Category: News

The return of minority Hindus to Kashmir, two decades after an exodus in the face of militant attacks and threats, has been held up by the Indian government as an illustration of how it is bringing normalcy to the restive Himalayan region.

But Kashmiri Hindus say that their lives have become anything but normal after an intensifying spate of targeted killings — and that they desperately want out, yet again.

The administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, they say, is preventing thousands of Hindus from fleeing their Kashmir residential colonies. The Hindu residents are demanding that the authorities lift the blockades and let them leave after three killings this week: a teacher gunned down outside her school, a bank manager shot at his desk and, on Thursday night, a laborer killed while working at a brick kiln.

“Our demand is to relocate us to anywhere other than Kashmir, any corner of India,” said T.N. Pandita, a father of two who works as a clerk at the local court in the Baramulla district.

“This morning, we tried to get out, but we were physically barred from leaving,” Mr. Pandita said on Thursday. “Our camp is locked, and the central police forces are deployed outside.”

Mr. Modi’s government has been invested in projecting the majority-Muslim region as a stable, integrated part of India after it dissolved the region’s elected government and revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status in 2019 to bring it under the direct rule of New Delhi.

Stripping the region of its special status had long been a goal of India’s Hindu nationalists. Under the direct rule that followed, a clampdown has increasingly quashed dissenting voices.

Kashmir has been disputed between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947.

In the late 1980s, a Kashmiri separatist movement, which received support and training in Pakistan, intensified the targeting of the region’s Hindus, known as Pandits. A mass migration of tens of thousands of Hindu families — perhaps 300,000 people in all — followed. Only a few hundred Hindu families remained.

A little over a decade ago, as the security situation in the valley improved under a heavy Indian military presence, the government encouraged Kashmiri Hindus to return by offering them incentives that included government jobs and payments for buying or rebuilding homes. Thousands of Hindus accepted the offers, taking up residence in half a dozen Kashmir residential colonies referred to as transit camps.

But Kashmiri Hindu organizations and local residents say there has been a renewed wave of targeted killings in the past two years, an apparent retaliation for Mr. Modi’s decision to revoke the region’s semiautonomous status. Mr. Modi also tried to reduce the requirements for Hindus to take up local jobs and buy property, which the militants and others cite as an effort to reshape the region’s demographics.

About 200 families who lived outside the camps, or who managed to get out of them, have left the valley in the past three days, local Hindu leaders say.

“We used to get all the support from the locals. But all of a sudden, from the last two and a half years, the scenario has fully changed,” said Ankaj Tickoo, a 31-year-old engineer with the power department in the Srinagar district.

“What happened to my parents in the 1990s,” he added, “the same is happening to us now.”

Sandeep Raina, 38, who works in the Anantnag district for the same agency, said he had received phone calls from the official in charge of four police stations discouraging him from doing site visits in their areas.

“We are not going to the office since the killing of Rahul Bhatt — that was 21 days ago, and since then more killings have taken place,” he said, referring to a civil servant who was shot inside his office. “I am worried about the safety of my family. I am not able to send my child to school.”

In a letter to India’s chief justice on Wednesday, Sangarsh Simiti, a Kashmiri Pandit organization, accused the government of “playing with the lives of the religious minorities in Kashmir Valley” and asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

The organization said that there had been more than a dozen targeted attacks, some fatal, recorded against Hindus since 2020, and many more against Muslims seen as supporting the government. It also detailed how the authorities were now preventing Kashmiri Hindus from relocating to more secure areas.

“The government blocked the roads, used electric currents to barricade the walls of the transit camps, the main doors of the transit camps are closed from outside with locks,” the organization said in its letter to the court.

Videos posted by Hindu residents from the Mattan camp, in the Anantnag district, showed a tense situation during a protest where local officials urged residents to stay. The officials said that they would increase security measures and that residents could work closer to home.

The Kashmiri Hindus told the local officials that it was too late for such measures. Some of them chanted, “What do we want? A right to live!” and “The only solution — relocation! Relocation!”

Ranjan Jotshi, 48, a protest leader who works at the local department of social welfare, said that he had been part of a delegation that visited the region’s governor for a meeting, and that the police chief had told attendees it would take three years to rid the region of the remaining militants.

Hours after the meeting with the local officials in the Mattan camp, as panic grew over the killing of the bank manager, security forces barricaded the camp’s exit with vehicles to stop families from leaving.

“Don’t force Kashmiri Pandits to pelt you with stone,” Mr. Jotshi is seen in a video telling the police, referring to an act that local Kashmiri Muslim youths sometimes resort to against the region’s heavy security forces.

“We want to leave, at any cost,” Mr. Jotshi says. “We do not want to die here.”

As the #MeToo movement fueled a public airing of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, defamation lawsuits quickly became a tool for both the accused and accusers to seek retribution and redemption.

Men accused of misconduct have increasingly turned to defamation suits to try to clear their names, as have victims accused of making false allegations. But between the high costs of lawyers’ fees and the fears of revealing embarrassing details in open court, many such cases are settled before they ever reach trial.

The bitter legal battle between the actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard was closely watched in part because it was one of the highest-profile defamation cases to make it to trial recently, and several lawyers said that Mr. Depp’s victory in a Virginia court on Wednesday — when he was awarded more than $10 million in damages — could embolden others accused of abuse or misconduct to try their luck with juries, despite the real risks of airing dirty laundry in public.

