WEST PALM BEACH, Florida: Friday marked the start of the annual Florida Python Challenge, where hunters head into the Everglades to track down invasive Burmese pythons in hopes of grabbing a share of $30,000 in prizes.
The annual 10-day hunt, which started more than a decade ago, promotes public awareness of issues with invasive species in Florida while engaging the public in Everglades conversation, said Sarah Funck, the wildlife impact management section leader with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
“They are a well-established invasive species across much of South Florida, unfortunately, in our natural areas,” Funck said of Burmese pythons. “A huge part of this challenge is to make sure that people understand about this issue and understand that in general, when you have a non-native species present in the state for whatever purpose, don’t let it loose, that can be really detrimental to our environment.”
Over the past decade, the python challenge has grabbed headlines for its incentive-based, only-in-Florida style of hunting as well as celebrity participation. This year, more than 600 people registered for the event, with two coming from Canada and 108 from other states.
During the challenge, hunters will linger around designated areas spanning through western Broward County to the Tamiami Trail in the Big Cypress Wildlife Management Area, including other management areas like Southern Glades, Holey Land and Rotenberger.
The goal is to humanely kill as many pythons as possible, and prizes divide between three groups: professional hunters who work for the state, hunters who are active in the military or are veterans and novice hunters, which includes anyone who is not working as a state contracted python hunter.
Each category has its own prizes, with $2,500 going to the person or team that kills the most pythons, $1,500 going to the runner-up for most kills and $1,000 going to whoever kills the longest python. The grand prize for the most kills in all categories gets a $10,000 prize.
Each person can only win one prize, so if someone is tops in two categories, they will end up with the highest-valued prize and the next qualifying hunter gets the remaining prize.
In 2017, the South Florida Water Management District and the state began hiring contractors to handle its invasive python problem year round. According to the wildlife agency’s website, through 2023, more than 11,000 pythons have been removed by these contractors.
Last year’s challenge brought in 209 pythons and the grand prize winner was Paul Hobbs, who bagged 20 pythons. Also during 2023, Florida wildlife agency and district contractors removed about 2,200 pythons.
Amy Siewe, the self-named Python Huntress, won a prize last year for catching a Burmese python measuring 10 feet and 9 inches (327 centimeters). This year, she won’t be participating in the challenge due to a knee surgery but said she’s not a fan of the annual challenge.
Siewe, who used to work as a state contractor catching invasive pythons, said she believed the initial intent of the challenge was to bring awareness to the issue. Now, it’s drawing large crowds of hunters, potentially scaring off pythons and potentially killing native snakes they mistake as pythons, like corn snakes, brown water snakes or cottonmouths.
“Pythons don’t take on their normal behavioral pattern because there’s so much traffic and they’ll come up and then they’ll go back into the swamp,” Siewe said. “I feel for myself, it’s counterproductive.”
Participants are required to undergo an online training, including information on how to identify Burmese pythons versus other snakes, Funck said. She said there’s also an additional optional in-person training participants can attend to properly identify Burmese pythons.
“That’s a huge part of what we do, is try to get the word out on how to identify these pythons, how to safely and humanely capture it,” Funck said.
Snake hunters will wrangle invasive Burmese pythons in Everglades during Florida’s 10-day challenge
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Snake hunters will wrangle invasive Burmese pythons in Everglades during Florida’s 10-day challenge
- Annual 10-day hunt promotes public awareness of issues with invasive species in Florida while engaging the public in Everglades conversation
- Over the past decade, the python challenge has grabbed headlines for its incentive-based, only-in-Florida style of hunting as well as celebrity participation
Invasive ‘murder hornets’ are wiped out in the US, officials say
- There had been no detections of the northern giant hornet in Washington since 2021
- Northern giant hornets pose significant threats to pollinators and native insects
SEATTLE: The world’s largest hornet, an invasive breed dubbed the “murder hornet” for its dangerous sting and ability to slaughter a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, has been declared eradicated in the US, five years after being spotted for the first time in Washington state near the Canadian border.
The Washington and US Departments of Agriculture announced the eradication Wednesday, saying there had been no detections of the northern giant hornet in Washington since 2021.
