09/06/2025

MONDAY | JUNE 9, 2025

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Trump deploys National Guard over LA protests

Kabul urges fleeing Afghans to return KABUL: The Afghan government has urged Afghans hoping to emigrate to the United States to instead return to Afghanistan, after Washington tightened entry conditions. US President Donald Trump last week announced a travel ban targeting 12 countries, including Afghanistan, which his proclamation said lacked “competent” central authorities for processing passports and vetting. Commenting on the ban on Saturday, Prime Minister Hassan Akhund urged Afghans to return to their country, saying they would be protected even if they worked with US-led forces in the two-decade fight against the insurgency. “For those who are worried that America has closed its doors to Afghans ... I want to tell them, ‘Return to your country, even if you have served the Americans for 20 or 30 years for their ends, and ruined the Islamic system’,” he said in a speech broadcast by state media. “You will not face abuse or trouble,” he said, making reassurances that the Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada had “granted amnesty for all”. Authorities in Kabul announced a general amnesty in 2021 for Afghans who worked with the Western-backed forces. However, the United Nations has recorded reports of extrajudicial killings, detentions and abuses. In the past four years, the government has imposed a strict view of Islamic law. Afghans fled in droves to neighbouring countries during decades of conflict, but the chaotic withdrawal of US-led troops saw a new wave clamouring to escape official curbs and fears of reprisal for working with Washington. The United States has not had a working embassy in Afghanistan since 2021 and Afghans must apply for visas in third countries, principally Pakistan which has recently ramped up campaigns to expel Afghans. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, Afghans have gradually seen their chances of migrating to the United States or staying there shrink. Trump administration orders have disrupted refugee pathways and revoked legal protections temporarily shielding Afghans from deportation starting next month. – AFP UK warned over new Chinese embassy LONDON: The United States warned British authorities against allowing the opening of a new Chinese embassy in London because of its planned location near the country’s important financial centres, reported The Times newspaper. The Chinese government bought a historic building in London six years ago, which used to house the Royal Mint, but has still not been able to obtain permission to open a new embassy there. In January, the Financial Times reported that the UK might allow China to open Europe’s largest embassy with a number of conditions. “The United States is deeply concerned about providing China with potential access to the sensitive communications of one of our closest allies,” a senior US official told the publication. The building where Beijing wants to open the embassy is located between financial centres, as well as next to three important data centres, the newspaper emphasised. According to the publication, US President Donald Trump previously called on UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to deny Beijing the opening of an embassy; the issue was raised during trade negotiations. According to the publication’s sources, if this embassy is opened, the Trump administration will have concerns about the transfer of intelligence information to the UK. China’s plans to build a new embassy in the London borough of Tower Hamlets have recently become a separate topic of disagreement between Beijing and London. – Bernama

o Vance calls protesters ‘insurrectionists’

LOS ANGELES: President Donald Trump’s administration said it would deploy 2,000 National Guard troops on Saturday as federal agents in Los Angeles faced off against a few hundred demonstrators during a second day of protests following immigration raids. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that the Pentagon was prepared to mobilise active-duty troops “if violence continues” in Los Angeles, saying the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton were “on high alert”. Federal security agents on Saturday confronted protesters in the Paramount area in southeast Los Angeles, where some demonstrators displayed Mexican flags. A second protest in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday night attracted some 60 people, who chanted slogans including “ICE out of L.A.!” Trump signed a presidential memorandum to deploy the National Guard troops to “address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester”, the White House said in a statement. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News that the National Guard would be deployed in Los Angeles on Saturday. California Governor Gavin Newsom called the decision “purposefully inflammatory”. He posted on X that Trump was deploying the National Guard “not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” adding: “Don’t give them one. Never use violence. Speak out peacefully.” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that if Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass can’t do their jobs “then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, riots & looters, the way it should be solved!!!” The protests pit Democratic-run Los Angeles, where census data suggests a significant portion of the population is Hispanic and foreign-born, against Trump’s Republican White House, which has made cracking down on immigration a hallmark of his second term. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Russian activist is staging “Police State” – a two-week piece of performance art aimed at raising awareness about the dangers of authoritarianism and oppression. Tolokonnikova, who spent nearly two years in a Russian penal colony for performing a protest song against Vladimir Putin in a Moscow church in 2012, knows a bit about the topic. Through the installation, which opened on Thursday and runs through June 14, she says she hopes to teach visitors about what she believes to be the advent of a new means of control – technology. While she is in the mock cell, during all museum opening hours, she will eat, use the toilet, sew clothes as she once did in her real cell and create “soundscapes”. Visitors can observe her through holes in the cell or on security camera footage. “People don’t treat authoritarianism

Sheriff’s deputies maintaining a cordon in Paramount city on Saturday. – REUTERSPIC

overturned shopping carts as small canisters exploded into gas clouds. Authorities began detaining some protesters, according to witnesses. There was no official information of any arrests. “Now they know that they cannot go anywhere in this country where our people are, and try to kidnap our workers, our people – they cannot do that without an organised and fierce resistance,” said protester Ron Gochez, 44. A first round of protests kicked off on Friday night after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted enforcement operations in the city and arrested at least 44 people on alleged immigration violations. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that there were about “1,000 rioters” at the protests on Friday. Reuters could not verify the department’s account. Angelica Salas, executive director of immigrants’ rights organisation Chirla, said lawyers had not had access to those detained on Friday, which she called “very worrying”. – Reuters person. You think, ‘Well, it’s not about me’,” she explained. “And then next thing we know, the entire country is under the military boot.” For Tolokonnikova, Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January has sparked an “erosion of the system of checks and balances”, which she deemed “very dangerous”. She says the artistic community, and society in general, should do more to counter governmental abuses of power, wherever they may occur, and stop “outsourcing politics and political action”. “I feel like it’s as if there is someone else who’s going to save us from everything. That’s not what works really. We all have to contribute.” Some who visited the installation said they agreed with Tolokonnikova that society had become too passive. “I feel like Americans don’t want to believe that we could be in danger of losing our freedoms,” said Jimmie Akin, a graphic designer who said she was worried about the policy

“Insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers, while one half of America’s political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil,” Vice-President JD Vance posted on X late on Saturday. Senior White House aide Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner, described the protests as a “violent insurrection”. The administration has not invoked the Insurrection Act, two US officials said. One said that National Guard troops can deploy quickly, within 24 hours in some cases, and that the military was working to source the 2,000 troops. The 1807 law empowers a president to deploy the US military to enforce the law and suppress events like civil disorder. The last time it was invoked was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots at the request of the California governor. Video footage of the Paramount protest showed dozens of green-uniformed security personnel with gas masks at the Paramount protest, lined up on a road strewn with

Pussy Riot co-founder back in ‘prison’ LOS ANGELES: Nadya Tolokonnikova, the co founder of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, is back in a prison cell, but this time, she has gone willingly.

Tolokonnikova inside her mock prison. – AFPPIC

seriously,”Tolokonnikova said. Seated in a makeshift Russian prison cell, wearing a green tracksuit, the 35-year-old activist says in several countries, the concept of a “police state” is expanding. “As someone who lived under authoritarian rule for over 25 years, I know how real it is and how it starts, step by step, on the arrest of one

changes since Trump took office. “People need to wake up.” – AFP