U.S. President Joe Biden will welcome German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to the White House Friday for discussions on continued support for Ukraine and bilateral cooperation on a range of global security and economic issues. 

The leaders first met in February of last year shortly after Scholz took office, and the visit comes after marking the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

“We’ve closely coordinated our support to Ukraine throughout this conflict, including through joint announcements in January to provide infantry fighting vehicles and tanks,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters during a Thursday briefing.

“Germany has provided significant air defense support to Ukraine, including a Patriot battery; the IRIS-T air defense system, which is an infrared seeking system; and five multiple — multiple launch rocket systems,” he said.

Kirby said discussing additional support for Ukraine is high on the agenda for the Friday’s meeting. He also said the United States would be announcing a new package of military aid for Ukraine later in the day.

Scholz addressed the German parliament Thursday, calling on China to use its influence with Russia to convince that nation to withdraw its troops from Ukraine and not to provide Moscow with additional weapons. 

Thursday, Kirby said the U.S. has communicated privately and publicly with China about providing weapons to Russia. 

“We believe it’s not in China’s best interest to move forward in that regard and they should see it the same way,” he said.

Speaking to reporters in Berlin ahead of his departure for Washington, Scholz was asked why he is traveling to Washington to meet with Biden in person when they could have the same conversation via video link. 

He said the two leaders talk on the phone regularly but meeting face to face “is part of the quality of our relationship,” as it should be “in a good life.” He said he sees it as a necessity in a world “where a lot of things have become very complicated.” 

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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U.S. companies no longer regard China as the primary investment destination it once was, according to an annual survey of American businesspeople operating there who, for the first time in 25 years, no longer see China as a top-three market.

Most of those surveyed by the American Chamber of Commerce in China (AmCham China) say they are pessimistic, given 2022 revenue and profits, China’s economy, the overall outlook for investment and business environment, and the future of U.S.-China relations.

According to the 2023 China Business Climate Survey, released Wednesday by the American Chamber of Commerce in China (AmCham China), only 45% of the surveyed American companies regard China as their primary or among their top three investment destinations, which is the largest drop in the survey’s 25-year history.

Michael Hart, president of AmCham China, said Wednesday at a news conference, “A year ago, 60% of people said China was either their top priority or their top-three priority. And this year, that’s fallen to 45%.”

The survey was conducted from October 16 to November 16 last year, before Beijing lifted its draconian zero-COVID policy, but AmCham China conducted a flash survey in February to monitor changes as China emerged from lockdowns and other controls.

A request for comment emailed by VOA to the Chinese Embassy in Washington was not answered in time for publication.

Factors affecting plans

Executives from 319 American multinational companies participated in the survey, accounting for about 47% of the total member companies of AmCham China. Of the respondents, 55% reported no plans to expand or decrease investment in China operations in 2023.

The factors coloring the survey results include the impact of the three-year pandemic and severe lockdown, the difficulty of business travel for Americans, the challenge of supply chain disruption, and the overall downturn in the business atmosphere, according to Hart.

Affected by the zero-COVID lockdowns, 68% of the American companies participating in the survey predicted that their company’s revenue in 2022 may be flat or lower than that in 2020. COVID was first reported in humans in late 2019 in Wuhan, China.

Hart said that in order to diversify risks, most of the member companies have begun to invest in other countries and establish alternative production lines. Their overall confidence in China has begun to decline, especially after the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China last year. That’s when the Chinese government discussed establishing state-controlled companies in various industries, making 65% of the American businesspeople question China’s commitment to continued foreign investment.

Of the AmCham China members surveyed, 49% said they feel less welcome than a year ago; that rises to 56% in the consumer sector.

However, when asked if they planned to withdraw from China, as many as 74% of the American companies said they would not consider relocating manufacturing or sourcing outside China, compared with 12% who had begun moving their businesses out of China, and another 12% who remained on the fence.

