Mumbai: Popular actress Katrina Kaif is one of the A-listers in Bollywood and is often chased by paps. She tied the knot with Vicky Kaushal in 2021 and since then she made very few public appearances. Rumours mills suggest that the actress is not hiding from the public because of marriage or any other personal issue but for another reason.
Yes, Katrina is not pregnant but she is focusing on her work right now. She will be next seen in Tiger3 opposite Salman Khan. According to a report in Bollywood Life, Katrina Kaif is deliberately keeping a low profile because of Tiger 3. Report suggests that the makers of Tiger 3 want to create a lot of curiosity around the actresses’ character which is why Katrina has voluntarily chosen to stay away from the limelight.
To make fans and the audience more excited about her character in Tiger 3, Katrina Kaif is ditching public appearances. This might be a good strategy to make a film successful but her fans are really curious to know the exact reason.
Hope, she will come with new looks and an exciting character in Bhaijaan’s next film. Tiger3 is slated to release on November, 10. Superstar Shah Rukh Khan will also be seen in a cameo in the movie.
Congress has put a record amount of money behind boosting jobs the U.S. workforce presently does not appear equipped to fulfill. That includes $369 billion in climate incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, $550 billion in new money through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act’s $52 billion to boost semiconductor manufacturing.
Lawmakers, former administration officials, clean energy and labor advocates said immigration fixes are needed if the administration wants to ensure its biggest victories don’t go to waste — and that the nation can fight climate change, add jobs and beat geopolitical rivals like China in the global marketplace. Those changes include raising annual visa caps for highly skilled workers needed to grow the next wave of U.S. industry and securing ironclad work protections for people in the country on a temporary basis, they said. It’s the key to building a workforce needed to design, manufacture and install millions of new appliances, solar panels and electric vehicles.
The high stakes for Biden’s jobs agenda, which will be a pillar of his likely reelection message next year, may force the White House to finally grapple with an issue it’s mostly kept on the back burner.
President Donald Trump cut legal immigration in half over his four years in office through a mix of executive orders that halted immigration from Muslim countries and limited the ability of people seeking to join their spouses and other family members in the U.S. As Republicans have attacked Biden over the migrant crisis at the southern border, his administration has kept some of his predecessor’s immigration policies in place. And the White House is wary about enabling additional GOP attacks that would likely ignore the economic rationale for any easing of legal migration and simply hammer Biden as “soft” on immigration.
In addition, calling for foreign-born workers would appear at odds with Biden’s blue-collar, American-made green revolution.
Last decade saw the U.S. population grow at its slowest rate since the Great Depression, yet the White House remains somewhat hesitant to take further executive action or use its bully pulpit on immigration, according to people familiar with the administration’s thinking. But they said the administration recognizes immigration tweaks could break a labor shortage raising the price of goods through supply chain constraints, slowing clean energy projects and preventing highly skilled people from helping American businesses lead in emerging global industries.
One former administration official warned that policymakers must soon address the reality of global competition for high-skilled talent.
“If in the long term we neglect the human capital equation here, to some extent these efforts to change the face of industrial policy in the United States are not going to be as successful as they should be,” said Amy Nice, distinguished immigration fellow and visiting scholar at Cornell Law, who until January led STEM immigration policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “And some measures will be in vain.”
The White House has been hearing from senior officials, including at least one Cabinet secretary, about the need for administrative actions on immigration — raising caps on certain visa categories, filling country quotas — to help alleviate the pressure on the workforce and increase the country’s labor supply, according to a senior administration official not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Biden, some officials and lawmakers have asserted, could also increase staff and other resources to help speed up visa processing and cut through a massive backlog that has left potential workers in limbo for months, years, and in some cases, decades.
But for now, the administration seems more inclined to allow Congress to work on the issue.
“I don’t think politics is the main concern. It’s just inertia and the hope that something more substantial could be done through legislation,” said one senior administration official who did not want to be named in order to speak freely.
A White House official defended the administration’s record on immigration, noting Biden sent a framework for comprehensive immigration reform to Congress as one of his first presidential actions. The measure has yet to gain traction.
The White House official noted the administration is moving to address immediate clean energy workforce needs in the construction, electrification and manufacturing fields, where a shortage of qualified people threatens to slow deployment of climate-fighting innovations Biden needs to meet his climate goals.
The official said the administration has worked with organizations to pair skilled refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine with trade union apprenticeship programs. The official said the administration’s focus remains on retraining people through creating training pipelines for electricians, broadband installers and construction workers. The official added that expanding union participation would ensure stronger labor supply by reducing turnover through improved job quality, safety and wages.
“I don’t think we’ve run out of people to do these kinds of jobs,” the official said.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said in an interview that the White House is “certainly aware that the low unemployment rate can be an obstacle” to the economy and the laws it has passed, but that the administration “hasn’t come to the Hill with a real workforce focus” on immigration.
