Zemeckis was a spunky fellow when he was making films like I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Romancing the Stone and Who Framed Roger Rabbit; too bad in his post Gump phase he approaches the audience as if he were a pollster. If the heart of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was its hallowing of homegrown UFO believers, the folks who yearn to reach out and touch an alien in Contact are overgrown collegiate types, bland (well, in one case, blind) technocrats, or the wacky group on the outskirts of the tracking base. In the climax, the alien home that’s right next door to Heaven resembles one of those mall like faux beaches so popular in Japan.

Multiple Whitehall and EU sources have told that the European Commission is likely to agree to only a three to six month extension of the arrangements in place for traders moving goods between Britain and the province. Ahead of a crunch meeting in London on Thursday, EU figures also accused the UK of exploiting an international backlash against Brussels over its aborted move to erect a hard vaccine border on the island of Ireland. While the UK argues the controversy has highlighted the need for urgent solutions to the problems being experienced in Northern Ireland, EU diplomats claimed the issue was being used to try and force through a renegotiation of the agreement.

The French nuclear attack submarine SNA Emeraude recently conducted a patrol in the South China Sea, Defence Minister Florence Parly announced this week, sparking questions over the timing and tensions in Asia’s hotly contested waters. The week in France kicked off with a Twitter thread by Defence Minister Florence Parly revealing that French nuclear attack submarine SNA Emeraude was among two navy ships that recently conducted a patrol through the South China Sea.”This extraordinary patrol has just completed a passage in the South China Sea. A striking proof of our French Navy capacity to deploy far away and for a long time together with our Australian, American and Japanese strategic partners,” she tweeted along with a picture of the two vessels at sea.’Indo Pacific zone’ from Gulf of Aden to beyond AustraliaThe SNA Emeraude, accompanied by a support vessel, set sail 15,000 km off the French coast as part of the Marianne mission which, since September 2020, has consisted of patrolling the Indo Pacific zone to “show that we are still present there militarily”, said Jean Vincent Brisset, research director at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (Iris) and a China specialist, in an interview with FRANCE 24.”It was an old promise made by Jean Yves Le Drian when he was still defence minister,” explained Brisset.