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Grace Aheron has never met the four transgender women from Honduras and El Salvador currently detained in a federal immigration facility in New Mexico, but she's waiting to welcome them into her home.

These women arrived in the United States in April after traveling thousands of miles with a migrant caravan from Central America to seek refuge from discrimination and persecution in their native countries. They made their way toward the U.S. without someone to sponsor them — until Aheron, a 27-year-old activist who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, volunteered to be their host.  

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Instagram Stories has blown through another big milestone. The nearly two-year-old feature now boasts 400 million daily users, the company announced on Thursday. 

To celebrate, the app is adding a feature that's likely to generate a lot of excitement among its Stories-loving users: the ability to add musical soundtracks to your posts.

The feature, which is rolling out to iOS and Android today, lets users add music to Stories via a new music sticker, which will appear next to GIF, location, and other sticker add-ons. Instagram says its library has thousands of songs available, and you can listen to previews before you decide to add them to your post. Read more...

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Sure, it’s one hundred and twelve degrees in the shade and you’ve been elbowing your way to the front of the stage for two hours now — but it’s festival season! Time to brave the heat, the dust, the crowds. It’s all worth it to see a dozen of your favorite bands alongside a few thousand of your closest friends.

To make sure you look and feel your best — you know, just in case you end up ‘gramming it — we’re bringing you our top picks for festival season. With millions of brand new, Buy It Now items from top-rated sellers, eBay makes finding your new favorite things super easy, all with the eBay Money Back Guarantee. Just click the shopping tags in the shoppable images below to buy our curated festival picks now.  Read more...

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Pride month is here, but with it inevitably comes complaints from certain straight people on why there's no parade for them.

Fortunately, the folks at The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon are talking about something the MSM refuses to cover: ideas for "Straight Pride Parade" floats.

Correspondents Julio Torres and Patti Harrison have got suggestions for floats, including a karaoke float which just features endless singing of "Come On Eileen" and a shrine to polo shirts that are one size too big. Happy now? Read more...

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Madonna might have told the world to "Express Yourself" way back in 1989, but it's millennials who have taken self-expression to a whole new level. And we've only got Instagram to thank for that. 

That's not because — despite what the headlines might say — we're a bunch of vain narcissists with nothing better to do than take endless selfies. It's actually because Instagram, and the mass adoption of cameraphones, has democratised self-expression and portraiture for everyone, regardless of class. 

Contrary to what you might think, this desire to express oneself through imagery isn't unique to millennials. Far from it, in fact. It's actually been around for millennia, art history experts say.  Read more...

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Over the weekend, surfers competed in the Ballito Pro, which takes place in South Africa's east.

In the Billabong Junior Series, the under-18 mens winner was Indonesia's Rio Waida, while the womens competition was won by South Africa's Zoe Steyn.

While the news would invite congratulations, a Facebook post showing the two winners has angered people. 

As the photo shows, Waida received 8,000 SAR ($577), while Steyn — who was standing right beside him — received exactly half of that. It's... not a good look.

"Did the girls surf a different ocean that was easier we don't know about? This is pathetic," reads one comment.  Read more...

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To hear Facebook tell it, no one at the company is secretly using your phone's microphone to listen in on your conversations for the purpose of ad targeting. 

But that doesn't mean they aren't open to the possibility. 

A patent application filed by the Menlo Park-based  company details a convoluted process to trigger users' devices to record the ambient audio surrounding them — be that your conversation or the sounds in your bedroom — and then send some form of data based on that recording back to the company.  

And yeah, it's creepy as hell. 

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Convincingly beaten 3-0 in its match against Sweden, Mexico were set to be the next team sent packing from the World Cup on Wednesday.

Then, the incredible happened.

South Korea's team, the deus ex machina, scored twice in the final minutes of the game against Germany. Die Mannschaft, as Germany's team is nicknamed, had won the last World Cup in 2014 and were favourites to win this year.

The result saw Germany eliminated from the tournament, and El Tri, as Mexico's team is called, progress to the next stage of the World Cup in extraordinary circumstances.  Read more...

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Apple is considering a sole subscription bundle for its TV, music, and online magazine services, if a new  report in the Information is to be believed. 

And if that kind of reminds you of Amazon Prime, well, that's because it seems pretty similar.