Ugly charges of physical abuse and lurid testimony came to define the Depp-Heard trial, which included one line of questioning about actual dirty laundry: the couple’s fierce argument over how the sheets in a Los Angeles penthouse where they were staying had become befouled. But the jury found in the end that Ms. Heard had defamed Mr. Depp in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”

“Some people will definitely look at this as a playbook for suing your accuser,” said Charles Tobin, a First Amendment lawyer who practices in Fairfax, Va., where the trial played out over six weeks, and who briefly represented the former employer of a witness called in the Depp case. The proceedings were broadcast and livestreamed far beyond the walls of the courtroom.

The $10.35 million award to Mr. Depp was offset by a $2 million partial victory for Ms. Heard, who countersued Mr. Depp for defamation after a lawyer representing him made several statements to a British tabloid calling her abuse accusations a “hoax.” The jury did not find two of those statements defamatory, but found that a third — in which the lawyer had accused Ms. Heard of damaging the couple’s penthouse and calling 911 “to set Mr. Depp up” — did defame her.

Mr. Depp praised the verdict, saying that “the jury gave me my life back,” while Ms. Heard described it as “heartbreaking.”

The outcome differed from that of a case in Britain, where a judge had ruled two years ago that there was evidence that Mr. Depp had repeatedly assaulted Ms. Heard. That ruling came in a libel suit that Mr. Depp had filed after The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, called him a “wife beater” in a headline. While Britain is sometimes considered hospitable to libel cases, the judge who heard that case, Andrew Nicol, found that there was sufficient proof to conclude that most of the assaults Ms. Heard described had occurred, and he determined that what the newspaper had published was “substantially true.”

Several high-profile defamation cases in recent years have been settled before they reached trial. In 2019, seven women who had accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, and then sued him for defamation after they were accused of lying, settled their claims; a spokesman for Mr. Cosby said that his insurance company had decided to settle the cases without his consent. And the casino mogul Steve Wynn recently agreed to a settlement of a defamation suit he had filed against the lawyer Lisa Bloom, who said she would retract a statement accusing him of inappropriate behavior involving a client.

In the wake of the Depp verdict, several lawyers and legal experts said, people accused of assault and misconduct may now be more inclined to try to bring defamation cases to trial. And some advocacy organizations and lawyers worry that the case could have a chilling effect on the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, adding to their fears that they could be punished for speaking out.

“I do think that well-resourced individuals who feel slighted by speech that embarrassed or criticized them in some way may feel emboldened by this verdict,” said Nicole Ligon, a First Amendment law professor who provides pro bono legal advice for people considering going public with sexual misconduct accusations. “I imagine part of the reason they’ll feel emboldened is beyond the verdict itself but the public reaction to it.”

The trial was captured by two cameras in the courtroom that allowed the testimony to be packaged into memes and online commentary — much of which mocked Ms. Heard’s accusations of abuse. In an interview with NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday, one of Ms. Heard’s lawyers, Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, said that the cameras had turned the trial into a “zoo.”

Before the trial, Ms. Bredehoft had sought to persuade the judge to block cameras from the courtroom, arguing that Ms. Heard would be describing incidents of alleged sexual violence and predicting that “anti-Amber” networks would take statements out of context and play them repeatedly.

“The potential for saturation of an unsequestered jury is a tremendous risk in this case,” Ms. Bredehoft argued, according to a court transcript from February.

Judge Penney S. Azcarate ordered that cameras be allowed, maintaining that Ms. Bredehoft’s argument about victims of sexual offenses would only pertain to criminal trials. The judge suggested that allowing cameras could make the courthouse “safer” by giving a broader audience of viewers access to the case remotely.

Mr. Depp may have won a victory in court, but it may take more than that to revive his career, or for Walt Disney Studios, which has cast Mr. Depp in several starring roles, to get back into business with him.

The studio declined to comment, but two Disney executives privately pointed to his box office track record as the primary reason: None of his Disney movies have succeeded outside of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise since “Alice in Wonderland” in 2010. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” was a misfire in 2016, taking in 70 percent less than its predecessor worldwide. “The Lone Ranger” was a big-budget bomb in 2013. Except as Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates” films, he has not been a box office draw recently.

As for the “Pirates” franchise, Disney decided long before the trial to part ways with Mr. Depp and reboot the series, which, while still formidable at the box office, had been in decline in North America, falling 20 percent to 30 percent with each installment. Mr. Depp also wore out his welcome with tardiness and other issues that came out at the trial, where a former talent agent testified that he wore an earpiece on set so that his lines could be fed to him.

But Mr. Depp’s victory — which a lawyer for Ms. Heard said she would appeal — may seem attractive to accused litigants who are desperately seeking a similar redemption arc, said Andrew Miltenberg, a lawyer whose firm regularly defends people accused of sexual misconduct. Right after the Depp-Heard verdict was announced, Mr. Miltenberg said, he received about a dozen emails from clients asking him if it would benefit their cases.

“I can see people saying, ‘I need that kind of victory to get my life back on track,’” said Mr. Miltenberg.

Several big defamation cases are still pending. E. Jean Carroll, who sued former President Donald J. Trump after he said that she had lied about his raping her. The actress Ashley Judd’s defamation lawsuit against the producer Harvey Weinstein has been on hold during his criminal proceedings in California. She sued after reading that a director said that Mr. Weinstein’s studio, Miramax, had described her as a “nightmare to work with.”

Several lawyers noted that Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard’s battle was so complex and singular in its level of public spectacle that people should be wary of drawing any lasting conclusions about how their own legal proceedings would unfold.

