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Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in New York City on Saturday on sex trafficking-related charges, according to multiple reports .

NBC 4 New York , citing sources, reported court documents state that Epstein allegedly had sexual encounters with dozens of underage girls at his Palm Beach, Florida residence. According to authorities, the politically connected hedge fund manager employed “female fixers” who sought out the girls from all over the world for such encounters. Some of the girls were allegedly transported to his homes in New York City, New Mexico, and a private Caribbean island, according to court documents.

Law enforcement sources told NBC 4 New York that Epstein is expected to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Monday.

“It’s been a long time coming—it’s been too long coming,” David Boies, an attorney who represents a pair of Epstein accusers, said in a statement to the Daily Beast. “It is an important step towards getting justice for the many victims of Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise.

“We hope that prosecutors will not stop with Mr. Epstein because there were many other people who participated with him and made the sex trafficking possible,” added Boies.

The development comes after a federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered the unsealing of nearly 2,000 pages of records related to a civil case that may contain lurid claims about the sexual history of the wealthy investor.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling relates to records in a since-settled defamation case after Epstein in 2008 pleaded guilty in Florida to state charges of soliciting and procuring a person under age 18 for prostitution.

He was sentenced to 13 months in jail and was required to reach financial settlements with dozens of his once-teenage victims. Epstein, now 66, also was required to register as a sex offender.

Attorney Alan Dershowitz, the Miami Herald Co., and independent blogger Michael Cernovich sought the unsealing of records in the case. Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor who had worked on Epstein’s legal defense, sought the unsealing of records to fight what he called “outrageous and impertinent allegations” made against him, the 2nd Circuit noted.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

DISCOVERING just one tiny fragment of debris from the infamous Roswell UFO crash could force the US government to disclose its UFO secrets, a real-life Fox Mulder has claimed.

Former Ministry of Defence investigator Nick Pope says we are still no closer to finding out what happened at the infamous Roswell crash even after 75 years.

However, he believes if just one tiny fragment of the debris could be found, it could force UFO disclosure as it would be “game over” for any government cover-up.

Speaking on this weekend’s 75th anniversary of the incident, in which an unknown craft crashed in the New Mexico desert sparking decades of theories about alien bodies and government cover-ups , UFO expert Nick said the events of July 2, 1947, remain a mystery.

He told The Sun, “Roswell is literally the ground zero of the modern UFO mystery. If you stop someone in the street who has no interest or particular belief in UFOs, there’s a good chance they’ll have heard of Roswell.

“But 75 years in – I’m not sure we are nearer to any answers.

“I’m a little conflicted on this but a UFO case is like a police investigation – the first 48 hours are critical.

“If you don’t solve it within the first 48, your chances of ever doing so rapidly diminish.

“So that’s my pessimistic opinion. My optimistic opinion is that occasionally cops do a cold case review.

“They will delve back into a case. Some new piece of information will come forward, like a new witness, a new document, or a new photograph.

“Or you get something like a new technique, forensics DNA, and suddenly this case from decades ago gets solved – maybe there’ll be something like that with Roswell.”

Nick says that if any wreckage or debris from the crash still exists and was discovered – today’s testing could immediately ascertain whether the UFO was from outer space – or earth.

“It only takes one critical piece of evidence that can blow the thing wide open,” he said.

“I think whether you are a skeptic or believer, nobody disputes that something crashed, and where something crashed there is debris.

“People love souvenirs so if you are if you back in 1947 and you’re told, ‘okay, you need to clear up all this stuff’ – somebody is going to have put a tiny piece of it in their pocket and that person’s grandson or granddaughter may have it in a little box somewhere or in the attic.

“In terms of the science, if we got our hands on a single piece of wreckage, it would be immediately discernible whether this was alien or terrestrial because there are scientific tests that frankly, that any high school chemistry student could do, that would tell whether something had been subjected to cosmic rays of outer space or not.”

Such an experiment could force the government to reveal any UFO secrets it may have been hiding , Nick said.

“Could this force disclosure? It could because it’s, it’s binary,” he added.

“If there is a piece of wreckage, somewhere in a warehouse, in a hanger, wherever it might be, you could do isotopic ratio analysis and you could tell, has this been in space or not?

“And then it would be game over.

“So I think there is work that still could be done on this.

“And it will show either, there’s something weird and otherworldly about this or there isn’t.”

Nick and other UFOexperts, alien hunters, and six fans descended on the town of Roswell this weekend for a festival to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Roswell crash.

The grandson of the first responder to the crash, Jesse Marcel, who attended the event, told The Sun how his grandfather revealed that alien bodies were found and he was part of the cover-up.

