The Brief

TORRANCE, Calif. — In the back of an office building, in a small room that smells like rotting strawberries, a criminal investigator watches his evidence crawl around on wood chips in five open plastic tanks.

The box turtles, native to eastern North America, were found at a nearby international mail facility in Los Angeles about a week prior, packaged in a series of boxes bound for Asia.

“These guys were being illegally exported,” said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) special agent, who asked to remain anonymous because of his undercover work. “Now it’s an ongoing investigation in terms of who shipped them.”

FWS Inspector Mac Elliot looks over a legal shipment while Braxton, a dog trained to smell heavily trafficked wildlife like reptiles and animal parts like ivory, enthusiastically does his job. Wildlife trafficking is one of the largest and most profitable crime sectors in the world. Estimates of its value range from $7-23 billion annually.

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The 40-some box turtles have a more immediate problem. They’re evidence of a crime and its victims. Distressed, possibly sick, and half a continent away from a home they’ll likely never see again, the turtles need specialized care and a long-term home.

Seized animals rarely get returned to the wild because it’s difficult to know where, specifically, they came from. They could carry disease.

“What to do with confiscated live animals has been a concern for as long as I’ve been a wildlife inspector because of the quantity, the care,” said Tamesha Woulard, a 36-year veteran of the FWS Office of Law Enforcement. “What happens after they’re here?"

Last year, the FWS and the Association for Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) launched a pilot project aimed at answering that question in Southern California. With wildlife trafficking surging globally, the organizations are now in talks to expand the program to other parts of the country.

“We’re reacting to a crisis,” said Sara Walker, senior advisor on wildlife trafficking at AZA. “It doesn’t do anything to actually reduce demand.”

Some of the confiscated turtles at the FWS office have mottled splotches on their shells, a sign of potential sickness. The seized shipment of turtles included a mix of Eastern Box Turtles, native to the eastern U.S., and Yucatan Box Turtles, native to Mexico. The Yucatan Box Turtles have pale white heads.

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The illegal wildlife trade is surging 

Wildlife trafficking is one of the largest and most profitable crime sectors in the world. Estimates of its value range from $7 billion to $23 billion annually. A recent report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that more than 4,000 species are being targeted by traffickers globally, to be sold as food, medicine, ornaments or pets. The crimes are causing “untold harm to nature,” said Ghada Waly, the office’s executive director, jeopardizing “livelihoods, public health, good governance and our planet’s ability to fight climate change.”

An analysis by Moody’s Analytics that used government data from around the world found that from 2018-2021, wildlife trafficking surged 150% globally.

The latest available data from the FWS shows that from 2015-2019, nearly 50,000 live plants and animals were seized or abandoned in the U.S. over that four year period — an average of about 27 individuals per day.

Woulard said the number is definitely higher today.

“To me, what was highlighted after COVID is that people will try to make money using a lot of different methods,” she said. “E-commerce has exploded and there are people that are making pets out of animals that were never pets before.”

Squirrels, skunks, scorpions and snakes.

“But then I started finding ants,” Woulard said. “Ants? Really?

Inspectors Mac Elliott and Ali Ventura look through a shipment.

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Illegal trade isn’t always nefarious, she said. Well-meaning pet enthusiasts don’t always know they’re purchasing something that was collected or shipped illegally. Importers don’t always mean to ship something that’s not allowed. Southern California is a hotspot for the legal import of tropical fish and corals, which can be hard to properly identify.

“There is a legal trade,” Woulard said. “What we do is we facilitate the legal trade and we intercept the illegal trade.”

When a live animal is seized by authorities, regardless of the reason, the authorities assume responsibility for the animal and its well-being.

At the FWS office in Torrance, there’s a room with saltwater tanks to house seized fish, corals and clams. The small room occupied by the 40 scurrying box turtles, a few doors down, has housed everything from rare birds to monkey-tailed skinks — “large lizards that don’t play well with each other,” Woulard said.

Their job is to keep the animals alive, she said. “Long enough for them to get to a place with better care.”

Aquatic species need specific water temperatures, pressure and chemistry. Specialized care at the Aquarium of the Pacific is often given by volunteers like Shaw Droker.

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A new approach 

In the nine months since the Wildlife Confiscations Network launched, participants said it’s helped streamline the process of getting animals triaged and placed in long-term care facilities.

It’s also helped law enforcement officers “who are being absolutely inundated with live animals being smuggled,” said Walker, with the AZA.

Since August of last year, the network has helped place more than 1,300 animals at zoos, aquariums and conservancies in the region. The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach has taken in 500 individual corals and clams in the last six months, said Nate Jaros, senior curator of fishes and invertebrates at the aquarium.

Tropical corals are very popular with aquariasts in the U.S. They’re often confiscated by authorities because they’re misidentified.

