Category World News

For months now, US President Donald Trump’s administration has been leading a well-publicised crackdown on migration. The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have turned deportations into media spectacles, posting videos of chained deportees and releasing their names to spread fear.

Within the past few weeks, the Trump administration has expanded its deportation surge to include even foreign nationals with legal status in the country, including academics. The president has pledged to deport 11 million people –&nbsp, doubling the number removed under President Joe Biden and even surpassing President Barack Obama’s two terms, during which 5.3 million people were deported.

While the world’s attention is focusing on Trump’s anti-migration spectacle, the European Union is quietly carrying out its own crackdown. Its policies are far less visible, yet they are just as ruthless.

In the first nine months of 2024, EU states issued 327, 880 expulsion orders, with 27, 740 people forcibly removed between July and September. Deportations have intensified, as EU states have begun implementing the new Pact on Migration and Asylum, which was passed in December 2023 and entered into force in June 2024.

Under its provisions, EU members are fast-tracking removals, expanding detention centres, and strengthening cooperation with third countries to facilitate deportations. However, it is not only member states that will be part of this.

Balkan countries that have to fulfill certain criteria to become part of the EU, through the EU accession process, are effectively being turned into a border zone for the EU. Unlike EU member states, Balkan candidate states had no say in shaping this pact, yet they are forced to implement it and abide by what can only be described as colonial blackmail.

Most recently, the EU made its expectations clear at the December EU-Western Balkans Summit, declaring that, “We need to strengthen our cooperation and strategic partnerships in migration management, which is a shared challenge and responsibility and a key priority”.

This is part of the EU’s broader strategy to externalise migration control and fortify its borders, but also to move away from any responsibility and accountability for violations of human rights and transfer them on to third countries.

A key part of this strategy is the creation of “return hubs” close to and outside the EU’s borders – places where unwanted people can be warehoused. This model, championed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is already in motion. People are being sent to the Balkans, Turkey and North Africa. Frontex, the EU’s border agency, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) play key roles in enforcing these removals.

In practice, we can see what that looks like in Croatia, the EU member state bordering two Balkan non-member states – Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Croatia has played an important role in maintaining the EU border regime by normalising pushbacks, which over the years caused numerous deaths and injuries and represented a massive violation of fundamental human rights. Instead of establishing responsibility for this, the EU rewarded Croatia – along with Bulgaria and Romania – by allowing them to join the Schengen Agreement, which abolishes border control between member states.

The EU has also strengthened readmission agreements – bilateral deals that allow EU states to send people back to their country of origin or country of transit, pushing them to the edge of the EU or outside its borders, basically to offload migrants. As a result, the Balkans have become a dumping ground for people the EU wants to expel.

Croatian authorities have not published any reports on migration control since 2020, but Minister of Interior Davor Bozinovic said in January that border police prevented 71, 000 “illegal entries” in 2024. The Bosnian Office for Foreigners reported that in 2023, Croatian authorities returned 4, 265 people into Bosnian territory. Bosnia, with financial aid from the EU, removed 893 people to their countries of origin or countries that accepted them through interstate agreements, while 96 migrants left through the IOM’s controversial “voluntary return” programme, which scholar Jean-Pierre Gauci has described as “disguised deportation”.

Currently, Croatia has four detention and return hubs located in Ježevo (near Zagreb), Tovarnik (by the Croatian-Serbian border), Dugi Dol (along the Croatian-Bosnian border) and Trilj (along the Croatian-Bosnian border).

NGOs and journalists have documented widespread rights violations inside these centres, including, inhumane living conditions and indefinite detention. It has also been a consistent practice of the local authorities to send foreign nationals to these centres for a few days and then to take them out and push them across the border with Serbia or Bosnia. There have also been cases of children and single women being detained in overcrowded men’s facilities.

Since the beginning of this year, Croatian police have intensified their activities along the eastern border. Their officers will be joined by colleagues from Slovenia and Italy under a newly signed agreement for joint patrols of the Croatian border. At the same time, border police have received more surveillance cameras and police vehicles equipped with surveillance technology.

