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Police in Greece are investigating the discovery of a 2,000-year-old statue in a black bag near some trash cans in a suburban municipality in the Thessaloniki region on Saturday.

"Migrants at Texas border in shock after Trump canceled their asylum appointments" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Margelis Tinoco Lopez arrived at the border at 4 a.m. Monday for her 1 p.m. immigration appointment along with her husband and her 13-year-old son. Standing on the bridge in below-freezing weather, Lopez got an email from U.S. Customs and Border Protection that made her heart drop: “Existing appointments scheduled through the CBP One application are no longer valid.”She broke down in tears.“I’m devastated,” she said, sitting on a chair at a Juárez migrant shelter. “It feels like a sense of instability, and I feel vulnerable and scared.”Tinoco Lopez is among the thousands of migrants who had hoped to enter the United States legally but saw their long-awaited appointments canceled shortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated Monday. Video of her crying at a bridge that connects El Paso and Juárez has spread across social media, which makes her worried for her safety, she said.On his first day back in office, Trump made good on his campaign promise to crack down on immigration, starting with shutting down the use of an app that let migrants make appointments to request asylum. The Biden administration had allowed 1,450 appointments daily at eight different ports of entry along the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border.Nearly 300,000 people a day tried to get an appointment, some waiting several months before they got lucky. More than 936,500 people had secured appointments since January 2023, according to CBP.Trump also issued an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship and declared an emergency at the border intended to allow the federal government to send the military and National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border. And he halted refugee resettlement, a program through which thousands of people fleeing war and persecution have entered the U.S.Migrants immediately felt the impact of Trump’s immigration agenda.Tinoco Lopez and her family left Colombia six months ago with the hope of migrating to the U.S. She declined to speak in detail about the reasons they left, but she said her oldest child was killed in her home country.After arriving in Mexico City late last year, she downloaded the CBP One app on her cell phone to attempt to get an appointment to request asylum. On Jan. 1, she finally received her appointment, so she and her family sold what little they had and bought one-way tickets to Juárez.“We were so happy, we thought we were finally going to be able to enter the U.S.,” said José Loaiza, Tinoco Lopez’s husband. “They made us feel hope because they said they would take us in for our appointment at 11 a.m. But when we found out they wouldn’t let us in it was just an overwhelming feeling that came over us.”Pastor Juan Fierro García, who runs a migrant shelter in the outskirts of Juárez, said before Monday, 12 migrants were staying in his shelter. But with the mass cancellation of appointments, he expects that number to grow.“There’s just a lot of uncertainty right now,” he said.At the cafeteria inside a Catholic church in the city’s plaza, Jesse Palmera, 31, ate beans, white bread and oatmeal. The Church provides free food and legal consultations for migrants seeking to enter the U.S. Palmera, who left Venezuela with his younger brother in April to migrate to the U.S., had an appointment with immigration officials for Jan. 28.His father, back in Venezuela, called him on Monday afternoon to ask if the news that the Trump administration had revoked the appointments was true. Palmera said that’s how he discovered that his opportunity to enter legally had vanished. Jesse Palmera at El Buen Pastor migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez. Palmera's asylum appointment, scheduled for Jan. 28, was canceled following the president's inauguration on Monday. Credit: Justin Hamel for The Texas Tribune“When I got the appointment, I thought, ‘My parents and sisters won’t have to suffer economically because I can finally work and send money back home,’” he said.“My dad just told me, ‘If it’s God’s will, you’ll be able to enter the U.S.,’” Palmera said.Cristina Coronado, coordinator for the Ministry for Migrants of the Missionary Society of Saint Columban, which offers the services inside the Catholic church, said that she hasn’t seen more migrants coming to the center but they have been bombarded with questions that they can’t answer.She said she has advised people not to cross the border illegally or hire someone to smuggle them.“I’m hoping there will be a moment of peace and clarity so that both country’s governments can talk and find a solution,” she said. “I hope they think of the people because, unfortunately, in the past few years, they’ve not thought about the migrants’ needs.”Almost instantly, Trump’s moves on immigration were challenged.The American Civil Liberties Union sued to halt the order targeting birthright citizenship and filed a request for a hearing regarding the end of asylum appointments through CBP One, the phone app.“We are working hard on bringing other lawsuits,” said Cecillia Wang of the ACLU. “We are coming to court in order to stand up for your rights.”Other lawsuits may follow.Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, said the executive order ending birthright citizenship is at odds with the 14th Amendment, which assures citizenship for all. She said the executive orders to shut down the border and reinstate “remain in Mexico” — a policy that forces asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are pending — violate domestic and international laws, and questioned the justification for declaring a national emergency at the southern border because the number of illegal crossings is currently low.“Just because the president does it, it doesn’t make it legal,” Mukherjee said. “It doesn’t make it right.”In South Texas, Andrea Rudnik worried that Trump’s executive orders could cause a chilling effect for organizations like the one she co-founded, Team Brownsville, which provides migrants with humanitarian aid. The organization has already been targeted by Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has launched investigations into several shelters and nonprofits that help migrants. Margelis Tinoco Lopez, left, and her husband José Loaiza, right, at El Buen Pastor migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on Tuesday, after their asylum appointment was canceled. “We were so happy, we thought we were finally going to be able to enter the U.S.,” Loaiza said. Credit: Justin Hamel for The Texas Tribune“We haven’t seen the worst of it yet,” Rudnik said, nodding to Trump’s promised mass deportations. “There’s just a lot of unknown. We will continue to try to serve in the best way that we can. The pathway is not clear at this point.”Jennifer Babaie, the director of legal services for Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, an El Paso nonprofit that provides migrants with legal services, said she will closely follow how federal agencies try to implement the orders so that she can try to protect people she represents from wrongful deportation.“These executive orders — no matter your political party — totally disregard civil liberties,” Babaie said. “If a government can come in on day one and put this much restriction on civil liberties, what else would they be willing to do?”This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/21/texas-border-migrants-trump-asylum-executive-order/.The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Former El Salvador President Mauricio Funes, who spent the final years of his life in Nicaragua to avoid various criminal sentences, died late Tuesday. He was 65.

