NEW YORK – A woman who wanted a job as a bikini-clad barmaid at a New York City eatery says managers rejected her because she has a “Latin accent.”

Melody Morales has sued seeking unspecified damages and saying she applied 15 times for a job at the Hawaiian Tropic Zone restaurant and bar. She says managers always denied there were any openings even though other employees said there were.

Her lawsuit says one manager told her her “Latin accent” would ruin his business. She says another told her “You don’t speak white.”

Morales says she was born in New York to Dominican and Puerto Rican parents. And she says she looks good in a bikini.

Representatives of the restaurant didn’t immediately respond to calls seeking comment Tuesday.

Presumed mammoth tusk actually a whale jawbone

SANTA CRUZ ISLAND, Calif. – Earlier this month, a graduate student photographed what some thought was a remarkable find: a complete tusk of a prehistoric pygmy mammoth.

Fortunately, it didn’t turn out to be a mammoth – it was something far older.

A team of researchers spent two days on Santa Cruz Island excavating and determined it was a jawbone from an extinct whale species.

Lotus Vermeer of the Nature Conservancy says the bone was found in a rock formation estimated to be between 9.5 million and 25 million years old – long before mammoths roamed the Channel Islands.

The team dug out the bone and cast it in plaster. The bone, about 3 feet in length, then was airlifted out via a helicopter.

A number of other bones were found nearby that could be even older and may include an intact whale skull.