RaMell Ross considers himself more of a visual artist than a movie director. His second film, Nickel Boys, attempts a visual artist’s feat: a feature shot entirely from the first-person point of view.
Business
One of the year’s best movies was filmed in first person
Every decade, it seems, first-person camerawork reemerges in film. Kathryn Bigelow’s dystopian thriller Strange Days (1995) cut to it when its characters deployed a sci-fi technology to experience other people’s memories; the much-maligned Doom (2005) had a section that paid homage to the POV of its video game origins; Hardcore Henry (2015) proved doing that at feature-length was exhausting. But if there’s a through line between the works that have deployed the first-person perspective, it’s that they’ve used them for visceral means, often to heighten the intensity of violence.
Nearly 10 years later, Nickel Boys presents the first person to achieve the opposite: quiet intimacy. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the film alternates between the perspectives of its leads, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), two Black teenagers who meet at a brutal reformatory school in the Jim Crow South. Despite the institution’s punishing environment, Elwood continues to maintain an optimistic worldview reflective of the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, while Turner grounds himself through pragmatic survivalism. The audience sees what they see — and believe.
The first-person vantage point does something clever: when we’re seeing things through Elwood’s eyes, we’re mostly looking at Turner, and vice versa. The effect is startling and, in its best moments, sublime. And the film is so confident that it almost never relents. Nickel Boys commits to the first person for nearly its entire two-hour, 20-minute runtime, except for a few splashes of archival footage and a handful of scenes that flash forward. But the brilliance of Nickel Boys is that the camerawork isn’t just a visual gimmick; it’s tied so deeply to the film’s themes that it allows the film to pull off a final act reveal that, before I saw this adaptation, I believed could only be achieved in a novel.
The movie arrives in theaters this Friday, but thanks to a strong run at festivals, it’s already being talked about as an Academy Award contender. (As of this writing, Nate Jones’ most recent “Oscar Futures” column at Vulture predicts the film as a Best Picture and Best Director finalist.) A New York Times critic declared it the year’s number one film, and director Ross just took home honors at the New York Film Critics Circle, an award that tends to be a bellwether for the industry’s biggest prizes.
The year’s most celebrated movie might just be its most ambitious. Asking audiences to watch a film from the first-person POV is a big risk, and the technical challenges to pull it off convincingly were no easy ask of the crew or actors. In some ways, Nickel Boys feels like an unlikely gambit.
Here’s how it got made.
A photographer and author, RaMell Ross comes from the art world, a place that, in his experience, embraces and elevates abstraction over explanation. Working in film, he says he finds that people — the regular ones that watch movies and the powerful ones that allow them to be made — tend to ask more questions about intention and meaning.
As a director, Ross is best known for his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which follows the life of two Black high school students in Alabama, where Ross spent five years capturing footage.
Hale County eschewed the traditional building blocks of narrative — plot through an order of scenes — for a fragmentary, patchwork approach. The result is stunning and resembles less a conventional documentary and more the kind of impressionistic video art you might find at a contemporary art museum. But even with all its formal invention, Hale County still earned an Academy Award nomination in the documentary feature category.
It lost to Free Solo, but still: not a bad showing for a movie never expected to be in the running. After, Ross was compelled to return to his work in visual arts, completing a performance piece for the Ogden Museum of Southern Art titled “Return to Origin,” wherein he shipped himself from Rhode Island to Alabama in a large wooden crate — an allusion and reversal of the Great Migration, made a touch funnier when you learn Ross is six-feet, six-inches tall.
During that time, he’d also returned to his full-time job, teaching visual arts at Brown University. It’s unsurprising to learn that Ross is a professor — even from our brief encounter, it’s clear he possesses an academic’s curiosity and the enthusiastic engagement of a lecturer. More importantly, teaching gives him the space to be patient. “I get to make art at my own pace. I get to think big and move slow. There’s nothing better than that.”
But having come within spitting distance of Hollywood’s highest recognition, the Oscar, surely producers and studios were reaching out to Ross with projects, right? It turns out that no one was calling. Sundance recognition and an Academy Award nod would have to suffice. “I never took a meeting,” he says, appearing content with that outcome.
Then, in 2019, a producer reached out about an adaptation of a not-yet-published novel called Nickel Boys.
