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GOP lawmakers, NRA slam ATF rule to regulate pistol braces: ‘Unconstitutional overreach’
Republican lawmakers and gun rights groups blasted the Biden administration over a new rule that tightens regulations on pistol stabilizing braces.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives (ATF) finalized a new regulation Friday that will treat guns with stabilizing accessories like short-barreled rifles, which require a federal license to own under the National Firearms Act.
The move is part of a comprehensive gun crime strategy President Biden announced in April 2021, in response to the massacre at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, where a gunman using a stabilizing brace killed 10 people. A stabilizing brace was also used in a shooting in Dayton, Ohio, that left nine people dead in 2019.
Announcing the rule, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that stabilizing brace accessories, which were designed to help disabled combat veterans enjoy recreational shooting, transform pistols into short-barreled rifles.
“Keeping our communities safe from gun violence is among the Department’s highest priorities,” Garland said. “Almost a century ago, Congress determined that short-barreled rifles must be subject to heightened requirements. Today’s rule makes clear that firearm manufacturers, dealers, and individuals cannot evade these important public safety protections simply by adding accessories to pistols that transform them into short-barreled rifles.”
US AUTHORITIES SAY OVER 100 PEOPLE CHARGED WITH GUN, DRUG CRIMES IN 3 STATES WEDNESDAY
A MCK pistol brace for a handgun is displayed with firearm accessories for sale at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show at the Orange County Fairgrounds on June 5, 2021 in Costa Mesa, California.
(PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
“Certain so-called stabilizing braces are designed to just attach to pistols, essentially converting them into short-barreled rifles to be fired from the shoulder,” said ATF Director Steven Dettelbach. “Therefore, they must be treated in the same way under the statute.”
Second Amendment advocates were apoplectic over new requirements for gun owners to register existing pistols equipped with stabilizing braces with the government within 120 days, else they must remove the brace or surrender the firearm to ATF.
“The Biden administration chose to shred the Constitution today,” the National Rifle Association said.
“Joe Biden is an enemy of our Second Amendment,” the group added.
ILLINOIS SHERIFF SAYS HE WILL NOT ARREST PEOPLE SOLELY FOR POSSESSING SEMIAUTOMATIC WEAPONS AFTER STATE BAN
Attorney General Merrick Garland names an independent special counsel to probe President Joe Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 12, 2023.
(OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Gun Owners of America, which bills itself as the only “no-compromise” gun lobby in Washington, D.C., vowed to file a lawsuit challenging Biden’s new ATF regulation.
“This admin continues to find ways to attack gun owners. We will continue to work with our industry partners to amplify the disapproving voices in the firearms industry and [Gun Owners Foundation], our sister legal arm, will be filing suit in the near future,” said Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America.
“Pres. Biden just initiated the largest federal gun registration scheme in our nation’s history w/o even the passage of a new law. GOA is actively working with Congress to pass a resolution blocking this rule under the Congressional Review Act,” added the organization’s director of federal affairs, Aidan Johnston.
Their cause was taken up by Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., who in June 2021 wrote a letter signed by 140 lawmakers expressing opposition to the proposed rule on stabilizing braces.
SUPREME COURT ALLOWS NEW YORK TO ENFORCE RESTRICTIONS ON CONCEALED CARRY OF FIREARMS – FOR NOW
President Biden signs into law S. 2938, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act gun safety bill, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Saturday, June 25, 2022.
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
“This rule jeopardizes the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners and disabled combat veterans, which is why I led Members of Congress in opposition,” Hudson said. “I will continue to fight against the ATF’s unconstitutional overreach that could turn millions of citizens into felons.”
ATF, however, says that its new rule does not affect stabilizing braces intended for disabled persons.
Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo also condemned the ATF rule. “The ATF’s announced rule on pistol braces today is nothing short of a massive executive branch-imposed gun registration and confiscation scheme,” Crapo tweeted. “This is an unacceptable attack on the Second Amendment and law-abiding Americans.”
Gun control advocates praised the new regulation. Everytown for Gun Safety cheered the ATF’s move, saying gunmakers had exploited loopholes in the law to make firearms more deadly.
