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Retired ICE director discusses the future of immigration and traffic at the border under the Biden administration.

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  • Lindsey Graham claims GOP will try to impeach Kamala Harris

    Senator falsely claims vice president bailed out ‘rioter’ who later ‘broke somebody’s head open’

  • Devastation as 500 tanker blast destroys Afghanistan-Iran customs post

    A catastrophic explosion and fire at an Afghan customs depot has destroyed hundreds of fuel tankers and caused traders tens of millions of pounds of losses. A series of blasts hurled lorries hundreds of yards into the air and deposited the crumpled remains of fuel tanks as far as half a mile from the blast site. Nasa satellites could reportedly see the blast from space and the fire was so intense that Afghan officials appealed to neighbouring Iran for help. The blast on the Iranian border in Western Afghanistan destroyed as much as $50 million worth of vehicles and goods, the local chamber of commerce said. “It's a huge catastrophe for the private sector,” said Younis Qazizada, a spokesman for the chamber. Health officials in the nearby city of Herat said only 17 people had been injured, but with the customs depot entirely incinerated, there were fears bodies would only be found later. The cause of the blast was unknown, officials said. “The devastation is much higher than we imagined,” said Mr Qazizada. “There's no infrastructure remaining at all.” Some estimates put the number of destroyed fuel tankers as high as 500. The blast site was still smouldering on Sunday. Electricity pylons had been knocked down by the force of the blast and the highway next to the depot was blocked by incinerated vehicles. Crowds looted many of the remaining lorries and on Sunday there were repeated bursts of gunfire as soldiers tried to keep order. Local traders blamed delays by customs officials for building a dangerous backlog of tankers are the border. Iranian state media said the country had sent several helicopters, 11 fire engines and 21 ambulances to the scene after requests for help from the local governor. Units of the Iranian Army's Ground Force were also sent to the border area and the Iranian police were drafted into rescue operations.

  • Biden administration has "deep concerns" about WHO's COVID-19 probe

    President Biden's National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a statement on Saturday that the administration is concerned by the World Health Organization's (WHO) probe into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why it matters: Sullivan said the administration fears the Chinese government may have intervened or altered the findings of the investigation.Stay on top of the latest market trends and economic insights with Axios Markets. Subscribe for freeContext: On the first day of his administration, Biden acted to return the U.S. to the WHO. The Trump administration had started a withdrawal from the organization in July 2020.WHO teams last month conducted the investigation in Wuhan, China, where the virus first emerged. The investigation had been agreed to last May, but it was delayed after Chinese officials withheld authorization to allow the international team's scheduled visit. The delay drew a rare rebuke from WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.The WHO team concluded that it's "extremely unlikely" the virus came from a laboratory accident, and that it most likely jumped to humans via an intermediate species.“Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific, targeted research,” said WHO scientist Peter Ben Embarek.What they're saying: "The mission of the World Health Organization (WHO) has never been more important, and we have deep respect for its experts and the work they are doing every day to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and advance global health and health security," Sullivan said in a statement."But re-engaging the WHO also means holding it to the highest standards. And at this critical moment, protecting the WHO’s credibility is a paramount priority." "We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them.""It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government. To better understand this pandemic and prepare for the next one, China must make available its data from the earliest days of the outbreak."The big picture: Going forward, Sullivan said all countries, including China, should be more transparent in order to prevent health emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic and allow other countries to respond to them faster.The other side: The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., said in a statement the U.S. has in recent years "severely undermined multilateral institutions, including the WHO, and gravely damaged international cooperation on COVID-19." So the U.S. should not be "pointing fingers at other countries" who've supported the WHO, the statement added.Editor's note: This article has been updated with comment from the Chinese Embassy.Like this article? Get more from Axios and subscribe to Axios Markets for free.

  • The curious case of the fugitive drug 'kingpin' who outran his charges

    After three decades on the run, Howard Farley Jr. was arrested in Florida, where he had been hiding in plain sight.

