Arkansas bills keep Chinese firms from leasing land near infrastructure
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R ) introduced on Wednesday a legislative package that bans 'Chinese Communist Party-linked companies' from leasing or buying land around military bases and electric substations.
'We previously banned companies linked to the CCP [China Communist Party] and other foreign adversaries from owning farmland. We'll ban those companies now from leasing property and owning property near our critical infrastructure, and we will shorten the amount of time a banned company has to divest from our state,' Sanders said of the measure.
The package builds upon her 2023 efforts to ban foreign ownership of agricultural land and digital asset mining in the state through Act 636 and 174.
Both laws were blocked by U.S. District Judge Kristine G. Baker following court battles in which plaintiffs claimed the acts were unconstitutional.
Sanders' new package enhances past limitations for foreign companies and also features a clause that will withhold funding from colleges and universities that have Chinese cultural centers, a Confucius Institute or programs related to the People's Republic of China.
'We will also ban made-in-China promotional items from state government. These items should be made in America,' Sanders said, lauding President Trump for the hard-line stance against the nation.
'Every state in the country has a role to play in defending America from our foreign adversaries, and I'm proud that Arkansas is leading the way,' the lawmaker continued.
State Sen. Blake Johnson (R) is a lead sponsor on the bill, alongside five House Republicans in the Arkansas legislature.
'From banning Chinese military drones, to prohibiting land ownership, and now instituting severe penalties and outlawing foreign influence peddling; These restrictions aim to protect Arkansas's economic and security interests by limiting CCP-backed entities, full stop,' state Rep. Brit McKenzie (R), a co-sponsor of the bill said in a statement.
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Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
Trump's China gambit belies rocky road ahead on tariff deals
President Donald Trump has come up short on striking trade deals with most nations with just one month left before his self-imposed tariff deadline, even as he took his first steps in weeks toward engaging with China. Trump secured a much-desired call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, paving the way for a new round of talks on Monday in London - yet the diplomacy was overshadowed by a blowout public fight between Trump and his billionaire onetime ally, Elon Musk. Trump's aides insisted Friday that the president was moving on and focused on his economic agenda. Still, question marks remain over the U.S.'s most consequential trade relationships, with few tangible signs of progress toward interim agreements. India, which the Trump administration has cited as an early deal target, has taken a tougher line in negotiations and challenged Trump's auto tariffs at the World Trade Organization. Japan held another round of talks with the U.S., while also signaling it wants a reprieve from duties on cars and light trucks. The legal fight over Trump's tariffs hangs over everything. A court ruling striking down the country-by-country duties imposed using emergency authorities left partners with no certainty over what Trump's powers are. The next test could come as soon as next week, when a court could rule on the administration's appeal. Trump and his team were eager to draw attention to inroads with China as proof his ways are working. Trump on Friday described talks with Beijing as 'very far advanced' and said Xi had agreed to speed shipments of critical rare-earth minerals that were at the center of recent tension. Unlocking those supplies would spell relief for major American automakers. Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng will visit the U.K. next week, during which he will conduct trade negotiations with the U.S., the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement late Saturday. The mixed results in the talks so far demonstrate the highs and lows of Trump's mercurial approach to trade, in which he and aides have cast him as the ultimate decision-maker on any deals. Rather than provide a clear-cut victory, Trump's dealings with Xi also show the difficult road ahead with China. The rare-earths dispute revealed how important those supplies, which Beijing dominates, are for the U.S. economy. 'Xi is not letting go of the rare earths. He's got leverage, he's using it,' said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank. 'They talked, that's the most important thing. I think they're really far apart.' The clock is ticking for Trump. His 90-day pause on higher tariffs for the European Union and nearly five dozen countries expires July 9 — barring an extension he could do with the flick of a pen — while China's reprieve extends until August. If deals aren't reached, Trump plans to restore tariff rates to the levels he first announced in April, or lower numbers that exceed the current 10% baseline, a White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'We will have deals. It takes time. Usually it takes months and years; in this administration, it's going to take more like days,' White House trade counselor Peter Navarro said Friday on Fox Business. 