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The rule will go into effect next week, at which point gun owners who own a pistol stabilizing brace will need to register the weapon with ATF or remove the accessory.
Officials estimated about 3 million stabilizing braces are currently in circulation in the U.S.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
“Stabilizing Feedback” Confirmed by MIT Scientists – Earth Can Regulate Its Own Temperature Over Millennia
MIT scientists confirm that Earth harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.
Earth can regulate its own temperature over millennia, new research finds.
Scientists have confirmed that a “stabilizing feedback” on 100,000-year timescales keeps global temperatures in check.
From global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation, the Earth’s climate has undergone some big changes. And yet for the last 3.7 billion years, life has kept on beating.
Now, new research by
“On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback. But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.” — Constantin Arnscheidt
Just how does Earth accomplish this? A likely mechanism is “silicate weathering” — a geological process by which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that ultimately draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks.
It has been long suspected by researchers that silicate weathering plays a major role in regulating the Earth’s carbon cycle. The mechanism of silicate weathering could provide a geologically constant force in keeping carbon dioxide — and global temperatures — in check. But until now, there’s never been direct evidence for the continual operation of such a feedback.
The new findings are based on a study of paleoclimate data that record changes in average global temperatures over the last 66 million years. The MIT team applied a mathematical analysis to see whether the data revealed any patterns characteristic of stabilizing phenomena that reined in global temperatures on a geologic timescale.
They found that indeed there appears to be a consistent pattern in which the Earth’s temperature swings are dampened over timescales of hundreds of thousands of years. The duration of this effect is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is predicted to act.
A study by MIT researchers confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range. Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT; NASA
The results are the first to use actual data to confirm the existence of a stabilizing feedback, the mechanism of which is likely silicate weathering.How the Earth has remained habitable through dramatic climate events in the geologic past can be explained by this stabilizing feedback.
“On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback,” says Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.”
The study is co-authored by Arnscheidt and Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics at MIT.
Stability in data
Scientists have previously seen hints of a climate-stabilizing effect in the Earth’s carbon cycle: Chemical analyses of ancient rocks have shown that the flux of carbon in and out of Earth’s surface environment has remained relatively balanced, even through dramatic swings in global temperature. Furthermore, models of silicate weathering predict that the process should have some stabilizing effect on the global climate. And finally, the fact of the Earth’s enduring habitability points to some inherent, geologic check on extreme temperature swings.
“You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,” Arnscheidt says. “But it’s never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth’s climate.”
Arnscheidt and Rothman sought to confirm whether a stabilizing feedback has indeed been at work, by looking at data of global temperature fluctuations through geologic history. They worked with a range of global temperature records compiled by other scientists, from the chemical composition of ancient marine fossils and shells, as well as preserved Antarctic ice cores.
“This whole study is only possible because there have been great advances in improving the resolution of these deep-sea temperature records,” Arnscheidt notes. “Now we have data going back 66 million years, with data points at most thousands of years apart.”
Speeding to a stop
To the data, the team applied the mathematical theory of stochastic differential equations, which is commonly used to reveal patterns in widely fluctuating datasets.
“We realized this theory makes predictions for what you would expect Earth’s temperature history to look like if there had been feedbacks acting on certain timescales,” Arnscheidt explains.
Using this approach, the team analyzed the history of average global temperatures over the last 66 million years, considering the entire period over different timescales, such as tens of thousands of years versus hundreds of thousands, to see whether any patterns of stabilizing feedback emerged within each timescale.
“To some extent, it’s like your car is speeding down the street, and when you put on the brakes, you slide for a long time before you stop,” Rothman says. “There’s a timescale over which frictional resistance, or a stabilizing feedback, kicks in, when the system returns to a steady state.”
Without stabilizing feedbacks, fluctuations of global temperature should grow with timescale. But the team’s analysis revealed a regime in which fluctuations did not grow, implying that a stabilizing mechanism reigned in the climate before fluctuations grew too extreme. The timescale for this stabilizing effect — hundreds of thousands of years — coincides with what scientists predict for silicate weathering.
