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Bing Liu’s film is an unflinching portrait of an undocumented Uyghur immigrant and a traumatised US veteran whose fragile connection is strained by their pasts
Chinese-American film-maker Bing Liu made an impression with the about people from his home town in Illinois; now he pivots to features with this sad and sombre study of romance and life choices among those on the margins of US society, adapted from the prize-winning novel of the same name by Atticus Lish.
The scene is the no-questions-asked world of New York’s Chinatown; newcomer Sebiye Behtiyar plays Aishe, a Chinese Uyghur Muslim undocumented immigrant. One day she catches the eye of Skinner, played by Fred Hechinger, a young military veteran who impulsively starts to talk to her. There is a spark between them and then something more.

A gripping film captures the fraught contests, lonely outposts and human toll of the Philippines’ struggle to assert sovereignty against China
Director Baby Ruth Villarama and her crew board an assortment of maritime vessels to record the ongoing strife and its consequences between the Philippines and China over control of what has recently been named the West Philippine Sea (WPS), formerly part of the South China Sea. This area, which is seen by just about everyone (apart from the People’s Republic of China) as part of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, has been increasingly infiltrated by Chinese boats, some of them fishing vessels but mostly Chinese coast guard vessels that have harassed, rammed and attempted to board Filipino boats as part of the dispute over sovereignty in the area. Some of the footage seen here is pretty tense, although mostly it’s a game of bluster at sea, with officers on different vessels exchanging puffed-chest speeches peppered with legalese over short-wave radios, a kind of airwave diplomacy.
The film’s title refers to the ongoing efforts by the Filipino army to deliver foodstuffs to some of the tiny islands in the WPS where soldiers hold the line, literally, for long lonely stretches. And when we say “islands”, we’re talking about dollops of sand in shallow waters no bigger than a football pitch, accessible only by inflatable motorboats travelling at frightening speeds. They are certainly scary for the poor baby goats, loaded along with canned food and other supplies that we see scrambling for better footholds as the boats go zooming across the waves. Elsewhere, we follow fishers living in the more populated Scarborough Shoal who complain they are catching less due to Chinese fishing boats in the area.

There's this weird guilt trip many people seem to have when they order orange chicken or crab rangoons. " True enough. Walk into a restaurant in Beijing or Shanghai and you won't find General Tso's ...

Booming Chinese exports have driven trade surplus past $1tn but also reveal the extent of country’s reliance on foreign markets
A boom in exports that has pushed China’s trade surplus past $1tn for the first time reveals the extent to which its economy is still overwhelmingly reliant on foreign markets – and the difficulty figures like Donald Trump will have in trying to rebalance global trade.
Data released on Monday shows that in the first 11 months of this year, China’s trade surplus in goods was $1.076tn. The record trade surplus comes even as exports to the US have plummeted, a reflection of the bruising that, despite a , has dampened the flow of goods between the world’s two largest economies.

Chinese exports are flooding the developing world, and the social consequences are bound to be profound.

There's something undeniably comforting about opening those white cardboard containers and digging into crispy orange chicken with fried rice. Yet for decades, American Chinese food has been dismissed ...

There's something undeniably comforting about opening those white cardboard containers and digging into crispy orange chicken with fried rice. Yet for decades, American Chinese food has been dismissed ...

Chinese exports are flooding the developing world, and the social consequences are bound to be profound.

Paramount says its hostile offer “provides superior value, and a more certain and quicker path to completion to WBD shareholders”
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Back in China, car sales have fallen for the second month running.
Retail vehicle sales fell about 8% to 2.1 million units in November, according to published by the China Passenger Car Association today. This shows a 22% slump in sales of gasoline cars, with new-energy vehicle sales rising 4.2% for the month.
“Usually the trend at the end of the year is that the car market should get stronger and stronger from October. But the retail sales in November compared to previous years is unusual.”
“Mortgage rates continue on the downward trend and November was particularly fruitful for fixed rate cuts.
The re-pricing by lenders led to the average five-year fixed rate dropping below 5% for the first time in over two years and sits at its lowest point since before the ‘mini-Budget’ in September 2022, alongside its two-year counterpart.

The pain is visceral, but civil society, media and the creative community have been sent into retreat since the 2019 pro-democracy protests
Antony Dapiran is the author of two books on Hong Kong politics and protest
White flowers at makeshift shrines and messages of support posted in a public square. A rainbow of folded paper cranes. Boxes of donated goods for those in need. Hongkongers’ responses to the Tai Po fire disaster – in which at least 159 people have died and 31 are still unaccounted for – have, on the surface, resembled similar community expressions of solidarity last seen during the 2019 protests. But beneath the surface, Hong Kong civil society is struggling to respond to this latest collective trauma in a city that has deeply changed in the past five years.
The cauterisation of Hong Kong’s civil society that has occurred under Beijing’s national security crackdown has meant that the types of grassroots activism that would traditionally have occurred in response to such a tragedy – as they would in any other open society – are no longer possible.
Antony Dapiran is the author of two books on Hong Kong politics and protest

Tokyo has vowed a 'calm and resolute' response as tensions with Beijing continue to escalate.

We can move from defensive crouch to position of strength but only if we use the economic cards we have against US coercion
Europe is on a trajectory towards nothing less than “civilisational erasure”, the Trump administration claims in its extraordinary new , a document that blames European integration and “activities of the European Union that undermine political liberty and sovereignty” for some of the continent’s deepest problems.
Everybody should have seen it coming after Washington’s humiliating 28-point plan for Ukraine. in February, in which he suggested that Europe’s democracies were not worth defending was an early red flag. But the new words still land as a shock. The security document is the clearest signal yet of how brutally and transactionally Washington wants to engage with the continent. It marks another phase in Trump’s attempt to reshape Europe in his ideological image while at the same time abandoning it militarily. US policy, the paper says, should enable Europe to “take primary responsibility for its own defence”.
Georg Riekeles is associate director and Varg Folkman a policy analyst at the European Policy Centre