The stakes are clear for sectors pivotal to building and operating the infrastructure, manufacturing and clean energy projects Biden and Democrats have promised. The 57,000 foreign-born workers currently in the electrical and electronics engineering field comprise nearly 27 percent that sector’s workforce, while the 686,000 foreign-born construction laborers account for 38 percent of the nation’s total, according to a New American Economy analysis of Census data. Most foreign-born construction laborers are undocumented immigrants, according to the Center for American Progress, making up nearly one-quarter of the sector’s national workforce.
“My largest worry about the American economy right now is the workforce worry,” Kaine said.
The White House has seemed more comfortable taking executive steps, Kaine said, such as expanding a humanitarian parole program for migrants that also comes with a two-year work authorization. It also has pledged to step up enforcement against employers that exploit undocumented workers, which advocates contend will help keep those people in the workforce.
But conversations are also brewing again on Capitol Hill about more “discreet” immigration bills. Kaine said he and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have discussed legislation to help support people with Temporary Protected Status, a Department of Homeland Security designation for people who have fled natural disasters, armed conflict or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions” in their home country.
Immigration restrictions are even hindering oil and gas companies right now, Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas), said in a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last month.
“The permits that ranchers use, agriculture, the permits that hospitality use — those same immigration permits are not the ones that are needed for people to have temporary work visas in the oil and gas sector,” he said. “You ain’t unleashing a thing unless you do something about immigration reform.”
Others have suggested that in addition to its inability to reach a deal to update the nation’s outdated immigration system, Congress needs to do a better job at retaining the immigrants who specifically come to the U.S. to earn degrees.
The U.S. for years has struggled to develop advanced STEM degree holders, a key indicator of a country’s future competitiveness in these fields. It has fewer native-born advanced STEM degree recipients than countries like China, raising national security concerns from top officials. The Biden administration has tried to break that logjam, in part by allowing international STEM students to stay on student visas and work for up to three years in the U.S. post-graduation.
“Why educate some of these folks in American schools … and then lose some of our best and brightest talent just because our system is super outdated?” said Kerri Talbot, deputy director of the Immigration Hub.
And the demand for high-skilled workers far outweighs the nation’s immigration caps, said Shev Dalal-Dheini, head of government affairs for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Congress limited employment-based green cards and H-1B visas offering temporary residency to skilled workers to 140,000 and 85,000 per year, respectively.
Foreign nationals dominate the exact fields the U.S. needs to grow its clean energy and manufacturing base. Nearly three-quarters of all full-time graduate students at U.S. universities pursuing electrical engineering, computer and information science, and industrial and manufacturing engineering degrees are foreign-born, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, an innovation, trade and immigration think tank. The same is true for more than half seeking mechanical engineering and agricultural economics, mathematics, chemical engineering, metallurgical and materials engineering and materials sciences degrees.
Subtle changes, like requiring more evidence and interviews, under the Trump administration worsened already-common backlogs. Processing at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is mainly paper based, not electronic, shuttered during the pandemic — it remains plagued by staff and funding shortages.
To the extent that the green energy transition is a race for a global market and influence, the U.S. immigration system is like a boulder in its shoe.
“Canada literally places billboards in Washington state saying, ‘Come here,’” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior advisor for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Our ability to succeed in these big goals relies on people being able to do the work to meet those goals.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
In its time, the “Polish question” tore Europe apart. When the Poles started an uprising against Russia in 1830, after partitions had erased their country from the European map a generation before, Tsar Nicholas I laid out the choice: “Poland or Russia must now perish.” Free Poland and authoritarian Russia couldn’t coexist. Nicholas put down the Polish insurrection, consigning Russia — as the Russian writer Peter Chaadayev, who saw the uprising firsthand, wrote — to “her own enslavement, and the enslavement of all neighboring peoples.” A century later, Hitler started World War II to enslave his eastern neighbors; after Yalta, Stalin got Poland and the region as his prize.
Poland became the cause célèbre in Western capitals the way Ukraine has become in the past year. In his “Sentimental Education,” Gustave Flaubert describes the feverish revolutionary mood in Paris inspired by the Polish January Uprising of 1863. He names the leaders of that failed insurrection who were executed by the Russians — among them, I should disclose, was a relative of mine. The Solidarity movement of the 1980s again stirred the Western imagination.
The fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t settle for good the question of where the borders of freedom and autocracy are in Europe. Poland only came off the map as a prize to be fought for in 1999, when it joined NATO, and, five years later, the European Union. Those decisions stabilized Central Europe.