Interestingly, Arnscheidt and Rothman found that on longer timescales, the data did not reveal any stabilizing feedbacks. That is, there doesn’t appear to be any recurring pull-back of global temperatures on timescales longer than a million years. Over these longer timescales, then, what has kept global temperatures in check?
“There’s an idea that chance may have played a major role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,” Rothman offers.
In other words, as the Earth’s temperatures fluctuate over longer stretches, these fluctuations may just happen to be small enough in the geologic sense, to be within a range that a stabilizing feedback, such as silicate weathering, could periodically keep the climate in check, and more to the point, within a habitable zone.
“There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheidt says. “We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.”
Reference: “Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different time scales” by Constantin W. Arnscheidt and Daniel H. Rothman, 16 November 2022, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adc9241
This research was supported, in part, by a MathWorks fellowship and the National Science Foundation.
Earth can regulate its own temperature over m
The Earth’s climate has undergone some big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation. And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating.
Now, a study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.
Just how does it accomplish this? A likely mechanism is “silicate weathering” — a geological process by which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that ultimately draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks.
Scientists have long suspected that silicate weathering plays a major role in regulating the Earth’s carbon cycle. The mechanism of silicate weathering could provide a geologically constant force in keeping carbon dioxide — and global temperatures — in check. But there’s never been direct evidence for the continual operation of such a feedback, until now.
The new findings are based on a study of paleoclimate data that record changes in average global temperatures over the last 66 million years. The MIT team applied a mathematical analysis to see whether the data revealed any patterns characteristic of stabilizing phenomena that reined in global temperatures on a geologic timescale.
They found that indeed there appears to be a consistent pattern in which the Earth’s temperature swings are dampened over timescales of hundreds of thousands of years. The duration of this effect is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is predicted to act.
The results are the first to use actual data to confirm the existence of a stabilizing feedback, the mechanism of which is likely silicate weathering. This stabilizing feedback would explain how the Earth has remained habitable through dramatic climate events in the geologic past.
“On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback,” says Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.”
The study is co-authored by Arnscheidt and Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics at MIT.
Stability in data
Scientists have previously seen hints of a climate-stabilizing effect in the Earth’s carbon cycle: Chemical analyses of ancient rocks have shown that the flux of carbon in and out of Earth’s surface environment has remained relatively balanced, even through dramatic swings in global temperature. Furthermore, models of silicate weathering predict that the process should have some stabilizing effect on the global climate. And finally, the fact of the Earth’s enduring habitability points to some inherent, geologic check on extreme temperature swings.
“You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,” Arnscheidt says. “But it’s never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth’s climate.”
Arnscheidt and Rothman sought to confirm whether a stabilizing feedback has indeed been at work, by looking at data of global temperature fluctuations through geologic history. They worked with a range of global temperature records compiled by other scientists, from the chemical composition of ancient marine fossils and shells, as well as preserved Antarctic ice cores.
“This whole study is only possible because there have been great advances in improving the resolution of these deep-sea temperature records,” Arnscheidt notes. “Now we have data going back 66 million years, with data points at most thousands of years apart.”
Speeding to a stop
To the data, the team applied the mathematical theory of stochastic differential equations, which is commonly used to reveal patterns in widely fluctuating datasets.
“We realized this theory makes predictions for what you would expect Earth’s temperature history to look like if there had been feedbacks acting on certain timescales,” Arnscheidt explains.
Using this approach, the team analyzed the history of average global temperatures over the last 66 million years, considering the entire period over different timescales, such as tens of thousands of years versus hundreds of thousands, to see whether any patterns of stabilizing feedback emerged within each timescale.
“To some extent, it’s like your car is speeding down the street, and when you put on the brakes, you slide for a long time before you stop,” Rothman says. “There’s a timescale over which frictional resistance, or a stabilizing feedback, kicks in, when the system returns to a steady state.”
Without stabilizing feedbacks, fluctuations of global temperature should grow with timescale. But the team’s analysis revealed a regime in which fluctuations did not grow, implying that a stabilizing mechanism reigned in the climate before fluctuations grew too extreme. The timescale for this stabilizing effect — hundreds of thousands of years — coincides with what scientists predict for silicate weathering.