Per the Information, the Cupertino-based tech giant is consolidating its various subscription-based services into one, according to "two people familiar with Apple's plans."

What might that subscription bundle actually include? While little is known at present, in early June, media mogul Oprah Winfrey teamed up with Apple to produce a slate of original programming "that embrace her incomparable ability to connect with audiences around the world."  Read more...

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Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court on Wednesday, effective July 31. Given that Donald Trump gets to pick his replacement, and Mitch McConnell controls the Senate confirmation process, it seems all but certain that the next judge on America's all-important bench will be a hardline conservative. 

Kennedy, appointed by President Reagan, was something of a conservative jurist himself. He has voted with the court's four other conservatives in every major decision of the Trump era thus far. But he was also the court's so-called swing vote; his decisions saved Roe v. Wade in 1992 and instituted gay marriage as the law of the land in 2015.  Read more...

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Rush hour makes driving hell. 

Unless you're in Amsterdam, where bikes — not cars — clog the roads. A viral video shows that in the most cyclist-friendly city in the world, it's bikers lining up at traffic lights. Even with the congestion, the timelapse shows how efficient biking is compared to driving in the city.

"If those bikes were all cars we would never get anywhere," the video's description says.

According to a 2013 report in the New York Times, the government estimates that bikes outnumber cars in the city 4:1. The city's website says there are 881,000 bikes in Amsterdam — the city's population is only 821,752.  Read more...

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With only six episodes remaining in the upcoming final season of Game of Thrones, no one is safe and anything can happen. But we're still holding out hope that the character who underwent the most heartfelt redemption arc in the series will find his happy ending.

Let's be real: Hope for happy endings in Westeros usually means you haven't been paying attention. And actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau doesn't sound all too hopeful for his character, either.

In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Coster-Waldau spoke on the huge shift for his character in the final episode of Season 7 when he finally split from Cersei, while also teasing the possibility of a truly depressing conclusion to Jaime's story in Season 8. Read more...

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Chicago rapper Vic Mensa discusses how love and concern for his hometown drove him to become an activist and humanitarian. 

While many of his song lyrics speak to the horrors of gun violence, Mensa goes even further, using his platform to promote gun control legislation and get behind movements like March for Our Lives and the protests at Standing Rock. His foundation, SaveMoneySaveLife, will help provide medical assistance and educational programs to communities in Chicago that have the highest rates of violence.

Mensa most recently released the single "Reverse,"  featuring G-Eazy. Read more...

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Did the CEO of Harley Davidson bash President Trump, calling him a moron?

The answer is no, he didn’t call Trump a moron. But, if you were one of the tens of thousands of people who retweeted or liked this viral tweet you may believe he did. 

According to this 100 percent false tweet, the CEO of Harley Davidson Matthew Levatich blasted Donald Trump for starting a trade war and blamed him for their decision to move some of their operations overseas.  Read more...

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Snapchat is starting to look increasingly more like old Facebook.

In a bizarre twist of events, it looks like Snap is now embracing a strategy that's not unlike Facebook's playbook circa 2010.

The latest sign of it comes from a new report in The Information, which says Snap has plans to launch a gaming platform inside of its app. Details are scarce on how it would work, but the main idea is that Snap would allow developers to create games that users could play inside of Snapchat. The platform could launch by the fall, according to the report. Read more...

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No, there isn't a supervolcano brewing beneath New England, despite what some media outlets are saying. 

That said, something weird is going on about 100 miles below the lush New England ground.

Scientists have found a mass of warmer rock that appears to be welling upwards. This research, led by geophysicist Vadim Levin, appeared last year in the scientific journal Geology. 

"We never advocated it could lead to volcanism," Levin, who performs research at Rutgers University–New Brunswick's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said in an interview. Read more...

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A passenger jet flying at hypersonic speeds could revolutionize air travel by cutting down a transatlantic flight from New York to London from seven hours to two. 

Er, theoretically, that is.

Boeing is still trying to figure out how any of this will all actually happen, but the aircraft manufacturing company does have its eye on a launch date. If the company has its way, it'll get these hypersonic jets in the air in about 20 to 30 years from now — which, coincidentally, is about as long as every layover in Chicago O'Hare feels.

Boeing's fast-flying plane "debuted" at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conference in Atlanta on Wednesday. It's the latest development of a vision that the company's CEO Dennis Muilenburg first shared with the world back in February. Read more...

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