Update: An emergency application has been filed with the court. Several witnesses and I have submitted materials to support the review.
The case is not over.
Full statement in English below
In response to inquiries from multiple German media outlets, I am issuing this statement regarding my interviewee Xu Xiaoren (known online as Macaron), who currently faces imminent deportation from Germany.
In March 2025, Xu was the only Chinese citizen I encountered on the Russian frontlines willing to appear on camera, showing his face, to condemn the war:
"Every inch of land is paid for in blood. It is inhuman and immoral."
For the year that followed, he endured relentless persecution and lived in flight because of this. Guided by professional ethics, I documented his journey through video, audio, and over 100,000 words of investigative notes, cross-verified by multiple witnesses, to record the risks the interviewee faced and to offer him a measure of protection.
In thirty years of investigative journalism, this is the first time I have had to do this. It shows how grave I believed the situation to be.
In February 2026, Xu escaped Russia. By April, I was informed that he had reached Germany, facing immediate deportation. He asked me to submit these original records to @BAMF_Dialog.
I never got the chance. No evidence was reviewed. No contact was made — with me or any other witness. Instead, BAMF ruled his application "manifestly unfounded," dismissing my statement as "mere rumors and unsubstantiated assertions."
An emergency application has been filed with the court. Several witnesses and I have submitted materials to support the review.
I am grateful for the attention of the press. A man who admitted he entered the war by mistake, who then defected from within it, and what he became over that year, may tell us something about how wars could truly end: the reflection, the suffering, the compassion, the change. It is a battle of the human soul. I ask the German people to hear his story, and to judge for themselves.
Full statement in English
She is three days old. Favs???
Some L4 facts:
— First song started (and second to last finished) was David
— Last song started was Clearblue. Last song finished was Broken Glass
— Hardest song was FD, to write, to produce, to sing. Kicked my ass
— We cut a song last minute because I thought it diluted the vision!! One of my absolute favs that I wrote with Fabi. Couple really good B sides knocking around actually
— I had had dreams of sampling Morning Love for like 8 years, it’s so sexy and murky to me and I loved the contrast w the really organic fragile guitar stuff. Happened to be in the exact same key, meant 2 be
— I had constant constant insomnia making this album. I wrote most of the FD lyrics, CA first verse, Clearblue, and David second verse right before dawn.
— My favourite sound on the album is a tie btw the ripping tremolo + icy vocal adlib at the end of David and the start of Hammer. People always thought the linked start and end of PH was intentional; it wasn’t, but starting and ending Virgin at the fountain was <3
Love u, thank u so much for listening. Got a show to cook now 😋 https://t.co/ssU7DadvzF
Marjorie Taylor Green
Lauren Boebert
Ted Cruz
Rick Scott
All won their races. WTF is wrong with this country.
And the fact that Donald Trump got any votes at all.
We are truly an Idiocracy
Sinister amplified the live horror recorded by VHS infinitely, and there were countless horror films expressed using the same image for the next 10 years.
But “It Follows” has created a new history of horror movies.
Jessica Lange says "so much of the industry now is not about the creative process."
“We’re living in a corporate world, and it certainly has rolled over into the film industry...there are many instances where I feel like the artistic impulse is overwhelmed by the corporate profit motive. You look at some of the best films of the past year — what do they have in common? They’re not from America. My favorite was ‘Anatomy of a Fall.’ How often do we get to see a film like that, where the ambiguity of things is never sewn up?”
Read more here: https://t.co/EDQj5ESHEY