Category World News

Venezuelan biologist Carlos Alvarado, 34, grips a young crocodile with one hand on its neck and the other on its tail. Armed with tape and callipers, he measures the animal, monitoring its growth just days before it is due to be released into the wild.

Alvarado’s journey – and that of the Orinoco crocodile under his care – is a testament to hope and determination amid overwhelming odds.

Fewer than 100 Orinoco crocodiles, one of the world’s largest living reptiles, remain in the wild, according to the Venezuelan conservation foundation FUDECI. The species’ natural habitat encompasses the Orinoco River basin, which covers much of Venezuela and stretches into Colombia.

For decades, members of the Venezuelan Crocodile Specialist Group have reared this critically endangered species in captivity, racing against time to prevent its extinction.

Yet, they now fear they are losing the battle. Once pushed to the verge of extinction by poaching for their leather, Orinoco crocodiles now face a new threat: Desperate Venezuelans who hunt the animals for meat and harvest their eggs for food.

Federico Pantin, 59, is not optimistic. He serves as director of the Leslie Pantin Zoo in Turmero, near Caracas – a facility specialising in endangered species and one of the few places where crocodile hatchlings are raised.

“We’re only delaying the Orinoco’s extinction,” he says.

Nevertheless, Pantin and his colleagues persevere: Researching, measuring, transporting.

The team records nesting sites for the long-snouted Orinoco crocodile, collecting eggs or hatchlings. They also maintain breeding programmes for adults kept at the zoo and at Masaguaral Ranch, a biodiversity centre and cattle farm near Tamarindito in central Venezuela.

The young are fed chicken, beef and vitamins, reaching about 6kg (13lb) by the time they are a year old.

Adult Orinocos can exceed 5 metres (16ft) in length and live for decades – a 70-year-old named Picopando resides at Masaguaral Ranch.

At the Leslie Pantin Zoo, Omar Hernandez, 63, biologist and head of FUDECI, tags the foot of a hatchling. Saving the species, he says, would require multiple efforts: Research, protection, education and management.

“We are doing the management, collecting the hatchlings, raising them for a year and freeing them,” he says. But “that is practically the only thing being done. And it is not being done at scale.”

Each year, the group releases about 200 young crocodiles into the wild.

The biologists wait until the animals reach a year old, a critical period in their lives, Hernandez explains. During this time, “almost all are hunted.”

In April, scientists released this year’s batch. The young crocodiles, with their jaws bound, were placed in crates and transported from the zoo to the Capanaparo River in western Venezuela, near the Colombian border, where human settlements are sparse. This part of the river runs through private land, lowering the risk that the animals will be hunted immediately.

Alvaro Velasco, 66, placed tape over the eyes of a juvenile to help it remain calm during transport.

“People ask me, ‘Why crocodiles? They’re ugly,’” says Velasco, president of the Crocodile Specialist Group. “To me, they’re fabulous animals. You release them and they stay there, looking at you, as if to say, ‘What am I supposed to do in this huge river?’ And then they swim off.”

Pick-up trucks carried the scientists, crocodiles and volunteers along muddy tracks to a camp by the river, where the team spent the night sleeping in hammocks. The following morning, the crocodiles were gently lifted from their crates and carried to the water’s edge. The juveniles slipped into the muddy, green-tinged river.

“Maybe many of these animals are going to be killed tomorrow or the day after tomorrow because of a lack of awareness among people and of course because of hunger,” says Hernandez. He echoes Pantin’s fears that the Orinoco crocodile may ultimately be doomed.

But, he adds, “we’re stubborn. It’s a way of delaying extinction and it’s something that is in our capacity to do. If we waited for the perfect circumstances, they would never come.”

I am obliged to open with a disclaimer of sorts.

Faithful readers know of my visceral antipathy towards Donald Trump whose idea of governance is largely driven by vindictiveness and reprisal. So, the crux of this column should not be construed as an endorsement or hearty praise.

Still, there is one aspect of Trump’s blunt, arbitrary determination to wield a fiscal machete to the federal government that, in my view, makes, dare I say it, some sense and that other presidents and prime ministers ought, belatedly, to consider.

For much of my career as an investigative reporter, I trained a jaundiced eye on the unchecked powers and unlimited resources of so-called “intelligence” services that rarely, if ever, suffered any tangible repercussions of their disastrous litany of errors and egregious, law-violating excesses.

Often, those errors and excesses have had profound and lasting strategic and human consequences, yet the spies and the shrouded-in-unnecessary-secrecy institutions they work for have, invariably, been rewarded with more resources, rather than restrained or sanctioned.

Instead, for too long, both Republican and Democratic presidents have fuelled the security Leviathan without hesitation or pause.

For too long, intelligence agencies have operated as states within states, shielded from scrutiny by national security pretence and a complicit press. They lie with impunity. They leak selectively to tame reporters when it suits them. They destroy lives using the convenient cover of “top secret”.

For too long, oversight has been a punchline. Accountability is for whistleblowers, who are hunted, jailed or exiled.

In his own clumsy, erratic way, Trump is doing what Barack Obama and Joe Biden were too conditioned or culpable to do: he’s pumping the emergency brake on a runaway train.

