Justice Department’s Antitrust Division And The Securities And Exchange Commission Sign Historic Memorandum Of Understanding

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-s-antitrust-division-and-securities-and-exchange-commission-sign-historic

Trump Halts Foreign Visa Worker Programs to Free Up 600K U.S. Jobs for Americans

President Trump expanded an executive order on Monday, halting a series of visa programs that bring hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to the United States to take American jobs.

The order will halt the inflow of foreign worker pipelines until at least December 31. The visa programs suspended include:

H-1B visas, who take white-collar U.S. jobs

H-4 visas, who are the spouses of H-1B visa holders

H-2B visas, who take blue-collar nonagricultural U.S. jobs

L visas, who take white-collar U.S. jobs

J-1 visas, who take a variety of blue-collar and white-collar U.S. jobs

“Obviously American workers have been hurt, and it’s nobody’s fault that the coronavirus hit, but it did do a blow to the economy and to businesses who were furloughing and laying people off, and we want to make sure that Americans get hired into those spots,” said Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli.

Altogether, the order is expected to free up about 600,000 American jobs for the more than 30,000,000 Americans who are jobless mostly due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis.

That includes about 287,000 U.S. jobs freed up for Americans that would have otherwise been taken by H-1B, H-2B, and L-1 visa workers, according to Cuccinelli.

Halting the J-1 visa program through the end of the year is set to free up about 97,000 U.S. jobs that would have otherwise gone to foreign workers.

The order will be up for expansion within 30 days and reviewed every 60 days after that date. Those reviews include evaluating all regulations relating to visa programs. Cuccinelli credited the April order’s 60-day review process for giving the administration time to consider Monday’s expansion.

The order includes a handful of exemptions, such as an exemption for foreign au pairs who arrive on J-1 visas to do low-wage nanny work for mostly wealthy American households.

Also exempted are H-2B visa workers taking U.S. jobs in the food industry, J-1 visa workers taking U.S. jobs in coronavirus-related medical research or treatment, and the Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa program, which delivers foreign graduates to multinational corporations at discounted wage rates.

DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are given authority to exempt visa workers from the order if they are deemed “necessary to facilitate the immediate and continued economic recovery of the United States.”

A DHS official told Breitbart News the exemption is for specific foreign visa workers who are vital to putting Americans back to work.

“The president is confident this is going to be very popular with the American people,” Cuccinelli said. “It’s proven popular thus far — to start clearing this space … and it is the kind of thing that, frankly, some people on the other side of the aisle have supported in the past.”

Indeed, reductions to overall immigration in the middle of mass unemployment are hugely popular with Americans.

Ministerial staff banned from holding Labor Party positions

Premier Daniel Andrews has banned ministerial staff from becoming factional powerbrokers, holding official positions inside the Labor Party and running for pre-selections.

Mr Andrews' latest move follows an investigation by The Age and 60 Minutes that revealed ministers, and a ministerial staffer, had engaged in industrial-scale branch stacking.

In an email seen by The Age and sent to ministerial staff on Monday afternoon, the Premier's office said the rules would come into effect from the beginning of next week.

"It is a long-standing rule in our office that all staff who work for the Premier agree not to hold elected positions in the Labor Party or to act as proxies in Party forums," the email said.

"This is to ensure that we can never be put in a situation of having to take a public position against the government and because our office is here to support every member of the caucus.

"I wanted to let you know that for the purposes of providing absolute clarity about the role and focus of all staff across the government, those rules will now be expanded to apply to all ministerial offices from the beginning of next week."

Covert recordings obtained by The Age and 60 Minutes revealed Nick McLennan, a ministerial adviser to Marlene Kairouz, who last week resigned from the frontbench, collected wads of cash from disgraced former cabinet minister Adem Somyurek to pay for Labor Party memberships.

Recordings also suggest Mr McLennan's job as a senior policy adviser to Ms Kairouz had been arranged by Mr Somyurek "because of a factional thing". Mr Somyurek also repeatedly claimed that Mr McLennan had not been branch stacking aggressively enough, despite being paid more than $100,000 a year.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/ministerial-staff-banned-from-holding-labor-party-positions-20200622-p55537.html

Ala: Extending European sanctions on Syria and Caesar Act constitute crime against humanity

Geneva, SANA – Syria’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, Hussam Eddin Ala, said that European Union’s extensions of the unilateral coercive measures on Syria amid the Coronavirus pandemic, in parallel with the US applying the so-called “Caesar Act,” constitute a crime against humanity.

In a statement on Monday before the Human Right Council passed Britain’s draft resolution about the state of human rights in Syria, Ala denounced the Council resolutions for ignoring to American practices and statements which seek to prolong its humanitarian crises in Syria through the so-called Caesar Act, looting oil, and burning crops.

