During a televised debate in 2016, populist presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte made a typically belligerent statement that he himself would jetski to Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea and plant a Philippine flag there. Duterte claimed that he was ready to die a hero to keep the Chinese out of the bitterly contested maritime territory. “That made millions of Filipino workers and fishers vote for him because of that one promise,” says film-maker Baby Ruth Villarama. As her new Oscar and Bafta-contending documentary Food Delivery: Fresh from the West…
Tag: World news
The Guardian view on Trump and Europe: more an abusive relationship than an alliance | Editorial
Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz have become adept at scrambling to deal with the latest bad news from Washington. Their meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Downing Street on Monday was so hastily arranged that Mr Macron needed to be back in Paris by late afternoon to meet Croatia’s prime minister, while Mr Merz was due on television for an end-of-year Q&A with the German public. But diplomatic improvisation alone cannot fully answer Donald Trump’s structural threat to European security. The US president and his emissaries are trying…
Preparation for the Next Life review – deeply felt story of love among the marginalised in New York
Chinese-American film-maker Bing Liu made an impression with the poignant documentary Minding the Gap 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…
Food Delivery: Fresh from the West Philippine Sea review – gripping trip along supply lines in China standoff
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…
Trump clears way for Nvidia to sell powerful AI chips to China
Donald Trump has cleared the way for Nvidia to begin selling its powerful AI computer chips to China, marking a win for the chip maker and its CEO Jensen Huang, who has spent months lobbying the White House to open up sales in the country. Before Monday’s announcement, the US had prohibited sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China over national security concerns. “I have informed President Xi, of China, that the United States will allow NVIDIA to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China, and other…
Silenced by China, Hong Kong struggles to voice its grief over the Tai Po fire disaster | Antony Dapiran
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 the 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…
Trump’s new doctrine confirms it. Ready or not, Europe is on its own | Georg Riekeles and Varg Folkman
Europe is on a trajectory towards nothing less than “civilisational erasure”, the Trump administration claims in its extraordinary new National Security Strategy, 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. JD Vance’s shocking Munich speech 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…
Hostile powers sending spies to west’s universities, says former security chief
Hostile spy agencies are now as focused on infiltrating western universities and companies as they are on doing so to governments, according to the former head of Canada’s intelligence service. David Vigneault warned that a recent “industrial-scale” attempt by China to steal new technologies showed the need for increased vigilance from academics. “The frontline has moved, from being focused on government information to private sector innovation, research innovation and universities,” he told the Guardian in his first interview since leaving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which is part of…
‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you’: Beijing summons journalists in Hong Kong after fire
Beijing’s powerful security agency in Hong Kong has summoned journalists from international media to inform them it will not tolerate “trouble-making”, after critical coverage of the deadly apartment complex fire that has left the territory reeling. Senior reporters from several outlets operating in the city were called to the meeting by the Office for Safeguarding National Security (OSNS), which was set up by Beijing in 2020. In the meeting, which was attended by the New York Times and Agence France-Presse, an official accused journalists of tainting the government. The official…
Zootopia 2 bucks trend for Hollywood releases in China as it breaks records for foreign animation
A comedy about animal cops investigating a reptilian mystery has become the highest-grossing foreign animated film ever in China, bucking the trend of declining interest in overseas productions that has resulted in Hollywood films struggling in the Chinese box office. Zootopia 2 (called Zootropolis 2 in some European countries), a hotly anticipated and widely marketed sequel to 2016’s Zootopia, was released in China last week. In its first seven days, it made about 2bn yuan (£213m) in ticket sales, making it one of the best-performing films of the year. On…