My name is Dick Russell, and I am a journalist who has specialized in writing about ocean-related issues for nearly twenty years. In the course of researching my latest book, “Eye of the Whale,” which will be published in August by Simon & Schuster, I interviewed a number of scientific experts on acoustics and marine […]
It’s a warm weekend not far south of Boston. Behind the thirty-foot walls of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution’s Norfolk prison – the state’s largest, with some 1,500 inmates – five men stand together facing a crowded auditorium. A large banner at the back reads: “Building safer communities inside the prison and beyond the walls of […]
New Report Says Second Gunman Fired at Kennedy By George Lardner Jr. The House Assassinations Committee may have been right after all: There was a shot from the grassy knoll. That was the key finding of the congressional investigation that concluded 22 years ago that President John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas in 1963 was […]
In March, the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed a rule allowing the U.S. Navy to deploy a controversial new sonar system, known as “Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System Low Frequency Active Sonar” (or LFA, for short). What is it? LFA has been in development by the Navy for years. It uses vessels to tow sonar […]
Decline Of the NW Orcas Published in Ocean Realms Magasine, Winter 2000/2001 Issue Editor’s note: since this article was published, 6 more orcas from the southern residents have mysteriously disappeared. The population is plummeting and now sits at 78 whales. Breaching skyward in an explosion of foam, J-1 sends a two-foot Chinook salmon tumbling, before […]
The twin smokestacks are set well back from High Street, barely visible to drivers passing through this industrialized sector of East Oakland, California. A sign at the front gate reads: “INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS … People, Service and Environment.” Within the confines of this compound, two kilns burn continuously five days a week, incinerating some 20 […]
Editor’s note: since this article was published, 6 more orcas from the southern residents have mysteriously disappeared. The population is plummeting and now sits at 78 whales. Breaching skyward in an explosion of foam, J-1 sends a two-foot Chinook salmon tumbling, before it lands, stunned and motionless on the sea’s surface. J-1, a 50-year old […]
Thirty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the public is being led to believe that the case is definitely closed. James Earl Ray, the alleged killer died at age 70 last year of liver and kidney failure while imprisoned for the crime. A new book by Gerald Posner, Killing The Dream, […]
Laguna San Ignacio, the gray whales’ last pristine nursery ground, is threatened by industry. Photo by Brian Keating Humans once hunted gray whales to near extinction, but these creatures are forgiving. Every winter, at the end of their annual 6,000-mile southern migration from the Bering Strait, they meet us in the salty waters of Laguna […]
The lowdown on deep-sea mining Long ago, the dark and chilly regions of the deep-sea floor were thought to be a biological wasteland. How could life survive, let alone flourish, in a region devoid of sunlight and therefore of plant life, subject to immense cold and the pressure of seawater at unimaginable depths? Even after […]