US brands China ‘aggressive’ – follow Biden news live

Mitt Romney has received the backing of moderate Republicans after he was booed by fellow GOP members in his home state of Utah.

Republicans at the Utah Republicans’ state organising convention narrowly rejected a motion to censure Mr Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, for voting to convict Donald Trump at the former president’s two impeachment trials, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The newspaper reported that Mr Romney told the crowd: “I’m a man who says what he means, and you know I was not a fan of our last president’s character issues.”

Senator Susan Collins, a leading moderate Republican in the US Congress, warned on Sunday against intolerance of differences within her party.

“We need to have room for a variety of views,” she told CNN’s State of the Union programme. “We are not a party that is led by just one person.”

“I was appalled,” Ms Collins added, that Mr Romney was booed on Saturday. “Mitt Romney is an outstanding senator who served his state and our country well,” she said.

Former Donald Trump strategist and architect of the widely-maligned migrant child separation policy Stephen Miller is behind a group suing the Biden administration for providing aid to black farmers, arguing it gave them an unfair advantage over white farmers.

Mr Miller appeared on Fox News to discuss his lawsuit, arguing that Covid-19 relief intended to allocate $5bn to help black farmers was discriminatory and that it was unfair to white farmers.

Joe Biden’s call for authorising Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices has energised Democrats on a politically popular idea they’ve been pushing for nearly 20 years only to encounter frustration.

But they still lack a clear path to enact legislation. That’s because a small number of Democrats remain uneasy over government price curbs on pharmaceutical companies.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will need every Democratic vote in a narrowly divided Congress.

Otherwise Democrats may have to settle for a compromise that stops short of their goal. Or they could take the issue into the 2022 midterm elections.

North Korea lashed out at the United States on Sunday in a series of statements saying recent comments from Washington were proof of a hostile policy that requires a corresponding response from Pyongyang.

The statements, carried on state news agency KCNA, come after the White House on Friday said US officials had completed a review of North Korean policy.

“Our policy towards North Korea is not aimed at hostility. It’s aimed at solutions,” Jake Sullivan, Mr Biden’s national security adviser, said in an interview with ABC’s This Week programme on Sunday.

In one statement, a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman accused Washington of insulting the dignity of the country’s supreme leadership by criticising North Korea‘s human rights situation.

This criticism is a provocation that shows the United States is “girding itself up for an all-out showdown” with North Korea, and will be answered accordingly, the unnamed spokesman said.

Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, has said in an interview that aired on Sunday that China had recently acted “more aggressively abroad” and was behaving “increasingly in adversarial ways”.

Asked if Washington was heading toward a military confrontation with Beijing, he told CBS News’ 60 Minutes: “It’s profoundly against the interests of both China and the United States to, to get to that point, or even to head in that direction.”

He added: “What we’ve witnessed over the last several years is China acting more repressively at home and more aggressively abroad. That is a fact.”

Asked about the reported theft of hundreds of billions of dollars or more in US trade secrets and intellectual property by China, Mr Blinken said the Biden administration had “real concerns” about the IP issue.

He said it sounded like the actions “of someone who’s trying to compete unfairly and increasingly in adversarial ways. But we’re much more effective and stronger when we’re bringing like-minded and similarly aggrieved countries together to say to Beijing: ‘This can’t stand and it won’t stand.’”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment on Mr Blinken’s interview.

Mr Blinken arrived in London on Sunday for a G7 foreign ministers meeting where China is one of the issues on the agenda.

In the interview, Mr Blinken said the United States was not aiming to “contain China” but to “uphold this rules-based order – that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re going to stand up and – and defend it”.