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NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Mikie Sherrill, the four-term congresswoman and former Navy helicopter pilot who cast her November election in New Jersey as a victory over President Donald Trump’s vision for the country, is set to be inaugurated as the state’s 57th governor on Tuesday. Sherrill, 54, will be just the second woman to lead the state of nearly 9.5 million people and is the first person from a major political party to be elected to a third straight term in more than six decades, succeeding two-term Democrat Phil Murphy. She swept to victory over her Trump-endorsed GOP rival in part by pinning blame for high costs on the president’s tariffs and promising that her first action once in office would be to order a freeze on skyrocketing utility rates. She will be sworn in Newark, the state’s largest city whose voters made up a key component of her winning coalition. It is a departure from previous inaugurations, which have included military artillery salutes along the Delaware River outside the statehouse in Trenton. She is being sworn in as her former congressional colleague Abigail Spanberger comes into office in as Virginia’s governor after a similar double-digit victory over her Republican opponent and as the midterm elections start to come into sharper focus. Democrats are hopeful the president will be a drag on GOP candidates in key races across the country. Sherrill takes over from Murphy, a former Obama administration ambassador and Wall Street finance executive, who delivered on a number of progressive promises over eight years, including raising taxes on income over $1 million, boosting the minimum wage, expanding early childhood education and fully funding the state workers’ pension, which was underfunded for years before he took over. Murphy said Friday in his final news conference that he has been in regular touch with Sherrill about the transition. He summed up his two terms as governor as having lived up to promises he made on the campaign trail. “We were who we said would be,” Murphy said. “We didn’t campaign on my thesis and pull a fast one.” He is also passing along a state budget that has swelled over the years, raising the prospect of potential shortfalls if state revenues dip as well as an unfunded promise to continue a property tax relief program begun in the governor’s second term. Sherrill will have a Democrat-led Legislature to work with, one of more than a dozen where the party controls the legislature and governorship. The first woman to be governor of New Jersey is Christine Todd Whitman, a two-term Republican who went on to serve as George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator. New Jersey’s governorship has often switched back and forth between the parties. The last time the same party prevailed in a third straight gubernatorial election was in 1961. Source

BEIJING (AP) — China’s one-child policy, one of the harshest attempts at population control the world has seen, forced abortions on women, made sterilization widespread and led to baby daughters being sold or even killed, because parents wanted their only child to be a male. Now, experts say, the question is whether it was all necessary. China’s birth rate fell to record lows last year and its population has fallen for four years in a row, official statistics showed this week. Authorities, alarmed by the prospect of a shrinking workforce and an aging population, scrapped the policy in 2015. “It’s hard to escape the fact that China demographically shot itself in the foot,” said Mei Fong, the author of the 2016 book, “One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment.” Population growth as a threat China’s leaders saw unbridled population growth as a potential threat in 1980 — to both economic development and its ability to feed what had grown into a nation of 1 billion people. The then impoverished country wasn’t the only one worried about having too many people at the time. Population control was a hot topic internationally and experts feared that rapid growth in China, India and elsewhere could overwhelm the earth’s resources. The birth rate had begun to fall in the 1970s after the government began encouraging people to have fewer children. It’s unclear how much its fall since then resulted from the one-child policy and to what degree it would have happened anyway because of the tremendous economic and societal changes over the last four decades. Stiff fines and sterilization But the leadership at the time decided to curb population growth more directly, launching the one-child policy and enforcing it with stiff financial penalties for parents who had more than one child, as well as abortions and sterilization campaigns. It lasted for 35 years. Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that the number of people getting sterilized plunged from 1.4 million women and 180,000 men in 2014, two years before the policy was eased, to 190,000 women and 2,600 men in 2020. In 2016, the government began allowing two children per couple and raised the limit to three children in 2021. But it has proven more difficult to reverse the mentality of people than the policy. ‘Little emperors’ China is far from the only country facing the challenges of an aging population. Around the world, as people get wealthier, they tend to want fewer, or no, children. But the one-child policy, leading to a preference for sons, has also created a gender imbalance in the one-child generation. Now, some from that generation, once dubbed “little emperors” because they were so fussed over, face the pressure of meeting the expectations, including financial, of being the only child. As they reach their 30s and 40s, there is only one child to support two parents, and in some cases, up to four grandparents. For some, this can lead to anxiety and depression, Fong said. “The little emperor at some point becomes the slave,” she said. Putting a tax on condoms China is an aging society that will likely face a major shortfall in the coming decades: not enough people of working age to support a growing population of retirees. That could burden government finances and pension systems. The government has launched a slew of polices to try to boost the birth rate, from eliminating a tax exemption for condoms to giving cash subsidies to couples who have children. But the experience of other countries shows that it’s difficult to turn around a declining birth rate. Source

