When Laure fled Cameroon in 2019, she never expected to be sleeping on the streets of Tijuana, eating from trash cans and, more than a year later, still fighting near-constant racism while trying to gain asylum in the US.

During those initial weeks, she said she came to understand her cold new reality when she was unable to find employment despite having a nursing certification.

“She asked for my papers, my diploma. I gave it to her. Maybe 30 minutes later, she called me and said, ‘We have no work for a stranger,’” Laure said. “If somebody lives in your country and has documents, how are they a stranger? I told her, ‘You want to say that I am Black, that I have a Black color.’”

“Many times I would pass in the road, and every time the Mexican guys say, ‘Cuánto, cuánto, cuánto.’ I didn’t know what this ‘cuánto’ meant. I think maybe it was a greeting, because I didn’t know Spanish. So I say, ‘Hola, hola!’” Laure said.

Remember the 20th century? Phones had dials; the closest thing anyone had to Internet erotica was waiting up until midnight for the Soloflex infomercial, and — most outdated of all — people who had money tried to be discreet about it.

None of those things would make sense to a child born after the year 2000. Today, every teenager is their own media brand, with all the technology they need to broadcast their lives on their smartphone, usually via the social media platform TikTok.

The cultural pressures of wealth and celebrity are explored in my new book, “Gatecrasher,” but the past weeks have also brought fresh evidence that public opinion may finally be turning against young “influencers.”

The trend for boasting about money began with hashtags like #daddysmoney and #richboycheck, in which teens of means competed to flaunt their material possessions.

“The hot new thing on TikTok is bragging about money,” Lucas Cruikshank, a 26-year-old influencer whose YouTube channel has over 3 million subscribers, explained in a video posted on his channel in December. “Which I love — if somebody’s entire social media personality is, ‘I’m rich, I have so much money,’ I’ll follow them. Because it’s just entertaining, and I like seeing the life they live.”

In recent weeks, Anatasia Army, 33, has kept tabs on celebrity social media exploits from the safety of her Brooklyn apartment. She saw when billionaire David Geffen shared his hope that “everyone is staying safe” in an Instagram post uploaded from his $590 million superyacht. And when comedian Ellen DeGeneres compared quarantine to “being in jail.” Most recently, she watched House Speaker Nancy Pelosi inadvertently reveal in a TV segment that she owns two industrial refrigerators, each reportedly worth $12,000.

“As soon as I saw that number, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I could live on that,’” Army, a babysitter, says. While public displays of wealth have often elicited backlash, the coronavirus pandemic has changed the context almost overnight. A luxury kitchen appliance, Army says, “takes on a new tenor” when lines for food banks stretch for half a mile and the nonprofit hunger relief organization Feeding America estimates that an additional 17.1 million Americans may soon be struggling to eat.

The internet has provided many of us with a much-needed tether to other people and places in the midst of the pandemic, but social media is also playing another role: It has become a catalyst for anger as it exposes the growing chasm between the haves and have-nots. For every video call with a loved one, there’s accumulating evidence of unfairness as people in quarantine reveal their starkly different isolation experiences.

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

A California man has been arrested for allegedly punching his mother after the two got into a heated dispute over toilet paper at their home.

On Monday, the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Office tweeted that they responded to a call “where family members were arguing with each other because one felt the other one hid toilet paper.”

The argument soon turned into a “physical confrontation,” which led to the man’s arrest.

A TEENAGE paperboy obsessed with vampires murdered a 90-year-old woman, ripped her heart out and drank her blood in the belief that he would become immortal, a new documentary reveals.

And Mathew Hardman would have gone on to prey on other elderly people had he not been caught for the murder of Mabel Leyshon, described by an officer as one of the most gruesome in British legal history. Mabel had been widowed for 40 years and had lived in her bungalow in Anglesey for 50 years when Hardman broke in as she watched TV on a 2001 December evening. Mabel, hard of hearing, 4ft 9in, and very thin, suffered 22 stab wounds as she tried to defend herself from Hardman, 17.

New York’s gilded Upper East Side has been rendered a ghost town. The tourists are at home; the shops are shuttered, with their shelves bereft. Many of its residents, meanwhile, are as far away from the new center of a global pandemic as their wealth can take them—in the country, by the shore, on a hilltop, virtually anywhere else.

