SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) - The first two cruise ships of the season could bring more than 6,000 passengers to Santa Barbara Wednesday and Thursday.

The overall cruise ship business has been reworked in Santa Barbara after city meetings with concerned groups who raised environmental concerns.

In the past as many as 30 cruise ships were visiting per year.

Now the city policy is for a maximum of 20 per year, with no cruise ship stops in the summer. There are also no cruise ship stops on weekends.

Ships do not dock and use tenders or small boats to bring passengers to the Santa Barbara Landing.  

Strict environmental guidelines are followed and routinely checked by the Waterfront staff and oversight groups concerned about water quality and waste disposal.

The Waterfront Department collects a fee of $15 per passenger whether they disembark or not.

Each passenger can stop by a  hospitality team on Cabrillo Boulevard and  get information on local sights, shops, restaurants, and the downtown area.

Shuttle and tour vehicles also pick up there.

The first ship is the Royal Princess which arrived at 7:00 a.m. It will depart at 4:30 p.m.  It has a capacity of 3,560.

The second ship Brilliant Lady (Thursday) will arrive at  8:00 a.m. and depart at 6 p.m. with a capacity of 2,770.

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SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) – On Tuesday evening, UC Santa Barbara Police issued a warning about a stalking incident on an MTD bus over the weekend that matched an earlier report on the same route.

On Saturday, April 4, a woman was riding an MTD bus on the North Hall Bus Loop when a man in his 30s sat next to her and placed a backpack on his lap stated a Timely Warning from the UCSB Police Department.

The woman did not know the man noted the UCSB Police Department.

The man moved closer to the woman and began rubbing her thigh and when the bus arrived at the bus loop, she exited and the man followed her detailed the UCSB Police Department.

According to UCSB Police, the woman got the attention of people nearby and the man walked away and campus law enforcement shared that a similar report was received on January 20 of this year.

In the January incident, another woman was riding an MTD bus back toward North Hall Bus Loop when a man in his 20s or 30s sat next to her, placed a backpack on his lap, and began to touch her thigh and private areas without consent explained the UCSB Police Department.

At the time, the man was wearing a dark gray beanie, a black t-shirt, black sweatpants, and black shoes as well as a faded black backpack and he stands around 5'6" to 5'8" and weighs around 220 pounds shared the UCSB Police Department.

Neither woman knew the man added the UCSB Police Department.

If you have more information that might help in this or similar investigations, you are asked to contact the UCSB Police Department at 805-893-3446 or you can report the crime anonymously here.

If you feel unsafe, you can also call the UCSB Police Department's free CSO Safety Escort Program at 805-893-2000. More information about the program can be found here.

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By Chris Isidore, Matt Egan, CNN

(CNN) — Oil futures are plunging – but it could still take weeks or months before gas prices are dramatically lower.

Word of a two-week ceasefire in the war in Iran and a possible reopening of the vital Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers sent crude prices crashing on Tuesday evening into Wednesday. But even if the war ends – which remains to be seen – the massive disruption in global oil markets isn’t over yet.

The average price for a gallon of gas has soared to $4.16 since the start of the war, according to AAA, up by $1.18. Even a relatively small decrease to $4 a gallon could take one or two weeks, according to gas price tracking service GasBuddy.

And getting below $3 a gallon, as gas prices were before the war started on February 27, could take months, analysts told CNN.

“There’s an old expression – gas prices go up like a rocket and come down like a feather,” said Tom Kloza, an independent oil analyst and advisor to major oil company Gulf Oil.

Within 48 hours of the ceasefire deal announcement, retail prices should start to edge down by a few cents each day as wholesale prices fall, Gas Buddy said.

But undoing all the price gains since late February hinges on getting oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again, a key waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil usually transits.

“There will be a lot of hesitancy and caution about passing through the strait because it seems that Iran is going to still be policing it,” said Matt Smith of trade analytics firm Kpler. “It will take time to restore confidence.”

Iranian media reported Wednesday that Iran had once again closed the strait following Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, adding to uncertainty about the strait’s status.

But even if the strait completely reopens, it will take time to restore production from oil-exporting nations in the Persian Gulf. Oil infrastructure suffered widespread damage over the last six weeks in countries like United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, Oman and Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter.

Those Gulf states also slowed or stopped production completely during the fighting since they ran out of storage space.

An estimated 7.5 million barrels per day of crude production from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain collectively shut down in March, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

“The market has been eager to get good news but it remains to be seen if the Strait of Hormuz opens fully,” Bob McNally, founder and president of Rapidan Energy Group, told CNN. “That’s the whole ball of wax and so far Washington and Tehran seem to be talking past each other on that.”

And exporting oil from the region could soon grow more expensive, with both the United States and Iran raising the possibility of charging a toll for vessels to move through the strait.

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By Taylor Nicioli, CNN

(CNN) — The traditional six-sided die has been around since the Bronze Age, with the earliest known pieces from approximately 3000 BC uncovered in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Now, a new study has found evidence that Native Americans were likely using dice for gaming and gambling more than 6,000 years earlier, since the end of the last ice age.

The dice looked different than the polyhedral shapes we’re used to playing with today. The oldest ones identified in the study were known as “binary lots.” These artifacts — found at archaeological sites from the Folsom Period in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico — date back roughly 12,800 to 12,200 years. The pieces were flat, two-sided dice crafted from wood or bone and could be tossed, similar to how we flip a coin today. The findings were reported in a paper published April 2 in the journal American Antiquity.

Lead study author Robert J. Madden, a doctoral student of archaeology at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, argued that the evidence has been hiding in plain sight.

“We’ve had a great record of this subject during the historical period after Europeans got here,” Madden said, referring to the past 1,000 to 2,000 years. “But then before that, we really didn’t know, like, how far does it go back before this? And that’s really what this paper adds.”

The study creates new criteria for deciphering old dice and allows archaeologists to further explore how games have evolved over time, researchers say.

Deciphering prehistoric dice

Because the dice were not the traditional cube shape, when they were initially uncovered archaeologists often referred to them as “gaming pieces,” Madden said. He noticed the gaps in the literature, particularly the lack of information about how dice were utilized before Europeans came to America, and wanted to come up with a way of identifying whether the pieces were used as dice.

“I kind of picked up on that there were some of these really old examples — these discs, and these late Pleistocene 12,000-year-old context — that just people were saying, ‘Well, we don’t know what these things are,’” Madden said. “I thought, ‘Boy, if they are dice, that is really significant.’”

Madden used a 1907 analysis by ethnographer Stewart Culin, which identified 293 sets of historic Native American dice, to create a four-part test to evaluate an unidentified object. The test utilized descriptors such as the shape of the object and the markings on each side to determine whether they were binary lots.

The doctoral student identified more than 600 previously unknown sets of Native American dice from 45 prehistoric archaeological sites in the western United States from the Late Pleistocene until after the period of European contact.

Games archaeology “has been overlooked for so long as unimportant or invisible in mainstream archaeology. This paper does quite a bit to demonstrate what is possible if you have the knowledge of traditional gaming practices and look for analogues in the archaeological record,” said Walter Crist, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who specializes in ancient games.