iftttwall

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

The Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense warned on Thursday, that its forces could carry out a precision strike on the Metzamur power station in western Armenia if Yerevan decided to hit Azerbaijani strategic installations.

This after renewed fighting along the historically contested border early this week, as the AP described: 

Armenia and Azerbaijan forces fought Tuesday with heavy artillery and drones, leaving at least 16 people killed on both sides, including an Azerbaijani general, in the worst outbreak of hostilities in years.

Skirmishes on the volatile border between the two South Caucasus nations began Sunday. Azerbaijan said it has lost 11 servicemen and one civilian in three days of fighting, and Armenia said four of its troops were killed Tuesday.

In response to Armenian threats to hit the Mingchevir water tank in northern Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry spokesman, Colonel Waqif Dargankhali, threatened:

“The Armenian side should not forget that the latest missile systems available to our army are capable of hitting the Metzamur Atomic Energy Station with high accuracy, which will turn into a great tragedy for Armenia.”

These statements reported in Interfax come against the backdrop of the military escalation in the border region between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which the two sides have accused each other of causing.

Moscow and Tehran have confirmed that they would do their utmost to reduce the tension between Baku and Yerevan, while Turkey aligned with Azerbaijan, has vowed to make Armenia “pay the price” for clashing with Azerbaijan.

CAUCASUS: Azerbaijan’s Defence Ministry states that it can hit Armenia’s Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant “with high accuracy”, something it says would be a “great catastrophe for Armenia”. https://t.co/jguSHiZ5q8

— Conflict News (@Conflicts) July 16, 2020

Meanwhile, the press secretary for the Armenian Ministry of Defense, Shusha Stepanian, announced on Thursday the resumption of clashes on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Stepanian wrote on her Facebook page: “At 03.40 at night, the Armenian Armed Forces on the front line noticed movements of the enemy forces. Our forces immediately took up the defense and were able to prevent a hostile infiltration attempt. After a fierce battle, the enemy was forced to retreat, after incurring losses.”

According to the Armenian Ministry of Defense, the Azerbaijani units began the attack by bombing the villages of Ijbar and Movsis at 12:20 A.M. using D-30 howitzers.

Last year we detailed the political firestorm unleashed in the UK after so-called British jihadist bride Shamima Begum demanded of British authorities to be repatriated. 

The now 20-year old UK citizen joined Islamic State in 2015 after fleeing the UK when she was just 15. Last year she gave birth in a Syrian refugee camp and is demanding safe return to Britain for fear that she and her child could die in the camp, so near the war zone. Proponents for her legal return to British soil have argued that as a teenager she was unwittingly manipulated into traveling to Syria by ISIS propaganda. 

But over a year ago her family was notified in a letter (on Feb. 19) from the Home Secretary  that authorities had revoked her British citizenship because she traveled to join a foreign terrorist group. The decision has been under appeal while Begum and her child remain in custody of US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeast Syria. 

But on Thursday British High Court judges ruled she should be allowed to return to the United Kingdom. CNN reports: 

The Court of Appeal and a Divisional Court of the High Court on Thursday ruled Begum should be allowed to return to the United Kingdom to pursue her appeal before the Special Immigrations Appeals Commission (SIAC) “albeit subject to such controls as the Secretary of State deems appropriate.”

Under the 1981 British Nationality Act, UK authorities have the legal right to revoke a person’s citizenship should it be “conducive to the public good” and they won’t become stateless as a result. She was captured in early 2019 in that was at the time ISIS’ last holdout pocket of Baghuz, in Syria Deir ez-Zor province. While in an SDF detention camp, she remains stateless since her British citizenship was stripped. 

Conservatives in Britain, such as previous Interior Minister Sajid Javid argued at the time the Begum case was driving national headlines that “dangerous individuals” coming back to the UK from battlefields in the Middle East should be stripped of their British citizenship. He said this option has already been “so far exercises more than 100 times,” otherwise he also advocates prosecution of apprehended returning suspects “regardless of their age and gender.” 

Conservative MPs have said they would not “hesitate to prevent” the return of Britons who set off for the Middle East to join ISIS. 

The UK Home Office is expected to fight the High Court appeals decision to allow her to return, with a spokesperson saying the decision was “very disappointing”. The statement said further: “The government’s top priority remains maintaining our national security and keeping the public safe.”

In recent interviews she expressed respect for “British values” while also demanding British ‘fairness’ in her case, yet still said she did not regret traveling to Syria to join ISIS and some aspects of the “good life” under the Islamic State. 

This latest decision to allow her return to the UK will unleash fresh debate and controversy, given Britons will no doubt be legitimately concerned over having someone who willingly and unrepentantly joined ISIS living freely in their midst. 

Submitted by Gefira

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced the conversion of the Hagia Sophia from the museum to a mosque.

The temple, which was built in 537 and served as the greatest Christian orthodox cathedral for a thousand years, was turned into a mosque in 1453 at the fall of Constantinople, Byzantium’s capital. After four centuries in 1934 this mosque was turned into a museum by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who wanted to tout himself to the world as a modern ruler of secular Turkey. President Erdoğan’s announcement met with an enthusiastic applause of the Muslims, not only those residing in Turkey. Much of the Western press denounced the move as Erdoğan’s maneuver aimed at diverting the nation’s attention from the current economic problems. This explanation – Marxist through and through – does not take into consideration at least two factors: psychological (Muslim faith) and political (symbolic message to the world). A nation’s attention can be diverted in a wide variety of ways, so why should it be the conversion of a museum into a mosque?

Atheist, deist or agnostic Western analysts typically cannot grasp the phenomenon of religious faith, its palpable reality. In scientific terms faith can be viewed as a psychological phenomenon and psychological phenomena are to be reckoned with just as physical ones or – at times – even more. Man is constricted in his actions by these two: physical reality and his internal psychological automatic pilot, so to say. It is not true that faith can move mountains in the literal sense of the world, but it is not true either that everything is a matter of physical coercion. There are women who turn prostitutes although they have money to burn, and there are such who will never even consider selling themselves despite the fact that they suffer want.

Religious (read: psychological) factor is as strong as economic. Failure to understand it caused the Western liberals to import millions of Muslims to (post-)Christian countries. The liberals regarded religious faith as a mere facet of tradition, culture or heritage, which can be changed at will and which constitutes no serious impediment to liberal ideas. How wrong they were is plain to see today, when religious – mainly Muslim – minorities pose serious social problems. Turkey has a special Directorate of Religious Affairs (known as Diyanet for short) that operates also abroad, especially among Turks dispersed in many West European countries. There is nothing comparable to it in any of the Western countries. The Diyanet has a large budget at its disposal and the word religious in its name obviously equates with Muslim.

Western analysts also claim that President Erdoğan has broken with the secular tradition set down by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as the former was creating the modern Turkish state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. They either genuinely fail to recognize that secularism is the same as faith or religion only with the minus sign assigned to it or they intentionally do it to present themselves as those who occupy moral high ground. Why should secularism be something better than religiousness? Being lukewarm Christians at best, the Western journalists are incapable of imagining how serious this psychological phenomenon known as religious faith can be. If they have this inability to place themselves in the shoes of genuine believers, they should at least learn something from psychology. If they could be bothered to do so, that is. Then they would have learnt that religion is anything that constitutes the highest value in a man’s psyche. Hence, it need not be Christianity or Islam alone; religion can take the form of communism, fascism, feminism or secularism for that matter. A few centuries earlier Europeans discovering, conquering and administering foreign territories would bring with themselves the Christian cross and Bible (one of Columbus’s ships was named the Santa Maria); today, Western powers display homosexual rainbow flags on foreign territory and enforce accepting homosexual rights the way they once forced indigenous people to accept Christianity.

Why should Turks refrain from re-converting a mosque-turned-museum into a mosque and be somehow ashamed of it when at almost the same time Americans and the British can be proud of flying homosexual flags from their Moscow embassies? Why should the former message be reprehensible while the latter not? The West treats its enshrined values with all seriousness, why should the East not treat theirs in an analogous way? Why should the allegedly high-minded principle of secularism stymie the expression of Muslim or Christian beliefs but not those of homosexuals?

It was in 1934 that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk signed an order that turned Istanbul’s historical mosque into a museum. At around that time – a few years earlier and a few years later – Soviet commissars would do the same in the vast territory of the Soviet Union: some churches and mosques – the lucky ones, we might say – would be converted into museums (of faith and atheism!), others into stables, depots, and similar facilities. Was the conversion of Istanbul’s landmark mosque – to use present-day political vernacular – not a slap in the face of the then Muslims and a violation of human rights to profess any religious faith? Is President Erdoğan’s act not a rectification of the past wrong? Whence this doublethink?

President Erdoğan has long been thinking about reconverting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. He has just delivered on his promise. Western mainstream media are now doing what they are accustomed to: they give the floor to westernized Turks, irreligious Turks living in the West or Turkish domestic dissidents – in a word all those who oppose Erdoğan’s move – and thus the media make the impression that the majority of Turks would so much rather their president ordered the Turkish embassy in Moscow to fly the homosexual flag instead of recovering the Hagia Sophia for Islam. That’s what these media habitually do. When president Putin wins an election or a referendum, when a right-wing candidate wins in an East European country, the BBC, Deutsche Welle and their ilk hasten to impress it on their viewers, listeners and readers that countries with such winning candidates have serious problems with democracy and human rights. That is to say demos (the people) electing a right-wing candidate is doing harm to democracy. In this case, too, selected residents of such countries are chosen to voice their criticism and express their fear at what is going on. The usual trick.

These considerations apart, Turkey’s president may also be testing the West’s fortitude. Not that there is much to be tested. Again and again the world could see the West’s total inability to act and incompetence to undertake anything. The 2015 influx of Third World people and the handling of it when President Erdoğan was paid billions to act as Europe’s bouncer spoke volumes. He might consider cashing in another billion for not converting the museum into a mosque, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Post-Christian Europe would rather pay him for not closing a mosque.

Pope Francis uttered the usual words of “concern” (all impotent politicians utter words of concern), but that’s about everything he can do. And why should President Erdoğan care? What does he think about the pope who in 2019 together with the Grand Imam of Al Azhar signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration, in which it is stated that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions are willed by God in His wisdom”?1)Why should such a pope care whether Hagia Sophia is Christian, secular or Muslim?

Mosques have been mushrooming in Western Europe and increasingly so in North America and Australia, whereas the Christian churches are empty, sold or converted into all kinds of facilities if not torn down. The fact that descendants of Christians do not care about the temples of their ancestors does not mean that believing Muslims ought to do the same. Muslims want their temples as places of worship. Europeans have discos in theirs.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

I have never been a fan of social media platforms, primarily because I realize most of them are operated by leftists and globalists with an antagonistic agenda. The idea of spending all the time and resources needed to build a following on these websites only to then have that work used against you as leverage to silence your viewpoints is not appealing.

The more effort you put into sites like Twitter, the more dependent you become on it to get your message out, and the more dependent you become the more power the people at at these companies hold over you.

Just ask any of the numerous conservative personalities that have been banned from Twitter over the past couple of years because of their political positions. Or ask the people who were banned from YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, etc. as part of a massive purge of accounts this past month, the vast majority of them considered conservative or moderates. Of course, these companies usually don’t admit outright that they are biased against conservative and moderate viewpoints; instead, they accuse accounts of spreading “hate speech”, violating community guidelines or violating “copyright rules”.

The claim by Twitter that they have no political bias is typical leftist misdirection. Banning people for copyright or for “hate speech” is not necessarily politically motivated, right? However, as analysts have shown in the past, conservatives are somehow FOUR TIMES more likely to be accused of “neutral” policy violations than leftists on Twitter.  As for hate speech, everything conservative is now considered a form of hate speech.  Everything moderate is considered hate speech.  Everything that does not conform to the social justice religion is considered hate speech.  And if it’s not considered hate speech today, it will be considered hate speech tomorrow.

It’s interesting that SJWs on social media can froth at the mouth with anti-white rabies whenever they please and consequences rarely befall them, yet conservatives can relate nothing more than facts and figures and are summarily booted for “racism”.

No bias?  Yeah, right…

YouTube banned thousands of accounts over the past two weeks because of “supremacist ideas and conspiracy theories”, calling the people behind them “harmful users”.