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“We really don’t harvest any wild coral for this,” he said, pointing to a massive display tank with schools of darting fish and colorful corals. “Mostly in-house propagation and confiscations have been enough to fulfill our coral exhibit needs.”

Animals that can’t be placed are likely to be euthanized. Fortunately, Walker said, since the Wildlife Confiscations Network launched in October that hasn’t happened yet. “But it’s going to happen in the future, I’m sure,” she said. “We’re just running out of space.”

Efforts are underway to launch similar networks in other parts of the country, Walker said, with the goal of creating a national network. The effort is “obviously a reactive initiative,” she said. “We’re reacting to a crisis. It doesn’t do anything to actually reduce demand.”

When animal care providers receive confiscated animals, they’re often malnourished, sick and distressed. Each animal is inspected and triaged to give it specific care.

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American turtles are increasingly part of the illicit trade

For some of the seized box turtles, temporarily housed at the Fish and Wildlife Service office, their long-term home is likely to be a couple hours drive north, at The Turtle Conservancy in Ojai, Calif.

Since 2017, the conservancy, which is closed to the public, has taken in about 500 confiscated turtles, including about 100 box turtles in just the last year.

A Ploughshare Tortoise (center), native to Madagascar, is critically endangered due to poaching from the pet trade. Their rareness adds to their value on the illegal market. For poachers, Liu said, “It’s like finding a gold brick on the ground.”

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The surge in American turtles being illegally collected and trafficked is part of a broader trend, said James Liu, director and head veterinarian at the facility.

“Now that there’s a lot more wealth in these Asian countries that have always liked turtles — they’ve always valued them as pets, as traditional medicine, as food — they now have the means to buy them from other countries,” he said.

The U.S. has the greatest turtle biodiversity in the world. That richness, coupled with steep declines in Asian turtle populations — what conservationists have dubbed the Asian turtle crisis — and economic hardships in the U.S. following the COVID-19 pandemic, “have created this perfect storm where now Americans are the people who are poaching and sending them to China,” Liu said.

A single box turtle can be sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on its coloration, wildlife officials said.

The patterns on box turtle shells are meant to emulate dappled light coming through trees to help the animals camouflage in their native forests of eastern North America. Their bright coloration also makes them more desirable for the pet trade.

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In the conservancy’s quarantine room, where new arrivals are kept for 60 days to be screened for disease and to be nursed back to health, Liu wiped the shell of a male box turtle with a wet rag. Its gleaming shell looks like a Rorschach test of ink black and golden orange.

The conservancy’s staff measured the turtle’s weight and moved on to the other confiscated turtles they had taken in. Their tanks run the length of a wall, stacked three high.

“It's a quarantine, but really it's an evidence locker,” Liu said. “Instead of cocaine and other contraband, it's living creatures. It's native U.S. turtles.”

Updated November 14, 2026 at 13:52 PM ET

WASHINGTON— Friday's nationwide ground stop started when a contractor updated old Federal Aviation Administration telecommunication lines, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday.

Tens of thousands of passengers across the U.S. are still stranded Saturday after the rare ground stop. Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator who joined Duffy at Saturday's media briefing, said schedule problems should be resolved by Sunday evening.

Nearly 25,000 flights were delayed, and over 9,000 were cancelled on Friday, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking site. The disruption seeped into Saturday morning with more than 4,000 cancellations recorded, which is 18% of flights departing the U.S., according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company.

L3Harris, a long time contractor for the FAA, was doing routine maintenance in at least one remote location changing copper wire to fiber optics, Duffy said. "When I tell you that we're using old equipment, we're using old equipment," he said.

He said the FAA is still investigating the exact error that started flooding other routers in the air traffic control system, and if L3Harris was at all responsible.

"It's pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location. So what we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error, installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?"

L3Harris did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.

These updates have been happening in American institutions for decades, Duffy said.

"Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from analog to digital," Duffy said. "Just maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this work because the investments haven't been made, but this is not complicated."

Bedford said there was no evidence of anything nefarious happening or any AI-related issues.

Since his time in office, Duffy said he's been asking Congress for money to make more upgrades. In July 2025, Congress approved $12.5 billion to modernize the nation's aging air traffic control system.

With that money, 70% of copper communications have been replaced to high-speed fiber, Bedford said. Duffy called the innovations and the need for more a "bipartisan moment."

"This is the moment, if we don't start to switch out our systems, when, how long are we going to wait, America, and Congress?" Duffy asked.

Thousands of passengers miss flights

Passengers wait at boarding gates at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, DC on November 13, 2026.

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For about four hours on Friday, thousands of flights at U.S. airports were grounded in one of the biggest disruptions of the nation's air travel system since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The aviation system is back online and slowly returning to normal Saturday morning, but delays and cancellations will continue, Duffy said. Bedford said all passengers will be put on new flights or they'll get a full refund, but that people should reach out to their airlines directly.

