A newly formed migrant caravan of more than 2,500 departed the southern Mexican border in Chiapas Saturday and is now traveling north for the U.S.

The group formed in Tapachula, Chiapas, over several weeks and is labeled the first Central American-Caribbean caravan since it includes a large number of Cubans.

The caravan departed Saturday morning at approximately 4:30 am. They spent the first night in the town of Huehuetán and later the outskirts of Huixtla. The caravan planned to reach Mapastepec by Monday, which would total approximately 65 miles since their departure on Saturday morning.

According to numbers released by Mexican immigration officials, the caravan consists of 1,199 Hondurans, 764 Salvadorans, 300 Guatemalans, 176 Nicaraguans, and 85 Cubans. Some expect the Cuban cohort to swell to 600 after immigration officials suspended the issuance of one-year humanitarian visas.

A journalist from a leading Austrian broadcaster has filed a legal case against the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) after he was barred from entering the country over border violation and "anti-Ukrainian propaganda."

Christian Wehrschutz, who was banned from entering Ukraine in early March, brought an appeal to the Kiev court on Tuesday.

The journalist was covering events in Ukraine for the major Austrian broadcaster ORF since the US-backed coup in 2014 and reported from the frontlines in the warzone in Eastern Ukraine. As the ban was announced authorities in Kiev dubbed him "a threat to national security" and accused him of border violation and peddling Kremlin propaganda.

A Sprint cell phone tower will be removed from a California elementary school after four students and three teachers were diagnosed with cancer.

Weston Elementary School in Ripon, CA went on high alert after the controversy erupted two years ago - with some parents even pulling their children from school over the tower which Sprint has been paying the school $2,000 per month to place on its property.

The Ripon Unified School District initially defended the cell phone tower earlier this month, with board president Kit Oase saying tests done on the tower had found it was operating within safety standards.

Google is launching the Local Experiments Project, an effort to fund dozens of new local news websites around the country and eventually around the world. The tech giant says it will have no editorial control over the sites, which will be built by partners it selects with local news expertise.


Why it matters:

Big tech companies like Google and Facebook are often blamed for the demise of the local news business model. Now, both are trying to fix the broken local news ecosystem for the sake of their audiences, which they say crave more local news.

"Everything we do in this space tends to be open-sourced learnings. Our business models are not attached to these efforts. There's no requirement in any of these experiments that the partners use Google advertising tools." - Richard Gingras, VP of news, Google

Austria's leader confirmed Wednesday that authorities have found financial links between the suspected gunman of the recent mosque massacres in New Zealand and a local nationalist group, following a raid on an activist's home.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz added that the Austrian government was looking into dissolving the group, known as the Identitarian Movement of Austria, after domestic intelligence agents seized electronic equipment from the apartment of its leader, Martin Sellner, on Monday.

"Our position on this is very clear, no kind of extremism whatsoever - whether it's radical Islamists or right-wing extremist fanatics - has any place in our society," Kurz said.

The chancellor's comments follow statements from Hansjoerg Bacher, a spokesperson for the Graz prosecutors leading the investigation under anti-terror laws. Bacher confirmed that Sellner's group received 1,500 euros ($1,690) in early 2018 from a donor with the same name as the shooter charged with conducting the Christchurch mosque attacks, which left 50 people dead and scores more injured.

Despite the fact that they were all heading in the same direction, three US military transport vehicles managed to get into a serious accident in which two of them collided, hospitalizing two soldiers.

According to Ewelina Buda, a spokesman for the Poviat police headquarters in nearby Brzesk, the vehicles were headed toward the Hungarian border when things went south. The crash occurred in Lesser Poland, where the country borders neighboring Hungary.

While details are currently limited, military police are trying to figure out exactly how one of the vehicles ended up rear-ending the other, despite the roads being dry and free of any abnormal weather conditions.


They did at least manage to get the cars onto the side of the road, which kept traffic flowing smoothly in spite of the embarrassing wreck that left personnel waiting on the hard shoulder next to their expensive damaged equipment.