Ross had heard of the production company Plan B before. But it wasn’t until they reached out that he looked them up: they’d made 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight. It was Brad Pitt’s production outfit. High-profile producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner were also involved, but honestly, Ross wasn’t familiar with the kind of names that circulate among Hollywood regulars. He’d made little effort to penetrate that world because, well, he liked his life, teaching and making art at his own speed.
But after reading an advanced copy of Nickel Boys, the idea of POV came immediately. Whitehead’s book fictionalizes the very real horrors of the Dozier School for Boys, where, only recently, forensic anthropologists have uncovered nearly 50 unmarked graves of students who were secretly buried. In imagining those harrowing details, Ross was at a loss for words, but he could conjure the images. What if he could give those boys a literal point of view?
He had no idea if Plan B would be up for such a formal gambit, but he had no interest in being a for-hire director. What did he have to lose? When Ross pitched the idea to Plan B, he was surprised when they immediately signed off on it.
“They genuinely did not flinch. They stress-tested it, as all the producers did over the course of making the film and really whittled down the script, but generally never questioned [the first-person approach],” Ross says, then adds: “Kind of crazy.”
He’d connected with cinematographer Jomo Fray, a fan of Hale County. But even Fray, who came with his own awards and bona fides, found that the POV of Nickel Boys required him to rethink the language of film “on a quantum level.” The two of them were suddenly reconceiving the basic elements of the medium: What is an establishing shot when you’re in first person? A cut? A transition? The prospect was daunting — and thrilling.
But first, there was a lot of testing — a month’s worth, just to get the feel right. Ross recalls specifically homing in on how they wanted time to move with the camera. What they learned is that the most convincing images had to be slightly behind their marks. Traditionally, a movie is tightly blocked and choreographed with the camera; but in their trials, Ross and Fray found the results unrealistic. Messiness, they found, was more convincing. “If you are late to something and then you find it… then it just fundamentally feels more like human vision.” The way a person sees the world is not as tidy as it is in cinema. To avoid making the POV feel like a contrivance, the image had to be deeply immersive, one “that allowed you to live life concurrently with Elwood and Turner… navigating and moving through space with them, not merely watching them do it,” Fray says.
It also required some special gear. Fray chose the Sony Venice, a full-frame digital camera, because it could shoot in IMAX quality. In “Rialto mode,” which separates the body from the 6K sensor, the footprint of what the camera operator is holding was barely larger than an average DSLR. (Fray knew from what Ross had imagined they would often be filming in tight spaces.) There were a lot of setups, too: chest mounts, helmet cams, SnorriCams (the exoskeletal selfie stick rig that produces shots most associated with Darren Aronofsky’s work); there were handhelds in various orientations; a scene where Elwood gets clocked required its own custom rig.
But what does shooting an entire movie in first person actually look like? Well, it involves the camera crew and the actors getting unusually close. There were times when they were actually on top of each other.
Most of the shots were filmed by Ross, Fray, and camera operator Sam Ellison. If the scene was from Elwood’s POV, Herisse would stand close behind the camera operator and say his lines; if a Turner scene needed a hand in it, Wilson would reach his arm around the camera operator to get himself into shot. “We’re making a frame and we’re like, ‘Hey, E, put your hand up here a little bit more,’” Ross says.
There were many scenes — Ross estimates about a quarter of the shots — where the limitations of space meant the actors needed to don the camera rigs themselves.
“You don’t really get that opportunity really as an actor, to work behind the camera and then step into the shoes of an operator for certain moments,” Herisse says. Suddenly, he had the opportunity to wield an object he didn’t normally interact with, which he was always told he was supposed to ignore the presence of. Was it stressful?
“Obviously it’s scary in the sense that I didn’t want to break anything. I definitely know that this is a very important and expensive piece of equipment that’s hanging off my chest,” he says. “But otherwise, it was so cool.”
For him and his co-star Wilson, shooting scenes from the other side of the POV meant violating the most basic rule of acting: never look at the camera. Now, they were instructed to speak directly into it. When I speak to Herisse and Wilson, I ask if it was hard to shift their focus.
