“The Tower,” an animated feature by Norwegian writer-director Mats Grorud, is both a political protest and a lament for a lost way of life, reminiscent of “Barefoot Gen,” Keiji Nakazawa’s first-person account of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Wardi, a bright 11-year-old Palestinian girl, lives with her extended family in a refugee camp in Lebanon. She adores her great-grandfather Sidi, who was one of the first settlers there after he lost his home in Galilee when Israel was founded in 1948. Four generations of the family long to return to that home and the prospects of a better life, their hope symbolized by the house key Sidi passes on to Wardi.

Grorud uses stop-motion animation for Wardi’s daily life and 2-D animation for the prolonged flashbacks of her relatives’ struggles against Israeli forces. Although he presents his story passionately, the narrative is undercut by the limits of the animation. Neither the stop-motion puppets nor the 2-D figures express the deeply felt emotions the artist tries to convey. “The Tower” demands nuanced acting comparable to the stop motion in “Kubo and the Two Strings” or the drawn animation in Isao Takahata’s “The Grave of the Fireflies.” Grorud and his artists haven’t reached that level of polish.

“The Tower” is an angry, ambitious and often moving film from an underrepresented group, but its story might have been told more effectively in live action.

Click Here: Real bape hoodie

‘Primal’

It’s usually best to approach any B-movie with lowered expectations; but it’s hard not to get excited about the premise for “Primal,” in which the ever-offbeat Nicolas Cage plays Frank Walsh, an exotic animal collector who’s escorting his latest catch on a transoceanic voyage when a rogue U.S. Marine escapes federal custody and frees the menagerie.

Kevin Durand plays the psychopath, who relies on Frank’s spider monkeys and tapirs — plus one rare white jaguar — to distract the ship’s crew, while he evades the U.S. attorney (Michael Imperioli) and the Navy neurologist (Famke Janssen) who’ve been assigned to keep him alive until he can be interrogated back home.

So we’ve got expert hunters and wild game playing cat-and-mouse on the high seas. Pretty fun, right?

Alas, “Primal” ends up being more exhausting than awesome. Cage and Durand chew the scenery like trenchermen; and Janssen and Imperioli are far more charismatic than their roles require. But while director Nicholas Powell is a veteran stunt coordinator, his movie is decidedly lacking in eye-popping action.

For the most part, the jungle creatures end up being a non-factor, as “Primal” devolves into scene after scene of overly serious guys and gals delivering earnest — and static — monologues, while pointing guns at each other. Even the cargo vessel proves dreary. It looks like a typical action movie warehouse, filling the background of every shot with featureless gray metal and drab wooden boxes.

Unfortunately, even by the relaxed standards of trash cinema, “Primal” is dispiritingly tame.

————-

‘Cold Brook’

The veteran character actor William Fichtner makes his directorial debut with “Cold Brook,” an offbeat indie drama he co-wrote with Cain DeVore. Fichtner also stars, as a blue collar small-towner who stumbles into a paranormal conundrum.

Fichtner and Kim Coates play Ted and Hilde, respectively, maintenance men at a small college near Syracuse. Harold Perrineau plays a troubled centuries-old ghost named Gil, who appears at the college’s history museum, looking for some closure that — for reasons that eventually become clear — only these middle-aged white men can provide.

Fichtner has good intentions, tying his character’s mid-life crisis to something meaningful, with roots in America’s racist past and Ted’s own macho short-sightedness. As Ted and Hilde investigate Gil’s story, both men also upset their loving wives (played by Robin Weigert and Mary Lynn Rajskub), whose uncommon tolerance for male bonding doesn’t extend to their husbands risking their jobs, by traipsing around the countryside with a needy apparition.

Ultimately, though, strong performances and a deep level of personal feeling can’t keep “Cold Brook” from feeling scattered and slight. Fichtner’s love for upstate New York — and his interest in exploring the dynamic of longtime married couples — makes this movie easy to root for. But he doesn’t have much of a story, or much of a directorial eye. His passion project is admirable but minor.

————-

‘Danger Close’

The explosive, action-packed Vietnam War movie “Danger Close” dramatizes a story that even a lot of military buffs don’t know, about the Battle of Long Tan, where a vastly outmanned scouting patrol of Australian and New Zealand soldiers fended off the Viet Cong forces surrounding the ANZAC base. Travis Fimmel stars as Major Harry Smith, a coldly calculating commander who gradually comes to respect the courage and cunning of his inexperienced troops.