Another attendee Travis Walton – one of the most famous ‘alien abductees’ in the world revealed how people are finally starting to believe the extraordinary story of how he was taken on board a spaceship and experimented on.

And retired military cop James Clarkson revealed how a local funeral director had been asked by the military to provide child-sized coffins after the 1947 crash – thought to be for alien bodies.

Forza Horizon 5 is coming November 9, heading to Mexico this time around. Just announced at Microsoft’s Xbox & Bethesda Showcase, Forza Horizon 5 is looking sharp in its debut trailer, where we see some new ray-tracing and photogrammetry tech in action. It’s definitely the best Forza has ever looked, with some huge dust storms, lush vegetation, and volcanic scenes.

The campaign sees you with a quippy group of drivers exploring Mexico and searching for places to expand the festival into. Horizon 5 will also feature some fancy new weather events, like tropical storms or the big dust storm on display in the trailer.

A detail only dorks like me will get excited about: the skyboxes are legit 12k 24-hour loops of real Mexican skies captured with a fancy HDR camera rig. Combined with the new ray-tracing lighting tech and super detailed photogrammetry textures, Forza is looking real fine. Like, real fine.

There’s a bit in the gameplay demo below (around 4:50) where they’re racing through a shallow creek, and you can see the sky and scenery perfectly reflected in the water as the cars distort it, vrooming like they do. Big fan.

As with all Microsoft games, it’ll be there day one on Xbox Game Pass.

More than 200 people the United States has sent back to El Salvador have been killed or seriously abused — including sexually assaulted and tortured — according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

The group’s investigation found that from 2013 to 2019, 138 people were killed and more than 70 others were beaten, sexually assaulted, extorted or tortured after they were sent back to the Central American country.

The report, released Wednesday , highlights the risks Salvadorans face when sent back to a country facing a humanitarian crisis , racked by extreme levels of violence. It emphasizes how efforts in the last few years by the Trump administration to restrict legal immigration — particularly asylum — have hit Salvadorans especially hard.

“This has been a brick-by-brick erection of a legal wall by the Trump administration in an attempt to effectively end asylum in the U.S.,” the report’s co-author, Alison Leal Parker, told NBC News. “Salvadorans are by no means the only nationality, but they are one of the populations that will suffer greatly from this.”

“A living hell”

Juana, who requested that her real name not be used because of safety concerns, is a Salvadoran woman who suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of her partner and fled for the U.S. border with her 2-year-old daughter in 2015.

But Juana and her daughter are back in San Miguel — one of El Salvador’s most violent areas — in the same neighborhood they fled nearly five years ago.

Eight percent of all homicides in El Salvador in 2018 happened in San Miguel, making it the second deadliest municipality in the country, according to the State Department ‘s Overseas Security Advisory Council .

“This is a very dangerous place. There’s no safe place here because people get killed all the time,” Juana told NBC News in Spanish. Gang members “left me all beaten” at work in April, she said, adding that it’s been difficult to hold a steady job since criminals are always looking to extort and assault her.

Shortly after Juana got to the U.S., she was detained in a holding cell known as a “hielera” for its cold temperatures (“hielo” is “ice” in Spanish), separated from her toddler and deported the following year without her child, even though she passed her credible fear interview.

“Being separated from my daughter really affected me,” Juana said. “That’s not a thing you can just overcome easily.”

Officials working the case found that Juana’s former partner, her daughter’s father, had reported her for human trafficking as part of his abuse. The Salvadoran government later determined she had not committed such a crime, and after a year and a half, Salvadoran and U.S. officials intervened to reunite mother and child.

For Salvadorans, doors are closing

Gang members shot and killed Adriana in 2017 after the U.S. dismissed her asylum claim and deported her back to El Salvador in 2015, according to the report, which changed Adriana’s and other victim’s real names to avoid identifying some of the people interviewed during the research.

Adriana, a former Salvadoran policewoman, was seeking asylum in the U.S. after being threatened by gangs.

The U.S. has deported many Salvadorans like her “who flee the country because they have tried to enforce the law,” Parker said. Typically, these are people who have worked on investigations or trials of gang members.

“The consequences for these police officers and law enforcement can be life and death,” Parker said.

The U.S. has been denying asylum applications from El Salvador even though the number of applicants increased from about 5,600 to over 60,000 from 2012 to 2017, a growth of nearly 1,000 percent.

A rise in asylum requests from people fleeing El Salvador suggests that the violence and human rights abuses in the country, “including one of the highest murder rates in the world and very high rates of sexual violence and disappearances,” have worsened, according to Human Rights Watch.

