Millions of people remain without power after ferocious ice storms blasted Texas with freezing temperatures and heavy snow resulting in treacherous travel conditions.
At least 3,000 flights have been cancelled across the United States and two people have died as a result of the severe weather.
United States President Joe Biden declared an emergency for the state in order to boost local response efforts with federal aid.
15 February 2021
Author: Editorial Board, ANU
The downward spiral in US–China relations during the Trump administration prompted many to assert that the United States and China were entering a ‘new Cold War’. This framing was partly the result of the Trump administration’s confrontational stance on China, and the tendency of senior officials such as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cast the relationship as a fundamental competition between the forces of democracy and authoritarianism.
This adversarial view of US–China relations always extended far beyond the Trump administration, and has now taken firm hold albeit with some notable exceptions within much of Washington’s political, scholarly, and think tank communities.
February 14, 2021
WASHINGTON (AP) United States (US) President Joe Biden met with a bipartisan group of governors and mayors at the White House on Friday as part of his push to give financial relief from the coronavirus pandemic to state and local governments a clear source of division with Republican lawmakers who view the spending as wasteful.
As part of a USD1.9 trillion coronavirus package, Biden wants to send USD350 billion to state and local governments and tribal governments. While Republicans in Congress have largely objected to this initiative, Biden’s push has some GOP support among governors and mayors.
“You folks are all on the front lines and dealing with the crisis since day one,” Biden said at the start of the Oval Office meeting. “They’ve been working on their own in many cases.”
Biden confronts Xi over rights, security, economic practices 1 minute read
(Update 1: adds Xi comments in pars 4-6, updates dateline, minor edits)
Washington/Beijing, Feb 10 (efe-epa).- United States President Joe Biden on Wednesday (Thursday Beijing time) spoke to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for the first time as leader and expressed concern over a range of issues including human rights, regional security and Beijing’s economic practices.
The White House reported that Biden “underscored his fundamental concerns about Beijing’s coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.”
Incidents of violence and restrictions towards journalists and media workers covering protests in Myanmar have been documented, as hundreds of thousands of people demonstrate against military rule following the coup on February 1. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns the threats to press freedom violations and calls for safeguards to protect the safety of reporters admid the protests.