Director Kriv Stenders — working from a script by Stuart Beattie — treats this subject with the gravity of such classic Australian wartime dramas as “Breaker Morant” and “Gallipoli,” which both examine a nation’s character via stories of men tested by a battlefield’s moral quandaries. The soldiers here, though, come across as too stock, drawn more from pulp adventures than from history. “Danger Close” lacks the sophistication and maturity of a great war movie.

That said, fans of elaborately staged battle sequences will find a lot to appreciate, given that the actual skirmishes at Long Tan went through several phases, affected by heavy rain, misty mud-clouds and the availability of air support. Anyone interested in the complexities and controversies surrounding Australia and New Zealand’s involvement in Vietnam may find “Danger Close” disappointing. But the movie actually works OK as one long fight scene.

————-

‘Ballet Blanc’

Some micro-budget horror leans heavy on atmosphere and formulaic jump-scares. Then there are movies such as writer-director Anne-Sophie Dutoit’s “Ballet Blanc,” which aim to upset viewers with unrelenting oddity. Dutoit, though, pushes her needle too far into the red, tilting her film from the bizarre to the inscrutable.

Shelley Starrett plays a raspy-voiced eccentric named Mrs. Willis, who adopts a long-haired orphan boy named Coco (Colter Carlbom-Mann) with a passion for music and dance. The strange new family — and their disturbing penchant for blood sacrifices — attracts the attention of a local pastor and social worker, Wax Crevice (Brian Woods), whose inquiry provokes an explosion of violence.

A curious framing device — which sees these same three characters adopting different personae — gives “Ballet Blanc” a dreamlike quality. But more often than not, it feels like Dutoit uses shock and surrealism as a way to cover up for the movie’s plodding pace, crude blocking and nonsensical story. It’s admirable that she’s trying to defy convention here, but the result is something ultimately too befuddling to disturb.

————-

‘Acceleration’

The inaptly named “Acceleration” stars Natalie Burn as Rhona, a skilled assassin tracking down her kidnapped son, in a movie that quickly becomes just another plodding, underwritten underworld shoot-‘em-up. Dolph Lundgren brings a little pizazz — but just a little — to the role of Vladik, the crime boss who sets Rhona’s mission in motion, treating it like one big game.

Screenwriter Michael Merino — who also co-directed with Daniel Zirilli — mixes together a bit of “Kill Bill,” a drop of “Drive,” a touch of “Taken” and a hefty helping of “John Wick.” (There’s scarcely a Z-grade crime movie these days that doesn’t rip off “John Wick.”) But while Burn gives an OK performance as Rhona, the heroine’s bloody rampage through various mob dens is mostly tedious, featuring more chitchat than action. “Acceleration” is like a quest story with all the cool complications and nifty narrow escapes removed.

In the stock market, it’s all about trade now.

Stocks were jumping early Thursday after China said both sides in the U.S.-China trade war had agreed to roll back tariffs if their talks progress. But an afternoon report citing fierce opposition within the White House to the agreement undercut the enthusiasm, and the majority of the market’s gains evaporated.

By the end of trading, the S&P 500 was up 8.40 points, or 0.3%, at 3,085.18. It managed to set a record for the second time this week, but it had been on pace for a bigger, 0.7% gain earlier in the day.

The Dow Jones industrial average climbed 182.24, or 0.7%, to 27,674.80 and also set a record. The Nasdaq composite finished just shy of its all-time high after rising 23.89 points, or 0.3%, to 8,434.52.

Encouraging reports on the economy and corporate profits have helped drive stocks back to record heights in recent weeks. The U.S. job market remains strong, and the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates three times since the summer to bolster the economy. Earnings for big companies, meanwhile, weren’t as bad in the summer as Wall Street had feared.

That leaves the U.S. trade war as the wild card for the global economy, and markets are trading on every whiff of movement about it as a result.

President Trump’s trade war has been a top concern for investors since early 2018. Increased tariffs don’t only raise costs and sap profits for U.S. companies. They also have made chief executives hesitant to spend on new factories, expansions and other investments given all the uncertainties about what the rules of trade will be.

Momentum has been moving toward a deal, at least an incremental one that prevents conditions from getting worse.