“We definitely couldn’t ignore [the camera]. But we were able to get into a rhythm with it and learn that new thing of staring down the barrel of the lens in place of having each other’s eyes or each other’s physical presence,” Wilson says.
“Eventually the camera just fades away and you get this feeling that you’re no longer speaking to this machine,” Herisse adds. “Brandon was there physically — right next to Jomo or Sam or RaMell during the scenes — and I could hear his voice. And I knew that he was there with me.”
They were still listening to each other, even if a 6K camera rig and its operator stood between them.
Toward the end of our conversation, I tell Ross that shooting Nickel Boys sounded extremely difficult — reinventing the language of film, coming up with the technical way to do that, then executing on that ambitious vision. But Ross just laughs it off.
“The hardest part is time in general because you don’t have infinite time, like in documentary where you can just come back. So we have two hours to shoot the scene and we’re starting from scratch. [The actor] doesn’t have the rig on. Bluetooth isn’t connecting. Those types of things make it challenging, but the images themselves, yeah, we had that.”
After rushing through eight or so weeks of preproduction, shooting was compressed to a month after losing a week to covid — an intense experience for a guy who spent the better part of a decade on his last film.
Preparation helped, though. Ross estimates that 90 percent of what he storyboarded and scripted shows up exactly that way in the final thing, with only a little bit of improvisation along the way. I’m surprised to hear the shot list was a whopping 35 pages, single-spaced — every single moment, gaze, and beat accounted for, in a film that still feels naturalistic.
It’s easy to see how Ross’ newest film is a clear extension of his body of work. If Hale County was, in his words, the story of how Black people have come to be known through the camera, Nickel Boys offers a story where the perspective of Black characters becomes the camera.
Nickel Boys is structured along more conventional plot lines (it even has a big twist), but the film also offers many reprieves and distractions, emulating the way the eye wanders and how memory can often be nonlinear. Some of those images are the most resonant: the first shot opens with an outstretched arm, gripping an orange; sensory fascinations, like the sound of loafers clopping through a puddle or a knife scraping cake off a dish, take center stage.
One of the movie’s most moving moments is a humble one: actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor embracing Turner for a hug, the camera suddenly looking past her shoulder.
Recalling that day on set, Fray describes it as a new experience for him as a cinematographer. No longer the voyeur, he was suddenly in a position where he had to meet his scene partner in the eye.
“That changes how you compose an image,” Fray says. “That changes how you shoot an image. And I think that changes the dynamic between actor and camera, and cinematographer and performer.”
Nickel Boys is in theaters on December 13th.
Continue Reading
Business
Trump Says US Banks Can’t Do Business in Canada. It’s Not That Simple.
Hours after imposing steep tariffs on Canada, President Trump raised an issue that even the American lenders whose cause he’s championing find perplexing: the access, or lack thereof, of U.S. banks to the Canadian market.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, “Canada doesn’t allow American Banks to do business in Canada, but their banks flood the American Market.” He added sarcastically, “Oh, that seems fair to me, doesn’t it?”
While this issue doesn’t often come up in conversations with prominent American bank executives, it appears to be increasingly on the president’s mind.
Mr. Trump mentioned the Canada banking issue early last month as part of a broader criticism against what he views as the unequal economic balance between the United States and its northern neighbor. Writing on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said Canada “doesn’t even allow U.S. Banks to open or do business.”
Here is the actual state of play for U.S. banks in Canada:
Can U.S. banks operate in Canada?
Canada’s banking sector is dominated by the “Big Six,” the half-dozen institutions including the Royal Bank of Canada and TD Bank. They are permitted to take deposits, extend mortgages and advise corporate clients — all the core activities for banks. And Canadian customers disproportionately still prefer to do their banking in person, as opposed to online, meaning it would require a major physical presence for any entrant to attempt to enter the market.
Additionally, U.S. banks are restricted in what they can do in Canada.
Foreign banks, including American ones, must either work with a Canadian middleman, establish a Canadian subsidiary or receive special government permission to do business. Unless they agree to follow Canada’s stringent banking rules that include holding a hefty sum of cash-like assets in reserve at all times, they cannot operate retail branches that take deposits under around $100,000.
