The administration of President Joe Biden has drawn Republican fire for its cautious response to nationwide protests in China against COVID-19 lockdowns, with some lawmakers accusing it of failing to seize a historic moment.

But some analysts say caution is the right approach given the volatile U.S.-China relationship and the risk of playing into a Chinese narrative that accuses “foreign forces” of being behind dissent.

On Monday, the White House said it backed the right of people to peacefully protest in China but stopped short of criticizing Beijing as protesters in multiple Chinese cities demonstrated against heavy COVID-19 measures.

The demonstrations came as the number of COVID cases in China hit record daily highs and large parts of several cities faced new lockdowns.

The Republican response was swift.

Senator Ted Cruz called White House response “pitiful,” adding in a tweet: “At a potentially historic inflection point, Dems shill for the CCP.”

Other Republicans, including Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Chris Smith weighed in on what they labeled a “weak” reaction from Biden, while Michael McCaul, the Republican lead on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in tweet: “As Chinese citizens bravely protest, Joe Biden & the corporate class shrug.”

McCaul vowed a tougher stance against China from the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives from next year while Rubio and Smith declared: “The United States must be unwavering in our support for the Chinese people as they bravely call for freedom.”

The Republican politicians did not state specifically how they would respond in Biden’s place.

The administration’s careful language contrasted with Biden’s earlier expression of solidarity with protesters against the Iranian government, when he told a political rally earlier in November that “we’re gonna free Iran.”

China’s biggest wave of civil disobedience since President Xi Jinping took power a decade ago arrives at a delicate moment in U.S.-China relations.

Following an August visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China launched military drills around the island, which it considers Chinese territory, and cut off communications with the U.S. in a number of areas, including military issues and climate change.

Since then, China and the U.S. have worked to steady the relationship. Biden and Xi met in-person on the Indonesian island of Bali earlier in November and the countries have agreed to follow-up discussion, including a planned visit to China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in early 2023.

A U.S. official involved in U.S.-China policy said the White House believed Xi’s handling of the COVID situation was undermining confidence in his approach to the pandemic, but wanted to avoid being seen to be interfering in domestic politics as they make progress in cooling down the relationship.

Beijing and Washington have dealt with the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in vastly different ways.

China’s zero-COVID policy has kept its official death toll in the thousands, against more than a million in the United States, but at the cost of confining many people to long spells at home, inflicting extensive disruption and damage to the world’s No.2 economy.

Isaac Stone Fish of Strategy Risks, a firm that helps companies navigate political risk in China, said the White House response was likely conditioned by the fact that the United States has far more at stake in its relations with China than with a country like Iran.

“It also may be a perception of longevity. The Biden administration seems to think that the Chinese Communist Party is more likely to survive its protests than Iran’s government.”

Beyond this, say analysts, the U.S. wants to avoid language that allows China to pin the protests on U.S. interference.

“The White House is wise to refrain from speaking out in defense of the protesters and their demands,” said Scott Kennedy, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“China has long asserted the U.S. government has been behind domestic protests, from Tiananmen in 1989 to Hong Kong in 2020. Saying anything now would give life to those assertions.”

On Monday, Chinese police tightened security at the sites of weekend protests in Shanghai and Beijing and had begun inquiries into some of the protesters, people who were at the Beijing demonstrations told Reuters.

Without explicitly mentioning the protests, China’s official Xinhua news agency said domestic security chief Chen Wenqing held a meeting of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission on Tuesday that vowed to “resolutely crack down on the infiltration and sabotage activities of hostile forces.”

Daniel Russel, who served as the top U.S. diplomat for East Asia in the Obama administration, said the Biden White House would be focused on the next steps by Chinese authorities.

“There will be plenty of time to turn up the rhetorical dial if Beijing follows the violent Tiananmen Square or the Iranian model and starts killing people,” he said. “So getting out of the way and keeping the spotlight on the protesters themselves is a smart move at this point.”

Related Galleries:

In this episode, NewsClick’s Prabir Purkayastha analyses the most up-to-date developments all over #Ukraine whose leaders seem eager to …

resource

The post Mapping Faultlines: Ukraine Dials Down War Talk appeared first on Ukraine Intelligence.

(JTA) — A week after former President Donald Trump dined with two men who are known for their outspoken antisemitism, Republican leaders are beginning to speak out — though some are sparing Trump direct criticism.

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader in the Senate, said Trump’s Nov. 20 dinner with Kanye West, the rapper and designer who in recent weeks has come out as antisemitic, and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who has denied the Holocaust and said he wants all Jews out of the United States, was a blow to Trump’s bid to be reelected in 2024.

“First, let me just say that there is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy,” McConnell said Tuesday when he met with a gaggle of reporters in the Senate. “And anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”

Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the likely next speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, did not directly criticize Trump, echoing a number of other Republicans who have spoken out.