“This is a unique case of public figures airing their private dirty laundry,” said Joseph Cammarata, a lawyer who represented the Cosby accusers in their defamation case. “It should not dissuade someone who has a legitimate case from seeking justice.”

Brooks Barnes and Graham Bowley contributed reporting.

We here at Opinion Headquarters don’t merely offer you controversial opinions on world events, we offer priceless life hacks to help you float effortlessly through the miasma of modern existence. These are the kind of bits of golden wisdom that get earned over the decades of experience but that can be shared for free.

We’re inspired by the legendary tech journalist Kevin Kelly, who, for his 68th, 69th and 70th birthdays shared his life learnings on his Technium blog. Here are some of Kelly’s life hack gems (I’ve reworded several for concision):

When you have 90 percent of a large project completed, finishing up the final details will take another 90 percent.

Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.

Denying or deflecting a compliment is rude. Accept it with thanks.

Getting cheated occasionally is a small price to pay for trusting the best of everyone, because when you trust the best in others they will treat you the best.

When you get invited to something in the future, ask yourself, Would I do this tomorrow?

Purchase a tourist guidebook to your hometown. You’ll learn a lot playing tourist once a year.

The thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult.

It’s not an apology if it comes with an excuse.

Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility.

Ignore what they are thinking of you because they are not thinking of you.

If you think you saw a mouse, you did, and if there is one, there are others.

Something does not need to be perfect to be wonderful, especially weddings.

The biggest lie we tell ourselves is, “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.”

Bravo to Kevin Kelly. Everybody learns life lessons. Not everyone clarifies them with such precision and shares them with such generosity. But even Kelly does not have a monopoly on practical wisdom.

For example, over the last few years I have embraced, almost as a religious mantra, the idea that if you’re not sure you can carry it all, take two trips.

A friend shares the advice: “Always make the call. If you’re disturbed or confused by something somebody did, always pick up the phone.”

A search around the world of online advice givers uncovers some other diamonds of practical wisdom, both prosaic and profound:

Job interviews are not really about you. They are about the employer’s needs and how you can fill them.

If you can’t make up your mind between two options, flip a coin. Don’t decide based on which side of the coin came up. Decide based on your emotional reaction to which side came up.

Take photos of things your parents do every day. That’s how you’ll want to remember them.

Build identity capital. In your 20s do three fascinating things that job interviewers and dinner companions will want to ask you about for the rest of your life.

Marriage is a 50-year conversation. Marry someone you want to talk with for the rest of your life.

If you’re giving a speech, be vulnerable. Fall on the audience and let them catch you. They will.

Never be furtive. If you’re doing something you don’t want others to find out about, it’s probably wrong.

If you’re traveling in a place you’ve never been before, listen to an album you’ve never heard before. Forever after that music will remind you of that place.

If you’re cutting cake at a birthday party with a bunch of kids howling around you, it’s quicker and easier to cut the cake with dental floss, not a knife. Lay the floss across the cake and firmly press down.

When you’re beginning a writing project, give yourself permission to write badly. You can’t fix it until it’s down on paper.

One-off events usually don’t amount to much. Organize gatherings that meet once a month or once a year.

Make the day; don’t let the day make you. Make sure you are setting your schedule, not just responding to invitations from others.

If you meet a jerk once a month, you’ve met a jerk. If you meet jerks every day, you’re a jerk.

Never pass up an opportunity to hang out with musicians.

Don’t try to figure out what your life is about. It’s too big a question. Just figure out what the next three years are about.

If you’ve lost your husband (or wife), sleep on his (or her) side of the bed and it won’t feel so empty.

Don’t ever look up a recent photo of your first great love.

If you’re trying to figure out what supermarket line is fastest, get behind a single shopper with a full cart over two shoppers each with a half-full cart.

Low on kitchen counter space? Pull out a drawer and put your cutting board on top of it.

You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow.

That last one I got from Warren Buffett. If you follow the life hacks above, you may not wind up as rich as he is, but you may wind up as serene.

HOUSTON — The European Union’s embargo on most Russian oil imports could deliver a fresh jolt to the world economy, propelling a realignment of global energy trading that leaves Russia economically weaker, gives China and India bargaining power and enriches producers like Saudi Arabia.

Europe, the United States and much of the rest of the world could suffer because oil prices, which have been marching higher for months, could climb further as Europe buys energy from more distant suppliers. European companies will have to scour the world for the grades of oil that their refineries can process as easily as Russian oil. There could even be sporadic shortages of certain fuels like diesel, which is crucial for trucks and agricultural equipment.

In effect, Europe is trading one unpredictable oil supplier — Russia — for unstable exporters in the Middle East.

Europe’s hunt for new oil supplies — and Russia’s quest to find new buyers of its oil — will leave no part of the world untouched, energy experts said. But figuring out the impact on each country or business is difficult because leaders, energy executives and traders will respond in varying ways.

China and India could be protected from some of the burden of higher oil prices because Russia is offering them discounted oil. In the last couple of months, Russia has become the second-biggest oil supplier to India, leapfrogging other big producers like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. India has several large refineries that could earn rich profits by refining Russian oil into diesel and other fuels in high demand around the world.

Ultimately, Western leaders are aiming to weaken President Vladimir V. Putin’s ability to wreak havoc in Ukraine and elsewhere by denying him billions of dollars in energy sales. They hope their moves will force Russian oil producers to shut down wells because the country does not have many places to store oil while it lines up new buyers. But the effort is perilous and could fail. If oil prices rise substantially, Russia’s overall oil revenue may not fall much.

