Six In The Morning Tuesday June 26

US border agents halt migrant family prosecutions

A US border security chief says he has temporarily stopped launching criminal prosecutions of migrants who illegally enter the country with children.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters in Texas the prosecution referrals were suspended last week.

He said it followed an order last week by President Donald Trump calling for an end to migrant family separations.

But Mr Trump had suggested the families would instead be detained together.

The Republican president bowed to public pressure last Wednesday, signing his executive order to "keep families together" in migrant detentions.

North Korea scraps 'anti-US imperialism' rally as ties appear to warm
Pyongyang protests usually mark start of Korean war and highlight grievances against ‘sworn enemy’

Benjamin Haas in Seoul and agencies

 @haasbenjamin

Tue 26 Jun 2018 03.52 BST

North Korea will cancel its annual “anti-US imperialism” rally, part of a growing detente with its longstanding enemy as the two countries negotiate over the fate of the North’s nuclear weapons program.

The rally, which typically marks the start of a month of events commemorating the 1950-53 Korean war and denouncing the US, has been held for years and last year attracted 100,000 people in the capital, Pyongyang. North Korean officials did not give a reason for skipping the rally, according to the Associated Press, which first reported the cancellation.

The event usually features slogans and propaganda cartoons attacking the US, participants raising their fists in defiance and even commemorative postage stamps showing the destruction of the US. Last year one official said all members of the ruling Workers’ party and residents of Pyongyang were “aflame with the will to completely remove the US imperialists, the sworn enemy, from the globe”.

Germany divided: 5 snapshots of discontent in a wealthy country

Germany is a very affluent country. The average German earns €3,771 ($4,400) a month and has a life expectancy of more than 80 years. So why is there so much quarreling? DW criss-crossed the nation in search of answers.

Cottbus: 'Our government doesn't act — it reacts'

You wouldn't guess from Cottbus' restored historic city center that at the start of this year this city of 100,000 declared a moratorium on migrants because residents felt overwhelmed. If anything, it feels somewhat underpopulated and empty.

But head to the outlying district of Sachsendorf, and you'll see evidence of the fact that the proportion of foreigners increased from 2.2 to 8.5 percent in Cottbus in only two years. Women wearing headscarves and young men speaking Arabic are no rarity in this lower-class neighborhood with its Communist-era pre-fab apartment blocks, small shopping centers and otherwise very European-looking populace.

Graphic novel tells the true story of Tibet’s national football team

On a Tibetan cycling tour in 1997, a young Dane, Michael Magnus Nybrandt, had the idea of creating Tibet’s first national football team. This June 20, he published a graphic novel recounting his struggle to get the team up and running.

While the most garlanded international teams compete at the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Tibetanplayers put on their team’s shirt, sit in front of the TV and watch the games, dreaming of taking part in the tournament one day.

The team has no Ronaldo or Messi, but the story of how it came to exist is an extraordinary one – as told in Nybrandt’s graphic novel “Dreams in Thin Air”.

Doctor in Spain faces court over Franco-era 'stolen babies'

By Laura Maestro and Angela Dewan, CNN

Updated 0847 GMT (1647 HKT) June 26, 2018

It was almost half a century ago that Ines Madrigal was born in Spain and handed to a woman who was not her mother.

In all those years, she has seen no trace of her birth mother, nor any evidence that she was willingly given up for adoption. Madrigal suspects she was one of Spain's ninos robados -- stolen babies -- a victim of a sinister political practice that began after the Spanish Civil War and continued as recently as the 1990s.

THE WIRETAP ROOMS

The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

Ryan Gallagher, Henrik Moltke

THE SECRETS ARE hidden behind fortified walls in cities across the United States, inside towering, windowless skyscrapers and fortress-like concrete structures that were built to withstand earthquakes and even nuclear attack. Thousands of people pass by the buildings each day and rarely give them a second glance, because their function is not publicly known. They are an integral part of one of the world’s largest telecommunications networks – and they are also linked to a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.

Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.