WASHINGTON (AP) — A stunning military intervention in Venezuela. Telling the New York Giants which coach to hire. Threats against Iran, Denmark, Greenland and Colombia. Posing with someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize. Dangling the potential of deploying U.S. troops in Minneapolis. Flipping off a critic. Announcing an aggressive round of tariffs. Threatening political enemies. For President Donald Trump, this blizzard was just the first half of January. If a president’s most valuable currency is time, Trump operates as if he has an almost limitless supply, ever willing to share no matter the day, the hour or the circumstance. He’s rewritten the role of the presidency in a divided country, commanding constant attention with little regard for consequences. For all his talk about strength, his approach leans more toward virality than virility with social media as his primary accelerant. “The president exists loudly,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “The president will play with fire. I haven’t seen him yet play with live hand grenades, but I’ve seen him come damn close. That’s just the way he is, and it’s not going to change.” At least Trump thanks you in the process. During his second term, the Republican president has signed off of his social media post with the catchphrase “thank you for your attention to this matter” 242 times, according to data compiled by Roll Call Factba.se. For good measure, he often uses all capital letters and a few exclamation points. Trump’s decades of seeking attention He has spent decades seeking attention, first in the New York tabloids and later as a reality television star. Attention, positive or negative, is its own reward. In the attention economy, Trump is what Wall Street might call a market maker. The gambits often have a tenuous relationship with truth and sometimes involve misogyny or racism. They can step on the administration’s other priorities and don’t always bend political realities in Trump’s favor (see affordability concerns and the Epstein files ). But they’re hard to ignore. “He’s saying hello to you in the morning, and he says good night to you at the end of the day,” Republican strategist Ron Bonjean said. “You’re never not going to hear from him.” In his second term, he observed even fewer constraints on where to assert his presence, with a fondness for sports. During September alone, Trump attended three major sporting events around New York City. His visit to the U.S. Open final forced long security lines and delayed the start of the match. The crowd — dominated by New York’s elite — booed him, but that didn’t matter. He was still on the stadium’s big screen and all over social media. That’s where some of the biggest changes during Trump’s second term have unfolded. During his first administration, many Silicon Valley leaders were cold — or outright hostile — to Trump. He was banned from platforms including Twitter and Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The leaders of those companies are now openly allied with Trump or at least friendly with him. Twitter is now named X and owned by Elon Musk, who led the Department of Government Efficiency during the first months of the second term and has returned to the president’s orbit after a brief falling-out. Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were among the technology executives who attended Trump’s inauguration last year. AI quickly produces memes and videos Trump, who’s not known to use a computer, this time has his own social media platform, where his team relies on fresh artificial intelligence technology to quickly produce memes and videos that keep the president at the forefront of the online conversation. Those posts often veer into crude territory, such as one in October that showed him wearing a crown, flying a plane, dumping excrement on his opponents. “The social media we’re talking about in Trump’s second term is not the social media of Trump’s first term,” said Nolan Higdon, a lecturer at the…

LONDON (AP) — Britain’s government on Tuesday approved a huge new Chinese Embassy in central London despite heavy pressure from lawmakers across the political spectrum over its potential security risks. Local Government Secretary Steve Reed formally signed off on plans for the building near the Tower of London after years of delays and legal challenges. Critics have long expressed concerns that the supersized embassy, set to be the biggest Chinese Embassy in Europe, will be used as a base for espionage as well as pose a heightened threat of surveillance and intimidation of Chinese dissidents in exile. But the government said it had worked “with policing, and other relevant partners, to ensure that the breadth of national security issues associated with this planning application have been considered and addressed.” Plans for the embassy have been plagued by objections and protests since 2018, when China’s government bought the site at Royal Mint Court, where Britain’s money was once made, for 225 million pounds ($301 million.) Opponents say the huge site sits too close to underground fiber optic cables carrying sensitive financial information between London’s two main financial districts. British media have reported that the 20,000 square meter (215,278 square feet) complex would include 208 secret basement rooms close to the data cables. Fears the embassy will be used to monitor activists Dissidents have been among those who have protested the plans, saying a mega-embassy housing large numbers of officials would further China’s repression of activists abroad. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, joined hundreds of protesters who chanted “no China mega embassy” at the site Sunday. Conservative foreign affairs spokeswoman Priti Patel said “Keir Starmer has sold off our national security to the Chinese Communist Party with his shameful super embassy surrender.” Conservative security spokeswoman Alicia Kearns said the decision would likely face a court challenge. Helena Kennedy, a human rights lawyer and Labour Party member of the House of Lords, said the decision was a dangerous step. “We cannot reinforce the dangerous notion that Britain will continue to make concessions — such as granting a mega-embassy — without reciprocity or regard for the rule of law,” she said. Starmer wants dialogue with China Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has repeatedly postponed its decision in recent months after multiple cases of alleged Chinese spying and political interference underlined concerns about the proposed embassy. In November, the domestic intelligence agency MI5 issued an alert to lawmakers warning that Chinese agents were making “targeted and widespread” efforts to recruit and cultivate them using LinkedIn or cover companies. Beijing has strongly denied those claims, calling them “pure fabrication and malicious slander.” U.K. security services gave the greenlight to the embassy development. Some security experts say the risks are manageable and that the embassy has the advantage of consolidating China’s current seven diplomatic premises in London onto one site. The government said that “no bodies with responsibility for national security … have raised concerns or objected to the proposal on the basis of the proximity of the cables or other underground infrastructure.” Starmer has stressed that while protecting national security is non-negotiable, Britain needs to keep up diplomatic dialogue and cooperation with the Asian superpower. The approval is widely expected to pave the way for a long-anticipated trip by Starmer to China, and an expansion of the U.K. Embassy in Beijing. The closely watched visit would be the first made by a British prime minister since 2018. China has complained about the seven-year delay in approving the project, saying the U.K. was “constantly complicating and politicizing the matter.” Source