A 12-foot alligator was found on a Florida highway: 'He wasn't happy'

MarKeith Cromartie
June 20, 2019




TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – It's not every day you see a 12-foot, 463-pound alligator wandering on an interstate. But that was the case earlier this month in Florida.

Broderick Vaughan, who has been trapping nuisance alligators in Leon County, Florida, for nearly 10 years, was in awe when he got the call about the behemoth wandering on Interstate 10 in Tallahassee.

“I’ve been the trapper here in Leon County since April 2010 and that was the third-biggest gator I’ve captured,” said Vaughan, the owner of Vaughan’s Gators. “That was a pretty big one and he wasn’t happy that we were trying to remove him.”

The Tallahassee Police Department and Florida Highway Patrol responded to calls at about midnight on June 3 about the massive reptile. The exit had to be closed for a few hours to keep drivers away from the huge gator, which had apparently wandered onto the highway.

The alligator was injured after being hit in the snout by a semi-truck. It was stunned and walking in circles when law enforcement officers arrived.

Vaughan was called and arrived less than an hour later. He was able to wrap his snare pole around the tired creature, tape its snout shut and load it on his truck using a hoist machine.

The gator was safely removed, but it had to be euthanized later because of the severity of its injuries.

Old spy images show just how fast ice is melting from the glaciers in the Himalayas

Climate Intelligence Agency CIA

Picture 3 million Olympic-size swimming pools full of water.

That's how much ice melts from glaciers in the Himalayas each year, a new study suggests, and climate change is the primary cause.

Even more concerning is that the ice melt has doubled in recent years: Himalayan glaciers have been losing the equivalent of more than a foot and half of ice each year since 2000 – which is double the amount of melting that took place from 1975 to 2000.

“This is the clearest picture yet of how fast Himalayan glaciers are melting over this time interval and why,” said study lead author Joshua Maurer, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Overall, the Asian mountain range, which includes Mount Everest, has been losing ice at a rate of about 1% a year since 2000.

The big melt: Global warming predicted to melt massive Himalayan glaciers, disrupt food production

The melting also threatens the water supplies for hundreds of millions of people downstream who rely on it for hydropower, agriculture and drinking, across a large portion of Asia, said study co-author Jorg Schaefer, a climate geochemistry professor at Columbia.

“Disaster is in the making here,” Schaefer said.

Scientists used recently declassified Cold-War-era 3D satellite images to track the glacial retreat back to the mid-1970s. By analyzing 650 Himalayan glaciers, the researchers estimate that, of the region’s total ice mass present in 1975, 87% remained in 2000, and 72% remained in 2016.

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FOR SOME THE COLD WAR WAS A REAL WAR

South Korea Jeju Massacre haunts the memories of survivors
Ko Wan-soon was only 9 when an anti-communist South Korean "soldier" smashed the skull of her 3-year-old brother with a club.

UNITED NATIONS, June 20 (UPI) -- Ko Wan-soon was only 9 when an anti-communist South Korean "soldier" smashed the skull of her 3-year-old brother with a club, as anti-communist forces terrorized their village and executed civilians.

Ko, an "80-year-old grandmother," is a witness and survivor of one of the most brutal massacres in South Korean history. At the U.N. Symposium on Human Rights and Jeju 4.3 on Thursday, she called for awareness of the Jeju Massacre, or Jeju Uprising, when tens of thousands of victims may have been killed in the South while detained or tortured at the hands of anti-communist police from 1948 to 1954.

Bruce Cumings, the influential U.S. historian of Korea at the University of Chicago, said at the symposium the killings were undertaken by young men who had been kicked out of northern Korea by communists. Some of them formed the Northwest Youth League in the South and began to embark "on a campaign of terror in order to defeat communism" on Jeju Island, Cumings said.

Cumings, who once dubbed the massacre "our Srebrenica" in a book on the 1950-53 Korean War, said the U.S. military, which maintained operational control of the South's military and national police after Japan's surrender, had a role in the suppression during the massacre.

"The United States ruled Korea, even experts seem unaware," Cumings said.

"But the United States is seen as a kind of innocent bystander" to what took place, the historian said.

Cumings also said in classified U.S. documents that U.S. intelligence appeared aware, but documents show "very little mention of outrage about the slaughter."

U.S. officials instead praised first South Korean President Syngman Rhee's "vigorous" anti-communism in the documents, favoring his hard-line policies over those of Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Republic of China.

"It made me ashamed," he said.

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UPI News Agency

8 hrs · 

The 4.3 Peace Park on Jeju Island, South Korea includes exhibits of how victims were tortured or killed during a massacre that has been kept hushed-up for decades in the country.


UPI.COM