AFP USA

President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration tactics, sweeping tariffs and nationalist policies may be a turn-off for many would-be European tourists to the United States, but the data paints a more nuanced bigger picture.The number of visitors to the United States from Western Europe in March fell by 17 percent from the same month a year earlier, but then picked up 12 percent in April, according to the US tourism office.The German Travel Association (DRV) said the number of Germans going to the United States dropped 28 percent in March, but then bounced back by 14 percent in April. The association’s spokesperson, Torsten Schaefer, said that Easter holidays fell later this year than in 2024, which might have impacted the figures.”There’re practically no requests in recent months to change or cancel reservations,” Schaefer said. However, he noted “a rise in queries about entry requirements into the United States”.At the end of March, several European countries urged their nationals to review their travel documents for the United States, following several mediatised cases of Europeans being held on arrival then deported.Anecdotally, there are signs of Europeans opting not to visit Trump’s America.”The country I knew no longer exists,” said Raphael Gruber, a 60-year-old German doctor who has been taking his family to Cape Cod in Massachusetts every summer since 2018.”Before, when you told the immigration officer you were there for whale-watching, that was a good reason to come. But now, they are afraid of everything that comes from outside,” he told AFP.Referring to invasive electronic checks at the US borders, he added: “I don’t want to buy a ‘burner’ phone just to keep my privacy”.In Britain, Matt Reay, a 35-year-old history teacher from Northamptonshire, said he had scratched the United States off his list, preferring to go to South America, where his “money would probably be better spent”.”It feels like, to be honest, that there’s a culture that’s built in the US in the last kind of 12 months, where as a foreign visitor, I don’t really feel like I’m that welcome anyway,” he said.Reay said he felt “insulted” by both Trump’s tariffs on British exports to the United States and comments by Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, about Britain as “a random country”.Trump’s public belittling of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a White House visit in February was also “outrageous”, he said.According to the US tourism office, however, the number of British visitors to the United States in April rose 15 percent year-on-year, after a 14 percent drop in March.Oxford Economics, an economics monitoring firm, attributed the March decline partly to the Easter dates this year, along with a stronger US dollar at the time that made the United States a more costly destination.But it mainly pointed to “polarising rhetoric and policy actions by the Trump administration, as well as concerns around tighter border and immigration policies”.- Cheaper flights -Didier Arino, head of the French travel consultancy Protourisme, said April traffic to the United States might have picked up because European airlines were offering discounted flights.”You can find flights, especially for New York, at 600 euros ($680),” he said.In Germany, Muriel Wagner, 34, said she was not putting off a summer trip to Boston to see a friend at Harvard — a US university in a legal and ideological struggle with Trump’s administration.”I’ve been asked if the political situation and trade war with the US has affected our trip,” the PhD student said in Frankfurt. But “you can’t let yourself be intimidated”, she said, adding that she was keen to discuss the tensions with Americans on their home turf.Protourisme’s Arino said that, as “the mood has sunk” regarding the United States, potential tourists were rethinking a visit.On top of the “the financial outlay, being insulted by the US administration for being European, that really robs you of the desire” to go there, he said.He estimated that the “Trump effect” would cut the number of French tourists going to the United States this year by a quarter.A body representing much of the French travel sector, Entreprises du Voyage, said the number of French visitors to America dropped eight percent in March, and a further 12 percent in April. It estimated that summer departures to the United States would drop by 11 percent.According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, covering major tourism operators, the US tourism sector — already reeling from Canadians and Mexicans staying away — could lose $12.5 billion in spending by foreign visitors this year.kap-lep-ajb-zap/jbo/rmb/js

Six elderly people were injured Sunday when a man used a makeshift flamethrower to attack demonstrators in the US state of Colorado as they demanded the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.The FBI called the assault a “targeted terror attack,” identifying the suspected perpetrator, who has been taken into custody, as 45-year-old Mohamed Sabry Soliman, but providing no further details about him.The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, posted on X that the man was a foreign national who “illegally overstayed (his) visa.”Police in the city of Boulder were cautious in presuming a possible motive for the attack, which multiple sources said was committed against Jews during a peaceful gathering.The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish activist group, said on X that the attack occurred at Sunday’s “Boulder Run for Their Lives” event, a weekly gathering of the Jewish community in support of the hostages seized during Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, sparking the war in Gaza.”This attack happened at a regularly scheduled weekly peaceful event,” FBI agent Mark Michalek confirmed to reporters.”Witnesses are reporting that the subject used a makeshift flamethrower and threw an incendiary into the crowd,” he said, adding that “the suspect was heard to yell: “Free Palestine!”