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      China sends dozens of warplanes towards Taiwan as US urges restraint amid military drills

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      China sent dozens of warplanes towards Taiwan for a second day of military drills on Sunday, launching simulated attacks in retaliation to the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, meeting the US House speaker during a brief visit to the US.Taiwan’s defence ministry said it was monitoring the movements of China’s missile forces, as the US said it too was on alert.China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent 70 warplanes, including fighter jets, reconnaissance craft and refuellers, into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ) on Sunday morning, according to Taiwan’s defence ministry. It did not provide a map or locations, but said 31 planes had crossed the median line – the de facto border in the Taiwan strait between Taiwan and China.The PLA had announced the immediate start to three days of drills on Saturday morning. By 7pm that evening it had sent 71 warplanes and eight ships into Taiwan’s ADIZ with almost 60 crossing the median line.Taiwan’s ministry said the activity had severely violated Indo-Pacific peace and stability, and had a negative effect on international security and economies. It urged other countries to speak out against China’s actions.Chinese state television reported that multiple units carried out simulated strikes on key targets in Taiwan and the surrounding sea. The Chinese military’s eastern theatre command put out a short animation of the simulated attacks on its WeChat account, showing missiles fired from land, sea and air into Taiwan with two of them exploding in flames as they hit their targets.A Taiwan security source told Reuters that on Saturday the Chinese drills around the Bashi channel, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines, included simulated attacks on aircraft carrier groups as well as anti-submarine drills.Last August, after a visit to Taipei by then US House speaker Nancy Pelosi, China staged war games around Taiwan including firing missiles into waters close to the island, though it has yet to announce similar drills this time.Chinese maritime authorities have issued just one notice of a live fire zone, in a small area of water near Pingtan, in the Taiwan strait. The mandatory notice warns air and seacraft to keep clear of the area, which is just a fraction of the areas designated for live fire during last year’s drills.While in Los Angeles last week, on what was officially billed a transit on her way back from Central America, Tsai met the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, despite Beijing’s warnings against the meeting.The de facto US embassy in Taiwan said on Sunday that the US was monitoring China’s drills around Taiwan closely and is “comfortable and confident” it has sufficient resources and capabilities regionally to ensure peace and stability.US channels of communication with China remain open and the US had consistently urged restraint and no change to the status quo, said a spokesperson for the American Institute in Taiwan, which serves as an embassy in the absence of formal diplomatic ties.Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in favour of Beijing in 1979 but is bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.China, which has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control, says Taiwan is the most important and sensitive issue in its relations with the US, and the topic is a frequent source of tensions.Beijing considers Tsai a separatist and has rebuffed her repeated calls for talks. Tsai says only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.China has over the past three years or so stepped up its military pressure against Taiwan, flying regular missions around Taiwan, though not in its territorial airspace or over the island itself.Chinese state media said the aircraft flown into the ADIZ this weekend were armed with live weapons.Taiwanese air force jets also typically carry live weapons when they scramble to see off Chinese incursions.Late on Saturday, Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council, which runs the coast guard, put out footage on its YouTube channel showing one of its ships shadowing a Chinese warship, though it did not give an exact location.“You are seriously harming regional peace, stability and security. Please immediately turn around and leave. If you continue to proceed we will take expulsion measures,” a coast guard officer says by radio to the Chinese ship.Other footage showed a Taiwanese warship, the Di Hua, accompanying the coast guard ship in what the coast guard officer calls a “standoff” with the Chinese warship.Still, civilian flights around Taiwan, including to Kinmen and Matsu, two groups of Taiwan-controlled islands right next to the Chinese coast, have continued as normal.In August, civilian air traffic was disrupted after China announced effective no-fly zones in several areas close to Taiwan where it was firing missiles.Meanwhile the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said in an interview published on Sunday that Europe must not be a “follower” of either the US or China on Taiwan, saying that the bloc risks entanglement in “crises that aren’t ours”.His comments risk riling Washington and highlight divisions in the European Union over how to approach China, as the US steps up confrontation with its closest rival and Beijing draws closer to Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.“The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans must be followers and adapt ourselves to the American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction,” Macron told media as he returned on Friday from a three-day state visit to Beijing.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Unlikely Heroes review: the advisers who helped FDR shape America

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      No modern American political era has been the subject of more books than the 12 years in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. But Derek Leebaert’s personality-driven account of the life and times of our greatest president quickly convinces us there is a place for one more compelling volume.Leebaert’s formal focus is on the four people many agree were the most important deputies to FDR:
      Harry Hopkins, the “son of an itinerant harness maker from Iowa” who became the president’s number one adviser and as secretary of commerce the nation’s “largest employer”, as the New Deal fought to end the massive unemployment of the Great Depression.
