Weds: The Panama Canal Could Run Dry

Who Needs Males? Not This Croc

The first case of a crocodile who made herself pregnant has been identified at a zoo in Costa Rica.

She produced a foetus that was 99.9% genetically identical to herself.

The phenomenon of so-called "virgin birth" has been found in species of birds, fish and other reptiles, but never before in crocodiles.

The scientists say the trait might be inherited from an evolutionary ancestor, so dinosaurs might also have been capable of self-reproduction.

The research has been published in the Royal Society journal, Biology Letters.

The egg was laid by an 18-year-old female American crocodile in Parque Reptilania in January 2018. The foetus inside was fully formed but stillborn and so did not hatch.

The crocodile who laid the egg was obtained when she was two years old and was kept apart from other crocodiles for its entire life. Because of this, the park's scientific team contacted Belfast-born Dr Warren Booth, now working at Virginia Tech in the US. He has been studying virgin births, known scientifically as parthenogenesis, for 11 years.

Dr Booth analysed the foetus and found that it was more than 99.9 % genetically identical to its mother - confirming that it had no father.

Drug Cartels Are Running Call Centers?

As many as eight young workers were confirmed dead Tuesday in Mexico after they apparently tried to quit jobs at a call center operated by a violent drug cartel that targeted Americans in a real estate scam.

U.S. and Mexican officials confirmed the brutal story that unfolded late last month when relatives of the youths reported them missing after they did not return from work in an office near the western city of Guadalajara. Suspicions rose last week when heaps of hacked-up body parts were found in plastic bags.

Forensic examiners in the western state of Jalisco said in a statement Monday that tests had confirmed the bodies belonged to the missing call center workers.

A total of six men and two women were reported missing between May 20 and May 22, but the forensic examiners did not mention the number of confirmed identities. There had been doubts about whether one of the youths was among the bodies found.

While the families believed their children worked at a normal call center, the office was in fact run by the Jalisco New Generation cartel, Mexico’s most violent gang. The cartel has branched out beyond its traditional business of drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping.

Officials confirmed the cartel now operates call centers that scam money from Americans and Canadians through fake offers to buy their timeshares.

When He Promised to "Dran the Swamp", Was He Talking About Draining the Mar-a-Lago Pool?

One day before the FBI came to Mar-a-Lago to conduct a search of a storage room containing classified documents, security cameras recorded a Trump aide and Mar-a-Lago workers removing boxes of material from that room. Those security cameras might have had more to say about how many times the boxes were accessed, who had seen their contents, and what else might have been there, but there’s a problem. As CNN reports, there are no more recordings and, according to Trump, the FBI can blame his pool boy.

An employee at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence drained the resort’s swimming pool last October and ended up flooding a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

That Trump would build a server room in a place where “below ground” also means “below sea level,” and not protect that room from flooding, seems in fitting with previous Trump construction projects—like Trump Tower, where people have died because the building lacks a sprinkler system. But what makes this particular version of “the dog ate my homework” more suspicious is that Trump has used this excuse before.

It's Not the First Time the Flood Ate His Homework ... the Evidence

On hearing about the pool flood, author David Johnston noted that his book “The Making of Donald Trump” contains another incident, one that took place when Trump was the focus of another investigation. That previous incident took place all the way back in 1986. At the time, Trump was being investigated for failing to pay over $3 million in rent due to New York City from his operations at the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

The rent Trump paid for operating the city-owned property was based in part on his revenues at the site. In 1985, the rent had come to $3.7 million. But in 1986, Trump paid less than $700,000. So the city called for an audit to determine why there was such an abrupt change.

After years of investigation, during which Trump and his attorneys were accused by the city of “stonewalling” and “obfuscation,” auditors reported to the city that Trump was missing most of the required documentation. In particular, over half of the monthly ledgers that were legally required to track operations at the hotel were missing.

The reason provided by Trump was that the ledgers “were discarded after they were severely damaged by water when the room in which they were stored was flooded.”

New York auditors didn’t shy away from complaining that Trump’s booking was erratic and incompetent, and scoffed at the idea that there was only one copy of documents vital to the operation of both the hotel and Trump’s company. Even in the parts of the ledger they could obtain, they found numerous issues. That included sliding some revenue around to make it appear that income had decreased by over $1 million when it had actually gone up.

Summaries of the hotel finances were discovered in another location some weeks later. Working from these documents, New York was able to show that Trump owed the city more than he had in 1985. However, by then, Trump’s accounting firm declared bankruptcy, which his attorneys used as a reason to prolong proceedings for months. Before it was settled, Trump actually sold his interest in the hotel, and the city had to reach an agreement for some reduced amount from the new operators.

CNN Took a Lichting.  Will It Keep on Ticking?

Chris Licht, the former television producer who oversaw a brief and chaotic tenure as the chairman of CNN, is out at the network, according to a person briefed on the decision.

Mr. Licht’s 13-month run at CNN was marked by one controversy after another, culminating in his exit earlier this week. He got off to a bumpy start even before he had officially started when he oversaw the shuttering of the pricey CNN+ streaming service at the request of its network’s new owners, who were skeptical about a stand-alone digital product. The cuts resulted in scores of layoffs.

Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Licht’s departure represents a dramatic fall not long after he departed as an executive producer of Stephen Colbert’s top-rated late night show and vowed to bring a middle-of-the-road balance to CNN’s journalism. When Mr. Licht took the job, he told friends it was a “calling.”

A Record Millions of Years in the Making

United States scientists documented the highest level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in millions of years, at the same time as record wildfires blazed through Canada, lacing the air from the Midwest to the East Coast in a blanket of smoke with enough disease-causing particles to make venturing outside unsafe for people with breathing problems.

Carbon dioxide levels measured at the federal government’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii reached concentrations of 424 parts per million in May, the month when the heat-trapping gas typically peaks in the Northern Hemisphere.

That’s more than 50% higher than before the industrial era began roughly 250 years ago and 3 parts per million higher than what federal scientists counted in May 2022. It represents the fourth-largest annual increase since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration started its tally 65 years ago. In a separate analysis, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego announced almost identical findings.

Death at a Funeral

Two people have been shot, one fatally, at a Maryland cemetery during the burial of a 10-year-old girl who fell victim to gun violence last month, according to police.

It appears Tuesday afternoon's shooting at Washington National Cemetery in Prince George's County, just outside of Washington, D.C., stemmed from a "dispute totally unrelated to what was going on with the funeral," Prince George's County police Maj. David Blazer said at a news conference.

A man, who died from his gunshot wounds, and a woman, who suffered non-life-threatening injuries, were not directly connected to the funeral for 10-year-old Arianna Davis, Blazer said.

One person is in custody, Blazer said.

Davis was in the car with her family on Mother's Day when she was "accidentally hit in a barrage of gunfire," said Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police.

This is All Just Nuts