BEIJING (AP) — The United States wants to improve military-to-military ties with China, a U.S. lawmaker leading a bipartisan congressional delegation said Monday in a meeting with China’s defense minister in Beijing.

The visit is the first from the House of Representatives to China since 2019, and comes as tensions have risen between the two countries over trade, technology and opposing views on global conflicts. A group of U.S. senators visited Beijing in 2023.

The current delegation is led by Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. The group met with Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun and separately, with Vice Premier He Lifeng, after holding talks with Premier Li Qiang on Sunday.

Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun speaks with Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash, unseen, who leads a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers for a meeting at the Ministry of Defense in Beijing, China, Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A., Pool)

“We want to open up better the lines of communication between our two countries in general, in particular between our defense (structures),” Smith told Dong ahead of their meeting.

He added that he believed both China and the U.S. wanted to uphold global peace and security, which made it important for the sides to maintain open communication lines.

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“And we have disagreements, without question, but I think it makes it all the more important that we have open discussions about how to resolve those differences,” he added.

Dong said the lawmakers’ visit “shows a good phase in strengthening China-U.S. communications,” which “is the right thing to do.”

U.S. and China military communications were suspended for over a year starting in August 2022, following a visit by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan. The visit angered Beijing, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own territory, to be annexed by force if necessary.

The sides restored military dialogue in November 2023, after a rare meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and then-U.S. President Joe Biden.

President Donald Trump said he would meet with Xi at a regional summit taking place at the end of October in South Korea and will visit China in the “early part of next year,” following a lengthy phone call between the two on Friday.

The congressional delegation also includes Michael Baumgartner, a Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as Ro Khanna and Chrissy Houlahan, both Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee. The lawmakers are in China until Thursday.

By Taylor Sisk, KFF Health News

Rebecca Kasen has seen and heard things in recent years in and around Michigan’s capital city that she never would have expected.

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“It’s a very weird time in our lives,” said Kasen, executive director of the Women’s Center of Greater Lansing.

Last November, a group of people were captured on surveillance video early one morning mocking a “Black Lives Matter” sign in the front window of the center, with one of them vandalizing its free pantry. That same fall, Women’s Center staff reported being harassed.

A couple of blocks down East Michigan Avenue, Strange Matter Coffee, which supports progressive causes in the community, has been confronted by “First Amendment auditors” outside its storefront. Some toted guns or cameras, sometimes chanting slogans supporting President Donald Trump, generally unnerving customers and staff, Kasen said.

In many cases, extremist activities and conduct throughout the U.S. over the past few years have been driven by the deepening chasm of political partisanship and disinformation-driven rebellion against responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, backlash against immigration and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives has heightened tensions.

Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 1,371 hate and extremist groups nationwide sowing unrest through a wide range of tactics, sometimes violent. Over the last several years, the group writes, the political right has increasingly shifted toward “an authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions.”

Researchers at American University’s Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, or PERIL, say that in online spaces, “hate is intersectional.” (For example, Pasha Dashtgard, PERIL’s director of research, explains, platforms dedicated to male supremacy are often also decidedly antisemitic.) Seemingly innocuous discussions erupt into vitriol: The release of “A Minecraft Movie” prompted tirades against an alleged trend toward casting Black women and nonbinary people.

The continued escalations drove staffers at PERIL and the Southern Poverty Law Center to approach the problem from a different angle: Treat extremism as a public health problem. Community Advisory, Resource, and Education Centers are now operating in Lansing, Michigan, and Athens, Georgia, offering training, support, referrals, and resources to communities affected by hate, discrimination, and supremacist ideologies and to people susceptible to radicalization, with a focus on young people.

The team defines extremism as the belief that one’s group is in direct and bitter conflict with another of a different identity — ideology, race, gender identity or expression — fomenting an us-versus-them mentality mired in the conviction that resolution can come only through separation, domination, or extermination.

Researchers who study extremism say that, as the federal government terminates grants for violence prevention, state governments and local communities are recognizing they’re on their own. (CARE receives no federal funding.)

Aaron Flanagan, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s deputy director of prevention and partnerships, said his organization and PERIL came together about five years ago to examine a shared research question: What would it take to create a nationally scalable model to prevent youth radicalization, one that’s rooted in communities and provides solutions residents trust?