Interestingly, Arnscheidt and Rothman found that on longer timescales, the data did not reveal any stabilizing feedbacks. That is, there doesn’t appear to be any recurring pull-back of global temperatures on timescales longer than a million years. Over these longer timescales, then, what has kept global temperatures in check?
“There’s an idea that chance may have played a major role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,” Rothman offers.
In other words, as the Earth’s temperatures fluctuate over longer stretches, these fluctuations may just happen to be small enough in the geologic sense, to be within a range that a stabilizing feedback, such as silicate weathering, could periodically keep the climate in check, and more to the point, within a habitable zone.
“There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheidt says. “We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.”
This research was supported in part by a MathWorks fellowship and the National Science Foundation.
###
Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office
Article Title
Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different timescales
Article Publication Date
16-Nov-2022
Earth can regulate its own temperature over millennia, new study finds
The Earth’s climate has undergone some big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation. And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating.
Now, a study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.
Just how does it accomplish this? A likely mechanism is “silicate weathering”—a geological process by which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that ultimately draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks.
Scientists have long suspected that silicate weathering plays a major role in regulating the Earth’s carbon cycle. The mechanism of silicate weathering could provide a geologically constant force in keeping carbon dioxide—and global temperatures—in check. But there’s never been direct evidence for the continual operation of such a feedback, until now.
The new findings are based on a study of paleoclimate data that record changes in average global temperatures over the last 66 million years. The MIT team applied a mathematical analysis to see whether the data revealed any patterns characteristic of stabilizing phenomena that reined in global temperatures on a geologic timescale.
They found that indeed there appears to be a consistent pattern in which the Earth’s temperature swings are dampened over timescales of hundreds of thousands of years. The duration of this effect is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is predicted to act.
The results are the first to use actual data to confirm the existence of a stabilizing feedback, the mechanism of which is likely silicate weathering. This stabilizing feedback would explain how the Earth has remained habitable through dramatic climate events in the geologic past.
“On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback,” says Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.”
The study is co-authored by Arnscheidt and Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics at MIT.
Stability in data
Scientists have previously seen hints of a climate-stabilizing effect in the Earth’s carbon cycle: Chemical analyses of ancient rocks have shown that the flux of carbon in and out of Earth’s surface environment has remained relatively balanced, even through dramatic swings in global temperature. Furthermore, models of silicate weathering predict that the process should have some stabilizing effect on the global climate. And finally, the fact of the Earth’s enduring habitability points to some inherent, geologic check on extreme temperature swings.
“You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,” Arnscheidt says. “But it’s never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth’s climate.”
Arnscheidt and Rothman sought to confirm whether a stabilizing feedback has indeed been at work, by looking at data of global temperature fluctuations through geologic history. They worked with a range of global temperature records compiled by other scientists, from the chemical composition of ancient marine fossils and shells, as well as preserved Antarctic ice cores.
“This whole study is only possible because there have been great advances in improving the resolution of these deep-sea temperature records,” Arnscheidt notes. “Now we have data going back 66 million years, with data points at most thousands of years apart.”
Speeding to a stop
To the data, the team applied the mathematical theory of stochastic differential equations, which is commonly used to reveal patterns in widely fluctuating datasets.
“We realized this theory makes predictions for what you would expect Earth’s temperature history to look like if there had been feedbacks acting on certain timescales,” Arnscheidt explains.
Using this approach, the team analyzed the history of average global temperatures over the last 66 million years, considering the entire period over different timescales, such as tens of thousands of years versus hundreds of thousands, to see whether any patterns of stabilizing feedback emerged within each timescale.
“To some extent, it’s like your car is speeding down the street, and when you put on the brakes, you slide for a long time before you stop,” Rothman says. “There’s a timescale over which frictional resistance, or a stabilizing feedback, kicks in, when the system returns to a steady state.”