Referring to Fuentes, McCarthy said, “I condemn his ideology; it has no place in society at all.”

About Trump, he said, “The president can have meetings with who he wants; I don’t think anybody, though, should have a meeting with Nick Fuentes.” McCarthy said Trump condemned Fuentes “four times.” Trump has not done so, although he has said multiple times that he did not know who Fuentes was and that he was an unexpected guest of West, who now goes by Ye.

Trump responded to the mounting criticism late Tuesday, saying again that he hadn’t known Fuentes, an organizer of rallies on his behalf, before the meeting, and for the first time indicating disapproval of his views.

“I had never heard of the man — I had no idea what his views were, and they weren’t expressed at the table in our very quick dinner, or it wouldn’t have been accepted,” Trump told Fox News.

The varying responses — McConnell outspoken and McCarthy evasive — reflected where each leader stands in the party. McConnell, who has tangled with Trump since the former president spread lies about winning the 2020 election that led to a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, handily headed off a Trump-backed leadership challenge earlier this month, even as Republicans failed to recapture the Senate in midterm elections.

McCarthy, on the other hand, leads a caucus that wrested the House from Democrats but by a bare majority. If he wants to be elected speaker on Jan. 3, the first day of the new Congress, he needs the vote of a small but powerful faction of House Republicans who remain loyal to Trump.

Meanwhile, Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president, has called on Trump to apologize — an action Trump has always been loath to take.

“President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist., an antisemite, and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table, and I think he should apologize for it,” Pence said Monday on NewsNation, a cable network.

Pence, unfailingly loyal to Trump during the presidency, has broken with the former president since refusing to heed Trump’s pleas to illegally rig the electoral vote count on Jan. 6. The vice president, in a ceremonial role, supervises the count. A number of the rioters who breached the Capitol said they hoped to kill Pence.

A number of GOP senators, confronted by reporters in the halls of Congress as they returned from Thanksgiving break, also spoke out. “I think it’s ridiculous that he had that meeting,” said Joni Ernst of Iowa. “Just it’s ridiculous. And that’s, that’s all I’m gonna say about it. Just crazy.”

A handful of Republicans, including several who have for years criticized Trump, spoke out as soon as the meeting with Fuentes was confirmed last Friday. A few others who were close to Trump, including David Friedman, his ambassador to Israel, also spoke out to denounce the meeting.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post From McConnell to McCarthy, Republican leaders criticize Trump’s dinner with Holocaust denier appeared first on The Forward.

On Nov. 22, the U.S. Department of Defense released their Zero Trust Strategy, a new approach to countering cyberattacks. The new framework employs a “‘never trust, always verify’” mindset, deviating from the Defense Department’s previously used perimeter defense model. The strategy is prompted by the “rapid growth” of offensive cyber threats and aims to fully implement the department-wide model by fiscal year 2027.

Following the strategy’s release, all Defense Department components are required to “adopt and integrate Zero Trust capabilities, technologies, solutions, and processes across their architectures, systems, and within their budget and execution plans” and to integrate this mindset into their training processes. The document urges every member of the the department, “regardless of whether they work in technology or cybersecurity or the Human Resource department,” to develop a “Zero Trust Solution Architecture[]” using the guidelines in the strategy, including the four major strategic goals: zero trust cultural adoption, Defense Department information systems secured and defended, technology acceleration, and zero trust enablement.

You can read the strategy here or below.

An experimental Alzheimer’s disease drug from Eisai (4523.T) and Biogen (BIIB.O) slowed cognitive decline in a closely-watched trial but may carry a risk of dangerous side effects for certain patients, according to new data presented on Tuesday.

The drug, lecanemab, was associated with a type of brain swelling in 12.6% of trial patients, a side effect previously seen with similar drugs. Fourteen percent of patients had microhemorrhages in the brain – a symptom linked to two recent deaths of people receiving lecanemab in a follow-on study – and five patients suffered macrohemorrhages.

The companies said in September that the 18-month trial, which enrolled nearly 1,800 participants with early-stage Alzheimer’s, found that treatment with lecanemab reduced the rate of decline on a clinical dementia scale (CDR-SB) by 27% compared to a placebo.

“All of these amyloid-lowering drugs carry a risk for increased brain hemorrhage,” said Dr. Ronald Petersen of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “I think the primary outcomes, the secondary outcomes, the amyloid-lowering is pretty impressive.”

The trial showed no benefit on the CDR-SB measure for some patients with a genetic risk of developing the mind-wasting disease.

About 16% of trial participants had two copies (homozygous) of the APOE4 gene variant known to raise the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, 53% had one copy of the gene (heterozygous), and 31% were noncarriers.