They looked to a decades-old German counterextremism model called mobile advisory centers. The objective is to equip “all levels of civil society with the skills and knowledge to recognize extremism” and to engage in conversations about addressing it, Dashtgard said.

“We’re not about, ‘How do you respond to a group of Patriot Front people marching through your town?’” Pete Kurtz-Glovas, who until June served as PERIL’s deputy director of regional partnerships, explained during a training in January. “Rather, ‘How do you respond when your son or a member of your congregation expresses some of these extremist ideas?’”

Michigan has long been considered fertile ground for extremism. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, convicted of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, were associated with a militia group in the state. Some of the men charged in 2020 in the plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had ties to a militia group calling itself the Wolverine Watchmen.

The state’s capital city and adjacent East Lansing, where Michigan State University is, are relatively progressive but have seen conflict.

Will Verchereau has a vivid recollection from the early days of the pandemic: a pickup truck speeding down the street in their Lansing neighborhood, a Confederate flag flying from it, music blasting, later joining a rolling protest that clogged streets around the Capitol to protest Whitmer’s COVID lockdown directives.

Incrementally, the community has responded to these expressions of extremism. After the confrontations at Strange Matter Coffee, Verchereau, a board member of the Salus Center, which advocates for and supports the LGBTQ+ community, said people banded together to talk about “how to be safe in those moments; how to de-escalate when and where possible.”

The CARE initiative reinforces such efforts. The centers offer tool kits catered to specific audiences. Among them are a parent and caregiver guide to online radicalization, a community guide to youth radicalization, and “Not Just a Joke: Understanding & Preventing Gender- & Sexuality-Based Bigotry.”

Flanagan said the team views this public health model as separate from but complementary to law enforcement interventions. The goal is to have law enforcement as minimally engaged as possible — to detect nascent warning signs and address them before police get involved.

The resources help identify conditions that can make people more susceptible to manipulation by extremists, such as unaddressed behavioral health issues and vulnerabilities, including having experienced trauma or the loss of a loved one.

Lansing resident Erin Buitendorp witnessed protesters, some of them armed, flood the state Capitol building during the pandemic over lockdown and masking orders. She’s a proponent of the public health approach. It’s “providing people with agency and a strategy to move forward,” she said. It’s a way to channel energy “and feel like you can actually create change with community.”

Lansing and Athens were chosen for a number of reasons, including their proximity to universities that could serve as partners — and to rural communities.

In the small town of Howell, 40 miles southeast of Lansing, protesters waived Nazi flags outside a production of the play “The Diary of Anne Frank” at an American Legion post.

In nearby DeWitt, the local school district proposed a mini lesson on pronouns for a first grade class that involved reading the picture book “They She He Me: Free to Be!” Threats against school staff followed and officials canceled the lesson. Since then, the CARE team has helped provide support to teachers there in holding conversations on contentious topics in classrooms and in dealing with skeptical parents.

“It’s really important that rural communities not be left behind,” Flanagan said. “They persistently are in America, and then they’re often simultaneously demonized for some of the most extreme, or extremist, political problems and challenges.”

The CARE team hopes to expand its program nationwide. Similar public health initiatives have been launched elsewhere, including Boston Children’s Hospital’s Trauma and Community Resilience Center and the DEEP program, run by New York City’s Citizens Crime Commission.

And in June a new tool, the Reach Out Resource Hub, went live, offering guidance to help prevent violent extremism.

Pete Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University and a leading expert on extremism, sees a daunting task ahead, with extremism’s having become more mainstream over the past 25 years. “It’s just devastating,” he said. “It’s really startling.”

Simi said that while there was previously talk of shifts in the Overton window, the range of ideas considered politically acceptable to mainstream society, “I would say now it has been completely shattered.” Violent extremists now feel “unshackled, supported by a new administration that has their back.”

“We are in a more dangerous time now than any other in my lifetime,” Simi said.

The Rev. Pippin Whitaker ministers the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Athens in Georgia, which last year received a package of ammunition in the mail with no note included. She embraces framing extremism, and people’s lack of awareness of it, as a public health issue.

