1 ‘Extreme vetting’ for those entering US (Sabrina
Siddiqui in The Guardian) Marking a draconian shift in US policy, Donald Trump has
issued an executive order that will deny refugees and immigrants from certain
Muslim-majority countries entry to the US.
With a simple stroke of his pen, the president
issued what he dubbed “extreme vetting” measures intended to “keep terrorists
out” of the US – the details of which were even more severe than had been
expected.
Trump’s unprecedented action will indefinitely close
US borders to refugees fleeing the humanitarian crisis in war-torn Syria and
impose a de facto ban on Muslims traveling to the US from parts of the Middle
East and North Africa by prioritizing refugee claims “on the basis of
religious-based persecution”.
The action puts in place a 90-day block on entry to
the US from citizens from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia.
It is unclear whether the measure would apply to citizens of those countries on
trips abroad who already have permission to live and work in the US.
It suspends the admittance of all refugees to the US
for a period of 120 days, and terminates indefinitely all refugee admissions
from Syria, where the nearly six-year war under Bashar al-Assad’s regime has
led to more than 500,000 civilian deaths and created the displacement of an
estimated 11 million Syrians. It also caps the total number of refugees
entering the US in 2017 to 50,000 – less than half the previous year’s figure
of 117,000.
The number of refugees currently arriving to the US
is not high by historic standards. In the early 1990s, more than 100,000
refugees were admitted to the country annually. But by 2015, the latest year
covered by Department for Homeland Security (DHS) statistics, that figure had
fallen to just 69,920 refugees.
The number of refugees admitted to the US increased
significantly in 2016, to 96,875, according to the Refugee Processing Center. That
figure represents just 0.03% of the US population of 323 million people.
2 US GDP misses forecast with 1.9% growth in Q4
(BBC) The US economy grew at an annual pace of 1.9% in the fourth quarter of
last year, according to official figures. That was slower than the 2.2% growth
rate economists had been expecting and below third quarter growth of 3.5%.
For the year, GDP rose by 1.6%, the slowest since
2011 and down on 2015 when the world's largest economy expanded by 2.6%. President
Donald Trump has promised to lift GDP growth to 4%, through tax cuts and
infrastructure spending. The last time that America's economy grew at that rate
was in 2000, the year of the dotcom boom, when it expanded by 4.1%.
Nancy Curtin, chief investment officer at Close
Brothers Asset Management, said the data highlighted how the heightened
political climate in the US and Europe had "put a pinch on US
growth".
Full year growth of 1.6% places the US behind the
UK, which this week reported that GDP rose by 2% last year. UK output also grew
ahead of Germany, the so-called engine room of the European economy, which
expanded by 1.9% last year.
3 Apple may join AI research group (Gulf News) Apple
Inc is set to join the Partnership on AI, an artificial intelligence research
group that includes Amazon.com Inc, Google, Facebook Inc, International
Business Machines Corp and Microsoft Corp.
Apple’s admission into the group could be announced
as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the situation.
Representatives at Apple and the Partnership on AI declined to comment.
When the non-profit organisation was announced in
September, it anticipated gaining additional members. Apple, Twitter Inc, Intel
Corp and China’s Baidu Inc were among noticeable absentees at the time. While
the introduction of the Siri virtual assistant in 2011 gave Apple an early
presence in AI for consumers, it has since lost ground to rivals such as Google
and Amazon.
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