      Harold Ickes, who Roosevelt “appointed out of nowhere” to be secretary of the interior, an early advocate for African Americans and Native Americans, the “first American official to be denounced by Hitler” and a “formidable war administrator” who became central to the allies’ victory in the second world war.
      Frances Perkins, secretary of labor and the first woman in the US cabinet, who made the creation of social security a condition of her employment during her job interview on the second floor of Roosevelt’s house on East 65th Street in Manhattan.
      Henry Wallace, the “foremost agronomist” in the western hemisphere who was secretary of agriculture and whose fabled intellectual strength was eventually matched by an extreme naivety about the failings of Joseph Stalin.
      Leebaert’s admirable strategy is to tell us as much about the personal struggles of these four giants as he does about their extraordinary achievements in the greatest administration of all. Part of his thesis is that they were so successful because their boss was as good at exploiting their weaknesses as he was at cultivating their strengths.Leebaert is also masterful at making his history relevant by reminding us of similarities between the challenges Roosevelt faced and issues that bedevil us today.It was during the re-election campaign in 1936 that FDR first talked about how a “concentration of wealth” had generated an “inequality of opportunity”. His more enlightened contemporaries were shocked that chief executive salaries of $100,000 towered over “the $1,200 that barely half of all families could hope for”.Leebaert immediately reminds us how much worse that problem has become in our time, when a “CEO’s job comes at a ratio of 320 to 1 for a worker’s”.There are many other echoes of our own time. We learn about Perkins’ foresight in trying to convince a young New York company, IBM, to invent a way of keeping track of state unemployment records. We are reminded that the original promoters of the America First slogan were the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, a publisher whose greediness and contempt for democracy have been perfectly replicated by Rupert Murdoch.Ickes’ personal struggles provide some of the book’s liveliest passages. First we learn that his “long wretched marriage to a rich divorcée only turned worse after he seduced his stepdaughter”. Almost as soon as he moved into his new office as secretary of the interior, Ickes began an affair with one Marguerite Moser. He dispatched Moser’s fiance to a job in the midwest, then hired his mistress at his own office as well as her female roommate. When the fiance complained that he wanted to come back to Washington, he got a job at headquarters as well.When Ickes started receiving blackmail letters about his affair, at the advice of a White House aide he used “the cruder methods of thuggish interior department investigators”. They persuaded a property manager to open the apartment of the jealous fiance, from which “carbon paper and an incriminating typewriter were removed”. The letters stopped and the fiance lost his government job – but eventually did marry Ickes’ mistress.Ickes’ defiance of convention had much more beneficial effects, as when he began his tenure by ending the segregation of Black and white employees at his department, then hired Black architects and engineers to work on some of thousands of New Deal public works projects.The scope of such efforts is suggested by the fact that in two days, Ickes authorized two of the biggest New York City transportation initiatives: the Lincoln tunnel under the Hudson river, connecting Manhattan and New Jersey, and the Triborough bridge that links three Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis was truly the era when the government worked for its citizens. The Works Progress Administration would eventually employ 9 million Americans over eight years. Between 1933 and 1940, “federal spending would double as tax revenue tripled, which included a Wealth Tax Act in 1935, which raised the top federal rate to 75%”.Also in 1935, the president signed into law his labor secretary’s signature project, the Social Security Act. The year before that, Ickes shepherded the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which ended 50 years of forced assimilation of Native Americans.The struggle to get the US into the second world war is covered with equal thoroughness in the second half of the book, including Ickes’ vital role as one of the first to identify the mortal danger posed by Hitler.Leebaert has written a panoramic history of one of the most successful eras of the US. By the end of his 432 pages, the author has made a convincing case that Roosevelt’s “fractious team of four” may well have been “the single most important to ever have shaped their country’s history”.
      Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      US domestic elections play key role in its foreign policy | Letters

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      Jonathan Freedland’s perceptive analysis of the progress/decline of Northern Ireland and Israel respectively since 1998 misses one important dynamic (Netanyahu is leading a coup against his own country. But the threat is not only to Israel, 31 March): the role the American domestic electoral cycle plays in influencing US foreign policy.I worked in Washington DC for the congressman Gary Ackerman (Democrat, Queens, New York) from 1989 to 1990. The substantial Jewish-American and Irish-American populations in his congressional district led Gary to take dramatically contrasting positions to Israel and Northern Ireland. Whereas he backed Israel’s policies without question, he also seemed to be a staunch supporter of Irish republicanism.This electoral imperative is, arguably, an important factor why US representatives who are not Irish-American have been members of the Irish caucus in Congress over the years. The importance of re-election is one reason why the Good Friday agreement is sacrosanct in Washington, and the lack of such a motive with regards to Palestinian issues hinders resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.Michael HerronLondon I always value Jonathan Freedland’s commentaries, never more so than at present, when Israel is fighting for its democratic soul. I feel anguished to see the democratic hopes and ideals of Israel’s founders torn to shreds by this far-right government.Jonathan Freedland provides a compass and wake-up call for all who care about Israel’s future, and I am grateful for that. I support the democratic movement which, hopefully, will continue to gather momentum, in Israel and among the diaspora. Elizabeth Barnell Shrewsbury, Shropshire More

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      The man who connected Bill Clinton and Gerry Adams: Politics Weekly America podcast

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      Next week, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton will arrive in Northern Ireland to join commemorations of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. Clinton is now celebrated as one of the key players behind the agreement, but he didn’t do it alone. It took years of background efforts – of secret meetings, discreet lobbying and high-risk shadow diplomacy, by people whose names we’ve never known – to convince the United States to get involved.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to one of those people, Niall O’Dowd, who tells the extraordinary story of how he built a secret channel between Clinton and the Irish republican movement

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Taiwan monitoring Chinese strike group off the coast after president meets US speaker

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      Taiwan authorities are monitoring Chinese military activity including a carrier strike group about 200 nautical miles (370km) off the main island’s coastline, after the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, met US House speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles.In the meeting, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, McCarthy stressed the urgency of arms deliveries to Taiwan, while Tsai praised the “strong and unique partnership” with the US..Taiwan’s defence minister, Chiu Kuo-cheng, said on Thursday that the island’s military was studying the carrier group, led by the Shandong aircraft carrier. Chiu said the group – a fleet of navy vessels led by an aircraft carrier – appeared to be on a training exercise and no planes had been detected taking off from the ship, but the timing was “sensitive”. He later confirmed that the US aircraft carrier Nimitz, which had been participating in joint drills with Japan and Korea in the East China Sea this week, was also in the same area as the Shandong on Thursday.The carrier group was sent to waters south-east of Taiwan’s main island on Wednesday, shortly before Tsai and McCarthy met in Los Angeles.Japan’s defence ministry confirmed it was also monitoring the strike group, which it detected 300km from Okinawa on Wednesday evening. The ministry said the Shandong was accompanied by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) frigate Liuzhou and a fast combat support ship as it travelled east towards the Philippines Sea, entering the Pacific Ocean for the first time.Separately, Japan said a PLAN guided-missile destroyer had been detected sailing between Taiwan and the Japanese island of Yonaguni, about 100km off Taiwan’s coast on Tuesday. Taiwan’s defence ministry would not confirm or comment on the detection.Taiwan’s defence ministry also reported three additional PLAN vessels and one anti-submarine helicopter operating near Taiwan in the 24 hours to Thursday morning.Chiu said a separate patrol of the Taiwan Strait announced by Chinese maritime authorities on Wednesday was not a military exercise, but appeared to be Beijing attempting to set a “new normal” in terms of enforcing their domestic law in wider maritime spaces. China’s coastguard, which comes under the command of the central military commission, claims authority to stop and inspect vessels in the area under a controversial 2021 law, though it is not believed to have done so before. The Taiwan defence ministry has instructed Taiwanese vessels, including cargo and ferry services, to not cooperate with attempts by this patrol to board and inspect them.Beijing has reacted angrily to the meeting between Taiwan’s leader and McCarthy, who is the second in line to the US presidency, accusing the pair of undermining its claim over Taiwan, conniving on “separatist” aims, and degrading China-US relations.McCarthy, a Republican who became the most senior figure to meet a Taiwanese leader on American soil in decades, was joined by a bipartisan group of US politicians who voiced support for dialogue with Taiwan amid simmering tensions with China.