'We're on task and on target.' The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative 'looks more like a deli now,' Navarro said, with countries lining up for talks. USTR sent letters this week to trading partners reminding them of the deadline. It's unclear what all the frantic activity has yielded. Xi for months was reluctant to get on the phone with Trump and analysts speculated about what concessions the U.S. president offered to his counterpart in exchange for the call. Trump at least appeared to give some ground on foreign students, saying it would be his 'honor' to welcome Chinese scholars even as his administration cracks down on student visas. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited Washington facing demands from his nation's automakers for tariff credits for vehicles they produce in the U.S. But the subject barely came up during the public portion of his meeting with Trump, who spent a large chunk of time unloading on Musk. 'We'll end up hopefully with a trade deal or we'll do something - you know, we'll do the tariffs,' Trump said Thursday alongside Merz. Merz, in his U.S. visit, emphasized the integrated trade ties between countries that are at risk — including by personally driving a BMW built in South Carolina. The German leader said Friday at an industry event the nations should agree on an 'offset rule' that would provide tariff relief for existing U.S. production. Trump's U.K. deal - the lone pact so far — was undercut this week when he plowed ahead with levies on steel and aluminum. The U.K. said the pact included an agreement for zero tariffs on British metals, but Trump's latest order kept a 25% charge on them while negotiations continue and doubled the rate for others. Still, the upcoming Group of Seven summit of leaders from major economies could provide an opportunity for the type of in-person dealmaking Trump craves. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been discussing terms of a potential interim deal with Trump ahead of the gathering this month near Calgary. One theme is clear: Negotiations over his so-called reciprocal tariffs have grown intertwined with his separate duties on autos and metals, despite previous U.S. signals that the administration considered them separate. 'He's entirely transactional,' Holtz-Eakin said of Trump. 'He will always deal.' Talks are ongoing with the EU, which has previously proposed an agreement with the U.S. to mutually drop auto tariffs to zero as part of a broader trade framework, which the Trump administration rejected. The bloc subsequently suggested working toward zero-for-zero tariffs on cars, other industrial goods and some agricultural imports with tariff-rate quotas as a possible interim measure. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said this week he'd consider some type of 'export credit' on autos, the kind of carve-out sought by Germany on vehicle tariffs. And he predicted there would be a U.S.-India deal in the 'not too distant future.' Lutnick signaled, though, Trump's push for so-called reciprocity comes with caveats. The U.S. wouldn't agree with Vietnam to drop all tariffs, because it believes the Southeast Asian nation is a hub for so-called transshipment of Chinese goods. Talks with South Korea, where Trump spoke with newly elected president Lee Jae-myung, and Japan, which had top trade negotiator Ryosei Akazawa meet with Lutnick, continued this week. In yet another sign of the Trump team's frenetic approach, Nikkei reported that different — and even competing — positions among Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Lutnick had confounded Japanese counterparts. --- (Akayla Gardner, Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Alberto Nardelli, Hadriana Lowenkron, Arne Delfs and Shiyin Chen contributed to this report.) Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Air Force veteran Gina Ortiz Jones wins runoff race for San Antonio mayor
San Antonio's next mayor will be Gina Ortiz Jones, a 44-year-old West Side native who rose from John Jay High School to the top ranks of the U.S. military on an ROTC scholarship. Jones defeated Rolando Pablos, a close ally of Texas GOP leaders, with 54% of the vote on Saturday night in a high-profile, bitterly partisan runoff. Thanks to new, longer terms that voters approved in November, this year's mayor and City Council winners will be the first to serve four-year terms before they must seek reelection. The closely watched runoff came after Jones took a commanding 10-percentage-point lead in last month's 27-candidate mayoral election, but weathered nearly $1 million in attacks from Pablos and his Republican allies. At the Dakota East Side Ice House, a beaming Jones said she was proud of a campaign that treated people with dignity and respect. She also said she was excited that San Antonio politics could deliver some positivity in an otherwise tumultuous news cycle. 