Other oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Western oil companies like Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and Chevron stand to do well simply because oil prices are higher. The flip side is that global consumers and businesses will have to pay more for every gallon of fuel and goods shipped in trucks and trains.

“It’s a historic, big deal,” said Robert McNally, an energy adviser to President George W. Bush. “This will reshape not only commercial relationships but political and geopolitical ones as well.”

E.U. officials have yet to release all the details of their effort to squelch Russian oil exports but have said those policies will go into effect over months. That is meant to give Europeans time to prepare, but it will also give Russia and its partners time to devise workarounds. Who will adapt better to the new reality is hard to know.

According to what European officials have said so far, the union will ban Russian tanker imports of crude oil and refined fuels like diesel, representing two-thirds of the continent’s purchases from Russia. The ban will be phased in over six months for crude and eight months for diesel and other refined fuels.

In addition, Germany and Poland have pledged to stop importing oil from Russia by pipeline, which means Europeans could reduce Russian imports by 3.3 million barrels a day by the end of the year.

And the union has said European companies will no longer be allowed to insure tankers carrying Russian oil anywhere. That ban will also be phased in over several months. Because many of the world’s largest insurers are based in Europe, that move could significantly raise the cost of shipping Russian energy, though insurers in China, India and Russia itself might now pick up some of that business.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, roughly half of Russia’s oil exports went to Europe, representing $10 billion in transactions a month. Sales of Russian oil to E.U. members have declined somewhat in the last few months, and those to the United States and Britain have been eliminated.

Some energy analysts said the new European effort could help untangle Europe from Russian energy and limit Mr. Putin’s political leverage over Western countries.

“There are many geopolitical repercussions,” said Meghan L. O’Sullivan, director of the geopolitics of energy project at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “The ban will draw the United States more deeply into the global energy economy, and it will strengthen energy ties between Russia and China.”

Another hope of Western leaders is that their moves will reduce Russia’s position in the global energy industry. The idea is that despite its efforts to find new buyers in China, India and elsewhere, Russia will export less oil overall. As a result, Russian producers will need to shut wells, which they will not be able to easily restart because of the difficulties of drilling and producing oil in inhospitable Arctic fields.

Still, the new European policy was the product of compromises between countries that can easily replace Russian energy and countries, like Hungary, that can’t easily break their dependence on Moscow or are unwilling to do so. That is why 800,000 barrels a day of Russian oil that goes to Europe by pipeline was excluded from the embargo for now.

The Europeans also decided to phase in the restrictions on insuring Russian oil shipments because of the importance of the shipping industry to Greece and Cyprus.

Such compromises could undermine the effectiveness of the new European effort, some energy experts warned.

“Why wait six months?” asked David Goldwyn, a top State Department energy official in the Obama administration. “As the sanctions are configured now, all that will happen is you will see more Russian crude and product flow to other destinations,” he said. But he added, “It’s a necessary first step.”

Despite the oil embargo, Europe is likely to remain reliant on Russian natural gas for some time, possibly years. That could preserve some of Mr. Putin’s leverage, especially if gas demand spikes during a cold winter. European leaders have fewer alternatives to Russian gas because the world’s other major suppliers of that fuel — the United States, Australia and Qatar — can’t quickly expand exports substantially.

Another wild card is the growing popularity of electric cars and renewable energy. Higher oil and gas prices could encourage individuals, businesses and elected officials in Europe and elsewhere to more quickly turn away from combustion engine cars and power plants that run on fossil fuels.

Russia also has other cards to play, which could undermine the effectiveness of the European embargo.

China is a growing market for Russia. Connected mainly by pipelines that are near capacity, China increased its tanker shipments of Russian crude in recent months.

Saudi Arabia and Iran might lose from those increased Russian sales to China, and Middle Eastern sellers have been forced to reduce their prices to compete with the heavily discounted Russian crude.

Dr. O’Sullivan said the relationship among Russia, Saudi Arabia and other members of the OPEC Plus alliance could become more complicated “as Moscow and Riyadh compete to build and maintain their market share in China.”

On Thursday, Saudi Arabia, Russia and their partners in OPEC Plus said they would raise oil production by 648,000 barrels a day, 50 percent more than the 400,000 barrel increase they had agreed to last year. But the cartel’s members have frequently failed to produce as much oil as they have pledged to.

Even as energy commercial ties are scrambled, the big oil producers like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have benefited overall from the war in Europe. Many European companies are now eager to buy more oil from the Middle East. Saudi oil export revenues are climbing and could set a record this year, according to Middle East Petroleum and Economic Publications, which tracks the industry, pushing the kingdom’s trade surplus to more than $250 billion.

India is another beneficiary because it has big refineries that can process Russian crude, turning it into diesel, some of which could end up in Europe even if the raw material came from Russia.

“India is becoming the de facto refining hub for Europe,” analysts at RBC Capital Markets said in a recent report.

But buying diesel from India will raise costs in Europe because it’s more expensive to ship fuel from India than to have it piped in from Russian refineries. “The unintended consequence is that Europe is effectively importing inflation to its own citizens,” the RBC analysts said.

India is getting about 600,000 barrels a day from Russia, up from 90,000 a day last year, when Russia was a relatively minor supplier. It is now India’s second-biggest supplier after Iraq.

But India could find it difficult to keep buying from Russia if the European Union’s restrictions on European companies insuring Russian oil shipments raise costs too much.

“India is a winner,” said Helima Croft, RBC’s head of commodity strategy, “as long as they are not hit with secondary sanctions.”