“We must continue the arms sales to Taiwan and make sure such sales reach Taiwan on a very timely basis,” McCarthy said at a news conference after the meeting, adding that he believed there was bipartisan agreement on this. “Second, we must strengthen our economic cooperation, particularly with trade and technology.”Beijing quickly denounced the meeting. Its foreign ministry said in statement that China will take “resolute and effective measures to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”A China defence ministry spokesperson called on the US to “stop its blatant interference in China’s internal affairs”.“We firmly oppose all forms of official interaction between the United States and Taiwan and any visit by leader of the Taiwan authorities to the United States in any name or under whatever pretext,” it said in a statement.China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, a position the government in Taipei strongly contests. Tsai says they are already a sovereign nation, and Taiwan’s future is for its people to decide.It is the second time Tsai has met the holder of the high-ranking office in less than a year, having welcomed McCarthy’s predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan in August. That visit, which took place on what China considers to be sovereign soil, provoked a stronger reaction from Beijing, including days of live-fire military exercises around Taiwan.So far, the reaction to the California meeting is far more muted. It is understood the McCarthy meeting was held on US soil instead of in Taiwan as McCarthy originally wanted, at least in part to reduce its provocativeness. On Thursday, Taiwan’s national security chief also noted the presidents of France and the European Union were currently visiting China, and “China must practice peaceful diplomacy”.McCarthy told Tsai a shared belief in democracy and freedom formed “the bedrock” of their enduring relationship.“The friendship between the people of Taiwan and America is a matter of profound importance to the free world, and it is critical to maintain economic freedom peace and regional stability,” he said.While stressing that there was no need for retaliation from China after the meeting, McCarthy also said he looked forward to, “more meeting like this in the future”.Republican Mike Gallagher, chair of the House Chinese Communist party committee, responded to China’s objections to the meeting, saying: “If the duly elected leader of one of our most important democratic partners can’t meet with American leaders on American soil, then we are merely feeding the crocodile that will eventually eat us.”Tsai’s US stops have been attended by crowds of pro- and anti-Taiwan protesters. The opposing groups scuffled outside the Ronald Reagan library, and were separated by police. Wednesday’s meeting was also attended by more than a dozen Democratic and Republican lawmakers, highlighting the bipartisan consensus in Congress when it comes to supporting Taiwan.Tsai thanked them for their “unwavering support”, which she said “reassures the people of Taiwan that we are not isolated and we are not alone”.Since 1979, the US has officially recognised the People’s Republic of China as the sole government of the “one China” that is mainland China and Taiwan. But the US also sells arms to Taiwan to deter any military advances from Beijing, something that McCarthy said should continue.He drew an explicit comparison between Hong Kong and Taiwan, saying that when China “reneged” on its promise to allow Hong Kong autonomy for 50 years after the handover to Chinese rule, “that harmed [Beijing’s reputation] around the world”.Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a thinktank, warned that the meeting could accelerate the downward spiral of US-China relations. He warned that it could trigger a “show of resolve” from Beijing, which could itself “drive Washington to move even closer to Taiwan in order to demonstrate its own resolve”.On Wednesday the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told Euronews that a move by China to annex Taiwan would have far reaching repercussions “for quite literally every country on Earth”.Chi Hui Lin and Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Afghans resettled in US fear being sent back as pathway to legal status stalls in Congress

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      On the day he turned 24 earlier this month, Asmatullah checked the status of his asylum request online, hoping that an approval would be his birthday gift.When he realized that his case was still pending, he took a deep breath and looked up at the California sky, more than 7,000 miles away from the city he grew up in but that he fears returning to.It’s been more than 18 months since Asmatullah and some members of his family rushed to Kabul’s besieged international airport after Taliban fighters stormed into the capital and retook control of Afghanistan.