Without stabilizing feedbacks, fluctuations of global temperature should grow with timescale. But the team’s analysis revealed a regime in which fluctuations did not grow, implying that a stabilizing mechanism reigned in the climate before fluctuations grew too extreme. The timescale for this stabilizing effect—hundreds of thousands of years—coincides with what scientists predict for silicate weathering.
Interestingly, Arnscheidt and Rothman found that on longer timescales, the data did not reveal any stabilizing feedbacks. That is, there doesn’t appear to be any recurring pull-back of global temperatures on timescales longer than a million years. Over these longer timescales, then, what has kept global temperatures in check?
“There’s an idea that chance may have played a major role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,” Rothman offers.
In other words, as the Earth’s temperatures fluctuate over longer stretches, these fluctuations may just happen to be small enough in the geologic sense, to be within a range that a stabilizing feedback, such as silicate weathering, could periodically keep the climate in check, and more to the point, within a habitable zone.
“There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheidt says. “We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.”
More information:
Constantin Arnscheidt, Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different timescales, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adc9241
Provided by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.
Citation:
Earth can regulate its own temperature over millennia, new study finds (2022, November 16)
retrieved 16 November 2022
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U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right regulate online speech
Facebook, Google and Twitter logos are seen in this combination photo from Reuters files. REUTERS/File Photo
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Sept 16 (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld a Texas law that bars large social media companies from banning or censoring users based on “viewpoint,” a setback for technology industry groups that say the measure would turn platforms into bastions of dangerous content.
The largely 2-1 ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, sets up the potential for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the law, which conservatives and right-wing commentators have said is necessary to prevent “Big Tech” from suppressing their views.
“Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Andrew Oldham, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote in the ruling.
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The Texas law was passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature and signed by its Republican governor.
The tech groups that challenged the law and were on the losing end of Friday’s ruling include NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which count Meta Platforms’ (META.O) Facebook, Twitter (TWTR.N) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) YouTube as members.
They have sought to preserve rights to regulate user content when they believe it may lead to violence, citing concerns that unregulated platforms will enable extremists such as Nazi supporters, terrorists and hostile foreign governments.
The association on Friday said it disagreed with forcing private companies to give equal treatment to all viewpoints. “‘God Bless America’ and ‘Death to America’ are both viewpoints, and it is unwise and unconstitutional for the state of Texas to compel a private business to treat those the same,” it said in a statement.
Some conservatives have labeled the social media companies’ practices abusive, pointing to Twitter’s permanent suspension of Trump from the platform shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters. Twitter had cited “the risk of further incitement of violence” as a reason.
The Texas law forbids social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users from acting to “censor” users based on “viewpoint,” and allows either users or the Texas attorney general to sue to enforce the law.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Twitter hailed the ruling as “massive victory for the constitution and free speech.”
Because the 5th Circuit ruling conflicts with part of a ruling by the 11th Circuit, the aggrieved parties have a stronger case for petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the matter.
In May, the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that most of a similar Florida law violates the companies’ free speech rights and cannot be enforced. read more
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Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Leslie Adler
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Here’s what’s in Biden framework to regulate crypto
U.S. President Joe Biden walks from Marine One to the White House following a trip from Michigan, in Washington, U.S., September 14, 2022.
Tom Brenner | Reuters
The Biden White House has just released its first-ever framework on what crypto regulation in the U.S. should look like — including ways in which the financial services industry should evolve to make borderless transactions easier, and how to crack down on fraud in the digital asset space.
The new directives tap the muscle of existing regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, but nobody’s mandating anything yet. The long-awaited direction from Washington has, however, captured the attention of both the crypto industry as a whole — and of investors in this nascent asset class.
The framework follows an executive order issued in March, in which President Biden called on federal agencies to examine the risks and benefits of cryptocurrencies and issue official reports on their findings.
For six months, government agencies have been working to develop their own frameworks and policy recommendations to address half a dozen priorities listed in the executive order: consumer and investor protection; promoting financial stability; countering illicit finance; U.S. leadership in the global financial system and economic competitiveness; financial inclusion; and responsible innovation. Together, these recommendations comprise the first, “whole-of-government approach” to regulating the industry.