Matt Higgins, a former judge on the reality TV show “Shark Tank,” is an experienced investor whose firm, RSE Ventures, helps young companies build their businesses.

So it was no surprise that in November 2020, Mr. Higgins embraced one of Wall Street’s biggest recent obsessions by launching a SPAC. Special purpose acquisition companies — known by their acronym — are shell entities that sell shares to the public and use those funds to buy an operating business. Investors get their money back if the SPAC hasn’t found a business to buy within a two-year window.

Last summer, Omnichannel Acquisition, the SPAC backed by Mr. Higgins, agreed to buy Kin Insurance, a fintech company. But in January, the two sides called off the deal, citing “unfavorable market conditions.” In May, Mr. Higgins decided he’d had enough. He is liquidating Omnichannel and returning the $206 million his SPAC raised to investors.

“We did months and months of work to get Kin ready to go,” Mr. Higgins said. “But the market completely turned on us.”

Wall Street’s love affair with SPACs is sputtering.

After two hot and heavy years, during which investors poured $250 billion into SPACs, rising inflation, interest rate increases and the threat of a recession are fomenting doubts. Increasingly, investors are withdrawing their money from SPACs, which they’re allowed to do at the time of the merger. With stocks of high-growth companies recently getting clobbered, they have been less willing to bet that SPAC mergers — which often involve risky companies — will be successful.

At the same time, regulators are stepping up scrutiny of SPACs. The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened dozens of investigations into SPACs and is proposing tighter rules. Increased regulation would make SPAC deals less profitable for the big investment banks that arrange these transactions, because they would have to commit more resources to comply. They, too, have begun pulling back.

“You could see this cliff coming,” said Usha Rodrigues, a professor of corporate law at the University of Georgia School of Law who has emerged as a leading expert on SPACs.

The wreckage is piling up.

On Tuesday, Forbes Media became the latest company to scrap its planned merger with a SPAC. Around 600 SPACs that went public in the past couple of years are still trying to complete deals, according to data from Dealogic. Roughly half of them might not find targets before their two-year window closes. At least seven SPACs have folded since the beginning of the year. Another 73 SPACs that were waiting to go public have shelved their plans. A fund that tracks the performance of 400 SPACs is down 40 percent over the past year.

Although SPACs had been around for decades, they long had an unsavory reputation. Only companies whose financials wouldn’t survive investor scrutiny en route to a traditional initial public offering used SPACs to go public. That changed at the beginning of 2020, when prominent financial firms, venture capitalists and hot start-ups embraced SPACs as a faster and easier route to the public markets than an I.P.O.

Wall Street banks were only too eager to arrange these cookie-cutter deals for hefty fees. And investors desperate for returns enthusiastically bought in.

Suddenly, everyone from hedge fund managers like Bill Ackman to celebrities like Patrick Mahomes, the N.F.L. quarterback, and Serena Williams, the tennis legend, jumped on the SPAC bandwagon. Retail investors got involved, too, as stock trading took off during the pandemic. Even former President Donald J. Trump struck a deal with a SPAC last year to take his fledgling social media company public.

“Why did V.C.s turn to SPACs all of a sudden? Because reputable investment banks started underwriting them,” said Mike Stegemoller, a finance professor at Baylor University.

SPAC deals have been an important new source of revenue for Wall Street banks. Since the start of 2020, the top 10 banks arranging the public offerings of SPACs made just over $5.4 billion in fees, according to Dealogic. Citigroup, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs pocketed the biggest fees.

Companies that sell shares to the public through an I.P.O. have to undergo a rigorous process with strict rules. But SPACs face few regulations, since the companies going public have no actual operations yet. The shares are usually priced at $10 apiece.

Early investors also get warrants, a type of security that gives them the right to buy additional shares later at a predetermined price. If shares of a SPAC go up after it finds a merger partner, warrants can be financially rewarding.

The SPAC has two years to find an operating business to buy; otherwise, the money has to be returned to investors. Since investors don’t know what business a SPAC will end up buying, they have the option of redeeming their shares when they vote on the merger — meaning that the merged entity could end up with far less cash than the SPAC raised.

The SPAC boom was fueled by a long period of low interest rates, which drove investors to riskier corners of the market in search of higher returns. SPACs became especially popular with hedge funds that were looking to profit off the difference between the price of a share in a SPAC and the warrants they held.

It helped that prominent venture capitalists embraced SPACs as a quicker way to take technology start-ups public. In late 2019, Richard Branson merged Virgin Galactic, his aerospace company, with a SPAC led by Chamath Palihapitiya, the Facebook executive turned venture capitalist. The next year, DraftKings, the popular online gaming company, went public in a SPAC deal underwritten by Goldman, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank.

The SPAC format also provided a lifeline to companies like WeWork, which had to pull its I.P.O. in 2019 when investors balked at the office sharing company’s financials. But that was not an obstacle when WeWork merged with a SPAC last year and got $1.3 billion in badly needed capital.

“Last year was one of the best years in terms of SPACs,” said Gary Stein, a former investment bank analyst and entertainment industry consultant who has invested in such companies for nearly three decades. “This year is probably one of the more difficult ones for me to navigate.”

Two things have cooled the ardor for SPACs. Inflation is skyrocketing, prompting the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and investors to pull their money out of SPAC deals to park elsewhere. And regulatory scrutiny of the SPAC market is increasing, which has made these deals less enticing for the players involved.

