DEVELOPING Defence rests without Donald Trump taking the witness stand in his New York hush money trial
Donald Trump's lawyers rested their defence Tuesday without the former president taking the witness stand in his New York hush money trial.
An aquarium in South Africa is stretched beyond capacity after more than 500 baby sea turtles were washed up on beaches by a rare and powerful storm and rescued by members of the public.
The little turtles are mostly endangered loggerheads and should be cruising the ocean. Most of them instead will spend the first few months of their lives in newly built plastic tanks at the Turtle Conservation Center at the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town. The aquarium is rehabilitating around 400 of the roughly 530 sick and injured turtles that were brought in, while sending the rest to two other aquariums to spread the load.
Baby turtles have to fend for themselves from the moment they hatch on beaches and make their way to the ocean.
In South Africa, loggerheads hatch on the northeast coast on the far side of the country from Cape Town. These turtles were likely sucked in by the warm Indian Ocean Agulhas Current, carried around the tip of South Africa and spat out in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Town.
That's fairly common, said Talitha Noble-Trull, the head of the Turtle Conservation Center. She's in charge of treating the new arrivals.
What isn't normal is the powerful storm that recently hit the Cape Town area, leaving hundreds of baby turtles needing help.
The conservation centre usually receives a few to maybe 100 stranded young turtles in the three to four months after hatching season. It has a normal capacity of 150 turtles.
"What we haven't seen before is over 500 turtles in two weeks, which is what the last little bit of time has brought us," Noble-Trull said. "My budgeting plans for the year have really gone out the window."
She estimated that each turtle will cost US$500 to get back to full strength before being released into the warmer Indian Ocean in a few months. The Turtle Conservation Center has brought in a small army of volunteers to help the aquarium's full-time staff care for them.
The turtles are ranked according to how sick they are, with some needing intensive care due to injuries, malnutrition or infection. A number is written on each shell to identify them.
While the storm was a major shock to the turtles, who are vulnerable to extreme weather and climate change, it has given Noble-Trull and other conservationists a valuable insight into another increasingly common danger.
Many of the turtles had ingested small pieces of plastic, which exited their systems after they arrived at the aquarium. Noble-Trull has a tray of plastic pieces collected in just one day, some as big as a fingernail.
The conservation team normally wouldn't see that amount of evidence of plastic pollution in the ocean.
Turtles spend almost all their lives in the ocean, apart from when they're born and when females return to shore to lay eggs. Because of that, they're "ocean indicators," Noble-Trull said.
"Little bits of soft plastic, little bits of hard plastic are floating all along the oceans and turtles are eating them. So, for us it's very important to be collecting and capturing this data. Because these turtles are coming at us with a message. They're not telling us. They're shouting it at us. That our oceans are not a safe place for turtles."
Donald Trump's lawyers rested their defence Tuesday without the former president taking the witness stand in his New York hush money trial.
One passenger was killed and 30 injured after a Singapore Airlines SIAL.SI flight from London hit severe turbulence en route on Tuesday, forcing it to make an emergency landing in Bangkok, officials and the airline said.
Anything is possible this week, as far as Canada's weather is concerned, with forecasts ranging from scorching heat in some parts of the country to rain and snow in others.
Canada's annual inflation rate slowed to a three-year low of 2.7 per cent in April, matching expectations, and core measures continued to ease, data showed on Tuesday, likely boosting chances of a June interest rate cut.
Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, is fighting plans to publicly auction his Graceland estate in Memphis after a company tried to sell the property based on claims that a loan using the king of rock ’n’ roll's former home as collateral was not repaid.
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Nestle NESN.S will market a new, US$5 line of frozen pizzas and protein-enriched pastas in the United States which it says it designed specifically for people taking drugs such as Wegovy or Ozempic for weight loss.
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Members of Piapot First Nation, students from the University of Winnipeg and various other professionals are learning new techniques that will hopefully be used for ground searches of potential unmarked grave sites in the future.
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