Former President Barack Obama said on Sunday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, though he’s feeling relatively healthy and his wife, Michelle Obama, tested negative.

“I’ve had a scratchy throat for a couple days, but am feeling fine otherwise,” Obama said on Twitter. “Michelle and I are grateful to be vaccinated and boosted.”

Obama encouraged more Americans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, despite the declining infection rate in the U.S. There were roughly 35,000 infections on average over the past week, down sharply from mid-January when that average was closer to 800,000.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that 75.2% of U.S. adults are fully vaccinated and 47.7% of the fully vaccinated have received a booster shot. The CDC relaxed its guidelines for indoor masking in late February, taking a more holistic approach that meant the vast majority of Americans live in areas without the recommendation for indoor masking in public.
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President Joe Biden is sending his national security adviser for talks with a senior Chinese official in Rome on Monday as concerns grow that China is amplifying Russian disinformation in the Ukraine war and may help Russia evade punishment from economic sanctions.

The talks between National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Yang Jiechi will center on “efforts to manage the competition between our two countries and discuss the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine on regional and global security,” said Emily Horne, speaking for the White House National Security Council.

The White House has accused Beijing of spreading false Russian claims that Ukraine was running chemical and biological weapons labs with U.S. support. U.S. officials said China was attempting to provide cover for a potential biological or chemical weapons attack on Ukrainians by the Russian military.

Sullivan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that when Russia starts accusing other countries of preparing to launch biological or chemical attacks, “it’s a good tell that they may be on the cusp of doing it themselves.”

He also said China and other countries should not try to help Russia work around the sanctions and the U.S. has made it clear that other countries should not bail out the Russian economy. “We will ensure that neither China nor anyone else can compensate Russia for these losses,” Sullivan said.

The striking accusations about Russian disinformation and Chinese complicity came after Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova alleged with no evidence that the U.S. was financing Ukrainian chemical and biological weapons labs.

The Russian claim was echoed by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who claimed there were 26 bio-labs and related facilities in “which the U.S. Department of Defense has absolute control.” The United Nations has said it has received no information backing up such accusations.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki last week called the claims “preposterous.”

“Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them,” Psaki tweeted Wednesday night. “It’s a clear pattern.”

Sullivan, who appeared on several of the Sunday news shows before his trip, told “Face the Nation” on CBS that the Russian rhetoric on chemical and biological warfare is an indicator that in fact the Russians are getting ready to do it and try and pin the blame elsewhere and nobody should fall for that.”

The international community for years has assessed that Russia has used chemical weapons in carrying out assassination attempts against Putin detractors such as Alexei Navalny and former spy Sergei Skripal. Russia also supports the Assad government in Syria, which has used chemical weapons against its people in a decade-long civil war.

Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, CIA Director William Burns also noted grave concern that Russia might be laying the groundwork for a chemical or biological attack of its own, which it would then blame on the U.S. or Ukraine in a false flag operation.

“This is something, as all of you know very well, is very much a part of Russia’s playbook,” he said. “They’ve used these weapons against their own citizens, they’ve at least encouraged the use in Syria and elsewhere, so it’s something we take very seriously.”

China has been one of few countries to avoid criticizing the Russians for its invasion of Ukraine. China’s Xi Jinping hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin for the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, just weeks before Russia launched the Feb. 24 invasion.

During Putin’s visit to China last month, the two leaders issued a 5,000-word statement declaring “no limits” in the friendship between the two countries.

The Chinese abstained on U.N. votes censuring Russia and has criticized economic sanctions against Moscow. It has expressed its support for peace talks and offered its services as a mediator, despite questions about its neutrality and scant experience mediating international conflict.

Chinese officials have also said Washington shouldn’t be able to complain about Russia’s actions because the U.S. invaded Iraq under false pretenses. The U.S. claimed to have evidence Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction though none was ever found.

For Russia, China could be a crucial economic partner in mitigating the severe sanctions levied by the U.S, Britain, the 27-national European Union and other countries, though there are questions as to how far Beijing will go to alienate the alliance and put its own economy at risk.

The Biden administration is looking to impress on China that any efforts to ease sanctions for Russia could have ramifications for its relations with the United States and Western allies.

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sullivan said Sunday that the administration believes China knew that Putin “was planning something” before the invasion of Ukraine. But Sullivan said the Chinese government “may not have understood the full extent of it because it’s very possible that Putin lied to them the same way that he lied to Europeans and others.”

Sullivan and Yang last met for face-to-face talks in Switzerland, where Sullivan raised the Biden administration’s concerns about China’s military provocations against Taiwan, human rights abuses against ethnic minorities and efforts to squelch pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong.

That meeting set the stage for a three-hour long virtual meeting in November between Biden and Xi.

Sullivan is also to meet Luigi Mattiolo, diplomatic adviser to Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, while in Rome.
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David Hoffman remembers a time when the interests of the U.S. business community carried great weight in Washington, especially regarding U.S. economic policy toward China. Hoffman, who formerly worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, once led the firm’s technology and entertainment advisory practices in that country.

