Labour MP Greg O’Connor has disputed National MP Mark Mitchell’s version of events of a conversation involving Police Minister Poto Williams in Parliament’s café, and says Mitchell should not have gone public with it. Mitchell tweeted…

Stories about long-departed Las Vegas organised crime figures are surfacing after a second set of unidentified human remains were revealed as the water level falls on drought-stricken Lake Mead.

The reservoir on the Colorado River is about a 30-minute drive from the mob-founded Las Vegas Strip.

“There’s no telling what we’ll find in Lake Mead,” former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said.

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“It’s not a bad place to dump a body.”

Goodman was a defence attorney who represented Mafia figures including ill-fated Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro before serving three terms as a martini-toting mayor who made public appearances with a showgirl on each arm.

He declined to speculate about who might turn up in the vast reservoir formed by Hoover Dam between Nevada and Arizona.

“I’m relatively sure it was not Jimmy Hoffa,” he laughed, referring to the former labour boss who disappeared in 1975.

But he added that a lot of his former clients seemed interested in “climate control” — mob speak for keeping the lake level up and bodies down in their watery graves.

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Instead, the world now has climate change, and as a result the surface of Lake Mead has dropped more than 52 metres since 1983.

The lake that slakes the thirst of 40 million people in cities, farms and tribes across seven Southwestern states is down to about 30 per cent of capacity.

“If the lake goes down much farther, it’s very possible we’re going to have some very interesting things surface,” Michael Green, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor whose father dealt blackjack for decades at casinos including the Stardust and Showboat, said.

“I wouldn’t bet the mortgage that we’re going to solve who killed Bugsy Siegel,” Green said, referring to the infamous gangster who opened the Flamingo casino in 1946 on what became the Strip.

Siegel was shot dead in 1947 in Beverly Hills, California.

His assassin has never been identified.

“But I would be willing to bet there are going to be a few more bodies,” Green said.

Last month. the dropping lake level exposed Las Vegas’ uppermost drinking water intake, forcing the regional water authority to switch to a deep-lake intake it completed in 2020 to continue to supply casinos, suburbs and 2.4 million residents and 40 million tourists per year.

The following weekend, boaters spotted the decomposed body of a man in a rusted barrel stuck in the mud of newly exposed shoreline.

The corpse has not been identified, but Las Vegas police say he had been shot, probably between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, according to the shoes found with him.

The death is being investigated as a homicide.

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A few days later, a second barrel was found by a KLAS-TV news crew, not far from the first. It was empty.

On Saturday, two sisters from the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson were paddle boarding on the lake near a former marina resort and noticed bones on a newly surfaced sand bar more than 14.5 kilometres from the barrels.

Lindsey Melvin, who took photos of their find, said they thought at first it was the skeleton of a bighorn sheep native to the region.

A closer look revealed a human jaw with teeth.

They called park rangers and the National Park Service confirmed in a statement that the bones were human.

There was no immediate evidence of foul play, Las Vegas police said Monday, and they are not investigating.

A homicide probe would be opened if the Clark County coroner determines the death was suspicious, the department said in a statement.

Geoff Schumacher, vice president of The Mob Museum, said he expects “a lot” of whatever bodies lie beneath the lake’s surface will turn out to be drowning victims.

But he said it’s clear whoever was in the barrel was a target.

Stuffing a body in a barrel has a "signature of a mob hit,” said Schumacher, whose museum is in a renovated historic downtown Las Vegas post office and federal building.

It opened in 2012 as The National Museum of Organised Crime & Law Enforcement.

He and Green both cited the death of John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, a mid-1950s Las Vegas mobster who disappeared in 1976.

A few days later his body was found in a steel drum floating off the coast of Miami.

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David Kohlmeier, a former police officer who now co-hosts a Las Vegas podcast and fledgling TV show called The Problem Solver Show, said that after offering a $5000 reward last week for qualified divers to find barrels in the lake, he heard from people in San Diego and Florida willing to try.

But National Park Service officials said that’s not allowed and that there are hundreds of barrels in the depths, some dating to the construction of Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

Kohlmeier said he also heard from families of missing people and about cases like a man suspected of killing his mother and brother in 1987, a hotel employee who disappeared in 1992, and a father from Utah who vanished in the 1980s.

Green said the discoveries have people talking not only about mob hits, but about bringing relief and closure to grieving families.

“They’re going to think we’re going to solve every mob murder. In fact, we may see some,” he said.

“But it’s also worth remembering that the mob did not like murders to take place in the Las Vegas area, because they did not like bad publicity going out under the Las Vegas dateline.”

Whatever story emerges about the body in the barrel, Goodman predicted it will add to the lore of a city that needed the creation of Lake Mead to sprout from the creosote bush-covered desert to become a marquee gambling mecca with a metro area home to about 2.25 million people.