Altogether, the improvements mean the worries about a possible recession that dominated markets just a few months ago are diminishing. That in turn has more investors on Wall Street confident that this bull market for stocks, which already is the longest on record, can keep going.

More than a dozen companies joined the lengthy parade of those reporting stronger profits for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

Qualcomm jumped 6.3% after it reported revenue and earnings that topped Wall Street’s forecasts, and Ralph Lauren surged 14.7% for the biggest gain in the S&P 500 after posting its own better-than-expected results.

Companies are no longer getting the benefit of the first year of lower tax rates, and they’re also contending with a slowing global economy weighing on their sales. But the S&P 500 is on track to report a drop of 2.5% in third-quarter earnings per share from a year earlier, versus the 4% that analysts initially expected, according to FactSet.

In a sign of increased optimism about the economy, the yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 1.92% from 1.81% late Wednesday. It has risen sharply over the last five weeks and is close to its highest level since the start of August.

The jump in yields helped send bank stocks, whose profits benefit from higher rates for mortgages and other loans, to some of the market’s biggest gains.

Energy stocks jumped 1.6% for the largest gain among the 11 sectors that make up the S&P 500, and financial stocks climbed 0.7%.

It’s a turnaround from a few months ago, when utilities and other so-called “defensive” areas led the way.

On the losing side were several companies that focus on travel, which sank after reporting weaker-than-expected quarterly results. TripAdvisor plunged 22.4%, and Expedia Group plummeted 27.4%.

In overseas markets, Germany’s DAX returned 0.8%, France’s CAC 40 rose 0.4% and the FTSE 100 in London added 0.1%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 0.1%, the Hang Seng in Hong Kong climbed 0.6% and the Kospi in South Korea was close to flat.

Benchmark crude oil rose 80 cents to settle at $57.15 a barrel. Brent crude oil, the international standard, rose 55 cents to $62.29 a barrel. Wholesale gasoline rose 1 cent to $1.64 per gallon.

Gold fell $26.00 to $1,464.20 per ounce, silver fell 59 cents to $16.97 per ounce and copper rose 6 cents to $2.72 per pound.

The dollar rose to 109.31 Japanese yen from 108.93 yen on Wednesday. The euro weakened to $1.1048 from $1.1069.

Click Here: Maori All Blacks Store

SAN DIEGO — 

SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. on Thursday named Sergio “Serge” Rivera, an executive in the hotel and vacation ownership industry, as its new chief executive. He will be the theme park company’s fourth CEO in the last five years.

Rivera, 57, who had been a top executive at Starwood Hotels & Resorts and most recently served as president of a private residential club, will join the company Monday. He succeeds Gustavo “Gus” Antorcha, who left SeaWorld in September, following disagreements with the board, after seven months on the job.

Rivera praised the company during a Thursday earnings call, adding, “There’s a lot more to do to unlock the long-term potential of this business.” SeaWorld had just posted third-quarter declines in attendance and revenue but an increase in profit.

SeaWorld shares jumped 10.9%.

Rivera will earn an annual base salary of $600,000 plus stock options as part of his three-year employment contract, according to a regulatory filing.

Most recently, Rivera worked at the residential Ocean Reef Club for a few months this year. Before that, he was president of the vacation ownership segment of timeshare operator ILG Inc. He also had worked 21 years at Starwood Hotels, where he held a number of positions, including president of the Americas.

Interim CEO Marc Swanson will return to his former role as the company’s chief financial officer.

The company also disclosed Thursday what Swanson described as a “significant overspend” of $9.4 million in marketing expenses. Though he did not elaborate on how the money was spent beyond “creative and media” expenses, Swanson said changes have been made “to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.”

Swanson sought to put a positive spin on the disappointing results for the third quarter, which represent a big chunk of SeaWorld’s crucial summer season. In a reversal of past quarters, SeaWorld saw its visitation drop 2.6%, with 221,000 fewer visitors coming to its 12 parks during the July-through-September quarter than in the same quarter last year. Also down was overall revenue, which dropped 2% to $473.7 million. Profit rose 2.1% to $98 million.

SeaWorld blamed the drop in attendance on bad weather, plus a calendar shift that resulted in one fewer peak summer weekend day than a year earlier.

“On days when there were no adverse weather conditions, we performed well,” Swanson said. “In July, we recorded three separate days with near all-time record daily attendance.”

