The man who was convicted of assaulting then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022 was re-sentenced to 30 years in prison on Tuesday, with no change in the original sentence after the case was reopened so he could speak during his sentencing hearing, local news reported.

David DePape was originally sentenced to 30 years in prison on May 17 for forcibly entering Pelosi’s home in San Francisco early on Oct. 28, 2022 and clubbing her husband Paul in the head with a hammer in a politically motivated attack.

During the original sentencing, U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley failed to give DePape a chance to address the court, a “clear error” under the federal judicial rules, the judge wrote in a court filing the next day.

She also scheduled a hearing for Tuesday to resolve the issue, allowing DePape to speak on his own behalf. He did, apologizing for the attack, before Corley sentenced him again to 30 years in prison, reported ABC7, a local ABC affiliate in San Francisco.

In November, a jury found DePape guilty of attempting to kidnap a federal officer and assaulting an immediate family member of a federal officer. Prosecutors said the 44-year-old was driven by the far-right conspiracy theories known as QAnon.

Paul Pelosi, 82, suffered skull fractures and other injuries that have continued to affect him, according to a letter filed in court. In addition to dizziness and a metal plate that remains in his head, Pelosi said he has struggled with balance and has permanent nerve damage in his left hand.

Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives at the time of the attack, was in Washington when it occurred.

DePape still faces separate state charges stemming from the Pelosi break-in and attack, including attempted murder. Those charges carry a potential sentence of 13 years to life in prison. He has pleaded not guilty.

In the U.S., there is a chasm between what the labor laws say and what workers experience as their everyday realities. That’s because employment here is based on private contractual law, or agreements between two parties — and the deeply misguided assumption that those two parties have equal bargaining power.

We need to bridge that chasm. Doing so will require stronger unions; more aggressive legislation by Congress; more resources for, and enforcement by, local and federal agencies; and changes in our courts, which have been hostile to labor enforcement and unions.

Until all that happens, the best model we have for enforcing labor laws is in California.

You could call it the California Model of Co-Enforcement. Or you might call it the San Francisco Model, because that’s where it started. Whatever you call it, the idea is this: Since governments lack the capacity to enforce the laws by themselves, they must work in tandem with entities that have long histories of efforts to empower workers, like S.F.’s Chinese Progressive Association and Filipino Community Center.

Through co-enforcement, government agencies enable the worker centers to pursue the pay, rights, and fair treatment workers are entitled to under the law, but that they don’t always get in employer-friendly legal systems.

The co-enforcement model did not appear overnight. It took years of workers organizing, building, and winning to create it. Co-enforcement supplemented the state’s Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), passed in 2003, that “gives workers a fighting chance in court” to confront their employers’ wrongdoing, according to a UCLA Labor Center report.

Now, the model is threatened. Business groups have bankrolled a ballot initiative that would all but eliminate workers’ rights under PAGA. If the initiative were to pass, it would deaden the state labor agency’s ability to contract with non-governmental entities or attorneys to enforce worker protections against violating employers. And that would not only threaten the progress workers have made under PAGA — it would threaten the co-enforcement model itself.

The story of the California Model starts at the turn of the 21st century, with the closure of San Francisco garment factories. Community organizations that had focused on organizing these factories, especially the Chinese Progressive Association, began reaching out to workers in other low-wage job sectors. Realizing the common struggles across trades, the city’s worker centers banded together and fomented a movement that led San Francisco voters to approve a local minimum wage law in 2003.

The minimum wage catalyzed San Francisco’s development into the site of the broadest range of worker protection laws of any municipality in the United States. Among the city’s worker mandates are paid sick days, a health care coverage mandate, protections for formerly incarcerated workers, secure scheduling, paid parental leave, pay equity, and time and space for lactation.

To enforce these new laws, San Francisco extended investigative and enforcement powers to its Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, known as OLSE. But even with a staff that had grown to two dozen, OLSE couldn’t investigate and enforce every violation of these labor standards. So, in 2006, the city established its novel model of co-enforcement, a series of formal collaborations with community partners that had a history of supporting workers, such as the Chinese Progressive Association.