  • Nigeria's president calls for calm after clashes in southwest Oyo state

    Clashes between traders from the Yoruba and Hausa ethnic groups broke out on Saturday at Shasha market in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo, the state governor's spokesman said. Most Yoruba live in southwestern Nigeria, while the Hausa are concentrated in northern states. Tensions have increased in southwestern states in recent weeks amid claims by public figures that nomadic cattle herders from the mainly northern Fulani ethnic group are carrying out violent crimes, which the pastoralists have denied.

  • Reports: Israeli strike near Syrian capital kills 6 fighters

    Israel fired several missiles early on Monday targeting areas near the Syrian capital, Damascus, Syria's state news agency reported. An opposition war-monitoring group said the strikes killed six Iran-backed fighters. The SANA news agency claimed that Syrian air defenses shot down most of the missiles, which it said were fired from Syria’s Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

  • ‘The last straw’: the US families ending love affair with grocery chain after Capitol riot

    Families are boycotting Publix after a member of founding family donated $300,000 to the Donald Trump rally that preceded January’s deadly Capitol attack Florida-based grocery chain operates more than 1,200 stores across seven south-eastern states. Photograph: Larry Marano/REX/Shutterstock Wendy Mize’s family grew up on Publix, disciples to the giant supermarket chain’s empirical marketing slogan: “Where shopping is a pleasure”. As infants, her three daughters wore diapers bought from the Publix baby club. As children, they munched on free cookies from the bakery. There were even perks for the family’s pets, who are proud members of Publix Paws. But now the decades-long love affair is over. After a member of Publix’s founding family donated $300,000 to the Donald Trump rally that preceded January’s deadly Capitol riots, Mize is pulling out of what she says has become “an abusive, dysfunctional relationship”, and joining others in a boycott of the Florida-based grocery chain that operates more than 1,200 stores across seven south-eastern states. “It was the last straw,” said Mize, 57, an advertising copywriter from Orlando whose youngest twin daughters are now 19. “Insurrection at the Capitol, images of the police officer with his head being crushed, individuals dressed as Vikings on the floor of the Senate… we’re not going to call this normal. [Publix] are a private company and it is their business how they want to contribute their money, but it’s also my right to decide where I want to spend my dollars.” Publix is an institution in Florida, the company growing from Depression-era roots in the 1930s to a regional behemoth with 225,000 workers today, and its founding Jenkins family now worth $8.8bn, according to Forbes. It prides itself on a family-friendly image, luring customers with prominent buy-one-get-one deals and a range of popular sandwich subs, and boasts of being the largest employee-owned company in the US. Yet the company and its founders have donated often and generously to partisan, conservative causes, including more than $2m alone by Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli, daughter of the late company founder George Jenkins, to the Republican National Committee and Trump’s failed re-election campaign. In a brief statement on 30 January, to date the company’s only comment about Fancelli, Publix attempted to distance itself from her. Yet her funding of the Trump gathering that formed the insurrection’s opening act, and revealed by the Wall Street Journal to have been channelled through the rightwing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, was just the latest in a series of controversies and missteps that left some shoppers holding their noses as they filled their carts, or others like Mize pulling out altogether. Three years ago, in the aftermath of the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17, Publix temporarily halted political donations after an outcry over its bankrolling of Adam Putnam, a self-confessed “proud National Rifle Association sellout”, for state governor. Parkland survivors, led by the activist David Hogg, and their supporters staged “die-ins” at Publix supermarkets in several locations, protesting the company’s donation of $670,000, through its political action committee, to Putnam’s campaign. Putnam, as Florida’s commissioner of agriculture, had strongly opposed stricter gun laws following the shooting. Publix donated donated $100,000 to a political action committee looking to secure