12 views

Nov. 14, 2025, 5:33 PM ESTBy Nicole AcevedoZhu Rikun spent months planning a film festival that never happened. As the director of the inaugural IndieChina Film Festival, Zhu was set to welcome filmmakers and directors from China to New York City for a small showcase of independent Chinese films this week, but he said concerns over harassment led to the event’s suspension two days before it was scheduled to start on Nov. 8.Every day this week, Zhu has been showing up to the empty venue he had booked for the film festival as a form of protest.“It was not the film festival that I prepared for,” the filmmaker told NBC News on Friday morning.In a statement ahead of the film festival’s cancellation, the organizer said he received messages saying that filmmakers, directors and producers from China set to participate in the event, as well as their relatives, were facing harassment.Many participants who pulled out of the independent film festival did not say why or cited “personal reasons,” but a few said they or their family members had been told to do so by Chinese authorities, according to Zhu.“I hope this announcement of the cancellation of IndieChina Film Festival will make certain unknown forces stop harassing all the directors, guests, former staff, volunteers and my friends and family,” Zhu said in a statement on the festival’s website.By the time Zhu suspended the film festival, it was too late for him to cancel the venue he had booked. Throughout the week, he has gone to the event space — sometimes by himself or with a handful of other filmmakers — to watch some films and discuss them.“I am still a filmmaker. I’m still a filmmaker from China and I’m still an independent film curator,” Zhu said, adding that independent filmmaking in China “is really difficult; it is extremely different from before.”Before moving to New York City a decade ago, Zhu had worked on independent film festivals in China for nearly 20 years and co-founded the Beijing Independent Film Festival.But independent film festivals in China began facing increasing crackdowns after Chinese President Xi Jinping, known for his stringent ideological control, stepped into power in 2012, according to Human Rights Watch. The nongovernmental organization investigating human rights abuses around the world has said that Chinese authorities have shut down all three major independent film festivals in China, including Zhu’s Beijing Independent Film Festival.“Eventually, all of my film festivals were banned, none of them could continue,” Zhu said.Following what happened to his film festival in Beijing, Zhu had been rethinking how to host a film festival focused on Chinese independent films that could avoid censorship — the New York City event was the first attempt at that.“The Chinese government reached around the globe to shut down a film festival in New York City,” Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “This latest act of transnational repression demonstrates the Chinese government’s aim to control what the world sees and learns about China.”The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to an NBC News email seeking comment.The Chinese Foreign Ministry told The New York Times this week that it wasn’t familiar with the specific circumstances around the IndieChina Film Festival and that Human Rights Watch had “long been prejudiced against China.”Nicole AcevedoNicole Acevedo is a news reporter for NBC News.

- Latest News - November 14, 2025

Many who pulled out of the independent film festival did not say why, but a few said they or their family members had been told to do so by Chinese.

TAGS:
15 views

Nov. 14, 2025, 12:02 PM EST / Updated Nov. 14, 2025, 4:26 PM ESTBy David K. Li, Erick Mendoza and Mary GodieRetired “Last Chance U” football coach John Beam died Friday in Northern California and a suspect was arrested in connection to the fatal shooting at Laney College in Oakland, authorities said.The suspect was identified as Cedric Irving Jr., a 27-year-old former high school football player who was arrested without incident, police said. Irving played at Skyline High School in Oakland where Beam once coached, but not when the suspect was a student there.The suspect and victim knew each other, according to Oakland Assistant Police Chief James Beere, who declined to elaborate on the nature of their relationship or any kind of motive.”I will say that coach Beam, although they did not have a close relationship, was open to helping everybody in our community and this is not uncommon for him to have a relationship with someone that he would think needs help,” Beere told reporters.”In this case, I can just tell you that the individual that was arrested went specifically to the campus for a specific reason.”Beam was shot Thursday at the Laney College Fieldhouse, police and the Peralta Community College District said.”Coach Beam passed away this morning from the gunshot wound that he sustained yesterday,” Oakland Police Chief Floyd Mitchell said.”I know that coach Beam meant a lot to the Oakland community and beyond.” The coach’s family has been touched by the sympathy that’s been expressed since news broke of Beam’s shooting.”Our hearts are full from the outpouring of love and support from all who cared about him,” according to a family statement read by Frederick Shavies, the police chief in neighboring Piedmont and a longtime friend of the coach’s.”We are deeply grateful for your continued prayers, well wishes and thoughts at this time.” Surveillance images from the school and nearby homes and businesses played a key role in the arrest, police said.An Alameda County Sheriff’s deputy spotted the suspect at 3:15 a.m. Friday at the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s (BART) San Leandro Station, about 8 miles from campus, and took him into custody, according to Gloria Beltran, commander of the OPD homicide unit.”OPD investigators interviewed the suspect and he provided a statement regarding the shooting,” she said.Laney College in Oakland, Calif.KNTVMayor Barbara Lee thanked police for the apprehension that came less than 24 hours after the shooting.“I’m grateful to the Oakland Police Department and our dedicated law enforcement partners for their swift work in making an arrest in the shooting of Coach Beam,” Lee said in a statement.“This arrest is a testament to the effective collaboration and dedication of our law enforcement community.”Beam is best known as the coach who was profiled in season five of the Netflix series “Last Chance U,” which follows players on a college football team struggling to make the best of limited or final opportunities.The season that focused on Beam and Laney College aired in 2020.Beam has been athletic director at the junior college near downtown Oakland, California, since 2006 and was the football coach from 2012 through last season. Former Denver Broncos running back and 1,000-yard rusher C.J. Anderson played for Beam at Laney.Before going to junior college, Beam coached at Skyline HS, where Pro Bowl offensive lineman Marvel Smith played in his prep ball. Smith played nine seasons for the Pittsburgh Steelers.Beam led Laney to the 2018 California Community College Athletic Association title.David K. LiSenior Breaking News ReporterErick MendozaMary GodieEric Salzman and Liz Kreutz contributed.