The minimum wage catalyzed San Francisco’s development into the site of the broadest range of worker protection laws of any municipality in the United States.

The idea behind co-enforcement was simple. Community partners already served as important anchors for marginalized workers. Now, they could build on that past work and train those workers to identify, report, and fight back against wage theft and other violations. OLSE had a particular interest in empowering low-wage, immigrant, and limited-English-proficiency workers to target their efforts in communities where wage theft is most likely to occur.

As OLSE created and boosted funding for these contracts with community partners, the initiative became known as the “community collaborative.” I was once involved in overseeing these contracts and the network of partnerships. The partners included the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Dolores Street Community Services (which had a long history of assisting refugees, homeless people, AIDS patients and LGBT people), Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, Young Workers United, La Raza Centro Legal (a half-century old advocate for the Bay Area’s Latinos), and the Filipino Community Center, which had been founded in 2004 to support Filipino airport screeners who had been laid off.

One of the victories that emerged from San Francisco’s co-enforcement model was a $4.25 million settlement with the popular dim sum restaurant Yank Sing, which was forcing workers to work 10-plus hour days without breaks, stealing tips from workers, and belittling an otherwise vulnerable workforce almost every day. With help from the Chinese Progressive Association, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, and UNITE HERE Local 2, which assisted with strategic research, the workers not only won unpaid wages but also achieved a workplace transformation for the restaurant’s nearly 300 employees.

The changes included meal and rest breaks, paid sick days, wages higher than the local minimum (including a 5% raise for non-tipped workers), non-mandated holiday pay and vacation pay, full health coverage with no deductibles, and the right to take up to four weeks of approved time off without risking their jobs — something many workers needed in order to visit families in China. The settlement even included an apology.

Since then, San Francisco’s co-enforcement approach has spawned imitators. Beginning in 2013, several other cities (among them New York City, Seattle, Oakland, San Jose, and Emeryville) developed offices similar to OLSE, and seeded co-enforcement partnerships with local community organizations.

In 2016, the state got in on the co-enforcement action. The California Labor Commissioner’s Office — then led by the pioneering labor lawyer Julie Su, who is today the acting U.S. labor secretary — formed the California Strategic Enforcement Partnership. Rather than wait for the long and often futile process of filing complaints, and conducting hearings and trying to collect judgments for unpaid wages, the state began using co-enforcement to target wage theft in six low-wage industries: agriculture, car washes, construction, janitorial, residential home care, and restaurants.

The state partnered with the National Employment Law Project and 14 workers’ rights and legal advocacy organizations. Among the initiative’s most publicized successes were enforcement actions for harsh treatment and illegally low pay at the Los Angeles-area car washes.

This new model of workers’ rights enforcement has made California a labor enforcement laboratory, and at the right time. As other major California cities have followed San Francisco’s lead — passing minimum wage laws and other worker protections and supporting enforcement — they have empowered workers, influenced industry practices, and found ways to build a more sustainable enforcement system throughout the state.

Co-enforcement is necessary because of weak federal labor laws, and dangerously low rates of unionization. (One study by the Economic Policy Institute concluded that less than 2% of the nearly $50 billion in wages stolen annually is ever recovered by workers.) The co-enforcement models have inspired other vehicles for worker empowerment.

When the pandemic hit, it was the San Francisco co-enforcement model that inspired the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency (LWDA) to partner with 61 community organizations throughout the state and create the COVID-19 Workplace Outreach Project (CWOP). This government-community partnership deployed “trusted messengers” to those frontline workers, to ensure the safety, health, and well-being of all citizens. Similarly, the Domestic Worker Rights Education and Outreach Program (DWEOP) ensures that housekeepers and nannies—workers who unfortunately do not enjoy the right to unionize—nevertheless can be educated about and trained in their labor rights and their employers’ responsibilities.