Ron DeSantis’s re-election in 2022. Soon after, the governor awarded Publix a lucrative and exclusive contract to distribute Covid-19 vaccines in numerous stores. Photograph: Bob Self/AP He was also the state official responsible for regulating Publix’s 800 stores in Florida, but ended up losing the Republican primary to the current governor Ron DeSantis, a staunch Trump ally and another recipient of the company’s political benevolence. Earlier this year, Publix donated donated $100,000 to a political action committee looking to secure DeSantis’s re-election in 2022. Soon after, the governor awarded Publix a lucrative and exclusive contract to distribute Covid-19 vaccines in numerous stores. The governor’s office, which denied impropriety, has since added other retailers, including Walmart and Winn Dixie, to its approved distribution chain. But the controversy did not sit well with some observers. “This is, plain and simple, dirty pay-to-play politics, corruption made possible by having a manipulative governor who kept Covid-19 infection data secret and is now doing the same with vaccine distribution,” the Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago wrote. “He isn’t working for us, but on behalf of his re-election campaign. And this is exactly the type of politician Publix aids and abets by financing their careers.” Others point to the juxtaposition of Publix being at the forefront of vaccine distribution in Florida while failing to enforce in-store mask wearing in some areas of the state, and defending a damaging wrongful death lawsuit from the family of an employee in Miami who died of Covid complications after being told not to wear a mask. A judge in Tampa last week threw out the company’s demand to reduce the lawsuit to a worker’s compensation claim after the company asked for 70-year-old deli worker Gerardo Gutierrez’s death last April to be classified as a workplace accident. Gutierrez’s family insists he contracted the infection from a colleague after employees were banned from wearing masks by workplace regulations later reversed. Publix has said it does not comment on pending litigation, and did not respond to other questions from the Guardian for this article. “They were very slow adapting to the pandemic, and the new pandemic rules,” said Craig Pittman, author of several books on Florida culture who has chronicled Publix’s rise to become the state’s premier grocery retailer. “But the thing with Publix is it does lots of little things that people like, they make a big deal of the fact they’ll carry your groceries to the car and won’t accept the tip, they give free cookies to the kids in the bakery, if you ask for a sample they’ll give it to you no questions asked. “So for a long time people have been willing to overlook some of the less savory aspects of the story, a number of sexual and racial discrimination lawsuits filed by employees, and this whole thing about them or their heirs donating to various politicians. “ Corporate messaging experts say Publix is walking a tightrope in its handling of the Fancelli crisis. “What Publix does is take the middle path, they minimize responsibility, and by noting that Mrs Fancelli’s actions were essentially those of a private citizen not involved in the company, they’re saying, ‘Look, we don’t have control here,” said professor Josh Scacco of the University of South Florida’s department of communication. “Publix assesses the situation as: ‘We don’t have responsibility, or responsibilities beyond guilt by association’. [But while] there is separation between the person at the checkout, the person behind the deli counter, the manager of a store, the CEO, and then the political action committee, ultimately they all come under the umbrella of Publix.” Scacco also believes the furore mirrors the increasingly partisan nature of corporate America, where even the purchase of guava and cheese square from a Publix bakery has become a political statement. “President Trump, for example, would tweet out support for a particular company and brand approval immediately polarized, Republicans like that company, Democrats dislike that company,” he said. “That is the risk that companies face being so closely tied to a particular leader or set of leaders. “It’s also partly why there was such a rush immediately after 6 January for many of these companies to say, ‘We are not donating to individuals in Congress who voted to overturn the election result, we’re just not going to do it’.” Mize, and her family, meanwhile, are working through their Publix break-up with a mixture of grief and relief. “This time I just thought, ‘Enough. It’s not going to be business as normal’.”