The M23 rebel group is advancing toward eastern Congo’s largest city of Goma

Authorities in Japan say one person is dead and two others are injured after a knife attack Wednesday night outside a train station in Nagano

El Salvador's ex-president Mauricio Funes died Tuesday at the age of 65 in Nicaragua, where he fled two years after leaving office and gained asylum following accusations of corruption in his country.Leading El Salvador from 2009 to 2014, Funes was a bespectacled former TV journalist who modeled himself on moderate leftist leaders, despite heading a party of former Marxist rebels.The former pupil of Jesuits at the University of Central America made his name as a journalist, including for CNN in Spanish.He carried out interviews with members of the ex-rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) -- the party he went on to lead -- as they battled a US-backed military government in a devastating 12-year civil war.As the first FMLN presidential candidate without a rebel fighter background, he attracted some voters wary of the FMLN's rebel warfare past.Accused of embezzling $351 million from state coffers, among other corruption charges during his administration, Funes fled to Nicaragua in 2016 where he was granted asylum and later Nicaraguan nationality.Funes, who had argued that he was the victim of political persecution, had five criminal proceedings pending before the Salvadoran courts, including embezzlement.In May 2023, he was sentenced in absentia to 14 years in prison for alleged secret negotiations held during his presidency with criminal gangs terrorizing the Central American nation.In June last year, he was also sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for money laundering, after being found guilty of favoring a Guatemalan company so that it would be awarded a bridge construction contract.- Leftist leader -Funes began teaching after high school, aged barely 16, before later beginning -- but not finishing -- a degree in literature and communications.He launched his journalism career in 1985 at the national television channel, where he became director of information and interviewed the tiny Central American nation's top politicians for 14 years.During the 1980-1992 civil war, in which more than 70,000 died, his elder brother Roberto was killed by police.Funes joined CNN in June 1991 and left in September 2007 to become presidential candidate for the FMLN.He welcomed comparisons to Brazilian moderate leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and US President Barack Obama during his campaign.He once said he wanted to maintain El Salvador's close relationship with Washington.But the United States later blacklisted Funes, making him ineligible for a US visa, after the State Department accused him of schemes that resulted in "pilfering hundreds of millions of dollars from state coffers."Funes was born on October 18, 1959, and was formerly married to Brazilian Wanda Pignato.He had five children including Alejandro, who was killed in Paris in 2007.© Agence France-Presse

