SAN LUIS, Ariz. — The 3-year-old boy with a bowl haircut and striped shirt silently clung to his father in the back of a U.S. Border Patrol truck.
Their shoes still muddy from crossing the border, the father and son had just been apprehended at a canal near a border fence in Arizona on a muggy night in July. Before the father, son and two older children could make it any farther, a Border Patrol agent intervened and directed them through a large border gate.
The father handed over documents that showed gang members had committed crimes against his family, one of the ways immigrants who seek asylum try to prove their cases. After a wait, he and his children were hauled away in a van to be processed at a Border Patrol station about 20 miles away in Yuma.
The Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector has seen a more than 120 percent spike in the number of families and unaccompanied children caught at the border over the last year, surprising many in an area that had been largely quiet and calm for the past decade.
AMALIA, N.M. — Searchers found the remains of a boy after raiding a makeshift compound last week in search of a missing Georgia child, authorities said Tuesday.
The remains were found Monday during a search in Amalia, near the Colorado border. Taos County Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe said. Authorities were awaiting positive identification of the remains.
The search for Abdul-ghani of Georgia led authorities Friday to the squalid compound where they found Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, the father of the missing boy, along with four other adults and 11 children living in filthy conditions.
“We discovered the remains yesterday on Abdul’s fourth birthday,” Hogrefe said, appearing to fight back tears.
The sheriff said authorities returned to the compound after interviews Friday and Saturday led them to believe the boy might still be on the property.
SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla CEO Elon Musk is gearing up to lead a buyout of the electric car maker in a stunning move that would end the maverick company’s eight-year history trading on the stock market.
In his typically unorthodox fashion, the eccentric Musk dropped his bombshell on his Twitter account, which he has used as a platform for pranks, vitriol and now for a proposal to pull off one of the biggest buyouts in U.S. history.
Musk got the ball rolling Tuesday after the stock market had already been open more than three hours with a tweet announcing he had secured funding to buy all of Tesla’s stock at $420 per share with no further details.
At that price, the buyout would cost nearly $72 billion, based on Tesla’s outstanding stock as of July 27, but it’s unlikely the deal would cost that much because Musk owns a roughly 20 percent stake in the Palo Alto, California, company. He also said he intends to give Tesla’s existing shareholders the option of retaining a stake in the company through a special fund, if they want.
“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” Musk wrote in his first tweet, following up with “good morning” and a smiley emoji. He later tweeted that the only uncertainty about completing the deal is whether he can gain shareholder approval.
NANYANG, China — The 62-year-old Chinese shopkeeper had waited nearly his entire adult life to see his dream of building a church come true — a brick house with a sunny courtyard and spacious hall with room for 200 believers.
But in March, about a dozen police officers and local officials suddenly showed up at the church on his property and made the frightened congregants disperse. They ordered that the cross, a painting of the Last Supper and Bible verse calligraphy be taken down. And they demanded that all services stop until each person, along with the church itself, was registered with the government, said the shopkeeper, Guo.
Without warning, Guo and his neighbors in China’s Christian heartland province of Henan had found themselves on the front lines of an ambitious new effort by the officially atheist ruling Communist Party to dictate — and in some cases displace — the practice of faith in the country.
Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, believers are seeing their freedoms shrink dramatically even as the country undergoes a religious revival. Experts and activists say that as he consolidates his power, Xi is waging the most severe systematic suppression of Christianity in the country since religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.
Sometimes Alfred Wilson still has to take a moment to collect himself after he pulls open files at the law firm where he works and sees Heather Heyer’s handwriting.
“I get choked up and have to gather myself before I talk to the client,” said Wilson, who hired Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed nearly a year ago in a car attack during a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The rally that left Heyer dead and dozens more injured proved to be a watershed moment, both for the racist, fringe “alt-right” movement, and for the city itself. In the year since, many residents like Wilson say the wounds haven’t healed. Others say the violence has laid bare divisions over deeper issues of race and economic inequality and what should be done to move forward.
“One of my hugest gripes with last year with the people of this town was that people, mostly white folks, kept saying, ‘This isn’t Charlottesville,’” said Brenda Brown-Grooms, a local pastor and activist. “I wonder what planet they live on. This is exactly who we are.”
A Charlottesville native, born in the segregated basement of the University of Virginia hospital, Brown-Grooms said white supremacy was present in Charlottesville long before the rally and is the “elephant in the room” the city now must deal with.
From Associated Press