'With everything happening around us at the federal level and at the state level, some of the most un-American things we have seen in a very, very long time, it's very heartening to see where we are right now,' she said shortly after the early results came in. When it became clear the results would hold, Jones returned to remark that 'deep in the heart of Texas,' San Antonio voters had reminded the world that it's a city built on 'compassion.' Chappell Roan's 'Pink Pony Club' blared over the speakers to the roughly 250 supporters celebrating with drinks on a hot evening. At Pablos' watch party, he said Jones' overwhelming victory surprised him. The conservative Northside votes he was counting on to carry him didn't wind up materializing. 'The fact is that San Antonio continues to be a blue city,' Pablos told reporters at the Drury Inn & Suites' Old Spanish Ballroom near La Cantera. 'This [race] became highly partisan, and today it showed.' After an overwhelmingly long ticket discouraged much voter interest in the first round, San Antonio's mayoral race suddenly took on new significance when it came down to a runoff between Jones, a two-time Democratic congressional candidate, and Pablos, a close ally of Texas' GOP leaders. The two City Hall outsiders boxed out a host of candidates with more local government experience, including four sitting council members, and sent local politicos scrambling into their partisan camps for an otherwise nonpartisan race. It also drew major interest from state and national political interests, with Republican and Democratic PACs each targeting a position that could be a springboard for a future politician from either party. Between the candidates and their supporting outside groups, the runoff had already drawn roughly $1.7 million in spending as of May 28 — the last date covered by campaign finance reports before the election. Both 2025 mayoral runoff campaigns and their supporting outside groups spent big on mailers, text messages and TV ads. At a recent Jones rally on the West Side, new Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said Republicans' willingness to sink unheard-of money into symbolic victories was enough to spur the Democratic state party to spend money on Jones' behalf near the end of the runoff — in a city where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans. 'These races are supposed to be nonpartisan, they are the ones making them not nonpartisan,' Scudder said of Texas Republicans. 'They are the ones that are coming in and flooding money into these races … and we have to stand on the front lines of that.' For Jones, who most recently served as Air Force Under Secretary in the Biden administration, this is the third high-profile race Democratic interests have expected her to win. She came close in 2018 in Texas' 23rd Congressional District, losing by roughly 1,000 votes to Republican Will Hurd, then lost by a larger margin in the same district two years later to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio. Both were multimillion-dollar, top-tier races in the battle for the U.S. House, and the losses stung so much that Jones chose to watch last month's election results in private — even though she'd led every public poll leading up to it. At her watch party on Saturday night, Jones was joined by the iconic local activist Rosie Castro and former Mayor Julián Castro, as well as representatives from an array of outside groups that helped her in the race: Texas Organizing Project, Vote Vets, and labor unions, to name a few. Underscoring the growing progressive influence at City Hall, Councilmembers Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), Phyllis Viagran (D3), Edward Mungia (D4) and Teri Castillo (D5) also attended. Another new progressive, 24-year-old Ric Galvan, was celebrating a narrow victory for District 6 on the city's West Side. The Democratic National Committee, Texas Democratic Party and Democratic Mayors Association all put out statements congratulating Jones. 'With her win in a heavily-Latino city, Mayor-elect Jones will continue the legacy of Mayor Nirenberg and move San Antonio forward,' Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. 'From school boards to city councils to mayoral offices across the state, Texas voters are making their voice heard loud and clear: They want strong Democratic leaders who will fight for them.' Going into the night, conservatives controlled just one seat on San Antonio's City Council, while Republican elected officials on the whole have been nearing extinction in Bexar County. Nevertheless, Republicans saw a big opportunity in the nonpartisan city election. Mayors of Texas' major urban centers have steadily become less progressive as longtime incumbents termed out, and in the November election, President Donald Trump flipped two historically blue counties in South Texas — fueling greater intrigue about Hispanic voters becoming more Republican. Pablos and his allies sought to cast Jones as a progressive zealot, with a PAC supporting him dubbing her the 'AOC of Texas' in recent days and the San Antonio Police Officers' Association threatening that she would defund the police (something Jones has said she doesn't plan to do). Pablos purposefully dropped the 'Ortiz' from her name nearly every time he was in front of a microphone, and ran ads accusing Jones, who is Filipina, of pretending to be Hispanic. It was an unexpected approach from a well-known business attorney with good relationships on both sides of the aisle, and deviation from the 'unity candidate' he set out to be more than a year ago when describing plans for his first political venture in San Antonio. Pabos said Saturday that he was proud of the race he ran, even when it got ugly. The crowd at his watch party even booed Jones when her face came on the TV screen after early results were announced. 