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By Jessie Yeung, CNN

(CNN) — This article may be meeting you at a very Chinese time in your life.

At least, if you’ve spent enough time recently on social media, where the phenomenon of “Chinamaxxing” has swept feeds with videos of people sipping hot water, shuffling around the house in slippers and donning a viral Adidas jacket resembling historic Chinese fashion.

These things, content creators joke, will help you “become Chinese” – reflecting a growing Western fascination with Chinese culture and aesthetics.

“Morning routine as a new Chinese baddie,” one TikTok creator captioned a video in which he does a series of traditional Chinese exercises. Another video, viewed more than 2.4 million times as of late February, shows the creator boiling apples to make fruit tea – a supposedly old-school Chinese elixir for gut health.

We’ve seen this play out before as Asia steadily accumulated global cultural capital. K-dramas, K-pop and K-beauty have become beloved worldwide, while record numbers of tourists are flocking to Japan and gushing over its pristine streets and high-speed rail.

Now, it seems it is China’s turn.

“For the longest time, there was all this discussion about (how) China didn’t really have as much soft power vis-à-vis South Korea or Japan,” said Tianyu Fang, a PhD student at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science.

“We see that changing quite a bit over the last few months – with Chinese video games, Chinese films, and even tiny things like Labubus that are really reshaping the cultural imagination of China in the US, and more broadly in the West.”

But this feels a little different from previous Asian cultural waves. For starters, South Korea and Japan are both democracies and staunch US allies, while China is an authoritarian state and major US rival.

The trend also marks a vibe shift within the American public.

Just a few years ago, the Covid-19 pandemic fueled a surge in deadly anti-Asian hate crimes. US President Donald Trump repeatedly used racist language, calling Covid “kung flu.” A trade war and other tensions deepened the widespread Sinophobia.

Against this backdrop, it can seem like something of a 180 for many Gen Z Americans to now embrace “becoming Chinese.”

But experts say the trend reveals deeper undercurrents like dissatisfaction among many Americans with life at home – from political turmoil, gun violence, immigration crackdowns and persistent racial tensions. All this has dulled the veneer of the US, driving curiosity for American youths to see what life is like on the other side.

It’s also about simple exposure, Fang pointed out. While Chinese products have long been ubiquitous across the planet, more Americans are now noticing Beijing’s dominance in many fields – especially in the competitive world of tech.

And increasingly, what they’re seeing is redefining their image of cool.

Has the US lost its ‘cool’ factor?

This isn’t the first time China has drawn intrigue from the West. In the 2000s and early 2010s, as China began opening up to the world, more outsiders began learning Mandarin, and travel and immigration to and from China spiked.

Much of the enthusiasm to engage with the Asian giant was economically driven, said Fang.

In the past decade, however, “China became more self-sufficient, it is much more inward-looking than it used to be, especially during Covid.”

Relations with the US also soured drastically as China turned increasingly authoritarian under leader Xi Jinping, instead of more democratic and liberal as Western leaders had hoped.

But now, it appears people are drawn to China not purely because of money – but because of the cool factor.

That may

By Adam Cancryn, CNN

(CNN) — For the first hour of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday, Democrats in the House chamber largely stuck to their plan: Sit in stony, defiant silence.

But once Trump began to level attacks on immigrants, that strategy went out the window.

Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib repeatedly yelled at Trump, objecting to his characterization of Minnesota’s Somali community as “pirates” and accusing him of enabling the deaths of US citizens through his hardline immigration crackdown in the state.

The back-and-forth crested after Trump told Democrats in the chamber they “should be ashamed” for refusing to stand and applaud in response to his declaration that the government’s primary duty is “to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

“You have killed Americans,” Omar, a Somali American who represents a Minnesota district, shouted multiple times at Trump, before gesturing at him and adding, “You should be ashamed.”

The outburst prompted Trump to retort by accusing Democrats of cheating in elections, asserting without evidence that “they want to cheat.”

“They have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat,” he said, eliciting another round of jeers from Democratic lawmakers. “These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy.”

Trump officials seized on Omar and Tlaib’s interruptions in the aftermath of the speech, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy calling them “incredibly distracting.”

“Even if you don’t agree with [Trump], you should respect him enough to listen to him,” Duffy said on CNN.

Pressed on the episode during a separate CNN interview, Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi downplayed it as “hardly noticeable in the room.”

“I don’t think there was much, shall we say, departure from what the leader had guided us to do,” the former House speaker said.

Democratic leaders in the lead-up to the speech had repeatedly warned their members not to react to Trump’s rhetoric or make themselves the center of attention, fearing a repeat of last year, when several Democrats used signs or other props to protest the president.