by Simon STURDEEMasayoshi Son, the Japanese tycoon helming US President Donald Trump's big new AI push, is the son of an immigrant pig farmer with a spectacular but also sketchy investment record.Trump's "friend Masa" was born in Japan in 1957 to ethnic Korean parents who scratched a living rearing chickens and hogs while battling discrimination."We collected leftover food from neighbors and fed it to cattle. It was slimy. We worked hard," he said later. "And I've worked hard."He went to the United States aged 16 and, while studying at Berkeley, developed a translation machine that he sold for around $1 million.In his 20s, Son founded investment group SoftBank and made colossally successful early bets on Yahoo! and Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba in the 1990s.The former reportedly made him -- for a few days -- the world's richest person and the latter seemed to cement his Midas Touch reputation."I could smell him. We are the same animal," Son said of Alibaba's founder Jack Ma.Ma replied: "He probably has the biggest guts in the world on doing investments."- Failures -At his eagerly awaited news conferences, Son would show slides showing geese laying golden eggs and set out glorious visions for the future.He launched his tech-focussed $100-billion Vision Fund investment vehicle in 2017, securing huge funding from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and others.But Yahoo! and Alibaba proved to be the exceptions, not the rules, and many other Silicon Valley investments have failed, some spectacularly.This included office-sharing firm WeWork, which went bankrupt, and the hospitality chain Oyo Rooms, and Son shied away from the limelight.In the 2022-23 financial year, SoftBank's two Vision Funds posted a whopping 4.3 trillion yen ($32 billion at the time) in losses.- AI pivot -But the irrepressible Son, 67, decided to pivot to artificial intelligence (AI).Key to the coming revolution, Son hopes, will be majority Softbank-owned Arm, the British chip designer whose technology is in 99 percent of smartphones.Son wants Arm to compete with the likes Nvidia -- the two are currently partners -- and make chips for AI processes.Son promised SoftBank would invest $50 billion in the United States and create 50,000 jobs within Trump's first term.Appearing alongside the US president-elect in December, Son said he would now "double down" with $100 billion and generate employment for 100,000 Americans.On Tuesday Son appeared at the White House along with Trump with OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman and Oracle founder Larry Ellison to announce Stargate.The aim is to build infrastructure to develop AI with an initial $100 billion and reaching $500 billion during Trump's second term, Son said.Son will be chairman, SoftBank will be responsible for financing and OpenAI for operations. Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI will provide the technology."This is the beginning of a golden age for America," Son said, predicting artificial general intelligence (AGI), a benchmark of human-level intelligence, "very very soon.""After that artificial super intelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind never ever would have thought could be solved," he said.- 'Mojo back'-SoftBank shares soared on the announcement, adding 10.6 percent on Wednesday in Tokyo."Masa has his mojo back," said Kirk Boodry, a SoftBank analyst at Astris Advisory. "Inevitably, there are going to be questions about how Softbank funds this but we expect they will be able to pull in limited partners (likely Middle Eastern money as they did with Vision Fund) whilst asset sales are very likely on the agenda," Boodry said in a note.Amir Anvarzadeh from Asymmetric Advisors was less sure, saying that Son and Trump "both like numbers"."Unless Softbank sells its stake in Arm, which is massively overvalued anyway, where is all the money going to come from?"© Agence France-Presse

President Trump told Russia on Wednesday it needs to strike a deal to end its war with Ukraine or get hit with harsher sanctions and other penalties.