- Latest News - November 14, 2025

Retired “Last Chance U” football coach John Beam died Friday in Northern California and a suspect was arrested in connection to the fatal shooting at Laney College in Oakland, authorities.

TAGS:
13 views

Nov. 14, 2025, 1:29 PM ESTBy Peter NicholasWASHINGTON — The East Wing that President Donald Trump tore down last month stood for decades.The ballroom he’s building in its place could be gone not long after the first wave of guests sit down for dinner, depending on the outcome of the 2028 presidential race.If elected, a Democratic president would have plenty to worry about aside from White House decor; war and peace can easily fill up a day. But a new president may face considerable pressure from within the Democratic fold to do something about a massive new ballroom forever linked to Trump.Already, prominent Democratic officials are workshopping ideas for repurposing the space in favor of something that’s decidedly un-Trump. If any of these come to fruition, the $300 million ballroom that Trump birthed could take on a function that he never intended.White House fires arts commission that reviews presidential construction projects02:51Should the ballroom be used as the president plans? “No way,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who said he will consider a presidential bid if Democrats gain control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections. “This is a space that’s owned by the people and that serves the people,” Raskin said in an interview. “So, it should be used opposite of what Trump has in mind, which is for the American aristocracy and plutocracy to gather.”Rep. Ro Khanna of California, another Democrat viewed as a possible presidential candidate, said the ballroom should be used in a way that “celebrates and empowers forgotten Americans” as opposed to accommodating guests for glitzy state dinners.Letting the 90,000-square-foot structure remain a ballroom would only validate the means by which Trump built it: demolishing the East Wing without forewarning and bankrolling the project with private donations, Democratic officials suggested.At least one Democratic lawmaker wants the ballroom to meet its demise.“I don’t think it would be a bad idea to tear it down,” said Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn.“It’s this gigantic blob there that’s Donald Trump,” he added.The White House declined to comment on the ballroom’s fate under future Democratic presidents.Trump has said that a ballroom will enable successors to hold large events in a convenient indoor space as opposed to herding guests onto the South Lawn under makeshift tents. For 150 years, presidents have wanted just this kind of solution, the White House contends.“I hope it remains a ballroom and hope that it’s tastefully and beautifully done so that future presidents will be proud to host honored guests there,” said Anita McBride, a member of the White House Historical Association board of directors and former chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush. “But what I mostly hope is that the new building includes offices for the Office of the First Lady, White House social office and White House Visitor Office,” McBride added. “Those offices serve the presidency in a unique and special way, welcoming all visitors to the People’s House.”Past presidents also faced public backlash for transforming the White House. Harry Truman was ridiculed for putting up a balcony that overlooks the South Lawn. A newspaper cartoon in 1948 depicted Truman standing on the balcony named for him and shouting, “Love me… love my balcony.”But no president has undertaken any exterior renovation on the ballroom’s scale, nor have many presidents proved as polarizing as Trump.That makes the ballroom an inviting target for Democratic candidates and officeholders alike. There’s little downside. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll of adults last month showed that 88% of Democrats and 61% of independents opposed the ballroom project.“It’s a metaphor for this administration — the recklessness to which he goes about things, the fact that he doesn’t believe in rules, he doesn’t believe they apply to him,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, another potential Democratic candidate for president, said in an interview last month with NBC News “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.“So, you know, he’s a wrecking ball presidency,” Newsom said.Inertia is a potent force in life and in politics. A Democratic president with a mountain of promises to fulfill might conclude the easiest answer is to leave the ballroom alone, rather than spend time and money mothballing it. Newsom is no friend of Trump, but his office did not respond to a question about whether he’d like to see the ballroom razed.One Democratic candidate for Congress, Saikat Chakrabarti, suggested turning the ballroom into a Smithsonian-run museum. If elected, he said he will introduce a bill aimed at converting the ballroom into a museum focused on “corruption and autocracy.”The space would list the private companies that donated to the ballroom, said Chakrabarti, who is running for the San Francisco seat held by outgoing Rep. Nancy Pelosi, to “really put into the sunlight how this thing came to even be.” (Major companies that have contributed to Trump’s ballroom project include Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Comcast Corp., the parent company of NBCUniversal, while the White House has said it is accepting other, anonymous donations.)On the campaign trail, Democratic candidates figure to propose creative alternatives for the ballroom. Raskin envisions a hybrid structure that could accommodate some dinner guests, but would also showcase exhibits devoted to America’s struggle to achieve full-fledged democracy.One side of the space would display the various attempts to “undermine and thwart popular democracy in American life,” starting with King George III during the Revolutionary War era and ending with Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Raskin said.He said he would name the space the “Democracy Matters Ballroom.”Khanna said the ballroom’s future should be decided by way of vox populi.“We need a White House that is not for the tech billionaires, but for forgotten Americans,” he said.“In that spirit, we should ask Americans — in rural communities, urban centers and hollowed-out factory towns — for their ideas of what to do with the space,” Khanna said.A Republican successor to Trump might be more apt to keep the ballroom, interpreting victory as a vindication of Trump’s policies and priorities.Then again, Trump’s tastes aren’t for everyone. He likes gold; he’s partial to grand, formal spaces. A GOP president with a different aesthetic might not be quite as besotted with a ballroom nearly twice the size of the White House proper.“The White House is a residence that symbolizes American democracy,” said Edward Lengel, former chief historian for the White House Historical Association. The ballroom, he said, makes the White House resemble something else: “a palace.”Peter NicholasPeter Nicholas is a senior White House reporter for NBC News.Megan Lebowitz and Natasha Korecki contributed.

