AFP

Haitian asylum seekers Jocelyn and Berline Jean-Philippe breathed a sigh of relief as they entered the United States legally from Mexico — in time, they hoped, for their unborn child to become a US citizen.

It is a dream shared by other parents-to-be who make the often-dangerous journey fleeing poverty and violence in their countries in search of a better life for their children.

“If my son’s born there (the United States), it’s better for me and for him,” Jocelyn Jean-Philippe said before crossing from Reynosa in northern Mexico to McAllen, Texas.

It was the culmination of a journey that began in 2015 when the couple left Haiti and included a stay in Chile where their first child was born.

“He’s Chilean. He can live there without any problem. Not us. So if my son is born there (in the United States) he won’t need any visa,” Jocelyn Jean-Philippe said, his two-year-old asleep in his arms.

“I want a stable life,” said his wife Berline, 25, who is four months pregnant with her second child.

“I want a better life for him. I suffered a lot,” she said.

Under the US constitution, a child born in the United States is automatically entitled to citizenship.

But after so many ordeals, the Jean-Philippe family was not celebrating yet.

“Only God knows” if their son will be born a US citizen, the father-to-be said.

The couple, who hope to join relatives in the southeastern state of Georgia, are among hundreds of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the Mexican border city of Reynosa in recent weeks. 

– ‘Unjust arrest’ –

Every day, thousands of migrants cross Mexico in the hope of entering the United States.

Those traveling with young children tend to have a better chance of being accepted by US immigration authorities.

Carolina, a Honduran women in her 30s who did not want to give her real name, said she fled her home country to save her three adolescent sons from forced recruitment into the ranks of a street gang.

Her youngest was born in April in Tapachula, a city in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala and Mexico.

Resting in a reception center on the banks of the Rio Grande river along the southern US border, she said Mexican authorities detained her for 12 days, which she called an “unjust arrest.”

“They said they couldn’t deport me because the baby is Mexican,” she added.

She expects to be granted permanent residency in Mexico, but her aim is to join the baby’s father, who lives in Houston.

One of her sons said he was ready to swim across the Rio Grande if needed.

In the end it was not necessary: Carolina and her four children were able to cross the border legally.

Many are less fortunate.

On Friday, a US judge ruled that a rule known as Title 42 imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic must remain in place.

Meant to stem the spread of the coronavirus, it can effectively prevent anyone without a visa from entering the United States, even to claim asylum.

– ‘We’re afraid’ –

At one migrant shelter in Reynosa, “Senda Vida” (Path of Life), there are now 200 pregnant women, said Pastor Hector Silva, whose refuge is overwhelmed.

Pascale, a mother of two from Haiti, spent the night in hospital after suffering a miscarriage.

“They said it was due to stress,” explained the 25-year-old, who said she had paid about 700 pesos ($35) in medical expenses.

Some women in Reynosa have not had any medical check-up even though they are six months pregnant, said Anayeli Flores, of the aid group Doctors Without Borders.

“With this new influx of people, we’ve seen an increase in our consultations — at least double the number of pregnant women in about three weeks,” she added.

Other migrants have left children behind at home, including one couple who fled violence in Honduras.

It was hard to say goodbye to their children aged one, eight and 10, they said, adding: “We’re afraid. But we trust in God.”

From promising to defend Taiwan militarily to suggesting regime change in Russia, US President Joe Biden has developed a knack for off-the-cuff pronouncements that have rattled diplomacy.

For journalists following Biden abroad, it has almost become routine — the frank-speaking US president making headlines with a loaded or brusque answer, and the White House then quickly insisting he was not setting new policy.

In the last moments of a news conference in Tokyo on Monday, Biden answered affirmatively that the United States would defend Taiwan militarily if it is attacked by China, which claims the self-governing democracy as its own.

It was not the first time Biden has made waves with a formulation on Taiwan. For more than four decades, under a policy set when he was a senator, the United States has provided the island weapons for its self-defense but stayed deliberately ambiguous on whether it would intervene.

Both a White House official and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin swiftly said that US policy had not changed, as Beijing voiced fury and Taiwan saluted what it considered evidence of ironclad commitment.