Brian Deese, Director of the National Economic Council, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a statement that the new guidelines are meant to position the country as a leader in governance of the digital assets ecosystem at home and abroad.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the White House’s new crypto framework.
Fighting illicit finance
One section of the White House’s new framework on crypto regulation focuses on eliminating illegal activity in the industry — and the measures proposed appear to have real teeth.
“The President will evaluate whether to call upon Congress to amend the Bank Secrecy Act, anti-tip-off statutes, and laws against unlicensed money transmitting to apply explicitly to digital asset service providers — including digital asset exchanges and nonfungible token (NFT) platforms,” according to a White House fact sheet.
The president is also looking into whether to push Congress to raise the penalties for unlicensed money transmitting, as well as potentially amending certain federal statutes to allow the Department of Justice to prosecute digital asset crimes in any jurisdiction where a victim of those crimes is found.
In terms of next steps, “Treasury will complete an illicit finance risk assessment on decentralized finance by the end of February 2023 and an assessment on non-fungible tokens by July 2023,” reads the fact sheet.
Crime is rife in the digital asset sector. More than $1 billion in crypto has been lost to fraud since the start of 2021, according to research from the Federal Trade Commission.
Last month, the SEC said it charged 11 people for their roles in creating and promoting a fraudulent crypto pyramid and Ponzi scheme that raised more than $300 million from millions of retail investors worldwide, including in the United States. Meanwhile, in February, U.S. officials seized $3.6 billion worth of bitcoin — their biggest seizure of cryptocurrencies ever — related to the 2016 hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex.
A new kind of digital dollar
The framework also points to the potential for “significant benefits” from a U.S. central bank digital currency, or CBDC, which you can think of as a digital form of the U.S. dollar.
Right now, there are several different types of digital U.S. dollars.
Sitting in commercial bank accounts across the country are electronic U.S. dollars, which are partially backed by reserves, under a system known as fractional-reserve banking. As the name implies, the bank holds in its reserves a fraction of the bank’s deposit liabilities. Transferring this form of money from one bank to another or from one country to another operates on legacy financial rails.
There are also a spate of USD-pegged stablecoins, including Tether and USD Coin. Although critics have questioned whether tether has enough dollar reserves to back its currency, it remains the largest stablecoin on the planet. USD Coin is backed by fully reserved assets, redeemable on a 1:1 basis for U.S. dollars, and governed by Centre, a consortium of regulated financial institutions. It is also relatively easy to use no matter where you are.
Then there’s the hypothetical digital dollar that would be the Federal Reserve’s take on a CBDC. This would essentially just be a digital twin of the U.S. dollar: Fully regulated, under a central authority, and with the full faith and backing of the country’s central bank.
“A dollar in CBDC form is a liability of the central bank. The Federal Reserve has to pay you back,” explained Ronit Ghose, who heads fintech and digital assets for Citi Global Insights.
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell previously said the main incentive for the U.S. to launch its own central bank digital currency, or CBDC, would be to eliminate the use case for crypto coins in America.
“You wouldn’t need stablecoins; you wouldn’t need cryptocurrencies, if you had a digital U.S. currency,” Powell said. “I think that’s one of the stronger arguments in its favor.”
In the White House’s new framework, it points to the fact that a U.S. CBDC could enable a payment system that is “more efficient, provides a foundation for further technological innovation, facilitates faster cross-border transactions, and is environmentally sustainable.”
“It could promote financial inclusion and equity by enabling access for a broad set of consumers,” continues the report.
To that end, the administration urges the Fed to continue its ongoing research, experimentation, and evaluation of a CBDC.
Safeguarding financial stability
Central bankers and U.S. lawmakers have for years bemoaned the rise of stablecoins, a specific subset of cryptocurrencies that have a value pegged to a real-world asset, such as a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar or a commodity like gold.
These nongovernmental digital tokens are increasingly being used in domestic and international transactions, which is scary for central banks because they don’t have a say in how this space is regulated.