But sympathy for those interests disappeared during the administration of former President Donald Trump, Hoffman says. And it has not gotten any better under President Joe Biden.

“Business is vilified by its China presence in all respects,” said Hoffman, now at The Conference Board, a global business and research think tank.

An annual survey released this week by the American Chamber of Commerce in China found China remains a “top global priority,” but that many businesses are not planning on any major investments there this year.

Geo-political challenges

Sino-U.S. relations continue to be strained and further exacerbated by China’s close ties with Russia and Beijing’s desire to stay neutral on the war in Ukraine.

Even before Russian troops entered Ukraine, U.S. regulators and lawmakers had been weighing policies aimed at curtailing business and investment between the two nations over a range of competitive, national security and human rights concerns. China’s crackdown on its own businesses has also affected U.S. investors and firms, some of which have pulled out of the country over the past year.

“One of the things I noticed about the difficulty American companies face is pleasing Beijing and Washington,” said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at a recent event.

The China market

For multinational corporations, there is still no substitute for being in China, which after the U.S., is the world’s second largest economy with 1.4 billion people. Despite the at-times hostile political rhetoric, China remains the U.S.’s largest trading partner.

During his administration, Trump accused China of not offering an even playing field for foreign businesses to compete. The result was a trade war in which the two countries imposed high tariffs on each other’s products.

De-coupling efforts

While dialing down the rhetoric, the Biden administration has continued with Trump’s hard line. “Engagement,” Washington’s approach toward China for decades, has given way to harsher rhetoric of de-coupling or even punishing China, complain business community members.

In Washington, some recent China-focused legislation and proposals have the business community’s attention. They include a regulatory battle over Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges and proposals to review U.S. investments in Chinese companies.

U.S. business concerns

At a recent Asia Society of Northern California event on the future of U.S.-China relations, some speakers said they were worried about measures emanating from Washington and Beijing that seem to be pulling apart business ties between the two nations.

Nicholas Borst, vice president and director of China research at Seafarer Capital Partners, argued that the U.S. business community should have a voice when it comes to U.S. policy toward China.

“It’s one of the few areas between the U.S. and China where we can really get away from a lot of the zero-sum thinking, where China’s economic development doesn’t have to come at the expense of the U.S.,” he said.

Myron Brilliant, executive vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the gathering that Washington is going to tighten export controls and investment screenings.

“The political environment in Washington is that one thing that unites the two parties is China and the threat of competition,” he said.

Washington is going to put pressure on U.S. companies “to divest a little bit, to bring back resources here, to invest domestically and think about our own national security in the lens of economic competitiveness, which puts at risk U.S. engagement over a long time in China,” he said.

Washington’s concerns

In Washington, where U.S. business focuses its considerable lobbying efforts, the consensus has shifted to a more aggressive stance toward the Chinese government because of the increasing role of the Chinese government, under President Xi Jinping, in taking over large parts of the economy, says one lawmaker.

“The development of state champions in key industry sectors should have been a warning signal to the businesses in the U.S. business community,” said Rep. Rick Larsen, a Democrat congressman from Washington state and chair of a bipartisan U.S. China Working Group.

“If there are individuals and companies or industries within the business community who feel aggrieved or not being listened to, the government they need to first look at is the government of Xi Jinping. The Chinese government policy has been very clear over the last decade plus about its direction — further regulation, further state involvement in the economy, in fact, not just state involvement but the state taking over large parts of the economy.”

However, there is a role for U.S. business to help the administration and Congress understand the implications of its decisions, Larsen said.

“That doesn’t mean it’s going to change those decisions, just that we might make those with our eyes opened wider,” he said.

Business climate in China

Ken Wilcox, former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, went to China in 2010-11 to set up a joint venture. From experience, he says the Chinese Communist Party controls the outcome of foreign and domestic businesses there and “the party wants to control the entire economy.”

Both Washington and business are too extreme in their views about China, the former too negative, the latter too positive, “giving China a hall pass,” said Wilcox.

In the current climate, businesses would be wise to rethink their China strategy, said Martijn Rasser, a former senior intelligence officer at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and now senior fellow and director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

“Yes, there’s a lot of money to be made, but these companies have to think much longer term and ultimately devise business strategies that don’t rely on the Chinese domestic market for long term growth, because that is ultimately ephemeral and there is a time limit on it,” he said.

Hoffman encourages U.S. companies to work with regulators to address national security concerns while doing business in China.

If they don’t, he argues, “any forthcoming ‘safe trade’ regulations will likely be more restrictive, less efficient, and more costly than they need to be.”
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The U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting Friday on alleged manufacture of biological weapons in Ukraine at the request of Moscow, whose credibility on chemical weapons was questioned during a session on Syria.

