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Miami-based Carnival Corp., the world's largest cruise operator, reported a third quarter profit nearly a third lower than a year ago following a series of embarrassing and deadly mishaps involving its ships.

Carnival turned a $934 million profit for the period June through August, down 30 percent from the same quarter in 2012.

The company owns several cruise lines, including Carnival, Holland America, Princess and Costa, whose Costa Concordia liner wrecked on the Tuscan coast last year, killing 32 people. Carnival also has had its share of problems, including fires and power outages at sea that became public relations disasters for the parent company.

Carnival Chairman Micky Arison acknowledged Tuesday that it could take as long as three years for the company's brand and reputation to rebound from the Costa Concordia wreck and other problems.

"There are a lot of great brands that have had setbacks, and they've recovered ... but the economic situation in southern Europe isn't helping," Arison said at a news conference Tuesday in London, according to Reuters.

"Costa is already beginning to recover, studies of acceptance suggest it [the brand] has recovered nicely," Arison said, according to the news agency. He added that it would take "two to three years" to get the brand back to where it was.

Arison's comments come a week after the completion of a massive operation to right the capsized Costa Corcordia, which had been lying on its side since the accident in January. The liner's captain is on trial in Italy on charges of manslaughter and abandoning his stricken vessel.

Testifying on Monday, Capt. Francesco Schettino blamed the ship's helmsman for steering the wrong way as he tried unsuccessfully to avoid hitting a reef off the coast of the island of Giglio.

On Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, Schettino got "some support during his trial from an unexpected corner: representatives of the tragedy's many victims."

" 'Schettino is the only defendant, but he's not the only one responsible,' said Daniele Bocciolini, a lawyer for several survivors in a civil suit attached to the criminal trial, according to the news agency. 'He's not responsible for the lifeboats that couldn't be launched nor for the emergency generators' that failed."

No doubt most of you reading this post have looked at Yelp or Google+ Local to check the user reviews before you tried that fish store, bakery or even dentist. On occasion, you may have wondered if some of those reviews were too good to be true.

It turns out that some of them were.

New York's attorney general revealed the results of a yearlong investigation into the business of fake reviews. Eric T. Schneiderman announced Monday that 19 companies that engaged in the practice will stop and pay fines between $2,500 and $100,000, for a total of more than $350,000 in penalties.

Schneiderman said his office used undercover agents. One agent, posing as the owner of a yogurt shop in Brooklyn, called up search engine optimization companies and asked for help in combating negative reviews on consumer websites. In many cases, the agent was told that they would write fake positive reviews for a fee.

One of the reputation companies required its freelancers to have an established Yelp account more than three months old, and at least 15 reviews and 10 Yelp friends. The jobs paid the false writers — who lived as far away as Bangladesh and the Philippines — between $1 and $10 per review.

The investigation also uncovered businesses that did their own reputation management. For example, US Coachways, a charter bus company on Staten Island, had its employees write positive reviews and offered $50 gift certificates to customers who would do the same — without requiring those customers to reveal the gift.

Ratings website Yelp says it welcomed the crackdown. However, the company has also been accused of manipulating reviews on its site by merchants who claim Yelp offered to move positive feedback closer to the top of the page for a payment. Yelp denies this.

All Tech Considered

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Could Texans soon be represented in the U.S. Senate by the Cruz family?

It's an entertaining though wildly improbable scenario that's been generating some chatter at the GOP grass-roots level. But the notion of Tea Party hero Sen. Ted Cruz serving with his father, Rafael Cruz — a Tea Party star in his own right after a series of anti-Obama speeches at town halls hosted by Heritage Action — just got a wee bit less outlandish.

The reason? John Cornyn's decision not to back his junior colleague's long-shot attempt to "defund" the Affordable Care Act.

Cornyn, Texas' senior senator, was already suspected of being insufficiently conservative by Tea Party activists. He raised Tea Party hackles when he first signed, then removed his name from a letter vowing not to vote for any spending bill that included money for Obamacare.

Now Cornyn has indicated that he, along with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, would not block a House bill that extends funding for the government but stops funding for Obamacare. Ted Cruz and his allies argued that because Democrats who control the Senate plan to eliminate the Obamacare language from the bill, the only way to accomplish what they want is to stop consideration of that bill entirely.