  • Biden calls on Congress to ban assault weapons

    Sunday marked the third anniversary of the Parkland school shooting.

  • Authorities search for suspect in 2016 homicide after skeletal remains identified as missing Louisiana woman

    The remains were found in a rural area of Evangeline Parish, Louisiana during the search for a missing child in December 2018.

  • US cold snap: Why is Texas seeing Arctic temperatures?

    Freezing temperatures have been recorded across the usually hot southern US state.

  • 14 killed in highway crash in India; 4 critically injured

    A speeding minibus jumped a road divider and crashed into a truck on a highway in southern India early Sunday, killing 14 members of a family, police said. The only survivors in the bus, four children under the age of 12, were critically injured, said police officer Fakirappa, who uses one name. The family was heading to Ajmer on a Muslim pilgrimage in western India, he said.

  • Florida woman seeks charges dropped, claims self-defense in SWAT officer shooting

    Last September, Diamonds Ford was arrested for shooting a Jacksonville Sheriff SWAT team officer after law enforcement broke a window while serving a search warrant. The Jacksonville, Florida woman, who was woken the morning of Sept. 28 by the sound of glass breaking, is now asking that charges brought against her be dropped arguing that she was unaware that it was law enforcement attempting to enter her home when she fired gunshots through the window.

  • Row over WHO Covid-19 probe escalates as China accuses U.S. of damaging cooperation

    The U.S. is "pointing fingers" at other countries who have been supportive of the WHO, Chinese embassy in Washington said in a statement Sunday.

  • Fort Worth, other school districts to go virtual only Tuesday due to ‘historic storm’

    Monday is a school holiday.

  • Philippines says wants more than 'loose change' for U.S. troops deal

    The United States is providing the Philippines with military aid that amounts to "loose change" compared to other Asian countries, a top official said on Monday, justifying demands by President Rodrigo Duterte for Washington to pay more. Duterte last week said the United States should fork out more if it wants to maintain a two-decade old Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which he unilaterally cancelled last year in an angry response to an ally being denied a U.S. visa. "If we have very strong ties with a very strong ally then I think it also comes with a higher amount of financial assistance to be given," presidential spokesman Harry Roque told a regular briefing.

  • Power cut across Texas as snow, ice blanket southern Plains

    A winter storm dropping snow and ice also sent temperatures plunging across the southern Plains, prompting a power emergency in Texas a day after conditions canceled flights and impacted traffic across large swaths of the U.S. Rotating power outages were initiated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, early Monday morning, meaning thousands went without electricity for short periods as temperatures fell into the teens near Dallas and 20s (about minus 5 degrees Celsius) around Houston. ERCOT manages the flow of electric power in the state.

  • One in custody in connection with suspected human smuggling incident

    In a chilling 911 call this week, a migrant told Texas dispatchers that he and about 80 others were trapped in a tank truck. They have not been found.

  • Thousands protests after Myanmar night of fear

    At a Yangon pagoda four suspected ex-criminals lie, tied up, on the ground.They were caught overnight by residents in the Sanchaung neighborhood, who fear Myanmar's military released them to cause trouble.Worries about criminal activity have increased since Friday (February 12), when the junta announced it would free 23,000 prisoners.They said the move was consistent with "establishing a new, democratic state with peace, development and discipline"But unverified pictures on social media have fueled rumors that criminals are trying to stir unrest by setting fires or poisoning water supplies.Tin Myint, who was among the crowds that detained the men in Sanchaung, cited pro-democracy protests in 1988 - when the military was widely accused of releasing criminals to stage attacks."We think the military intends to cause violence with these criminals by getting them to infiltrate the peaceful protests. Then the military will have a reason to extend their power to crack down on violence."The men were handed over to police. The government and the army could not be reached for comment.This is just one episode from a night in which residents patrolled together, fearful of attacks and arrest raids.But despite their worries, people were once again out in force on Sunday (February 14) - from thousands marching in Yangon and convoys of motorbikes in the capital Naypidaw, to drumming in the coastal southeastern town of Dawei and flag-waving and revolutionary songs in Waimaw, in the mountainous, far-northern Kachin.One common thread across those protests - the face of Aung San Suu Kyi.Her detention, on charges of importing walkie-talkies, is due to expire on Monday (February 15). Her lawyer could not be reached for comment on what was set to happen.

  • Trump impeachment: Insurrection incitement charge a 'monstrous lie'

    The ex-president's lawyers present evidence in the US Senate relating to the deadly Capitol riots.

  • S.Korea cuts Q1 COVID-19 vaccination plan, restricts use of AstraZeneca shot

    South Korea said on Monday it will not use AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine on people aged 65 and older, reversing an earlier decision, and scaled back initial vaccination targets due to delayed shipments from global vaccine-sharing scheme COVAX. South Korea had said it would complete vaccinations on 1.3 million people by the first quarter of this year with AstraZeneca shots, but it slashed the target sharply to 750,000. The decision is largely due to adjustments in the supply timetable of the 2.6 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine from COVAX, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said on Monday.