“It was crowded and I saw a little boy that lost his parents,” he told the Guardian, speaking in a park in Sacramento during a break between rainstorms last week. “I grabbed him and started yelling ‘whose son is this?’ whose son is this?’”Asmatullah called out for help at one of the airport’s busiest gates, where Afghan citizens and US military were all trying to deal with the chaos, but to no avail.In the crush and mortal danger from so many directions, he knew he needed to get himself out. Asmatullah managed to board an evacuation flight after showing an American soldier a certificate his father had received for his work as a civil engineer in several US military construction projects in the country, which would put him and his family in peril as Afghanistan came back under Taliban control.Asmatullah asked for his last name to be withheld out of concerns for the safety of his father, who remains in Afghanistan.The plane took off and he, his mother, sister and two brothers escaped, flown first to Qatar for vetting then the US via the government’s humanitarian parole system, a special immigration authority that the Biden administration used to resettle tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees, dubbed Operation Allies Welcome.Within six days of the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, Asmatullah arrived in Pennsylvania. He was later taken to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, where he was offered temporary housing and medical care for four months until he was able to travel to Sacramento, home to several relatives who had emigrated to California following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, after Al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks on the US on September 11.Asmatullah was given permission to live and work in the country legally for two years.That period runs out this September and he’s increasingly concerned that if his asylum request is not approved he – along with tens of thousands of other Afghan evacuees in the US – is at risk of losing his work permit and protection from deportation and he dreads the prospect of having to return to a Taliban-controlled nation gripped by humanitarian crises.But nearly two years since the fall of Kabul, only a small percentage of evacuated Afghans have managed to secure permanent legal status in the US’s clogged immigration system.“We are strongly pushing for an extension of parole status. This is very much within the power of the [Biden] administration,” said Tara Rangarajan, executive director of the the International Rescue Committee in Northern California, a resettlement organization that assisted 11,612 of the more than 78,000 Afghan refugees relocated to the US as part of Operation Allies Welcome.“There’s an unbelievable mental instability of not knowing what the future holds. It’s our responsibility as a country to help ensure their stability,” she added.In the Sacramento area alone, IRC has helped resettle 1,164 Afghans.Asmatullah watched his little brother ride a bike near a tennis court in busy Swanston Park, in a part of Sacramento with a growing Afghan population, in the county with the highest concentration of Afghan immigrants nationwide.“Sacramento feels like home and I love it,” he said. “Here, we are not concerned about getting killed, I just want to worry about getting an education.”Nearby is bustling Fulton Avenue, notable for its Afghan stores and restaurants, where Asmatullah and his family enjoy spending free time, he said.Asmatullah’s ambition in the US is to become a computer scientist and he recently enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes at American River College, a Sacramento public community college.His 14-year-old sister is one of more than 2,000 Afghan refugee children in the local public school district and he said she’s eager to pursue higher education, an opportunity now out of reach for women in Afghanistan.He also hopes that his asylum request is approved so that he can apply for a green card and ultimately find a legal path for his father to come to the US and be reunited with the family.His voice cracked as he began talking about concerns for his father’s safety back in Afghanistan and he quickly asked to switch topics.Meanwhile, legislation that would help Asmatullah and thousands of other Afghans out of their nerve-racking wait with a clear pathway to permanent residency, the bipartisan Afghan Adjustment Act, stalled in Congress last year.The law would provide the evacuees a sure pathway to permanent US residency. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar called it “the right and necessary thing to do”, while Republican Lisa Murkowski called on the US to “keep our promises” adding she was proud of legislation designed “to give innocent Afghans hope for a safer, brighter future”.But Chuck Grassley, the Senate judiciary committee’s top Republican, blocked the bill, seeking tougher vetting.Almost 4,500 Afghans have received permanent residency through the Special Immigrant Visa program for those who directly assisted the US war effort, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).And as of 12 March this year, USCIS has received approximately 15,000 asylum applications from Afghans who arrived under Operation Allies Welcome, but has so far approved only 1,400, according to agency data provided to the Guardian.Asmatullah said he always knew that starting again in America from scratch would be a challenge.But he said: “I just want to show my siblings that a better life is possible.” More

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      Defeating the Dictators review: prescriptions for democratic health

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      Charles Dunst’s “aspirational” book about how democracies can do a better job of competing with autocracies is bursting with statistics and lots of common sense.The statistics are there to convince us that many autocracies spend much more sensibly than the world’s richest democracies do. A few examples:
      China has increased spending on education as a percentage of its gross domestic product by 75% since 1975.
      In 2018, 15-year-old Chinese students had the highest average scores in the world on tests for math, science and reading, followed by Singapore, Macao and Hong Kong – “none of which is a democracy”.
      Citizens of Singapore have an average life expectancy of around 84 and an infant mortality rate of two per 1,000 – “better than almost every democracy”.
      Singapore achieves that good health by spending just 4% of its GDP on healthcare – versus 17% of GDP spent in the US, which gets much less impressive results.
