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President Biden argues that his ambitious domestic agenda — totaling some $6 trillion — is necessary to keep up with our primary geopolitical rival. As he told Congress last week: “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.”

In so doing, Biden harked back to the Cold War, when national security was often used as a justification for initiatives that had little to do with the Pentagon.

the competition with China today can pay major dividends if properly managed

Growing tensions between Europe and Turkey over elements of a deal to end the refugee crisis are raising fears that the accord, signed by the two sides in March, may already be on the verge of collapse.

The latest sign of trouble came this week when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned European leaders that he would block the deal if the European Union refused to lift visa restrictions for Turks

steps

the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

Under the plan, the bulk of the estimated 5 million people who could be protected from deportation would be parents of U.S. citizens or green card holders who have lived in the country for more than five years. According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, as many as 3.7 million undocumented immigrants could fall into this category; beginning next spring, they could register with the government, undergo a background check, start paying taxes, and gain protected status for up to three years.

Another 290,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children would also be newly protected under an expansion of Obama's original Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The administration is eliminating the age cutoff for DACA, which had been open only to people under 31, and it is allowing immigrants to apply if they have lived in the U.S. since 2010, not 2007 as before. The changes will increase the number of people eligible for that program to about 1.5 million,

another 1 million immigrants would be newly protected from deportation under the other reforms in the president's directive.

In a long tradition of “persecuting the refugee,” the State Department and FDR claimed that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security

the summer of 1942, the SS Drottningholm set sail carrying hundreds of desperate Jewish refugees, en route to New York City from Sweden.

But during a meticulous interview process that involved five separate government agencies, Bahr's story began to unravel. Days later, the FBI accused Bahr of being a Nazi spy.

et in January 1939, Americans polled said by a two-to-one majority that the United States should not accept 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany.

If the Islamic State wanted to dispatch a terrorist to America, it wouldn’t ask a mole to apply for refugee status, but rather to apply for a student visa to study at, say, Indiana University. Hey, governors, are you going to keep out foreign university students?

Or the Islamic State could simply send fighters who are French or Belgian citizens (like some of those behind the Paris attacks) to the U.S. as tourists, no visa required. Governors, are you planning to ban foreign tourists, too?

Europe has been so transfixed by tragedies in the Mediterranean in recent years that a similar crisis in the Indian Ocean has gone almost unnoticed. It is caused by the magnetic attraction of the French island of Mayotte to the inhabitants of the neighbouring Comoros Islands.

"Ahmed was dead before the fisherman arrived to rescue the girls and women. Initially, they agreed to take his body, but then they decided to throw it overboard."This is the last thing Nouriati el Hairia Houmadi remembers from the day where she lost her youngest brother, Ahmed, on the journey from one Comoros Island to another 60km (40 miles) away.He was 14, and she was taking him from the family home on the island of Anjouan, to Mayotte - a tiny speck of French territory in the Indian Ocean, where she and her elder sister already lived. The goal was to get him a better education.

"We left Anjouan at 8pm, the accident happened at about 10.30pm in the waters near Mayotte. We could see the lights on the island," she says.

The result is that, for the first time since the republic was founded nearly a century ago, many from the old moneyed class, in particular the secular elite who have dominated Turkey’s cultural and business life for decades, are moving away and the new rich close to Mr. Erdogan and his governing party are taking their place.

Thousands of Turks like her have applied for business visas in Britain or for golden visa programs in Greece, Portugal and Spain, which grant immigrants residency if they buy property at a certain level.

With the help of subsidies and favorable contracts, the government has helped new businesses to emerge, and they are rapidly replacing the old ones, he said. “There is a transfer of capital underway,” he said. “It is social and political engineering.”

Labor spokesman for citizenship and multiculturalism, Tony Burke, earlier on Saturday called on Coleman to treat far-right extremism as it would other forms of extremism and revoke Yiannopoulos’s visa

“We knock back people all the time with respect to other forms of hatred that have been consistent with what has resulted in terrorism actions,” Burke said. “We need to make sure the full force of the law treats this as the same as any other form of terrorism.”

Burke also criticised Anning’s comments but said: “the normalisation of bigotry is something that is not only confined to him.”

Thousands of Venezuelans are pouring out of their crippled nation in one of the biggest migration crises in Latin American history, causing growing alarm in the region and prompting neighboring countries to rush thousands of soldiers to the border.

In Venezuela, children are dying. People are starving and being persecuted. What they’re getting from us is a door in the face.

Nowhere is the crisis more acute than here in Colombia, where 3,000 troops are fanning out across the 1,400-mile border to contain an influx of Venezuelans fleeing a collapsing economy and an increasingly repressive socialist regime.

The official name for Russia is either Russian Federation or Russia. Both names are equal according to the Russian Constitution. In Russian script, they are spelled as Российская Федерация and Россия accordingly.

Russia is located in the Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. The territory of Russia lies between latitudes 41 degrees north and 82 degrees north, and longitudes 19 degrees east and 169 degrees west.

President Donald Trump has signed a new executive order placing a 90-day ban on people from six mainly Muslim nations.

Iraq - which was covered in the previous seven-nation order - has been removed from the new one after agreeing additional visa vetting measures.

Citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, the other six countries on the original list, will once more be subject to a 90-day travel ban.

Kushner Companies said Monday that the name drop at the event in Beijing on Saturday was not intended to be an "attempt to lure investors"

Nicole Kushner Meyer, the sister of White House adviser and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, mentioned her brother's new role in the administration during a pitch for her family's property

"In 2008, my brother Jared Kushner joined the family company as CEO, and recently moved to Washington to join the administration," she said at the conference.

In the years prior to taking office, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and many of their administration's top officials harshly criticized President Donald Trump's lack of action against Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Biden is now facing criticism for not following through on campaign promises to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the killing.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday announced visa restrictions that affected 76 Saudis believed to be involved in harassing activists and journalists, but he did not announce any measures against the crown prince.

Lots of immigration and relatively high fertility rates increased its population faster—and kept it more youthful—than its rich-country peers.

Over many generations they proved much readier than Europeans

dynamism helped to produce a flexible labour force and lively economy.

Britain on Friday hailed a new visa offering Hong Kong citizens a route to citizenship after China’s crackdown but Beijing said it would no longer recognise special British passports offered to residents of the former colony.

Britain says it is fulfilling a historic and moral commitment to the people of Hong Kong after China imposed a tough new security law on the city that Britain says breaches the terms of agreements to hand the colony back in 1997.

The new 250 pound ($340) visa could attract more than 300,000 people and their dependents to Britain and generate up to 2.9 billion pounds net benefit to the British economy over the next five years, according to government forecasts.

While President Donald Trump doesn't enjoy the same support as predecessors former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush -- presumably because of his trade threats and his restrictions on visas for highly-skilled workers, most of which go to Indians -- that broad approval remains largely intact, with 56% of Indians polled saying they had confidence in Trump to do the right thing on world affairs.

At one level, India and the US have continued to move their nascent strategic relationship forward with mutual concerns about China's territorial and political assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific serving as the backdrop.

The US president and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have gone out of their respective ways to rub shoulders and share podiums with each other over the past four years.