The news represented an enormous success that included residents agreeing to place traps on their properties and reporting sightings, as well as researchers capturing a live hornet, attaching a tiny radio tracking tag to it with dental floss, and following it through a forest to a nest in an alder tree. Scientists destroyed the nest just as a number of queens were just beginning to emerge, officials said.
“I’ve gotta tell you, as an entomologist — I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects,” Sven Spichiger, pest program manager of the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told a virtual news conference.
The hornets, which can be 5 centimeters long and were formerly called Asian giant hornets, gained attention in 2013, when they killed 42 people in China and seriously injured 1,675. In the US, around 72 people a year die from bee and hornet stings each year, according to data from the National Institutes of Health.
The hornets were first detected in North America in British Columbia, Canada, in August 2019 and confirmed in Washington state in December 2019, when a Whatcom County resident reported a specimen. A beekeeper also reported hives being attacked and turned over specimens in the summer of 2020. The hornets could have traveled to North America in plant pots or shipping containers, experts said.
DNA evidence suggested the populations found in British Columbia and Washington were not related and appeared to originate from different countries. There also have been no confirmed reports in British Columbia since 2021, and the nonprofit Invasive Species Center in Canada has said the hornet is also considered eradicated there.
Northern giant hornets pose significant threats to pollinators and native insects. They can wipe out a honeybee hive in as little as 90 minutes, decapitating the bees and then defending the hive as their own, taking the brood to feed their own young.
The hornet can sting through most beekeeper suits, deliver nearly seven times the amount of venom as a honeybee, and sting multiple times. At one point the Washington agriculture department ordered special reinforced suits from China.
Washington is the only state that has had confirmed reports of northern giant hornets. Trappers found four nests in 2020 and 2021.
Spichiger said Washington will remain on the lookout, despite reporting the eradication. He noted that entomologists will continue to monitor traps in Kitsap County, where a resident reported an unconfirmed sighting in October but where trapping efforts and public outreach have come up empty.
He noted that other invasive hornets can also pose problems: Officials in Georgia and South Carolina are fighting yellow-legged hornets, and southern giant hornets were recently detected in Spain.
“We will continue to be vigilant,” Spichiger said.
Re-discovered tapes bear witness to Somaliland identity
HARGEISA: In a library in Somaliland, Hafsa Omer presses play on a small cassette player. The sound of a Somali lute interwoven with a woman’s soft singing fills the room.
Tapping her keyboard, Omer bobs with the rhythm of the pentatonic melody typical in the northern region of the Horn of Africa.
Since 2021, the 21-year-old has been painstakingly archiving and digitising a collection of some 14,000 cassettes at the Cultural Center in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital.
Bought back, found or donated, the tapes contain more than half a century of the musical, cultural and political life of the region.
Somaliland has run its own affairs since unilaterally declaring independence from Somalia in 1991 but remains unrecognized by any country.
That makes cultural heritage — like the tapes — vital.
“Many people don’t consider these things to be important, but they contain the whole history of my country,” Omer told AFP.
“My people don’t write, they don’t read. All they do is talk.”
Somalis have traditionally been primarily nomadic shepherds, with culture transmitted orally from one generation to another.
What is now Somaliland has long been a center of music and poetry — art that plays a crucial, even political, role in this corner of Africa.
The public radio station, Radio Hargeisa, also has a collection of over 5,000 reels and cassettes, programs and music recorded in its studios since its founding in 1943.
The tens of thousands of hours of tapes in the cultural center tell a less official story — ranging from 1970s counterculture “Somali funk,” to unreleased recordings of play rehearsals and accounts of people’s daily lives.
With small tape recorders becoming widely available in the 1970s and 1980s, Somalilanders got into the habit of corresponding with exiled relatives via cassette.
Gathered around a tape recorder, they would recount intimacies of family life but also survival during a decade-long war that culminated in the declaration of independence in 1991.
The conflict between rebels and the Mogadishu-based military regime of Siad Barre saw around 70 percent of Hargeisa destroyed in 1988.
Jama Musse Jama, director of the cultural center, described how troves of cassettes were recorded “underground” as people met clandestinely to chat, chew the stimulant khat and talk politics.
“They cannot say (these things) in public,” he said. “You find all what didn’t end up in the ordinary, formal recordings of the state — what was happening in the streets.”
Fewer than 5,000 cassettes have been catalogued and only 1,100 digitised, leaving a titanic task for Omer and her team of four friends.