“If you have a germ out there,” Whitaker said, “and people aren’t aware that if you wash your hands you can protect yourself, and that it’s an actual problem, you won’t enact basic protective behavior.”

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

In the middle of a conversation about “Clown Town,” the new Slow Horses novel, author Mick Herron reveals a bit of previously untold lore about the origins of Slough House.

Referring to a team of older spies who appear in the just-published book, Herron says, “Their careers never really went in the direction that they should have, very similar to the way the Slow Horses have been treated,” the latter referring to his recurring cast of misbegotten MI5 agents. “But of course, this is way back when Slough House itself didn’t exist at the time they were on active duty, so there was never any chance that they would have been sent there.”

Balancing gripping espionage, office tensions and Herron’s deeply funny prose, the Slow Horses books focus on M15’s fictional Slough House unit: the career dead-end for screw-ups, ne’er-do-wells and the odd spy who’s just had a bit of bad luck.

But wait, Herron doesn’t share how Slough House got started in the books, does he?

“I don’t; I’ve never specifically stated it. But I’ve always felt, and I don’t think I’ve stated this either, that it came into being with Jackson when it started,” he says. “Slough House was made for him, as it were, rather than him taking it over. I don’t think it was around before he was.

“It’s not something I’ve examined, but that’s certainly my feeling about it. I may have made allusions to that. I’ve certainly never gone into any detail about it,” says Herron.

Jackson, of course, refers to Jackson Lamb, the brilliant, bilious spymaster who runs Slough House. Though his motives are often as murky as the foul air in his office, Lamb seems to be keeping the nation safe by burying his team in pointless paperwork and isolating them from actual spywork – except when things have gotten so bleak that the Slow Horses can’t possibly make things worse. Until they do.

In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Herron, a warm, generous conversationalist, spoke by phone from Oxford, England, about the new book, his characters and how Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger came to sing the theme to the Apple TV+ streaming series, which returns for a fifth season on Sept. 24.

Q. How do you describe the new book “Clown Town” for people who haven’t read it yet?

It’s about a bunch of older spies who were treated badly, they feel, in terms of what they were asked to do, the operation they were asked to to take part in many years ago, a morally dubious operation, and are seeking some kind of reparation for what they went through. That, for me, is the core of the book.

Apart from that, it’s the Slow Horses doing what they always do, which is bicker amongst each other and make a bad situation worse.

Q. Do you find yourself doing a lot of research to write the novels?

If I find an interesting nugget of information that I can use, I’m going to use it. But I really write to mood and tone more than to anything else. I have quite deliberately deprived my characters access to any high-tech stuff so I don’t have to worry about that.

And I have invented a character in Roddy Ho who can do things on the computer, and that’s all I need to know. So I can have him do stuff I wouldn’t know how to go about doing, but I believe it’s possible to do it, and therefore he will be able to do it for me.

Q. Let’s talk about Roddy, the computer genius: He’s awful and self-deluded, but you somehow manage to make him sympathetic and entertaining to spend time with.

I think this is largely due to reader empathy more than anything else. One of the wonderful things about reading is that it does give you insight into other lives, other states of being. I don’t try to make him less awful, and I don’t try to make the reader love him. I just know that readers do extend their sympathy to characters, unless they’re outright evil.

You wouldn’t want to work at the desk next to him, but it does make him fun to read about, because you can let yourself go and just enjoy the ego trip that he’s on, but also recognize that there’s a sadness there, because Roddy genuinely doesn’t appreciate what an awful person he is.

ALSO SEE: ‘Slow Horses’ author Mick Herron says, ‘My heart is with those who struggle’

Q. In the new book, you say Jackson Lamb looks like “a sleeping bag someone had stuffed with potatoes,” among other descriptions I won’t spoil. Is it challenging to find fresh ways to describe characters?

I have to not repeat myself and I’m never totally confident that I’m not doing that. I don’t have total recall on every word I’ve ever written. It’s work and it’s fun at the same time. I mean, I enjoy it when I come up with something like, “sleeping bag someone had stuffed with potatoes.” I don’t recall laboring long and hard over that one.