After an EU ministerial meeting in Brussels earlier this month, Bozinovic declared that deportations are no longer a “taboo” topic in the EU and that the European Commission was looking into legislative proposals to speed them up.

Croatia’s non-EU borders are already dotted with unmarked graves of people who have perished while on the move to seek safety and security. The new pact will only intensify the brutality asylum seekers face at Croatia’s borders and in non-member states like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia and elsewhere.

The new pact is allocating millions of euros for policies and technologies that will directly feed into the global politics of dehumanisation of people on the move. It is also empowering Frontex, which has long been accused of complicity in illegal pushbacks and human rights violations, to play an even bigger role in border control and deportations. Its annual budget for deportation-related expenses alone is 18 million euros ($19.5m).

As we write this, alarm bells are ringing across the EU. In Germany, solidarity groups are trying to stop the deportations of Palestinians. In Italy, the government is still looking for ways to send unwanted migrants to centres built for that purpose in Albania. Austria has temporarily halted family reunions for asylum claimants. France has introduced more strict immigration policies and started to deport more people, which led to a row with Algeria due to a high number of deportees.

It is now increasingly clear that Western countries, led by the EU and the US, are using migrants as scapegoats to justify militarised border control. The EU’s collaboration with Israel in developing advanced surveillance and AI technology is central to this strategy. The very systems used to track and control migrants today – drones, biometric databases and predictive policing – were tested in occupied Palestine before being deployed at European borders. Asylum seekers, Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them are the first targets, but they will not be the last.

If we fail to challenge these policies, this machinery of control will continue expanding, ensnaring more and more people in its grip. The only way forward is to build transnational solidarity networks that resist these injustices and hold those in power accountable while exposing the flawed political and economic systems that allow for the global dehumanisation of disadvantaged communities. The alternative is to remain silent and allow a future where no one is safe.

Mandalay, Bangkok – Rescue workers in Myanmar are struggling to save people trapped beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings in the country’s second-largest city, Mandalay, following the powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake that toppled buildings, brought down bridges, destroyed roads and sent shockwaves felt across the region.

Every street in the city has collapsed buildings as a result of Friday’s quake. Distraught residents are waiting outside their damaged and flattened homes and businesses for rescue crews and any assistance from the government, which has yet to arrive.

Mandalay resident Sandar Win, 45, told Al Jazeera how her six-year-old son was trapped under falling debris and suffered a fractured pelvis.

Sandar Win said she brought her boy to Mandalay General Hospital but they were turned away as the facility was overcrowded with victims of the earthquake.

“So we had to go to a private hospital. He is now in the operating room,” Sandar Win said. “He is our only child. My heart is dying to see my son like this.”

Shops, restaurants and teashops are closed and there are crowds at Mandalay’s petrol stations, with people in need of fuel for electric generators as power is out in the city of more than 1.5 million.

Ambulances have been seen speeding in the direction of Pyin Oo Lwin, a town situated in the scenic hills about 64km (40 miles) east of Mandalay and popular with foreign tourists and visitors from other parts of Myanmar.

Wai Phyo, a rescue worker, said search and recovery teams were doing their best but were overwhelmed by the scale of destruction and the lack of “proper equipment”.

“There are many people still trapped under the debris. We hope to get them alive but the hope is not so bright,” Wai Phyo told Al Jazeera, adding that communications were also a problem as they barely had phone lines and access to the internet was almost impossible.

Myanmar’s military has sent troops to the affected areas, but “they are not helping,” Wai Phyo said.

“We don’t need them here,” he said, adding: “We need proper aid.”

The Reuters news agency also reported that rescue workers in Mandalay had to borrow machinery from private businesses to help shift debris, and some residents had taken to Facebook to appeal for donations of equipment to aid the rescue efforts.