Twitch organized a “Safety Advisory Council” made up primarily of social justice leftists (including a power hungry lunatic that thinks he’s a female deer) to “inform and guide decisions” specifically on protecting the safety of “marginalized” users.

Look, I understand the concepts behind Alinsky Tactics and the reality that leftists as a rule deny everything they are doing no matter how obvious it is. They’ll even claim their own groups (like Antifa) don’t exist whenever they get caught in a compromising position. But there comes a point when the gaslighting just isn’t going to work anymore. We all know that social media platforms HATE anyone that opposes the social justice narrative; the only reason they haven’t kicked all conservatives off their platforms yet is because there is something else they hate even more – the prospect that conservatives and moderates might retaliate en masse by organizing on their own competing platforms.

Enter Parler…

I have been arguing for years that alternative analysts and anyone not on the political left should be building their own social media. If you are dependent on controlled systems, then you can be controlled. It’s really that simple. Whenever someone puts in the work to establish an alternative system, it behooves us to support it and at least give it a chance.

There have been some attempts to make this happen, but in every case the attacks from the mainstream media and leftists have been relentless.  What I want to explore here is why?  Why do the lefties care so much if we leave them to their little bubble world and start our own thing?

Parler in particular has been under endless attack the past few weeks from SJWs attempting to troll and disrupt the site, as well as disjointed criticism from the MSM. 

Perhaps part of the reason is that Parler has been gaining momentum; with 500,000 new people joining in a matter of days.  We have to consider the possibility that if Parler wasn’t a threat to the social justice cult, they would not be attacking it so consistently.

The main criticism of Parler by the left goes a little something like this:

“Parler claims it’s a free speech site but it censors people just like Twitter, so why leave Twitter at all?”

I love this argument because it really showcases the dishonest sophistry of leftists.

• First, leftists do not care about free speech and haven’t cared for at least a decade. They only care about controlling the narrative. How often do you see leftists attacking Twitter or YouTube for censorship of conservatives? They won’t do that, because they like it and they know the odds are slim that those platforms will ever come after them.

• Second, when Parler says it’s a “free speech platform” I think it’s obvious that they are referring to political speech specifically. Leftists OPENLY ADMIT to trolling Parler in order to disrupt and sabotage its progress, including posting pornography and other childish tactics in order to force Parler to ban them so that they can then say “Look! Parler lied about free speech…”

The left defends censorship by companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google because they are “private corporations” and websites are private property (imagine that, commies defending private property rights). I actually agree with that basic premise, but there are some problems with their arguments. Parler is indeed a private company and is perfectly within its rights to ban trolls that are attempting to disrupt discussion and drive people off the platform.  But, there is a big difference between sites like Parler and the major media platforms.

Most major tech conglomerates, like Google and Facebook, receive billions of dollars in state and federal government subsidies and taxpayer dollars. As far as I can tell from my research Parler does not.  Twitter even received an extensive tax break for eight years worth over $70 million for being based in San Francisco as part of a program called “the Twitter tax break”.  In return for giving welfare and special treatment to silicone valley, Californians in SF now enjoy a historic bubble in real estate and rental prices, along with a spike in poverty and homelessness as well endless traffic.  Many of the people that work at these companies can’t even afford to live in the same city as them.

Major social media platforms that accept government funds are receiving an unfair advantage over other competing companies and should therefore be held accountable as public services, not private businesses. If a corporation like Google wants to give up taxpayer cash and pay full price for all that bandwidth it uses, then sure, they should be allowed to censor whoever they want. But until then, these companies are subject to oversight, just as any corporate monopoly would be.

The fact that Parler is encouraging political free speech is what matters here. And so far the only leftists being kicked off the site are those that deliberately go there to try to burn it down. Is it perfect? No, nothing is. But Twitter and others have a proven prejudice against conservative voices and even liberal voices that go against the accepted script. Why stay on Twitter when there are other options that are more free?

I suspect SJWs despise Parler because it represents a focal point for conservative organization, and they think they own the organizational wheelhouse.

