Back in 2018, President Donald Trump disputed having used the epithet “shithole” to describe some countries whose citizens emigrated to the United States.Nowadays, he embraces it and pushes his anti-immigrant and xenophobic tirades even further.Case in point: during a rally in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania on Wednesday that was supposed to focus on his economic policy, the 79-year-old Republican openly ranted and reused the phrase that had sparked an outcry during his first term.”We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? ‘Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?'” Trump told his cheering audience. “But we always take people from Somalia,” he continued. “Places that are a disaster. Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”Recently, he called Somali immigrants “trash.”These comments are “more proof of his racist, anti-immigrant agenda,” Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey responded on X.- The Trump megaphone -Florida Republican lawmaker Randy Fine, on the other hand, defended Trump.”Not all cultures are equal and not all countries are equal,” he said on CNN, adding “the president speaks in language that Americans understand, he is blunt.”University of Albany history professor Carl Bon Tempo told AFP this type of anti-immigrant rhetoric has long thrived on the far-right.”The difference is now it’s coming directly out of the White House,” he said, adding “there’s no bigger megaphone” in American politics.On the campaign trail in 2023, Trump told a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” — a remark that drew comparisons to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Now back in power, Trump’s administration has launched a sweeping and brutal deportation campaign and suspended immigration applications from nationals of 19 of the poorest countries on the planet.Simultaneously, the president ordered white South African farmers to be admitted to the US, claiming their persecution.- No filter left -“Any filter he might have had is gone,” Terri Givens, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and immigration policy expert, told AFP. For Trump, it doesn’t matter whether an immigrant obeys the law, or owns a business, or has been here for decades, according to Syracuse University political science professor Mark Brockway.”They are caught in the middle of Trump’s fight against an invented evil enemy,” Brockway told AFP.By describing some immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” — as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem did earlier this month — the White House is designating a target other than itself for American economic ire at a time when the cost of living has gone up and fears are growing over job security and loss of federal benefits.But, Bon Tempo noted, “when immigration spikes as an issue, it spikes because of economics sometimes, but it also spikes because of these larger sort of foundational questions about what it means to be an American.”On November 28, after an Afghan national attacked two National Guard soldiers in Washington, Trump took to his Truth Social network to call for “REVERSE MIGRATION.”This notion, developed by European far-right theorists such as French writer Renaud Camus, refers to the mass expulsion of foreigners deemed incapable of assimilation.Digging into the “Make America Great Again” belief system, many experts have noted echoes of the “nativist” current of politics from the 1920s in the US, which held that white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture was the true American identity.That stance led to immigration policies favoring Northern and Western Europe.As White House senior advisor Stephen Miller recently wrote on X: “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies…At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

The US government has moved to drop its case against a former Fox broadcasting executive involved in the FIFA corruption scandal that plunged the world’s footballing body into crisis.Prosecutors told the Supreme Court on Tuesday they wanted to end their fight to preserve the convictions of Hernan Lopez and Argentine sports marketing firm Full Play. Both were found guilty in March 2023 of paying bribes to secure lucrative television rights to international football officials. The convictions were overturned on appeal months later, before being reinstated this July.The case was one of several to emerge from a sweeping 2015 corruption probe by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), which ultimately led to the downfall of then-FIFA president Sepp Blatter.In a filing to the Supreme Court, which Lopez had asked to review his conviction, prosecutors said that dismissal of the case is “in the interests of justice,” without giving further details. They asked the case be returned to a lower court for its formal dismissal.”I’m grateful the truth prevailed, and I’m also confident more of that truth will come out,” Lopez, a US and Argentine citizen, wrote on X late Tuesday.While there was no indication of Donald Trump’s involvement, the US president has issued a string of pardons including for corruption related offenses.In February, he ordered the DOJ to pause enforcement of a long-established law that prohibits American companies from bribing officials of foreign governments to gain business.Lopez was facing up to 40 years in prison and millions of dollars in penalties after his conviction for money laundering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy.During the trial, a US court heard that the main beneficiaries of the kickback scheme were six of the most powerful men in South American football.They included former CONMEBOL president Nicolas Leoz, who died in 2019, former Argentine football executive Julio Grondona, who died in 2014, and former Brazilian football chief Ricardo Teixeira.The United States will host the World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico next year.FIFA president Gianni Infantino has cozied up with Trump ahead of the sporting event, this month awarding him the governing body’s inaugural “peace prize.”

In pursuit of the AI dream, the tech industry this year has plunked down about $400 billion on specialized chips and data centers, but questions are mounting about the wisdom of such unprecedented levels of investment.At the heart of the doubts: overly optimistic estimates about how long these specialized chips will last before becoming obsolete. With persistent worries of an AI bubble and so much of the US economy now riding on the boom in artificial intelligence, analysts warn that the wake-up call could be brutal and costly.”Fraud” is how renowned investor Michael Burry, made famous by the movie “The Big Short,” described the situation on X in early November.Before the AI wave unleashed by ChatGPT, cloud computing giants typically assumed that their chips and servers would last about six years.But Mihir Kshirsagar of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy says the “combination of wear and tear along with technological obsolescence makes the six-year assumption hard to sustain.”One problem: chip makers — with Nvidia the unquestioned leader — are releasing new, more powerful processors much faster than before.Less than a year after launching its flagship Blackwell chip, Nvidia announced that Rubin would arrive in 2026 with performance 7.5 times greater.At this pace, chips lose 85 to 90 percent of their market value within three to four years, warned Gil Luria of financial advisory firm D.A. Davidson.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made the point himself in March, explaining that when Blackwell was released, nobody wanted the previous generation of chip anymore.”There are circumstances where Hopper is fine,” he added, referring to the older chip. “Not many.”AI processors are also failing more often than in the past, Luria noted.”They run so hot that sometimes the equipment just burns out,” he said.A recent Meta study on its Llama AI model found an annual failure rate of 9 percent.- Profit risk -For Kshirsagar and Burry alike, the realistic lifespan of these AI chips is just two or three years.Nvidia pushed back in an unusual November statement, defending the industry’s four-to-six-year estimate as based on real-world evidence and usage trends.But Kshirsagar believes these optimistic assumptions mean the AI boom rests on “artificially low” costs — and consequences are inevitable.If companies were forced to shorten their depreciation timelines, “it would immediately impact the bottom line” and slash profits, warned Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.”This is where companies get in trouble with creative bookkeeping.”The fallout could ripple through an economy increasingly dependent on AI, analysts warn.Luria isn’t worried about giants like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, which have diverse revenue streams. His concern focuses on AI specialists like Oracle and CoreWeave.Both companies are already heavily indebted while racing to buy more chips to compete for cloud customers.Building data centers requires raising significant capital, Luria points out.”If they look like they’re a lot less profitable” because equipment must be replaced more frequently, “it will become more expensive for them to raise the capital.”The situation is especially precarious because some loans use the chips themselves as collateral.Some companies hope to soften the blow by reselling older chips or using them for less demanding tasks than cutting-edge AI.A chip from 2023, “if economically viable, can be used for second-tier problems and as a backup,” Peddie said.