“For that small group of homozygous patients, when it comes to CDR-SB we don’t see a signal favoring lecanemab,” Ivan Cheung, Eisai’s U.S. chairman, said in an interview. He suggested that could be because homozygous study patients who were given a placebo fared better than expected.

The APOE4 carriers did show improvement on the trial’s secondary goals, including other measures of cognition and daily function. Overall, lecanemab patients benefited by 23% to 26% compared with a placebo on these secondary trial goals.

“I believe it’s an important benefit that will justify full approval. But of course, we want a bigger benefit,” said Dr. Paul Aisen, director of the University of Southern California Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute and a co-author of the study. He said lecanemab is likely to provide greater benefit if given earlier in the disease, “before you’ve accumulated enough irreversible damage to be causing symptoms.”

Detailed data from the study were presented at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease meeting in San Francisco and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Eisai believes the trial results prove a longstanding theory that removal of sticky deposits of a protein called amyloid beta from the brains of people with early Alzheimer’s can delay advance of the debilitating disease.

At 18 months, 68% of trial participants treated with lecanemab had amyloid clearance, Eisai said.

On Sunday, the journal Science reported the death of a 65-year-old woman who was being treated with lecanemab. After suffering a stroke, the woman received a type of medicine known as tissue plasminogen activator to clear blood clots and suffered a brain hemorrhage.

Earlier this year, Stat reported that an 87-year-old man in the study, who was on the blood thinner Eliquis, also developed a brain hemorrhage and died.

Eisai said it believes that the two deaths “cannot be attributed to lecanemab.”

Cheung said Eisai has protocols in place for monitoring brain swelling and sees no need for restrictions on which patients might be eligible for lecanemab treatment.

Dr. Howard Fillit, chief science officer at the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, said doctors always balance the benefits and risks of therapies. “Currently, I would hesitate to give this drug to someone on blood thinners,” he said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is slated to decide by Jan. 6 whether to approve lecanemab under its “accelerated” review program, which requires proof that a drug can impact a biomarker associated with a disease, such as reduction of amyloid beta in the brain.

Regardless of that decision, Cheung said Eisai plans to soon thereafter file for standard FDA approval of the drug, based on its recent efficacy and safety data. The company also plans to seek approval in Europe and Japan.

Related Galleries:

(NewsNation) — The crime scene in Moscow, Idaho, is active again as the search for the killer in a quadruple murder enters a third week. Police had the cars of the victims towed from the house Tuesday to a secure location where they can perform further processing for evidence.

The action comes as new details emerge from prosecutors and police about the case.

Unfortunately, the investigation has not seen much progress with the suspect still at large. Prosecutor Bill Thompson said investigators still have not identified a person or persons of interest in the murders of Ethan Chapin, 20; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Kaylee Goncalves, 21. 

“I think it’s fair to say that there have been people of interest to the investigators and everyone that they’ve identified so far they’ve been able to exonerate. Perhaps, exonerate isn’t the best word. But they’ve been able to eliminate them as being an actual suspect. And we do not have a name of a person or persons who are actual suspects. That’s what they’re focusing on still,” Thompson said.

He added: “I’m not aware of any single person with a name that we’re focusing on, the investigators are focusing on.”

Thompson believes the case could take a while or break open at any time. It’s news of uncertainty that members of the community and family of the victims obviously do not want to hear.

There has been hope that police were making significant progress behind the scenes and that they may have seen a suspect on surveillance video. NewsNation is told that’s not the case.

On Wednesday, there will be a vigil for the victims at the University of Idaho. Some students have safety concerns about the vigil.

Idaho State Police addressed speculation that the killer could attend the vigil.

“There’s been speculation about that. We understand that there is community concern and fear. What I can say is that our detectives are on top of their game. We recognize there’s potential contingencies for kind of everything, and so we’re working on that,” Aaron Snell, communications director with Idaho State Police, said.

Many students NewsNation has spoken with said they came back to Moscow to attend the vigil, but they plan to return to their hometowns and continue their classes online.

Investigators believe this was a targeted crime. Prosecutors say they do not have any evidence of which victim was specifically targeted, but they feel the house in general was targeted.

(NewsNation) — A record-breaking number of migrant encounters is prompting the Department of Homeland Security to reroute U.S. air marshals to the southern border.

Customs and Border Protection logged more than 2.3 million encounters in the 2022 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. More than 230,000 encounters were reported in October, a jump from about 165,000 the same month last year.

Confirming the deployment of air marshals to the southern border, the TSA said it was “grateful for their work” in supporting CBP personnel.

“The deployment of Federal Air Marshals to execute (the) DHS mission at the southwest border on a reimbursable basis is temporary,” the TSA said in a statement. “At the same time, our expert Federal Air Marshal Service workforce continues their important work in transportation security.”

A NewsNation source within the Federal Air Marshal Service said reports suggesting that only 1% of flights now have an air marshal onboard “seems a little extreme.”

