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Critics denounced the highly unusual plan, which has yet to be finalized or approved, as a vast political slush fund financed by taxpayers.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is in Beijing for a highly anticipated summit with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping. It is the first U.S. state visit to China since 2017, during Trump's first administration. Trade, the Iran war, artificial intelligence and the fate of Taiwan are some of the issues being discussed, although it's not clear if any new agreements are likely. Trump traveled to China with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with a delegation of top U.S. executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk of Tesla and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
The summit comes after years of rising hostility between the two superpowers, but leaders recognize the importance of improving the bilateral relationship, says Zhao Hai, director of international political studies at the Institute of World Economics and Politics in Beijing. "This is a very critical historical moment [at] a crossroad, and both sides now are working together to establish a stable relationship that will have a global ramification," he says.
We also speak with Jake Werner, a historian of modern China and director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He says the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the resulting economic chaos have strengthened China's position.
"China has ties to all the countries in the region. It has acted in the past to help broker the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran," says Werner. "So it has some experience in this realm, sort of acting as a broker towards peace."
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Trump's commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Martin Makary, has resigned. During Makary's 13-month tenure, he attempted to split the difference between Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again agenda and a more traditional approach to regulation, ultimately angering both camps. "Nobody was happy with what he did," says Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Shortly before his resignation, Makary had drawn the ire of President Trump for attempting to block the approval of fruit-flavored vapes, and anti-abortion groups for not placing harsher restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone. But even before Makary took the helm, mass layoffs and the loss of scientific expertise had already thrown the FDA, which has oversight powers extending to more than a fifth of the U.S. economy, in turmoil.
The FDA's deputy commissioner for food, Kyle Diamantis, will now assume Makary's position in an acting capacity. Diamantas, a personal friend of Donald Trump Jr., does not have a background in medicine. The abrupt leadership shakeup is worrisome for the future of health and medicine in the United States, says Dr. Robert Steinbrook, the health research director at watchdog organization Public Citizen. "We need a strong public health agency," he explains. "[But] when you pick them apart for particular theories and the idiosyncrasies of the Health and Human Services secretary, you destroy things which take years, if not decades, to rebuild."
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We speak with Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, about growing threats to democracy in the United States following the Supreme Court's gutting of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Republican lawmakers across the South are responding to the ruling by racing to redraw their congressional maps, which is expected to lead to a historic drop in the number of Black representatives in Congress.
"The Supreme Court's devastating decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case has really turned our country upside down," says Clarke, who previously served as assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department in the Biden administration. She says that given the history of racial discrimination in the United States, particularly in the Deep South, "it is unsurprising" to see lawmakers "race at lightning speed to eradicate the gains that have been made over the decades."
Clarke also discusses President Trump's efforts to take federal control of elections in at least eight states, which Clarke says is part of his administration's goal to "lock out certain voters" and commit "mass disenfranchisement."
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As Democracy Now! broadcasts from Toronto, we speak with Avi Lewis, the new head of Canada's progressive New Democratic Party. Lewis was elected leader in a landslide last month, winning over party members on a democratic socialist platform that vowed to prioritize affordability, address the climate crisis, fight the Trump administration's attacks on Canada and more. Lewis takes over as the NDP has only five seats in Parliament and just as Prime Minister Mark Carney secured a majority for his Liberal government following three special elections in April.
Lewis acknowledges that "the NDP has a lot of rebuilding to do," but says there is "wide-open political space" in Canada for a populist left-wing agenda. "I think young people in particular are really responding to a vision where life just doesn't have to be so grindingly unfair," Lewis says. "We need nonmarket solutions to a time of market failure."
Lewis is a longtime activist and filmmaker whose late father Stephen Lewis led the Ontario NDP in the 1970s. He is married to the acclaimed author Naomi Klein.
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The Tremont, Pa., area has roughly 2,000 residents and limited resources. The Trump administration plans to convert a warehouse there to hold nearly four times as many people.
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