- Molotov cocktails -In one video apparently of the attack, a shirtless man holding clear bottles in his hands is seen pacing as the grass in front of him burns.He can be heard screaming “End Zionists!” and “They are killers!” towards several people in red t-shirts as they tend to a person lying on the ground.Other images showed billowing black smoke.The six people injured were aged between 67 and 88, and had all be transported to local hospitals, Michalek said.Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn told reporters that “at least one victim was very seriously injured, probably safe to say critical condition.”The suspected perpetrator had also been injured before being taken into custody, Redfearn said.He hailed the bravery of the responding officers, who “immediately ran into a chaotic situation where a man was throwing Molotov cocktails and using other devices to hurt people.”Asked if it was a terror attack against the protesters, Redfearn insisted it was “way too early to speculate motive” behind the violence, which took place shortly before 1:30 pm (1930 GMT).There had initially been reports of a possible second perpetrator, but Redfearn stressed that “at this point, we do not believe that there is an additional suspect at large.””We’re fairly confident we have the lone suspect in custody.”FBI chief Kash Patel immediately described Sunday’s incident as “a targeted terror attack,” while Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser labeled it “a hate crime.””People may have differing views about world events and the Israeli-Hamas conflict, but violence is never the answer to settling differences. Hate has no place in Colorado,” Weiser said. The White House said President Donald Trump has been briefed on the incident.- ‘Antisemitic attack’ -Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, voiced outrage at the incident.”Terrorism against Jews does not stop at the Gaza border — it is already burning the streets of America,” he said in a statement.”Make no mistake — this is not a political protest, this is terrorism.”US Secretary of State Marco Rubio like Patel described the incident as a “targeted terror attack,” while lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle expressed revulsion at Sunday’s tragedy and said they were praying for the victims’ recovery.”Tonight, a peaceful demonstration was targeted in a vile, antisemitic act of terror,” top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “Once again, Jews are left reeling from repeated acts of violence and terror.Several organizations also decried the apparent hate-fueled violence.”Our community was targeted in a violent, antisemitic attack,” the Israeli-American Council said in a statement.”This is an attack on all of us — and we will not stay silent.”The Boulder violence comes almost two weeks after the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum in Washington, where a 31-year-old suspect who shouted “Free Palestine” was taken into custody by police.

China said Monday it “firmly rejects” US claims that it had violated a sweeping tariffs deal, as tensions between the two economic superpowers showed signs of ratcheting back up.Beijing and Washington last month agreed to slash staggeringly high tariffs on each other for 90 days after talks between top officials in Geneva.But top Washington officials last week accused China of violating the deal, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying Beijing was “slow-rolling” the agreement in comments to “Fox News Sunday”.China hit back Monday, saying Washington “has made bogus charges and unreasonably accused China of violating the consensus, which is seriously contrary to the facts”. “China firmly rejects these unreasonable accusations,” its commerce ministry said in a statement.US President Donald Trump said last week that China had “totally violated” the deal, without providing details.Beijing’s commerce ministry said it “has been firm in safeguarding its rights and interests, and sincere in implementing the consensus”.It fired back that Washington “has successively introduced a number of discriminatory restrictive measures against China” since the Geneva talks.The ministry cited export controls on artificial intelligence chips, curbs on the sale of chip design software and the revocation of Chinese student visas in the United States.”We urge the US to meet China halfway, immediately correct its wrongful actions, and jointly uphold the consensus from the Geneva trade talks,” the ministry said.If not, “China will continue to resolutely take strong measures to uphold its legitimate rights and interests,” it added.- Trump-Xi talks? -US officials have said they are frustrated by what they see as Chinese foot-dragging on approving export licences for rare earths and other elements needed to make cars and chips.But Washington’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent looked to ease the pressure on Sunday, saying the two sides could arrange a call between their respective heads of state to resolve their differences.”I’m confident… this will be ironed out” in a call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Bessent said on CBS’s “Face the Nation”.He added, however, that China was “withholding some of the products that they agreed to release”, including rare earths.On when a Trump-Xi call could take place, Bessent said: “I believe we will see something very soon.”China has been less forthcoming, and the commerce ministry’s statement on Monday did not mention any planned conversations between the two leaders.The Geneva deal was “an important consensus reached by the two sides on the principle of mutual respect and equality, and its results were hard-won”, the ministry said.It warned Washington against “going its own way and continuing to harm China’s interests”.Global stocks finished mixed on Friday after Trump made his social media post accusing Beijing.The Hong Kong stock exchange was down around 2 percent shortly after opening on Monday.