The co-enforcement model has some challenges. Building relationships between workers and the officials of government agencies — both of whom are busy working, and not in the same places — can be hard. Government procedures that require confidentiality can be difficult to square with the community’s desire for transparency. But the deeper the co-enforcement model has taken root, the better the outcomes that have emerged — for business, consumers, the agency, and for workers themselves.

There have been many promising lessons. One is that such collaborations render government officials more knowledgeable about labor violations, and sophisticated in their approach to enforcement. The second is that the state agency can only fulfill its mission with the support of community partners (which is why the November 2024 ballot initiative to gut the Private Attorneys General Act is such a threat). The most important aspect of a co-enforcement model is that it enables an organized and informed workforce to demand and attain compliance with the labor standards to which they are entitled under law.

Co-enforcement provides direct connection, funding, and legitimacy that can be game-changing for empowering workers. It also provides enforcement agencies with a trove of new education and connections to the underground economy. Co-enforcement is a win-win-win for workers, for community organizations, and for government agencies seeking effective and efficient ways to enforce laws in the low-wage sectors.

We need this California model of win-win-win to go national.

Seema N. Patel is the Thomas C. Grey Fellow & Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School and recently completed a term as Practitioner-in-Residence at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. She wrote this for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.

SAN FRANCISCO – President Joe Biden on Thursday met the wife and daughter of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died last week in a prison camp, and called him “a man of incredible courage.”

Biden, speaking to reporters in California, reiterated that Washington plans to impose a wide array of sanctions on Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin following Navalny’s death.

Navalny, 47, fell unconscious and died suddenly on Friday after a walk at the “Polar Wolf” penal colony above the Arctic Circle where he was serving a three-decade sentence, the prison service said.

“He was a man of incredible courage and it’s amazing how his wife and daughter are emulating that,” Biden said after meeting them.

“I know that we’re going to be announcing the sanctions against Putin, who is responsible for his death, tomorrow.”

Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said on Thursday that some of the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of sanctions to be unveiled in the coming days would target those responsible for Navalny’s death, but most would hit “Putin’s war machine” and close gaps among existing sanctions.

The new measures are timed to mark the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In a statement released before Biden spoke to reporters, the White House said the president conveyed his “heartfelt condolences” to Navalny’s family, including his wife Yulia and daughter Dasha.

During the meeting in California, he expressed his admiration for Navalny’s “extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia in which the rule of law applies equally to everyone,” the White House said.

(Reporting by Jasper Ward and Trevor Hunnicutt; editing by David Ljunggren and Daniel Wallis)

United Airlines said on Wednesday it plans to resume direct U.S. flights to Israel early next month, becoming the first American carrier to resume service since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel.

United, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines all suspended U.S. service to Israel in October following the attack.

Chicago-based United said it will resume flights from Newark to Tel Aviv next month but does not plan to restart flights from other U.S. cities until at least this fall.

Restarting U.S. carrier flights to Tel Aviv signals a potential turning point for travel to Israel, after tourism dried up on security fears following the Hamas rampage and subsequent Israel bombardment of Gaza.

United said its goal is to resume daily nonstop service to Tel Aviv starting March 6 from Newark on a Boeing 787-10.

On March 2 and March 4, the airline said it will operate flights from Newark to Tel Aviv with a stop in Munich, Germany, with return flights from Israel to Newark on March 3 and March 5.

United said it “conducted a detailed safety analysis in making this decision, including close work with security experts and government officials in the United States and Israel.”

The Israeli Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

United said it “will continue to monitor the situation in Tel Aviv and adjust the schedule as warranted, including changes to the resumed service from New York/Newark announced today.”

Before Oct. 7, United had four direct flights daily to Tel Aviv from Newark, San Francisco, Washington and Chicago. The airline said the flights where service has not yet resumed “will be evaluated for resumption beginning in the fall.”

Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian, Aegean and Air France are among other airlines that have restarted flights to Tel Aviv.

Delta has canceled flights to Israel through April 30 while American Airlines has halted flights through Oct. 28. Last October, more than 30 U.S. lawmakers urged the airlines to resume flights to Israel “as soon as possible.”