Warning sign

According to AmCham China’s survey, the increasing number of companies that are relocating or considering relocation is a warning sign worth watching.

Colm Rafferty, chairman of AmCham China, called on the U.S. and Chinese governments to face up to the challenges the foreign business community is encountering. He addressed a news conference Wednesday through a prerecorded video.

Rafferty said, “Last year was particularly challenging for our member companies, as they dealt with China’s economic slowdown, zero-COVID control measures, and ongoing efforts to ensure compliance with various new U.S. and China-related regulations.”

According to the survey, the increasingly tense U.S.-China relations topped the challenges facing U.S. businesspeople in China for three consecutive years, far ahead of COVID-19 prevention measures, inconsistent regulatory interpretation and unclear laws and enforcement, rising labor costs and regulatory compliance risks.

Moreover, American businesspeople are pessimistic about the future trend of U.S.-China relations. Forty-six percent of those surveyed believe that the relationship between the two countries will continue to deteriorate, and as many as 72% have felt political pressure from the governments of the two countries, asking them to violate commercial operations and occasionally make political statements.

Tensions between the U.S. and China have affected the hiring progress of U.S. companies for the first time. The survey found that 51% of members reported qualified employees are unwilling to relocate to China. This may also be related to China’s strict pandemic prevention measures.

Wang Zhangcheng, professor of human resources management at Guangzhou City University of Technology, told VOA Mandarin that the tensions in U.S.-China relations may affect the employment choices of Chinese employees, but that most workers will make employment choices without considering U.S.-China relations.

He said a small number of Chinese workers may refuse to work for foreign companies or use foreign products because they see patriotism trumping livelihood.

Geopolitical effects

He Jiangbing, a Chinese economist in Hubei province in central China, told VOA Mandarin that the survey results reflect geopolitics such as the war in Ukraine and tensions over Taiwan.

He said that China’s tightening control of foreign and private enterprises is not conducive to attracting investment. He predicts the pace of economic decoupling between the United States and China may accelerate in the future.

“Overall, the business environment will deteriorate in the future, and it will not improve,” he said. “I personally predict that this trend will not be reversed within five to 10 years.”

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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Former President Donald Trump can be sued by injured Capitol Police officers and Democratic lawmakers over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Justice Department said Thursday in a federal court case testing Trump’s legal vulnerability and the limits of executive power.

Although a president enjoys broad legal latitude to communicate to the public on matters of concern, the department wrote that “no part of a President’s official responsibilities includes the incitement of imminent private violence. By definition, such conduct plainly falls outside the President’s constitutional and statutory duties.”

The brief was filed by lawyers of the Justice Department’s Civil Division and has no bearing on a separate criminal investigation by a department special counsel into whether Trump can be criminally charged over efforts to undo President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election ahead of the Capitol riot.

In fact, the lawyers note that they are not taking a position with respect to potential criminal liability for Trump or anyone else.

The Justice Department lawyers also wrote that they take no view on a lower court judge’s conclusion that those who sued Trump have “plausibly” alleged that his speech caused the riot.

Nevertheless, the department wrote that an appeals court should reject Trump’s claim of absolute immunity.

An email seeking comment was sent to an attorney for Trump on Thursday. Trump’s lawyers have argued he was acting within his official rights and had no intention to spark violence when he called on thousands of supporters to “march to the Capitol” and “fight like hell” before the riot erupted.

The case is among many legal woes facing Trump as he mounts another bid for the White House in 2024.

A prosecutor in Georgia has been investigating whether Trump and his allies broke the law as they tried to overturn his election defeat in that state. Trump is also under federal criminal investigation over top secret documents found at his Florida estate.

In the separate investigation into Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the election results, special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence, who has said he will fight the subpoena.

Trump is appealing a decision by a federal judge in Washington, who last year rejected efforts by the former president to toss out the conspiracy civil lawsuits filed by lawmakers and two Capitol police officers. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Trump’s words during a rally before the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol were likely “words of incitement not protected by the First Amendment.”

