aspensmonster

By Derek Cai BBC News

US President Joe Biden has called Chinese President Xi Jinping a dictator at a fundraiser in California.

His remarks come a day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Mr Xi for talks in Beijing, which were aimed at easing tensions between the two superpowers.

Mr Xi said some progress had been made in Beijing, while Mr Blinken indicated both sides were open to more talks.

China is yet to respond to Mr Biden's comments.

President Biden, at the fundraiser on Tuesday night local time, also said Mr Xi was embarrassed over the recent tensions around a Chinese spy balloon that had been blown off course over the US.

"The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset, in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment in it, was he didn't know it was there," Mr Biden said.

"That's a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn't know what happened."

Mr Blinken's visit to Beijing - the first by a top US diplomat in almost five years - restarted high-level communications between the two countries. Both Mr Biden and Mr Xi hailed it as a welcome development. But Mr Blinken made clear that major differences remain between the two countries.

Washington and Beijing have long locked horns over an array of issues including trade, human rights, and Taiwan.

But relations have especially deteriorated in the past year. With the US election looming and tensions with China emerging as a political issue, some Republican senators have attacked the Biden administration for being "soft" on China.

OCR/caption below. It's a post from a sopuli.xyz user saying that Lemmygrad is the worst Lemmy instance of them all, even ones carrying far-right terrorism, NSFL gore, and CSAM.

same, I'm on Sopuli and their Blocklist is pretty short but has the worst ones.

they are really, really bad and some are straight up illegal in some countries.

Mostly far-right ones, straight up terrorism (seriously there are people with RAF and other terrorist organization's logos on their profile pics there), nsfl gore videos (like people dying and being tortured type of stuff), and nsfw ones full of underage anime girls in suggestive poses...

lemmygrad is probably the worst one out of all of them, just because of it's [sic] size (tankie terrorist group)

--@vox@sopuli.xyz

Ah yes. There's far-right terrorism, NSFL gore, CSAM, but it's the commies that are "the worst one out of all of them."

--@aspensmonster@lemmygrad.ml

Glock G19 compact 9mm, three yards, ten-round group. Still got some work to do.

Haven't been to the range in a while. My trigger discipline has definitely decayed. Still not terrible though.