The episode comes two months after Biden ad-libbed in a speech in Poland about Russian President Vladimir Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The White House promptly denied that Biden was advocating the removal of Putin, which would be a major escalation of the US campaign that Biden himself had said was limited to supporting Ukraine.

Before Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Biden, who had been warning of dire consequences if Russia went ahead with an attack, also raised eyebrows by suggesting a lighter Western reaction for a “minor incursion.”

But Biden, who throughout his life in politics has been known for wearing his emotions on his sleeve and has limited the opportunities at home for verbal blunders, sometimes digs in.

Biden has stood firm on accusing Russia of “genocide” in Ukraine and, well before the rest of his administration, accused Moscow of “war crimes.”

– ‘Two-level game’? –

Each time, Biden’s remarks prompt questions. Is the 79-year-old simply speaking from his heart? Or is he setting a new policy — or perhaps testing one out?

“It’s very hard to say whether these are gaffes or a two-level game. But if it is a two-level game, it is incredibly dangerous,” said Joshua Shifrinson, an associate professor of international relations at Boston University.

“It can exacerbate tensions; it generates uncertainty,” he added.

Biden took office with more experience in foreign affairs than any president in decades and had promised more predictability than his voluble and volatile predecessor Donald Trump.

Trump frequently stunned the world with his undiplomatic pronouncements, from insulting leaders of allied nations to threatening war over Twitter.

“With Trump there was no predictability but Biden was expected to be the very consistent kind of guy,” Shifrinson said.

“Bluntness can be a very good thing but in a situation like Taiwan it can be quite dangerous.”

Bonnie Glaser, an expert on Taiwan at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said that Biden no doubt believed what he was saying.

“But it is a gaffe in the sense that he is misstating US policy,” she said.

“I don’t think it serves US interests to have the president misstating what our policy is,” she added.

“I think that it is more effective if our policy is clear and understandable to our friends, our allies and our enemies.”

Some hawks that usually feud with Biden gave him credit for his remarks.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted that Biden’s statement was “the right thing to say and the right thing to do.”

But others saw risks in seemingly loose talk after months of US-backed efforts to rally support for Ukraine.

“The West’s robust response to Russian aggression in Ukraine could serve to deter China from invading Taiwan,” tweeted Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“But Biden’s statement risks undoing the potential benefit and instead helping to bring about a Taiwan conflict.”

A trial against Bill Cosby began Monday in California, with a civil suit alleging the disgraced comedian sexually assaulted a teenage girl almost five decades ago.

Judy Huth says the man once known as “America’s Dad” attacked her at the Playboy Mansion in the mid-1970s when she was around 15 years old.

Huth says she suffered “psychological damage and mental anguish” as a result of the alleged assault.

The case is the latest in a raft of legal actions against 84-year-old Cosby, who was once one of the most popular performers on US television.

Dozens of women have said they suffered sexual assault at his hands.

Huth’s case was originally filed in 2014, but had been on hold while Cosby faced aggravated indecent assault charges in Pennsylvania.

Cosby was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman 17 years ago, but freed from his prison sentence after the state’s supreme court ruled he had been denied a fair trial.

His release from prison — he had served more than two years of his three-to-10 year sentence — infuriated many advocates of the #MeToo movement.

His conviction was the first sexual assault guilty verdict against a celebrity since the advent of the worldwide reckoning against sexual violence and abuse of power.

But the court did not exonerate him, rather it overturned the conviction on a technicality.

Judges wrote that a non-prosecution agreement between a former district attorney and Cosby over evidence he gave in a different civil case meant the actor shouldn’t have been criminally charged in the first place.

In the case that local broadcasters reported had started Monday, Huth claims she met Cosby on a film set, and days later was invited to his tennis club.

There, she says, he gave her alcohol and took her to the Playboy Mansion, where he forced her to perform a sex act.

Cosby has denied her version of events.

The defence has leapt on apparent discrepancies in Huth’s claim.

The assault was initially alleged to have happened in 1974, when she was 15 years old, but more recently has said it took place a year later.