This isn’t the first time this has happened. DHS requested air marshals be sent to the border during a surge in 2019, when encounters exceeded 850,000, only a fraction of the numbers in the last fiscal year.

It comes as the Border Patrol has doubled its hiring incentive from $10,000 to $20,000 for new recruits. DHS has also created a volunteer force of workers to help with daily duties at the soft sided facilities along the border.

(NewsNation) — Newly unsealed court records detail how a cellphone video and unspent bullet led officers to arrest a man they interviewed five years earlier in connection with the deaths of two Indiana teens.

A judge on Tuesday released a redacted version of an affidavit that outlines why police suspected 50-year-old Delphi man Richard Allen in connection with the deaths of Abby Williams and Libby German. NewsNation reviewed a copy of the affidavit that was obtained by its Indianapolis affiliate WXIN and posted to the local station’s website.

Officers arrested Allen last month — more than five years after police began their investigation. Allen faces two counts of murder stemming from the deaths of Williams, 13, and German, 14.

Investigators tied Allen to the case, in part, after identifying an unspent .40 caliber bullet less than two feet from one of the girls’ bodies. Lab analysis later confirmed the same bullet had been cycled through a pistol that Allen purchased in 2001 and which police recovered from his home early last month, according to the affidavit.

NewsNation left a message for Allen’s lead attorney Bradley Rozzi, who could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.

German and Williams went for a walk together Feb. 13, 2017, on the Monon High Bridge and never returned. Their bodies were found on a community hiking trail the next day.

A video discovered on German’s phone showed that she and Williams came across a man on the bridge at 2:13 p.m. As he approached, one of the girls could be heard on the video mentioning the word “gun.” The man then said “Guys, down the hill,” police have said.

The video ends as the girls walked down the hill, according to the affidavit.

Police now say they believe that man was Allen and that no witnesses recalled seeing him on the trail after 2:13 p.m. “because he was in the woods” with the girls.

Allen was among the trail visitors that day whom police interviewed early on. During his 2017 interview, Allen allegedly told investigators he was on the trail between 1:30 and 3:30 p.m. and claimed to have been on another bridge when he saw three females, according to the affidavit.

Those girls told police they remembered passing by a man whom they described as “kind of creepy.” One of the girls tried to say “Hi,” but the man didn’t respond and instead “glared at them,” according to the affidavit.

Another woman told police she saw a “muddy and bloody” man walking west on Count Road just before 4 p.m. The man appeared to have “gotten into a fight,” she said, according to the affidavit.

During a second interview with police on Oct. 13, 2022, Allen disclosed to police that he had firearms at his Delphi home, including a .40 caliber Sig Sauer pistol.

Officers used a warrant to search Allen’s home over the course of the next week and confirmed the bullet found at the scene had been cycled through Allen’s pistol, according to the affidavit.

Allen, who told police that he never let anyone borrow his gun, said he had no explanation for how a bullet linked to his weapon might have ended up at the scene.

He denied knowing either girl and said he was not involved in their deaths.

Allen’s next court appearance is scheduled for Feb. 17 in Carroll County, Indiana, online court records show.

As Palmer Report has warned it would — Donald Trump’s rage is getting darker, more malevolent, and more openly insane. And this weekend, smoldering with the unhinged anger of the abandoned, Trump took to his toy truth social. Using the caps lock, Trump vented his furies and frustrations about Jack Smith.

And, showing his increasing desperation, Trump decided to launch a new attack — on Jack Smith’s name. This is not a joke. “Jack Smith (nice soft name, isn’t it,”) Trump wrote, adding that Smith is a “political hit man” who is compromised.”

Trump’s ramblings also included insulting Former president Obama and Hunter Biden. It was indeed a meltdown for the ages. And in my opinion, this shows Trump’s inner knowledge that he will soon be indicted. Innocent people do not act this way. Normal people do not act this way.

And if Donald Trump actually thinks he can INTIMIDATE Jack Smith, he is loonier than I thought. Smith is not a guy who scares easily. I suspect he doesn’t scare at all. But part of Trump’s fury may come from the fact that he has been abandoned.

He announced his campaign, and (most) of his children were not even there. Ivanka said she has no intention of being involved. Few have endorsed him. Every day articles are pointing to an imminent indictment. So I am guessing the traitor feels abandoned right now. That would account for his strange dinner companions.

That would also account for his mad ramblings on Truth-Social. Another thing Trump called for was for the Supreme Court leaker to be turned in. Good luck with THAT one. There were more insane diatribes, but who wants to hear about them?

The point is — Trump cannot seem to shut up. He is doing more and more damage to his case, but it appears he doesn’t care. Or perhaps he’s just given up and has decided to wallow in the tired victimhood of the abandoned.

The post Donald Trump sounds like he isn’t going to make it appeared first on Palmer Report.