McConnell already has a Tea Party-backed challenger in Kentucky, and Cornyn's decision means he, too, may soon face an opponent from his right.

That's where Rafael Cruz comes in.

Neither Cruz has suggested that Rafael might challenge Cornyn. But the elder Cruz — a Cuban native, now a Dallas preacher — has already been talked about as a possible opponent, even before this latest incident.

"More and more tea party activists are whispering that he should challenge John Cornyn," Erick Erickson wrote in late August on the popular conservative grass-roots site RedState.

Should Rafael Cruz run and win, he and Ted would be the first-ever father-son team representing the same state in the Senate at the same time. In the mid-1800s, Henry Dodge and his son Augustus Dodge served in the Senate together, but with Henry representing Wisconsin and Augustus representing Iowa.

S.V. Dte is the congressional editor on NPR's Washington Desk.

Americans love bananas. Each year, we eat more bananas than any other fruit. But banana growers use a lot of pesticides — and those chemicals could be hurting wildlife. As a new study shows, the pesticides are ending up in the bodies of crocodiles living near banana farms in Costa Rica, where many of the bananas we eat are grown.

Of course, there's a reason why banana plantations rely heavily on pesticides. For one, banana trees are particularly susceptible to infestations, says Chris Wille, the chief of sustainable agriculture at the nonprofit Rainforest Alliance. He works with banana growers to help them reduce the amount of pesticides they use.

Second, most plantations are in the tropics, "where there are a lot more kinds of pests and in abundance," he says.

And insects aren't the only problem there. There are worms and fungi, too.

"When you see pictures of airplanes spraying banana farms, they're spraying for airborne fungal disease called Black Sigatoka, which can devastate a plantation in a matter of a week or so," says Wille.

Many of Costa Rica's banana plantations are in the remote northeastern region, at the headwaters of the Rio Suerte River. The area is full of streams and canals, flowing past the banana farms and into protected rain forests that are part of the Tortuguero Conservation Area.

Paul Grant, a wildlife biologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, went there to investigate whether pesticides are hurting local wildlife.

"In the past, I have witnessed and a lot of the locals have pointed out that there have been massive fish kills as a result of pesticide exposure in high levels," says Grant.

He wanted to know if these pesticides are also ending up in animals that eat the fish. In particular, he was interested in a small crocodile called a spectacled caiman, because a bony ridge between its eyes makes it look like it's wearing eye glasses. These caimans live in the Tortugero Conservation Area, which is just downstream from the banana farms. The animal is considered a threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Grant wanted to test caimans because they are long-lived animals and are top predators in the ecosystem. "A lot of the pesticides will wind up at the top of the food chain," he says.

He collected blood samples from 14 adult caimans. Some of the animals lived closer to plantations and others further downstream, in more remote, pristine areas.

He and his colleagues analyzed the blood samples for 70 different pesticides. The results concerned him.

The samples contained nine pesticides, of which only two are currently in use. The remaining seven are "historic organic pollutants," says Grant.

These are pesticides like DDT, dieldrin, and endosulfan — chemicals that have been banned, some of them for nearly a decade. But they persist in the environment, and build up in the bodies of animals.

These chemicals are also found in significant levels in all sorts of aquatic mammals, including American crocodiles in the U.S., and whales and seals in different parts of the world.

The overall levels of pesticides in the Costa Rican caimans in comparison were modest, says Peter Ross, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and also an author on this study.

Still, he says there was some indication that the chemicals may be harming the caiman.

"What was revealing to me was the fact that the caiman that were near the banana plantations had not only higher concentrations of pesticides, but also they were in a poorer state of health relative to the caiman in more pristine, remote areas," says Ross.

Ross and his colleagues have published their findings in the latest issue of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

There's an important lesson here, says Chris Wille of the Rainforest Alliance.

"You know, we're now reckoning with the problem left by past use of highly toxic, highly persistent pesticides," he says. "So, what plantations must avoid now is leaving similar toxic legacies for the next generation to deal with."

Especially as the demand for bananas has been growing worldwide, and farms move towards more intensive methods of cultivation.