Subject: Morning Brief: Thousands of U.S. troops are heading to the southern border
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Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2018 07:55:09 -0500 (CDT)

Thousands of U.S. Troops Are Heading to the Southern Border

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MORNING BRIEF

Today's Global News from Foreign Policy

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10/30/2018

10/30/2018

TOP NEWS

Thousands of U.S. Troops Are Heading to the Southern Border

Top News: President Trump has announced that his administration will send 5,200 troops—a force comparable in size to the U.S. military’s numbers in Iraq—to the southern border as a caravan of migrants treks through Mexico toward the United States. According to General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, the head of U.S. Northern Command, 800 troops are already heading to Texas border with Mexico.

The caravan has become a major issue for Trump and the Republican party in advance of next Tuesday’s midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. Some civil rights groups have denounced the troop deployment as a political show.

Tunisia: A suicide bomber injured 15 people when she detonated explosives on Habib Bourguiba Avenue in the capital, Tunis—the scene of the country’s 2011 protests that marked the beginning of the Arab Spring. Walid Hkima, an official in Tunisia’s interior ministry, said the bomber “left her city three days ago and told her family that she was going to the capital to look for work.”

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AFRICA

•  Uganda continues to keep its borders open to refugees as other countries shut their doors. The country hosts an estimated 1.25 million refugees.

•  Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, is in hospital in Saudi Arabia, after allegedly suffering a stroke, although Gabonese officials maintain he was admitted for fatigue.

•  South Africa’s unemployment rate has risen to 27.5 percent, with jobs in the formal sector decreasing, while employment in the informal sector grew.

AMERICAS

•  Mexico’s incoming president, Andres Manuel López Obrador, has said he will halt construction on a new airport for Mexico City, after holding an informal public vote that has been slammed by critics.

•  In Pittsburgh, where 11 people were killed by an anti-Semitic gunman on Saturday, some Jewish leaders have said that President Trump is not welcome in the city, and called on the president to “stop targeting and endangering all minorities.”

•  Trump openly contemplated denying citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are not U.S. citizens by using an executive order. Such a move would likely draw legal challenges for openly defying the U.S. Constitution’s 14th amendment which states “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

ASIA

•  Despite claims that conditions for Rohingya in Rakhine state are still dire, officials from Myanmar and Bangladesh agreed that they intend to start repatriating hundreds of thousands of Rohingya by mid-November.

•  Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, is facing ten years in prison for corruption after a court added another seven years to her sentence on Tuesday.

•  Taiwan is aiming to move from conscription to an all-volunteer military by 2019. But the country’s ministry of defense is struggling to find young people who want to become one of the 188,000 troops it says it needs to hedge against Beijing.

EUROPE

•  The European Environmental Agency has reported that air pollution is still the leading cause of premature death in 41 European countries, with the head of the organization calling it “an invisible killer.”

•  Russia’s only aircraft carrier was damaged when a floating dock sank, causing a crane to crash down on the vessel during repairs at Kola Bay.

•  Over five tons of unexploded artillery shells from World War I were removed from a river bed in France. With the 100th anniversary of the war’s end approaching on Nov. 11, there are still an estimated 250 tons of century-old ammunition strewn across the eastern part of the country.

MIDDLE EAST

•  A U.N. convoy scheduled to deliver much-needed supplies to 45,000 Syrian refugees at Rukban camp near the Jordanian border has been indefinitely delayed.

•  Saudi Arabia’s financial ties to universities in the United States are under scrutiny in the wake of Jamal Khashoggi’s killing.

•  In Iraq, three women making the Pilgrimage of Arbaeen, an annual event for many Shiite Muslims, were killed by a roadside bomb in the city of Khanaqin.

- By Jefcoate O'Donnell

(Photo by (Herika Martinez / AFP/ Getty Images)

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