Now, here we are with Ukraine. The similarities are bracing. Both the national anthems of Poland and Ukraine begin with the same line, that their nation “has not perished yet.” The Ukrainian question is shaping the Europe of the 21st century for the same reason the Polish one did: Its position in Europe, its future as a nation that desires freedom against the violent wishes of a tyrant next door, is at its heart what this conflict is about. The outcome, as the Polish experience shows, isn’t by any means certain.
The Russia-Ukraine split
The Ukrainian question didn’t emerge last year when Russian troops flooded over the Ukrainian borders. Nor when Vladimir Putin, breaking a taboo of the post-Cold War world ‘order’ (now coming with scare quotes), annexed Crimea in 2014 and pushed his proxies into the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
You can better pinpoint its birth to the changing of the clock, and the century, on Dec. 31, 1999. On that day, the ailing Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, handed power over to his young and largely unknown prime minister, Vladimir Putin. In his near-decade at the Kremlin, Yeltsin had balanced reformers and revanchists. He had bad instincts, shelling the Russian parliament in 1993 and launching the Chechen war a year later, mixed with good. His Russia was on a slow, ugly and circuitous path toward the West. He made a critical call early on, overruling his deputy, Aleksandr Rutskoi, who pushed for military action to keep Ukraine within the Russian fold in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. He made peace with Ukraine over Crimea and struck up a close relationship with Bill Clinton. Putin was a sharp departure, the KGB Lieutenant Colonel as 21st-century Tsar. Early on, he suppressed his internal opponents. Then he turned his attention to recreating an empire.
It was far less noticed that the rise of Putin coincided — and at first without any direct connection to what was happening in Russia — with the flowering of a civic democracy in the second largest and most important of the former Soviet republics. At that time, many Ukrainians spoke Russian not just fluently but as a first choice. But scratch off the Soviet veneer, and their political values were grounded in a culture and history of heroic opposition to oppressors going back to the 17th century. Through the worst years of official corruption and government dysfunction, the democratic impulse was the most vivid feature of its politics. The first free election was held in 1991, in which 90 percent backed independence. Voters bounced the first president of independent Ukraine, after a single term, in 1994. When the ruling party tried to subvert a free election in 2004, and Putin, for the first time, directly sought to impose his will on Ukraine, millions rose up in the Orange Revolution and secured their right to a free vote. They changed presidents in 2010, in 2014, and yet again, with Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s election, in 2019. Six freely elected presidents in three decades of independence. Only one incumbent won a second term. Ukraine is different: The other two Eastern Slavic states — Belarus and Russia — have had the same ruler this whole century.
What’s Putin’s problem with Ukraine? It’s not NATO as such. The Kremlin shrugged when Finland — of Cold War-era Finlandization! — decided last year to join the alliance. It has little to do with Ukraine’s efforts to sign trading arrangements with the European Union that Putin forced a corrupt Ukrainian president in 2013 to tear up, sparking the protests on the Maidan. In reality, Ukraine’s outreach to NATO and the EU is just a manifestation of something far more unacceptable to an authoritarian Russia: That a democratic Ukraine would naturally seek alliances with other European democracies. Or really, since views on NATO were sharply split in Ukraine until last year’s invasion, that a democratic Ukraine could never be an ally or a vassal of an authoritarian Russia. The problem, at its heart, is Ukrainian democracy — and genuine independence.
Free Ukraine is a rebuff to Putin’s repeated denial of its existence, as a country or people separate from Russia. But its existence presents an existential threat to a Russia ruled by a single man that sees itself as an empire. Regime survival is the top priority for any autocrat. If people who are such close cousins of Russians build a vibrant democracy that regularly chucks out leaders, someone like Putin rightly fears contagion. An independent Ukraine sets back Russia’s ambitions for control over this region.
Now, many in the West would have preferred for the Ukrainians to slink on their way into Russia’s messy, authoritarian, pseudo-imperial world (Russkiy mir, as Putin calls it). The EU had trouble digesting the Central European countries and slow-walked their membership in the block. The West seems fine to abandon the Belarusians to Putin. But the Ukrainians never gave the West that option. Not only that, they’re showing it up, bleeding for values that, for generations, people in free countries haven’t had to fight for.
Biden’s choices
The U.S. and its allies have mobilized with speed to support the Ukrainians. The generosity and continued unity in Europe and America on Ukraine surely took Putin by surprise.
But the “Ukrainian question” hangs out there, largely unanswered. The discussions in Washington, Berlin and Kyiv are consumed by what weapons to send or which extra sanctions to impose. Yes, on Javelins and eventually HIMARs, no for Patriots, then yes. The Ukrainians asked for Leopard and Abrams tanks, and after much drama, last month will receive them, though perhaps not in time for a Russian advance in the Donbas. Ukrainians want more, possibly F-16s and long-range rockets. Joe Biden says no, for now; maybe he’ll change his mind later.