In May, the collapse of TerraUSD, one of the most popular U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin projects, cost investors tens of billions of dollars as they pulled out in a panic that some have compared to a bank run. Widespread buy-in — and public PSAs — from respected financial institutions lent credibility to the project, further driving the narrative that the whole thing was legit.
The implosion of this stablecoin project led to a series of insolvencies that erased nearly $600 billion in wealth, according to the White House.
“Digital assets and the mainstream financial system are becoming increasingly intertwined, creating channels for turmoil to have spillover effects,” according to the White House fact sheet.
The framework goes on to single out stablecoins, warning that they could create disruptive runs if not paired with appropriate regulation.
To make stablecoins “safer,” the administration says Treasury will “work with financial institutions to bolster their capacity to identify and mitigate cyber vulnerabilities by sharing information and promoting a wide range of data sets and analytical tools, as well as team up with other agencies to “identify, track, and analyze emerging strategic risks that relate to digital asset markets.”
Those efforts will also happen in concert with international allies, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Financial Stability Board.
Brain motor and fear circuits regulate leukocytes during acute stress
The nervous and immune systems are intricately linked1. Although psychological stress is known to modulate immune function, mechanistic pathways linking stress networks in the brain to peripheral leukocytes remain poorly understood2. Here, we show that distinct brain regions shape leukocyte distribution and function throughout the body during acute stress in mice. Using optogenetics and chemogenetics, we demonstrate that motor circuits induce rapid neutrophil mobilization from the bone marrow to peripheral tissues via skeletal muscle-derived neutrophil-attracting chemokines. Conversely, the paraventricular hypothalamus controls monocyte and lymphocyte egress from secondary lymphoid organs and blood to the bone marrow through direct, cell-intrinsic glucocorticoid signaling. These stress-induced, counter-directional, population-wide leukocyte shifts are associated with altered disease susceptibility. On the one hand, acute stress changes innate immunity by reprogramming neutrophils and directing their recruitment to sites of injury. On the other hand, corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) neuron-mediated leukocyte shifts protect against the acquisition of autoimmunity, but impair immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and influenza infection. Collectively, these data show that distinct brain regions differentially and rapidly tailor the leukocyte landscape during psychological stress, thus calibrating the immune system’s capacity to respond to physical threats.
China says will more tightly regulate celebrities’ online information
The Chinese national flag is seen in Beijing, China April 29, 2020. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
SHANGHAI, Nov 23 (Reuters) – China’s cyberspace regulator said on Tuesday it will more tightly regulate the online information of celebrities, including the publishing of their personal details and the placements of their advertisements on internet sites.
The Cyberspace Administration of China said this was aimed at creating a positive and healthy internet environment, describing the proliferation of gossip and star-chasing as impacting mainstream values.
Chinese authorities in recent months have moved to dampen what they have called the country’s “chaotic” celebrity fan culture, ordering broadcasters, online platforms and artists to help curb the phenomenon.
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Reporting by Brenda Goh and Wang Jing; Editing by Christopher Cushing
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Arizona Senate skips vote on controversial bill that would regulate Apple and Google app stores
The Arizona State Senate was scheduled to vote an unprecedented and controversial bill on Wednesday that would have imposed far-reaching changes on how Apple and Google operate their respective mobile app stores, specifically by allowing alternative in-app payment systems. But the vote never happened, having been passed over on the schedule without explanation. The Verge watched every other bill on the schedule be debated and voted on over the senate’s live stream, but Arizona HB2005, listed first on the agenda, never came up.
One notable Apple critic is now accusing the iPhone maker of stepping in to stop the vote, saying the company hired a former chief of staff to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to broker a deal that prevented the bill from being heard in the Senate and ultimately voted on. This is after the legislation, an amendment to the existing HB2005 law, passed the Arizona House of Representatives earlier this month in a landmark 31-29 vote.
“The big show turned out to be a no show. The bill was killed in mid-air while on the agenda with a backroom deal. Apple has hired the governor’s former chief of staff, and word is that he brokered a deal to prevent this from even being heard,” David Heinemeier Hansson, a fierce Apple critic who submitted testimony in support of HB2005, tweeted this afternoon.