Russia on Thursday accused the United States of funding research into the development of biological weapons in Ukraine, which has faced an assault by tens of thousands of Russian troops since Feb. 24.

Both Washington and Kyiv have denied the allegations, with the United States saying they were a sign that Moscow could soon use the weapons itself.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Russia’s allegations in a video address on Thursday, saying, “No one is developing any chemical or any other weapons of mass destruction” in Ukraine.

Western states have charged that Russia is employing a ruse by accusing their opponents and the United states of developing biological and chemical weapons to lay the ground for their possible use in Ukraine — something Moscow has been accused of doing in Syria.

At a monthly Security Council meeting on the use of chemical weapons in Syria — a case that remains unresolved and continues to suffer from a U.N.-denounced lack of information from Damascus — both Washington and London raised Ukraine.

“The Russian Federation has repeatedly spread disinformation regarding Syria’s repeated use of chemical weapons,” the deputy U.S. envoy to the U.N., Richard Mills, said.

“The recent web of lies that Russia has cast in an attempt to justify the premeditated and unjustified war it has undertaken against Ukraine, should make clear, once and for all, that Russia also cannot be trusted when it talks about chemical weapon use in Syria.”

Mills’ U.K. counterpart, James Kariuki, denounced Moscow’s attack on Ukraine and said the “parallels with Russian action in Syria are clear.”

“Regrettably, the comparison also extends to chemical weapons, as we see the familiar specter of Russian chemical weapons disinformation raising its head in Ukraine.”

In 2018, Moscow accused the United States of secretly conducting biological weapons experiments in a laboratory in Georgia, another former Soviet republic that, like Ukraine, has ambitions to join NATO and the European Union.

The Security Council meeting Friday is slated to begin at 11 a.m. (1600 GMT). 
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U.S. authorities allowed a Ukrainian woman and her three children to seek asylum Thursday, a reversal from a day earlier when she was denied entry under the Biden administration’s sweeping restrictions for seeking humanitarian protection. 

The 34-year-old woman and her children — ages 14, 12 and 6 — entered San Diego for processing after authorities blocked her path hours earlier, triggering sharp criticism from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats. 

Blaine Bookey, legal director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, was returning to San Diego on Wednesday from Tijuana, where she was helping Haitian migrants. She saw the Ukrainian woman crying with her children, looking “very uncomfortable” with a reporter “in her face.” 

Bookey’s tweets and media coverage sparked renewed criticism of a Trump-era order to deny people a chance to seek asylum under an order to prevent spread of COVID-19 known as Title 42 authority. 

Schumer raised the Ukrainian woman’s case as he called for an end to use of Title 42, which the Biden administration has defended as health risks from COVID-19 have subsided. 

“They requested refuge in one of the ports of entry on our southern border, but were turned away because of Title 42,” Schumer said on a conference call with reporters. “This is not who we are as a country. Continuing this Trump-era policy has defied common sense and common decency.” 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. Migrants have been expelled more than 1.6 million times since Title 42 was introduced in March 2020. 

The Ukrainian woman, who identified herself to reporters only as Sofiia, tried entering the U.S. in a car with a relative this week but was blocked, Bookey said. Another attempt on foot Wednesday was also stopped, but Bookey found her before she returned to her Tijuana hotel to wait for news. 

Erika Pinheiro, litigation and policy director for Al Otro Lado advocacy group, said she got a call from CBP early Thursday, telling the woman to pack her bags and be ready on short notice. She was told to come hours later. 

“She’s just been very stoic for her kids, and I think she let herself get emotional,” Bookey said. 

The woman left Ukraine with her children February 27 as friends warned her that Russia might invade. She went to Moldova, Romania and Mexico, arriving in Tijuana on Monday. She plans to settle with family in the San Francisco area and seek asylum. 

The woman pulled a small red suitcase and carried a pink backpack patterned with tiny dogs as she walked into the U.S. with her 6-year-old daughter beside her and her older children behind. 

Mexico accepts citizens from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who are expelled under Title 42 authority. People of other nationalities are subject to expulsion, but many are released into the United States to seek asylum because of the difficulties involved in flying them home. They must be on U.S. soil to claim protection, though, and authorities often block their path. 

Thousands of Russians have sought asylum at San Diego border crossings in recent months after flying to Mexico. People from Ukraine and other former Soviet republics use the same route but in much lower numbers. In January, 248 Ukrainians crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, with three out of four in San Diego. 

A 27-year-old Ukrainian who asked to be identified only as Kristina was left behind on the Mexican side of the border Thursday with her fiancé, a U.S. citizen. She said she had been living in Kyiv when the fighting started. 

“It was so scary,” Kristina said. “We just woke up and there was bombing. We never expected this.” 

Kristina fled to Poland, but hotels and apartments were full. She flew to Mexico where her fiancé was trying to help her get into the U.S. They spent hours waiting at the border. 

“They don’t listen to us,” she said. 

 
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