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Invasive iguanas burrowing into the soft dirt around an aging dam cost a Florida city $1.8 million in emergency repairs. Employees noticed last year that water was seeping round the edges of a decades-old weir that controls water delivery in West Palm Beach, the Palm Beach Post reported. “The sheet piling was getting pretty old and needed to be replaced, but the digging by the burrowing animals like iguanas made it more vulnerable,” said Poonam Kalkat, director of public utilities for West Palm Beach. “I can’t say how much the iguanas were the cause because it’s an older structure, but...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is prepared to go to court with two "sanctuary cities," New York City, New York, and Denver, Colorado, if they fail to provide personal information on illegal immigrants with criminal records released in each city instead of being transferred to ICE. “We expect them to comply" with subpoenas for the information, said acting ICE Director Matt Albence at a press conference in Washington on Thursday. "If they don’t comply, we’ll be working with DOJ to go to district court to force them to comply with the requirements,” Albence said, noting the rule in the U.S....

A DNA match has led to a Florida man prosecutors suspect is the “pillowcase rapist” responsible for numerous sexual assaults of women in the Miami area during the 1980s. Robert Koehler, 60, was arrested over the weekend in Brevard County and was being held without bond Thursday after his transfer to a Miami jail. He faces charges in one assault though authorities say as many as 25 victims could be involved. Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said it will take time to locate victims and determine if there is enough evidence to prosecute all of these cases. The rapes...

A French publisher has issued an apology after one of its history textbooks suggested that the CIA “orchestrated” the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed. The textbook titled “History of the 20th Century in Flashcards” was published last November through Ellipses publications to present the entire last century in French, European and world history to undergraduate students. The sentence appeared on page 204 of the textbook in a chapter about the creation of the Al Qaeda terrorist group and the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, French daily Le Monde reported....

The Commissioner for Human Rights in Russia, Tatyana Moskalkova, said that the condemned Israeli-American drug smuggler, Naama Issakhar, did not write an independent petition for clemency to the Russian leader. This is reported by Interfax . She said that the girl is convinced that the appeal of her mother and the leadership of Israel is enough. At the same time, the Ombudsman added that she hoped for a successful resolution of the situation and early release of the girl. Moskvalkova also emphasized that Issakhar has no complaints about the conditions of detention: the camp's barrack has a refrigerator, TV, hot...

Amazing video shows one of China's most beautiful and reclusive birds, the Golden Pheasant. The birds were spotted foraging in central China's Ganshan National Forest Park. The brightly colored birds are native to forests in mountainous areas. They are a protected species in China, as their population numbers are decreasing. They were recently named, along with the white swan, as the city birds of Sanmenxia. Take a look at the video above to see the birds in action. Take a look at the video above to see the birds in action.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius turned an ancient victim’s brain into glass, according to Italian anthropologists. The finding, dubbed as “sensational” and published on Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, marks the first time that scientists have verified such a phenomenon. […] The remains of a man found lying on a wooden bed were discovered in Herculaneum in the 1960s. He is believed to have been the custodian of the College of Augustales, a place of worship that was at the center of the cult of Roman Emperor Augustus. The glassy substance found inside of the victim’s skull...

A time traveller has predicted that humans will be eating polystyrene balls in 2075. The man - known only as Kasper - claims the small, white pellets will be our daily meal in the future. Kasper told Apex TV: "I'm going to show you food, actual food, from the future. Here is actual food from year 2075." He then shows off a small jar filled with the pellets and suggests they will be enough nutrition for a day. He said: "These are individual capsules, and taking just one capsule allowed you to live for an entire day. You take one...

The California Highway Patrol has made a significant breakthrough in its investigation into projectiles on SR-156 and US-101 in the Prunedale area, as well as on SR-156 in San Benito County.The seemingly never-ending series of projectiles shattering car windows and endangering drivers along Highway 101 and State Route 156 in Monterey County may have finally come to an end. On Thursday, the California Highway Patrol announced "a major breakthrough in our investigation." The investigation has covered 69 known cases since February 2019 in which an unnamed projectile cracks a car's windshield or shatters the driver's side window. There would often...

On Sunday (Jan. 19), SpaceX's Crew Dragon launched on a brilliant a high-altitude test of its launch escape system. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk called the in-flight abort test flight "picture perfect," and, in looking at the stunning images of the test, he was absolutely right. Following a weather delay, Crew Dragon lifted off at 10:30 a.m. EST (1430 GMT) atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With the test, SpaceX successfully (and intentionally) destroyed one of its Falcon 9 rockets to show that, if there were a launch anomaly,...

As the third day of the ongoing impeachment trial of President Trump wrapped up in the Senate chamber, most of the drama was elsewhere -- with one witness for the Democrats accusing a Republican senator of "defamation" and "slander," and Republicans vowing to aggressively highlight alleged corruption by Hunter Biden. The off-field spat began Thursday evening on Twitter, when Tennessee GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn quoted the commanding officer of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as saying that Vindman was a "political activist in uniform." [cut] Vindman's legal team fired back within hours.

Another Explosive Socci Interview Antonio Socci has written a new book, Il Dio Mercato, La Chiesa, e L’Anticrsiso (The Market God, the Church and the Antichrist). As followers of his work – and I am one – have come to expect, Socci provides an acute and devastating commentary on the state of the Church and the world today, which his interviewer calls (translation mine) “a situation beyond all limits and unsustainable, given the Bergoglian line and the co-presence of two Popes who, beyond ceremonial courtesies, say opposite things.”In Socci’s view, expressed in the opening of his book (quoting a 1934...

Bye bye Blaine? In oral arguments yesterday, the Supreme Court questioned the litigants in a challenge to a Montana constitutional provision that bars any government benefit from flowing to private schools run by churches — even tax breaks for contributions. While it’s sometimes dangerous to assume a direction from the Socratic style of questioning used at Supreme Court hearings, NPR detects a significant drift in yesterday’s debate for Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito compared the exclusion of parochial schools from taxpayers-funded aid programs to unconstitutional discrimination based on race.That view...

In a wide-ranging speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that Germany had made a mistake during the 2015 refugee crisis. Not, she said, by welcoming asylum-seekers fleeing conflict, but by not preparing for their arrival as civil conflicts began cropping up across the Middle East and northern Africa. “The mistake was not to have paid attention to create an environment where people can stay in their own country,” the chancellor said. She warned that the mistake should not be repeated with Libya, where the conflict between the UN-backed government and rival...

Taiwanese president writes Pope Francis: ‘Dialogue’ with China ‘impossible’ The president of a vulnerable nation has reminded Pope Francis that it is difficult to 'dialogue' with a tyrant. TAIPEI, Taiwan, January 23, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― The president of a vulnerable nation has reminded Pope Francis that it is difficult to “dialogue” with a tyrant. Tsai Ing-wen, the recently re-elected president of the island nation of Taiwan, wrote an open letter to the pontiff on Tuesday in response to his 2020 World Day of Peace message. In his letter, Pope Francis declared, “We need to pursue a genuine fraternity based...

A Butler County girl currently fighting cancer received the surprise of her life courtesy of the Butler County Sheriff's Office. Naomi Short, 8, was surprised this weekend when she got to meet and ride a unicorn. The animal, named Anna Marie, is part of the Sheriff's Office's mounted patrol. "I'm obsessed with unicorns," she said. "I've always wanted to meet a real unicorn in real life. It was so pretty and magical." Short was diagnosed with stage 4 pineoblastoma, a rare brain cancer, in October. The sweet but sassy third-grader just completed radiation and starts chemotherapy Friday at Children's Hospital....

Stephen Walder spent £1,000 a week on cocktails of drink and cocaine“In two 36-hour binges on my own I drank 112 cans of Red Stripe,” Stephen Walder confesses. Spending £1,000 a week on his alcohol addiction - washed down with cocaine - was something he didn’t think twice about.But he admits he “doesn’t know” how he is still alive after drinking can after can after can in his last ever binge. From an innocent sip of cider at 13 he started regularly drinking pints of lager at 16 one or two nights a week. But his habit soon spiralled to...

Newly revealed documents raise questions about the alleged Ukraine whistleblower. Fox News host Laura Ingraham reported Wednesday evening that she obtained a chain of State Department emails stemming from a standard request for comment from New York Times journalist Ken Vogel, whose reporting helped generate scrutiny of Hunter Biden's ties to Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Hunter Biden, 49, is the son of Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, and Republicans have called for him to testify during the Ukraine-related Senate impeachment trial against President Trump. On May 1, 2019, Vogel contacted State Department official Kate Schilling about a story he was...

In recent weeks, Sen. Bernie Sanders has criticized his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination for having too much “baggage” to win the diverse coalition needed to defeat President Donald Trump in November. But as the Vermont independent tops national polls for the first time, newly unearthed baggage from his own decades-long political career could call his own past statements and judgment into question. As the leading member of a self-described “radical political party” in the 1970s, Sanders repeatedly compared Vermont workers to enslaved black people, according to archival interviews obtained by The Daily Beast. In one 1976 conversation, Sanders...

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani dropped a bomb Thursday morning warning that he is going to start revealing documents related to the Biden family’s corrupt and criminal dealings in the Ukraine and elsewhere around the world. Later Thursday evening, Rudy revealed that he’s going to start hitting the swamp tomorrow and unleash on top level Democrats who sold their public office for millions of dollars! Rudy also said Democrat officials conspired with foreign officials to “destroy” the Trump candidacy! “Starting tomorrow we will begin cracking through the Swamp media’s cover-up of TOP level Democrats selling their public office, resulting...