By MICHAEL R. BLOOD

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Scientists on a research vessel off the central California coast spotted a waved albatross, marking just the second recorded sighting of the bird north of Central America.

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The yellow-billed bird with black button eyes, which can have an 8-foot wingspan and spends much of its life airborne over the ocean, also came with a mystery: Researchers wonder how and why a species known to breed in the Galapagos Islands — roughly 3,000 miles away — ventured so far north.

To scientists, it’s a “vagrant” bird, one traveling far outside its typical range. It was spotted 23 miles off the coast of Point Piedras Blancas, roughly midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The adult bird “doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get back south,” said marine ornithologist Tammy Russell, who was onboard the vessel and noted that the same bird apparently was spotted in October off the Northern California coast.

“I can’t even believe what I saw,” Russell wrote on Facebook. “I’m still in shock.”

Russell, a contract scientist with the Farallon Institute and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said it’s all but impossible to determine why the bird ended up so far from its home.

It could have been driven north by a storm. Some birds have a rambling spirit and just go farther than others.

“It likely didn’t breed last season because adults lay their egg in spring and the chicks leave the nests by January,” Russell said in an email. “Perhaps it went wandering on its year off and will soon return to the Galapagos to be reunited with its mate for the next season?”

“Who knows how long it will stay around or if it will ever return?” Russell added. “But that’s why these sightings are so special.”

The International Union for Conservation of Nature calls the bird — the largest in the Galapagos — critically endangered. According to the American Bird Conservancy, its range is restricted to the tropics. It nests on lava fields amid scattered boulders and sparse vegetation.

The lifespan of the birds can reach 45 years. They feed primarily on fish, squid and crustaceans.

Russell noted that if multiple birds were being seen in California, it could be a sign they were being driven northward by environmental factors. Previously, she has written about five species of Booby that are now common off California because of warming temperatures and marine heatwaves.

As for the lone albatross, “If this is a sign of this species moving north, we now have some baseline data when we first detected one,” Russell added.

By DYLAN LOVAN

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A Kentucky family battling extreme cold temperatures on their farm over the weekend opened their home to a newborn calf that was struggling in the deep freeze.

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Hours later, the calf, fed and fluffed, took a spot on the couch with the Sorrell family’s two children. Their mom, Macey Sorrell, snapped some photos and later posted them to social media, and the cuteness did not go unnoticed.

The calf was born outdoors in single digit temperatures on Saturday. Macey Sorrell said her husband, Tanner, went outside to check on the pregnant mother and found the calf, suffering in the cold.

“She was just frozen. Her umbilical cord looked like a popsicle,” Macey Sorrell said Thursday from her home in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. “It was just frozen.”

After losing a calf last winter to frostbite, the family moved quickly to bring the baby inside to clean her off and warm her up.

In this photo provided by the family, Tanner Sorrell and his wife, Macey Sorrell, feed and clean a calf that was born on their farm during extreme temperatures in Mount Sterling, Ky., on Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026. (Courtesy Macey Sorrell via AP)

“When we brought her in, she had ice on her. The afterbirth was still on her, I had to wipe all that off,” Sorrell said. “I took out the blow dryer and warmed her up, and got her all fluffed out.”

Soon the calf was lying on the couch, cuddling with her young children.

“They crawled up next to her like it was just the most normal thing,” she said. Her 3-year-old son, Gregory, decided to name the calf Sally, a character from his favorite movie, “Cars.”

In this photo provided by Macey Sorrell, 3-year-old Gregory Sorrell lies with a newborn calf that was brought into the family’s home during extreme cold temperatures in Mount Sterling, Ky., on Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026. (Courtesy Macey Sorrell via AP)

The family keeps about three dozen cows on their land and are used to bringing farm animals indoors from time to time. Sally was reunited with her mother the next morning, and is doing well, Sorrell said.

Sorrell said she almost didn’t share the photos on social media, because it was nothing new to the family to bring an animal indoors when necessary. Several commented on the cuteness of the photos.

“It’s just part of what you do,” she said.

A former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer from Minnetonka was sentenced Thursday to nearly six years in federal prison for uploading child pornography to the Kik app in 2022.

Anthony John Crowley (Courtesy of the Sherburne County Sheriff’s Office)

Anthony John Crowley, 52, had pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in St. Paul to one count of distribution of child pornography, admitting he used the messaging app to upload images of a minor less than 12 years old engaged in sexually explicit conduct in August 2022.

Judge Laura Provinzino gave Crowley the top of sentencing guideline range — 71 months — and 10 years of supervised release.

She said Crowley “had earned his position of trust” after a 23-year career in federal law enforcement. “You wore the badge, people trusted you,” she said. “You knew what you did was wrong.”