Flight boards at airports across the country Saturday morning continued to be riddled with red cancelled marks. At Tampa International Airport in Florida, people in the main terminal area before security curled up in chairs to grab a wink of sleep.

On Friday night, a flight board at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D.C. showed dozens of flights delayed into the early morning hours or cancelled.

Passengers Erin and Jake Britt spent half the day at the airport in D.C. on Friday. Their plane to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. boarded at 3 p.m. By 5:30 p.m., they were getting off the plane — but they were still in D.C.

"Overall, our plane was definitely annoyed, but reasonable," Erin Britt said, as the couple left the airport at 8 p.m. "People being upset and asking like, 'Well, how are you not prepared for this?' And it was like, 'Well, no one was prepared.'"

She said neither the pilot nor flight attendants had any more information than passengers."They seem just as in the dark," she said.

The pair decided to cancel their weekend trip, but the night didn't end there. They spent over nine hours overnight waiting on the JetBlue customer service call line to be reimbursed. "I was setting alarms in 20 minute intervals in case I fell asleep," Erin Britt said.

For people who had events or plans over the weekend – the delay added an extra layer of stress. Joe Romano and Maddie Cabana had a cruise leaving Orlando, Fla. Saturday afternoon.

"It was a big eye roll. I mean, I travel a lot for work already, so I'm constantly dealing with flight delays," Romano said. "When this happened, I was just like, 'Of course, it always happens to me.'"

"Just rather inconvenient and frustrating," Cabana added, as the pair contemplated checking their bags or going home. They even thought about driving to Florida. "Hopefully, everything will be fine. It'll all work out. It always does."

And it did— eventually. After their JetBlue flight was ultimately cancelled, they quickly booked another one on Southwest Airlines and made it early Saturday morning.

Others, like Suze DiPietro decided flying wasn't worth it anymore. Her husband drove about four hours down from Ocean City, New Jersey to pick her up in D.C. Luckily, they had friends in the area where they spent the night.

"My husband, my hero, is driving down from New Jersey to come get me," DiPietro said.

Other alternatives included people switching to Amtrak trains as they struggled to get to their destination. Although, even Amtrak's system had a brief outage Friday night.

This was only the second nationwide ground stop since September 11, 2001. The U.S. last issued a ground stop of this scale in 2023, when all U.S. airports were shut down due to an outage in the NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which alerts pilots and airports of real-time hazards.

That outage prompted fears of a cyberattack, but the FAA later determined the issue was caused when contract workers inadvertently deleted critical files.

The FAA has recently begun rolling out an AI-enhanced software tool known as the SMART system as part of its ambitious overhaul of the nation's air traffic control system. But Air Space Intelligence, the company that makes the tool, quickly dismissed speculation that its product could be connected to the flight disruptions.

"The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC," the company said on social media.

Ava Pukatch contributed to reporting.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Eggs from the first confirmed sea turtle nests found on the U.S. West Coast have hatched.

"We are excited to share that some of the olive ridley sea turtle eggs from Seal Beach successfully hatched after a 58-day incubation period," said the Aquarium of the Pacific in a social media post.

The Long Beach-based aquarium has been keeping watch over 204 olive ridley sea turtle eggs, laid on Seal Beach and Huntington Beach in September. A second set of eggs found on Huntington Beach is still incubating

The aquarium said the hatchlings were released early Saturday morning in a coastal area with little light and human disturbances.

Baby turtles, the aquarium said, go through a “frenzy period” after hatching, where they swim nonstop for up to two days

The eggs came from the first confirmed sea turtle nests found on the U.S. West Coast. Scientists say unusually warming water tied to El Niño likely drew the rare turtles to the Southern California coast.

A couple of decades ago, a friend in New York told me about something happening that was kinda underground and just getting traction. It was called “The Moth.” People took turns telling a true, personal story, with no notes, named after the Southern tradition of sitting on front porches and sharing spellbinding tales — with moths flying mesmerized around the porchlight.

It sounded amazing. And terrifying. I filed it under the same list as bungee jumping — no doubt exhilarating but something I’d never do — and got on with my life. Over the years, as it grew bigger and bigger, I went to several Moth events in different cities, and was always so impressed with the storytellers — and equally adamant I’d never do it.

Cut to this September, when a message went out to all the staff at LAist. We’re a media sponsor of The Moth, and an event, a open mike StorySLAM, was coming up in Silver Lake. There were a few tickets available. Did anyone want one? The theme was "Divas." Sure, I thought. I’d go watch. It's always fun.

