the few and a biblical quotation celebrating how through marriage they “develop into just one flesh.”

They would not, however, demonstrate exact-sex nuptials.

Smith, an evangelical Christian who thinks relationship is only amongst a guy and a girl, has taken her fight to refuse to make wedding day internet websites for exact-sex partners and to promote that policy to the U.S. Supreme Court in a important circumstance to be argued on Monday. Smith is captivating decreased court rulings backing Colorado.

The stakes are high, pitting the right of LGBT folks to look for items and providers from firms with out discrimination in opposition to the proper to totally free speech under the U.S. Constitution’s 1st Modification, as asserted by Smith.

Smith, 38, is married with 1 baby and lives in the Denver suburb of Littleton. She argues that Colorado anti-discrimination law violates totally free speech legal rights by forcing artists – which includes website designers – to convey messages through their work that they oppose.

“Colorado is compelling and censoring my speech and forcing me to design and create customized artwork that celebrates messages that go in opposition to my deeply held beliefs,” Smith mentioned in an interview. “My religion is at the main of who I am.”

Public lodging guidelines exist in several states, banning discrimination in areas these kinds of as housing, inns, retail companies, eating places and academic institutions. Colorado first enacted one in 1885. Its present-day Anti-Discrimination Act bars businesses open to the community from denying merchandise or services to folks because of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and selected other traits, and from exhibiting a detect to that impact.

Colorado, civil rights groups and several lawful students alert of a ripple effect of discrimination from LGBT folks and other individuals if Smith wins, featuring a assortment of hypothetical circumstances. Could a professional photographer refuse to consider images of a corporation’s woman chief government? Could a baker refuse to make a birthday cake for a Black kid? Could an architect refuse to layout households for Jewish or Muslim men and women?

“It is really likely to be very hard for them (Supreme Courtroom justices) to attract strains in any way that is coherent or analytically seem – specially for reduce courts to use – that will never just be a get-out-of-jail no cost card due to the fact, ‘I don’t want to serve you or make use of you,'” stated Amanda Shanor, an expert in constitutional regulation and cost-free speech at the College of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Faculty.

The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative the vast majority, has become progressively supportive of spiritual rights and associated free speech claims in modern decades even as

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This Colorado world-wide-web designer does not want to make marriage ceremony web-sites for exact-sexual intercourse partners. The U.S. Supreme Courtroom will decide whether which is legal

Amel
This Colorado world-wide-web designer does not want to make marriage ceremony web-sites for exact-sexual intercourse partners. The U.S. Supreme Courtroom will decide whether which is legal

From Lorie Smith’s perspective, it’s not who the likely marriage-web page customers are, it’s the concept they are asking her to build that is problematic.

Smith, the proprietor of 303 Imaginative, mentioned she’s preferred to structure wedding day internet sites given that she was a child, but due to the fact she is a Christian, she doesn’t truly feel relaxed coming up with for nuptial celebrations for exact-intercourse partners. 

She reported she has clientele who identify as LGTBQ, who she happily serves, but she attracts a line at building messages for them she does not agree with.

“The artwork that I make is speech,” Smith said, in an interview. “It matters not to me how an personal identifies. What’s significant to me is what information is I’m currently being asked to make and design and style for. And these messages must be regular with my convictions.”

From state Lawyer Basic Phil Weiser’s viewpoint, Smith’s organization should not be taken care of in another way than anything at all else. Any business could call by itself a artistic organization. A coffee store could say the lattes it steams are innovative will work of enthusiasm. A tire repair business owner could say changing tires is a passionate devotion to creating men and women safer on the street.

“You do get to outline what your product or service is,” Weiser stated. “Your item can be a guide or a portray, but when you make your products you just cannot discriminate in opposition to selected consumers dependent on who they are. If you enable this loophole, considering by some means this expressive curiosity exception is a insignificant exception, we are deeply anxious how this will operate roughshod through the general public accommodation necessities.”

This tension goes ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.

The higher court will listen to oral arguments on the most new exam to Colorado’s general public accommodations law, weighing irrespective of whether companies saying to be imaginative or creative enterprises have the ideal to switch absent customers based on what is requested of them. 

Specifically, the courtroom agreed to acquire up a single concern: Does implementing a general public lodging law to compel an artist to talk or stay silent violate the absolutely free speech clause of the 1st Modification?

They took up a equivalent situation in 2017 that pitted a Lakewood bakery referred to as Masterpiece Cakeshop against a homosexual few in Denver who requested for a wedding ceremony cake and was denied. The court declined to definitively answer the dilemma at hand, though, so numerous lawful specialists say the justices took up the 303 Creative case to come to some resolution at the time and for all.

cake-discrimination-2Denver Article through Getty Pictures
Jack Phillips, proprietor of Masterpiece Cakeshop.

Weiser, whose staff is arguing on behalf of the condition of Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission, has preserved that this web site designer scenario is essentially flawed because, as opposed to Masterpiece Cakeshop, there is no natural and organic tale

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U.S. Supreme Courtroom leans toward world-wide-web designer with anti-homosexual relationship stance

Amel
U.S. Supreme Courtroom leans toward world-wide-web designer with anti-homosexual relationship stance
  • Circumstance centers on U.S. Constitution’s To start with Modification
  • Colorado says plaintiff is in search of license to discriminate
  • Court docket, with 6-3 conservative the greater part, owing to rule by June

WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative the greater part on Monday appeared prepared to rule that a Christian world-wide-web designer has a appropriate to refuse to provide companies for exact-sex marriages in a situation the liberal justices claimed could empower specific firms to discriminate primarily based on constitutional cost-free speech protections.

The justices heard feisty arguments in Denver-place business operator Lorie Smith’s attraction trying to get an exemption from a Colorado regulation that bars discrimination primarily based on sexual orientation and other things. Reduced courts dominated in Colorado’s favor.

The conservative justices indicated assistance for Smith’s watch that corporations featuring innovative expert services like world-wide-web style are secured by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment warranty towards government abridgment of cost-free speech from being forced to categorical messages through their get the job done that they oppose. The courtroom has a 6-3 conservative greater part.

Smith, an evangelical Christian whose internet design organization is termed 303 Artistic, has explained she believes marriage really should be restricted to opposite-intercourse couples. She preemptively sued Colorado’s civil rights fee and other state officials in 2016 due to the fact she feared she would be punished for refusing to provide gay weddings less than Colorado’s general public lodging law.

Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act bars firms open to the general public from denying merchandise or products and services to people for the reason that of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and specific other traits.

The liberal justices offered many situations aimed at demonstrating how a ruling embracing Smith’s arguments could empower organizations declaring artistic legal rights to freely discriminate, not only against LGBT men and women but on the basis of race, intercourse, disabilities and other components.

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas questioned how public accommodations guidelines can control speech, noting that Smith’s business is “not a hotel, this is not a restaurant, this is not a riverboat or a prepare.”

Public accommodations laws exist in a lot of states, banning discrimination in places these types of as housing, inns, retail corporations, eating places and educational institutions.

The circumstance provides the Supreme Court’s conservatives a further prospect to exert their electrical power adhering to big latest rulings curbing abortion legal rights and expanding gun and spiritual rights.

‘BLACK SANTA’

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson advised that a ruling backing Smith could permit a skilled photographer to exclude Black little ones from a nostalgic Xmas photo with Santa Claus styled immediately after the 1940s – a time of racial segregation in elements of The usa – because “they are hoping to capture the feelings of a selected era.”

Kristen Waggoner, the law firm representing Smith, doubted these types of a state of affairs would advantage a cost-free speech exemption, but stated, “There are challenging lines to draw and that may perhaps be an

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