A.M. Edition for Mar. 13. Democrats signal they will block a Republican plan to avert a government shut down this weekend. Plus, US and Canadian officials meet today in a bid to tamp down the trade war between the two allies. And, chief correspondent Naharika Mandana explains how China is cementing power across Asia by exhausting its opponents with a thousand cuts. Kate Bullivant hosts. Check out our special series on how China’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan is challenging the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the top news highlights for March 13?
Democrats signal they will block a Republican plan to avert a government shutdown this weekend. Plus, US and Canadian officials meet today in a bid to tamp down the trade war between the two allies. And we look at China's efforts to cement power across Asia by exhausting its opponents with a thousand cuts.
So China escalates a little bit with every move, and no single move is so intolerable as to provoke conflict. But if you add them up over a period of time, the picture kind of changes bit by bit in China's favor.
Chapter 2: How are Democrats responding to the government shutdown proposal?
It's Thursday, March 13th. I'm Kate Bullivan for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for Luke Vargas. And here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said Democrats won't back a Republican plan to fund federal agencies through September, setting up a potential government shutdown this week.
The Republican-controlled House left town after it approved the resolution on Tuesday, effectively giving the Senate no time to revise the bill. but to simply pass it or reject it by Friday's midnight deadline. Speaking in the Senate, Schumer floated a shorter-term plan that would fund the government for a month.
Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input from congressional Democrats.
Chapter 3: What is the current status of the US-Canada trade war?
On Fox News, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said Democrats could cast a vote to keep the government open or take the blame for shutting it down. President Trump's trade team will meet with Canadian Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Ontario Premier Doug Ford in Washington today amid the escalating trade war between the longtime allies.
Canada's reciprocal 25% tariffs on more than $20 billion in US imported goods, such as steel, aluminum and computers, came into effect at midnight. Incoming Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he plans to continue Canada's strategy of responding to Trump's tariffs with targeted duties of its own. He'll be sworn in on Friday.
After losing a large number of their population during the pandemic, cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are growing again and at a faster pace than previously thought. New Census Bureau estimates released today show that in the year ended in June, most growth occurred in metro areas, where 86% of the US population lives.
Chapter 4: Why are US cities experiencing population growth again?
Economics reporter Conrad Puzier says cities are being boosted by immigration in particular.
People aren't having kids as much anymore as they used to. A lot of these big expensive cities are still losing people to the rest of the country, even though it's now a slower pace than during the pandemic. So what you're left with is really immigration as a driver of growth. And it's not just New York and San Francisco and LA, even places like Atlanta.
And all that means that population growth in these big cities is on pretty shaky ground. Because the Trump administration is pretty open about wanting to restrict immigration. And if you stop the flow of immigrants to big American cities, their population are likely to shrink again.
Chapter 5: What are the recent developments in the case of Mahmoud Khalil?
A federal judge has said that Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student arrested after his participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, would remain in Louisiana for now. Yesterday's order comes as Khalil's lawyers push for him to be returned to New York as soon as possible to have better access to their client and to allow Khalil's wife, who is eight months pregnant, to visit him.
Chapter 6: What is causing Intel’s recent stock rally?
Lawyers for the government argue that the case shouldn't be decided by a judge in New York but rather in New Jersey, where he was first booked and processed, or in Louisiana, where he was transferred this past weekend. In market news today, shares in Intel have rallied in off-hours trading after the semiconductor company named Litbu Tan as its new chief executive.
Tan is a career venture capitalist and former Intel board member with more than 20 years of chip and software experience. Intel shares have lost more than half their value over the past year as the one-time industry-leading semiconductor manufacturer has underperformed both the market and its competitors. though deal speculation has helped push shares up so far this year.
New data from the Treasury Department shows that the gap between federal revenue and government spending widened to $1.15 trillion in the first five months of the fiscal year. That marks a record for the October through February period. The biggest increases in spending came from interest paid on public debt, which rose by 10% in the current fiscal year.
Higher tax credits and military and security spending also jumped. And later today, markets will get another inflation update when the Labor Department releases February's producer price index. Yesterday, data showed consumer prices were up 2.8% last month from a year earlier, a lower than expected reading, although there is concern from analysts and on Wall Street
that tariffs could continue to push prices higher. PPI is due out at 8.30am Eastern. Coming up, China's relentless campaign to extend its power across Asia is blurring the lines between war and peace. We take a look at this grey zone after the break. In the middle ground between war and peace lies the grey zone.
It's a domain of boundary pushing that tests the limits of what your opponents consider tolerable. And it's a strategy that journal chief correspondent Naharika Mandana reports China has been embracing across a swath of Asia as it looks to cement its power. Naharika, let me just say first off, for our journal subscribers, I think it's worth checking out the link to your story.
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Chapter 7: How is China expanding its influence in Asia through grey zone tactics?
We've left a link to that in our show notes. The graphics showing Chinese military activity in the waters around Taiwan or the buildup of Chinese settlements in the Himalayas is really quite eye-catching stuff.
Yeah, so what caught my attention was that China is using the gray zone campaign across a number of different places and geographies and problem areas, if you will, you know, in the South China Sea, around Taiwan, along its Himalayan border, and really intensifying these gray zone activities in all of these places. So the crux of a gray zone campaign is that it's nonstop, right?
So China escalates a little bit with every move, and no single move is so intolerable as to provoke conflict. But if you add them up over a period of time, the picture kind of changes bit by bit in China's favor. So if you look at the South China Sea, first over 10 years, first China turned reefs into islands, islands into military bases, then it used those bases to kind of
send out Coast Guard fleets on patrol. Those fleets grew in size. They were then joined by the maritime militia. You saw sort of an intensification of those tactics of using ramming and water cannons to push others out. And then what we were able to see with ship tracking data over the last three years is that the presence of the Chinese Coast Guard and maritime militia
is getting so much stronger near the Philippines, which means they're just covering a bigger area inside the Philippines' exclusive economic zone. And more and more of this activity has become normal over time as China pushes the boundaries. You'll see a similar pattern around Taiwan. Five years ago, it was rare to have Chinese military planes cross the median line, which is
kind of a notional line that divides the Taiwan Straits. Now that's the new normal.
And one location we haven't discussed on the podcast before is China's border with Bhutan, where this strategy also seems to be playing out. Tell us about the significance here.
So that's really interesting because, of course, on land, it's not ships or it's not aircraft, right? But what China's doing is building civilian settlements in areas that are considered to be disputed. So these areas are remote and mountainous and historically no one's really lived in these areas.
But now you have little villages or settlements where China's built rows and rows of homes and administrative offices and kind of moved families into these areas. And once you've built this stuff, it's hard to reverse. So what it means is that China's effectively taken this land that it believes to be its own by building these civilian settlements little by little by little.
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