'I think that my team did a great job. I think we ran an excellent campaign,' said Pablos, who vowed to continue looking for ways to serve the community. 'What we did is we just laid everything out for everybody to look at and consider.' Jones, whose family grew up leaning on housing vouchers and other forms of government support, crafted a campaign around protecting San Antonio's most vulnerable residents — particularly in times of political uncertainty at the state and federal levels. She was one of the most vocal critics of the city's plans for a roughly $4 billion downtown development project and NBA arena for the San Antonio Spurs known as Project Marvel early in the race, saying she instead wanted to focus city resources on expanded Pre-K programs, workforce development and affordable housing. It was a major contrast to Pablos, a former San Antonio Hispanic Chamber chair, who vowed to focus on bringing major corporations to San Antonio, and led even some left-leaning members of the business community to view her with uncertainty. A surprising number of progressive elected officials either stayed out of the runoff entirely or publicly backed Pablos. Jones seemed undeterred by that dynamic, saying often on the campaign trail that her own approach was rooted in personal experience with leaders who only listen to the privileged few. She joined the military under Don't Ask Don't Tell more than two decades ago at Boston University, and will now be the city's first mayor from the LGBTQ community. 'That experience [of Don't Ask Don't Tell] showed me the importance of when you are in leadership, always having the humility to ask, 'Who am I not hearing from? And why am I not hearing from them?' Jones said at a recent San Antonio Report debate. Jones pointed to San Antonio's ongoing struggle with poverty — despite major investments over many years to try to change that reputation. 'We've had, I think, too many leaders listening to too small a part of our community.' Big news: 20 more speakers join the TribFest lineup! New additions include Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center; Michael Curry, former presiding bishop and primate of The Episcopal Church; Beto O'Rourke, former U.S. Representative, D-El Paso; Joe Lonsdale, entrepreneur, founder and managing partner at 8VC; and Katie Phang, journalist and trial lawyer. Get tickets. TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Democrats fend off GOP in San Antonio mayor runoff election
Former Biden administration official Gina Ortiz Jones has won a runoff election in San Antonio's mayoral race, fending off a Republican opponent that the GOP hoped could pull off an upset, Decision Desk HQ projects. Jones defeated former Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos in an officially nonpartisan election that still in practice played out as a partisan election as Jones is a registered Democrat and Pablos is a registered Republican. The two candidates had advanced from the first round of the election in which many competed on the same ballot. Since no candidate received a majority of the vote in that round last month, the top two performing candidates advanced to face each other in the runoff. The city of San Antonio hasn't elected a Republican mayor in more than 20 years, and the past two elections for outgoing Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who has served since 2017, haven't been close. Nirenberg is term-limited from running again after serving four two-year terms. But Republicans had hope that they could notch a win with Pablos, who served as secretary of state for about two years under Gov. Greg Abbott (R). The GOP made some gains in the city in November after three presidential races in a row in which the city swung toward Democrats, though former Vice President Harris still comfortably won the area. Pablos also had a significant fundraising advantage, outraising Jones by a margin of 1.5 to 1, while outside spending from PACs contributed more than triple the amount in favor of Pablos compared to Jones, according to DDHQ. That includes a PAC with ties to Abbott and San Antonio's police union, The Texas Tribune reported. Pablos also picked up an endorsement from the editorial board of the San Antonio Express-News, uncommon for a Republican. But Jones was still the favorite in the Democratic-leaning city, even despite the gains that President Trump and the GOP has made with Hispanic voters recently. She finished first in the first round of voting in May, receiving 27.2 percent of the vote in a crowded field to Pablos's 16.6 percent. Jones previously served as undersecretary of the Air Force during the Biden administration from 2021 to 2023. Before that, she was the Democratic nominee for the House seat in Texas's 23rd Congressional District in 2018 and 2020, losing narrowly both times. She will be San Antonio's third female mayor and the first person to serve a four-year term after voters in the city approved a measure in November extending the mayor's term from two years to four. She will also be the city's first openly lesbian mayor. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
