“Secretary of State Antony Blinken wants to reschedule his date with China. Beijing is giving him the cold shoulder.
The Biden administration called off Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing in February after a Chinese spy balloon traversed U.S. skies, but has since been trying to restart high-level talks. That includes rescheduling the Blinken visit, and setting up other trips by top U.S. officials and a phone call between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, a current U.S. official and a former State Department official said.
But China is rebuffing the U.S. efforts”
…
“China also is pressing back particularly hard on the proposals for a Xi-Biden call.”
The U.S. Defense Industrial Base Is Not Prepared for a Possible Conflict with China Seth G. Jones. CSIS. https://features.csis.org/preparing-the-US-industrial-base-to-deter-conflict-with-China/ Affordable Mass: The Need for a Cost-Effective PGM Mix for Great Power Conflict Mark A. Aunzinger. 2021 11. Mitchell Institute. https://mitchellaerospacepower.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Affordable_Mass_Policy_Paper_31-FINAL.pdf Ukraine War
“U.S.-Nicaragua links began unraveling more than a decade ago as it became clear that Ortega — a former rebel who fought another Nicaraguan dictator — wouldn’t leave the presidency. Relations worsened over the past five years as Ortega and Murillo strengthened their grip.
The Trump administration imposed economic sanctions and other penalties, mainly targeting individuals such as Murillo, in 2018, a year when the regime brutally cracked down on widespread protests.
In June 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told his Nicaraguan counterpart that the United States could ease up on those penalties if Nicaragua were to move back toward democracy and improve its human rights record. (Abuses such as torture and extrajudicial executions in Nicaragua may constitute crimes against humanity, a U.N. investigative panel said earlier this month.)
Blinken’s message failed to sway the ruling power couple. Over the next few months, Ortega and Murillo imprisoned more dissidents ahead of an election.
The U.S. responded by slapping sanctions on a Nicaraguan state-owned mining company and banning visas for hundreds of Nicaraguan officials and their relatives. Biden also issued orders in October that authorized his administration to impose future sanctions on various economic sectors in Nicaragua, as well as trade and investment.”
“Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s strict stance on drugs, the triads — which run global crime networks distributing chemicals needed to manufacture methamphetamine and fentanyl, among other potentially dangerous substances — often curry favor with the CCP by functioning as extralegal enforcers for the government, Felbab-Brown said. The CCP in turn often allows them to continue their operations, though it does not control them.”
…
“Roughly 75 percent of the $100 billion cannabis market in the U.S. remains illegal, and roughly two thirds of that illicit weed is grown domestically”
…
“In California, the Department of Cannabis Control says Chinese triads have been nominally involved in illegal cannabis production for decades, but that there’s been a recent increase in the number of actors and money that may have originated in China. The DCC also said that some — but not all — of the Chinese-funded grows they’ve encountered are operated by Chinese triads.”
…
““This notion that you now have Chinese actual funding for illicit cannabis, it’s definitely new, and it cuts directly across the interests of Mexican drug trafficking groups,” said Felbab-Brown. “It’s interesting to see whether it continues growing, [and] how that’s going to affect relations between the Mexicans and the Chinese [criminal groups].””
“One of the grievances behind the Declaration of Independence itself centered on immigration. King George III, the Declaration charged, had “endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.” Volokh Conspiracy contributor Ilya Somin has noted this complaint “was aimed at a series of royal orders” that, among other things, “forbade the colonies from naturalizing aliens” and passing laws to promote migration. The regulations directly contributed to “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” the Declaration explained.
No wonder—in the colonial days, immigration was both a boon to the young America and a headache for the distant Britain. In 1700, the British Parliament “limited the colonies’ ability to grant naturalization and other group rights because it believed that colonial naturalization policies weakened English citizens’ trading positions,” according to a 2021 Cato Institute paper. After a period of liberalization, Britain cracked down on certain colonial settlement and naturalization authorities. By the beginning of the Revolutionary War, about 2.2 million people were living in the colonies—”much of that growth fueled by the 346,000 European immigrants and their descendants,” the Cato paper noted.
The Founding Fathers turned to questions of citizenship and naturalization soon after the Revolution was won. During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, delegates worried that overly harsh barriers to citizenship could prevent deserving immigrants from coming to the nation. Gouverneur Morris had proposed an amendment that would require someone to have been a citizen for 14 years before being able to serve as a senator.
It sparked a vigorous debate: James Madison said he “could never agree” to the amendment since it would “give a tincture of illiberality to the Constitution” and “discourage the most desirable class of people from emigrating to the U.S.” James Wilson, himself a nonnative, lamented that he might be “incapacitated from holding a place under the very Constitution which he had shared in the trust of making.” The delegates eventually adopted a nine-year minimum as their standard.”