But it has become a fitting cultural odyssey in a place still searching for recognition.
“It’s proof against those who say Somaliland doesn’t exist,” said Jama.
He believes his and Omer’s work will guide younger generations searching for their past — a storied history that stretches beyond their regional conflict to its time as an Italian and British colony and beyond.
“We need to give them an identity,” he said.
“All these stories that make up the identity of the Somaliland people are in these recordings.”
Drones, planes or UFOs? Americans abuzz over mysterious New Jersey sightings
- The saga of the drones reported over New Jersey has reached incredible heights
- ‘How can you say it’s not posing a threat if you don’t know what it is?’
CHATHAM, New Jersey: That buzzing coming out of New Jersey? It’s unclear if it’s drones or something else, but for sure the nighttime sightings are producing tons of talk, a raft of conspiracy theories and craned necks looking skyward.
Cropping up on local news and social media sites around Thanksgiving, the saga of the drones reported over New Jersey has reached incredible heights.
This week seems to have begun a new, higher-profile chapter: Lawmakers are demanding (but so far not getting) explanations from federal and state authorities about what’s behind them. Gov. Phil Murphy wrote to President Joe Biden asking for answers. New Jersey’s new senator, Andy Kim, spent Thursday night on a drone hunt in rural northern New Jersey, and posted about it on X.
More drone sightings have been reported in New York City, and Mayor Eric Adams says the city is investigating and collaborating with New Jersey and federal officials. And then President-elect Donald Trump posted that he believes the government knows more than it’s saying. “Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!” he posted on his social media site.
But perhaps the most fantastic development is the dizzying proliferation of conspiracies, none of which has been confirmed or suggested by federal and state officials who say they’re looking into what’s happening. It has become shorthand to refer to the flying machines as drones, but there are questions about whether what people are seeing are unmanned aircraft or something else.
Some theorize the drones came from an Iranian mothership. Others think they are the Secret Service making sure President-elect Donald Trump’s Bedminster property is secure. Others worry about China. The deep state. And on.
In the face of uncertainty, people have done what they do in 2024: Create a social media group.
The Facebook page, New Jersey Mystery Drones — let’s solve it, has nearly 44,000 members, up from 39,000 late Thursday. People are posting their photo and video sightings, and the online commenters take it from there.
One video shows a whitish light flying in a darkened sky, and one commenter concludes it’s otherworldly. “Straight up orbs,” the person says. Others weigh in to say it’s a plane or maybe a satellite. Another group called for hunting the drones literally, shooting them down like turkeys. (Do not shoot at anything in the sky, experts warn.)
Trisha Bushey, 48, of Lebanon Township, New Jersey, lives near Round Valley Reservoir where there have been numerous sightings. She said she first posted photos online last month wondering what the objects were and became convinced they were drones when she saw how they moved and when her son showed her on a flight tracking site that no planes were around. Now she’s glued to the Mystery Drones page, she said.
“I find myself — instead of Christmas shopping or cleaning my house — checking it,” she said.
She doesn’t buy what the governor said, that the drones aren’t a risk to public safety. Murphy told Biden on Friday that residents need answers. The federal Homeland Security Department and FBI also said in a joint statement they have no evidence that the sightings pose “a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”
“How can you say it’s not posing a threat if you don’t know what it is?” she said. “I think that’s why so many people are uneasy.”
Then there’s the notion that people could misunderstand what they’re seeing. William Austin is the president of Warren County Community College, which has a drone technology degree program, and is coincidentally located in one of the sighting hotspots.
Austin says he has looked at videos of purported drones and that airplanes are being misidentified as drones. He cited an optical effect called parallax, which is the apparent shift of an object when viewed from different perspectives. Austin encouraged people to download flight and drone tracker apps so they can better understand what they’re looking at.
Nonetheless, people continue to come up with their own theories.
“It represents the United States of America in 2024,” Austin said. “We’ve lost trust in our institutions, and we need it.”
Federal officials echo Austin’s view that many of the sightings are piloted aircraft such as planes and helicopters being mistaken for drones, according to lawmakers and Murphy.
That’s not really convincing for many, though, who are homing in on the sightings beyond just New Jersey and the East Coast, where others have reported seeing the objects.
