How does a kangaroo escape a petting zoo?It's not the opening line to a dad joke. If you're Chesney the kangaroo, you scale an eight-foot (2 1/2 meter) fence and go on the lam for three days, giving your keeper sleepless nights and sending residents of a small Wisconsin town on a search that would end happily on Saturday. The unprecedented leap at Sunshine Farm in Necedah, Wisconsin, last week was precipitated by some stray dogs that rushed the enclosure and spooked the 16-month-old Chesney, a...

ABOARD THE CRESCENT (AP) — There’s something melodic about watching the sun rise over a rural stillness broken only by the rhythms of steel wheels on tracks. Or so we tell ourselves. In this case, being aboard a train at all owed more to politics than poetry. Congress and Donald Trump were mired in their latest budget stalemate, one rooted in the Republican president’s immigration crackdown and the tactics of federal forces he has sent to U. S. cities. But this impasse has upended a of a...

When an invisible entity making up 85% of the universe's mass stumps the greatest scientific minds of our time, awe is an understandable response. Physicists call it “ dark matter, ” a substance they describe as the cosmic glue, the scaffolding, a web that uses gravity to corral, shape and hold together stars, planets and galaxies. Yet nobody knows exactly what it is. Dark matter's existence is only inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter. Together with dark energy — a...