- Latest News - November 14, 2025

The East Wing that President Donald Trump tore down last month stood for decades. A future Democratic president could tear it down or repurpose it.

Source link

TAGS:
17 views

Nov. 14, 2025, 2:29 PM EST / Updated Nov. 14, 2025, 2:42 PM ESTBy Katherine DoyleWASHINGTON — Ten months into Donald Trump’s second term, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has positioned herself as a surprising critic of the administration’s policies — and as a torchbearer for the “America First” agenda that she believes the president has drifted from, she told NBC News in recent interviews.Greene, who has long been one of his most outspoken allies, said that Trump personally inspired her run for Congress in Georgia in 2022 and described her political identity as rooted in his promise to represent what she calls “the forgotten man and woman of America.”“That was me,” she told Tucker Carlson recently, recalling how she saw Trump’s campaign as a “referendum to the Republican Party on behalf of the American people … that were just so sick of Washington, D.C.”Now, Greene finds herself at the center of a divide inside the Republican Party over how deeply the U.S. should involve itself abroad, as surveys show the state of the economy is top of mind for many Americans and following a round of elections that focused on affordability. “No one cares about the foreign countries. No one cares about the never-ending amount of foreign leaders coming to the White House every single week,” Greene told NBC News.Trump says Marjorie Taylor Greene ‘lost her way’01:37The dispute underscores a broader rift over whether Trump’s presidency still reflects the populist message that powered his rise. And it reflects a MAGA movement preparing for a future without Trump at the top of the ticket, with the next generation of leaders figuring out where to take the base he built. Since taking office in January, Trump has made 14 foreign trips, with stops in Italy, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and the U.K., among others, according to an NBC News analysis. In the same period, he’s visited 15 U.S. states. That includes a trip to Alaska to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. By the same point in Trump’s first term, he had visited 27 states. Trump also said that he expects to travel to China early next year to meet with President Xi Jinping. And Bloomberg reported Thursday that he may attend the World Economic Forum, a gathering of the political and business elite, next year in Davos, Switzerland.“We didn’t elect the president to go out there and travel the world and end the foreign wars,” Greene said. “We elected the president to stop sending tax dollars and weapons for the foreign wars — to completely not engage anymore. Watching the foreign leaders come to the White House through a revolving door is not helping Americans.”“One of the big campaign issues is Americans were fed up with foreign wars,” she added. “It’s like, get us out of this.”President Donald Trump, with South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, in Busan during his Asia trip in October.Andrew Harnik / Getty ImagesWhile Trump did promise on the campaign trail to quickly end the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, the latest national NBC News poll shows Republicans overwhelmingly believe he has lived up to their expectations on foreign policy (82%), including 66% of Republicans who do not identify with the MAGA movement.But for Greene and others, it’s a matter of priorities; they argue that the economy should be the clear focus.“It’s not that I want a very different foreign policy,” said one Trump ally with a lens on foreign policy, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “He just needs to be messaging more aggressively that his focus is on young Americans, and the things that they are still having trouble getting, and the problems they’re having.”Greene has escalated her criticism as the foreign visits have continued, saying Trump’s attention abroad is “doing nothing to solve the problems that are really plaguing vulnerable segments of our population, especially young people.”She has slammed meetings with leaders such as Argentina’s Javier Milei, whom she described as seeking “a bailout,” and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who she said arrived “with his hands out begging for more.”Ryan Girdusky, a Republican consultant who helped run a pro-JD Vance super PAC in the 2022 Ohio Senate race, said it’s not surprising that the president has shown interest in cementing his global legacy.