In recent months, investors have invoked more frequently their contractual right to redeem their shares in a SPAC. Historically, around 54 percent of shareholders would opt to redeem shares when a merger was announced. Now, as many as 80 percent of investors have sought their money back in some instances — a move that leaves the postmerger company with little of that promised capital.

Concerns that too many investors would seek to get cash for their shares torpedoed the merger between Kin Insurance and Omnichannel, Mr. Higgins’s SPAC. The media company BuzzFeed took in only $16 million from its merger with a SPAC, as investors reclaimed much of the $250 million it hoped to get.

Some SPAC mergers completed recently are looking grim. When MSP Recovery, a medical litigation and claims firm, closed its SPAC deal with Lionheart Acquisition Corporation II on May 24, the company’s shares fell 53 percent immediately. They are now trading around $2. Neither Lionheart nor MSP Recovery returned requests for comment.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened two dozen investigations involving SPACs since January 2020, according to Audit Analytics. A half-dozen involve electric vehicle companies, including Lordstown Motors, Lucid and Faraday Futures. The SPAC seeking to merge with Mr. Trump’s company is also under investigation.

Regulators have proposed rules that would make it easier for shareholders to sue companies that merged with a SPAC for making fanciful financial projections and dubious claims about production capabilities. Banks could also face increased liability for their work on such deals.

On Tuesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released a report that focused on conflicts of interest involving certain players in SPAC deals. “The process of bringing a SPAC to market inherently favors institutional investors and financial institutions — the so-called ‘SPAC mafia’ — over retail investors,” according to the report.

Some Wall Street banks are now stepping away from SPACs, concerned that they will be held liable in shareholder lawsuits for overhyped financial projections made by private companies that merge with a SPAC.

Goldman has reduced its involvement with SPACs partly because of the “changed regulatory environment,” said Maeve Duvally, a spokeswoman for the bank.

Ms. Rodrigues, the law professor, said that if Wall Street banks could be held liable for false statements made by a company that was merging with a SPAC, it would be similar to the liability they have when arranging a traditional I.P.O. Increased regulation would lead to higher costs for banks and higher fees for clients, which would dampen enthusiasm for SPACs, she said.

Of the roughly 600 SPACs still out there scrambling to find targets before the market shuts down entirely, 270 have been looking for at least a year, according to Dealogic.

Backers of those companies are desperate, which could make them less than judicious in choosing merger partners, said Nathan Anderson of Hindenburg Research, a firm that specializes in publishing critical reports about publicly traded companies including SPACs.

“The quality of SPAC deals was never high to begin with,” Mr. Hindenburg said. “And now it has the potential to get substantially worse.”

Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, celebrating her 70 years on the British throne, is above all a tribute to one of history’s great acts of constancy.

Her reign has spanned virtually the entire post-World War II era, making her a witness to cultural upheavals from the Beatles to Brexit, technological advances from wireless radio to Zoom, political leaders from Winston Churchill to Boris Johnson.

From the sepia-tinted pictures of her coronation in 1953 to her emotional televised address to a nation in the grip of the pandemic in 2020, the queen has been an abiding presence in British life for as long as most Britons have been alive.

Her triumphs — history-making visits to South Africa and Ireland — have lifted the country. Her sorrows — the fraught days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a Paris car crash, or the Covid-enforced isolation of her grieving for her deceased husband, Prince Philip — have become the nation’s sorrows.

Perhaps no living person has met so many famous people, a gallery of heroes and villains ranging from Nelson Mandela to Vladimir V. Putin. But it is her countless meetings with ordinary people that have left perhaps the most lasting imprint of the longest serving British monarch in history.

The photographs below are a small representation of her reign:

The queen at Balmoral Castle in Scotland with one of her corgis in September 1952.

She was 25 years old when she ascended to the throne in 1952.

Riding in front of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, en route to the Horse Guards Parade in London for a Trooping of the Colour ceremony in May 1956.

Attending a dinner with Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, at No. 10 Downing Street in London in April 1955.

The queen on a royal tour in Nigeria in 1956.

A motorcade taking Queen Elizabeth along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House in Washington in 1957, on her first trip to the United States as the British monarch.

Elizabeth and Philip with their three children — Prince Charles, right, Princess Anne, left, and Prince Andrew — at Balmoral in September 1960.

Reviewing troops with President Heinrich Lubke of West Germany in May 1965.

Riding an elephant after a tiger hunt, part of a royal tour of Nepal in February 1961.

Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at the Berlin Wall during a visit to West Germany in May 1965.

With Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia at the Tisisat Falls in February 1965.

Flying back from a visit to Yorkshire in a photograph taken during the filming of the documentary “Royal Family” in 1969.

Elizabeth and Philip leaving Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, during a visit to Canada in 1978.

At the British Embassy in Kuwait in February 1979.

Touring Nizwa Fort in Oman in February 1979.

Queen Elizabeth with Prime Minister Edward Heath of Britain, left, and President Richard Nixon and the first lady, Patricia Nixon, at Chequers, the official country residence of the prime minister, in 1970.

In Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea, in October 1982.

Riding on the grounds of Windsor Castle with President Ronald Reagan during his state visit to England in 1982.

Queen Elizabeth with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, left, President Ronald Reagan, and Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Buckingham Palace in 1984.

At the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, in Xi’an, China in 1986.

With Prince William and Prince Harry at Guards Polo Club in Windsor in 1987.

Visiting maternity patient Molly Mavunda and her 4-day-old baby boy, Caswell, in Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1995.

With President Nelson Mandela of South Africa at Buckingham Palace in July 1996.

Shaking hands with Innu women while visiting Sheshatshiu in central Labrador, Canada, in June 1997.