Rescue operations in the city are now turning to recovery as the time window to save survivors closes, Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng reported from Mandalay.

“I was just speaking to the fire chief who is leading this operation about the revised figure of 1,000 fatalities across Myanmar and he simply said there are a thousand bodies in this city alone, which suggests those numbers are going to rise, and rise steeply,” Cheng said.

‘Working around the clock’

In Thailand’s capital Bangkok, rescue efforts are focused on a collapsed 30-storey building, which was under construction at the time the earthquake hit and where dozens of workers are believed to be under the ruins.

At least 10 people died in Bangkok on Friday despite the city being more than 1,000km (620 miles) from the epicentre in Myanmar.

“It’s hard to locate the missing,” said Atikom Watkoson, a rescue worker at the scene of what was to be a multistorey government building in Bangkok’s Chatuchak district.

The search has been complicated by the fact there is no clear indication where in the building the estimated 47 missing workers were when it collapsed on Friday, Atikom Watkoson told Al Jazeera.

But sign of survivors have been detected and heavy machinery has been brought in to help clear the mountain of debris from the site, he said.

Still, “there is a lot of work left to get through,” Atikom Watkoson added.

Across Bangkok, engineers and government officials are now inspecting the integrity of the city’s hundreds of skyscrapers, with residents of many high-rise buildings reporting cracks in walls and floors.

“It’s all high-rise buildings in Bangkok’s city centre,” said Sirin Hiranthanakasem, a resident in the capital who fled down 23 flights of stairs when the earthquake struck and is now staying in a hotel, too afraid to return to her apartment.

“If something was to collapse, we would not survive,” she said.

The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration has also opened an online portal for people in the capital to report damage to buildings.

Despite the chaos resulting from the earthquake on Friday and the Bangkok authorities declaring the city a disaster zone, the Thai capital has quickly returned to normal with the city’s airports functioning and light rail system back up and running, with most shops and restaurants back in operation.

Still, Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minster Anutin Charnvirakul said all possible resources have been deployed to search for survivors at the site of the building collapse and recover the bodies of the deceased.

“We always have hope,” he told reporters of the possibility of finding workers alive.

Have you ever been convinced that you remember being a baby? A moment in a crib, or the taste of a first birthday cake?

Chances are, those memories aren’t real. Decades of research suggest that most people cannot recall personal experiences from the first few years of life.

However, even though we can’t remember being a baby, a new study has found new evidence that babies do take in the world around them and may also begin forming memories far earlier than once thought.

How did the study work and what did it find?

A study published this month in Science by researchers at Yale and Columbia universities has revealed that babies as young as 12 months old can form memories via the hippocampus – a part of the brain that stores memories in adults, too.

To observe this, the researchers used a specially adapted brain scan for infants during a single session. It allowed them to watch how babies’ brains responded while they were awake and looking at images of faces and objects. Parents remained close to their babies, which helped keep them calm and alert.

In the study, 26 infants aged four to 25 months were shown a series of images. It was found that if a baby’s hippocampus was more active the first time they saw a particular image, they would look at the same image for longer when it reappeared a short time later, next to a new one – suggesting they recognised it.

“Our results suggest that babies’ brains have the capacity for forming memories – but how long-lasting these memories are is still an open question,” said Tristan Yates, a postdoctoral research scientist in the department of psychology at Columbia University and lead author of the study.

This is the first time scientists have directly observed how a memory begins to take shape in an awake baby’s brain. Previous research relied on indirect observations, such as watching whether babies reacted to something familiar. This time, however, researchers observed brain activity linked to specific memories as they form in real time.

Most past brain activity studies have been done while babies were asleep, which limited what researchers could learn about conscious memory-building.

What does this tell us about early life memories?

The findings suggest that episodic memory – the kind of memory that helps us remember specific events and the context in which they took place – begins to develop earlier than scientists previously believed.

Until recently, it was widely believed that this type of memory didn’t begin to form until well after a baby’s first birthday, typically around 18 to 24 months. Although the findings from the Science study were strongest in infants older than 12 months, the results were observed in much younger babies as well.