Given how dominant Canada’s homegrown banks are, any international bank that tries to compete faces “an additional regulatory burden for what would begin as a small prize,” said James R. Thompson, associate professor of finance at the University of Waterloo.
The upshot is that U.S. banks have minimal operations in Canada. The largest American lender, JPMorgan Chase, says it has roughly 600 employees in Canada, out of more than 300,000 worldwide. Many international banks limit themselves to areas that don’t involve lending, such as offering investment advice to wealthy Canadians or local companies.
So Mr. Trump is incorrect in asserting that American banks cannot do any business in Canada, but it is true that they are hamstrung in their activities.
Why is Canada so restrictive?
While there are more than 4,000 banks in the United States, Canada has just a few dozen, and more than three-quarters of deposits are held by the Big Six.
For decades, Canadian political leaders have crowed about that restrictive financial regulatory model. They argue that fending off foreign entrants in the country’s mortgage market helped the country largely avoid the 2008 collapse south of its border.
In light of Mr. Trump’s criticism, Maggie Cheung, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Bankers Association, was quick to point out on Tuesday that foreign banks were an integral part of the banking landscape. She said 16 U.S. banks were operating to some degree in Canada, with a cumulative of nearly $79 billion in assets — a statistic that the nation’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, also cited on Tuesday.
“American banks are alive and well and prospering in Canada,” Mr. Trudeau said.
But in relative terms, their successes are small. U.S. bank assets represent 1 to 2 percent of the $6.5 trillion held by banks operating in Canada writ large.
“The major impediment faced by U.S. banks,” said Laurence Booth, professor of finance at the University of Toronto, “is simply they can’t compete with the Canadian banks as they don’t have the scale, while they can’t take any of them over as there are restrictions on foreign ownership.”
Do Canadian banks ‘flood’ the U.S.?
International banks — including Canadian ones — are largely free to establish U.S. arms. The United States is a more attractive target for international banks than Canada, both because it is a hub for world finance and because its market permits more exotic, higher-profit lending activities like 30-year mortgages. (The most common mortgage in Canada carries a five-year term.)
The largest Canadian bank in America, TD Bank, operates more than 1,000 U.S. branches through a Delaware subsidiary. That size puts it in line with well-known regional lenders like Citizens and Fifth Third.
The Canadian Bankers Association said the six largest Canadian lenders held less than 3.5 percent of U.S. bank assets.
Is this even an issue for Wall Street?
Big U.S. banks had plenty of hopes that Mr. Trump would decrease regulations, encourage merger activity and slash taxes. Expanding their presence in Canada was not on the list.
A U.S. banking industry trade group, the Bank Policy Institute, said Tuesday that it had released no statements on the matter, and no bank chief executive has taken up the rallying cry.
More pressing for the global banking industry are Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which have helped push the industry’s stocks down 8 percent over the past month, according to the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index.
Business
Trump’s New Tariffs Could Strain Collection of Customs Fees
The sweeping tariffs on Canadian, Mexican and Chinese products that President Trump imposed on Tuesday could strain the system that collects import duties and the government agencies that enforce those fees, trade and legal experts said.
Collecting import duties is usually a routine task, but the new tariffs are being imposed on Mexican and Canadian goods, many of which have been imported into the United States duty-free for many years. Adding to the challenge is the sheer volume of goods subject to the new tariffs — U.S. imports from China, Mexico and Canada totaled over $1.3 trillion last year, or about two-fifths of all imports.
The tariffs apply a 25 percent duty on goods from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10 percent on imports from China.
Importers typically employ customs brokers to calculate and pay tariffs to the government agency that collects them, U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Adam Lewis, a co-founder and the president of Clearit, a customs broker, said that it would not be hard to tweak software to collect the new tariffs, but that a crucial part of the tariffs payment system might need significant adjustments. Importers must buy a “customs bond,” a type of insurance that guarantees the duties will be paid. Mr. Lewis said some customers might have to increase the size of their bonds to cover the extra tariff payments.
“Many of their products were coming in duty-free, and all of a sudden there’s going to be a 25 percent increase,” he said. “It’s quite large.”
In addition, policing importers for tariff evasion will now become a much bigger task for Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Justice. Some importers may try to avoid tariffs by understating the cost of goods in customs declarations or by falsely claiming they were imported from countries not subject to tariffs.
