Good morning. With the Taliban capturing the Afghan capital, Kabul, some observers are saying that fresh sanctions could be imposed on the Taliban if human rights violations occur.

Just last week, Afghanistan’s foreign minister called for international sanctions to be reimposed on Taliban leaders. And this past weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken expressed hope the Taliban would safeguard human rights, including those of women, if it assumed power in order to gain wider international recognition and secure the easing of sanctions. 

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“Sanctions won’t be lifted, their ability to travel won’t happen, if they’re not sustaining the basic rights of the Afghan people and if they revert to supporting or harboring terrorists who might strike us,” Mr. Blinken said in an interview with CNN Sunday. 

“It looks like [the possible sanctions] would be multilateral and would be focused on the Global Magnitsky Act,” said Cari N. Stinebower, a partner at law firm Winston & Strawn LLP, citing a program that designates alleged human-rights abusers. Ms. Stinebower, who previously served as counsel for the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, cited a joint statement from dozens of countries on Afghanistan released Sunday.

But further sanctions on Afghanistan also could bring the risks of serious collateral consequences for the Afghan people now that the Taliban is in charge, said Adam M. Smith, a partner at law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP who previously served in the Obama Administration, adding, “How can we assure humanitarian deliveries to a sanctioned regime?”

Read more: 

• America’s Failures in Afghanistan Were Bipartisan and Long-Running
• Kabul Under Taliban Control: Checkpoints, Beatings, Fear
• Biden Defends Afghanistan Pullout Amid Bipartisan Criticism

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A clash over tax rules for digital currencies such as bitcoin turned into a political coming-of-age moment for the cryptocurrency industry, galvanizing a usually fractious coalition of investors, exchanges, financiers and social-media influencers.

In public, Ashton Kutcher, Elon Musk and Square Inc. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey brought the Twitter heat over a provision in the $1 trillion infrastructure bill seeking to expand and strengthen tax enforcement of crypto transactions. That helped prompt tens of thousands of followers to call members of Congress.

Behind the scenes, lobbyists, trade-group officials and executives at crypto companies hopped on Google Meet every few hours to coordinate Congressional outreach and tracked legislative contacts in a shared spreadsheet.

U.S. auto safety regulators are investigating Tesla Inc.’s advanced driver-assistance system known as Autopilot after a series of crashes at emergency scenes.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration probe made public Monday is the latest sign that U.S. authorities are beginning to scrutinize driver-assistance technologies more closely after largely giving companies free rein.

• Some big banks are evaluating if the reference rate that is backed by regulators as the best replacement for the scandal-plagued London interbank offered rate is the only option for companies, or if they should offer other rates. Many large U.S. financial institutions are providing the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR, to corporate borrowers as part of the transition away from Libor.
   
• Attorneys for Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes told a federal judge on Monday that she plans to attend her criminal fraud trial with three family members or friends by her side and strongly prefers not to wear a face mask. Preventative measures against Covid-19 were on display in the courtroom here as Ms. Holmes and prosecutors prepared for the high stakes Silicon Valley trial.

T-Mobile US Inc. said it suffered an intrusion into a company database and was investigating the extent of the breach, after personal data on some of its wireless subscribers was found for sale on the web.

The company, which has more than 100 million subscribers, said Monday that “unauthorized access to some T-Mobile data occurred” but that it hadn’t determined whether personal information was involved.

• Some tech companies are slow to share details about hacks of their products, leaving customers vulnerable to disruptions and uncertain how to respond as information trickles out. Cyberattacks in which hackers target a service provider and then use that foothold to access their customers’ networks are receiving scrutiny from policy makers in the U.S. and Europe. Large-scale attacks in recent months on software companies SolarWinds Corp., Accellion USA LLC and Kaseya Ltd. demonstrate attackers’ ability to infect a large number of companies and government agencies that use the same technology products.

• Financial giant State Street Corp. is vacating its two New York City office locations.
   
• Facebook Inc. said it would back two new underwater cable projects—one in Africa and another in Asia in collaboration with Alphabet Inc.’s Google—that aim to give the Silicon Valley giants greater control of the global internet infrastructure that their businesses rely on.

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