2026-01-05 03:15:23
In 1975, just three years after the release of the Kawasaki Jet Ski, the American crocodile was nearing extinction in the U.S. The nation's crocodile population, only found in South Florida, had dwindled to just 200 individuals, with 10 to 20 breeding females. The crocodiles' population had plummeted due to habitat development and hunting, for sport or hides. In 1975, the American crocodile was listed on the federal endangered species list, where it stayed for nearly three decades until it was downgraded to threatened status in 2007.
The population has since rebounded to approximately 2,000 individuals, most of whom dwell in protected areas like the Everglades. But the reptiles' historic South Florida homeland has been transformed from swampy creeks to a heavily developed landscape. The shores where crocodiles once hauled out to bask have been barricaded with sea walls intended to limit erosion. But some heavily developed areas have unintentionally offered the reptiles a very modern refuge for basking: jet skis, paddleboards, and kayaks, according to a paper recently published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. These vessels don't just offer crocs a spot to nap, but a lifeline to meet their basic physiological needs in a heavily altered environment, as well as a way of looking super chill and cool.
2026-01-05 00:52:13
Late Friday night, the United States launched airstrikes on Caracas, Venezuela, and military special forces landed, captured, and extracted President Nicolás Maduro. He was arrested and is expected to appear in a New York federal court within days on narco-terrorism charges. It was an insane thing to wake up to on Saturday, and it feels no less insane after the passage of a day: The U.S. kidnapped a sitting head of state, and now he's in a jail cell in Brooklyn.
It's the culmination of the Trump administration's longstanding aim of regime change in Venezuela, which has only escalated since Maduro was declared the winner of sham elections last summer. There are still a whole lot of unanswered questions. Why now? Who will run Venezuela next? Was this done with the cooperation of any of Venezuela's remaining government? What's not in question is why the U.S. acted in the first place. Donald Trump will happily tell you that himself.
2026-01-04 23:19:24
Here is the only highlight I'm going to give you from Panthers-Bucs, because, frankly, it's what you deserve for clicking on a blog about the NFC South, thereby incentivizing the continued existence of the division when it ought to be consigned to the dustbin of history, or, barring that, launched into the Sun. It's the game's final play, as chaotic and unsuccessful and poorly thought-out as the division itself.
2026-01-03 05:52:39
Enzo Maresca is out at Chelsea. Thus brings a close to another weird chapter in the weirdest club's recent history. The upside for the legion of Chelsea haters is that the particular weirdness and grossness of the club's present predicament provides ample material to further stoke the flames of hate. But the downside, as ever, is that it probably won't even matter, as both Maresca and Chelsea look to fashion their twin Ls into a pair of Ws.
There are no good guys involved here. Maresca is for my money one of the more unlikable coaches in a profession that, across sports, tends to select for unlikability. He comes off like the textbook sideline tyrant, smug and preening in moments of success, insincere in moments of humility, absolutely certain that all triumphs redound to himself and all failures owe to either those below or above him who did not heed his commands. For much of his Chelsea tenure—a job he got mostly due to his proximity to Pep Guardiola during his one season as a Manchester City assistant—the Italian was content to play the puppet for the Blues' notoriously meddlesome bosses, handing playing time to the players the club had most heavily invested in, shamefully contributing to the ostracization campaigns against the players the club wanted to bully out of their contracts. Maresca surely assumed that his "successes" at the end of last season (not blowing a top-four finish, winning the hardly hallowed Conference League and Club World Cup trophies) would carve for himself some more power of his own, which appears to have been what motivated his recent public criticisms of how the club is being run. What he found out, however, was that the same puppeteer's hand he'd welcomed up his ass earlier would be quick to fling him off the minute he stopped moving his mouth along with the fingered instructions. No one should weep that this guy is out of a job.
2026-01-03 03:13:12
Twitter, also called X, the social media network owned and constantly used by the world's richest man as well as virtually every powerful person in the American tech industry, and on which the vast preponderance of national political figures also maintain active accounts, has a sexual harassment and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) problem.
This has been true more or less since Elon Musk took it over, but this problem's latest and most repellent efflorescence is the result of one of Musk's signature additions as owner. Grok, the network's embedded AI chatbot, will—or would, as recently as yesterday, and certainly did many, many times—generate graphically sexualized images of real people, including minors and non-consenting third parties, in response to any user's request. Another Twitter feature bearing Elon Musk's fingerprints is that the site filled with the kind of people who, when a photograph of a 14-year-old TV actress appears on their timeline, will ask Grok to generate an image of her without clothes on. As a result, for much of this week Twitter has been rife with AI-generated revenge porn, deepfake celebrity porn, and CSAM.
2026-01-03 01:51:14
This is what's going to happen in 2026, according to the Defector staff.
Kelsey McKinney