“The greater the breadth and severity of these new tariffs, the greater the likelihood that at least some potential importers may want to misrepresent the value or the origin of their goods,” said Kirti Vaidya Reddy, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at the law firm Quarles.
If the government finds that an importer has not paid duties, customs officials are likely to demand that the importer pay what is owed and a penalty that can double or even triple the amount due.
In a statement, a customs agency spokeswoman said: “The dynamic nature of our mission, along with evolving threats and challenges, requires C.B.P. to remain flexible and adapt quickly while ensuring seamless operations and mission resilience. These tariffs will help maintain America’s global competitiveness and protect American industries from unfair trade practices.”
Some evasion cases have become the subject of criminal prosecutions. Last year, a Miami importer pleaded guilty to participating in an import scheme involving Chinese truck tires that the Justice Department said had cost the United States more than $1.9 million in forgone tariff revenue.
But stepping up enforcement efforts is likely to require that the Justice Department devote significantly more staff to pursuing tariff evasion cases, which, lawyers said, can take time to build.
“The Department of Justice has the personnel and infrastructure to do it, but these cases are complex, transnational and document-heavy,” said Artie McConnell, a former federal prosecutor who is a partner at the law firm BakerHostetler. “You can’t rush it, and prosecutions likely won’t come quickly.”
Business
China Retaliates Against Trump, Imposing Tariffs and Blacklisting U.S. Companies
Minutes after President Trump’s latest tariffs took effect, the Chinese government said on Tuesday that it was imposing its own broad tariffs on food imported from the United States and would essentially halt sales to 15 American companies.
China’s Ministry of Finance put tariffs of 15 percent on imports of American chicken, wheat, corn and cotton and 10 percent tariffs on other foods, ranging from soybeans to dairy products. In addition, the Ministry of Commerce said 15 U.S. companies would no longer be allowed to buy products from China except with special permission, including Skydio, which is the largest American maker of drones and a supplier to the U.S. military and emergency services.
Lou Qinjian, a spokesman for China’s National People’s Congress, chastised the United States for violating the World Trade Organization’s free trade rules. “By imposing unilateral tariffs, the U.S. has violated W.T.O. rules and disrupted the security and stability of the global industrial and supply chains,” he said.
President Trump has contended his tariffs are essential to stopping the flow into the United States of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths through overdoses.
But the U.S. imposition of tariffs “will deal a heavy blow to counternarcotics dialogue and cooperation,” Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a news briefing.
Mr. Trump has now tagged almost all goods from China with an extra 20 percent in tariffs since taking office in January. He announced 10 percent tariffs on Feb. 4 and another round on Tuesday. Mr. Trump also moved ahead on 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada on Tuesday, after a monthlong delay.
China had responded to the February tariffs by immediately announcing that it would start collecting, six days later, additional tariffs on liquefied natural gas, coal and farm machinery from the United States. But those tariffs combined hit only about a tenth of American exports to China, making them much narrower than Mr. Trump’s comprehensive tariffs.
China’s action on Tuesday was much broader. China is the top overseas market for American farmers, wielding considerable influence over prices and demand in the commodities markets of the Midwest.
By targeting imports of food, Beijing repeated its response to tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed during his first term. China put tariffs on American soybeans in 2018 and shifted much of its purchasing to Brazil.
But the strategy backfired then: Mr. Trump responded by placing more tariffs on Chinese goods. Because China sells much more to the United States than it buys, it quickly ran out of American goods to impose tariffs on. And American farmers had some success in finding other markets for their crops.
China’s tariffs in 2018 also had less of a political impact in the United States than Beijing’s leaders had hoped. In 2018 Senate elections in three of the top soybean-exporting states, voters gave little evidence they held the Chinese action against Mr. Trump or the Republican Party. All three states saw Democratic senators replaced with Republicans that year, as social issues proved more compelling for many voters than trade disputes.
Yet China has potential trade weapons that go beyond tariffs on food. In early February, Beijing implemented restrictions on exports to the United States of certain critical minerals, which are used in the production of some semiconductors and other technology products.