This incremental approach has some merits. American and European officials who are firm backers of Ukraine say this kind of “calibration” keeps the alliance together. It reflects the approach favored by Biden, who, above all, doesn’t want to suck America into a direct clash with Russia. Equally concerned supporters in the West, echoing Ukrainian anxieties, say the weapons are coming too slowly, that time is on Putin’s side. The Russian strongman won’t stop, they say, until he sees the West deliver overwhelming firepower to destroy, not just diminish, his military.
This debate avoids the one thing that requires a clear answer: What outcome does the West want for Ukraine and, for that matter, Russia? We know how Ukrainians would wish this to end. Same goes for Putin, who can’t let them win. It’s the West that sometimes looks lost in the fog of war, lacking a vision for what victory looks like.
There are plenty of good reasons for that. Look closer and divisions in the alliance become clearer. The North Americans, British, Poles and Balts are pushing hardest for Ukraine. These countries — most of which are members of NATO but not the EU — account for the bulk of the arms and economic sent to Ukraine. It’s the old Atlantic bloc, plus the “new Europeans.” The Continental powers (Germany, France, Italy) are less generous and more circumspect. As a share of its GDP, Germany gives roughly half what America has and a quarter of what Poland has last year in military aid to Ukraine. Hence the creative ambiguity in the alliance about where this is going.
Ambiguity and risk-aversion with Putin’s Russia has a poor track record. At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Germany stopped the U.S. push to give Ukraine and Georgia an eventual path into the alliance, not wishing to offend Russia; Putin invaded Georgia four months later. In 2014, after Putin seized Crimea, President Barack Obama kept talking about “off ramps” for Putin and refused to send the Ukrainians even defensive weapons, so as not to provoke the Russian leader; Putin moved on from Crimea right past those “off ramps” into the Donbas. Before last year’s invasion, the U.S. and Europe were reluctant to spell out the costs to Putin. The pattern was familiar from the Bucharest meeting: The West has been better at deterring itself than at deterring Russia.
These are hard decisions. The EU would be looking at many billions of euros in commitments to Ukraine. NATO would be looking to extend a formal security guarantee, possibly creating another Korea-style DMZ along Ukraine’s eastern frontier with Russia. Russia, and let’s not forget China, would be deterred from aggression elsewhere. Victory also means a Russia without Putin. “This man cannot remain in power,” Biden ad-libbed in Warsaw last March, before his cautious aides walked back this rare expression of clarity. The debate is moving, incrementally but clearly in that direction. The most famous realist of all, Henry Kissinger, now thinks Ukraine should be brought into NATO.
Until the “Ukrainian question” of this century is answered, presumably with an unambiguous statement of ultimate objectives followed by determined action, it’s hard to imagine enduring peace in Europe. This path carries grave risks for Europe and its American patron, but the alternative may be more unappealing. As the physical scars of the Continent remind us to this day, the failure to address the Polish question left it in ruins in 1945 and divided until 1989. This is another key moment where the future of Europe will be decided.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
But Biden’s remarks set off a back-and-forth later in the day that underscored the deep divide between the White House and House Republicans over how to approach the debt ceiling discussions.
McCarthy tweeted shortly afterward that he would accept a request to meet “and discuss a responsible debt ceiling increase to address irresponsible government spending.”
The White House responded in a statement issued later on Friday, where Jean-Pierre reiterated that “raising the debt ceiling is not a negotiation; it is an obligation of this country and its leaders to avoid economic chaos.”
“We are going to have a clear debate on two different visions for the country — one that cuts Social Security, and one that protects it — and the President is happy to discuss that with the Speaker,” Jean-Pierre said.
The development comes a day after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the U.S. had reached its debt limit and would need to use special measures to avoid a default. Yellen has projected that Congress has until at least June to pass a debt ceiling increase.
Biden officials have insisted that Congress pass a clean debt ceiling increasing, arguing that it is one of the government’s basic duties and shouldn’t come with any conditions attached.
The U.S. has never defaulted on its debt. Failing to do so for the first time ever, Democrats and a wide swathe of economists have cautioned, would destroy the nation’s financial credibility, tank the stock market and throw the global economy into chaos.
But Republicans are signaling that they plan to force a showdown over the debt ceiling, in a bid to extract a host of deep spending cuts from the administration. McCarthy earlier this week urged Biden and Democratic congressional leaders to begin discussions on a potential deal.
On Friday, Biden also said that he would address what he called a “fundamental disagreement” over how to control spending as part of his State of the Union address. The White House has hammered Republicans repeatedly over their suggestions that the government cut funding for Medicare and Social Security as part of a debt ceiling deal.
“Their way to deal with cutting that debt is to cut social security, cut Medicaid,” Biden said. “These are the kind of debates that we’re going to have.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