For Seph Divine, 34, another member of the drone hunting group who lives in Eugene, Oregon, it feels as if it’s up to citizen sleuths to solve the mystery. He said he tries to be a voice of reason, encouraging people to fact check their information, while also asking probing questions.
“My main goal is I don’t want people to be caught up in the hysteria and I also want people to not just ignore it at the same time,” he said.
“Whether or not it’s foreign military or some secret access program or something otherworldly, whatever it is, all I’m saying is it’s alarming that this is happening so suddenly and so consistently for hours at a time,” he added.
Bollywood actor Allu Arjun held after stampede death at Pushpa 2 screening
- The 42-year-old actor was arrested on suspicion of three offenses
- Allu Arjun is hugely popular in southern India
NEW DELHI: An Indian actor was arrested Friday after his appearance at a movie screening allegedly prompted a stampede by fans that crushed a woman to death, police and local media said.
Huge crowds had gathered at a theater in the southern city of Hyderabad this month to catch a glimpse of actor Allu Arjun as he arrived for the screening of his film “Pushpa 2: The Rule.”
The 42-year-old actor was arrested on suspicion of three offenses, including voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means, a police officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media.
The officer added that seven other people had already been arrested in the case.
A video on social media platform X, shared by broadcaster TV9, showed the actor holding a coffee mug as he spoke to officers who arrived at his residence to take him into custody.
The victim of the December 4 stampede was a woman in her 30s attending the screening with her son, who was also seriously injured.
The woman’s family later filed a complaint against Arjun, his security team and the theater management, media outlet India Today reported.
Arjun said he was “deeply heartbroken” two days after the accident.
“While respecting their need for space to grieve, I stand committed to extend every possible assistance to help them navigate through this challenging journey,” he wrote on X.
Arjun is hugely popular in southern India, and the Pushpa film franchise has made millions at the box office.
He won best actor at India’s National Film Awards for his title role in the first instalment of the series, released two years ago.
3 men say in lawsuits that Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs drugged and sexually assaulted them
NEW YORK: Three men sued Sean “Diddy” Combs in New York on Thursday, claiming the hip-hop mogul drugged and raped them.
The lawsuits, which were filed anonymously in a state court, add to a wave of sexual assault litigation against the rapper, producer and record executive as he also faces federal sex trafficking charges in New York.
Thomas Giuffra, a New York attorney who filed Thursday’s lawsuits on the men’s behalf, said Combs used his power and wealth to take advantage of the accusers and then ensured their silence through threats and fear.
“This is a long overdue opportunity for the victims to take the power back after carrying the burden of the assaults in silence for several years,” he said in a statement. “While a lawsuit will not undo the wrongs done to them, it enables the survivors to regain the power and dignity that was stripped from them by Sean Combs.”
Attorneys for Combs, 55-year-old founder of Bad Boy Records, said the claims are baseless.
“These complaints are full of lies,” the lawyers wrote in a statement, declining to elaborate. “We will prove them false and seek sanctions against every unethical lawyer who filed fictional claims against him.”
The lawsuits involve incidents taking place from 2019 to 2022. The men, all identified as John Doe, say they were unwittingly served drugged drinks and then sexually assaulted by Combs and others.
They each seek a jury trial and to be awarded unspecified damages from Combs.
One of the men claims Combs drugged and raped him in 2020 when the two met at Combs’ suite at the InterContinental hotel in Times Square to discuss payments the man was owed as a longtime employee of the entrepreneur.
Another claims he met Combs in 2019 at a Manhattan nightclub and was invited to an afterparty at Combs’ suite at the Park Hyatt hotel, where he was also drugged and raped.
The man said he tried to resist before the drugged drink left him unconscious. He also said he was given $2,500 after the attack by a man who had been recording the bedroom assault.
The third man claims he was drugged and raped by Combs and associates from his record label during a summertime party in 2020 at Combs’ mansion in East Hampton, New York.
Combs has pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he coerced and abused women for years, using a network of associates and employees to hold drug-fueled, elaborately produced sexual performances known as “Freak Offs” involving male sex workers.
Prosecutors say he then silenced his victims through blackmail and violence, including kidnapping, arson and physical beatings.
Combs has been seeking to be released until his trial in May but was denied bail a third time last month and remains in a federal jail in Brooklyn.
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Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.
