The essential China reading list
We asked 51 China watchers for the best book on the country they’ve read this year.
We asked 51 China watchers for the best book on the country they’ve read this year.
Drop Site Daily: December 19, 2025
While industrialisation remains a top priority for Global South countries, debt-driven austerity, corporate dominance, wars, and sanctions keep many poorer nations locked into dependency and underdevelopment.
The entertainment company behind mega-popular boy band BTS announced a new joint venture with several regional music veterans.
The agreement is with a consortium comprising pan-African infrastructure investor Africa50 and the Indian government.
We get an update on the extraordinary case of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland father who first made headlines in March when he was wrongfully deported to El Salvador and held in the notorious CECOT mega-prison. Ábrego García was returned to the United States after months of public outrage, but his ordeal continued as the Trump administration has threatened to deport him to Uganda, Eswatini and Liberia, despite having no ties to those African countries. Last week, a federal judge ordered him released from an ICE jail in Pennsylvania and blocked further arrests as a denial of due process. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Ábrego García’s attorneys, says the administration’s actions are primarily meant “to punish him” for standing up for his rights. “It’s also about the government using him, more or less at random, to stand for the principle that they get to do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want — and, specifically, courts can’t stop them.”
A handful of countries have signed agreements with Washington but a Kenyan court case has raised growing data privacy concerns.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s dominant chipmaker, is accelerating plans to expand abroad.