Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi said Wednesday a proposed $9 billion megaport and city project on the strategic Great Nicobar Island is “destruction dressed in development’s language”.

The island, nearly 3,000 kilometres (1,860 miles) from New Delhi, sits at the entrance to one of the world’s busiest waterways — the Strait of Malacca, through which up to 30% of global maritime trade passes.

The plan to develop the 910 square kilometre (351 square miles) island with a container port, airport and city see swathes of pristine rainforest cut down, including land inhabited for millennia by communities with minimal outside contact.

“What is being done in Great Nicobar is one of the biggest scams and gravest crimes against this country’s natural and tribal heritage in our lifetime,” Gandhi said in a video message posted on social media, showing him walking through the island’s forests.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said the Great Nicobar Island Project “is of strategic, defence and national importance”, and India´s environmental court gave the green light in February.

But Gandhi said he would try to stop it.

“What I have seen is not a project,” he added. “It is millions of trees marked for the axe. It is 160 square kilometres of rainforest condemned to die. It is communities that have been ignored while their homes have been snatched away.”

Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav last year insisted that the project “poses no threat to the island’s tribal groups” and “does not jeopardise the eco-sensitivity of the region”.

Around 9,000 people live on the island, including around 1,200 from Indigenous groups, including the Nicobarese and the Shompen, hunter-gatherers who have shunned contact with outsiders, according to rights group Survival International.

“As well as devastating the local environment and the Nicobarese Indigenous communities, the Great Nicobar project would destroy the Shompen, a largely uncontacted people who live in the rainforest,” Survival’s Sophie Grig said Wednesday.

She called the megaport an “ill-conceived project, which must be cancelled before an entire people are wiped out”.

Asian stocks fluctuated on Wednesday while oil prices swung as talks to end the Iran war appeared to be at a standstill and the crucial Strait of Hormuz no nearer being reopened.

While the White House has said Donald Trump and his team were considering Tehran’s latest proposal to restore traffic through the waterway, CNN and the Wall Street Journal said the president was sceptical.

The Islamic republic this week submitted a plan that would reportedly see it ease the chokehold and Washington lift its retaliatory blockade on the country’s ports as talks continued, including over its nuclear programme.

While US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran’s proposal was “better than what we thought they were going to submit”, he insisted any eventual deal had to be “one that definitively prevents them from sprinting towards a nuclear weapon”.

Iranian defence ministry spokesman Reza Talaei-Nik said Washington “must abandon its illegal and irrational demands”, adding the United States was “no longer in a position to dictate its policy to independent nations”.

Qatar warned of the possibility of a “frozen conflict” if a definitive resolution is not found.

Concerns about the stalled peace push have pushed crude prices higher for more than a week, with Trump’s decision to cancel his envoys’ trip for peace talks in Pakistan last weekend adding to the downbeat mood.

Brent is above the level it hit before the two sides announced a ceasefire at the start of April, sitting around $112, while West Texas Intermediate broke $100 Tuesday for the first time in two weeks.

Both contracts were slightly higher on Wednesday.

“Iran wants the blockade lifted and access to its flows restored,” wrote Stephen Innes at SPI Asset Management.

“Washington holds that lever and is in no hurry to give it away without extracting value.

“Meanwhile, the longer this drags on, the more second-order effects start to bite. Storage pressure builds, production risks emerge, and the system begins to strain in ways that futures prices cannot ignore.”

There was little major reaction to news that key producer United Arab Emirates had decided to withdraw from the OPEC and OPEC+ oil cartels on Friday, calling it a strategic decision.

Still, CNN also cited sources familiar with the mediation as saying the two sides were not as far apart as they seemed.

It added that intense diplomacy continued and talks were focused on a staged process with the first part of a potential deal aimed at returning to the pre-war status and reopening the Strait.

Iran’s nuclear programme would be dealt with down the line, it said.

Equity markets were mixed, with Hong Kong, Shanghai, Jakarta and Manila up while Sydney, Singapore, Seoul and Taipei fell.

Traders were given a weak lead from Wall Street, where the Nasdaq-led losses owing to a tech selloff that came on the back of a report in the Wall Street Journal that ChatGPT-maker OpenAI had missed targets on the number of users and revenue.

The news came as markets gear up for the release of earnings from Wall Street titans Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft this week.

The Federal Reserve will also conclude a two-day meeting later in the day, with investors keeping tabs on its outlook for inflation and interest rates as energy costs soar.

An image of Donald Trump will soon appear in some US passports, officials said Tuesday, shattering another norm as the president aggressively puts his personal stamp on government institutions.

There are few precedents anywhere in the world, let alone in a democracy, of displaying sitting leaders’ pictures in passports, and Trump would be the first sitting US president featured in Americans’ travel documents.

The State Department said it would offer the limited-edition passport to mark this year’s 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence.

The department — which has historically viewed itself as outside US partisan politics — posted on social media a sample of the passport, which features a stern-looking Trump superimposed over the Declaration of July 4, 1776.

Trump’s signature — in gold — lies underneath.

A second limited-edition passport showed a historic painting of the US Founding Fathers.

“As the United States celebrates America’s 250th anniversary in July, the State Department is preparing to release a limited number of specially designed US passports to commemorate this historic occasion,” State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said.

Another department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Trump-themed passports would only be available at in-person appointments in Washington “for as long as there is availability.”

The passports would come at no additional cost, the official said.

It was not immediately clear if passport applicants could refuse the Trump picture, although the majority of Americans seeking passports do so through local post offices, which would not provide the special edition.

‘Indulging Trump’s vanity’

Lawmakers of the rival Democratic Party criticised Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the passport initiative.

“Secretary Rubio should spend more time convincing his boss to end his war of choice in Iran, and less on wasting American tax dollars indulging Trump’s vanity,” the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Democrats wrote on X.

Among countries that carry artwork in their passports, nearly all feature either historical imagery or nature.

Even North Korea, which plasters pictures of leader Kim Jong Un across the country and demands reverence, does not feature him in the passport, which instead depicts sacred Mount Paektu.

Current US passports depict multiple scenes from the country’s history such as the Moon landing along with historic sites including the Statue of Liberty.

Since returning to office last year, Trump has slapped his name and image on government institutions in an unprecedented way.

Several government buildings in the capital have put up banners of the president, while officials have added his name onto the Kennedy Center for the performing arts and the dismantled US Institute of Peace.

Last month the Treasury Department also said Trump’s signature would soon start appearing on the dollar bill, in another first.

Britain and other Commonwealth countries feature on their currency the likeness of King Charles III, who is a head of state without direct involvement in politics.

The king met with Trump on Tuesday during a state visit to Washington.

Only around half of Americans hold valid passports, less than in many other Western nations, and people in states that voted for Trump are less likely to travel internationally, according to surveys.