      Dunst’s commonsense observations include ideas like these: weak safety nets damage citizens’ confidence in their governments (and therefore should be strengthened); bad healthcare systems cost more money in the long run than good ones; and investments in infrastructure repay themselves many times over.Dunst is deputy director of research and analytics at The Asia Group and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Looking at his own country, he is heartened that Joe Biden managed to push through a $1tn infrastructure bill, but then points out that’s only 1.25% of GDP, compared with the 8.5% of GDP China spent on infrastructure every year from 1992 to 2011.“China today spends more on infrastructure than the United States and Europe do combined,” Dunst writes.By spending more on things that actually matter, countries that oppress their citizens in other ways can engender remarkable levels of confidence in government.“In 2019,” Dunst writes, “nearly 90% of Chinese reported trust in their government … as did almost 70% of Singaporeans.”Practically the only good news for democracies in this story is the fact that almost every major economy faces similar declining birth rates. Most dramatically, China has gone from 2.25 children per woman in 1990 to just 1.3 today. No major economy is producing enough children to maintain its current population.At the same time, since 2017, China’s net migration rate – the number of immigrants minus the number of emigrants – “has worsened every year”.China lost about 335,000 people in 2022 alone.Democracies like the US, Germany and the UK all posted positive net migration rates of at least 2.7%. These numbers support one of Dunst’s more optimistic notions. While “China and others may promise economic stability”, democracies remain attractive because they offer “more freedom, equality and opportunities to pursue happiness”.Dunst argues that one of the biggest challenges for democracies is to convince their populations of the benefits of immigration, instead of listening to politicians like Donald Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France, who have been so successful in reviving ancient xenophobia.Dunst also thinks education systems in places like the US and Britain need to become much more democratic. At Harvard, the acceptance rate for the children of alumni is 30%, versus 6% for the general population. In 2021, “nearly a third of legacy freshmen hailed from households making more than half a million dollars”.When non-connected parents “see the underperforming children of top financiers and politicians vaunted into top schools and jobs because of connections, these parents will rebel against the system that allowed this to happen … They will vote for the would-be dictator.”Dunst thinks we must offer more scholarships “for people studying science and technology … more funding for vocational schools” and “constant skill training” for the workforce.He wisely suggests that a “key reform would be to make non-regular [American] workers eligible for high-quality health insurance that travels with them from job to job”. But he is also bizarrely opposed to universal healthcare – the kind that is the norm all over Europe. Suddenly, he sounds like a flack for a greedy pharmaceutical company, writing that such a system “could undermine the competitive attitude that makes the United States one of the world’s leaders in medical innovation”.America’s continuing failure to provide decent health insurance to its most needy citizens is hardly a spur to innovation. And the fact we are the only major democracy with a healthcare system dominated by the profit motive isn’t mentioned here at all.Dunst is almost entirely silent about the explosion of fake facts on the internet, which makes it so much more difficult to sell the commonsense ideas he pushes for. Another problem is his failure to acknowledge that America now has only one major political party that is genuinely interested in solving any of these fundamental problems, while the other prefers to cater to its base with attacks on wokeness or any prosecutor who thinks it makes sense to prosecute a former president for any of his dozens of alleged crimes.This is the fundamental problem facing American democracy now. As long as the Republicans control the House of Representatives or any other part of the government, the chances of enacting any of the proposals Dunst thinks necessary to help defeat the dictators – serious educational reform, immigration reform and additional infrastructure projects – are exactly zero. More

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      TikTok CEO grilled for over five hours on China, drugs and teen mental health

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      The chief executive of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, was forced to defend his company’s relationship with China, as well as the protections for its youngest users, at a testy congressional hearing on Thursday that came amid a bipartisan push to ban the app entirely in the US over national security concerns.The hearing got off to an intense start, with members of the committee hammering on Chew’s connection to executives at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, whom lawmakers say have ties to the Chinese Communist party. The committee members asked how frequently Chew was in contact with them, and questioned whether the company’s proposed solution, called Project Texas, would offer sufficient protection against Chinese laws that require companies to make user data accessible to the government.Lawmakers have long held concerns over China’s control over the app, concerns Chew repeatedly tried to resist throughout the hearing. “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” he said in prepared testimony.But Chew’s claims of independence were undermined by a Wall Street Journal story published just hours before the hearing that said China would strongly oppose any forced sale of the company. Responding for the first time to Joe Biden’s threat of a national ban unless ByteDance sells its shares, the Chinese commerce ministry said such a move would involve exporting technology from China and thus would have to be approved by the Chinese government.Lawmakers also questioned Chew over the platform’s impact on mental health, particularly of its young users. The Republican congressman Gus Bilirakis shared the story of Chase Nasca, a 16-year-old boy who died by suicide a year ago by stepping in front of a train. Nasca’s parents, who have sued ByteDance, claiming Chase was “targeted” with unsolicited suicide-related content, appeared at the hearing and grew emotional as Bilirakis told their son’s story.