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After several days of camping on the street and relieving herself outside, Herrera began to itch uncontrollably with an infection. She worried: Would it imperil her baby?

She was seeing doctors and social workers at a Denver hospital where she planned to give birth because they served everyone, even those without insurance. They were alarmed their pregnant patient was now sleeping outside in the cold.

Days after she was forced to leave the Microtel, Denver paused its policy and allowed homeless immigrants to stay in its shelters through the winter. Denver officials say they visited encampments to urge homeless migrants to come back inside. But they didn’t venture outside the city limits to Aurora.

As Colorado’s third-largest city, Aurora, on Denver’s eastern edge, is a place where officials have turned down requests to help migrants. In February, the Aurora City Council passed a resolution telling other cities and nonprofits not to bring migrants into the community because it “does not currently have the financial capacity to fund new services related to this crisis.” Yet still they come, because of its lower cost of living and Spanish-speaking community.

In fact, former President Donald Trump last week called attention to the city, suggesting a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex. Authorities say that hasn’t happened.

The doctors treated Herrera’s yeast infection and urged her to sleep at the hospital. It wouldn’t cost anything, they assured her, just as her birth would be covered by emergency Medicaid, a program that extends the health care benefits for poor American families to unauthorized immigrants for labor and delivery.

Herrera refused.

“How,” she asked, “could I sleep in a warm place when my son is cold on the street?”

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240910115616/https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/m-living-lie-streets-colorado-city-pregnant-migrants-struggle-survive-rcna170164

The arrest of Telegram’s CEO in France and the closure of X in Brazil are two of the latest signs that times are changing, with networks beginning to be held more accountable

Russian-born tycoon Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested on August 24  outside Paris as soon as he got off his private jet. He is accused of complicity in the dissemination of child pornography on Telegram, which is widely used for criminal activities. Just a week later, a judge ordered the closure of X in Brazil due to the social network’s “repeated failure to comply with court orders.” Its owner, Elon Musk, refuses to block profiles that contribute to the “massive dissemination of Nazi, racist, fascist, hateful and anti-democratic speech.”

These two actions are symptomatic of how times are changing. During the first decade of this century, the world was seduced by social media, so much so that today more than half of the global population — around 4.5 billion people — use these platforms every day. During the second decade, social media companies grew into omnipresent, corporate giants. The world also got a glimpse of the dark side of social media, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal the first big wake-up call. And in the third decade, action is being taken to curb social media.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240910115014/https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2024/migrant-shelter-norfolk-massachusetts-immigration-debate/

Around the time Kamala Harris was taking over the reins of the Democratic presidential ticket, a mysterious group reportedly began a smear campaign against her, paying social media influencers tens of thousands of dollars to promote posts, according to reports.

In late July, a network of influencers who had been recruited to push conservative messages about Donald Trump or President Joe Biden throughout the summer, received an email requesting they make colorful sexual insults about Harris, according to Semafor.

In return, they would be paid tens of thousands of dollars via Zelle, a digital payments network.

The mission, known as Polaris Dawn, is designed to carry four crew members to the highest orbital altitude that humans have reached since 1972.

A SpaceX capsule carrying four private citizens blasted off early Tuesday on a five-day mission that is set to include the first spacewalk carried out by an all-civilian crew.

The mission, known as Polaris Dawn, lifted off at 5:24 a.m. ET from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

The flight is designed to carry the four crew members to the highest orbital altitude that humans have reached since the final Apollo moon mission in 1972: 870 miles above Earth’s surface. That's more than three times higher than the International Space Station. While in space, the group will test new spacesuits and technologies that could pave the way for future long-duration missions to the moon and eventually Mars.

Vance wrote on X that "people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country." Police say they haven't seen evidence.

Police in Springfield, Ohio, said Monday they had received no credible reports of immigrants harming pets, contradicting a claim by Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance.

The senator from Ohio, as well as other Republican lawmakers and several conservative commentators, have in recent days asserted without evidence that the arrival of thousands of immigrants from Haiti had created chaos in Springfield.

