Politics
Trump aims to clinch deal with China’s Xi during Asia trip
- Trump’s five-day trip spans Malaysia, Japan, South Korea.
- US president likely to attend Asean summit in Malaysia.
- Taiwan issue to be raised during talks with Xi: Trump
US President Donald Trump will test his deal-making capabilities on a trip to Asia, a region battered by his hardball trade policies, while doubts hang over his highly anticipated meeting with China’s Xi Jinping.
Trump, who left Washington on Friday night, is set for a five-day trip to Malaysia, Japan and South Korea, his first to the region and longest journey abroad since taking office in January.
The Republican leader hopes to pile up trade, critical mineral and ceasefire deals before turning to the toughest challenge, a face-to-face with Xi on Thursday in South Korea.
Trump is also working to maintain the signature foreign policy achievement of his second term, a fragile ceasefire he helped to strike in the Israel-Gaza conflict, while the Russian war in Ukraine rages and a trade war with China shows little sign of ending.
Washington and Beijing have hiked tariffs on each other’s exports and threatened to cut off trade in critical minerals and technologies altogether.
The trip was formally announced by the White House on Thursday. Details remain in flux, including the meeting between leaders of the world’s two largest economies.
Neither side expects a breakthrough that would restore terms of trade that existed before Trump’s second-term inauguration in January, according to a person familiar with the conversations. Instead, talks between the two sides to prepare for the meeting focused on managing disagreements and modest improvements.
An interim agreement could include limited relief on tariffs, an extension of current rates, or China committing to buy US-made soybeans and Boeing airplanes. Beijing reneged on similar promises in a 2020 deal with Trump.
Washington could let more high-end computer chips flow to Beijing, which in turn could loosen controls on rare earth magnets that have angered Trump.
Or, nothing could come of the talks at all.
On Wednesday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump-Xi talk would be a “pull-aside,” suggesting nothing formal. Trump later told reporters the two would have “a pretty long meeting,” allowing them to “work out a lot of our questions and our doubts and our tremendous assets together.”
China has not confirmed a meeting is planned.
Trump set to visit three countries
Mira Rapp-Hooper, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Biden administration official, said Trump’s Asia policy has been defined by intense pressure on countries’ trade policies and defence spending.
“The high-level question on this trip is really, who does the United States stand with, and what does it stand for,” she said.
Trump is expected at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, which starts Sunday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
There, he could oversee the signing of a ceasefire deal between Thailand and Cambodia. The deal would formalise an agreement that ended the worst fighting in years between the two countries in July, though it falls short of a comprehensive peace deal. During his second term in office, Trump has branded himself as a global peacemaker.
After that stop, Trump will head to Japan to meet Sanae Takaichi, the newly elected prime minister. Takaichi is expected to affirm plans by her predecessor to hike military spending and to make $550 billion in Trump-directed investments in the US
Then, in Busan, South Korea, Trump plans to meet Xi ahead of an international trade summit. Trump is set to return to Washington before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ forum gets underway, according to the schedule announced by the White House on Thursday.
Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on Chinese imports to a total of some 155% from November 1 if they cannot strike a deal. That would almost certainly provoke a reaction from Beijing and end a truce that paused tit-for-tat hikes.
Beyond trade, the two leaders are expected to discuss Taiwan, a long-running US-China irritant, and Russia, a Chinese ally now subject to expanded US sanctions over the war in Ukraine.
“There’s no intent from the US side to discuss other issues,” aside from China’s trade, export controls and its purchases of Russian oil, according to a US official, who said Trump would be prepared to reiterate previous responses if Xi raised other topics.
Before departing the White House on Friday for the trip, Trump told reporters he expected the Taiwan issue to be raised during his talks with Xi.
Trump also said he will likely raise the issue of releasing Jimmy Lai, the founder of the now-defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily. Lai is serving a prison sentence in Hong Kong under Beijing-imposed national security laws.
“It’s on my list. I’m going to ask … We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters.
Deal or no deal
It was not clear if Trump would try to resume trade negotiations with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is also travelling in Asia, after abruptly cutting off talks. The two “will likely see each other” on Wednesday at a dinner with other leaders, another official said.
Trump told reporters that he doesn’t plan on meeting with Carney and said he was “satisfied with the deal we have.”
Trump is also trying to close trade deals with Malaysia and India, while shoring up a deal that has already been struck with South Korea.
US and South Korean relations have been strained by Seoul’s concerns over the $350 billion investment in US companies sought by Trump and the deportations of the country’s foreign workers.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung wants Trump to pursue peace with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. US officials considered, but never confirmed, a trip to the demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas, according to another person familiar with the discussions. Another US official said on Friday that no Kim-Trump meeting was on the schedule for the trip.
Trump said contacting North Korea’s secluded society is challenging and told reporters, “If you want to put out the word, I’m open to it. You know, they don’t have a lot of telephone service.”
- Indian envoy summoned to express “grave concern”, says ministry.
- India dismissed reports of vandalism as “misleading propaganda”.
- Bangladesh-India ties deteriorate since ex-PM Hasina fled New Delhi.
DHAKA: Bangladesh on Tuesday summoned the top Indian envoy as fresh protests erupted outside its high commission in New Delhi over the mob lynching of a Hindu worker in Dhaka.
The garment worker was accused of blasphemy and lynched on December 18 as anti-India sentiment rises in the neighbouring majority Muslim nation. Seven suspects have been arrested over the killing.