They’ve lost count of how many times they’ve been arrested, but even with a combined age of 180 years, American couple Joseph and Joyce Ellwanger are far from hanging up their activist boots.The pair, who joined the US civil rights rallies in the 1960s, hope protesting will again pay off against Donald Trump, whose right-wing agenda has pushed the limits of presidential power.”Inaction and silence do not bring about change,” 92-year-old Joseph, who uses a walker, told AFP at a rally near Milwaukee in late April.He was among a few hundred people protesting the FBI’s arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan, who is accused of helping an undocumented man in her court evade migration authorities. By his side — as always — was Joyce, 88, carrying a sign reading “Hands Off Hannah.”They are certain that protesting does make a difference, despite some Americans feeling despondent about opposing Trump in his second term. “The struggle for justice has always had so much pushback and difficulty that it almost always appeared as though we’ll never win,” Joseph said.”How did slavery end? How did Jim Crow end? How did women get the right to vote? It was the resilience and determination of people who would not give up,” he added.”Change does happen.”The couple, who have been married for more than 60 years, can certainly speak from experience when it comes to protesting. Joseph took part in strategy meetings with Martin Luther King Jr — the only white religious leader to do so — after he became pastor of an all-Black church in Alabama at the age of 25. He also joined King in the five-day, 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, which historians consider a pivotal moment in the US civil rights movement.Joyce, meanwhile, was jailed for 50 days after she rallied against the US military training of soldiers from El Salvador in the 1980s. Other causes taken up by the couple included opposing the Iraq war in the early 2000s.”You do what you have to do. You don’t let them stop you just because they put up a blockade. You go around it,” Joyce told AFP.- ‘We’ll do our part’ -Joseph admitted he would like to slow down, noting the only time he and his wife unplug is on Sunday evening when they do a Zoom call with their three adult children. But Trump has kept them active with his sweeping executive actions — including crackdowns on undocumented migrants and on foreign students protesting at US universities.The threats to younger protesters are particularly concerning for Joyce, who compared those demonstrating today to the students on the streets during the 1960s. “They’ve been very non-violent, and to me, that’s the most important part,” she said.Joyce also acknowledged the couple likely won’t live to see every fight to the end, but insisted they still had a role to play.”We’re standing on the shoulders of people who have built the justice movement and who have brought things forward. So, we’ll do our part,” she said.Joyce added that she and Joseph would be protesting again on June 14 as part of the national “No Kings” rally against Trump.”More people are taking to the streets, we will also be in the street,” she said.