I’m very hesitant about talking about this, in a way, because it’s not something that I analyze while I’m doing it. It’s something that I look on retrospectively and try to find reasons for how I do what I do, whereas, in fact, in real life, I simply do it to the best of my ability and keep my fingers crossed.

Mick Herron’s Slough House novels. (Courtesy of Soho Press)

Q. The recurring character Peter Judd, an amoral political insider, might have at one time seemed a little buffoonish or over the top, but now seems like he could have a plausible career.

Yes, it is quite frightening the way that certainly over the past decade and a half, characters whom we might quite rightly have considered buffoonish when they first appeared on the political landscape are, in fact, as it turns out, very, very dangerous, very despicable, and are doing an awful lot of damage to our various Commonwealths. So yes, it gives me no pleasure to think that there was any prescience involved in creating a character like that.

Q. Your characters haven’t always survived in previous books. Do you plan that out ahead?

I don’t ever have a full plan in place for each book, but when I start writing a book, I vaguely know where I’m going. I have a few plot points along the way. The daily work is a matter of getting from one point to another, so that the plot moves forward. If the character is going to die, then I know that right from the start.

In a way, it’s all sort of one big exercise in self-justification: I decided this is going to happen, and therefore I’m going to make all the other things happen that will allow that to take place. I don’t take pleasure in killing characters off, but I feel that it would be untrue to the book that I have in mind, the shape of the book, the color of the book, if you like. I sometimes think of them in terms of colors. It would be untrue to that original impulse if I started saying, I don’t really want to do that; I’d rather not kill a character off. 

Q. You said you think about the books in terms of colors. Would you talk about that, please?

In the earlier days, I certainly did think of them in terms of colors. It’s a mood thing, really – and what kind of mood I was going to be in. Don’t ask me to say what they were, because I can’t remember, but I do know I felt it quite strongly. I haven’t done that so much lately, and it doesn’t seem to be a thing with me anymore.

Q. As you’ve been writing the series, have you developed a process for approaching each book?

It’s probably true that a lot of the, I don’t know what you want to call them rituals or superstitions, that are attached to writing a book, you could probably dispense with them, but they come to feel like scaffolding, in a way. You’ll know that my intros to a book are always the same for the Slough House series, and I would find it very difficult to write one of these novels without doing that. It would just feel wrong to me, you know? I could write a book and dispense with that structural element, but I feel that I’d be less confident about doing it. And I think readers might say, Hey, what happened to the intro?

Q. It’s a great device; it’s like you’re walking the reader back into the building.

I’ve always felt that way. It’s also like: New readers, start here. I don’t want to have to just explain what Slough House is in bare terms every time I start writing a book. I think it’s one of the reasons why people often say to me that the house itself has become a character.

Q. I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s absolutely true. You feel like you know that place.

The [Apple TV+] series has used the actual building – not the interior, that’s all built – but when you see an exterior on the TV show that is the building I walked past every day on my way to work. That is Slough House. And they didn’t have to do that. That really was the production team going the extra mile there.

Now everybody knows where it is, and anybody who’s interested can find it.

Q. Is it hard writing the series knowing that there’s a whole TV apparatus at work?

I don’t think it’s really had that big an impact on the books and the rest of it – the plots, the characters — I think they’re remaining the same. I’m not going out of my way to provide something that I think will be a stunning climax on a TV show or anything. I’m simply writing the book as it feels to me the book needs to be written. So I hope it has no effect at all.

But, of course, I mean, it almost inevitably does, I’m sure. I’m probably the last person to ask about it.

Gary Oldman in a scene from season 5 of “Slow Horses,” premiering Sept. 24, 2025, on Apple TV+. (Photo credit Jack English / Courtesy of Apple TV+)

Q. So Gary Oldman hasn’t overwritten your conception of Jackson Lamb?

No, I think I’m aware that there are now two Jacksons, really, because there’s mine, which is just on the page, and there’s Gary’s. And I think Gary is doing really interesting things with it. Gary has his extra insights. He spent, it must have been at least a year of his life, being George Smiley [in the 2011 film adaptation of John le Carré’s spy classic “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”]. And so he has the view that Jackson Lamb is George Smiley having made some wrong decisions, or something along those lines, which I think is really interesting. It’s not something I’m trying to do, but I think Gary has every right to incorporate that into his portrayal. He’s doing it wonderfully. I couldn’t ask for a better Jackson Lamb. I’m very, very happy with the way it’s turned out.