A crowd vandalized and set fire to a Waymo self-driving car using a firework in San Francisco on Saturday, the Alphabet-owned company and authorities said, marking the most destructive attack so far on driverless vehicles in the U.S.

On Saturday night, a crowd surrounded a white sport utility vehicle that was moving along a street in the city’s Chinatown district, a company spokesperson said.

Michael Vandi, a witness who posted videos of the incident, told Reuters that people were celebrating China’s Lunar New Year by setting off fireworks. A person jumped onto the hood of the Waymo vehicle and broke its windshield. Another person also jumped on the hood 30 seconds later as some in the crowd clapped in approval, he told Reuters in an X direct message. 

“That was when it went WILD,” he wrote, describing people with skateboards breaking the glass and others graffitiing the car. “There were 2 groups of people. Folks who encourage it – and others who were just shocked & started filming. No one stood up – i mean there wasn’t anything you could do to stand up to dozens of people.” 

His video showed the vehicle engulfed in flames with a huge plume of black smoke.

Waymo said someone threw a firework inside, which set the vehicle on fire. The fire department posted pictures on social media of the charred remains of the car and said a firework started the blaze. 

“The vehicle was not transporting any riders and no injuries have been reported. We are working closely with local safety officials to respond to the situation,” the company said. It did not say what caused the attack. 

The San Francisco Police Department said it was investigating the cause of the fire and did not say whether arrests have been made. The electric car, a Jaguar I-PACE, is equipped with 29 cameras and other sensors. 

The latest incident came a day before the Super Bowl NFL championship involving the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs.

“This was a one-off event,” the Waymo spokesperson told Reuters, adding it will “continue serving riders during today’s festivities.”

The incident was not the first time people have harassed self-driving cars, but its severity may illustrate growing public hostility following a pedestrian-dragging accident last year involving a vehicle operated by General Motors’ Cruise unit. 

On previous occasions in San Francisco and Phoenix, Arizona, groups have disrupted the operations of self-driving vehicles, blocking their path, trying to enter the vehicles and jumping on their hoods. Videos that went viral showed people putting orange traffic cones on top of the vehicles to obstruct their sensors and force them to stop abruptly.

Last week, a driverless Waymo car collided with a cyclist in San Francisco, causing minor injuries. The incident is being reviewed by the state’s auto regulator.

Waymo offers driverless ride-hailing service in Phoenix and is working to expand the service to Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. 

On Oct. 2, 2023, a pedestrian hit by another vehicle was thrown into the path of a self-driving Cruise vehicle and dragged 20 feet (6 meters). California subsequently suspended the company’s driverless testing license, and Cruise pulled all its U.S. self-driving vehicles from testing. 

Completely driverless test vehicles, mostly from Cruise and Waymo fleets, traveled nearly 3.3 million miles (5.3 million km) in California last year.

Enjoy the Maritime Museum of San Diego? Take the next step and join in as the museum begins its next Docent Volunteer Training Program on Tuesday.

Docent tasks include acting as a guide to small groups and educating guests while participating in on-the-water experiences such as the day sails offered most weekends aboard the galleon replica San Salvador.

“The docents add tremendous value to the visitor experience,” said Raymond Ashley, the museum’s president and CEO. ” Their knowledge and friendliness make an impression for all ages …”

Training sessions are set for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesdays on the upper west-end deck of the historic Victorian-era 1898 steam ferryboat Berkeley.  Classes include a 45-minute walking tour of one of the ships.

Volunteers will learn about maritime history with a focus on the 16th through 21st centuries represented by the vessels and artifacts in the museum’s collection. Docents will engage with museum visitors, fielding questions and sharing knowledge to enrich the guest experience. Training is conducted through a series of lectures, readings and walking tours.

Volunteers interested in the program, but unable to attend on Tuesdays may opt for the museum’s mentorship program in which docent recruits collaborate one-on-one with an experienced docent to build the necessary skill set.

Museum membership is required to be a docent. Questions about the Docent Training Program may be directed to Docent Chair Jim Cassidy at jimdcass@aol.com or at (661) 406-0605.

