White House condemns ‘chilling’ Adam Toledo shooting video – follow live

Black Lives Matter (BLM) co-founder Patrisse Cullors held back tears while discussing criticism she faced last week over her housing portfolio, worth $3m (£2.17m).

Ms Cullors, who created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013 and later co-founded the BLM Network, was criticised last week after the New York Post revealed that she had spent $1.4m (£1.017m) on a Los Angeles property, her third residence in the city and fourth overall.

Questions have been raised about how she had acquired the funds to pay for the properties, with Black sports journalist Jason Whitlock accusing her and other BLM founders of “making millions of dollars off the backs of these dead Black men who they wouldn’t spit on if they were on fire and alive”.

Staunch Biden critic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who famously goes by the acronym AOC, tweets her delight at the Biden administration’s decision to backtrack on Donald Trump’s refugee cap.

She said the move was “a testament to the power that people’s movements, community advocates, & progressive coalitions have built”.

China has hit back at the US’s apparent show of alliance with Japan during talks between Joe Biden and Japan’s PM Yoshihide Suga, calling it an “ironic attempt of stoking division”.

The east Asian nation said Mr Biden and Mr Suga’s news conference on Friday, in which they issued a joint statement on shared values in democracy and human rights and aired concerns about China’s activities in the Indo-Pacific region, had gone “far beyond the scope of normal development of bilateral relations”.

“It cannot be more ironic that such attempt of stoking division and building blocs against other countries is put under the banner of ‘free and open,’” the Chinese Embassy’s spokesperson in Washington said in a statement on Saturday.

The statement by the Japanese and US leaders also mentioned the importance of “peace and stability” in the Taiwan Strait, marking the first time a Japanese PM had spoken out in a communique with the US on Taiwan since 1969 talks between Richard Nixon and Eisaku Sato.

Japan has become more outspoken with Suga.

Meanwhile, the US and China have clashed over a wide range of issues in the last few years, including human rights in Tibet and the Xinjiang region, a crackdown on protests and political freedom in Hong Kong, China’s assertion of its territorial claims to Taiwan and most of the South China Sea and accusations Beijing was slow to inform the world about the Covid-19 outbreak.

China claims self-governing Taiwan as its territory and says, like Hong Kong, it should be under Beijing’s control.

“The US should never try to play the Taiwan card,” Le Yucheng, China’s vice foreign minister, said in an interview with the AP news agency on Friday. “It is very dangerous. This is our red line. The US should never try to cross it.”

China also reiterated its stance on Xinjiang, Taiwan and Hong Kong, all of which it considers “domestic matters”.

Following backlash from allies and aid groups, Joe Biden now plans to lift his predecessor’s historically low cap on refugees by next month, after initially moving only to expand the eligibility criteria for resettlements.

In an emergency determination signed by Mr Biden on Friday, he stated the admission of up to 15,000 refugees set by former Donald Trump this year “remains justified by humanitarian concerns and is otherwise in the national interest.” But if the cap is reached before the end of the current budget year and the emergency refugee situation persists, then a presidential determination may be issued to raise the ceiling.

That set off a deluge of criticism from top allies on Capitol Hill such as the second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, who called that initial limit “unacceptable.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said later that Mr Biden is expected to increase the refugee cap by 15 May, though she didn’t say by how much.

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White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the recently released video footage of the police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo serves as a “chilling” reminder that “too often in this country law enforcement uses unnecessary force.”

“I will say for those of us who did watch that video, it is certainly chilling,” Ms Psaki reporters on Friday. “And a reminder that across the country there are far too communities where there is violence that is impacting… that too often in this country law enforcement uses unnecessary force, too often resulting in the death of Black and brown Americans.”

Video of Adam’s death was released hours before another mass shooting in Indiana on Thursday night, among nearly 150 mass shootings to have occurred in 2021, reports Alex Woodward.