SEE ALSO: Meet the audiobook narrator who gives voice to Jackson Lamb and the Slow Horses

Q. Does it ever feel to you like this all one long book, like Patrick O’Brian’s many Aubrey-Maturin novels, divided up into individual installments? 

I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but in a sense, yes, I certainly see what you’re saying, and I wouldn’t disagree with it. The O’Brian books, of course, are wonderful and essentially focus on a single relationship that develops, matures and deepens throughout the novels. And it’s a wonderful journey to be on. 

I like to put different characters in the same car every so often to see how they will end up arguing with each other, which they inevitably will do. For me, the books are all individual, and I need a beginning, a middle and an end. But yeah, I can see readers would feel that way. And again, I’m perfectly happy with that.

Q. Speaking of putting characters in cars: In “Clown Town,” you give us a kind of clown car moment at one point with nearly everybody stuffed into a vehicle together.

It was an image I couldn’t escape. I say I don’t write to images in my head, but the clown car is a pretty strong one, it has to be said.

Q. Let me ask about Mick Jagger, who performs the theme song for the Apple TV+ series. I read that he was a fan of the books. Is that true, and if so, will you be going out on tour with the Rolling Stones?

I was told that he’d read the books, so he knew what he was being asked to do, and was clearly enthusiastic about it because it all happened very, very quickly. By the time I was told about it, he’d already recorded the song, and so it was a done deal.

I haven’t met him, and we don’t currently plan to go on tour together, but I am touring. They might turn up to do a support gig, you never know. 

By STAN CHOE, Associated Press Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are slipping on Monday as Wall Street lets off the accelerator for its seemingly relentless rally.

The S&P 500 dipped 0.2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 228 points, or 0.5%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.1% lower. All three set their latest all-time highs on Friday.

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It’s only a modest pullback when compared with the surge that stocks have enjoyed hitting a bottom in April. Driving the market have been hopes that President Donald Trump’s tariffs won’t derail global trade and that the Federal Reserve will deliver several cuts to interest rates that will boost the U.S. economy.

The Fed made its first cut of the year to rates last week, and officials indicated they could deliver more through the end of this year and into next.

“Every time the market seems to be running out of momentum, it fools most of us by pushing to higher heights,” said Jay Woods, chief market strategist at Freedom Capital Markets.

But the U.S. stock market still faces challenges. Chief among them is if the Fed does not cut interest rates as many times as investors expect. The Fed is wary because lower rates can give inflation more fuel, and inflation has stubbornly remained above its 2% target. An update on Friday will show how much prices are rising for U.S. households based on the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, and economists expect it to show a slight acceleration for last month.

Plus, stocks already look too expensive to many professional investors after their prices surged so much.

Coinbase Global fell to one of Wall Street’s bigger losses on Monday with a drop of 3.8%. But it’s still up nearly 33% for the year so far thanks to interest for cryptocurrencies, whose prices have soared to records on expectations for more cuts to interest rates.

Some of the market’s sharpest action was among companies agreeing to buy one another.

Pfizer said it would buy Metsera and its pipeline of medicines to potentially treat obesity in a deal initially valuing it at $4.9 billion. The price tag could go up sharply, by nearly 50%, if Metsera’s candidates win approval from federal regulators and achieve other milestones.

Metsera’s stock jumped 60.7%, and Pfizer’s rose 1.2%.

ODP, which runs Office Depot and Office Max, leaped 33.2% after Atlas Holdings agreed to buy it in a deal valued at roughly $1 billion.

Anywhere Real Estate soared 61.6% after Compass said it would buy the company behind the Coldwell Banker and Corcoran brands in an all-stock deal. They said the combined company is expected to have a total enterprise value of roughly $10 billion, including debt. Compass shares edged down by 0.1%.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed across Europe and Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 1%, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.8% for two of the world’s bigger moves.

In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.13% from 4.14% on Friday.

AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.