“When presidents don’t have to run again, they do a lot of foreign policy trips,” Girdusky said. “They do a lot of things for the legacy. And Trump’s Middle East stuff is probably the most important of any president since Nixon.”The Trump ally said that while he supports Trump raising awareness of, say, Christians being persecuted in Nigeria, “if we get to the point at which we really start talking about doing military action there, then I think we’ve lost the plot.”Conservatives have also questioned recent U.S. strikes in the Pacific and Caribbean and whether Trump risks the U.S. drifting into deeper conflict. The president, in October, denied that he is considering strikes inside Venezuela.In an article last month, the conservative journalist Christopher Caldwell questioned the buildup of U.S. military forces and weaponry off the coast of Venezuela, asking, “What does Trump think he’s doing?”Carlson, in the recent show featuring Greene, outlined what he said were MAGA’s five pillars, or the founding principles of the Trump administration. The first, he said, is putting America first, describing this as the idea “that the country operates on behalf of its owners, the citizens of that country.” Other pillars have a similar focus on the homeland, including a secure border, ending foreign wars, and a “real” domestic economy not dependent on globalization. A fifth calls for protecting free speech.“You can’t have a global country,” Carlson said, arguing that this is “a point Trump made again and again.”Asked about Greene’s recent comments following a meeting that morning with Syrian interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, Trump said Monday he has to “view the presidency as a worldwide situation, not locally.”“When you’re president, you really sort of have to watch over the world, because you’re going to be dragged into it — otherwise, you’re going to be dragged into a world war,” Trump said.“You know, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about the world.’ But the world is turning out to be our biggest customer,” he continued. “The world is — the world was on fire, and we could have been in that fire very easily if you didn’t have a president that knew what he was doing.”Of Greene, a longtime ally, he said, “She’s lost her way, I think.”Responding to Trump’s comments, Greene told NBC News this week: “I’m America First, America Only. Hardcore.”Asked if she had spoken to him to hash things out, she said, “No, I haven’t talked to him. 100% haven’t changed.”The clash comes against the backdrop of a difficult housing market and rising costs of living. Only about 1 in 5 homes sold in the year ending in June was purchased by a first-time buyer, according to a new report by the National Association of Realtors. Greene pointed to her own adult children — ages 22, 26 and 28 — as examples of what she views as a generation facing diminishing prospects.“They don’t think they’re ever really going to be able to buy a home,” she said. “They were promised, you go to college, you’re going to get a great job. That doesn’t exist. That’s not reality.”In a recent Fox News interview, Trump discussed affordability but seemed to downplay Americans’ concerns around economic anxiety, calling the issue a “con job by the Democrats” and suggesting that polling showing it was top of mind for voters was “fake.”Greene’s message has resonated with others in the party, particularly after a string of disappointing GOP election results this month. And she has drawn applause across the political aisle for her willingness to take direct aim at her own party, including during a recent appearance on “The View.” Greene dismissed speculation that she is positioning for a 2028 presidential bid, saying she is focused on her district.Analysts say the tension reflects the broader evolution of the Trump movement.Justin Logan, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said that so long as Americans do not feel direct costs from the foreign engagements, dissent inside the movement may remain limited. “If they can win on the argument that they’ve been successful and cheap, they’ll be able to push back their critics,” he said of the administration.Katherine DoyleKatherine Doyle is a White House reporter for NBC News. Peter Nicholas, Henry J. Gomez, Tara Prindiville, Megan Shannon and Melanie Zanona contributed.

- Latest News - November 14, 2025

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a surprising critic of Donald Trump’s policies — and as a torchbearer for the “America First” agenda that she says he has drifted from.

Source.

TAGS: