Trump’s remarks about changing culture draw ire
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s lament this week that immigration is “changing the culture” of Europe echoed rising anti-immigrant feelings on both sides of the Atlantic, where Europe and the United States are going through a demographic transformation that makes some of the white majority uncomfortable.
Historians and advocates immediately denounced Trump’s comments, saying such talk would encourage white nationalists.
“The way he put this argument about changing our culture … about Europe becoming less nice than it is, in other words, these people are here and they are making the culture crappy and making the place lesser, that’s straight out of the white supremacist/white nationalist playbook,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
Trump, in an interview with the British newspaper The Sun, blamed immigration for a changing culture in Europe: “I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago.”
Lobbying firm sought envoys’ help to salvage Russian company
WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. lobbying firm sought to recruit the ambassadors of France, Germany and several other countries to demonstrate international support for severing Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s control of Rusal, the aluminum manufacturing giant sanctioned by Washington.
Documents made public by the Justice Department show that Mercury LLC drafted messages for at least six envoys to send to senior U.S. government officials that expressed support for a plan to eliminate Deripaska’s majority stake in the EN+ Group, the holding company that owns nearly 50 percent of Rusal.
The records are the latest installment in a drama full of international intrigue.
Deripaska’s close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin are under a microscope while unintended targets of the U.S. penalties struggle with the punishment’s impact. Leading the way, in an odd twist, is a conservative member of Britain’s House of Lords, Gregory Barker, who hired Mercury to salvage Rusal and EN+ by casting Deripaska as the heavy. It’s unclear how many of the ambassadors sent the messages.
Home may be forever lost for displaced Syrians
JARABLUS, Syria (AP) — When Hikmat’s mother managed to sneak back into their home city of Aleppo, now controlled by government forces, she found a single word spray-painted in red on their house: “Confiscated.” Same with the family store and another house. Their farm, south of the city, is probably lost to them as well, in territory recently recaptured by Syrian forces.
This is the new reality for displaced Syrians who supported the armed opposition challenging President Bashar Assad or who lived in areas once held by the opposition. Now driven elsewhere, they face the prospect that they may never be able to return.
Around half of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million has been uprooted — the overwhelming majority of them Sunni Muslims, who were among the first to rise against the government in 2011. Nearly 6 million fled abroad, while 6.6 million are displaced within Syria.
Roughly a third of the displaced are crammed into areas that remain outside government hands in northern Syria: rebel-held Idlib province and a neighboring Turkish-controlled enclave. Thrown together from different parts of the country, they have to adjust to a strange new hybrid society where former city dweller and former village farmer, uneducated and educated, liberal and conservative now live side by side in tent camps or rented homes, with different accents, cuisines and customs.
They all share the realization that this may be their future.
Border measures part of Trump’s bigger immigration crackdown
WASHINGTON (AP) — The separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border caught the attention of the world and prompted mass outrage, but it only tells a small part of the story surrounding the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
In reality, the government is working to harden the system on multiple fronts to curb immigration, carving a path around various court rulings to do so. The administration is seeking to lock up families indefinitely, expand detention space and tighten asylum rules and apply more scrutiny to green card applications.
Many of the initiatives received little attention during the chaos over separated families, but they show how determined President Donald Trump is to stop immigrants from coming — both legally and illegally — even in cases where the administration has been stymied by the courts.