SEATTLE — The call came at mealtime — an anonymous threat demanding $5,000 or her son’s life.
So Blanca Orantes-Lopez, her 8-year-old boy and his father packed up and left the Pacific surfing town of Puerto La Libertad in El Salvador and headed for the United States.
Two months later, she sits in a federal prison south of Seattle. The boy, Abel Alexander, is in custody at a children’s home across the country in upstate New York. She has no idea when she might see him again.
“I still haven’t been able to talk to him,” Orantes told The Associated Press in Spanish as she wept through a telephone interview Monday from the prison. “The most difficult is not seeing him.”
Her story is emblematic of the 2,300 instances in which President Donald Trump’s administration has separated minors from their migrant parents in an effort to deter illegal immigration. The practice has provoked a national uproar fueled by stories of children being torn from their mothers’ arms and of parents being deported without their kids.
COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France — For decades, he was known only as Unknown X-9352 at a World War II American cemetery in Belgium where he was interred.
On Tuesday, Julius Heinrich Otto “Henry” Pieper, his identity recovered, was laid to rest beside his twin brother in Normandy, 74 years after the two Navy men died together when their ship shattered while trying to reach the blood-soaked D-Day beaches.
Six Navy officers in crisp white uniforms carried the flag-draped metal coffin bearing the remains of Julius to its final resting place, at the side of Ludwig Julius Wilhelm “Louie” Pieper at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.
The two 19-year-olds from Esmond, South Dakota, died together on June 19, 1944, when their huge flat-bottom ship hit an underwater mine as it tried to approach Utah Beach, 13 days after the D-Day landings.
While Louie’s body was soon found, identified and laid to rest, his brother’s remains were only recovered in 1961 by French salvage divers and not identified until 2017.
HOMESTEAD, Fla. — U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson accused the Trump administration of a “cover-up” after officials denied him entry Tuesday to a detention center for migrant children in South Florida where he had hoped to survey living conditions.
Nelson and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, both Florida Democrats, went to the contractor-run Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children following reports it was receiving detained migrant children who had arrived in the country illegally.
Wasserman Schultz said the facility was being used for an estimated 1,000 children, aged 13 to 17 — most of whom arrived here as unaccompanied minors and about 10 percent of them as children separated from their families at the border. She said two other facilities in South Florida were being used for younger children.
“It is an affront as the senior senator of this state that an agency head would tell me that I do not have entrance into a federally funded facility where the lives and health of children are at stake,” Nelson said.
GOTHIC, Colo. — David Inouye is an accidental climate scientist. More than 40 years ago, the University of Maryland biologist started studying when wildflowers, birds, bees and butterflies first appeared each spring on this mountain.
These days, plants and animals are arriving at Rocky Mountain Biological Lab a week or two earlier than they were 30 years ago. The robins that used to arrive in early April now show up in mid-March. Marmots end their winter slumber ever earlier.
“If the climate weren’t changing, we wouldn’t see these kind of changes happen,” Inouye said while standing on a bed of wildflowers that are popping up on the first day of May as marmots snoop around nearby.
It’s been 30 years since much of the world learned that global warming had arrived. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress, explaining that heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of fossil fuels were pushing temperatures higher.
NEW YORK — If meat is grown in a lab without slaughtering animals, what should it be called?
That question has yet to be decided by regulators, but for the moment it’s pitting animal rights advocates and others against cattle ranchers in a war of words.
Supporters of the science are embracing “clean meat” to describe meat grown by replicating animal cells. Many in the conventional meat industry are irritated by the term and want to stamp it out before it takes hold.
The spat shows the power of language as a new industry attempts to reshape eating habits. It’s why the $49.5 billion U.S. beef, poultry, pork and lamb industry is mobilizing to claim ownership of the term “meat.”
DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. — The lawyer for slain rapper XXXTentacion said Tuesday that detectives believe he was fatally shot in a random robbery while likely planning to buy a motorcycle at an upscale shop near a residential neighborhood in South Florida.
Attorney David Bogenschutz said investigators also told him the 20-year-old rapper, who pronounced his stage name “Ex Ex Ex ten-ta-see-YAWN,” had visited a bank shortly before the shooting and possibly withdrew cash for the purchase.
XXXTentacion, whose real name was Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, was exiting the shop’s parking lot in his luxury BMW electric car when he was shot. The Broward Sheriff’s Office says deputies are looking for two suspects who fled in a dark SUV.
From Associated Press