A humpback whale briefly swallowed a 24-year-old kayaker last Saturday during a father-son excursion out on the icy waters around Chile’s southernmost Patagonia region. The terrifying moment, captured on camera by the kayaker’s father, showed the whale surfacing in the Strait of Magellan and gulping Adrian Simancas for a few moments before releasing him. “I thought it swallowed me,” Adrian ...

Thailand has received 260 human trafficking victims, more than half of them Ethiopians, from Myanmar, its army said on Thursday, in a massive repatriation that comes amid a mounting crackdown on scam centers operating along a porous border. Criminal gangs have trafficked hundreds of thousands of people and forced them to work in illegal online operations generating billions annually across ...

Sri Lanka extended power cuts for a third day on Thursday as it scrambled to restore its national grid to full capacity after a monkey triggered a widespread blackout over the weekend that disrupted supply to the island’s 22 million people. An outage lasting six hours on Sunday was blamed by power minister, Kumara Jayakody, on a monkey that disrupted ...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a Russian drone struck the destroyed nuclear power plant at Chernobyl near Ukraine’s border with Belarus on Thursday night. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service later said that the radiation background limits remain within normal limits. “A Russian attack drone with a high-explosive warhead struck the shelter protecting the world from radiation at the destroyed 4th power ...

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman was involved in a collision with a merchant ship near Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea on Wednesday night, a Navy spokesperson said Thursday. It’s not clear what caused the collision between the US warship and the Panamanian-flagged vessel Besiktas-M, but the spokesperson said it did not result in any flooding on board ...

Pope Francis will go into the hospital in Rome for treatment for bronchitis and medical examinations, the Vatican said Friday, the latest in a string of ailments that have raised concerns about the 88-year-old pontiff’s health. “This morning, at the end of the audiences, Pope Francis will be admitted to the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic for some necessary diagnostic tests and ...

The U.S. spirits industry maintained its market share leadership over beer and wine for a third straight year in 2024, even as revenues slid, according to new data released Tuesday. Spirits supplier sales in the U.S. fell 1.1% last year to a total of $37.2 billion, while volumes rose 1.1%, according to the annual U.S. economic report from the Distilled Spirits ...

When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made an appearance in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint, the conservative group’s plan was simple: Abolish it entirely. Now, with a Project 2025 co-author in charge of the bureau, that idea looks like a real possibility. Over the weekend, Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the powerful Office of Management and ...

Last week, White House crypto czar David Sacks held his first press conference to discuss the future of crypto policy coming out of the Trump administration. While that will include stablecoin legislation and digital asset regulation, Sacks told CNBC that a top agenda idea is also evaluating “whether it’s feasible to create either a bitcoin reserve or some sort of digital ...

Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa claimed, without evidence, that the first round of the country’s presidential election was rife with “irregularities” after he made it to the second round with a slim lead — which authorities have called a technical tie with his leftist rival Luisa González. “There have been many irregularities,” Noboa said in a Tuesday interview streamed on the ...