Instead, dozens of Democrats opted to skip the address altogether. And outside of Rep. Al Green — whose one-man protest in the event’s opening moments got him immediately escorted out of the chamber for a second consecutive year — those who did attend spent the first part of Trump’s speech doing little more than shaking their heads in disagreement.

But as the president leaned into his more divisive policies, including his immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two US citizens in Minnesota, the protestations on the Democratic side of the aisle began to grow more audible.

Trump credited his immigration policies with sealing the southern border and rapidly deporting undocumented immigrants on multiple occasions, without mentioning the killings by federal immigration agents of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti last month.

The president raised Omar’s ire in particular when he singled out Minnesota as a “stunning example” of the fraud that he’s alleged with little evidence is running rampant in blue states, blaming the state’s Somali community.

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By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address Tuesday to slam the Supreme Court’s decision against his sweeping emergency tariffs, repeatedly calling the ruling “unfortunate” even as he suggested his administration would quickly move past it.

With four justices sitting mere feet away, their hands folded over their robes, Trump touted what he described as a vast economic benefit from the global tariffs before lamenting the “unfortunate ruling from the United States Supreme Court.”

“It just came down,” the president said. “Very unfortunate ruling.”

Though it was likely an awkward moment for the justices, Trump’s criticism of the court was far more tempered than on Friday, when he railed against the justices who voted against his tariffs. In an angry press conference at the White House, he described the court’s decision as a “disgrace” and at one point said that justices in the majority were an “embarrassment to their families.”

Four justices showed for the president’s speech: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, a first-term Trump appointee. Three of them — Roberts, Kagan and Barrett — voted against his tariffs. Kavanaugh, whom Trump also appointed to the high court in his first term, wrote the dissent from that decision.

The justices themselves have made clear for years they would prefer to be almost anywhere besides a State of the Union address. Stone-faced and silent, their front-row presence is an oddity at an event where lawmakers repeatedly erupt into applause or jeers.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia once described the speech as a “childish spectacle.” Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged the awkwardness and in 2010 complained that jurists essentially had to sit in the chamber “like the proverbial potted plant.”

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday that Trump could no longer rely on an emergency law enacted in the 1970s to impose his tariffs on a whim. Nothing in the court’s decision barred Trump from relying on other laws to raise tariffs, though many of those other measures come with strings attached.

Trump last week praised Kavanaugh, who penned the dissent in the case, but called those who voted against him a disgrace and suggested without evidence that their decision may have been driven by foreign influence.

But Trump said the justices were still invited to his speech.

“Barely,” he added.

On Tuesday, Trump exchanged pleasantries and shook hands with all four justices in attendance as he worked his way through the chamber before the speech.

After calling the decision “unfortunate” and “disappointing,” he framed its impact as limited.

“The good news is that almost all countries and corporations want to keep the deal that they already made,” the president said.

Sixteen years ago, President Barack Obama during his State of the Union took a similar swipe at the court for its decision days earlier in Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums in candidate elections. Six justices who attended the speech offered little reaction at first as Obama began speaking about that decision.

“With all due deference to separation of powers,” Obama said, “last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our ele

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) -

CIF SoCal Water Polo Championships Division 1: San Marcos 7, Bishop's 6: Junior Shea Estabrook snapped a 6-6 tie by scoring a goal with just :34 seconds to play to give the Royals a road win over San Diego's top team. Harvard-bound goalie Bethany King made 11 blocks for San Marcos who improved to 27-7 on the season.

USC-bound Charlotte Raisin and sophomore Ella Grube each scored 2 goals for the Royals.

Oaks Christian 16, Beckman 13: The Lions, who won the CIF-Southern Section Open Division championship last weekend, will host San Marcos in a CIF-Regional semifinal on Thursday at 5 p.m.

Division 2: Carlsbad 10, Santa Barbara 9: Standout sophomore Jules Horton scored a game-high 6 goals for the Dons who finish their season at 26-10. Madison Thomas scored the final two goals for the visiting Lancers, the game winner coming with :56 seconds left to snap a 9-9 tie.

(Rose Nelley scored the first three goals for the Dons. Entenza Design).

The game was tied at 2 after one quarter and Rose Nelley's third goal of the game put the Dons up 3-2 early in the second quarter.

Horton scored back-to-back goals to push the lead to 5-2. Her third goal in the second quarter helped the Dons to a 6-4 halftime lead.

Horton scored one a goal in the third quarter but the Dons were down 8-7 after three quarters.

The star Horton tied the game at 8 early in the fourth quarter and her highlight-reel backhanded goal with 4:15 remaining put Santa Barbara up 9-8.

But the offense dried up from there with Horton just missing some contested outside shots as time was winding down.

(Jules Horton put on an offensive show for the Dons scoring her team's final 6 goals. Entenza Design).

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