Author: AFP
President Joe Biden’s administration said Friday that nearly one million immigrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela will be allowed to legally remain in the United States for another 18 months. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was extending the so-called “temporary protected status” (TPS) of 232,000 Salvadorans, 1,900 Sudanese, 600,000 Venezuelans and 103,700 Ukrainians. The move comes less than 10 days before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has pledged to carry out a mass deportation of migrants after taking office. TPS is granted to foreign citizens who cannot safely return home because of war,…
US President Joe Biden said Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was in “tough shape,” after Washington and London imposed sweeping sanctions against Moscow’s energy sector over its invasion of Ukraine. “Putin is in tough shape right now, and I think it’s really important that he not have any breathing room to continue to do the god-awful things he continues to do,” Biden told reporters at the White House. Biden added that there was a “real chance Ukraine can prevail” if it continues to get Western support, with just days until Donald Trump takes over the US presidency.
President Joe Biden’s administration said Friday that nearly one million immigrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela will be allowed to legally remain in the United States for another 18 months. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was extending the so-called “temporary protected status” (TPS) of 232,000 Salvadorans, 1,900 Sudanese, 600,000 Venezuelans and 103,700 Ukrainians. The move comes less than 10 days before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has pledged to carry out a mass deportation of migrants after taking office. TPS is granted to foreign citizens who cannot safely return home because of war,…
Faced with plunging temperatures and heavy rain in war-battered central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, displaced Palestinian father Tayseer Obaid resorted to digging for a modicum of domestic comfort. In the clay soil of the encampment area that his family has been displaced to by the war, Obaid dug a square hole nearly two metres deep and capped it with a tarpaulin stretched over an improvised wooden A-frame to keep out the rain. “I had an idea to dig into the ground to expand the space as it was very limited,” Obaid said. “So I dug 90 centimetres, it was okay and…
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani began his first official visit to post-Assad Syria on Friday with a tour of the landmark Umayyad mosque in Damascus. “It’s a great pleasure… to be here this morning to visit and pay homage to all Syrian believers,” he told AFP from the mosque, which is about 1,300 years old and he described as “one of the most beautiful” in the world. He is expected to meet Syria’s de facto ruler Ahmed al-Sharaa and his counterpart Asaad al-Shaibani at the presidential palace later in the morning. Sharaa heads the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham Islamist group that…
Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa told visiting Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani on Friday that he was ready to stem “illegal immigration” to Europe, the European diplomat said. “Sharaa says he is ready to block illegal immigration, (and) fight against drug traffickers,” Tajani said in the Lebanese capital, the second leg of his trip, adding these were “two crucial commitments for Italy”.
Internet giant Meta’s fact-checking programme aims to counter false information on its social platforms — Facebook, Instagram and Threads — with the help of media organisations, including AFP. Here is a guide to how it works, following Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on January 6 that he was halting the programme in the United States. – Who does fact-checking? – Meta has since 2016 tasked journalists with assessing false information on its platforms under its “third-party fact-checking” programme — which currently has 80 media organisations working on it. In the United States, for example, Meta has 10 media partners for…
Iranian state TV on Friday showed the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps touring an underground missile base used in an attack against Israel, hours after fighters marched through Tehran. The footage of the missile base at an undisclosed location “in the mountains” and the parade by paramilitary Basij volunteers come after the weakening of Iran’s allies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, during wars with Israel. They also come days before US President-elect Donald Trump is due to take office. During his first term, he oversaw the killing of Revolutionary Guards commander Qasem Soleimani in…
Today’s robots perform safety checks at industrial plants, conduct quality control in manufacturing, and are even starting to keep hospital patients company. But soon — perhaps very soon — these increasingly humanlike machines will handle more sophisticated tasks, freeing up people while raising complex questions about the roles of artificial intelligence that are gaining attention. At a panel hosted by the American Association of Retired Persons at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), experts described the next five years as a period where robots transition primarily from industrial sites to service settings, helping to address a worsening health care labor…
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Friday that he had called for a moratorium on European Union sanctions on Syria for six months or one year. However, Tajani added during a press briefing in Lebanon that “lifting sanctions is not a national decision, they are a European bloc decision”.