It’s the same story all over the world: The wealthy are experiencing coronavirus differently. Some have gone to their second or third homes or to visit family members in more remote locations. (In the interests of full transparency, I have spent the past two weeks staying with my mother at her home in rural Connecticut.) Others have paid thousands for short-term rentals: In France and the UK, sleepy country towns are overrun with weekenders hunkering down for the long haul, while entire hotels in Ireland have been bought out by families fleeing cities. In the US, Airbnb saw year-on-year revenue in rural areas increased by $280 million in March 2020, or almost 30%, while revenue in urban areas fell by $75 million, according to data from AirDNA. In the same period, bookings in Manhattan and New Jersey fell by 66%, while bookings in some Cape Cod towns have soared by as much as 600%.

Commentators widely agree that this is selfish, unfair, and in some cases actively dangerous. Writing in the Atlantic, travel journalist Nathan Thornburgh warns prospective emigrants that by leaving now, “you are nakedly prioritizing your comfort and peace of mind over the physical health of others.” Even tourism officials have asked would-be visitors to stay home: “This is something I thought I’d never have to say throughout my tourism career, but please stay home at this time,” Carol Chaplin, CEO of the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority, said in a press release.

A police chief in Oklahoma is accused of harassing the gay owners of a local businesses, and sticking his finger down the butt cracks of officers.

David Hanson, the police chief in Seminole, Okla., admitted using gay slurs in text messages with Todd Holliday, who runs a local office supply businesses with his husband, Justin.

But Hanson insisted he is not homophobic, saying the Hollidays are family friends and calling the slurs “cordial, off-color texts.” In one text, Hanson referred to himself as the Hollidays’ “daddy,” while other messages were “too vulgar” to be included in a story by KFOR-TV.

When parents, educators and mental health professionals talk about bullying, there is understandably a lot of emphasis on the victims. But in focusing solely on victims in anti-bullying efforts, an important part of the equation gets forgotten: the kids who do the bullying.

“Bullying is not a one-time event or a random act of mean behavior but rather a pervasive, ongoing pattern of aggression targeted toward another child who in some way has less power in the relationship,” explained school psychologist Rebecca Branstetter, noting that it’s important to distinguish it from other forms of aggressive behavior or typical childhood conflicts.

Obviously every child who bullies comes from different circumstances and has different reasons for this behavior. There is no one profile of a bully, as each child who engages in this conduct has a unique set of challenges. But there are many common traits and experiences among bullies, and examining them can be beneficial.

This 2-year-old girl has given up on walking, and it's ok because her dad effortlessly came to her rescue.

In California and across much of the country, children with cognitive problems routinely languish in custody for months or years while judges determine whether they’ll be able to pick up the skills needed for a fair trial. Most states don’t have comprehensive programs to help these kids become “competent,” as the courts call it, referring to someone who has the ability to assist their attorneys with their defense and possesses a solid understanding of the charges and proceedings against them. In one egregious case, according to a legal director at the National Juvenile Defender Center, children were asked to watch episodes of Law & Order to prepare for their trials.

A 92-year-old US woman shot and killed her son, 72, in order to avoid being sent into a care home, police say.

Anna Mae Blessing, who is charged with murder, contemplated her son's intentions to put her into care for days, according to court documents.

"You took my life, so I'm taking yours," she reportedly said as she was escorted out of the Arizona home she shared with her son and his girlfriend.

A 79-year-old English gay vicar who defied the church to marry his 24-year-old Romanian partner has been left homeless after their break up.

Retired vicar Philip Clements went against Church of England teachings to marry male model Florin Marin, who is 55 years his junior.

But since marrying in April, they separated in August.

A teenager in Indianapolis has been charged with murder, arson, and auto theft after burning his adopted father alive, RTV6 reports.

16-year-old Jordan Marin-Doan was arrested Saturday in connection to a house fire he allegedly started that left his adopted father, 45-year-old Jason Doan, dead.

Doan’s husband, Alan Marin, told police that he and his husband awoke to find a fire blocking the staircase leading to the exit last Thursday night. Doan helped Marin and two of their children flee to safety through a bedroom window before he himself succumbed to the flames.

A gay landlord was jailed after having sex in a tenant’s bed while they were out.

The landlord, 40-year-old Carlos Quijada-Lara, pleaded guilty after shocking footage captured him in the act.

Arrested last December, he pleaded guilty to the charges of criminal trespassing and misdemeanor obscenity.

He will be jailed for two years.

Logan Pierce and Mikaela DiGiulio set up cameras in their Colorado apartment, which cost them $1,100 (€930).