Apple declined to comment.
It was well-known prior to today’s scheduled vote that both Apple and Google had hired lobbyists to combat the bill, according to a report from Protocol, because it directly threatened the companies’ industry standard app store commission of 30 percent. If the Arizona bill passed the senate and was signed into law by Ducey, it would have made the state a haven for app makers looking to sidestep the App Store and the Google Play Store’s payment systems, which are the mechanisms the companies use to take their cuts of all app sales and in-app purchases of digital goods.
It could have also caused all sorts of additional headaches for both companies by forcing them to either institute a patchwork system of state-specific enforcement, or by potentially forcing them to stop doing business in Arizona altogether while opening the door to lawsuits against the state.
In testimony in front of the Arizona House earlier this month, Apple’s chief compliance officer, Kyle Andeer, argued that the App Store provides enough value to developers justify the 30 percent cut. “The commission has been described by some special interests as a ‘payment processing fee’—as if Apple is just swiping a credit card. That’s terribly misleading. Apple provides developers an enormous amount of value — both the store to distribute their apps around the world and the studio to create them. That is what the commission reflects,” Andeer said in written testimony.
“Yet this bill tells Apple that it cannot use its own check-out lane (and collect a commission) in the store we built,” he added. “This would allow billion-dollar developers to take all of the App Store’s value for free — even if they’re selling digital goods, even if they’re making millions or even billions of dollars doing it. The bill is a government mandate that Apple give away the App Store.”
It’s worth noting that the bill also faced considerable opposition in the Arizona House not by big business-loving Republicans, but instead by Democrats. A number of Democrats publicly objected to the bill and voted against it on the grounds it was potentially unconstitutional for interfering with interstate commerce and also that it interjected Arizona into a California legal fight between game developer Epic Games and both Apple and Google over the removal of Fortnite from the Android and iOS platforms.
The bill, which was primarily sponsored by Rep. Regina Cobb (R-5), is one of many that have popped up in state legislatures around the country challenging Apple’s and Google’s longstanding policies around the mobile app economy. These bills can be traced back to growing antitrust pressure against Big Tech mounting in both Europe and Washington, DC, and they represents a new local and state front in the ongoing fight over the tech industry’s outsize power and whatever methods lawmakers may employ to try and reign it in. Other arenas include California, where Epic launched its own fight, and the European Union. which launched antitrust investigations into the App Store and Apple Pay over anticompetitive claims.
Both Apple and Google operate the two most dominant app stores in the world, and while the Google Play Store allows alternative app stores and therefore alternative payments systems, Apple does not. That means all digital purchases on iOS are subject to Apple’s mandated 30 percent cut, or in some cases a reduced 15 percent cut, though Apple has been criticized for cutting secret deals, like those it has made with Amazon over Prime Video subscriptions and later in-app purchases, to exempt certain types of purchases when it’s strategically convenient.
Both companies in the last six months announced changes to the commission structure that allows for smaller developers, which represent the vast majority of app makers on both Android and iOS, to claim a reduced 15 percent cut, though that has done little assuage the app store critics.
These antitrust proposals, like HB2005, are largely the work of the Coalition for App Fairness (CAF). The CAF is an industry group formed last year consisting of Epic, Spotify, Tinder parent company Match Group, and dozens of other companies that have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo of the mobile app economy and the app store owners’ ironclad developer agreements. Some of these companies, like Spotify, have for years complained of unfair treatment from Apple and have accused the company of prioritizing its own software over competitors through its use of App Store rules and iOS requirements.
The CAF began lobbying lawmakers earlier this year, first in North Dakota and now in multiple states including Arizona, to instigate the introduction of bills like HB2005. While the North Dakota bill failed, Arizona’s was seen as a more promising alternative because it focused solely on in-app payment systems, while the North Dakota one also mandated that operating system owners allow for alternative app stores, too.
But the bill’s fate is now in question, and it’s not immediately clear what happened. Rep. Cobb, the bill’s sponsor, did not respond to a request for comment. The Arizona governor’s office and the office of the Arizona State Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray (R-21) also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.