By Priscilla Alvarez, Chris Boyette, CNN

(CNN) — A 5-year-old who was taken by federal agents from the driveway of his metro Minneapolis home Tuesday after returning from preschool is being detained with his father at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas, a source familiar with the situation said.

The preschooler, Liam Conejo Ramos, was removed from the family’s running car, said Zena Stenvik, superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb.

“Another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let them take care of the small child, but was refused,” Stenvik said at a news conference Wednesday.

An agent “led him to the door and directed him to knock on the door, asking to be let in, in order to see if anyone else was home — essentially using a 5-year-old as bait,” Stenvik said.

ICE posted on X Thursday the agency “did not, and has never, ‘used a child as bait.’ The child was ABANDONED.”

The Department of Homeland Security said the father, who is from Ecuador, was the intended target of the operation. The two were eventually taken into custody together.

Ramos is the latest child caught up in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign in Minnesota and across the country. The campaign has been marked by aggressive tactics by armed, masked agents, the apprehension of US citizens and crackdowns on protesters as battles intensify over the legality of the actions. Residents in targeted areas have responded by warning neighbors and, at times, taking steps to hinder immigration agents’ movements and actions.

According to a source familiar with Tuesday’s situation, the father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, and his young son are being held at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, an ICE facility for families.

In a statement to CNN, DHS said ICE was conducting an operation to arrest the child’s father when he “fled on foot — abandoning his child.”

“For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended” the father, Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement to CNN.

“We conduct legal, ethical and moral law enforcement missions here in Minneapolis,” Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino said Thursday at a news conference. “… I didn’t detain a 5-year-old, and we’re going to continue with that law enforcement mission.”

The department said the father was released into the US under the Biden

Lina Robles

El forense dio a conocer el nombre de la persona que murió después de ser atropellada el domingo pasado a las 3:30 de la madrugada cuando caminaba por la calle Vista Chino cerca de la Avenida Caballeros en Palm Springs.

Mientras la policía sigue buscando al conductor del carro involucrado quien huyó y dejó abandonado a su suerte a Ricardo Marano de 56 años.

Además, los investigadores dijeron que el vehículo involucrado en la tragedia fue encontrado abandonado en Thousand Palms.

The post El forense reveló la identidad del hombre que murió después de ser atropellado en Palm Springs appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

Lina Robles

Ayer a las 3:30 de la madrugada el sheriff llego a investigar después que se activó una alarma antirrobo en el área de la calle Bob Hope y la Varner Road en Thousand Palms, donde descubrieron que una torre de radio comunicación de la policía que fue vandalizada.

Al respecto el Departamento del Sheriff y la policía de Palm Springs e Indio confirmaron que su servicio de radio no dejo de funcionar, pero Cathedral City reporto fallas y redujo la cobertura hasta que terminen las reparaciones.

Los investigadores continúan buscando a los responsables del acto vandálico.

The post La policía investiga un acto de vandalismo realizado a una torre de radio comunicación en Thousand Palms appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

By Andrew Freedman, CNN

(CNN) — The frigid temperatures, massive snow and deadly ice storm taking shape east of the Rockies might seem to conflict with life on a rapidly warming planet. But all of these things still happen, even with climate change, and some of them could be even more severe than before when the conditions are right.

Bone-chilling cold is becoming less common and severe as the world warms — cold comfort for millions of people about to experience a prolonged period of frigid temperatures. Winter is the fastest-warming season in the US, and even this winter so far, warm temperature records have been outnumbering cold records in the Lower 48 states.

This is largely because many states in the West are having their warmest winter on record, with ski areas in Colorado and other typical skiing meccas in that region starved for snow.

Relatively few cold temperature records have been set so far when compared to the warm records out West, said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at the research nonprofit Climate Central. But there is no denying that this weather is unusually cold, she said, describing it as more like the winters that the Midwest and Northeast were accustomed to experiencing a few decades ago.

Climate Central researchers looked at trends in the coldest temperature of the year in cities across the US, showing that they have been increasing rapidly with climate change. For example, in Minneapolis, the lowest temperature of the year has increased by around 12 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970.

And in Cleveland, the coldest temperature of the year has gone up by 11.2 degrees since 1970, the research shows. This means winters just haven’t been getting as cold as they used to, making this cold snap rarer, though it remains to be seen whether many all-time cold temperature records are tied or broken.

Other experts point to the winter storm and particularly the Arctic cold that will follow in its wake and note that climate change may itself be playing a role in instigating them. Jennifer Francis, a researcher at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who has studied changes in the polar vortex as the world warms, said she’s seeing evidence in this storm.

“Even though global warming is causing warmer winters overall, severe winter weather events are still possible — and perhaps even more likely — because warming is not the only consequence of human-caused climate change,” she said. “Other ingredients that set the stage for severe winter weather are on the rise, and many of them are in play this week.”

The cold air invading from the Arctic comes courtesy of the polar vortex, as its frigid lobes rotate around a main frigid whirl near Hudson Bay in Canada.

The polar vortex is a roaring, circular wall of wind that typically confines frigid air to the Arctic. But when it stretches out, it can dip south and bring the cold air with it. That is what is happening across the U.S. now with a big dip, or trough, in the jet stream across the Central and Eastern states.

Judah Cohen, a research scientist at MIT, said the stretching of the vortex is tied in pa

By Jacopo Prisco, CNN

(CNN) — Space junk falling out of orbit and crashing toward Earth is a growing threat. Indeed, old satellites and spacecraft parts reenter our planet’s atmosphere more than three times a day.

When these objects burn through the atmosphere, they can release harmful substances, and if they reach Earth’s surface, they can contaminate the environment as well as collide with buildings, other infrastructure and possibly even people.

However, tracking falling debris in an effort to mitigate its impact is complicated because space junk can deorbit suddenly as it travels at speeds up to 18,000 miles per hour. Current methods to monitor falling space junk use radar and optical tracking but they struggle to accurately predict where most objects could land, especially if the debris breaks up during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. This lack of precise location data can delay or prevent the recovery of dangerous toxic space residue.

Now, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College London say they’ve found a new way to help spot space junk during reentry. Their approach uses seismometers, the instruments that normally detect earthquakes in the ground.

The trick is to look for data indicating a sonic boom — the shock wave produced when an object exceeds the speed of sound — which the falling debris generates as it tumbles through the atmosphere.

“We’ve known for a long time that space debris reentering the atmosphere produces sonic booms, exactly the same way as natural meteoroids or supersonic aircraft produce sonic booms,” said Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins, who studies earthquakes on Mars, Earth and other planets in our solar system.

“I did a lot of work on a NASA mission called InSight, where we tried to use meteoroids as seismic sources on Mars, with a single seismometer,” added Fernando, who coauthored a paper with Constantinos Charalambous, a research fellow at Imperial College London, on the new method that published Thursday in the journal Science.

The InSight lander, which touched down on Mars in 2018, has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes, a handful of which were produced by meteoroids striking the surface, rather than by the movement of rocks within the planet. InSight was able to “hear” the shock waves that the meteoroids produced as they entered Mars’ thin atmosphere and then pinpoint the location of the impact. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was subsequently flown over these craters to study and photograph them, revealing important insights about the red planet’s surface.

“The big step in this paper was taking some of the techniques we developed for studying natural meteoroids on Earth and Mars and applying them to the study of space debris on Earth,” Fernando said.

“But in many ways, space debris is quite different to natural space objects — it tends to enter the atmosphere more slowly and at a much shallower angle. It also ten