North America

United States border inspectors yesterday allowed in the first wave of Central American asylum-seekers to enter the country for processing after a temporary impasse over lack of space to accommodate them. US Customs and Border Protection said it processed hundreds of asylumseekers in the previous week, many of them Mexican, which contributed to a bottleneck that led inspectors to turn away caravan members when they arrived on Monday. The agency didn’t say how many caravan members were allowed in, but organisers said there were eight. About 140 others were still waiting in Mexico to turn themselves in at San Diego’s San Ysidro border crossing, the nation’s busiest, said Alex Mensing, caravan project organiser for Pueblo Sin Fronteras.

The porn actress alleging a sexual encounter with US President Donald Trump is escalating her legal fight, suing him for defamation. Stormy Daniels filed the complaint in federal court in New York yesterday. At issue is a tweet Trump made in which he dismissed a composite sketch that Daniels says depicted a man who threatened her in 2011 to stay quiet about her alleged relationship with Trump. In the tweet last month, Trump said: “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!” The filing says the tweet was “false and defamatory”, arguing that Trump was speaking about Daniels and that he “knew that his false, disparaging statement would be read by people around the world, as well as widely reported”. It also says Daniels has been “exposed to death threats and other threats of physical violence”. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages.