By Laura Paddison, CNN

The Dead Sea (CNN) — The motorboat cut through the aquamarine water of the Dead Sea, past dazzling-white formations forged from salt crystals. Jake Ben Zaken, the boat captain, pointed to a patch of darker water nearby indicating a sinkhole beneath the seabed. These are both signs of an unfolding ecological disaster, he said.

The Dead Sea sits where Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian land meet and is a place of extremes. It’s the lowest point on the planet, around 1,400 feet below sea level. It’s also one of the world’s saltiest water bodies, nearly 10 times saltier than the ocean, which makes the water so dense people can float effortlessly on its surface.

But this unique body of water is dying. Every year it recedes around 4 feet, as the impacts of human activities and climate change take a heavy toll. Over the past five decades, its surface area has shrunk by roughly a third. As the water retreats, it’s forging a new landscape of sinkholes and salt-encrusted shorelines that is both strikingly beautiful and a haunting reminder that the Dead Sea’s future hangs in the balance.

Ben Zaken, who runs the company Salty Landscapes from Mitzpe Shalem, a settlement in the West Bank, has been taking people out onto the Dead Sea for more than 12 years. It’s given him a front row seat to the alarming changes.

His boat tours used to start from Mineral Beach, just to the south of Mitzpe Shalem, but he was forced to move when sinkholes closed it in 2015. His current location is safe for now, but the landscape is shifting fast. “Every year we get about seven and a half meters of new shoreline,” Ben Zaken said.

There are multiple plans to save the Dead Sea, but the years tick by and little happens as costs, fraught regional politics and a lack of political urgency stymie action, experts told CNN. Unless something is done, the world risks losing a unique ecosystem, they warned.

“It is a treasure,” said Peleg Gottdiener of EcoPeace Middle East, an organization of Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian environmentalists. “There’s nothing like the Dead Sea.”

The Dead Sea’s demise is human-caused.

This landlocked swath of salty water is technically a lake. Water enters from the Jordan River, which starts on the Syria-Lebanon border, flows through the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, then continues its journey south toward the Dead Sea, with Jordan on one side and Israel and the occupied West Bank on the other.

Over the decades, the Jordan River, and its main tributary the Yarmouk, have shrunk as they’ve been dammed and diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan to quench the thirst of people, crops and livestock. The river used to transport 1.3 billion cubic meters of water to the Dead Sea; that has fallen to roughly 100 million cubic meters.

The mineral extraction industry is the other major driver of decline.

In the late 1970s, the Dead Sea split into two basins, now separated by a strip of dry land. The deeper northern basin, where Ben Zaken operates his boat tours, is the natural remnant of the sea. The southern basin is artificially maintained, made up of a series of industrial evaporation pools.

Companies on the Israeli and Jordanian sides — the Dead Sea Works and the Arab Potash Company — pump water from the northern basin into the pools. The water evaporates in the sun leaving behind a mineral-rich brine, from which companies extract minerals including potash and magnesium for fertilizers and other industrial uses.

There’s another force at work too: climate change. Droughts are becoming fiercer and more prolonged, and rainfall is rarer. Even without river diversions and industry, there’s evidence climate change impacts would cause the Dead Sea to shrink, albeit far more slowly, said Yael Kiro, a geochemist at the Weizman

ISLA VISTA, Calif. (KEYT) A vigil took place in honor of a rape survivor.

The candlelight vigil happened on Tuesday evening at Greek Park in Isla Vista.

Organizers hope to call attention to the unsolved rape and strangulation of an 18-year-old UCSB freshman at the Tropicana Gardens on May 9.

The student housing complex is on El Colegio Road.

The survivor's family has hired an attorney to help solve the case.

Anyone with information is urged to break their silence and contact university police at 805-893-3446.

Anonymous tips are welcome at 805-893-7274 or https://police.ucsb.edu

The post Candlelight Vigil held for rape survivor in Isla Vista appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

By Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump finished his monthlong revenge tour in Texas on Tuesday night.

The president’s national approval ratings may be near their weakest overall. But a series of red-state primaries in May have shown that conservative voters remain fiercely supportive of Trump – and willing to turn against those he deems disloyal.

After toppling incumbents in Indiana, Kentucky and Louisiana, Trump got what he wanted in Texas when Ken Paxton, the controversial state attorney general, defeated four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.

Now, Republicans face the prospect of ponying up to defend a red-state seat in a race against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico that could become the most expensive contest in history.

Republican senators and top operatives believed Cornyn was a shoo-in for reelection if he could survive the primary and that Paxton was a weaker general election candidate. But Trump decided to ignore months of Senate leadership’s lobbying for the president to back Cornyn or stay out of the runoff by issuing a late endorsement of Paxton. Trump’s move effectively sealed Cornyn’s political fate.

In his victory speech, Paxton called Trump’s endorsement “the most powerful force in politics.”

Here are takeaways from the Texas primary runoff:

Speed bumps ahead

Trump has ousted Indiana state Senate Republican incumbents who refused to support his push for redistricting, toppled a frequent critic in Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and unseated Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump after his second impeachment following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Cornyn voted to acquit Trump then but was slow to endorse him in his third bid for the White House. He said in 2023 that Trump had “a unique ability to rally his base, but not to grow beyond his base, which is a problem.”

Still, while Trump’s endorsement is potent in Republican primaries, he also has a long history of supporting candidates who alienated the broader electorate and lost winnable general elections.

