By Ariel Edwards-Levy, Jennifer Agiesta, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address drew largely positive marks from a heavily Republican audience, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

But it didn’t fully convince significant shares of even that friendly audience that he’s focusing on the nation’s most important problems or that he’ll lower the cost of living.

Nearly two-thirds of speech-watchers said they had at least a somewhat positive reaction to Trump’s speech, with a smaller 38% offering a very positive response. That’s a few points cooler than the reception to his address to Congress last year and falls below the ratings for his first-term speeches in CNN polling. It’s similar to the ratings that former President Joe Biden saw during his last year in office.

Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract generally friendly audiences that disproportionately align with presidents’ own parties. In CNN’s speech reaction polls, which have been conducted most years dating back to the Clinton era, audience reactions have always been positive.

The pool of people who watched Trump speak on Tuesday was about 13 percentage points more Republican than the general public.

Trump’s speech seemed to rally some who watched it. In a survey conducted prior to the speech, 54% said they believed his policies would move the country in the right direction; afterward, 64% of the same people said his policies would take the country down the right path. The share who believed Trump has had the right priorities stood at 44% prior to the speech and 54% immediately following its conclusion.

In the pre-speech survey, a majority of viewers said they most wanted to hear Trump talk about the economy and the cost of living. But nearly half of the audience, 45%, said that, based on Trump’s speech – which set a record for the longest State of the Union address – he was focusing too little on the issue, with 53% saying he’d given the issue the right amount of focus.

Speech-watchers were about evenly split on whether Trump’s handling of tariffs was an appropriate use of power, or whether it represented an overstep on his part. And just 31% expressed a lot of confidence in the president to make the cost of living more affordable, with 29% saying they had some confidence in him to do so and 40% that they had none at all.

Following the address, 62% of speech-watchers said both that Trump’s economic policies and his immigration policies would move the country in the right direction.

While the economic numbers are identical to his ratings after last year’s speech, Trump’s numbers on immigration represent an erosion to first-term levels, when the issue stood as one of his most significant political liabilities. The minority of speech-watchers who were dissatisfied with his level of focus on immigration were more likely to say he’d paid the issue too much attention (38%), not too little (6%).

Forty-five percent of speech-watchers said they had a lot of confidence in Trump to provide real leadership for the country, and 43% expressed a lot of confidence in him to use US military power responsibly, with 38% saying they were highly confident in him to make the right decisions about Iran.

While State of the Union addresses have long been seen as a chance for the president to shift public perception of his efforts, history suggests that the speech is unlikely to have much

Por Casey Tolan y Isabelle Chapman, CNN

Decenas de entrevistas a testigos del FBI en la investigación de Jeffrey Epstein parecen faltar en el enorme conjunto de archivos publicados por el Departamento de Justicia el mes pasado, incluidas tres declaraciones relacionadas con una mujer que acusó al presidente Donald Trump de agredirla sexualmente hace décadas, según una revisión de CNN.

Un registro de evidencia proporcionado a los abogados de Ghislaine Maxwell, socia de Epstein, incluye números de serie de alrededor de 325 documentos de entrevistas de testigos del FBI, pero más de 90 de esos materiales, alrededor de una cuarta parte de la lista, no parecen estar presentes en el sitio web del Departamento de Justicia, arrojó la revisión de CNN.

Entre esos registros faltantes hay tres entrevistas relacionadas con una mujer que denunció a los agentes que Epstein había abusado de ella repetidamente desde que tenía aproximadamente 13 años, y también acusó a Trump de agredirla sexualmente.

Un legislador demócrata señaló el martes los documentos aparentemente faltantes para cuestionar el alcance de la divulgación del Departamento de Justicia y si la administración Trump cumplió con la ley que obliga a la agencia a publicar sus archivos relacionados con Epstein, el rico financiero que murió en una cárcel federal en 2019 mientras enfrentaba cargos de tráfico sexual.

“Tenemos a una sobreviviente que hizo graves acusaciones contra el presidente”, declaró a CNN el representante Robert García, el demócrata de mayor rango en la Comisión de Supervisión de la Cámara de Representantes. “Pero hay una serie de documentos, y al parecer posibles entrevistas, que el FBI realizó con la sobreviviente y que están realmente desaparecidos, a los que no tenemos acceso”.

Trump ha negado sistemáticamente haber actuado mal en relación con Epstein.

En un comunicado, la Casa Blanca calificó las acusaciones contra Trump de “falsas y sensacionalistas” y señaló una declaración previa del Departamento de Justicia que afirmaba que “algunos documentos contienen afirmaciones falsas y sensacionalistas contra el presidente Trump”.

Los detalles sobre los documentos faltantes relacionados con la acusadora de Trump fueron informados previamente por NPR y el periodista independiente Roger Sollenberger.

Un portavoz del Departamento de Justicia negó que se hubieran eliminado registros de Epstein y enfatizó que el departamento estaba cumpliendo con la ley.

“No hemos eliminado nada y, como siempre hemos dicho, se presentaron todos los documentos pertinentes”, declaró el portavoz. Los documentos no incluidos en el comunicado eran “duplicados, confidenciales o parte de una investigación federal en curso”, añadió.

El Departamento no respondió a preguntas adicionales sobre archivos específicos.

Es posible que algunos de los documentos a los que se hace referencia en los registros de evidencia de Maxwell puedan estar presentes en otras partes de los archivos sin los números de serie, o con esos números de serie redactados.

Muchos documentos también han sido eliminados y reincorporados al sitio web de los archivos de Epstein del Departamento de Justicia durante las semanas transcurridas desde su publicación inicial.

La semana pasada, el análisis de CNN reveló que faltaban alrededor de una docena de informes de entrevistas adicionales, pero estos estaban disponibles en línea hasta el martes por la tarde.

Uno de los dos registros de pruebas también estuvo fuera del alcance la semana pasada, pero ahor

The post Lyndon Lea, Former Montecito Polo Player and International Business Tycoon, Appears in Epstein Files appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

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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