Leftists, being collectivist in nature, are only adept at one thing – mobilizing bodies through lies and manipulation. This is where they have a distinct advantage over conservatives. The issue is that leftists are easy to mobilize because they have a drone mentality. They tend to follow their gatekeepers blindly. Conservatives tend to be more independent and often question the motives behind any given movement, and this causes internal disagreements on mobilization. Our liberty mindedness is our strength as well as our weakness, and the political left knows it.

By congregating on a platform that is not relentlessly hostile to us, we are given a free hand to discuss options and organize without being attacked by an engineered mob in the process.

When I see the vitriol from leftists over Parler, I am also reminded once again that communists don’t see people as “allies”, they see people as property. They want to get rid of conservatives from their platforms but also don’t want conservatives to leave and build their own platforms. I often think of the Chinese invasion of Tibet when pondering this mentality. The CCP’s strategy was one of ethnic cleansing; building railways to Tibet to import Chinese people and run out the indigenous Tibetans. But, when Tibetans sought to leave the country on foot to go to Nepal, the Chinese government set up snipers in the mountains to kill them as they tried to escape.

This is the communist philosophy – You are not allowed to walk away. You are not allowed to stay as you are. Your only choice is to be reeducated. Your only option is to conform.

One criticism that I’ve seen on the conservative side is that by moving to Parler we are “walling ourselves off” from public discourse and will not have any sway going into election time. This is an idiotic notion.

There is no rule that says you can’t use BOTH Parler and Twitter to spread your message. If you really think elections still matter, then by all means jump on as many platforms as you can. Just understand that the purge on sites like Twitter and YouTube is going to get much worse as 2020 comes to a close. Count on it.

Beyond that, if you believe that the lines are not already deeply drawn on the political divide in the US then you are kidding yourself. Most people have made up their minds as to which side they are on. The only ambiguity is perhaps that many people don’t yet realize how bad the situation could get. Staying on leftist platforms to “fight the good fight” is, in my view, a waste of time. Now is the time to build community so that we are ready for the political and social storm that is ready to make landfall, I have no interest in trying to win raving leftists to my side.

I’m promoting Parler in this article because it’s the first major attempt I’ve seen to grow a conservative friendly social media outlet. They don’t pay me, I don’t know the people that run the company, and I don’t have any stake in Parler’s success or failure. I have joined the site, and anyone who wants to follow me there can do so by searching brandon@altmarket. My hope is that the site will become an internet safe haven for conservatives during these troubled times. I feel it can be used as a tool for us to join forces and prepare. Conservative ideals and principles of limited government, civil liberties, free markets and individualism must endure for the sake of future generations. We have to start building our citadels, and Parler could be a good place to start.

*  *  *

If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

We’re told that institutional ‘bias reduction’ training and ‘diversity’ hiring policies are meant to create an inclusive environment which values and respects minorities.

Certainly, as 21st Century Wire notes, Silicon Valley believes it is leading the world in advancing such values.

Upon closer inspection, the opposite seems to be the case.

Diversity training and hiring practices do not extinguish prejudice – they actually promote it.

Ex-Google and Facebook employee, Patrick Shyu, explains why ‘diversity’ policy creates more problems than solutions.

Watch:

Authored by Jake Anderson via TheMindUnleashed.com,

As much as astronomy has revealed to us about the universe, there is still much we don’t know and anomalous discoveries routinely remind scientists of this. The newest discovery could be a totally brand-new type of astronomical object that is fascinating and a bit spooky.

Astronomers have discovered four rings, called “odd radio circles,” or ORCs, that so far have defied explanation or description. We don’t know how big the objects are, how far away they are, or how they formed-all we know is that they are only visible at radio wavelengths, where they are very bright at the edges. The ORCs are totally invisible when viewed with the visible, infrared, and X-ray wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The paper describing this phenomenon, which was submitted for publication to the journal Nature Astronomy, offers explanations for ORCs but also methodically rules them out. So far, supernovas, star-forming galaxies, planetary nebulas, and gravitational lensing have all been excluded as possible explanations.

Two of the ORCs appear to contain central galaxies that can be seen at visible wavelengths; scientists speculate those rings could be connected to some kind of local galactic phenomena. The other two ORCs share close physical proximity and so could be interconnected in some way.