The San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park has received a grant of nearly $800,000 from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to launch a statewide nature alliance.

The grant will back the three-year effort to coordinate and enhance biodiversity and environmental equity research in San Diego, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, while also supporting San Diego-based community science in urban canyons.

In addition to the Nat, the California Urban Nature Alliance includes three institutions, the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley. 

The gift will fund the Nat’s coordination of the alliance, including a post-doctoral position based at UC Berkeley, and its own research here in San Diego.  

“At the Nat, we are ready to provide leadership for the alliance,” explained Judy Gradwohl, president and CEO. “Together, the four participating institutions will have a meaningful impact on California’s major urban centers by increasing the understanding of urban ecology and working with community scientists and policymakers to study and enhance nature in our cities.” 

The focus in San Diego will be assessing local canyons, the city and county’s dominant urban green space.

In the city of San Diego, 80% of residents live within a 10-minute walk from a park or open space. There are hundreds of canyons across the county. Despite their predominance in the landscape, there is still much unknown about these canyons, including the extent of natural habitat, how they contribute to conserving regional wildlife, the ecological services they provide to people and how to mitigate threats to their survival. 

“Currently, there is no comprehensive map of urban canyons for San Diego County, which hinders opportunities for researchers looking to study them and local people who want to use them,” explained Dr. Michelle Thompson, the Nat’s director of conservation biology, who will lead the initiative. “The strategy we plan to use could be replicated in other cities.” 

The Nat and the other organizations are building the alliance in partnership with the Schell Lab at UC Berkeley to elevate community involvement in assessing and preserving urban nature. The aim is to provide a model for collaboration for other cities in California and across the U.S.

“Natural history museums, and particularly the members of this alliance, are uniquely suited to lead this type of work. We are committed to conservation in our local regions, and independently have designed urban green space initiatives,” Gradwohl said.

The alliance will seek to rally support for green spaces, canyons and wildlife as part of neighborhoods in each metro area, including under-resourced communities. Residents will be invited to participate in scientific data collection and analysis, broadening and diversifying the network of California community scientists.

Stumbling lugubriously down a pee-smelling, detritus-strewn sidewalk, the too-skinny woman’s eyes are glazed. She moves languidly, stopping momentarily to lean on the stanchion of a streetlight, in a seemingly untroubled haze.

Stained underwear sticks out from her soiled, oversized sweats. Her hair is tangled and wild. Her face — dirty, lined, blemished, and swollen — is full of pain. She’s mumbling indomitably sad facts, such as: “I’m hungry. I’m sick. I’m dying.”

The woman doesn’t ask for help from passersby, and no one will help anyway. Too scared mostly, they don’t know where to begin. Others are mad she exists. They’re mad she’s filthy, that she’s breathing (albeit in a hacking, unhealthy way), and that they can’t, especially in the light of day, make her disappear — not even with hate. She exists, for now, and she’s not invisible.

Slowly, stolidly, the woman moves down the street sensing, and smelling fear—and loathing—from both tourists and city denizens; they suppress their stares—but they stare nonetheless—studiously side-stepping around her, and her squalor.

At the dispensary nearby, incuriously checking a driver’s license and waiving a well-dressed, well-coiffed, well-off man inside, a young, pony-tailed security guard adjusts his cargo pants. Looking at his watch, he thinks about his bed in his overpriced apartment — barely bigger than a cell — a long commute away, and yawns with earned ennui.

Down the block, in the hotel lobby at The Hilton, an up-tempo instrumental is being piped in from hidden, expensive speakers. The sound fills the cavernous space where conferencing professors (some with name-tags still dutifully stuck to their breasts) alternatively drink overpriced cocktails and coffees. In the background, a constant flow of travelers with conspicuous baggage prepare to make ingress deeper into the hotel, or egress, to places unknown. A tired doorman in a ridiculous-looking top-hat overlooks the scene severely. He would sigh too, but he’s old, and with his advanced age he’s learned to eschew — or at least not betray — any overly visible exasperation with life. For one thing: it had never led to better tips.