Going forward, Swanson said he expects growth in the low single digits. He pointed to SeaWorld’s ramped-up efforts to bring new thrill rides to its major parks, a move that some analysts say is driving the company’s turnaround following years of declining attendance due to fallout from the 2013 documentary “Blackfish,” which examined issues of animal captivity.

For 2020, Swanson said, “almost every park will get a new ride or slide.”

In San Diego, construction is underway for next year’s Mako dive coaster. And for the following year, SeaWorld recently announced that its Aquatica water park in Chula Vista will be transformed into a “Sesame Street” theme park.

Click Here: All Blacks Rugby Jersey

Weisberg writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Atop a Las Vegas skyscraper, an extravagant penthouse that reflects the city’s over-the-top glitz and glamour just traded hands for $12.475 million.

The three-bedroom condo was owned by former New Mexico state Sen. Phil Maloof, whose family developed the building, as well as the Palms Casino Resort next door. He first floated it for sale at $38 million five years ago — offering to throw in some Pablo Picasso paintings and a two-year lease on a Lamborghini — before trimming the price to $15 million late last year.

It was bought by a group headed by Bryan Ercolano, founder of luxury rental service TurnKey Pads. He told The Times he plans to rent it out for weddings, corporate functions and Raiders events once the team moves to Vegas next year.

Occupying the entire 59th floor of Palms Place, the home is a 6,200-square-foot cocktail of contemporary living spaces, LED lights and Vegas-esque amenities. A professional-grade wet bar anchors the living room. A DJ booth overlooks the space from above.

There’s also a formal dining room, sleek center-island kitchen, gym and office. Lined with glass, the master suite expands to a wraparound deck overlooking the Strip.

The opulence continues upstairs, where a rooftop deck with room for 500 people tacks on some more amenities. In addition to a series of living and dining areas, it holds a hot tub and movie screen.

The Maloof family has deep ties to Las Vegas. They’re minority owners of the Vegas Golden Knights NHL team and have opened two casinos in the city: the Palms Casino Resort and Fiesta Rancho.

Ivan Sher of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Nevada Properties held the listing. Hali Gillin of Keller Williams Southern Nevada represented the buyer.

Click Here: All Blacks Rugby Jersey

Los Angeles Clippers head coach Doc Rivers has put his home in the Hollywood Hills back in play at $11.25 million, down from about $12 million earlier this year.

Set on a cul-de-sac in the Bird Streets neighborhood, the Hamptons-inspired traditional house has a fireplace in the living room, a skylight-topped dining room and pocketing glass walls that extend the living space outward. A hybrid island/breakfast booth anchors the kitchen, which opens to the family room. Three bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms round out the single-story floor plan.

1/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

2/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

3/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

4/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

5/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

6/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

7/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

8/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

9/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

10/10

Doc Rivers’s Hollywood Hills home 

(Realtor.com)

Outside, grounds designed for year-round entertaining feature a swimming pool, a separate spa, mounted TVs, multiple fire features and a wraparound barbecue/bar. A separate guest suite and a sauna lie beneath the patio and are reached by floating glass staircase.

Rivers, 58, is now in his seventh season with the Clippers. He previously earned NBA coach of the year honors in 2000 while with the Orlando Magic and won a championship in 2008 as head coach of the Boston Celtics.

In April, he agreed to a long-term contract extension with the Clippers.

Mary Swanson of Compass holds the listing.

If you’ve ever walked into a native plant nursery and felt defeated because — admit it — all the offerings looked like 4-inch pots of weeds, do we have the shopping/planning guide for you: a set of easy-to-carry flash cards that explain in brilliant color what those nondescript little plants will look like when they’re all grown up.

Native plants just aren’t that easy to understand for traditional gardeners, many of whom who may not realize, for instance, that a small pot of quailbush (Atriplex lentiformis ssp. breweri) can quickly grow into a 10-foot-wide, 8-foot-tall monster, great for sheltering birds and stabilizing slopes but perhaps not what you hoped for outside your bedroom window.

That’s why in 2016, staffers at the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers & Native Plants began tossing around the idea of creating some good entry information into the world of native plants, said Executive Director Kitty Connolly.

