Aging Billionaire Cowboys Are Now Selling Their Iconic American Ranches

Japan is a magical place. It's a country where you can roam futuristic neighborhoods one minute and walk down streets that feel like stepping back in time the next.

Bison in Yellowstone, grizzlies at Katmai, gators in the Everglades. Without doubt, national parks are among the best places to see America’s iconic animals in the wild.

A group of former Americans filed a class-action lawsuit against the United States to recover $1,900 paid through the process of renouncing their citizenship, arguing that the fee is too costly.

For fans of nostalgia TV as well as avid animal and travel lovers, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom is back in a big way. Sixty years ago, this beloved show innovated the nature adventure genre, enthralled viewers with its global destinations, won multiple Emmy Awards and galvanized conservation goals and gains. It offered an eagerly anticipated, families-gathered, weekly gaze at creatures in far-flung locales to a television audience that averaged 34-million Americans for much of its initial, astonishingly lengthy 25-year run. Between then and now, weaving through subsequent decades, Wild Kingdom had been transformed again and again, showcased on Animal Planet and as a web series. Now there is a fresh fourth project, the all-new Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild, which will premiere October 7 on NBC-TV (as part of its “The More You Know” programming block on Saturday mornings), as well as via NBC.com and NBC VOD. It is co-hosted by wildlife expert Peter Gros (who joined the original series in 1985) and wildlife ecologist Rae Wynn-Grant, Ph.D., a National Geographic Society research fellow and host of the PBS podcast Going Wild. Currently primed for 26 episodes set in North America, Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild kicks off with journeys to California’s super-parched Mojave Desert for desert-dwelling tortoises, the Maine Coast for Atlantic puffins (nicknamed “parrots of the sea” because of their colorful triangular beaks), the Florida Coast for aqua-agile manatees and Austin, Texas, for high-soaring-quick-swooping Mexican free-tailed bats. I reached out to Gros and Wynn-Grant to share their behind-the-scenes insights and inspirations, as they forge modern Wild Kingdom paths, while still applauding the footsteps of legendary zoologists Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler, who, as co-hosts of the documentary show’s dawn in 1963, put this legacy wildlife wonderland on the map.

There's good news for Americans weary from high airfares: Prices are finally coming down.

There's nothing quite like a long line at airport security to seriously dampen the excitement of a trip or a vacation. To get through airport security as quickly as possible, you can try your best to avoid peak travel time, pack efficiently, pre-bag your liquids, and make sure your electronic devices are easily accessible until the cows come home. But at the end of the day, the power is out of your hands.

Brandon Townsley. (Photo Credit: Celestyal)

Adventure booking platform TourRadar has added two new partners, Local Adventures and TRAVLR, to its business-to-business tool for selling organized multi-day adventure travel.

Airshare’s acquisition of Wheels Up’s private jet management business closed over the weekend. It sends 90 airplanes and 300 personnel to the Kansas City-based operator, which already had 56 managed and fractional aircraft in its fleet. After the sale, Wheels Up still has 215 airframes, including 75 King Air turboprops, 52 super midsize jets it can deploy for transcontinental flights, and 61 light jets. For both companies, Wheels Up the fourth-largest operator based on fractional and charter flight hours, and Airshare, ranked 11th, it marks a new chapter.

With its fifth and final season making its way down the trail, Kevin Costner’s wildly popular Yellowstone – a Paramount Network series about a cattle-ranching family in the American West – continues to spark interest in the cowboy aesthetic. Looking to learn the ropes? These five destinations have you living out your ranch-hand fantasies in no time.

As Global Entry becomes more and more popular, wait times to score the coveted popular time-saving tool is also increasing.Global Entry, offered by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), has become a must-have for millions of travelers looking to save time during the customs and re-entry process back into the United States. CBP shared the current wait times as being as long as 11 months in a July post about the program, citing “high demand and processing volumes” as the primary reason behind the delays. 

Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta is known for being a growth and change agent at the hotel conglomerate.