The lawsuits, filed by Representative Eric Swalwell, officers James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, and later joined by other House Democrats, argue that Trump and others made “false and incendiary allegations of fraud and theft, and in direct response to the Defendant’s express calls for violence at the rally, a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol.”

The suits cite a federal civil rights law that was enacted to counter the Ku Klux Klan’s intimidation of officials. They describe in detail how Trump and others spread baseless claims of election fraud, both before and after the 2020 presidential election was declared, and charge that they helped to rile up the thousands of rioters before they stormed the Capitol.

The lawsuits seek damages for the physical and emotional injuries the plaintiffs sustained during the insurrection.

In its filing, the Justice Department cautioned that the “court must take care not to adopt rules that would unduly chill legitimate presidential communication” or saddle a president with meritless lawsuits.

“In exercising their traditional communicative functions, Presidents routinely address controversial issues that are the subject of passionate feelings,” the department wrote. “Presidents may at times use strong rhetoric. And some who hear that rhetoric may overreact, or even respond with violence.”
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A California parole board has denied parole to Sirhan Sirhan, who was found guilty of killing U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

It was the 17th parole hearing and 16th rejection for the 78-year-old Sirhan. While his lawyers argued he is no longer a threat to the public, the parole board Wednesday ruled he still was not suitable for release.  

In 2021, a parole board approved his parole, but the decision was overturned by California Governor Gavin Newsom, who argued Sirhan was not yet rehabilitated. His lawyers sued, saying the governor’s decision was illegal. The case is still pending. 

Kennedy, the former U.S. attorney general in his brother John F. Kennedy’s administration, had just finished a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in which he claimed victory in the California presidential primary. As he and his entourage were leaving, Sirhan, an Israeli-born Palestinian who emigrated to the United States from Jordan, shot him. He was arrested at the scene.

Sirhan later said he was angry at Kennedy for his support of Israel. Robert Kennedy’s death came five years after JFK’s.

Surviving members of his family are divided on parole for Sirhan. Kennedy’s widow, 94-year-old Ethel Kennedy, and six of their children oppose it, but two sons support the release.

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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California has a new poet laureate. And for the first time, that state poet is Asian American. For VOA, Genia Dulot traveled to Fresno, California, to hear from Lee Herrick about his roots and his poetry
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Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX launched a four-person crew on a trip to the International Space Station early Thursday, with a Russian cosmonaut and United Arab Emirates astronaut joining two NASA crewmates on the flight.

The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, lifted off at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

A live NASA webcast showed the 25-story-tall spacecraft ascending from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of vapor and a reddish fireball that lit up the predawn sky.

The launch was expected to accelerate the Crew Dragon to an orbital velocity of 28,164 kph, more than 22 times the speed of sound.

The flight came 72 hours after an initial launch attempt was scrubbed in the final minutes of countdown early on Monday due to a clog in the flow of engine-ignition fluid. NASA said the problem was fixed by replacing a clogged filter and purging the system.

The trip to the International Space Station (ISS), a laboratory orbiting some 420 kilometers above Earth, was expected to take nearly 25 hours, with rendezvous planned for about 1:15 a.m. EST (0615 GMT) Friday as the crew begins a six-month science mission in microgravity.

Designated Crew 6, the mission marks the sixth long-term ISS team that NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since the private rocket venture founded by Musk — billionaire CEO of electric car maker Tesla and social media platform Twitter — began sending American astronauts to orbit in May 2020.

The latest ISS crew was led by mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a onetime U.S. Navy submarine officer who has logged more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three space shuttle flights and seven spacewalks.

Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an engineer and commercial aviator designated as the Crew 6 pilot, was making his first spaceflight.