“It was the height of the drought-lawn rebate programs, and lots of people were transforming their yards,” Connolly said. “Everybody needs to learn about natives if we’re going to have them in our future, but it’s difficult to get information to everyone at once. We wanted something that would be useful to recreational gardeners and professional landscapers, aimed more at designing and planning than maintaining.”

The foundation got a grant from the National Park Service to work with other native plant promoters in Southern California: the Tree of Life Nursery in San Juan Capistrano, Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont and the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden in Santa Barbara.

The grant provided a facilitator, Patrick Johnston, “who was the soul of patience,” said Lili Singer, director of special projects at Theodore Payne. “Getting everybody to agree on a list of plants was a game-stopper for me, but he helped us step by step through the process. We hoped it would take 18 months, but from the time of our first conference call to the time the finished cards arrived, it took three years.”

Ultimately the group decided to create a series of flash cards “about the size and shape of an iPhone 6,” said Mike Evans, founder of the Tree of Life Nursery. “They’re like a deck of cards with a hole punched in the corner, and a ring to hold them together, but you can take them apart and spread them out on a table to see what plants go with other plants. They don’t replace a website or great books on the shelf; they’re just easier to carry around and use for planning.”

Singer wrote most of the text, with editing and contributions by Evans. And Carlos Flores, a Theodore Payne volunteer and National Park Service employee, created the design and made all the translations into Spanish.

The organizers “had quite a lively discussion about whether the text should also be in Spanish,” Connolly said. “There was pushback from people who wanted more info about each plant in English, but the landscape industry in Southern California is largely staffed with people who speak Spanish. We wanted to create a way for everyone to be able to talk about these native plants.”

This way, she said, the cards provide a bridge for Spanish-speaking gardeners and their English-speaking clients to more easily discuss the kinds of native plants they want to add to the yard.

And while the cards are relatively small, they pack a lot of information. You can tell at a glance how tall and wide a particular plant will grow, when it blooms, how quickly it grows, what birds and animals it attracts and how much water and sun it needs to thrive.

The cards aren’t a definitive list of Southern California native plants. They don’t include milkweed, for instance. But the decision was to create an entry-level guide that features some of the showiest plants in the native palette. “Milkweed is a very important habitat plant but it’s not much of a looker,” Connolly said. “We were going for the ones with the highest aesthetic appeal.”

Click Here: NRL Telstra Premiership

The cards were designed to stay affordable, Connolly said, with a suggested retail price of $17. They are available online through the Theodore Payne website and in the stores at Tree of Life Nursery, Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and Santa Barbara Botanic Garden.

And finally, Connolly says, the cards are part of a stealth plan to make native plants available at all Southern California nurseries. If people have the cards, they can more easily request the plants they want.

“If there’s no demand, local nurseries won’t stock the natives, but they will respond to demand,” she said. “That’s one of my secret uses for the cards. Yes, we want to support professional landscapers and home gardeners, but we also want retail nurseries to carry more natives.”

Asylum seekers who have finished their court cases are being sent back to Mexico with documents that contain fraudulent future court dates, keeping some migrants south of the border indefinitely, records show.

Under the Migrant Protection Protocols policy, asylum seekers with cases in the United States have to wait in Mexico until those cases are resolved. The Mexican government agreed to only accept migrants with future court dates scheduled.

Normally, when migrants conclude their immigration court cases, they are either paroled into the United States or kept in federal custody depending on the outcome of the case.

However, records obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune show that on at least 14 occasions, Customs and Border Protection agents in California and Texas gave migrants who had already concluded their court cases documents with fraudulent future court dates written on them and sent the migrants back to Mexico anyway.

Those documents, unofficially known as tear sheets, are given to every migrant in the Migrant Protection Protocols program who is sent back to Mexico. The document tells the migrants where and when to appear at the border so that they can be transported to immigration court. What is different about the tear sheets that migrants with closed cases receive is that the future court date is not legitimate, according to multiple immigration lawyers whose clients have received these documents.

This has happened both to migrants who have been granted asylum and those who had their cases terminated — meaning a judge closed the case without making a formal decision, usually on procedural grounds. Additionally, at least one migrant was physically assaulted after being sent back to Mexico this way, according to her lawyer.

Bashir Ghazialam, a San Diego immigration lawyer who represents six people who received these fake future court dates, said he was shocked by the developments.

“This is fraud,” he said. “I don’t call everything fraud. This is the first time I’ve used the words, ‘U.S. government’ and ‘fraud’ in the same sentence. No one should be OK with this.”

