Immigrants face hurdles to prove abuse by US agents
HOUSTON — Within hours of being booked at a Border Patrol station in far West Texas, two teenage sisters from Guatemala came forward to allege that an agent conducted an improper strip search.
The agent in question denied the allegations, including the sisters’ claims that he touched their genitals. He insisted he had only fingerprinted the sisters before taking them back to their cell.
Investigating the case came down to the sisters’ word versus the agent’s. And as in dozens of similar cases, government investigators sided with the agent.
Advocates say the case — outlined in a report compiled by internal investigators — shows the kinds of hurdles detained immigrants face when they make claims of misconduct, even when they come forward immediately, as the sisters did.
“These women were actually, for lack of a better word, lucky that their case was investigated,” said Christina Mansfield, co-founder of the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants. “They are in the extreme minority in that regard.”
Pope makes El Salvador’s Oscar Romero, Pope Paul VI saints
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Sunday praised two towering figures of the 20th-century Catholic Church as prophets who shunned wealth and looked out for the poor as he made saints of Pope Paul VI and martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Francis canonized two men at a Mass in St. Peter’s Square before some 70,000 faithful, a handful of presidents and 5,000 Salvadoran pilgrims who traveled to Rome to honor a man considered a hero to many Latin Americans.
Tens of thousands more Salvadorans stayed up all night at home to watch the Mass on giant TV screens outside the San Salvador cathedral where Romero’s remains are entombed.
In a sign of the strong influence that Paul and Romero had on the first Latin American pope, Francis wore the blood-stained rope belt that Romero wore when he was gunned down by right-wing death squads in 1980, and also used Paul’s staff, chalice and pallium vestment.
Paul, who was pope from 1963-1978, presided over the modernizing yet polarizing church reforms of the 1960s. He was the pope of Francis’ formative years as a young priest in Argentina and was instrumental in giving rise to the Latin American church’s “preferential option for the poor” that Francis has made his own.
Mattis pushes closer ties to Vietnam amid tension with China
WASHINGTON — By making a rare second trip this year to Vietnam, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is signaling how intensively the Trump administration is trying to counter China’s military assertiveness by cozying up to smaller nations in the region that share American wariness about Chinese intentions.
The visit beginning Tuesday also shows how far U.S.-Vietnamese relations have advanced since the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War.
Mattis, a retired general who entered the Marine Corps during Vietnam but did not serve there, visited Hanoi in January. By coincidence, that stop came just days before the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive in 1968. Tet was a turning point when North Vietnamese fighters attacked an array of key objectives in the South, surprising Washington and feeding anti-war sentiment even though the North’s offensive turned out to be a tactical military failure.
Three months after the Mattis visit, an U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, made a port call at Da Nang. It was the first such visit since the war and a reminder to China that the U.S. is intent on strengthening partnerships in the region as a counterweight to China’s growing military might.
The most vivid expression of Chinese assertiveness is its transformation of contested islets and other features in the South China Sea into strategic military outposts. The Trump administration has sharply criticized China for deploying surface-to-air missiles and other weapons on some of these outposts. In June, Mattis said the placement of these weapons is “tied directly to military use for the purposes of intimidation and coercion.”
Buffer zone brings fragile calm to Syria’s rebel-held Idlib
BEIRUT — A month after Russia, Turkey and Iran came together in a last-ditch effort to avert a potentially catastrophic Syrian government offensive in Idlib, they appear to have succeeded in creating a buffer zone around the northern rebel-held province, defusing tensions in a major flashpoint area.
The deal has for now averted a government offensive on the last major opposition stronghold in Syria, where tens of thousands of militants, including foreign jihadis, live alongside 3 million civilians and opposition fighters. But if the truce falls apart, the fighting could cause massive displacement and bloodshed.
The Sept. 17 agreement called for setting up a demilitarized zone 15-20 kilometers (9-12 miles) deep and stretching along the front lines around Idlib, including parts of the provinces of Latakia, Hama and Aleppo.
Days ahead of an Oct. 10 deadline, Turkey-backed rebels and an al-Qaida-linked alliance pulled their heavy weaponry back from the front lines in accordance with the deal struck between the Russian and Turkish presidents. By Monday, all “radical terrorist groups” are also to pull back. At an unspecified date, Turkish troops and Russian military police plan to begin conducting coordinated patrols and monitoring with drones along the DMZ’s boundaries.
Some jihadi groups have remained at their posts in the area, but for now they appear keen to avoid any confrontation with Turkey, activists say.