Disney’s family-friendly “Lilo & Stitch,” a live-action remake of the 2002 animated film, won the North American box office for a second week in a row, taking in another $63 million, industry estimates showed Sunday. So far, its worldwide take is at a whopping $610 million, Exhibitor Relations said.Maia Kealoha (as Lilo), Hannah Waddingham, Courtney B. Vance and Zach Galifianakis star, while Chris Sanders again provides the voice of the chaos-creating blue alien Stitch.”Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” — the latest, and ostensibly last, in the hugely successful Tom Cruise spy thriller series based on a 1960s TV show — took second place with $27.3 million in the United States and Canada.The Paramount film has made another $231 million overseas, which should help offset its massive production budget, reportedly at $400 million.Debuting in a disappointing third place was Sony’s “Karate Kid: Legends,” a sequel featuring Ralph Macchio — the star of the original 1984 classic — and action flick icon Jackie Chan, along with Ben Wang in the title role. It made $21 million at the domestic box office and another $26 million overseas.”‘Legends’ is trying to invigorate the story with a new Kid — again — but business is not strong,” said David A. Gross of Franchise Entertainment Research. In fourth place was Warner Bros. and New Line’s horror film “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” at $10.8 million.And another horror film, “Bring Her Back,” debuted in fifth place with $7.1 million.”This is a very good opening for an original horror movie that cost only $4.5 million to make,” said Gross.Rounding out the top 10 were:”Sinners” ($5.2 million)”Thunderbolts” ($4.8 million)”Friendship” ($2.6 million)”The Last Rodeo” ($2.1 million)”J-Hope Hope on the Stage” – live tour broadcast ($940,000)

Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the 2024 campaign trail.The New York Times reported Friday that the billionaire adviser to President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems.The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January.In a post Saturday on X, Musk said: “To be clear, I am NOT taking drugs! The New York Times was lying their ass off.”He added: “I tried ‘prescription’ ketamine a few years ago and said so on X, so this not even news. It helps for getting out of dark mental holes, but haven’t taken it since then.”Musk first dodged a question about his drug use at a bizarre farewell appearance Friday with Trump in the Oval Office in which the Tesla and SpaceX boss sported a noticeable black eye as he formally ended his role as Trump’s main cost-cutter at DOGE, which fired tens of thousands of civil servants.News of the injury drew substantial attention as it came right after the Times report on his alleged drug use. The daily recalled erratic behavior such as Musk giving an enthusiastic Nazi-style salute in January of this year at a rally celebrating Trump’s inauguration.Musk said he got the injury while horsing around with his young son, named X, when he told the child to hit him in the face.”And he did. Turns out even a five-year-old punching you in the face actually is…” he added, before tailing off.Later Friday, when a reporter asked Trump if he was aware of Musk’s “regular drug use,” Trump responded: “I wasn’t.” “I think Elon is a fantastic guy,” he added. Musk has previously admitted to taking ketamine, saying he was prescribed it to treat a “negative frame of mind” and suggesting his use of drugs benefited his work.

In a Los Angeles theater, a trench coat-wearing Neo bends backwards to dodge bullets that spiral over the viewer’s head, as the sound of gunfire erupts from everywhere.This new immersive experience is designed to be a red pill moment that will get film fans off their couches at a time when the movie industry is desperate to bring back audiences. Cosm, which has venues in Los Angeles and Dallas, is launching its dome-style screen and 3D sets in June with a “shared reality” version of “The Matrix,” the cult 1999 film starring Keanu Reeves as a man who suddenly learns his world is a fiction.”We believe the future will be more immersive and more experiential,” said Cosm president Jeb Terry at a recent preview screening.”It’s trying to create an additive, a new experience, ideally non-cannibalistic, so that the industry can continue to thrive across all formats.”Cinema audiences were already dwindling when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, shuttering theaters at a time when streaming was exploding.With ever bigger and better TVs available for the home, the challenge for theater owners is to offer something that movie buffs cannot get in their living room.Prestige projects like Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” or Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning “Oppenheimer” increasingly opt for the huge screens and superior film quality of IMAX.But Cosm and other projects like it want to go one step further, collaborating with designers who have worked with Cirque du Soleil to create an environment in which the viewer feels like they are inside the film.For filmmakers, it’s all about how you place the cameras and where you capture the sound, said Jay Rinsky, founder of Little Cinema, a creative studio specializing in immersive experiences.”We create sets like the Parisian opera, let the movie be the singer, follow the tone, highlight the emotions… through light, through production design, through 3D environments,” he said.The approach, he said, felt particularly well suited to “The Matrix,” which he called “a masterpiece of cinema, but done as a rectangle.”For the uninitiated: Reeves’s Neo is a computer hacker who starts poking around in a life that doesn’t quite seem to fit.A mysterious Laurence Fishburne offers him a blue pill that will leave him where he is, or a red pill that will show him he is a slave whose body is being farmed by AI machines while his conscious lives in a computer simulation.There follows much gunfire, lots of martial arts and some mysticism, along with a romance between Neo and Trinity, played by the leather-clad Carrie-Anne Moss.”The Matrix” in shared reality kicks off with a choice of cocktails — blue or red, of course — which are consumed as the audience sits surrounded by high-definition screens.Shifting perspectives place the viewer inside Neo’s office cubicle, or seemingly in peril.”They’re sometimes inside the character’s head,” said Rinsky. “The world changes as you look up and down for trucks coming at you.”The result impressed those who were at the preview screening.”It just did feel like an experience,” influencer Vince Rossi told AFP. “It felt like you’re at a theme park for a movie almost.”

For Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the world has split into two camps: those with deep enough pockets to invest in artificial intelligence behemoths, and everyone else waiting to see where the AI revolution leads.The generative AI frenzy unleashed by ChatGPT in 2022 has propelled a handful of venture-backed companies to eye-watering valuations. Leading the pack is OpenAI, which raised $40 billion in its latest funding round at a $300 billion valuation — unprecedented largesse in Silicon Valley’s history.Other AI giants are following suit. Anthropic now commands a $61.5 billion valuation, while Elon Musk’s xAI is reportedly in talks to raise $20 billion at a $120 billion price tag.The stakes have grown so high that even major venture capital firms — the same ones that helped birth the internet revolution — can no longer compete. Mostly, only the deepest pockets remain in the game: big tech companies, Japan’s SoftBank, and Middle Eastern investment funds betting big on a post-fossil fuel future.”There’s a really clear split between the haves and the have-nots,” says Emily Zheng, senior analyst at PitchBook, told AFP at the Web Summit in Vancouver. “Even though the top-line figures are very high, it’s not necessarily representative of venture overall, because there’s just a few elite startups and a lot of them happen to be AI.”Given Silicon Valley’s confidence that AI represents an era-defining shift, venture capitalists face a crucial challenge: finding viable opportunities in an excruciatingly expensive market that is rife with disruption.Simon Wu of Cathay Innovation sees clear customer demand for AI improvements, even if most spending flows to the biggest players. “AI across the board, if you’re selling a product that makes you more efficient, that’s flying off the shelves,” Wu explained. “People will find money to spend on OpenAI” and the big players.The real challenge, according to Andy McLoughlin, managing partner at San Francisco-based Uncork Capital, is determining “where the opportunities are against the mega platforms.” “If you’re OpenAI or Anthropic, the amount that you can do is huge. So where are the places that those companies cannot play?”Finding that answer isn’t easy. In an industry where large language models behind ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini seem to have limitless potential, everything moves at breakneck speed.AI giants including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are releasing tools and products at a furious pace. ChatGPT and its rivals now handle search, translation, and coding all within one chatbot — raising doubts among investors about what new ideas could possibly survive the competition.Generative AI has also democratized software development, allowing non-professionals to code new applications from simple prompts. This completely disrupts traditional startup organization models.”Every day I think, what am I going to wake up to today in terms of something that has changed or (was) announced geopolitically or within our world as tech investors,” reflected Christine Tsai, founding partner and CEO at 500 Global.- The ‘moat’ problem -In Silicon Valley parlance, companies are struggling to find a “moat” — that unique feature or breakthrough like Microsoft Windows in the 1990s or Google Search in the 2000s that’s so successful it takes competitors years to catch up, if ever.When it comes to business software, AI is “shaking up the topology of what makes sense and what’s investable,” noted Brett Gibson, managing partner at Initialized Capital.The risks seem particularly acute given that generative AI’s economics remain unproven. Even the biggest players see a very uncertain path to profitability given the massive sums involved.The huge valuations for OpenAI and others are causing “a lot of squinting of the eyes, with people wondering ‘is this really going to replace labor costs'” at the levels needed to justify the investments, Wu observed. Despite AI’s importance, “I think everyone’s starting to see how this might fall short of the magical” even if its early days, he added.Still, only the rare contrarians believe generative AI isn’t here to stay.In five years, “we won’t be talking about AI the same way we’re talking about it now, the same way we don’t talk about mobile or cloud,” predicted McLoughlin. “It’ll become a fabric of how everything gets built.”But who will be building remains an open question.