The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection did not respond to multiple requests to comment about why they had engaged in the practice.

Ghazialam first noticed this in September, when three of his clients were sent back to Mexico after their cases were terminated on Sept. 17. After the judge made his decision, the family spent 10 days in Customs and Border Protection custody.

On Sept. 27, the family was given a document that read, in part, “At your last court appearance, an immigration judge ordered you to return to court for another hearing.” That piece of paper told them to return to court on Nov. 28.

However, the immigration judge ordered no further hearing. Ghazialam’s clients do not have a hearing scheduled on that or any other day.

To confirm Ghazialam’s claims, a reporter called a Department of Justice hotline that people with immigration court cases use to check their status and dates of future hearings. That hotline confirmed that the family’s case had been terminated on Sept. 17 and that “the system does not contain any information regarding a future hearing date on your case.”

“That date is completely made up and the Mexican authorities are not trained enough to know this is a fake court date,” Ghazialam said.

After being returned to Mexico, the mother was stabbed in the forearm while protecting her children from an attempted kidnapping. She still has stitches from the knife wound, Ghazialam said.

The mother presented herself at the border shortly after the stabbing. She told Customs and Border Protection agents that she was afraid to stay in Mexico. The agents gave her a fear of return interview and tried to send her back to Mexico.

But this time, Mexican immigration officials refused to let her and her children back into Mexico because they did not have a court date, Ghazialam said. She is currently with relatives in New York, waiting to figure out the future of her legal status in the United States while wearing an ankle monitor.

In most of these cases, immigration attorneys aren’t aware that their clients were sent back to Mexico until it’s too late.

In one case, a Cuban asylum seeker was returned to Mexico after an immigration judge in Brownsville, Texas, granted her asylum.

The woman’s lawyer, Jodi Goodwin, remembers hugging her client after the decision and arranging a place to meet after authorities released her later that day following processing.

Goodwin expected the process to take 45 minutes, so she went to a nearby Whataburger and ordered a chocolate milkshake. About 40 minutes later, she got a phone call from her client.

“She was hysterical and crying,” Goodwin said. “I’m like, ‘What happened?’ and she says, ‘I’m in Mexico.’”

Goodwin called U.S. and Mexican immigration authorities to try to find out what happened. She spent five hours at the border until 9 p.m. and then went back home to draft a lawsuit. It wasn’t until she threatened to sue CBP that her client was paroled into the United States.

“It was total chaos for 24 hours to try to figure it out,” Goodwin said. “It shouldn’t be like that, especially when CBP is blatantly lying. They are creating documents that have false information.”

The American Immigration Lawyers Assn. said the practice worried them.

“The idea that even though these vulnerable individuals are able to obtain an asylum grant from an immigration judge and CBP is sending them back to harm’s way in Mexico is really disturbing, especially under the guise that there’s a future hearing date,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the organization.

Mexico’s Institute for National Migration did not immediately respond to questions about this practice.

Although Ghazialam and Goodwin were able to eventually get their clients back in the United States, some people are still in Mexico.

That’s what happened to a Guatemalan woman and her two children after a judge terminated their case on Oct. 18. The same day the judge closed their case, a U.S. immigration official gave her a piece of paper with the false hearing date of Jan. 16.

“But this appointment does not exist,” said the woman’s New York City attorney, Rebecca Press. “If you check with the immigration court system there is no January hearing date and the case has already been terminated.”

It’s unclear how widespread this practice is. Lawyers in San Diego; Laredo, Texas; and Brownsville confirmed they have seen it firsthand.

However, only about 1% of asylum seekers in the Migrant Protection Protocols program have lawyers. Therefore it’s difficult to track what happens to the overwhelming majority of the people in the program.

Lawyers said asylum seekers without legal representation who have been sent back in this manner likely have no way of advocating for themselves. It took Goodwin hours of calls to high-level officials in both U.S. and Mexican immigration agencies plus the threat of a lawsuit to get her client back in the United States.

“If you don’t have someone who’s willing to sit around and spend five hours on the phone and stay up all night drafting litigation to force their hand, you’re going to be stuck,” she said.

As news of these false hearing dates spread among the immigration attorney community, some lawyers are taking proactive steps to protect their clients from being returned to Mexico after their court cases are closed.