The case is being heard in Santa Monica, next to Los Angeles, and begins with jury selection.

Opening arguments are set for next week.

A 21-year-old Russian soldier was found guilty of war crimes for killing an unarmed civilian and handed a life sentence by a Ukrainian court on Monday, in the first verdict of its kind since the invasion began three months ago.

The ruling came as President Volodymyr Zelensky warned elites gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos that slow-walking military aid to Ukraine was costing thousands of lives, as he called for more weapons and even tougher sanctions against Moscow.

And as ferocious battles raged in eastern Ukraine, where Russia pummeled cities and towns in a bid to expand its hold on the Donbass region, a Russian diplomat in Geneva quit his post in protest over the war telling colleagues: “Never have I been so ashamed of my country.”

In a Kyiv courtroom, Russian serviceman Vadim Shishimarin looked on from a glass defence box as was sentenced in a trial followed around the world — likely the first of many as Ukraine investigates thousands of alleged war crimes.

The sergeant from Siberia had admitted to killing a 62-year-old civilian, Oleksandr Shelipov as he was riding his bike in the village of Chupakhivka in northeast Ukraine.

He claimed he shot Shelipov under pressure from another soldier as they tried to retreat and escape back into Russia in a stolen car on February 28.

Shishimarin apologised and asked Shelipov’s widow for forgiveness, adding: “I was nervous about what was going on. I didn’t want to kill.”

But prosecutors stated he shot between three and four bullets with the intention of killing the civilian, and Judge Sergiy Agafonov sentenced him to life.

The sergeant was also found guilty of premeditated murder, which Agafonov said had been committed with direct intent.

Shishimarin’s lawyer Viktor Ovsyannikov said he would appeal the “most severe” verdict, arguing that “societal pressure” weighed on the decision.

– Davos appeal –

International institutions are also probing abuses allegedly committed by Russian forces in places such as Bucha and Mariupol, which have become emblematic of the destruction and suffering of the war.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, from which Russians have been barred this year, Zelensky made a fresh appeal for Western support.

He revealed that 87 people had been killed in a Russian attack earlier this month on a military base in northern Ukraine, in what would be one of the largest single recorded strikes of the war.

Western countries have sent huge amounts of weapons and cash to Ukraine to help it repel Russia’s assault, and punished Moscow with unprecedented economic sanctions.

But Zelensky said tens of thousands of lives would have been saved if Kyiv had received “100 percent of our needs at once back in February”, when Russia invaded.

Ukraine, he said via videolink, “is paying dearly for freedom and independence and for this struggle”. 

Later Monday, Zelensky said Russia has carried out nearly 1,500 missile strikes and over 3,000 airstrikes against Ukraine in less than three months. 

“Each time when we tell our partners that we need modern anti-missile equipment and modern military aviation, we are not just making a formal request,” Zelensky said in his daily address to the nation.

“Our request means the lives of many people, who wouldn’t have died, had we gotten the weapons that we are asking for.”

Shortly after Zelensky’s speech in Davos, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that 20 nations had pledged new arms, ammunition and other supplies to support Kyiv, while others were offering trainng for Ukraine’s military.

– Destroying territory –

Ramping up his demands that Moscow be cut off from the global economy, Zelensky also called in Davos for an international oil embargo on Russia, punitive measures against all its banks and the shunning of its IT sector.

He also urged all foreign companies to leave Russia — which many have already done: US coffee giant Starbucks said Monday it would close all its 130 cafes there, following a similar move by McDonald’s last week.

As Zelensky delivered his address, meanwhile, a counsellor at Moscow’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Boris Bondarev, announced he was leaving his job after 20 years of diplomatic service in protest at Russia’s invasion of its neighbour.

In the letter circulated to a number of diplomatic missions in Geneva and seen by AFP, he condemned the war as “not only a crime against the Ukrainian people but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia”.

Western support has helped Ukraine in many areas hold off Russia forces which, after initially moving on Kyiv, are now focused on securing and expanding their gains in eastern Donbas and on Ukraine’s southern coast.