Republicans will seek to prevent Paxton from joining a list of doomed Trump-backed candidates that includes Herschel Walker in Georgia, Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona, and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania.

Trump, meanwhile, will also face seven more months of Republican majorities on Capitol Hill where lawmakers like Massie, Cassidy and Cornyn are now untethered from the political demands of reelection.

The fractures are already showing up in Washington. Last week, the Senate broke with Trump over his request to fund a White House ballroom and create an “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate those Trump’s administration thinks to have been politically prosecuted.

Talarico takes center stage

While Paxton and Cornyn battled, the Democratic nominee, Talarico, was Read more

By Patrick Svitek, CNN

(CNN) — Ken Paxton weathered a long list of scandals in the years leading up to his decisive victory Tuesday in the Republican primary runoff for Senate in Texas.

Through criminal charges and allegations of infidelity, the Texas attorney general has remained a force in state politics and maintained a close relationship with President Donald Trump, who gave him a crucial endorsement a week before his hard-fought runoff against Sen. John Cornyn.

Paxton has often dismissed the allegations against him as politically motivated, and many of his supporters have been willing to overlook them because they like how aggressively he pushes a conservative agenda as attorney general.

The controversies are set to factor heavily into the general election. The Democratic nominee, James Talarico, responded to Paxton’s emergence as the GOP standard-bearer by labeling him “The Most Corrupt Politician in America.” The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said in a statement that Paxton is “so corrupt that even his own party tried to remove him from office,” a reference to his 2023 impeachment by the state House.

Meanwhile, Republicans have signaled they hope to keep the focus on Talarico and hound him on culture war issues. In his victory speech, Paxton said Talarico is the “most extreme radical the Democrats have ever nominated.”

Here’s a recap of Paxton’s controversies:

Securities fraud charges

Several months after taking office as attorney general in 2015, Paxton was indicted on felony securities fraud charges in Texas and was accused of misleading investors in a company years earlier. He would have faced decades in prison if convicted.

The case dragged on for nearly nine years, ending in a pretrial agreement in March 2024 that required him to complete community service and pay restitution. Paxton did not have to enter a plea under the deal.

Along the way, Paxton also faced a civil case based on similar allegations from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. That case did not last nearly as long, and a judge threw it out in 2016.

Whistleblower lawsuit

In 2020, a group of top Paxton deputies reported him to the FBI, voicing concern that he was abusing his office to help an Austin real estate investor and political donor, Nate Paul. Some of the Paxton employees resigned, but four were fired and later sued Paxton under the Texas Whistleblower Act.

Paxton fought bitterly with the former aides in court and in public, branding them as “rogue” and disgruntled.

In 2025, a Travis County district court judge agreed the former aides were improperly fired and awarded them $6.6 million. Paxton appealed against the judgment but dropped his appeal a few months later, after announcing his Senate campaign.

While the FBI investigated the wh

By Patrick Svitek, CNN

(CNN) — Sen. John Cornyn’s landslide defeat immediately raises a pressing question for his GOP colleagues: Will he join the ranks of other Republicans recently vanquished by President Donald Trump and begin bucking the president more?

Cornyn suggested prior to Tuesday’s loss that he will continue to be a team player, but that has not stopped Republicans from speculating about whether he will go the way of Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Tillis abandoned his reelection campaign last year after Trump threatened to back a primary challenger, while Cassidy lost reelection earlier this month after Trump endorsed against him. Both have since become more outspoken against Trump, complicating his legislative agenda.

Already, a small and eclectic bloc of Republicans has been increasingly outspoken against key Trump policies, from the war in Iran to a government settlement fund that could benefit MAGA loyalists.

Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas’ junior senator, said on his podcast recently that it is “fair to expect John’s going to be less than thrilled” if he loses reelection — and could become more of a problem for GOP vote-counters.

“Bill Cassidy, Thom Tillis, John Cornyn, Rand Paul,” Cruz said, counting the Kentucky senator who is also sometimes critical of Trump. “Those are four senators. We have a 53-47 majority. If you lose four senators, you’re below 50 and you can’t get anything done. That is going to be a complicating factor for the rest of the year.”

But it’s not just that group that’s posing problems for the White House. Tensions between Trump and Hill Republicans have spiked in recent weeks as lawmakers have grumbled that his recent decisions — from endorsing Cornyn’s opponent to pushing politically toxic projects like funding for his East Wing ballroom to that “anti-weaponization” settlement fund — could cost them control of Congress.

Trump still needs to get at least one major legislative package through the Hill this year: A package of tens of billions of dollars to fund US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border enforcement that Democrats rejected in the most recent spending deal.

But that immigration measure is now roiled by so many internal problems that some in the party aren’t completely convinced it can be done by the midterms.

Cornyn has long been a party stalwart. He has held multiple roles in Senate leadership, including majority whip and chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

On the campaign trail, he regularly spoke about his passion for the state Republican Party and wanting to protect the brand from someone like Paxton, who has a history of criminal and civil cases, allegations of official misconduct, and a nasty and public divorce.

Still, for all his criticism of Paxton, Cornyn always promised to support the Republican ticket in November, even if he would not be on it, and reiterated that in the first lines of his concession speech.

In the days before the runoff, he was asked if a “different John Cornyn” would return to the Senate if he lost.

“I don’t think so,” Cornyn told NewsNation. “I think I would certainly do what I always try to do, is pick my fights on a case-b