Viewing the floral tributes and other mementos to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, at Buckingham Palace in September 1997.

With the pop band the Spice Girls at the Victoria Palace Theatre in London in 1997.

Queen Elizabeth with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on their way to Buckingham Palace in 2003.

Visiting the Royal Albert Hall in London to mark the end of restoration work in 2004.

The Queen received a scroll from Bruce Two Dogs Bozsum at Southwark Cathedral, London, where she attended a funeral blessing for Mahomet Weyonomon, a Native American chieftain of the Mohegan tribe who died in 1736 and was laid to rest in an unmarked grave on the grounds, in 2006.

President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, the first lady, with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at Winfield House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence in London, in 2011.

Planting a tree in Dublin in 2011, as President Mary McAleese of Ireland looks on, during the first visit by a British monarch since 1911.

Sitting next to Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor in chief; Angela Kelly, a royal dressmaker; and Caroline Rush, the chief executive of the British Fashion Council, at Richard Quinn’s runway show in London in 2018.

Queen Elizabeth with Charles, the Prince of Wales, center right, and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, second right, at the State Opening of Parliament in the House of Lords at Westminster in 2019.

At a D-Day commemorative event in Portsmouth, England, with President Donald Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, in June 2019.

The Royal Family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in June 2019 during the queen’s annual birthday parade.

Greeting President Joe Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, at Windsor Castle in 2021.

At the funeral of Prince Philip, who died at 99, at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle in 2021.

Driving her Range Rover during the Royal Windsor Horse Show at Windsor Castle in 2021.

The queen meeting with the staff of London’s Crossrail project at Paddington Station in May.

The Queen with one of her dogs, a corgi named Candy, at Windsor Castle in February.

Elon Musk’s repeated wavering on his deal to buy Twitter has roiled markets and raised fresh questions about his seriousness. His promises to preserve free speech, ban spam bots and dramatically boost revenue may have earned the blessing of the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey, but with Twitter’s stock falling well below his offer price, Mr. Musk appears to be reneging on a deal that has made even Wall Street grow skeptical.

For those of us who have followed Mr. Musk’s antics for some time, the latest twist in his bid for the social media platform is entirely in character. The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes. Often announcing new features without consultation with his team, he forces his employees to bridge the enormous gap between technological reality and his dreams. This disconnect fosters a negligent and sometimes cruel workplace, to disastrous effect.

In 2016, Mr. Musk promised that newly made Teslas would be able to drive themselves with nothing more than a future software update that Tesla owners could buy in advance for thousands of dollars.

That fully self-driving announcement that so delighted his fans came as a far more jarring revelation to the project’s engineers, who found out about their staggering new mission when Mr. Musk tweeted about it. Tesla buyers never got the promised software update. The cars still cannot drive themselves without humans. But every year since then, he has repeated different versions of this claim. His ability to repeatedly sell such science fiction fantasies to a credulous public is the foundation for a vast empire and fortune.

Tesla’s manufacturing engineers were aghast when, also in 2016, Mr. Musk publicly committed to developing a fully automated factory that required no human workers. Tesla built two assembly lines that attempted to automate tasks requiring levels of dexterity and flexibility that modern robotics is still far from attaining. He ultimately gave up and cobbled together a manual-labor-intensive production line in an open-air tent.

Mr. Musk took this as a new opportunity to build his legend, and he reported that he had slept in Tesla’s factories during this period, which he called “production hell.” What he left out of his self-aggrandizing was the reality for his employees. His presence brought no real manufacturing expertise to bear, just the overbearing pressure of a boss whose public shaming was punctuated by declarations like “I can be on my own private island with naked supermodels, drinking mai tais — but I’m not.”

In my reporting on Tesla, interviewing employees at times felt more as if I had been a therapist than a journalist, as they sought to untangle the pride and satisfaction they felt about their work from the trauma of working for Mr. Musk. Surviving 10 years of the grind at Tesla is a rare achievement, and it is common for talent to be squeezed dry or pushed out before the end of the company’s four-year stock vesting period.

This grim environment is all the more pronounced for women and racial minorities. Lawsuits by workers and California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing allege that Black workers were tasked with menial physical labor in parts of the factory nicknamed “the plantation,” where they were subjected to racist slurs and graffiti. Female workers have sued, alleging a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and groping by supervisors. Mr. Musk was indifferent, emailing workers who experienced abuse that “it is important to be thick-skinned.”

Mr. Musk’s interest lies in supervising entrepreneurial projects that result in flashy new components. In more prosaic areas of the business like manufacturing, service and sales, he tends to get involved only in order to put out the fires that regularly threaten the company’s immediate future (though not the literal fires that have repeatedly ravaged its Fremont, Calif., factory over the years).

This is the fundamental weakness of every organization run as a cult of personality: The dear leader can’t be everywhere or make every decision but often fails to provide the clear code of values that allows managers to independently shape their decisions around common goals. When the success of the company is tied to one man’s whims, you get bizarre phenomena like managers deciding whether or not to take issues to Mr. Musk based on the shade of blond of his wife’s hair that day (with platinum shades being correlated with better moods).

When the boss happens to run tunneling, rocket and brain-implant companies in addition to a high-profile car company, even the most brilliant minds will occasionally be too disconnected from the realities of the decisions that they must make. After the collapses of Theranos and WeWork — companies with similarly confident founders who insisted that they would achieve their soaring ambitions if given more time and money — Mr. Musk’s reliance on hype is especially jarring.