A mile away a freelance writer — meaning unpaid and unheralded — sits in a tattoo shop mulling over his own existential complaints with a bald, bemused stranger — a tattoo artist he’s only just met (but who has great online reviews); the tattooist, an amateur philosopher, and professional conversationalist, listens sympathetically.

The writer is saying that once he was a practicing lawyer, but he quit, and now his major focus is writing and interviewing reggae stars. The writer is explaining how life has gotten much better for him, simpler, and more fulfilling, with much more reggae. The tattoo artist is grinning — genially, not smugly or snidely, or so it seems to the writer — he’s heard it all before.

Dappled sunlight streaks through the tattoo shop’s front window, shining on the bald head of the tattooist as he presses his tattoo gun deeper into the writer’s skin. The writer isn’t talking about law or writing, or reggae anymore. He’s talking about loss, about emptiness. He’s talking about that discomfiting realization that death — and likely some quotient of suffering, be it big or be it small—will eventually touch each and every one of us, overtaking all we hold dear.

A few miles away from the tattoo shop, deep maroon, rust-colored steel rises — like a prehistoric monster — from the surrounding foothills right into the sky. Piercing low-lying clouds, the steel creates a perch for angels — and seabirds. Below, vehicles rumble under the bridge’s majestic arches while sailboats, with their white sails billowing, pockmark the blue sea.

Back on Market Street, the destitute woman has reached her destination: a folding table her crack dealer has unabashedly set up, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Glowing, the sequined sign sagely reads: “Quick Fixes Here. Cheap!”

The music is playing louder at The Hilton now — it’s happy hour. Sickeningly-sweet expensive perfumes fill the air and mingle with the smell of sweat, alcohol, and unspoken but obvious desperation on the faces of the professors.

His tattoo complete, the freelance writer has left the tattoo shop and is walking back gingerly towards The Hilton. Soon, he too will join the desperate, drinking professors at the bar. Later though, back in the quietude of his room, he’ll put the “do not disturb” sign on the doorknob, peel off the blood-stained gauze, and look closely in the mirror. Here, in the heart of San Francisco, he’s committed to becoming someone new.

Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public. defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills. Follow him on Twitter @SteveCooperEsq.

The Oceanside Public Library is hosting an event, “Remember and Commit” in honor of World AIDS Day on Friday.

The ceremony, in the Civic Center Library Community Room, 330 N Coast Hwy., will include public speakers, a moment of remembrance, HIV resources and a display with four panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Partnering with the library on the event are the North County LGBTQ Resource Center, Pride by the Beach, Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Vista Community Clinic and TrueCare.

The quilt sections connect the story of AIDS to the work being done to provide services and raise greater awareness about HIV today.

The memorial was created 35 years ago by gay rights activist Cleve Jones. While planning a march in 1985, he was devastated by the growing numbers of lives that had been affected by AIDS in San Francisco and asked each of his fellow marchers to write down the names of friends and loved ones who had died.

Jones and others stood on ladders taping the placards to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. The names looked like a patchwork quilt, and inspired by this sight, Jones and his friends made plans for a larger memorial. 

In 1987, a group of strangers began gathering in a San Francisco storefront with the goal of creating a memorial for those who had died of AIDS, while also helping people understand the devastating impact of the disease.

The project served as the foundation of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and later that year, nearly 2,000 of the panels were displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Today, the quilt has grown to more than 50,000 panels, with more than 110,000 names stitched within its fabric.  It weighs 54 tons, stretches more than 50 miles in length and is the largest community-arts project in the world.  And it is now part of the National AIDS Memorial, which oversees its preservation and care. 

For more information about the Oceanside event, please contact operations@northcountycenter.org or call 760-994-1690.

President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed on Wednesday to open a presidential hotline, resume military-to-military communications and work to curb fentanyl production, showing tangible progress in their first face-to-face talks in a year.