Ala underlined that addressing the humanitarian crises which the Syrian people are enduring cannot be done with conferences held without presence of the Syrian government nor through pressure on the United Nations to prevent it from supporting the development efforts, or hindering the reconstruction process, or by politicizing humanitarian aid and diverting it to areas where terrorists are active.

He stressed that the Council has ignored the war crimes which the Turkish regime has committed by destroying historical heritage, looting economic resources, and applying systematic Turkification measures in the north of Syria, in addition to ignoring the threats posed by the US against Syrian unity and territorial integrity through the support provided by US occupation forces to separatist militias in the southeast of Syria and terrorist groups in al-Tanf and al-Rukban.

Ala added that the Turkish regime is violating the Astana and Sochi agreements by providing direct military support and protection for Takfiri organizations such as Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as the participation of the Turkish occupation forces in the operations of terrorist organizations, in addition to making Idleb a hotbed of international terrorism.

https://sana.sy/en/?p=195302

London to Erect Statues Celebrating Mass Migration

Two large sculptures celebrating mass migration will be unveiled in London next year, the Guardian has revealed.

It was announced Monday, on the UK’s second ever ‘Windrush Day’ that works by artists Thomas J Price and Veronica Ryan will be erected in London’s Hackney borough in 2021. Windrush Day commemorates the beginning of the modern mass migration era in Britain in 1948, and was instituted in 2018 after members of that original generation of post-war migrant arrivals detained deported because of government error, causing a significant scandal.

The pieces, which include a sculpture of fruit and a nine-foot statue of a Hackney local are “a statement of pride” for members of the so-called Windrush generation and their descendants, according to the Mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville.

The Labour politician said the new works would not be “an answer to the statue conversation” that has emerged with the Black Lives Matter protests, which have seen demonstrators vandalise and tear down sculptures of white figures across the UK.

“But I think it’s an early down payment on righting some of that wrong, and a chance to see more diverse people represented in a public realm,” he said in remarks reported by the Guardian.

Price, whose past works are typified by naturalistic sculptures of BAME males (pictured, above), told the Guardian he hoped the statues would highlight a deficit of non-white statues in Britain, asserting that “representation is incredibly important”.

“It’s been so lacking, we just haven’t had it. You can count on one hand the number of public sculptures of statues of non-white people, and it’s even worse for black people. You have to be Nelson Mandela. It’s incredible. And yet that is just seen as normal,” he said.

His piece, the liberal newspaper reports, will be a nine-foot-tall bronze figure, “created by using photo archives and digital 3D scans” of residents of London’s Hackney borough, the population of which is 40 per cent BAME and 36 per cent white British, according to the last census.

Price commented: “For the people who are here today who are British, but have to answer that question of: ‘Where you really from?’ They can see there’s a sculpture standing nine foot high, looking like someone they know, in the centre of Hackney.”

Montserrat-born sculptor Ryan, meanwhile, has designed statues of fruit and vegetables from the Caribbean, which she said represent the ideas of migration and identity

“I have memories of going to Ridley Road Market with my mother as a child to buy fruit and vegetables, fabrics, and sewing materials,” she said.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/06/22/london-erect-statues-mass-migration/

US State Department Designates Four Chinese Media Outlets as Foreign Missions

The US Department of State has designated four more Chinese news agencies as state-controlled media: China Central Television (CCTV), China News Service, People's Daily and Global Times.

US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell said on Monday that the designation was a response to actions by Beijing. According to Stilwell, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has full editorial control over the four news entities, and they will have to inform the State Department of their personnel rosters and real estate holdings as a consequence of the designation.

The move follows a similar designation given to the Chinese news outlets Xinhua News Agency, China Global Television (CGTN), China Radio International, China Daily, and Hai Tian Development USA in February.

"These nine entities all meet the definition of a foreign mission under the Foreign Missions Act, which is to say that they are 'substantially owned or effectively controlled' by a foreign government," State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said in a Monday statement. "This designation recognizes PRC [People's Republic of China] propaganda outlets as foreign missions and increases transparency relating to the CCP and PRC government's media activities in the United States."

"Entities designated as foreign missions must adhere to certain administrative requirements that also apply to foreign embassies and consulates in the United States," Ortagus added.

In March, the Trump administration imposed strict limits on staff sizes for Chinese media outlets operating in the US, reducing them from 160 to 100. In response, Beijing revoked the accreditations of American correspondents with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

https://sputniknews.com/world/202006221079691413-us-state-department-designates-four-chinese-media-outlets-as-foreign-missions/