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The crashed plane’s wing jetted out of the alligator and python-invested swamps of the Everglades just long enough for the pilot to survive. . OKEECHOBEE, FLORIDA — After nine hours waiting on the wing of his downed plane in the Florida Everglades, a pilot was rescued by Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue. He was the only person aboard. The plane was registered to a flight school in Homestead, Florida but the school called 911 after they lost contact with the pilot. The plane was a single-engine Cessna Skyhawk 172M that began experiencing trouble close to I-75 in South Broward County. A...

A 13-foot alligator was killed by Florida officials after it was reportedly seen carrying human remains on Friday. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office said officers responded to an area near 134th Avenue North and 121st Street in Ridgecrest, Florida, on Friday after getting reports of a body in the waterway, according to FOX 13. With help of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the alligator was "humanely killed." Blood could be seen near the alligator. A witness told Spectrum Bay News 9 that he could see a body in the alligator's mouth.

Construction of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline has quietly attracted an alarming amount of aggressive protesters, arriving from around the country and using destructive means to stall the project’s completion. The Bayou Bridge Pipeline is a 163-mile crude oil pipeline that will extend through southern Louisiana, running across the state’s Atchafalaya Basin. The project is actually a “phase II” of Bayou Bridge that already runs from east Texas to Lake Charles, La. When completed, the new pipeline will run from Lake Charles to St. James, La. and carry up to 480,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Project construction will bring...

Charlie Daniels has had enough of CNN's Piers Morgan attacking Americans he doesn't agree with. After Morgan said about Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson via Twitter Thursday, "[T]he 1st Amendment shouldn't protect vile bigots," Daniels scolded the arrogant Brit Friday with a series of tweets that began, "Piers Morgan why don't you go back to England and straighten it out before you try to change the United States of America":

Louisiana’s Wetlands Are Being Lost At The Rate Of One Football Field Every 38 Minutes ScienceDaily (Jan. 4, 2008) — LSU and Ohio State University will battle for the BCS National College Football Championship in the Superdome early next week, but if the game was held in the Louisiana wetlands instead, the entire field would disappear before halftime. Louisiana’s wetlands are being lost at the rate of approximately one football field every 38 minutes. To fight against this rapid destruction, the two universities joined forces in 2003, forming an ongoing research partnership with the goal of rebuilding the vanishing coastal...

ROME (AFP) - A steep rise in sea levels swamped part of the historic lagooon city of Venice amid storms and heavy rains that have beaten down on Italy over the past 24 hours. On the other side of the peninsula, at La Spezia, a storm slammed a bulk carrier against a jetty, holing it and dumping thousands of litres of fuel into the harbor, the Italian news agency ANSA said. Venice was hit by a common seasonal phenomenon as winds and tides backed up the Adriatic waters, causing levels in the lagoon to rise. According to the city's flood...

Editor's note: Readers may be interested in two related stories: "Invested in Terrorism" and "BBC: U.S. Damned if it does and damned if it doesn't". -ALJ Douglas Farah uncovered the story of al-Qaeda's involvement in West Africa's diamond smuggling while reporting on Africa for the Washington Post, which he described in Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror (New York: Broadway, 2004). Mr. Farah, now a consultant, freelance writer on terror finance and national security matters, and a senior fellow at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, addressed the Middle East Forum in New York City on...

Human floodtide swamps Italian holiday island By Bruce Johnston in Lampedusa (Filed: 26/06/2003) A flood of illegal immigrants from some of Africa's poorest countries is overwhelming the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, the European Union's southernmost outpost, and a favourite Italian holiday destination. Across from the port filled with luxury yachts, a dozen hulks used in recent weeks by boat people to start a new life have been abandoned. An illegal immigrant peers out from behind barbed wire at a detention centre in Lampedusa Another leaky boat laden with Third World passengers said to have paid £650 for the journey arrives...