On Tuesday, hundreds of demonstrators converged near Bangladesh’s High Commission in New Delhi waving saffron flags and banners, including one that read: “Stop Killing Hindus in Bangladesh”.
“Hindus are warning Bangladesh that it is taking the wrong approach,” said Puneet Gautam, 37, a protester and member of the right-wing Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) organisation.
VHP members and security personnel clashed outside Dhaka’s outpost as the crowd shoved its way through yellow metal barricades around 300 metres from the building.
Earlier on Tuesday, Bangladesh’s foreign ministry had summoned Indian High Commissioner Pranay Verma to express “grave concern” over previous protests outside its visa centres.
In its statement, the ministry cited “regrettable incidents” and vandalism outside its visa centres in New Delhi and Siliguri last week. India has dismissed reports of vandalism as “misleading propaganda”.
Ties between the neighbours have deteriorated since ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina fled the pro-democracy uprising last year and sought refuge in India.
India says it is still considering Dhaka’s requests to extradite Hasina, who was sentenced to death in absentia for orchestrating a deadly crackdown on the uprising.
Bangladesh has been in political turmoil since the end of Hasina’s rule, with violence marring the campaigning ahead of next year’s election.
This month, parliamentary hopeful and vocal India critic Sharif Osman Hadi was shot by masked assailants in Dhaka, with unconfirmed reports suggesting his attackers might have fled to India.
The killing set off protests in Dhaka with arsonists torching several buildings, including two major newspapers deemed to favour India as well as a prominent cultural institution.
Mobs also pelted stones at the Indian High Commission in the port city of Chattogram, where India has since suspended visa services.
On Monday, Dhaka temporarily suspended visa services in Delhi.
Russia has urged Delhi and Dhaka to mend fences.
“The sooner this happens, the better,” Russian Ambassador to Bangladesh, Alexander G Khozin, was quoted as saying in the Dhaka Tribune.
An investigative reporter best known for exposing fraud at Silicon Valley blood-testing startup Theranos sued Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Perplexity on Monday for using copyrighted books without permission to train their artificial intelligence systems.
New York Times reporter and “Bad Blood” author John Carreyrou filed the lawsuit in California federal court with five other writers, accusing the AI companies of pirating their books and feeding them into the large language models (LLMs) that power the companies’ chatbots.
The lawsuit is one of several copyright cases brought by authors and other copyright owners against tech companies over the use of their work in AI training. The case is the first to name xAI as a defendant.
Spokespeople for the defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.
Unlike other pending cases, the writers are not seeking to band together in a larger class action – a type of lawsuit they said favours defendants by allowing them to negotiate a single settlement with many plaintiffs.
“LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates,” the complaint said.
Anthropic reached the first major settlement in an AI-training copyright dispute in August, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to a class of authors who said the company pirated millions of books.
The new lawsuit said class members in that case will receive “a tiny fraction (just 2%) of the Copyright Act’s statutory ceiling of $150,000” per infringed work.
Monday’s complaint was filed by attorneys at law firm Freedman Normand Friedland, including Kyle Roche, whom Carreyrou profiled in a 2023 New York Times article.
During a November hearing in the Anthropic class action, US District Judge William Alsup criticised a separate law firm Roche co-founded for gathering authors to opt out of the settlement in search of “a sweeter deal.” Roche declined to comment on Monday.
Carreyrou told the judge at a later hearing that stealing books to build its AI was Anthropic’s “original sin” and that the settlement did not go far enough.
- Bill limits most gun owners to four firearms, 10 for farmers.
- Main opposition Liberal party backs amendments.
- Three-quarters of Australians want tougher gun laws, shows poll.
Australia’s most populous state is set to pass tougher gun laws, ban the display of terrorist symbols and curb protests after the state parliament’s lower house cleared a bill late on Monday in an emergency sitting following the Bondi mass shooting.
The terrorism and other legislation amendment bill won support from the opposition Liberal Party in New South Wales state, and is expected to clear the upper house on Tuesday.
The ruling centre-left Labour government has proposed capping most individual gun licences at four firearms and allowing up to 10 for farmers.
Fifteen people were killed and dozens were injured in the mass shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi on December 14, a shock attack that has prompted calls for tougher gun laws and stronger action against antisemitism.
Police said one alleged gunman, Sajid Akram, 50, who was shot dead by officers, owned six firearms. His 24-year-old son Naveed, faces 59 charges, including murder and terrorism.
Although Australia tightened gun laws after a 1996 shooting that killed 35 people, a police firearms registry showed more than 70 people in New South Wales, which includes Sydney, each own over 100 guns. One licence holder has 298 guns.
A Sydney Morning Herald poll on Tuesday found three-quarters of Australians want tougher gun laws. The rural-focused National Party opposed the gun reforms in New South Wales, saying the amendments would disadvantage farmers.
The federal government has also pledged reforms, including tighter gun controls and a gun buyback plan but has resisted calls to set up a royal commission, the most powerful type of government inquiry, into the attack.
Instead, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is facing mounting criticism from opponents who argue his government has not done enough to curb a rise in antisemitism, has announced an independent review of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
“We need to get to these answers quickly, and we cannot be waiting around for years, which is what a royal commission would take,” Defence Minister Richard Marles told ABC News on Tuesday.
Tariff jitters: US consumer confidence slips in December; inflation and jobs worries deepen – The Times of India
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