Nagging thought

As the days went by, the same thought kept nagging at me. How about getting on stage yourself? No, I thought. Too risky. But this time there was another thought, even more vehement. Why are you being held hostage by fear? Life is too short. If you want to do something, you just have to do it. And this opportunity has just fallen into your lap.

So when the day came, I went to the event, and put my name in the hat. Would I be picked? I sat there with sweaty palms as the show started and people came up tell their own funny, moving, poignant stories.

Finally, near the end of the show, my name was called out. Gulp. I walked on stage to the mic, and began telling my story.

“Some years ago I was a BBC radio producer. A show host and I were at Albuquerque airport, on our way to Los Alamos to do interviews about the Manhattan project. But when we got to the gate, it was closed. They’d boarded the plane 15 minutes early. We couldn't believe it. There was only one plane per day and we'd flown in from London and were on a tight schedule. What should we do?”

Holding their breath

It was a strange experience, simultaneously storytelling while looking at the audience and scanning for their reactions. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.... and were holding their breath, waiting to see what came next.

“I could see the plane on the tarmac, one of those regional planes with propellers, on the other side of an alarmed emergency exit door. So I decided, in the heat of the moment, to push it open, and started dashing across the tarmac, yelling for the host to follow me. Security men began running towards me from every direction as the alarm blared loudly.”

The audience was laughing with delight and disbelief, and I was laughing, too, at the recollection. What on earth had made me do that? Ah, my young, impulsive, determined self. Just as well it wasn’t today, post 9/11. I’d be dead.

“As I reached the plane, the security men were shouting 'What are you doing? You can’t run onto the tarmac!' That’s when the diva part came in. I drew myself up to my full 5’ 2” and said, determinedly, 'No, YOU were the ones who boarded the plane early. We did everything right! We have our tickets, we have interviews to do and we are going to get on this plane.'"

The security men looked at each other, unsure what to do. Maybe it was the British accent, or not being used to a woman giving them a dressing down. But one of them shrugged, moved out of the way, and they let us get on the plane. "Hurray! And we made it to Los Alamos, in time to do our interviews. Thank you.”

The audience went crazy, clapping and whooping. I was standing there grinning stupidly. I couldn’t believe I’d done it.

Yes, the story went down well. And the audience hadn't eaten me alive. But there was something bigger, something even more satisfying in my reaction. I’d had made myself do something I was scared of. I'd faced my demons.... and survived.

A lesson for us all.

If you happen to see 600 people snaking down 14.3 miles of Santa Monica Boulevard (and then some) on Saturday, Nov. 21 — their sole purpose is just to … walk.

“For years people were asking us, ‘What are you doing?’” said Michael Schneider, founder of the Great Los Angeles Walk.

These strolls are maximalist in nature, usually covering the entire length of a given thoroughfare. Sunset Boulevard. Melrose Avenue. Ventura Boulevard.

The inaugural Great L.A. Walk in 2006 along Wilshire Boulevard.

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How the walk began 

The pre-Thanksgiving tradition started in 2006 with Wilshire Boulevard. Schneider, who had reached the milestone of living in L.A. for a decade, was inspired by a book about the street’s history to walk its entire 15.8 miles on foot. He asked others to join on his blog Franklin Avenue.

About two dozen people showed up. That day, they popped into storefronts, stopped by restaurants, sneaked into the Park Plaza Hotel near MacArthur Park and shot up to the roof. “That kind of unearthed a whole new side of Los Angeles as we walked down Wilshire,” he said.

By the time the trek reached the ocean, folks were asking Schneider about next year. Now, it's always on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

“I inadvertently turned it into an annual tradition,” he said.

The 2016 edition of Great L.A. Walk along Pico Boulevard.

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The 2007 installment was Pico Boulevard — with restaurant recommendations along the route handpicked by the late Pulitzer-winning food critic Jonathan Gold.

Eventually, Schneider included themed walks. March of Los Pobladores — which retraces the final leg of the 1781 journey taken by the original founders of L.A. — from the San Gabriel Mission to downtown. And USC to UCLA when the rivals faced off on game day.

This year’s route: Route 66 

This year's theme is Route 66.

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This year’s focus is Route 66, marking the centennial of the iconic road. Saturday's walk will start in Echo Park, then go the whole way down Santa Monica Boulevard and end at the pier, totaling about 16 miles.

“You see so many different versions of Los Angeles,” he said.

Michael Schneider, founder of the Great L.A. Walk, at last year's trot along Wilshire Boulevard.

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Celebrity sightings and a marquee shout-out 

One year, he said, the group walked by Magic Johnson.

“He waved at us," Schneider said. "Probably was wondering why [there were] hundreds of people walking past where he was."

As many as 600 people now join the walk, he said. As the number grows, so too has its legend.

“Now we find a lot of people who know who we are,” he said. “You hear people say, ‘Hey, it's the Great L.A. Walk.”