“I want to thank his parents for being here today, and allowing us to show this,” Bilirakis said. “Mr Chew, your company destroyed their lives.”Driving home concerns about young users, Congresswoman Nanette Barragán asked Chew about reports that he does not let his own children use the app.“At what age do you think it would be appropriate for a young person to get on TikTok?” she said.Chew confirmed his own children were not on TikTok but said that was because in Singapore, where they live, there is not a version of the platform for users under the age of 13. In the US there is a version of TikTok in which the content is curated for a users under 13.“Our approach is to give differentiated experiences for different age groups, and let the parents have conversations with their children to decide what’s best for their family,” he said.The appearance of Chew before the House energy and commerce committee, the first ever by a TikTok chief executive, represents a major test for the 40-year-old, who has remained largely out of the spotlight.Throughout the hearing, Chew stressed TikTok’s distance from the Chinese government, kicking off his testimony with an emphasis on his own Singaporean heritage. Chew talked about Project Texas – an effort to move all US data to domestic servers – and said the company was deleting all US user data that is backed up to servers outside the US by the end of the year.Some legislators expressed that Project Texas was too large an undertaking, and would not tackle concerns about US data privacy soon enough. “I am concerned that what you’re proposing with Project Texas just doesn’t have the technical capability of providing us the assurances that we need,” the California Republican Jay Obernolte, a software engineer, said.At one point, Tony Cárdenas, a Democrat from California, asked Chew outright if TikTok is a Chinese company. Chew responded that TikTok is global in nature, not available in mainland China, and headquartered in Singapore and Los Angeles.Neal Dunn, a Republican from Florida, asked with similar bluntness whether ByteDance has “spied on American citizens” – a question that came amid reports the company accessed journalists’ information in an attempt to identify which employees were leaking information. Chew responded that “spying is not the right way to describe it”.The hearing comes three years after TikTok was formally targeted by the Trump administration with an executive order prohibiting US companies from doing business with ByteDance. Biden revoked that order in June 2021, under the stipulation that the US committee on foreign investment conduct a review of the company. When that review stalled, Biden demanded TikTok sell its Chinese-owned shares or face a ban in the US.This bipartisan nature of the backlash was remarked upon several times during the hearing, with Cárdenas pointing out that Chew “has been one of the few people to unite this committee”.Chew’s testimony, some lawmakers said, was reminiscent of Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in an April 2018 hearing to answer for his own platform’s data-privacy issues – answers many lawmakers were unsatisfied with. Cárdenas said: “We are frustrated with TikTok … and yes, you keep mentioning that there are industry issues that not only TikTok faces but others. You remind me a lot of [Mark] Zuckerberg … when he came here, I said he reminds me of Fred Astaire: a good dancer with words. And you are doing the same today. A lot of your answers are a bit nebulous, they’re not yes or no.”Chew, a former Goldman Sachs banker who has helmed the company since March 2021, warned users in a video posted to TikTok earlier in the week that the company was at a “pivotal moment”.“Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok,” he said, adding that the app now has more than 150 million active monthly US users. “That’s almost half the US coming to TikTok.”TikTok has battled legislative headwinds since its meteoric rise began in 2018. Today, a majority of teens in the US say they use TikTok – with 67% of people ages 13 to 17 saying they have used the app and 16% of that age group saying they use it “almost constantly”, according to the Pew Research Center.This has raised a number of concerns about the app’s impact on young users’ safety, with self-harm and eating disorder-related content spreading on the platform. TikTok is also facing lawsuits over deadly “challenges” that have gone viral on the app.TikTok has introduced features in response to such criticisms, including automatic time limits for users under 18.Some tech critics have said that while TikTok’s data collection does raise concerns, its practices are not much different from those of other big tech firms.“Holding TikTok and China accountable are steps in the right direction, but doing so without holding other platforms accountable is simply not enough,” said the Tech Oversight Project, a technology policy advocacy organization, in a statement.“Lawmakers and regulators should use this week’s hearing as an opportunity to re-engage with civil society organizations, NGOs, academics and activists to squash all of big tech’s harmful practices.” More