1 Migrant caravan: Calls for a new migrant caravan went largely unheeded Tuesday as a relatively small group departed from Honduras, a week after a raid by Mexican police resulted in hundreds of detentions and the dissolution of a previous caravan. Conversation in online chat groups used to organize the caravans has been marked by anxiety since the raid and amid other policies in Mexico that seem designed to discourage movements of migrants en masse. Fewer than 300 people gathered at a bus station in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, to leave by bus and on foot in the overnight darkness. Caravans tend to grow as they move north and are joined by migrants already on the road, but the group was a far cry from previous caravans that began with around 1,000-2,000 people. The caravan that was broken up last week numbered around 3,000 at its peak. Calls for a parallel caravan leaving from San Salvador, capital of neighboring El Salvador, also fizzled.
2 Painting protest: An American art museum is demanding that a German far-right party stop using one of its paintings, portraying a 19th century slave auction, on an anti-Muslim campaign poster. The case is drawing attention to the ways in which populist parties are playing on fear of foreigners to win votes for upcoming European elections. The dispute over the painting, which shows a Middle Eastern slave trader displaying a naked young woman with much lighter skin to a group of men for examination, highlights the aggressive and fear-mongering portrayal of Muslim migrants by the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party as it attempts to capitalize on concerns about the huge influx of asylum-seekers in recent years. The director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., condemned the use of Jean-Leon Gerome’s 1866 oil-on-canvas painting “Slave Market,” by the AfD. The...
