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 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 Hechinger, a young military veteran who impulsively starts to talk to her. There is a spark between them and then something more.

The civil liberties group argues the Texas governor’s proclamation exceeds his authority and deepens fears

Islamophobia is on the rise in the US, with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), a civil liberties group, reporting sharp increases in anti-Muslim violence and rhetoric over the last two years.

In Texas, the issue has come to the fore in high-profile incidents, including the case of a Euless woman who was initially released on a $40,000 bail after attempting to drown two Palestinian American children.

Arrested in 2013 on India’s Himalayan border after fleeing Beijing’s ‘genocide’ against Muslims in Xinjiang, the siblings have been imprisoned indefinitely ever since then

On the evening of 12 June 2013, according to court documents, three “Chinese intruders” were arrested by the Indian army in Sultan Chusku, a remote and uninhabited desert area in the mountainous northern region of Ladakh.

The three Thursun brothers – Adil, 23, Abdul Khaliq, 22 and Salamu, 20 – had found themselves in an area of unmarked and disputed borders after a 13-day journey by bus and foot over the rugged Himalayan terrain through China’s Xinjiang province, which borders Ladakh.

In Dearborn, provocateurs have held anti-Islam rallies, attempted to burn the Qur’an and rile residents for clickbait

White nationalist and rightwing agitators recently descended on Dearborn, Michigan, to hold an anti-Islam rally at which they attempted to burn a Qur’an and manufacture controversy over the city’s large Arab American population. But the protest has been dismissed by local leaders as a cheap publicity stunt aimed at generating money and clicks for far-right influencers.

But there is little doubt the Michigan city has become a repeated target for the publicity-hungry far-right because it holds the US’s highest percentage of Arab American residents. Similar provocateurs have marched with a pig’s head on a pole at an Arab American fair. Meanwhile, Christian evangelists regularly attempt to convert Muslim children at parks or outside schools.

Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson are increasingly espousing Christian ‘values’, and a wealthy US legal group is becoming influential – this could have dire consequences

Earlier this year, not long after Tommy Robinson embraced evangelical Christianity while in prison, the then Conservative MP Danny Kruger spoke in parliament about the need for a restoration of Britain through the “recovery of a Christian politics”. Less than two months later, Kruger joined Reform, and shortly after that, James Orr, a vociferously conservative theologian who has been described as JD Vance’s “English philosopher king”, was appointed as one of Reform’s senior advisers. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, now frequently invokes the need for a return to “Judeo-Christian” values.

The British right is increasingly invoking the Christian tradition: the question is what it hopes to gain from doing so.

Lamorna Ash is the author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever (Bloomsbury Publishing, £22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Still largely viewed as a peaceful philosophy, across much of south-east Asia, the religion has been weaponised to serve nationalist goals

In the summer of 2023, I arrived in Dharamshala, an Indian town celebrated as the home of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. The place hadn’t changed much since my last visit almost two decades ago. The roads were still a patchwork of uneven asphalt and dirt, and Tibetan monks in maroon robes filled the streets. Despite the relentless hum of traffic, Dharamshala had a rare stillness. The hills seemed to absorb the noise. Prayer flags flickered in the breeze, each rustle a reminder of something enduring.

But beneath the surface, the Buddhism practised across Asia has shifted. While still widely followed as a peaceful, nonviolent philosophy, it has been weaponised, in some quarters, in the service of nationalism, and in support of governments embracing a global trend toward majoritarianism and autocracy.

President signs executive order for Rubio and Bessent to submit report on chapters in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan

Donald Trump on Monday began the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists, a move that would bring sanctions against one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements.

Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and treasury secretary Scott Bessent to submit a report on whether to designate any Muslim Brotherhood chapters, such as those in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, according to a White House fact sheet. It orders the secretaries to move forward with any designations within 45 days of the report.

Nationals senator Matt Canavan says One Nation leader ‘debased’ parliament while independent Fatima Payman says she is ‘disrespecting Muslim Australians’

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Pauline Hanson has worn a burqa in the Senate, repeating a widely condemned stunt as she sought to ban the Muslim face covering on national security grounds – despite being unable to name a single safety incident linked to the burqa.

The special envoy for Islamophobia warned the stunt could “deepen existing safety risks for Australian Muslim women who choose to wear the headscarf, the hijab, or the full face and body covering, the burqa”.

Architect Farshid Moussavi is behind a tranquil and timeless new building where Houston’s 40,000-strong Ismaili Muslim community can come together. But how has she created something that looks so delicate out of stone?

On a hot autumn day in southern Texas, monarch butterflies flit around the gardens of Houston’s new Ismaili Centre. Fragile and gaudy, they are on their way south to overwinter in Mexico, travelling up to 3,000 miles in a typical migration cycle, an epic feat of insectile endurance.

Their combination of delicacy and stamina is an apt metaphor for the Ismaili Centre, a building that has taken seven years to realise and is designed to last for a century or more. It’s a place where Houston’s 40,000-strong Ismaili Muslim community, one of the largest in the US, can practise their faith but it’s also a venue for shared activities.

Greg Abbott’s move heightens the clash with Muslim groups and usurps federal authority

Texas governor Greg Abbott declared the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) and the Muslim Brotherhood to be “foreign terrorist organizations” on Tuesday, prohibiting them from acquiring property in the state and authorizing legal action to shut down affiliated entities.

The move marks a massive escalation in Abbott’s confrontation with Muslim organizations and communities in Texas, though states have no authority to designate foreign terrorist organizations on behalf of the US.

Worshippers prepare to start using first completed building and hope to host formal opening in early 2026

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On a bush block on the industrial outskirts of Bendigo, a minaret rises from the facade of a mosque. There are no fences, making the site of the central Victorian city’s first mosque visible from adjacent roads.

This is no accident. Sameer Syed, who has been involved in the Bendigo Islamic Community Centre’s inception from its start, says the vision was an “open mosque”.

New York City mayor-elect refused to ‘be in the shadows’ in the face of Islamophobic attacks during his campaign

Across the country, Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense of panic among communities. But in New York, on Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, and an immigrant from Uganda, chose to underline his identity. “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he told an ecstatic crowd at Paramount theater in Brooklyn.

The son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, he was born in Kampala, raised in New York, and identifies as a democratic socialist. Almost every aspect of Mamdani’s identity had been an issue of contention during the election. Earlier this week, the Center for Study of Organized Hate published a report highlighting the surge in Islamophobic comments online between July and October, most of which labelled Mamdani as an extremist or terrorist.

Between July and October, 25 buildings were targeted in 27 attacks, according to British Muslim Trust

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Attacks on mosques in the UK have soared in recent months, the government’s Islamophobia monitoring partner has said, with more than 40% of incidents featuring British or English flags and Christian nationalist symbols or slogans.

In the past three months, a mosque was set alight in East Sussex; in Merseyside the windows of a mosque were shot with an air gun while children were inside; in Greater Manchester, a paving slab was thrown at a window; and in Glasgow, a window was smashed with a metal pole.

The racist abuse that Zohran Mamdani is still facing proves how normalized bigotry is. We need to keep calling it out

Pack your bags and flee, infidels: New York City has fallen to a cabal of socialist jihadists. With Zohran Mamdani to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, many are celebrating the democratic socialist’s historic win. Billionaires, Islamophobes and Republicans, however, are in the throes of hysteria. But what’s new? The New York mayoral race has been marred by bigotry so unhinged it’s almost impossible to parody.

Far-right activist and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X, for example, that “there will be another 9/11 in NYC” under Mamdani. New York City councilmember Vickie Paladino called the 34-year-old a “known jihadist terrorist”. Actor Debra Messing, meanwhile, has been having a Mamdani-induced meltdown on Instagram, posting story after story about how the puppy-eyed politician is a threat to civilization. She recently posted: “In Judaism and Christianity, we are commanded to speak the truth. In Islam, they are commanded to lie if it means spreading Islam … Now, take a look at Mamdani … He’s revealing their goal: mass conversion.”

Total referrals reach record high, with 21% being due to ‘extreme rightwing concerns’ and 10% to Islamist ideology

More suspected far-right extremists were referred to the government’s anti-terrorism programme Prevent last year than those suspected of Islamist extremism, annual figures show.

In total, 8,778 referrals were made because of suspicions of extremist radicalisation in the year to March 2025, 27% more than the previous year and the highest number of referrals in a single year since records began 10 years ago.

Forty Labour and independent MPs call on Steve Reed to take ‘important step’ of defining anti-Muslim hatred

More than three dozen Labour and independent MPs have written to the housing secretary calling on the government to adopt a definition of Islamophobia, after recent figures revealed hate crimes against Muslims were up by nearly a fifth.

Forty MPs, including Labour MPs Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Kim Johnson and independent Andrew Gwynne, were among the signatories on the letter from Afzal Khan who wrote to Steve Reed on Friday asking him to adopt a definition of anti-Muslim hatred as an “important step” in addressing discrimination, prejudice and hatred the community faces.

Akeela Ahmed, of British Muslim Trust, says experience is part of a wider rise in anti-Muslim hatred

The chief executive of the government’s new official partner in tackling Islamophobia has spoken about being refused service in a shop for being Muslim, amid concerns about a rise in insidious anti-Muslim “microaggressions”.

The British Muslim Trust (BMT) is launching a government-backed telephone and online reporting service for hate crimes. In July, the trust was selected as a recipient of the government’s “combating hate against Muslims fund”, and in the months since its chief executive, Akeela Ahmed, has been meeting members of Muslim communities, including in Bradford in West Yorkshire, East Sussex, Greater London and Greater Manchester.

The poll is seen as a litmus test for the Netherlands and its democratic ideals, as activists decry a hardening of political discourse driven by Geert Wilders

The drawing depicted two women; a young blonde with a friendly expression and a scowling older woman wearing a headscarf. On top of the image was a nod to this month’s general election in the Netherlands, along with the phrase “The choice is yours.”

The social media post, made by the far-right, anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, prompted a record 14,000 complaints to the country’s anti-discrimination hotline. “Many of those who called to report the image compared it to Nazi propaganda from the second world war,” the hotline said in a statement, adding that the 19 anti-discrimination agencies associated with the hotline had flagged the post to police, amid concerns that it could be an incitement to hatred.

Trump ally Laura Loomer took credit for Sami Hamdi’s detainment in move denounced as ‘affront to free speech’

The British journalist Sami Hamdi was reportedly detained on Sunday morning by federal immigration authorities at San Francisco international airport, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) says that action is apparent retaliation for the Muslim political commentator’s criticism of Israel while touring the US.

A statement from Cair said it was “a blatant affront to free speech” to detain Hamdi for criticizing Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza while he engaged on a speaking tour in the US. A Trump administration official added in a separate statement that Hamdi was facing deportation.

Critics of the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor have called him everything from ‘jihadist candidate’ to ‘terrorist sympathizer’

On Thursday morning, hours after a combative final New York mayoral debate that failed to move the needle in his favor, Andrew Cuomo’s attacks on his progressive Democratic rival Zohran Mamdani resumed a familiar, racially charged theme.

“God forbid, another 9/11, can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” the independent candidate and former governor told the conservative radio talkshow host Sid Rosenberg, referring to the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City by Islamic extremists.