The governor of Lugansk, in the Donbas region, said Monday that Russia has sent thousands of troops to capture his entire region and that the city of Severodonetsk was under massive attack, warning residents that it was too late to evacuate.

“At this point I will not say: get out, evacuate. Now I will say: stay in a shelter,” Sergiy Gaidai said on Telegram. “Because such a density of shelling will not allow us to calmly gather people and come for them”.

– Morning prayer –

More than six million people have fled Ukraine and eight million have been internally displaced since the war broke out, according to the United Nations.

For the civilians left behind near the front, prayer is sometimes all they have left.

In the eastern city of Bakhmut, Maria Mayashlapak scanned the devastation of her home, where a missile destroyed her kitchen and cratered her vegetable garden.

“I was reciting my morning prayer for God to keep me from getting hurt,” the 82-year-old recalled, as the family kitten mewed from somewhere in the rubble.

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The high-profile defamation case between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard is poised to get another dash of celebrity — British model Kate Moss is expected to testify.

The 48-year-old Moss, Depp’s former girlfriend, is scheduled to make an appearance by video on Wednesday.

Moss, who went out with the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star from 1994 to 1997, is being called to the witness stand by Depp’s legal team, the New York Post and other US media said.

The 36-year-old Heard, during her testimony earlier this month, mentioned a reported incident in which Depp was alleged to have pushed Moss down a flight of stairs.

That reference provided an opening to Depp’s lawyers to call Moss as a witness to address the allegation.

Depp, 58, filed suit against Heard over an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in December 2018 in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”

Heard, who had a starring role in “Aquaman,” did not name Depp in the op-ed, but he sued her for implying he was a domestic abuser and is seeking $50 million in damages.

The Texas-born Heard countersued, asking for $100 million and claiming that she suffered “rampant physical violence and abuse” at his hands.

Depp, during his four days on the witness stand, denied ever striking Heard or any other woman and claimed that she was the one who was frequently violent.

– ‘Narcissistic traits’ –

On Monday, the seven-person jury hearing the case listened to testimony from two doctors called as witnesses by Heard’s team and from a Hollywood industry expert.

Richard Moore, an orthopedic surgeon, said it was unlikely that a finger injury sustained by Depp during a fight with Heard occurred in the manner in which Depp said it did.

Depp said the tip of the middle finger on his right hand was severed when Heard threw a vodka bottle at him while the couple were in Australia, where he was filming the fifth installment of the “Pirates” franchise.

Moore, who reviewed the medical records, said the wound was not consistent with that explanation.

David Spiegel, a psychiatrist, testified that Depp had “narcissistic traits” and behavior that indicated he had a substance use disorder.

Spiegel engaged in a testy exchange with one of Depp’s lawyers when pressed about the American Psychiatric Association’s so-called Goldwater Rule, which says it is “unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination.”

Spiegel acknowledged that he did not personally examine Depp but said his opinions were valid as an expert witness.

– ‘Causing his own demise’ –

Also testifying on behalf of Heard was entertainment expert Kathryn Arnold, who said Depp’s habitual “tardiness, drinking and drug abuse” had hurt his career along with pursuing this and other lawsuits.

“He’s causing his own demise,” Arnold said.

Arnold said that allegedly defamatory statements made about Heard by Depp’s former lawyer, Adam Waldman, had damaged her career.

Heard’s career was “on the precipice of a meteoric rise” following her starring turn in “Aquaman” but it has been stymied by a “lot of negative publicity,” she said.

“Her world has been silenced in terms of opportunities,” she added, estimating that Heard has suffered between $45 and $50 million in lost film and TV roles and endorsements.

Depp’s lawyers put experts on the stand earlier in the trial who testified that the actor lost millions because of the abuse accusations, including a $22.5-million payday for a sixth installment of “Pirates.”

Depp filed the defamation complaint in the United States after losing a separate libel case in London in November 2020 that he brought against The Sun for calling him a “wife-beater.”

Depp, a three-time Oscar nominee, and Heard were married in February 2015. Their divorce was finalized two years later.

Judge Penney Azcarate has scheduled closing arguments in the case for Friday, after which it will go to the jury.