Gabriel G. was targeted by gangs for being in the Salvadoran military and unsuccessfully sought U.S. asylum. Gabriel told Human Rights Watch that he and his family are continually harassed by gang members after he was deported in 2018. The death threats are constant, he said.

Salvadorans facing deportation are often subjected to an immigration system that is “harsh and punitive,” plagued with court hearing backlogs and limited access to comprehensive legal advice, as well as “prolonged and inhumane detention,” according to the report.

Two U.S. attorney general decisions, one by Jeff Sessions and one by William Barr, narrowed the categories of people who can claim asylum in ways that particularly affect Salvadorans. The decisions limited the ability to seek asylum for those fleeing gang and gender-based violence or fleeing because a relative was assaulted or killed — all common reasons Salvadorans leave their country, according to the report.

High risk for longtime U.S. residents

The report emphasized the high risk of harm for longtime U.S. residents who return to El Salvador, what Parker called its “most surprising” finding. Those deportees may stick out in El Salvador as easy marks for gangs that control much of the country’s territory.

Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans could be deported from the U.S. in the coming years based on two Trump administration efforts to end immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) .

About 47 percent of the estimated 1.2 million Salvadorans living in the U.S. who are not citizens are in the country legally as lawful permanent residents or through TPS and DACA . The rest are undocumented.

Work authorizations for TPS holders are set to expire in January 2021 and DACA’s future won’t be decided until the Supreme Court rules on whether to keep or overturn Trump’s decision to end the program.

Rollbacks of legal immigration protections make at least 900,000 Salvadorans who are undocumented, DACA or TPS holders vulnerable to deportation, subsequently “sending them to face murder and attacks on their safety,” Parker said.

The U.S. determined that only 18.2 percent of Salvadorans seeking asylum from 2014 to 2018 qualified for it. During the same time period, the U.S. deported 111,000 people to El Salvador, the report said.

Human Rights Watch said many of those denied asylum and sent back were later killed.

Under the one-year-old Migrant Protection Protocols , known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, thousands of migrants waiting for U.S. immigration hearings have been sent to Mexico, in areas the State Department has deemed unsafe because of ” organized crime activity — including gun battles, murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, forced disappearances, extortion and sexual assault.”

The report calls on the Trump administration, as well as lawmakers, to “address due process failures in asylum adjudications” and adopt laws that take into account the “global realities prompting people to flee their homes,” instead of implementing policies that “shift responsibility for immigration enforcement to countries like Mexico” to avoid obligations over migrants’ safety.

“Evidence continues to pile up showing that the U.S. government is knowingly signing a death sentence by forcibly returning vulnerable people to the very place they fled. It’s our responsibility to demand accountability, restore our asylum and refugee systems, and uphold our nation’s core values,” said Sen.Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a statement reacting to the report .

The organization also recommends implementing additional protections under international law to help people who may have been denied asylum and will likely face risk of serious harm or death upon their deportation to El Salvador.

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A new novel about a woman and her young son’s harrowing trek across the U.S.-Mexico border, an Oprah Book Club pick, has drawn praise from several literary figures, but it has also stirred fierce debate after being slammed as stereotypical and racist.

What’s more, the hype around Jeanine Cummins’ “American Dirt” has unleashed a firestorm on social media about who gets to write about the migrant Latino experience and the realities in Mexico — and whether the publishing industry favors certain authors and narratives to tell these stories.

Cummins, who got a seven-figure deal for the book after a fierce bidding war, identifies as white with Latina heritage; one of her grandmothers is from Puerto Rico.

In the novel, a middle-class bookstore owner in Mexico flees toward the U.S. border with her son after her journalist husband and other family members are killed by a ruthless drug cartel.

‘Thrilling’ or reinforcing stereotypes?

Prominent authors including Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez, as well as Stephen King, Ann Patchett and Don Winslow wrote blurbs for the text, with Winslow comparing the novel to John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.” The Washington Post described it as “thrilling and devastating,” the movie rights have already been sold, and actresses Gina Rodriguez and Yalitza Aparicio have posted pictures of themselves reading it, urging their followers to join Oprah’s book club.

We’re excited to welcome @jeaninecummins to @BNUnionSquareNY on Tuesday, 1/21 at 7 PM to celebrate her new book AMERICAN DIRT! Details: https://t.co/q2qg46NbLI pic.twitter.com/rNjQ17f2YS

— Barnes & Noble (@BNBuzz) January 16, 2020

Yet the novel has been slammed by several Latino critics, most prominently by Mexican American author Myriam Gurba, whose scathing takedown has been widely shared and has ignited fierce debate.