“When I was the mayor, every time I went to a groundbreaking, I’d begin to shake for fear that somebody I may have run into over the years will be uncovered,” he joked.

Spilotro, Goodman's one-time client, represented the Chicago mob in Las Vegas in the 1970s.

He headed a crew dubbed the “Hole in the Wall” gang for drilling through walls to gain entry to homes and businesses.

Spilotro's body and the body of his brother, Michael Spilotro, were found in June 1986 by a farmer plowing a cornfield in north-west Indiana.

Tony the Ant served as the model for the character Nicky Santoro, portrayed by actor Joe Pesci, in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 movie Casino.

Goodman played himself in the film.

“We have a very interesting background,” Goodman told The Associated Press.

“It certainly adds to the mystique of Las Vegas.”

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One of the video game industry's most iconic franchises will soon look very different.

Electronic Arts and its subsidiary EA Sports will end a three-decade partnership with FIFA — global soccer's governing body — the gaming company announced.

Starting next year, the hugely popular FIFA video game franchise will be known as EA SPORTS FC.

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"This new independent platform will bring fresh opportunity, to innovate, create and evolve," Cam Weber, EVP and group GM for EA Sports & Racing, said in a statement.

"EA SPORTS FC will allow us to realise this future and much more … but not before we deliver our most expansive game ever with our current naming rights partner, FIFA, for one more year," he added.

EA will still retain most of the team and player likenesses that have made its game so popular, thanks to separate license agreements with global soccer leagues in England, Spain, Italy, Germany, the United States and European soccer association UEFA.

Electronic Arts' stock was essentially flat following the news.

FIFA said in a statement that it had granted EA a one-year extension to release the FIFA 23 video game later this year, which will feature the upcoming men's and women's World Cups that FIFA organises.

But the governing body will now seek to develop new games with "third party studios and publishers" in the next two years and is in talks for a "major new" FIFA game in 2024.

"I can assure you that the only authentic, real game that has the FIFA name will be the best one available for gamers and football fans," FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in the statement.

"FIFA 23, FIFA 24, FIFA 25 and FIFA 26, and so on — the constant is the FIFA name and it will remain forever and remain THE BEST."

While EA Sports owns several other popular video game sports franchises, including Madden (American football), NHL (hockey), the PGA tour (golf) and Formula 1 (racing), the company says FIFA is by far its biggest money maker.

"FIFA is our largest and most popular game and franchise," the company said in its latest annual report last year.

"Revenue from our FIFA franchise, including the annualised console and PC game which is consistently one of the best-selling games in the marketplace … is material to our business and will continue to be so."

According to the New York Times, the FIFA franchise has generated more than $20 billion in sales over the past two decades.

EA declined to comment to CNN Business on the game's revenues.

In its annual report, the company said it has "historically derived a significant portion of our net revenue" — which totalled nearly $7 billion in the company's last fiscal year — from FIFA.

In his statement, Weber thanked the "incredible community of more than 150 million fans" for building FIFA into the "world's biggest [soccer] entertainment platform."

The gaming company also touted an endorsement from global sporting behemoth Nike.

"We are excited to continue and expand our long partnership with EA Sports as we serve athletes at the intersection of sport, gaming, and culture," DJ van Hameren, Nike's EVP and CMO, said in a statement shared by EA.

"Our partnership with EA SPORTS FC will authentically grow the ways our communities can play and engage with sport."

An Al-Jazeera journalist was shot and killed while covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank town of Jenin early Wednesday, the Palestinian health ministry said.

It said Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known Palestinian reporter for the broadcaster's Arabic language channel, was shot and died soon afterward.

Another Palestinian journalist working for the Jerusalem-based Al-Quds newspaper was wounded but is in a stable condition.

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The health ministry said the reporters were hit by Israeli fire.

In video footage of the incident, Abu Akleh can be seen wearing a blue flak jacket clearly marked with the word "PRESS."

The Israeli military said its forces came under attack with heavy gunfire and explosives while operating in Jenin, and that they fired back.

The military said it is "investigating the event and looking into the possibility that the journalists were hit by the Palestinian gunmen".

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Israel has carried out near-daily raids in the occupied West Bank in recent weeks amid a series of deadly attacks inside Israel, many of them carried out by Palestinians from in and around Jenin.

The town, and particularly its refugee camp, has long been known as a militant bastion.

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, and the Palestinians want the territory to form the main part of their future state.

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Nearly 3 million Palestinians live in the territory under Israeli military rule. Israel has built more than 130 settlements across the West Bank that are home to nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers, who have full Israeli citizenship.

Israelis have long been critical of Al-Jazeera's coverage, but authorities generally allow its journalists to operate freely.

Another Al-Jazeera reporter, Givara Budeiri, was briefly detained last year during a protest in Jerusalem and treated for a broken hand, which her employer blamed on rough treatment by police.