Biden welcomed the Chinese leader at the historic Filoli estate, a country mansion and gardens in Woodside, about 30 miles south of San Francisco, where they will head later for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

During the four hour meeting at the elegant, 650-acre estate built in 1915, the two leaders agreed to resume military contacts that China severed after then-House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022.

“We’re back to direct, open clear direct communication on a direct basis,” Biden said.

In addition, Biden said he and Xi agreed to high-level communications. “He and I agreed that each one of us can pick up the phone call directly and we’ll be heard immediately.”

But in a comment likely to irk the Chinese, Biden told reporters later that he had not changed his view that Xi is a dictator.

“Well, look, he is. I mean, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country,” Biden said.

Xi told Biden that the negative views of the Communist Party in the United States were unfair, a U.S. official told reporters after the meeting.

Biden and Xi came into the talks looking to smooth over a rocky period in relations that took a turn for the worse after a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon transited the United States and was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet in February.

Biden said he raised areas where Washington has concerns, including detained U.S. citizens, human rights and Beijing’s aggressive activities in the South China Sea.

“Just talking, just being blunt with one another so there’s no misunderstanding,” Biden said.

Fentanyl, Military, AI, Taiwan

Biden requested that both countries institutionalize the military-to-military dialogues, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will meet his Chinese counterpart when that person is named, a senior U.S. official said.

U.S. and China’s militaries have had a number of near-misses and acrimonious exchanges over the past year.

Biden and Xi agreed China would stem the export of items related to the production of the opioid fentanyl, a leading cause of drug overdoses in the United States. “It’s going to save lives,” Biden said, adding he appreciated Xi’s “commitment” on the issue.

Under the agreement, China will go directly after specific chemical companies that make fentanyl precursors, a senior U.S. official told reporters. He vowed to “trust but verify” Chinese actions on the drug.

The two leaders also agreed to get experts together to discuss the risks of artificial intelligence.

A U.S. official described an exchange over Taiwan, the democratic island that China claims as its territory. China’s preference is for peaceful reunification with the Chinese-claimed island of Taiwan, Xi told Biden, the U.S. official said, but Xi went on to talk about conditions in which force could be used.

Biden said he stressed the need for peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. official said Biden argued to maintain the status quo and for China to respect Taiwan’s electoral process.

“President Xi responded ‘Look, peace is all well and good, but at some point we need to move towards resolution more generally’,” the official quoted Xi as saying.

Xi also urged the United States to stop sending weapons to Taiwan and support China’s peaceful “reunification” with Taiwan, Chinese state media said.

Biden said he asked Xi to use his influence with Iran to urge Tehran not to launch proxy attacks on U.S. targets in the Middle East as the Israel-Hamas conflict continues in Gaza.

Respect

Xi came into the meeting looking for respect from the United States as China’s economy struggles to recover from sluggish growth.

Biden, who had long sought the meeting, struck a welcoming tone aimed at showing respect, and treated him as a major player on global hotspots.

“Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed,” Xi told Biden as they and their delegations sat across from each other at a long table in an ornate conference room.

Biden said the U.S. and China had to ensure that competition between them “does not veer into conflict” and manage their relationship “responsibly.”

After lunch, the leaders took a short walk together in the manicured garden of the mansion following an interaction that lasted around four hours. Biden waved to reporters and gave a two thumbs up sign when asked how the talks were going. “Well,” he said.

Xi told Biden as they began their talks a lot had happened since their last meeting a year ago in Bali. “The world has emerged from the COVID pandemic, but is still under its tremendous impacts. The global economy is recovering, but its momentum remains sluggish.”

He called the U.S.-China relationship “the most important bilateral relationship in the world,” and said he and Biden “shoulder heavy responsibilities for the two peoples, for the world, and for history.”

“For two large countries like China and the United States, turning their back on each other is not an option,” he said. “It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other, and conflict and confrontation has unbearable consequences for both sides.”

Leaders from the 21-country group APEC — and hundreds of CEOs in San Francisco to court them — are meeting amid relative Chinese economic weakness, Beijing’s territorial feuds with neighbors and a Middle East conflict that is dividing the United States from allies.

Updated at 7:15 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023