Gurba criticizes the novel for having an outsider’s perspective of Mexico that perpetuates the stereotypes of a narco-state, one that would inspire President Donald Trump to say “this is why we must invade,” writing that the main character, Lydia, “experiences shock after shock when confronted with the realities of México, realities that would not shock a Mexican.”

This criticism is echoed by Domino Perez, an associate professor of English with a focus on Latinx literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

“‘American Dirt’ is the continuation of a systemic problem that involves the publishing industry more broadly and the public need to consume particular kinds of stories about Mexicans, preferably ones that reinforce popular beliefs,” Perez said. “It ticks all of the boxes: a quinceañera, narcos, machetes, Día de Muertos, violence, and suffering, lots of suffering. It’s timely and does nothing to threaten the status quo.”

Gurba and others note that while Cummins relies heavily on the work of other Latino authors — which Cummins notes in her acknowledgments — there are so few books by Latinos that receive the same level of support that “American Dirt” can have undue influence in promoting a distorted view of migration. Critics feel the work of many Latinos has been devalued in an industry that is nearly 80 percent white, according to a recent survey .

Guba says she originally wrote her review for “Ms.” Magazine but it was rejected for being too negative and she thought it would be dishonest to add positive praise.

“‘American Dirt’ is precisely the kind of book that would appeal to Ms. readers because it is being marketed as a social justice and protest novel when instead it treats migrants like a zoo curiosity,” Gurba told NBC News.

Writing in The Los Angeles Times, Rigoberto González, also an NBC News contributor, praised the book’s “highly original” story but thought it got overshadowed by its “moments of pandering to social justice language.”

Who tells the story?

Cummins, for her part, has questioned whether she was “the right person” to write “American Dirt.”

She has said in her previous writings that she is white and can’t claim to know what it’s like to be profiled, for example, as is the case with darker-skinned Latinos.

In the book’s afterword, Cummins wrote that she was concerned that her “privilege would make me blind to certain truths” and said she wished “someone browner than me would write” the novel.

Yet the book’s attention and ensuing controversy have ignited more debate, including the fact Cummins identifies as “Latinx.” David Bowles, a prolific Chicano author, tells NBC News that Cummins cites her marriage to a formerly undocumented immigrant in the author’s note — but fails to disclose her husband is an immigrant from Ireland, not the same experience as a migrant from Mexico or Central America. Gurba called this “racial rebranding.”

At a bookstore event in New York City on Tuesday, Cummins was asked whether her “whiteness factored in” on her decision to write about the topic and whether this impacted the book’s positive reception.

“I don’t know, and frankly I don’t think it’s a question for me. I think this is a question for all of us in this room,” Cummins said. “I think this is a question for the publishing industry.”

She added that she thought it was an “important question to be asking,” but that she didn’t feel “qualified” to answer and didn’t “really want to answer.”

Gurba, the author of “Mean,” a memoir about a serial killer that touches upon themes of migration, among several other works, said that she has often received feedback that her work is either “too Mexican or not Mexican enough” — a criticism that’s particularly frustrating when it appears some writers find success with making Latino identity exotic. Perez has also observed writers who’ve been told to “add more spice” or “magical realism” to their works just because they’re Latino.

In highlighting the disparity between which Latino narratives are accepted and uplifted by the publishing industry, “American Dirt” has reignited a contentious debate: who claims ownership of certain narratives?

The controversy surrounding “American Dirt” is ongoing as critics, who are concerned that the novel does not address the United States’ complicity in the violence Mexico faces, have called for protests at Cummins’ book signings. Meanwhile, pictures of celebrities holding copies of the novel and urging others to read, along with the Oprah Book Club, are also flooding social media, highlighting the juxtaposition.

“We understand and respect that people are discussing this and that it can spark passionate conversations,” Amy Einhorn, Cummins’ publisher, wrote in an emailed statement. “In today’s turbulent times, it’s hopeful and important that books still have power.”

As for whether people should read the novel, critics hold differing opinions. Perez said she personally doesn’t plan on doing so and recommends people who are interested in reading about Mexico and the border to read the works of authors such as Oscar Cásares, Norma Cantú, Ana Castillo, Benjamin Saenz, and Luis Urrea.

Yet Bowles, who has already read the novel, disagrees, and states that it’s important to have more Latinos read the book and add their voices to the conversation as the dialogue will “lose weight if the same chorus of people are repeating the same things.”

“In the past 10 years, the publishing industry has been paying lip service to improving visibility for people of color,” Bowles said. “Some publishers do a great job shining a spotlight on a few select books and storing weight behind them, but they’re not taking real steps to diversify the overall landscape of publishing.”

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