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The Biden administration is facing an increasing number of unaccompanied migrant children crossing into the United States, placing added strain on a system operating under limited capacity due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The pandemic has taken a dramatic toll on Latin America, where Covid-19 cases and deaths have soared and economies once projected to grow have been decimated. The region was also hit with two devastating hurricanes. The decline in economic growth in 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service, is expected to worsen income inequality and poverty

The majority of border crossers since October are single adults, many of whom are from Mexico. In January, the US Border Patrol arrested more than 75,000 migrants on the southern border, up from around 71,000 in December, according to the latest data. Of those, single adults made up around 62,000 arrests.

It's a fast-moving situation, described by the Biden administration as a "stressful challenge" and decried by critics of immigration as a "crisis." There are a lot of details we're still learning in real time.

This is a higher number than we've seen before. At the peak of the 2019 border crisis -- when there were overcrowded facilities and children sleeping on the ground -- there were around 2,600 unaccompanied children in Border Patrol custody, a former CBP official told CNN.

The treatment of kids in custody is one of the thorniest issues at the border. One of the largest public outcries we heard during the Trump administration came when monitors revealed squalid conditions inside CBP facilities where children were held. We haven't heard much about the current conditions in these facilities. But it's concerning, because the number of children arriving is outpacing the Biden administration's ability to place them in shelters overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services. And due to limited capacity at shelters, children are being held in CBP facilities beyond the 72-hour limit the law requires.

President Biden claimed Thursday in his first press conference since taking office that "nothing has changed" compared to earlier influxes of migrants and unaccompanied children at the border.

The Biden administration has been grappling with surging numbers of migrants, especially children arriving at the border without their parents. It is true, as Biden states, that numbers often rise during the early months of the year when temperatures begin to warm. But the number of children arriving today without their parents is considerably higher than at the same time in 2019 and 2020.

In fact, the number of unaccompanied children being apprehended by the Border Patrol were higher in February than they've been any previous February since 2014, according to data shared with NPR by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

I am a refugee living in the United States and I know what it means to escape death. Still, I warn others not to come – they won’t be safe or welcome here

Don’t come here. If you are afraid for your life and you have no place to go, don’t pick this country. It is not safe for you here any more.

If you try to cross our borders, people in military uniform called border patrol agents, will arrest you, throw you in a freezing cage and subject you to all kinds of abuses. These agents who don’t speak your language will sit you down and interrogate you. It won’t matter if you didn’t understand their questions, they will write whatever they want in dozens of forms, make you sign them, and use them against you later as they try to deport you.

The attack was carried out by 25-30 militants who arrived at the mosque in five all-terrain vehicles, Sadeq said.

He said the building is "huge" and was lined with bodies and a large quantity of shell casings following the attack.

The resident added that urgent cases are being sent to another hospital in Ismailia, almost 75 miles away.

Democratic state Rep. Park Cannon, a Black woman, continued knocking on Kemp's office door after Georgia State Patrol troopers instructed her to stop.She said later she was arrested for "fighting voter suppression." A law signed by Kemp on Thursday includes new limitations on mail-in voting, expands most voters' access to in-person early voting and caps a months-long battle over voting in a battleground state.

It has been heavily criticized as a bill that would end up disenfranchising Black voters. It's also seen as Republicans' rebuke of the November and January elections in which the state's Black voters led the election of two Democrats to the Senate.

Cannon is facing a charge of obstructing law enforcement officers by use of threats or violence and she faces a second charge of disrupting general assembly sessions or other meetings of members.

In the early 1900s, primatologists noticed a group of apes in central Africa with a distinctly slender build; they called them “pygmy chimpanzees.” But as the years passed, it became clear that those animals, now known as bonobos, were profoundly different from chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee societies are dominated by males that kill other males, raid the territory of neighboring troops and defend their own ground with border patrols. Male chimpanzees also attack females to coerce them into mating, and sometimes even kill infants.

Among bonobos, in contrast, females are dominant. Males do not go on patrols, form alliances or kill other bonobos. And bonobos usually resolve their disputes with sex — lots of it.

China to send nuclear-armed submarines into Pacific amid tensions with US

The Chinese military is poised to send submarines armed with nuclear missiles into the Pacific Ocean for the first time, arguing that new US weapons systems have so undermined Beijing’s existing deterrent force that it has been left with no alternative.

They point to plans unveiled in March to station the US Thaad anti-ballistic system in South Korea, and the development of hypersonic glide missiles potentially capable of hitting China less than an hour after launch, as huge threats to the effectiveness of its land-based deterrent force.

Raqqa, Syria -- ISIS's de facto capital city.

It's illegal to leave the so-called Islamic State.

Life in a warzone -- with fighter jets from Russia and the U.S.-led coalition dropping bombs on the ISIS heartland --

A former Oklahoma City police officer was convicted Thursday of raping and sexually victimizing eight women on his police beat in a minority, low-income neighborhood.

Daniel Holtzclaw, who turned 29 Thursday, sobbed as the verdict was read aloud. Jurors convicted him on 18 counts involving eight of the 13 women who had accused him; the jury acquitted him on another 18 counts.

CBS affiliate KWTV reported the jury deliberated for 45 hours before finding Holtzclaw guilty on four counts of first-degree rape, one count of second-degree rape, six counts of sexual battery, four counts of forcible sodomy and three counts of procuring lewd acts.

British Labour Leader Offers Compromise on Trident Program

Stirring a divisive internal debate over defense, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, suggested on Sunday that he might support the continued existence of the country’s Trident submarine fleet if it were sent on patrol without carrying nuclear

warheads.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track.

This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials.

Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

The attack was carried out by 25-30 militants who arrived at the mosque in five all-terrain vehicles, Sadeq said.

as well as passing vehicles, after first shooting some who were "kneeling in prayer."

"There was a woman waiting outside for her husband and young child to finish praying; she came inside and found them dead next to each other," Shetewy said.

By Justin FentonIn late 2015, I interviewed several young police officers over lunch in the middle of their patrol shift.

I asked each officer the same question: What do you want to be doing in 10 years? I assumed one might say “detective,” another “chief.”

Most of them responded with the same word: “tactical.” They wanted to be on a SWAT team, or something like it, handling shootouts and other high-risk situations.

he Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will restart the Central American Minors program, which allows certain at-risk Central American youths to live in the US.

hat program was "abruptly" ended by the Trump administration, "leaving around 3,000 children already approved for travel stranded," Roberta Jacobson, the coordinator for the southern border, said at a briefing Wednesday. The new phase of the program will work to "expand safe and legal avenues" for migration to the US

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The 10-year-old had been lost for hours — crying and shaking as he wandered a vast scrubland— when he saw the Border Patrol officer.

Wilton and his mother, Meylin, 30, crossed the border into Texas last month to seek asylum after fleeing their native Nicaragua. But they were immediately sent back to Mexico under Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that expels migrants who cross the border without allowing them to apply for protection.

The smugglers then abandoned Wilton after leading him across the border, leaving him to wander through the arid farmland of South Texas looking for assistance, until he found the Border Patrol agent who recorded his encounter with the boy.

Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill have called on Harris and President Joe Biden to visit areas along the U.S.-Mexican border, where they say an increase of migrants has developed into a crisis

Instead, officials said, they want the Biden administration to make border cities and their leaders a larger part in conversations about finding solutions, and they want Congress to pass immigration legislation.

Some presidents have visited the area; others skipped Texas’ southernmost tip.

They were the key to Rome’s military might.

The first major Roman road—the famed Appian Way, or “queen of the roads”—was constructed in 312 B.C. to serve as a supply route between republican Rome and its allies in Capua during the Second Samnite War.

Reduced travel time and marching fatigue allowed the fleet-footed legions to move as quickly as 20 miles a day to respond to outside threats and internal uprisings.