Siobhan Waldron, a Los Angeles lawyer, wrote a letter to Mexican immigration officials explaining that her client had no future hearing date and outlined a step-by-step process Mexican officials could take to verify that her client’s case had been closed by using the Department of Justice hotline.

The letter worked at first.

When CBP officers tried to return Waldron’s client to Mexico on Nov. 1 with a false January hearing date, her client showed the note to Mexican officials, who refused to take her in. However, the next day, CBP officers sent Waldron’s client back to Mexico with another false court date and this time did not allow her to show Mexican officials her lawyer’s letter that she kept in a special folder, Waldron said.

“They didn’t let her take it out,” Waldron said. “They said, ‘You can’t present anything from that folder.’”

The lawyer plans to file “any complaint you can imagine” to CBP, the Department of Homeland Security and other regulatory agencies because “these agents need to be held accountable.”

Her client is still in Mexico, too afraid to walk outside because she has already been kidnapped and assaulted, Waldron added.

Solis writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Click Here: NRL Telstra Premiership

BRUSSELS — 

French President Emmanuel Macron claimed that a lack of U.S. leadership is causing the “brain death” of the NATO military alliance, insisting in an interview published Thursday that the European Union must step up and start acting as a strategic world power.

Macron’s public criticism of the state of the world’s biggest military alliance was rejected by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, setting the scene for a possible showdown in London next month when President Trump joins his counterparts.

“What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” Macron told the Economist magazine. He said the United States under Trump appears to be “turning its back on us,” notably by pulling troops out of northeast Syria without notice.

Trump surprised his NATO partners with last month’s troop withdrawal. NATO plays no role in Syria, apart from helping the coalition fighting Islamic State. But the move was seen by Turkey, another NATO ally, as a green light to invade the region.

“So as soon as you have a member who feels they have a right to head off on their own, granted by the United States of America, they do it. And that’s what happened,” Macron said.

Trump also wrong-footed the allies by announcing a troop drawdown in Afghanistan and then declaring that peace talks with the Taliban were canceled after a bomb attack killed a U.S. soldier. NATO has played a major security role in the country since 2003, but its future there is now unclear.

Beyond that, the U.S. leader publicly berated other leaders at a May 2017 summit for failing to boost their military budgets. Trump’s preoccupation with defense spending has been a constant theme since he came to office in 2016 and is expected to feature at the Dec. 3-4 summit in London.

The United States is the biggest and most influential member of NATO. It spends more on its defense budget than all the other members combined.

Macron said the European members of the 29-nation alliance “should reassess the reality of what NATO is in the light of the commitment of the United States.”

But after talks with Stoltenberg in Berlin, Merkel said: “The French president chose drastic words. That is not my view of cooperation in NATO and I think that such a sweeping blow is not necessary, even if we do have problems, even if we must pull together.”

More broadly, Trump’s trade tariffs against the EU have also rankled European members of NATO and have appeared to target Germany. His decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement particularly annoyed Macron.

In the interview, Macron said that Trump “doesn’t share our idea of the European project.” He added that Europe stands on “the edge of a precipice” and must start thinking like a geopolitical power, otherwise it will “no longer be in control of our destiny.”

Merkel, however, said that “we in Europe certainly must take our fate in our hands a bit more, but the trans-Atlantic alliance is indispensable for us and I think there are many areas in which NATO works well.”

Agreeing with Merkel, Stoltenberg said, “We have to remember that any attempt to distance Europe from North America risks not only [weakening] the alliance, the trans-Atlantic bond, but also [dividing] Europe, so therefore we have to stand together.”

“I welcome European unity, I welcome efforts to strengthen European defense, but European unity cannot replace trans-Atlantic unity,” he added.

Here’s a pretty cool byproduct of the recent decision to allow Olympic figure skaters to perform to music with lyrics—now you can see them skate to some of the biggest hit pop songs. 

Skaters competing in the ice dancing short program on Saturday night were required to feature a “Latin rhythm” in their routines, and two pairs picked the Luis Fonsi mega hit “Despacito.”

First up was the South Korean pair of Yura Min and Alexander Gamelin. 

Click Here: Crystal Palace Shop

The very next duo, Chinese skaters Shiyue Wang and Xinyu Liu, also incorporated “Despacito” into their dance. Not the most original choice, but can you blame them for picking such a banger?