Astronomer Kristine Spekkens at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen’s University says,

“[The objects] may well point to a new phenomenon that we haven’t really probed yet. It may also be that these are an extension of a previously known class of objects that we haven’t been able to explore.”

Other astronomers have speculated the ring-shaped islands in deep space could be the result of shockwaves or radio galaxies.

Astronomers discovered the ORCs while working on another project, the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU), which is a map of radio frequencies in space. The EMU pilot survey employs the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, or ASKAP, a radio telescope network of 36 dish antennas which are collectively generating a wide-angle view of the night sky and which scientists expect will identify 70 million new radio objects.

“This is a really nice indication of the shape of things to come in radio astronomy in the next couple of years,” Spekkens added. “History shows us that when we open up a new [avenue of looking at] space to explore … we always find new and exciting things.”

The discovery comes right at a time when astronomers are still struggling to understand more about another space radio anomaly, the Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs, that spew incomprehensible amounts of energy in concentrated beams across the universe. While there are many outlandish speculations–including often specious murmurs of advanced extraterrestrial life–anytime scientists discover something in space that defies explanation, we will have to wait substantially longer to learn what both ORCs and FRBs really are.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned in June there was a “significant risk” of fraud for Paycheck Protection Program loans. 

GAO said, which oversees spending for the CARES Act, “a number of loans approved, the speed with which they were processed, and the limited safeguards, there is a significant risk that some fraudulent or inflated applications were approved.” 

The GAO said the Small Business Administration (SBA) had safeguards to deter fraudulent loans, but as we find out in mid-July, they weren’t good enough. 

Fortune reports a Texas man received almost $1 million in PPP loans to support 51 employees at his “Texas Barbecue” company to payout salaries during months of lockdowns.

The only problem, Joshua Argires, who received $956,250, never had a BBQ company nor any employees, but received the money and deposited in Coinbase to trade cryptocurrency. 

On Tuesday, Argires was charged with wire fraud, bank fraud, and engaging in the unlawful monetary transactions by the Department of Justice (DoJ).

The DoJ didn’t specify how they detected the fraud but suggest something was a miss when Argires noted on PPP forms he would pay 51 of his fictitious employees $90,000 per month.

“Such a high average salary for a barbecue operation raises further suspicion,” the DoJ’s complaint said. 

Argires was involved in another PPP scam, that was with a fictitious business called Houston Landscaping. The DoJ said he was paid out $160,657 in PPP funds. 

There was no mention of what cryptocurrencies the Texas man bought or how frequently he was trading. 

During the PPP disbursements period, we outlined how some Americans who received Trump stimulus checks were taking the money and using it for “securities trades.” 

The rise of daytraders, as Goldman strategists have recently pointed could explain the surge in small trades over the last several months. It seems like President Trump’s CARES Act partially funded the boom in day trading during the pandemic. With Nasdaq at new highs, well, mission accomplished Mr. President. 

Following in the foosteps of a report from earlier thisweek, that the White House would rescind its decision to deny student visas to students who won’t be studying on campus full time this fall, Reuters reports that foreign students coming from Europe will be exempt from a travel ban the United States imposed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. State Department told congressional offices on Thursday. The State Department also told lawmakers that it would offer exemptions for some au pairs and family members of visa holders in the United States, according to a memo sent to lawmakers and seen by Reuters.

The decision is part of the administration’s effort to gradually reopen international travel following months of sweeping restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic. In March, President Trump banned travelers from most European countries as COVID-19 cases soared in the region before the disease took hold in the United States.

Meanwhile, even though the European Union began to allow non-essential travel from a limited number of countries last month, travelers from the United States remain banned due to the recent spike in coronavirus cases.

The U.S. decision to allow European students comes days after the Trump administration agreed to drop a policy that would have forced tens of thousands of international students to leave the United States if their classes went entirely online; the reversal came amid legal challenges by major universities and pressure from business and tech companies.

China, Brazil and Iran face similar travel bans, but students from those nations were not included in the U.S. exemptions.  Students in European countries who already have visas to study in the United States are exempt from the ban, according to the memo.

The State Department also said spouses and children of certain foreign workers coming to the United States could qualify for exemptions, including the spouses of skilled workers with H-1B visas.