Blocking key materials from reaching the United States, a tactic known as supply chain warfare, carries considerable risks for China. Beijing is struggling to attract foreign investment. China’s leaders have also stated that attempting to bolster the country’s domestic economy, weighed down by the fallout of a devastating real estate slowdown, is a priority.
Beijing could make it even harder for American companies to do business in China, but that could also hurt foreign investment. In addition to effectively preventing 15 companies from buying Chinese goods, China’s Ministry of Commerce added another 10 American companies on Tuesday to what it calls an “unreliable entities list,” preventing them from doing any business in China.
Many of the companies that China penalized on Tuesday are military contractors. But the Ministry of Commerce also blocked imports from the biotech firm Illumina. It accused Illumina, which is based in San Diego, of violating market transaction rules and discriminating against Chinese companies.
Chinese market regulators said in early February, after Mr. Trump imposed tariffs, that they had launched an antimonopoly investigation into Google. Google has been blocked from China’s internet for more than a decade, but the move could disrupt the company’s dealings with Chinese companies.
Mr. Lou, the National People’s Congress spokesman, signaled his country’s emerging strategy in dealing with Mr. Trump’s tariffs by calling for closer trade relations with Europe.
“China and Europe can complement each other’s strengths and achieve mutual benefit in many areas of cooperation,” he said at a news conference ahead of the opening on Wednesday of the annual weeklong session of China’s legislature.
But Europe has its own trade disputes with China, notably over electric vehicles. European politicians and business leaders have voiced concern about how to cope with an expected further flood of exports this year from China, which has embarked on a far-reaching factory construction program.
China’s rapid rise since 2000 to global pre-eminence in manufacturing, with a third of the world’s output, has come to a considerable extent at the expense of the American share of global industrial production, according to United Nations data. European nations have been wary of closing factories and relying on low-cost imports from China.
Mr. Trump has moved much faster on China tariffs during his second term than he did in his first. In 2018 and 2019, he imposed tariffs of up to 25 percent, in stages, on imports worth about $300 billion a year. He then concluded a trade agreement with China in January 2020, leaving in place 25 percent tariffs on many industrial goods while cutting 15 percent tariffs on some consumer products to 7.5 percent and canceling a few other tariffs.
By contrast, Mr. Trump has now imposed 20 percent tariffs on all goods that the United States imports from China, worth about $440 billion a year. That includes some products, like smartphones, that he omitted during his first term.
Mr. Trump’s actions this year have raised average tariffs on the affected Chinese imports to 39 percent — compared with just 3 percent before he took office in 2017. Apart from China, Canada and Mexico, the United States imposes tariffs averaging about 3 percent on most trading partners.
China’s average tariffs on goods from most of the world are twice as high, and much higher on imports from the United States.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, the Chinese government reduced taxes that it charges the country’s exporters. That gave them room to cut prices and offset at least part of the tariffs for their customers, which include many small American businesses as well as big retailers like Walmart, Amazon and Home Depot.
As another way around tariffs, some Chinese exporters shifted the final assembly of their products to countries like Vietnam, Thailand or Mexico, while keeping the production of core components in China. Mr. Trump is now trying to stop some of the trade through Mexico, which critics of Chinese exports see as a backdoor into the U.S. market.
Many Chinese exporters resorted to using the so-called de minimis exception to tariffs: dividing shipments into many packages, each with a value of less than $800. Each shipment is then exempt from tariffs and customs processing fees and mostly omitted from customs inspections and American imports data.
At least $1 of every $6 worth of American imports from China is now arriving through these de minimis shipments.
In early February, Mr. Trump issued an order briefly halting the de minimis tariff exemption for goods from China, Mexico and Canada. After packages quickly accumulated at American airports, he delayed the order for shipments from China until procedures could be developed to handle them, and postponed for a month his order for de minimis imports from Canada and Mexico. On Sunday, he again delayed action on those imports from Canada and Mexico.
Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said that by retaliating now, “China sends a strong signal to the Trump administration that a unilateral tariff doesn’t work — you have to sit down to talk to us and to negotiate with us.”
Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Beijing, and Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien from Taipei. Li You contributed research.
Sports4 weeks ago
A'ja Wilson has no shortage of motivation after Aces' early exit in '24
Entertainment4 weeks ago
Best Mothers Day gifts: Show mom some love
Sports4 weeks ago