Google said Saturday it will appeal a ruling against it for anti-competitive practices in online search, a day after urging a US judge to reject the suggestion it spin off its Chrome browser.”We will wait for the Court’s opinion. And we still strongly believe the Court’s original decision was wrong, and look forward to our eventual appeal,” the tech giant wrote on X.Google was found guilty in the summer of 2024 of illegal practices to establish and maintain its monopoly in online search by a federal judge in Washington.The Justice Department is now demanding remedies that could transform the digital landscape: Google’s divestiture from its Chrome browser and a ban on entering exclusivity agreements with smartphone manufacturers to install the search engine by default.It is also asking that the California-based company be forced to share the data used to produce search results on Chrome.The department’s proposal “reserves the right for the government to decide who gets Google users’ data. Not the Court,” Google said Saturday.”While we heard a lot about how the remedies would help various well-funded competitors (w/ repeated references to Bing), we heard very little about how all this helps consumers,” Google added, referring to the Microsoft-owned search engine.The firm has proposed much more limited measures, including giving phone manufacturers the possibility to pre-install its Google Play app store but not Chrome or the search engine.The Friday hearing devoted to arguments marked the end of the trial to determine Google’s penalty. The judge’s decision is expected by August. 

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Saturday warned that China was “credibly preparing” to use military force to upend the balance of power in Asia — remarks that earned a sharp rebuke from Beijing.The Pentagon chief was speaking at an annual security forum in Singapore, as the administration of US President Donald Trump spars with Beijing on trade, technology, and influence over strategic corners of the globe.China’s foreign ministry blasted the speech, saying it had “lodged solemn representations with the US side” over Hegseth’s comments and taking particular exception to his remarks about Taiwan.Trump has launched a trade war with China since taking office in January, sought to curb its access to key AI technologies and deepened security ties with allies such as the Philippines, which is engaged in escalating territorial disputes with Beijing.”The threat China poses is real and it could be imminent,” Hegseth said at the Shangri-La Dialogue, attended by defence officials from around the world.Beijing is “credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific”, he said.Hegseth warned that the Chinese military was building the capabilities to invade Taiwan and “rehearsing for the real deal”.China has ramped up military pressure on Taiwan and held large-scale exercises around the self-governed democratic island that are often described as preparations for a blockade or invasion.The United States was “reorienting toward deterring aggression by communist China”, Hegseth said, calling on US allies and partners in Asia to swiftly upgrade their defences in the face of mounting threats.In Beijing, the foreign ministry said: “The US should not try to use the Taiwan issue as a bargaining chip to contain China and must not play with fire.”- ‘Stirring up trouble’ –Hegseth described China’s conduct as a “wake-up call”, accusing Beijing of endangering lives with cyber attacks, harassing its neighbours, and “illegally seizing and militarising lands” in the disputed South China Sea.Beijing claims almost the entire waterway, through which more than 60 percent of global maritime trade passes, despite an international ruling that its assertion has no merit.It has clashed repeatedly with the Philippines in the strategic waters in recent months, with the flashpoint set to dominate discussions at the Singapore forum, according to US officials.As Hegseth spoke in Singapore, China’s military announced that its navy and air force were carrying out routine “combat readiness patrols” around the Scarborough Shoal, a chain of reefs and rocks Beijing disputes with the Philippines.Beijing did not send any top defence ministry officials to the summit, dispatching instead a delegation from the People’s Liberation Army National Defence University led by Rear Admiral Hu Gangfeng.Without referring to Hegseth by name, Hu said of his speech that “these actions are essentially about stirring up trouble, creating division, inciting confrontation, and destabilising the Asia-Pacific”.Hegseth’s comments came after Trump stoked new trade tensions with China, arguing that Beijing had “violated” a deal to de-escalate tariffs as the two sides appeared deadlocked in negotiations.The world’s two biggest economies had agreed to temporarily lower eye-watering tariffs they had imposed on each other, pausing them for 90 days.- ‘Cannot dominate’ -Reassuring US allies on Saturday, Hegseth said the Asia-Pacific region was “America’s priority theatre”, pledging to ensure “China cannot dominate us — or our allies and partners”.He said the United States had stepped up cooperation with allies including the Philippines and Japan, and reiterated Trump’s vow that “China will not invade (Taiwan) on his watch”.However, he called on US partners in the region to ramp up spending on their militaries and “quickly upgrade their own defences”.”Asian allies should look to countries in Europe for a newfound example,” Hegseth said, citing pledges by NATO members including Germany to move towards Trump’s defence spending target of five percent of GDP.”Deterrence doesn’t come on the cheap.”