Indeed, the main difference between Mr. Musk and Silicon Valley’s fallen heroes is that he has been able to deliver on some promises: Tesla does make cars, and SpaceX does land rockets. But as a number of old promises like fully self-driving cars appear to be more aspirational and less plausible, the distinction between him and those fallen heroes is starting to lose its meaning. His long list of unfulfilled commitments — a fully solar-powered electric vehicle charging network, a fully automated manufacturing system, an autonomous minibus and even a rocket-powered flying car — wildly exceed his achievements.

By moving to buy Twitter, Mr. Musk has not only added another distraction to his long list but has also already shown the same drive to announce sweeping decisions in public. While he had some success in realizing user features at Tesla, his contradictory goals of increasing algorithmic transparency and eliminating spam bots on Twitter are the most obvious sign that he intends to impose his will on the service without drawing on the expertise of workers who have been wrestling with Twitter’s thorniest challenges.

Ultimately Mr. Musk’s goals for Twitter, as they are for Tesla, are not about making the right decisions for his companies or the people who make them possible. They are about playing to the crowd and burnishing the legend that keeps fresh bodies and minds moving through the businesses that chew them up and spit them out. Now if Twitter falls into his control, Mr. Musk will have seized the means of making the product he has always cared about most: his own myth making.

Edward Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) is the author of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors” and a co-host of “The Autonocast,” a podcast about driving automation technology and the future of mobility.

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During his first six months as mayor, Eric Adams has developed a reputation for being a fixture of New York City’s nightlife scene.

So it should perhaps not come as a surprise that Mr. Adams has proposed changing the city’s zoning regulations to allow New Yorkers to dance more easily in bars and restaurants.

Although the city had repealed its Cabaret Law, a 1926 regulation that made it illegal to host dancing, singing or musical entertainment without a license, zoning law restrictions left many establishments unable to permit dancing.

“Think about the owner of a tapas bar that has live music on weekends and wants to set aside a small space for dancing, but finds that under city rules, it’s not allowed,” Mr. Adams said on Wednesday during a speech before the Association for a Better New York. “We’re going to change that no to a yes, and let the people dance.”

Supporting the city’s nightlife is not just about fun, the mayor has said. It is also part of an effort to help small business owners still trying to recover from more than two years of the pandemic’s devastating effects on the economy.

But too many bars and restaurants are hampered by antiquated zoning regulations that prohibit dancing, among other things, Mr. Adams said on Wednesday, adding that he intended to change out-of-date zoning rules that interfered with the city’s recovery.

“Far too many agencies don’t understand part of their mandate is to allow the city to grow and flourish,” Mr. Adams said. “Don’t start with no. Start with how do we get to yes. How do we build our city?”

The proposed changes to the city’s zoning rules would, for example, allow a small retailer looking to expand its business selling to other businesses do so without relocating to an area zoned for manufacturing; they would allow homeowners to convert the second floor of their homes to rental units without having to add a parking space; and the changes would make it easier to convert unused office space into housing.

Other zoning changes would make it easier to install solar panels and create charging stations for electric vehicles. Mr. Adams said the city also wants to use smart zoning to increase opportunities around four new Metro-North stations expected to open in the Bronx in 2027.

City planning officials will begin a public engagement process to craft the language of the zoning text amendments. There will be an environmental review for the proposed changes and the City Council will have to approve the changes.

New York suffered as a result of the pandemic but is starting to see some job growth, said James Parrott, an economist with the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. The city added 39,400 jobs in April, including 7,200 in the full service restaurant industry.

The changes to the zoning regulations that make it legal for bars and restaurants to allow dancing are a continuation of the repeal of the Cabaret Law from 1926 that made it illegal to host dancing, singing or musical entertainment without a license. It is widely believed that the law was used to target racially mixed jazz clubs in Harlem.

The rule was liberally applied across the city’s venues, and music was not allowed at bars without a cabaret license until 1936. The city required cabaret employees and performers to carry “cabaret cards” and also be fingerprinted. A prior police record could be used to deny applicants cabaret cards, and famous musicians such as Ray Charles and Billie Holiday were not eligible.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani used the cabaret law to enforce his quality of life initiatives, but Mayor Bill de Blasio repealed the law in 2017. Even after the law was repealed, the city’s zoning rules still prevented dancing in some restaurants or bars.

The proposed changes will remove dancing from consideration under the zoning laws and will instead rely on indicators such as whether venues have cover charges or show times and thus might need a license, city officials said.

Ariel Palitz, executive director of the Office of Nightlife at the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, said in an email that Mr. Adams was essentially carrying out “unfinished business” left behind from the repeal of the Cabaret Law.

Large establishments that want to offer dancing will still come under review as they apply for a liquor license, and be subject to fire and noise rules and community review, said Keith Powers, the City Council’s majority leader.

Business owners expressed relief at the coming changes.

“All of these tiny, weird things affect how you operate,” said Diana Mora, who helped found NYC Nightlife United, and runs Friends and Lovers in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. A fuller repeal of the Cabaret Law helps remove the fear that even though businesses are trying to follow the rules, “someone’s going to come in, something’s going to happen. You’re going to be shut down.”

John Barclay, owner of Paragon, was involved in the Dance Liberation Network that pushed for repealing the Cabaret Law in 2017. He said the law was being “enforced against very predictable groups,” such as venues frequented by Black and Latino people.

“If a law or a regulation is founded with clear, bigoted intent or if the results of enforcement are clearly racist or bigoted in any way, it needs to be repealed point blank,” he said.