Crowley was charged and arrested in June. As part of a September plea agreement, the prosecution agreed to dismiss an indictment charging him with two counts of possessing child pornography.

Court documents said the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force tipped off the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in 2022 that someone was using Kik to upload images of child pornography. The account was linked to a phone number and email address belonging to Crowley, a customs and border officer.

Law enforcement obtained a search warrant for Crowley’s home and seized his electronic devices, which contained images of child pornography and “child erotica” stories, according to prosecutors.

“Anthony Crowley’s crimes against children are a disgrace,” former acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Joseph Thompson said after the guilty plea. “In the last few months, we have seen a rash of law enforcement officers, public officials, and others in positions of trust abusing children. I have zero tolerance for this betrayal.”

Other officers charged

Crowley was among three Minnesota law enforcement officers charged federally for alleged sex crimes in just over a month’s time.

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Four days before Crowley was charged, a special agent with Homeland Security, Timothy Ryan Gregg, 52, of Eagan, was charged with producing child sexual abuse material of a 17-year-old girl after authorities say images and videos of the two engaged in sexual activity were found on her cellphone on May 29. Gregg has pleaded guilty to the sole count of transportation of visual depictions of a minor engaging in sexual conduct. A sentencing date has not been scheduled.

A month earlier, Minnesota state trooper Jeremy Francis Plonski, 30, of Shakopee was charged with production of child pornography. He pleaded guilty to the charge Oct. 8, admitting to repeatedly sexually assaulting a toddler girl while recording the abuse and then sharing the videos with someone he met through the Telegram app. Under a plea agreement, Plonski faces between 23 and 28 years in prison at sentencing, which has not been scheduled.

By REGINA GARCIA CANO

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela’s legislature on Thursday approved opening the nation’s oil sector to privatization, reversing a tenet of the self-proclaimed socialist movement that has ruled the country for more than two decades.

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The National Assembly approved the overhaul of the energy industry law less than a month after the brazen seizure of then-President Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military attack in Venezuela’s capital.

The bill now awaits the signature of acting President Delcy Rodríguez, who proposed the changes in the days after U.S. President Donald Trump said his administration would take control of Venezuela’s oil exports and revitalize the ailing industry by luring foreign investment.

The legislation promises to give private companies control over the production and sale of oil and allow for independent arbitration of disputes.

Rodríguez’s government expects the changes to serve as assurances for major U.S. oil companies that have so far hesitated about returning to the volatile country. Some of those companies lost investments when the ruling party enacted the existing law two decades ago to favor Venezuela’s state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA.

The revised law would modify extraction taxes, setting a royalty cap rate of 30% and allowing the executive branch to set percentages for every project based on capital investment needs, competitiveness and other factors.

It also removes the mandate for disputes to be settled only in Venezuelan courts, which are controlled by the ruling party. Foreign investors have long viewed the involvement of independent courts as crucial to guard against future expropriation.

Ruling-party lawmaker Orlando Camacho, head of the assembly’s oil committee, said the reform “will change the country’s economy.”

Meanwhile, opposition lawmaker Antonio Ecarri urged the assembly to add transparency and accountability provisions to the law, including the creation of a website to make funding and other information public. He noted that the current lack of oversight has led to systemic corruption and argued that these provisions can also be considered judicial guarantees.

Those guarantees are among the key changes foreign investors are looking for as they weigh entering the Venezuelan market.

“Let the light shine on in the oil industry,” Ecarri said.

Oil workers dressed in red jumpsuits and hard hats celebrated the bill’s approval, waving a Venezuelan flag inside the legislative palace and then joining lawmakers to a demonstration with ruling-party supporters.

The law was last altered two decades ago as Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez, made heavy state control over the oil industry a pillar of his socialist-inspired revolution.

In the early years of his tenure, a massive windfall in petrodollars thanks to record-high global oil prices turned PDVSA into the main source of government revenue and the backbone of Venezuela’s economy.

Chávez’s 2006 changes to the hydrocarbons law required PDVSA to be the principal stakeholder in all major oil projects.

In tearing up the contracts that foreign companies signed in the 1990s, Chávez nationalized huge assets belonging to American and other Western firms that refused to comply, including ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. They are still waiting to receive billions of dollars in arbitration awards.

From those heady days of lavish state spending, PDVSA’s fortunes turned — along with the country’s — as oil prices dropped and government mismanagement eroded profits and hurt production, first under Chávez, then Maduro.

The nation home to the world’s biggest proven crude reserves underwent a dire economic crisis that drove over 7 million Venezuelans to flee since 2014. Sanctions imposed by successive U.S. administrations further crippled the oil industry.

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america