Refugee Ripple Effect | The Next Steve Irwin Brings Species Back From the Dead

“I’m not fine at all. I’m dying in Libya,” Muhammad Hafees messaged me from a Libyan detention center on May 26 during Islam’s fasting month of Ramadan. After fleeing Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region, the 26-year-old came to Libya two years ago to cross the Mediterranean, despite the conflict that has torn the country apart since 2011.

Having scratched together just enough money from relatives, Hafees boarded a rickety boat from the coastal Libyan city of Sabratha in late 2018, with 111 others, all of whom were escaping conflicts and poverty back home. But the Libyan “coast guard” — a band of militias that the European Union has co-opted, trained and paid to prevent migrants from reaching Europe — intercepted the boat and dragged everyone back to detention centers, where reports of trafficking, rape, torture and other horrors are rife. That’s where Hafees was languishing the last time I spoke to him, on June 1. He hasn’t been active on WhatsApp since.

Few people have more fun hiking than Forrest Galante. It’s been only a few minutes since the 31–year–old conservationist–biologist–TV star ventured into Toro Canyon Park in Santa Barbara, California, and he’s already flipped over a log to unveil a gorgeous night snake.

“Very cryptic, elusive animal, not seen commonly in California at all. We got very lucky,” says Galante. “This is from someone who finds extinct animals for a living. This is probably only the 10th or 11th one I’ve ever seen.” It’s just another afternoon with the host of Animal Planet’s Extinct or Alive.

There’s little doubt that Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is going away for life, but his appetite for destruction now looks rather tame compared to today’s crime wars in Mexico. Although he ran a billion-dollar criminal enterprise and most likely ordered or committed some, if not all, of the 26 homicides on his charge sheet, Guzmán seems like an old-school gentleman next to the younger, more contemporary bosses marking out criminal territory and market share on both sides of the southern U.S. border.