So, at what age do we start making memories?

It is now understood that babies begin forming limited types of memory when they are as young as two or three months. These include implicit memories (such as motor skills) and statistical learning, which helps infants detect patterns in language, faces and routines.

However, episodic memory, which allows us to recall specific events as well as where and when they occurred, takes longer to develop and requires the maturation of the hippocampus.

According to Cristina Maria Alberini, professor of neural science at New York University, the period in infancy when the hippocampus is developing its ability to form and store memories may be “critical”. This window could be important not only for memory but also has “great implications for mental health and memory or cognitive disorders”, she added.

Memories formed in early childhood do not typically last very long, it is believed, which might explain why we can’t remember them later in life. In an ongoing study at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany, 20-month-old toddlers were able to remember which toy was in which room for up to six months, while younger children retained the memory for only about one month.

Why can’t we remember anything from infancy?

Humans’ near-universal inability to recall personal experiences from before the age of about three is a phenomenon known as “infantile amnesia”.

For decades, scientists believed this happens simply because babies’ brains were too immature to store episodic memories.

But the Science study has shown that babies do indeed form memories. The mystery is why those memories become inaccessible as we grow older.

One explanation, scientists say, is that babies’ brains undergo rapid neurogenesis – the fast-paced creation of new neurons in the brain. This rapid growth might disrupt or “write over” existing memories. In animal studies, when scientists slowed this process in baby mice, the mice were able to retain memories much longer – similar to adult mice.

There is also a hypothesis that episodic memory requires language to describe them and a “sense of self” to relate to them. Since these skills don’t fully develop until around age three or four, the brain might not yet have the tools to organise and retrieve memories in the way adults do.

Some researchers also think the process of forgetting might serve a developmental purpose. By letting go of specific early experiences, the brain might be better able to focus on building general knowledge – to understand how the world works, for example – without being distracted by detailed memories which no longer serve a purpose.

Can some people remember events from infancy?

Some people claim they can remember being a baby, but there is no evidence that what they describe are genuine episodic memories.

According to the Yale and Columbia study, this belief typically stems from a psychological process called “source misattribution”.

People may remember information, such as that they cried during their first haircut, but not where that information came from. They might unconsciously attribute the memory to personal experience when it actually came from a photo, family stories or a parent’s retelling. Over time, the line between “real” and “reconstructed” has blurred.

Research shows that early family stories, frequent photo viewings or cultural emphasis on early development can all contribute to this phenomenon.

Yale is currently conducting a new study in which parents will film their babies regularly, either with their phones angled from the baby’s point of view or by using head-mounted cameras on toddlers. Later, as the children grow older, the researchers will show the children these old videos to see if they recognise the experiences, primarily by monitoring brain activity, to find out how long early memories can last, Yates told Al Jazeera.

Could early memories be recalled later in life?

There is debate about whether early life memories are completely erased or have simply become inaccessible and could eventually be recovered.

Yates said that while the latest study does not answer this question, preliminary evidence from other research at the Yale lab shows that early life memories can be recalled in early childhood, but not later childhood.

“I think the idea that at least some of our early life memories may exist in some form in our brains as adults is fascinating,” she said.

Studies of adult rodents have shown that early memories can be brought back through approaches such as optogenetics – activating the specific brain cells which are believed to store those memories. This works by identifying the brain cells involved in forming a memory, then later using light to reactivate those same cells, causing the animal to recall the memory.

Techniques such as optogenetics cannot yet be used in humans, but the study of rodents suggests that the process by which we retrieve memories is where the issue lies, rather than whether the memories exist at all, according to Paul Frankland, senior scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

“Perhaps there are natural conditions where these early life memories become more accessible,” he added.

Psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud believed that early childhood memories are not lost but buried deep in the unconscious, and that psychotherapy might help bring them to the surface by changing mental states.