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…
Tag: US news
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…
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…
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…
Want to be hotter? Try this one weird Republican trick | Arwa Mahdawi
Maybe she was born with it, maybe it’s Mar-a-Lago face Forget expensive moisturizers or designer clothes. Ladies, if you want a quick and easy glow-up, you may want to try Republicanism. This one weird trick of voting against your own reproductive rights will instantly make you 10 times hotter. That’s not my personal sales pitch, I should note. But it’s increasingly how conservatism is being marketed to young women. As is painfully clear almost one year into Donald Trump 2.0, Maga authoritarianism doesn’t have any meaningful selling points for most…
China is bearing down on Taiwan – enabled by Trump’s weakness and vacillation | Simon Tisdall
Sheer ignorance, fed by malign intent, historical prejudice and mutual misunderstanding, is often the crucial spark that ignites simmering international conflicts. If Adolf Hitler, remarkably ignorant of the US, had grasped the true extent of American industrial might, would he still have fatefully declared war on Washington in 1941? When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, it evidently had no idea what it was getting into. Humiliating defeat contributed greatly to its subsequent disintegration. In 1990, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait, convinced he had a green light from the…
John Kerry urges Australia to take ‘hard-nosed’ approach with world’s biggest fossil fuel-producing countries at Cop31
Australia’s government, which will preside over the next UN climate summit, should gather the world’s 25 biggest greenhouse gasemitting countries and push them to draw up a roadmap to end the era of fossil fuels, former US secretary of state John Kerry has said. Only by “hard-nosed” confrontation with fossil fuel producers, and reducing their consumption in major economies, would the world be able to tackle the climate crisis, he said. Australia’s climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, has been given the role of “president of negotiations”, even though…
China’s Xi Jinping raises future of Taiwan in call with Donald Trump
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told Donald Trump that Beijing’s claims to Taiwan remain unchanged, in a phone call that came amid rising tensions over the self-governing island. Xi told Trump on Monday that Taiwan’s return to China was an “integral part of the postwar international order” forged in the joint US-China fight against “fascism and militarism”, according to the Chinese foreign ministry. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to annex it, by force if necessary. Taiwan’s democratically elected government strongly rejects China’s stance. The…
China has brought millions out of poverty. The US has not – by choice
The Chinese did rather well in the age of globalization. In 1990, 943 million people there lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars – 83% of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero. Unfortunately, the United States was not as successful. More than 4 million Americans – 1.25% of the population – must make ends meet with less than $3 a day, more than three times as many as 35 years ago. The data is not super…
Brother Wang, a global manhunt and the Chinese-Mexican drug nexus
Like so many great escapes, it involved a tunnel. One night in July, in the Mexico City neighbourhood where he was under house arrest, Zhi Dong Zhang snuck through a hole into the property nextdoor and escaped from under the noses of the soldiers guarding him. Zhang, an alleged drug trafficker, managed to get to Cuba and then reportedly all the way to Russia – only to be turned back. At the end of October, the Cuban government announced that it had arrested him. The same day he was flown…