In a post on X, Vance wrote Monday that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

The former boyfriend of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei, who killed her by setting her on fire, has himself died from burns sustained in the attack, a Kenyan hospital official has said.

Dickson Ndiema ambushed the marathon runner as she returned home from church more than a week ago, before dousing her with petrol and setting her ablaze. 

Local administrators said the two had been in conflict over a small piece of land in north-west Kenya, where Cheptegei lived and trained. 

Ndiema died on Monday night at the intensive care unit where he had been admitted with more than 30% burns on his body.

Israeli air strikes on a so-called "humanitarian zone" in southern Gaza's al-Mawasi killed at least 40 people on Tuesday, according to health authorities in the enclave.

The strikes targeted at least 20 tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in the coastal area near the city of Khan Younis.

Eyewitnesses told AFP that at least five rockets fell in the area, with emergency services saying the strikes created craters up to nine metres deep.

The United States’ top commander in the Indo-Pacific region spoke with his Chinese counterpart Monday night, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the planning, as the two superpowers try to rebuild military ties in an effort to avoid conflict. 

Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, spoke with Gen. Wu Yanan, the commander of China’s Southern Theater, which is responsible for Beijing’s vast claims over the South China Sea. The call was the first time in years that the two regional military commanders have engaged in a formal conversation.

With early voting fast approaching, the rhetoric by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has turned more ominous with a pledge to prosecute anyone who “cheats” in the election in the same way he believes they did in 2020, when he falsely claimed he won and attacked those who stood by their accurate vote tallies.

He also told a gathering of police officers last Friday that they should “watch for the voter fraud,” an apparent attempt to enlist law enforcement that would be legally dubious.

Trump has contended, without providing evidence, that he lost the 2020 election only because of cheating by Democrats, election officials and other, unspecified forces. On Saturday, Trump promised that this year those who cheat “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law” should he win in November. He said he was referencing everyone from election officials to attorneys, political staffers and donors.

Samuel Alito, the US supreme court justice, accepted $900 concert tickets from a Catholic German aristocrat known for her unabashed conservative views and ties to rightwing activists, his latest financial disclosure form reveals.

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis reportedly gifted the tickets to Alito and his wife to allow them to attend the Regensburg castle festival, an annual summer music extravaganza hosted at her 500-room castle in Bavaria.

The princess, a descendant of princes of the Holy Roman empire, is noted for ties with Steve Bannon, a key supporter and former aide of Donald Trump, and connections to figures in the Catholic hierarchy opposed to Pope Francis.

Golden eagles have suddenly attacked four different people across a large geographic area in Norway during the past five days. Ornithologists have no explanation for this abnormal behaviour.

James Earl Jones, the distinguished and prolific actor in films, TV and theater known for providing the voice of Darth Vader in "Star Wars," has died.

Dallas Humber, 34, and Matthew Allison, 37, face 15 counts including soliciting hate crimes and support for terrorism

A white supremacist group that branded itself the Terrorgram Collective drew up a list of high-profile assassination targets including at least one senator and a district court judge, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Monday.

Prosecutors allege that the two leading agitators of the group incited followers on social media to commit hate crimes against Black and Jewish people, immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Dallas Humber, 34, of Elk Grove, California; and Matthew Allison, 37, of Boise, Idaho; face 15 counts each of soliciting hate crimes and providing material support to terrorism. US justice department lawyers filed the 37-page indictment in district court in the eastern district of California on Thursday.

It alleges the pair encouraged attacks on government infrastructure, energy facilities and other buildings “to ignite a race war and help accelerate the collapse of government and society”.

Calling it “unserious and unacceptable,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries rejected on Monday a proposal from Speaker Mike Johnson that links continued government funding for six months with a measure to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

The response frames the spending battle to come over the next weeks as lawmakers work to reach consensus on a short-term spending bill that would prevent a partial government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. Lawmakers hope to avoid a shutdown just weeks before voters go to the polls.

Johnson is punting the final decisions on full-year spending into next year when a new president and Congress take over. He’s doing so at the urging of members within his conference who believe that Republicans will be in a better position next year to secure the funding and policy priorities they want.