As Trump continues to ratchet up NATO's military budget, one crucial sector he might consider is extra driving lessons. Only about a month ago, seven soldiers were injured, two seriously, when a military transport van rolled over in Karliki, Poland.

Germany should keep an eye on Islamists' children under the age of 14 who risk being indoctrinated by their parents, the interior minister has suggested, triggering a barrage of criticism against his offbeat proposal.

BfV, the homeland security agency, should be able to accumulate intelligence on children whose parents left Germany and joined Islamist groups in the Middle East, according to a policy paper drafted on behalf of Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, which was reported by Die Welt.

Existing laws prohibit storing such data on persons who have not yet reached the age of 14, therefore Seehofer's paper calls for an amendment in order to be prepared for the risk of children returning to the country, potentially plotting terrorist attacks or spreading Islamist ideology.

"According to our experience, more and more children and young people found themselves in the jihadist environment," said Hans-Georg Engelke, the ministry's state secretary. He said there is a "significant number" of minors who are now in Syria and whose German parents are considered a security threat.

Massachusetts' Amherst College has drawn criticism for publishing a 'language guide' to the latest social justice buzzwords. The ensuing fiasco is the latest battle in the neverending war over free speech on America's campuses.

The college's Office of Diversity circulated a 'Common Language Guide' last week. Flicking through its pages, the guide is an exhaustive list of the latest, politically correct, university-approved terms to describe pretty much everything.

Predictably, much of the guide's pages are devoted to issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality, all covered from the furthest left position possible. From 'Cultural Appropriation' to 'Biological Determinism,' every social justice box is ticked. Did you know that "women cannot be 'just as sexist as men,'" because 'Reverse Oppression' is not real? And when LGBT people's achievements in the military are celebrated, that's a blatant case of 'Homonationalism.'

A New York suburb has banned children not vaccinated against measles from public spaces, such as schools and shopping malls, as it fights the state's worst outbreak in decades of the potentially deadly disease.

Rockland County declared a state of emergency on Tuesday and said the ban would remain in place for 30 days or until unvaccinated children get the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot.

The Rockland announcement follows measles outbreaks in California, Illinois, Texas and Washington and is part of a global resurgence of the viral infection, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We will not sit idly by while children in our community are at risk," County Executive Ed Day said in a statement. "This is a public health crisis, and it is time to sound the alarm."

We are students, academics and medical science researchers at the University of Alberta. We've had our eye on the state of academic freedom in Canada for years, in large part due to our experiences serving on various academic-governance bodies. In mid-2017, we began to wonder if there was any way we could quantify free speech on campus. Was there a threat? Was it widespread-or just a localized phenomenon that characterized elite American liberal-arts schools (which is where most of the most widely shared anecdotes are rooted)? Having just observed Bret Weinstein's ordeal at Evergreen State College and Jordan Peterson's fight for free speech at the University of Toronto, we wanted to see if concerns in this area were shared by academics at other institutions.

So we decided to start asking questions. And in the process, we collected some interesting statistics. For example, 39% of Canadian academic respondents to our survey said that if they had more academic freedom, their students would receive a better education. We also found out how difficult it could be to ask even simple questions that touch on such a highly charged topic.

In August, 2017, we formulated our survey questions and got feedback from others, which helped us fine-tune their wording. Consistent with our training, we wrote up the study design and asked our university's research ethics office to review it. This was technically research on "human subjects." And even though we were not collecting or publishing personally identifiable details, we wanted to cross the T's and dot the I's. Our research ethics office asked us to explain the questions we wanted to ask. And then things went sideways.

The research ethics office told us that they couldn't even look at our study because it was out of its jurisdiction. We disagreed: As a matter of policy, they really should want to help make research more ethical; moreover, we were students at the university, and the resources they offered should be available as much to us as to anyone else. So we appealed-more or less begging them to have a look. We thought we may at some point want to publish our results academically, and the research ethics office serves as a gatekeeper to academic publication.