Trump’s qualified insurgency deserves attention. Not because he’s a principled reformer – he isn’t. But because, by instinct or spite, he is threatening the sanctity of institutions that have earned and deserved a reckoning for decades.

In this context, I welcomed the White House’s decision to begin pruning America’s pervasive national security state. It’s a promising start.

In early May, there were two announcements that sent, I suspect, a shudder through the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and triggered a predictable bout of apoplexy among their many obsequious allies in the media, wailing about how the “cutbacks” would fatally undermine America’s safety and embolden its adversaries.

Reportedly, the Trump team is poised to ask Congress to trim the budgets of the DEA, FBI and other Justice Department law enforcement offices by $585m in 2026.

The doomsday warnings are as silly as the wind-up marionettes issuing them, since the agencies will keep much of their multibillion-dollar coffers to “fight” crime and terrorism – homegrown or otherwise.

Even the modest snipping is a welcome signal that the de rigueur annual budget increases may be over – finally.

America’s G-men and women should be relieved that the cuts do not go much deeper and wider, given Trump’s belief that the FBI, in particular, was responsible for many of the tectonic legal troubles he faced before a divided Supreme Court granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution.

Despite the parochial motivation and their limited scope, the proposed cropping of the FBI’s brimming cash box is a necessary, long-overdue first step in clipping America’s bloated national security bureaucracy.

Towards that agreeable end, Trump and company also plan to cut thousands of jobs throughout the mushrooming US “intelligence community,” including 1,200 positions at the CIA over the next several years.

On cue, news of the downsizing has provoked hysterical howls among Democrats and former members of the “intelligence community” who litter US cable news networks as national security “consultants” or “experts” and are treated with cloying deference by their CNN and MSNBC hosts.

The instructive irony, of course, is that congressional Democrats once chaired committee hearings that exposed the “intelligence community’s” wanton disregard for the Constitution and the supposedly sacrosanct rights of Americans.

Those responsible days are decidedly over.

Supine Democrats and the “progressive” journalists who populate “progressive” TV news networks and the “progressive” editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, now rush to defend the spooks and their indispensable duties from a retributive rogue president intent on putting the CIA on a tardy diet.

Oh, how times and attitudes have changed.

Apparently, the absent-minded liberal intelligentsia need reminding that the CIA has deceived politicians and reporters as a matter of standard protocol. It has subverted democracies abroad, and its covert, blood-stained designs are well remembered from Santiago to Guatemala City and beyond.

It is an emetic sight watching career Democrats – who spent the better part of the Bush years denouncing illegal wiretaps and black sites – recoil in performative horror at the suggestion that the CIA and its brethren have grown too powerful, too arrogant and too dangerous.

And the FBI? The holy shrine of J Edgar Hoover? My goodness. These are the same vaunted, buttoned-down agents who tried to ruin Martin Luther King Jr, who infiltrated peace movements, who surveilled Muslims en masse after 9/11.

Their sanctimonious defenders in newsrooms seem to have buried the blatant fact that the bureau only earned its halo when it became politically expedient to paint it as a bulwark against Trumpism.

This is the liberal establishment’s hypocritical secret: they love order more than justice, power more than truth. So long as the right people are holding the guns and the surveillance keys, they’ll cheer.

The status quo-friendly stable of malleable politicians in Ottawa, London and Canberra – even those who campaign on transparency and reform – cave once they’re inside the palace. They start parroting the briefings, mouthing the jargon, justifying the surveillance. The machinery is too big, too opaque, too entrenched.

Trump, for all his manifest ugliness and corrosive faults, has, in this important instance, bucked the stubborn orthodoxy.

It is possible to lasso cops and spies. But this requires will, resolve, and an understanding that their authority is upheld by myths – myths of necessity, permanence, and the ruse that their power is natural or inevitable.

It can and must be contested.

More than 3, 000 people dressed as Smurfs were counted over the weekend in a small town in western France, according to organizers, setting a new world record for the largest gathering of people dressed as Smurfs.

Landerneau, a town of 16 000 in the far west of Brittany, had twice attempted to challenge Lauchringen, a German town that gathered 2, 762 Smurfs in 2019, for the record twice.

However, on Saturday, the French enthusiasts finally succeeded by assembling 3, 076 people wearing white hats, outfits, faces, and singing “smurfy songs” in blue.

The Smurfs, which were created in 1958 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo and are known as “Schtroumpfs” in French, are tiny, human-like creatures that inhabit forests.

Since then, the beloved characters have been a global franchise, producing movies, television shows, advertisements, video games, theme parks, and toys.

“A friend of mine encouraged me to join, and I thought, “Why not?” 82-year-old Simone Pronost posed as a Smurfette.

A 20-year-old student named Albane Delariviere traveled more than 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Rennes to join the festivities.

We thought Landerneau would benefit greatly from this, she said.

The event “brings people together and gives them something else to think about than the times we’re living in,” said Landerneau’s mayor, Patrick Leclerc, who was also dressed in full Smurf.

The gathering’s organizers, Pascal Soun, said the event “allows people to have fun and enter an imaginary world for a few hours.”