The Crew 6 mission also is notable for its inclusion of UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, only the second person from his country to fly to space and the first to launch from U.S. soil as part of a long-duration space station team. UAE’s first-ever astronaut launched to orbit in 2019 aboard a Russian spacecraft.

Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 was Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, 42, who like Alneyadi is an engineer and spaceflight rookie designated as a mission specialist for the team.

Fedyaev is the second cosmonaut to fly aboard an American spacecraft under a renewed ride-sharing deal signed in July by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Crew 6 team will be welcomed aboard the space station by seven current ISS occupants — three U.S. NASA crew members, including commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to fly to space, along with three Russians and a Japanese astronaut.

The ISS, about the length of a football field, has been continuously operated for more than two decades years by a U.S.-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

The Crew 6 mission follows two recent mishaps in which Russian spacecraft docked to the orbiting laboratory sprang coolant leaks apparently caused micrometeoroids, tiny grains of space rock, streaking through space and striking the craft at high velocity.

One of the affected Russian vehicles was a Soyuz crew capsule that had carried two cosmonauts and an astronaut to the space station in September for a six-month mission now set to end in March. An empty replacement Soyuz to bring them home arrived at the space station Saturday.
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U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos del Toro on Wednesday reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to Caribbean nations in their fight against what he called the “existential threat” of climate change.

“The United States stands by you, with you, combatting this threat,” Del Toro said during a meeting with officials, students, and professors at Nassau’s University of the Bahamas. “Time is not on our side. We are in a critical decade to make meaningful progress so we can avoid the worst climate scenarios. We must act now. We view the climate crisis the same way we view damage control on a sinking ship: All hands on deck.”

The second Hispanic to head of the U.S. Department of the Navy, Del Toro said he traveled to the Bahamas to listen to the region’s climate emergency “challenges and stories,” acknowledging that “the increasing severity of those consequences are already being felt in the Caribbean and also in the United States” as he pointed to the dozen devastating storms that have pummeled the region in the last decade.

‘No one can fight climate change alone’

In the Caribbean, climate change has caused sea levels to rise, islands to be devastated by flooding and extreme temperatures while the salinization of farmland endangers ecosystems and makes it harder for residents to make a living in an area mainly sustained by tourism.

The Navy secretary said the U.S. is cooperating on several projects with universities and governments in the region, including a multimillion-dollar fund for disaster relief infrastructure, as well as aid to cope with health emergencies and epidemic outbreaks.

Del Toro added that work is also under way on energy-efficiency programs to lower carbon emissions at U.S. bases and on ships, and financing scientific research on soil and marine life, especially on the Caribbean’s coral reefs.

“No one can fight climate change alone,” he said. “We want to share and trade information, resources and expertise with allies, governments, and NGOs. Everywhere from Vietnam, Ghana, or right here in the Caribbean, we are collaborating on projects and enabling best practices.”

The Cuban-born Del Toro, who said the Navy launched the 2030 Climate Action Plan last May, said he still feels a part of the Caribbean community and has made the “threat of climate change a priority,” since taking office 18 months ago.

“To remain the world’s dominant maritime force, the Department of the Navy must adapt to climate change: We must build resilience and reduce the threat,” he said.

‘We want to help’

Del Toro also highlighted the Biden administration’s support for efforts to reduce the effects of climate change, reflected in the U.S.-Caribbean Partnership to Address the Climate Crisis 2030 (PACC 2030), introduced by Vice President Kamala Harris in June.

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry also recently visited the Bahamas, and Del Toro said he would convey details of this meeting to Kerry at the Our Oceans Conference in Panama, March 2-3.

Secretary Del Toro said that in April, the United States, Caribbean and Central American countries would participate in the Ninth Inter-American Specialized Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation to be held in Orlando, Florida. The event will focus on the use of scientific innovation to address climate change and marine pollution.

“We recognize that the resilience of our friends and neighbors in this region is of critical importance to our own security,” asserted Del Toro. “And like I have said, and I will continue to say, we want to help.”
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