Bloomberg ) — President Xi Jinping’s first assembly with US congressional leaders in 8 years turned into fraught with tension, because the chinese language chief confronted his kingdom’s failure to sentence Hamas’s intervention in Israel.

“i beg you and the chinese language human beings to stand with the Israeli human beings and condemn the cowardly and harsh attacks on them,” Senate Majority chief Chuck Schumer advised Xi on Monday, hours after he criticized chinese language foreign Minister Wang Yi for displaying “no sympathy or guide”. In those tough and troubling instances for Israel.

In his starting comments, Xi did now not reside at the weekend’s dramatic escalation of violence inside the middle East, alternatively expressing desire for mutual respect and peaceful coexistence between the united states and China. “we’ve to be got a thousand reasons to enhance US-China relations and no purpose to cause them to worse,” Xi said.

The meeting in Beijing is Xi’s first assembly with US senators on the grounds that 2015, when he spoke to congressional leaders on a visit to Washington. It comes as the us and China seem like lining up a assembly between Xi and President Joe Biden on the Asia-Pacific financial Cooperation summit in San Francisco next month.

Eleven and Biden met at the Organization of 20 gathering in Indonesia in November. Sino-US relations hit a new low less than three months after the US shot down a Chinese-language balloon over espionage concerns.

Even as Xi sat with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blanken in June, the Chinese leader has skipped three different cabinet-level Biden officials in the assembly in recent months, making Monday’s replacement all the more unusual. .

Taking a hard line on China has become one of the few bipartisan areas of consensus in Washington in recent years, with Congress often pressuring Beijing for tougher regulations. China’s delegation was led by Democrat and Republican Senator Mike Crapo.

The Yamaha Corporation has honored Jessie Vallejo, associate professor of ethnomusicology with its 2024 “40 under 40” award, which nationally recognized 40 music teachers under 40 years of age from K-12, and the college undergraduate level.

The music education advocacy program highlighted Vallejo for her work teaching Latin American and Hispanic music. Moreover, her active commitment to social justice has influenced students well into their careers and has international reach.

Vallejo was nominated by Cal Poly Pomona’s Music Department Chair, David Kopplin. According to Vallejo, she was at home checking her email over coffee when she received the award.

“I’ve really seen this as an award for the places where I was a student, the professors I worked with, how they taught me how to teach, how they taught me how to think,” said Vallejo. “But I think it’s a great recognition for Cal Poly, and what we offer students. We have world class researchers, and we have world class teachers at Cal Poly in different fields. It’s not just the STEM school, we have lots of highlights all throughout the university.”

Originally from Syracuse, New York, Vallejo studied at the State University of New York at Potsdam, the Crane School of Music, the oldest music education program in the United States. After receiving her undergraduate degree, she went to the University of California, Los Angeles for her masters in ethnomusicology. Vallejo began teaching at CPP in the fall 2015.

In 2016, with the help from her network of mariachi friends from UCLA, Vallejo restarted the mariachi program on campus after approximately 20 years since the class was last offered.

The first mariachi group at CPP began in the late ‘70s, and was mostly white, with Chicano and Latinos joining the band in the 1980s according to Vallejo.

CPP’s demographics have since changed, and in 2005 CPP became a Hispanic serving school with 54% of students identifying as Latino or Hispanic as of 2023. Still in contact with some of the alumni, as band director, Vallejo made a conscious decision to use the class as cultural ambassadors by representing the Hispanic community.

“I want people to come in and feel welcomed and feel excited to share,” said Vallejo. “I want the students who come in with the heritage to feel proud and I want to prepare students so if they go out into the world and want to perform mariachi music more after graduating, they have an idea of some of the classics, but also some of the more showy repertoire that you have.”