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America's top US diplomat said the order was meant to "eliminate vulnerabilities that radical Islamic terrorists can and will exploit for destructive ends".

Gone are the most controversial measures of the old order, such as preference for Christian refugees and the suspension of existing visas and green cards.

It's still an open question as to what, if anything, this order will do to prevent violent attacks on US soil, given that past high-profile incidents have not involved individuals from any of the six named countries.

Mr Trump promised bold action on border security, however - the kind of move that would unnerve traditional politicians and anger civil liberties advocates.

There is no refuge in the argument that Jackson merely reflected the values of his time. Jackson’s opponent in two elections, John Quincy Adams, viewed slavery as “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union.” Henry Clay called Indian expulsion “a foul and lasting stain upon the good faith, humanity and character of the nation.” And Jackson’s reputation will always bear those indelible marks.

These issues are directly applicable in our politics. Like Jackson, Trump has become the champion of poor, voiceless, white Americans. But does he view liberty as a universal gift? His dehumanization of migrants and Muslim refugees would indicate otherwise.

Is American identity really related to ethnicity? Does American nationalism require the identification of internal enemies? Does putting America first always involve the organization of resentments and a search for scapegoats?

this makes Trump’s choice of heroes a self-indictment.

The Myanmar military has been accused of pursuing a brutal crackdown on the Rohingya -- a largely Muslim ethnic minority not officially recognized by Myanmar -- following an outbreak of violence in August between soldiers and armed militants in Rakhine State, a poor region in the country's west.

Francis has previously decried violence against the Rohingya, calling them his persecuted "brothers and sisters."

The Myanmar government has repeatedly denied allegations they are conducting a systematic campaign of violence against the Rohingya, blaming the widespread damage on a militant insurgency.

Myanmar's military still holds the balance of power in the country after its transition to partial democracy in 2015

Even using the word Rohingya is controversial: the Myanmar government and much of the population regard the ethnic minority as illegal Bengali immigrants, and refuse to call them "Rohingya," despite many being able to trace their roots in the country back centuries.

The Freedom Party, which was founded in the 1950s by former Nazis, regularly underscored the threat of Islam to Austria.

If a conservative-far right government emerges in Austria, which is likely but not certain, the coalition would certainly breathe wind into the sails of the post-communist nations such as Poland, Hungary, Croatia and others that, in general, bristle under Brussels' curbs on state sovereignty and, specifically, the imperative to accept and integrate refugees.

The United States has not been directly involved in the illicit arms race. But it bears responsibility for the mess by bailing out of the conflict soon after Colonel el-Qaddafi was overthrown and killed

In any event, a major infusion of military support for the Government of National Accord by Turkey blunted Mr. Hifter’s offensive, leading to a cease-fire in October, the convening of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum in November and the appointment of an interim administration.

The interests of the foreign powers range from avarice to influence, and given the vast resources they have invested in Libya, they no doubt stand ready to resume their meddling if the peace process collapses. But they also appear to appreciate that they and their clients have fought to a stalemate, and that reverting to their zero-sum game might be futile.

Peace in Libya matters for reasons beyond its own sake. The country has huge reserves of oil, and the anarchy of the past decade has made it a prime jumping-off point for refugees seeking to flee to Europe across the Mediterranean. Shortly after leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama declared in an interview that the failure to plan for the aftermath of Colonel el-Qaddafi’s exit was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

here’s a glimmer of hope.

id Dbeibah, a billionaire who was a close associate of Colonel el-Qaddafi, stands accused of buying the votes that gave him the job. The interim team and the cabinet it proposes need to survive a vote of confidence in a House of Representatives that is also split in two, one side based in Tobruk and the other in

This peace process is the best chance to date to put Libya together again. Libyans are thoroughly sick of the fighting, banditry and destruction that have plagued their country for a decade, and tired of the foreign powers and mercenaries who have spread death across the land, much of it through armed drones. The U.N. estimates there are now at least 20,000 mercenaries in Libya.

statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month praised Ms. Williams for her “creativity and tenacity” in facilitating the process, and declared that the United States “supports the Libyan vision of a peaceful, prosperous and unified Libya with an inclusive government that can both secure the country and meet the economic and humanitarian needs of it

The administration has said it needs more time to accomplish its goal and has repeatedly warned prospective migrants that now isn’t the time to make the journey to the border.

the U.S. said Wednesday it is restarting a program allowing Central American children to come to the U.S. legally if they have a parent here. Mr. Biden was briefed earlier in the day by a team of senior administration officials who recently traveled to the Southern border to review the situation.

The Central American Minors program was started by former President Barack Obama in 2014 in response to the first wave of Central American children arriving at the border. Former President Donald Trump terminated the program in 2017, saying it was an immigration pathway that had been created without congressional approval.

The Central American Minors program was meant to provide a safe and legal alternative for children who would otherwise undertake dangerous journeys to the U.S., the State Department said when the program was announced.

“Neither this announcement nor any of the other measures suggests that anyone, especially children and families with young children, should make the dangerous trip to try to enter the U.S. in an irregular fashion,” Roberta Jacobson, the administration’s coordinator for the southern border, said at a news conference announcing the restart of the Central American Minors program at the White House. “The border is not open.”

One of the Trump administration policies that the Biden administration has maintained is a public-health-emergency order allowing Border Patrol agents to immediately turn back most migrants they encounter, skipping the process of formally arresting them and depriving them of the chance to ask for asylum. The policy is being applied to single adults who cross the border—still the majority of migrants—as well as most families.

The Biden administration also stopped expelling unaccompanied children to their home countries, a reversal of Trump administration policy that the Biden team says is a more humane approach to caring for children. The government has instead been allowing children to claim asylum or apply for other visas. The children are then transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which operates a network of child-welfare shelters around the country.

“The United States and Mexico are stronger when we stand together,” Mr. Biden said at the beginning of a virtual meeting with the Mexican president, while acknowledging that the countries have not been “perfect” neighbors. He said that during the Obama administration, “we looked at Mexico as an equal — you are equal.”

The conversation came after a tumultuous start between the two leaders

“What you do in Mexico and how you succeed affects the rest of the hemisphere,” Mr. Biden told him.

Mr. Biden is not using the rule to expel unaccompanied migrant children, a practice that under Mr. Trump caused families to scramble to find Central American children and violated a diplomatic agreement with Mexico. I

Mr. Biden has made immigration one of his top legislative and diplomatic priorities, moving quickly to raise Trump-era limits on refugees who can be allowed into the United States and calling on Congress to pass a far-reaching bill that would give a path to citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the country.

The Biden administration has also formed a task force to unite parents separated from their children under Mr. Trump’s family separations policy

Republicans have already signaled that they intend to seize on Mr. Biden’s reversals of his predecessor’s immigration policies as a cornerstone in their efforts to take back Congress in 2022 and recapture the White House two years later.

While Mr. Biden is unwinding the Migrant Protection Protocols program that forced migrants to wait in Mexico for an adjudication in their asylum cases, he has kept another Trump-era rule in place that empowers border agents to swiftly expel migrants and turn them over to Mexican authorities.

But even as Mr. Biden seeks to unwind those policies, Mr. Mayorkas acknowledged that the United States continued to rely, for now, on a measure at the heart of Mr. Trump’s approach: a public health rule that requires border agents to quickly deport border crossers to Mexico without a chance to request asylum.

Despite the emergency rule, border agents have for weeks released a limited number of families into communities in South Texas because of a change in Mexican law that has been the subject of internal discussions between Mexican and American government officials in recent weeks, according to a senior administration official.

At the same time, pandemic restrictions remain in place on nonessential travelers who have long stimulated the local economy along the border, he said.

In 2014, Ahmad’s older brother Imad pleaded guilty in Denver to carrying a concealed weapon, records show. He was arrested again four years later on a charge of possession of a weapon by a previous offender, though prosecutors did not pursue charges.In 2016, a female member of the family pleaded guilty to a charge of reckless endangerment and was given a deferred sentence after she agreed to take a parenting class.In 2018, the Arvada police responded to a call at the house that stemmed from a dispute between Imad Alissa and his wife, Ms. Archuleta’s daughter. The couple had broken up (they later reconciled, Ms. Archuleta said), and a fight over a torn mattress had escalated to the point that the police were called.

Six days before the attack, Mr. Alissa bought a Ruger AR-556 pistol, a handgun that resembles a shortened assault-style rifle, from a gun store just three miles from the family home. About two days before the attack, a relative saw him back at the family home, playing with what she told the police looked like a “machine gun.”After the attack, the Mercedes C-class sedan that was often seen parked in the driveway of the large family house was one of the cars left in the parking lot at the King Soopers grocery, along with all of the other cars whose owners would not be driving them home. An empty rifle case was left in the passenger compartment.

Mr. Biden’s suggestion, made during his primary campaign, that entering the United States illegally should no longer be treated as a criminal offense, his promise to end construction of the border wall and his pledge that not a single deportation would take place during his first hundred days in office — ’tis gone, and all is gray.

Between announcing that the remaining 2,500 American troops would return from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, he has carried out airstrikes in Syria, spoken equivocally about our shameful adventures in Yemen and largely ignored the genocide being carried out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.

The United States may be on the verge of returning to the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons accord with Iran, but when it comes to North Korea, the nation is also, in the words of Lloyd Austin, Mr. Biden’s secretary of defense, “ready to fight tonight,” presumably with fire and fury.

Even in the area of economics, where it might have been supposed by both supporters and critics during the presidential campaign that Mr. Biden would adopt a more progressive agenda, he has differed from the bipartisan center-right economic consensus along curiously familiar lines. In addition to keeping Mr. Trump’s moratorium on evictions in place, for example, he has continued with the suspension of interest on student loan debt and the collection of monthly payments.

Despite occasional rhetorical sops to organized labor that have become a mainstay of populist conservative rhetoric, Mr. Trump was arguably the least union-friendly president since Ronald Reagan, whereas Mr. Biden has restored some collective bargaining rights by executive order.

Why is Mr. Biden having more success carrying out some of his predecessor’s policies? Certainly Mr. Trump’s fabled étourderie and his inability to staff a cabinet with qualified officials sympathetic to what was ostensibly his agenda are a part of the story. A more interesting question, though, is where the indignation from would-be opponents of moderate protectionism and realism in foreign policy has gone. Would Mr. Biden’s broken promises regarding deportations be less excusable if he, too, were in the habit of calling immigrants revolting names?

My father had come to recognize that in contrast to what so many of today’s most vulnerable immigrants face, the system his family encountered ultimately supported them. He also knew intimately that lives are at stake.

"We expected that Saudi Arabia would announce an end to the blockade of ports and airports and an initiative to allow in 14 ships that are held by the coalition," the Houthis' chief negotiator, Mohammed Abdulsalam,

The United States and the U.N. have been trying to end what they call the world's worst humanitarian disaster. President Biden has pledged to use diplomacy to end the war and to allow more refugees to come to the U.S.

Salisbury says he believes the Saudi proposal is likely aimed at pressuring the Houthis. For now, he predicts more talks, more air strikes, and more fighting on the ground

In a briefing, U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq said he welcomed the Saudi proposals, and that U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths has been working toward these goals. Asked about the Houthis' rejection of the Saudi offer, Haq said Griffiths would be in touch with all parties to discuss moving forward with Saudi Arabia's proposal.Peter Salisbury, senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group, says the Saudi proposal is essentially a new take on an idea that was put forth a year ago.

The conflict has become a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Years of fighting have left 80% of Yemen's population reliant on aid and millions are on the brink of starvation.

The war in Yemen began in 2014, when Houthi militants supported by Iran overthrew the unpopular Saudi-backed government in Yemen's capital. A coalition of Gulf states — led by Saudi Arabia and with support from the U.S., France and the U.K. — responded with airstrikes, beginning in 2015.While the Biden administration has been critical of the way the Saudis have waged the war, it has also raised alarms about recent Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia.

The State Department said that in a call with Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken "reiterated our commitment to supporting the defense of Saudi Arabia and strongly condemned recent attacks against Saudi territory from Iranian-aligned groups in the region."

The two officials reportedly expressed support for diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Yemen, "starting with the need for all parties to commit to a ceasefire and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid."State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter said the proposal is "one step in the right direction," calling on all of the parties to negotiate under the auspices of the U.N.

When Mr. Abiy came to power, Ethiopia was among the most repressive countries for journalists in Africa, and he quickly won global praise for a series of sweeping reforms.

But Mr. Abiy’s ambitious reforms quickly ran into stiff headwinds, including opposition from regional political parties and outbreaks of ethnic violence in several restive regions. His government began to revert to the old ways, shutting down the internet during political protests and detaining journalists under laws that had been introduced by the previous government.

After Mr. Abiy began a military operation in Tigray on Nov. 4, hoping to oust a regional ruling party that had challenged his authority, press freedoms deteriorated further.

Last week, government officials confirmed that they had revoked the accreditation of Simon Marks, an Irish reporter based in Ethiopia working for The New York Times.

In a war that has already caused thousands of deaths, displaced at least two million people and led to charges of ethnic cleansing, news media coverage has become a “very sensitive” topic for the government, said Befeqadu Hailu, an Ethiopian journalist imprisoned for 18 months by the previous regime.

Mr. Marks, who works for The Times and other publications, has reported from Ethiopia since 2019.

A day earlier, Mr. Marks had returned to Addis Ababa from Tigray, where he interviewed civilians who described atrocities by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, and women who said they suffered horrendous sexual assaults.

Officials told Mr. Marks that The Times’ coverage of Ethiopia had “caused huge diplomatic pressure” and that senior government officials had authorized the decision to cancel his papers.

The next test of Ethiopia’s openness is likely to be the June 5 election, the first for Mr. Abiy since being appointed prime minister in 2018.

What’s distinctive right now isn’t the fact that someone like Greene exists but that no one has emerged to play the role of Buckley. A longtime Republican leader like Mitch McConnell can try — he denounced Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” as a “cancer” on the party — but after he served four years as an ally to Donald Trump, his words aren’t worth much.

Those once-porous borders, in other words, now appear to be nonexistent, and there’s no one in the Republican Party or its intellectual orbit to police the extreme right. Representative Greene is the first QAnon member of Congress, but she won’t be the last and she may not even ultimately be the worst.

The scope of U.S. intelligence activity in the region has drawn renewed interest in recent days, in the wake of a U.S. raid on Saturday that killed ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The CIA, as well as Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officers, tracked the ISIS chief by interviewing the wife of an al-Baghdadi aide and one of his couriers, and by recruiting local spies along the Syrian-Iraqi border.

“The oil fields are small, we blasted them after Daesh [ISIS] seized them, and they will take years to rebuild,” said one official. So why leave forces there to protect them? “Talking about oil was the only way we could talk the President into keeping any U.S. military force in the area,” the official says. On Friday, after the plan to protect the oilfields was unveiled, Trump tweeted, “Oil is secured.”

U.S. officials are worried that a humanitarian crisis and renewed fighting in the region will invite a resurgence of ISIS, which operates best in chaotic situations. Many captured ISIS fighters remain in Kurdish custody in northern Syria. Trump appeared to dismiss the danger of a renewed terrorist threat Friday, when he tweeted, “ISIS SECURED”. Esper told reporters at NATO that the U.S. mission remains preventing a resurgence of ISIS.

U.S. intelligence officials aren’t the only ones seeing evidence of war crimes. The human rights group Amnesty International reported on Friday that Turkish-backed Syrian forces have committed war crimes, including executions of Kurdish civilians.

The crusades – the long series of wars fought between 1096 and 1492 under the direction of medieval popes against a wide range of enemies of many different faiths, including Sunni and Shia Muslims – have long been fascinating to the extreme right wing, both in the United States and elsewhere.

The square-limbed crusader cross

is a symbol often spotted on white supremacist marches.

Crusader iconography and the language of crusading is usually rolled together with other right-wing tropes and generic threats of violence against non-whites and women.

Sometimes, the crusading rhetoric of online cranks and neo-Nazis is translated into deadly action. Nowhere has this been more chillingly demonstrated recently than in New Zealand, where on March 15th this year a lone gunman murdered more than forty people worshiping at mosques in Christchurch. The assault rifles and automatic shotguns used to carry out his crimes were daubed with the references to crusader battles dating back to the twelfth century AD and the names of crusader warriors including the medieval lord Bohemond of Taranto, prince of Antioch.

The crusades have immense propaganda value to anyone who wishes to suggest that the Islamic world and the Christian West are engaged in a permanent civilizational war dating back a thousand years or more, from which there is no escape and in which there can only be one victor. Superficially, at least, it is possible to read the history of the medieval crusades in such a way.

In other words, the medieval crusades did indeed contain a clear spine of conflict between Christian and Islamic powers. It is also true that at certain times, these wars were essentially spiritual: that is to say, making war on unbelievers, either through the crusade or its Islamic equivalent, the jihad, was an end in itself. Yet we do not have to look very far at all to realize that the story is rather more complex than it appears.

for all that modern zealots like to paint the crusades as a period of mutual hostility between Christians and Muslims, the truth is that the story was more often one of co-operation, trade and co-existence between people of different faiths and backgrounds.

None of this nuanced history tends to appear in the manifestos of terrorists, or would-be car-bombers. They are content, alas, to perpetuate an idea of the crusades that is binary and zero-sum: an us-or-them narrative designed to justify hatred, racist vitriol, violence and even murder. The medieval crusades were a largely dreadful misdirection of religious enthusiasm towards painful and bloody ends. They were neither a glorious clash of civilizations, nor a model for the world as it is today.

Pax Americana is now faced with a dilemma that European empires had to contend with before. Even as it becomes clear that nations should be weaned from foreign hegemony, the transition is almost always messy and sometimes bloody.

Apart from the risk of war, Mr. Trump’s posturing is having another serious consequence. The strength of the United States never relied only on its often-misguided use of military power. American democracy, with all its flaws, was a model, even an ideal, for much of the world. Refugees from tyranny and war continued to see the United States as a haven

This is the true end of Pax Americana, the best of it anyway. The reckless unpicking of military alliances and the betrayal of allies are already bad enough. But there is something even worse afoot. People all over the world still look to the United States as an example. But now it is the enemies of liberal values who view with glee how American leadership is wrecking the very things that Mr. Roosevelt once fought for.

Roughly 3,600 asylum seekers, mostly from southern Mexico or Central America, were in Mexicali, in Mexico's Baja California state, as of October 1, waiting for months to apply for asylum or to return to the United States for immigration court hearings, according to Altagracia Tamayo, manager of the Cobina shelter for families and children there. About, 1,500 were waiting in Nogales, in Sonora state, and 1,250 in San Luis Rio Colorado, south of Yuma, Arizona, according to officials managing the wait lists in those cities.

In recent weeks, several of the grassroots Phoenix groups have crossed the border to bring supplies or aid to asylum seekers and shelters in those cities.

Many asylum seekers are desperate for such help, since legal restrictions against seeking employment in the United States make it tough for them to pay attorneys on their own.

From December 21, 2018, through the end of September, ICE said its Phoenix office released about 43,100 asylum seekers, nearly 20% of those released from across the southern border states this year.First Church United Church of Christ, which took in 120 people in its first hosting in October, was among those that reached out to the International Rescue Committee for help, said Ellie Hutchison, the church's outreach director

It is not, however, too late. But it is time that European nations, who have the most to lose and most to gain from a stable Middle East in general, and Syria especially, focus on the chaos on their doorstep.Their armed forces need to be able to function outside of an American life support system and show some initiative, rather than wailing when the White House does something surprising.