In early September, just weeks before his sentencing in a decade-long Navy bribery and corruption scandal, Leonard Glenn Francis, known as “Fat Leonard,” escaped from house arrest in his San Diego home and fled the country. The Malaysian businessman is the center of the largest bribery scandal in US Navy history.
Now, USNI News reports that authorities in Venezuela arrested “Fat Leonard” Francis as he attempted to board a plane to Russia, officials said late Wednesday.
More than 200 whales have been found stranded on a remote beach at the entrance to Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania, Australia. Half of the pod, thought to be pilot whales, are believed to be still alive.
Experts were planning a rescue of the 230 whales discovered on Wednesday but the operation would be “complex” due to the location, Tasmania’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment said in a statement.
The stranding comes exactly two years after Australia’s worst whale stranding on record, which occurred in the same location. On 21 September 2020, 470 long-finned pilot whales were found beached on sandbars. A week-long rescue effort saved 111 whales, but authorities had to dispose of more than 350 carcasses.
Photo: David Gal
Ancient trade routes in the Mediterranean have long been a mystery. How was it that sailing ships of antiquity, that could not sail well to weather, succeeded in carrying grain and other cargoes from the east to Rome against the prevailing westerly winds?
Israeli researcher David Gal, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa, studied wind patterns and ancient texts about the weather to find the answer. And then, he and his team sailed a replica of a 5th century BCE ship across part of the Mediterranean to test his theories. The results of his analysis were published this summer in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.
The Washington Post quotes Gal, “We started with a trivial question: How did Roman ships visiting the Levant return to Rome? One would simply say, ‘Oh, they turned them around and sailed the other direction.’ However, a windward journey was not practical in the kind of ships they used. So how did they accomplish these voyages?”
The 137-foot Denis Sullivan — the world’s only replica of a 19th-century three-masted Great Lakes schooner — will soon be leaving the Great Lakes bound for Boston, MA. Milwaukee’s Discovery World has sold the schooner to World Ocean School, a nonprofit that will operate the ship year-round, according to Discovery World President and CEO Bryan Wunar.
World Ocean School owns the 96-year-old schooner Roseway, which sails seasonally in Boston and St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. The nonprofit has officially taken ownership of the Denis Sullivan, with staff onsite to begin preparing it for its journey through the Great Lakes to Boston and eventually St. Croix. They hope to have it ready to begin that journey by early October.
An artistic impression of the surface of the candidate water world exoplanet TOI-1452b. (Benoit Gougeon/Université de Montréal)
ScienceAlert.com reports the discovery of an exoplanet just 100 light-years from Earth that appears to be the best candidate yet for a sloshy, water-covered ocean world.
It’s called TOI-1452b, and measurements of its size and mass suggest a density profile consistent with a global liquid ocean. Scientists believe that worlds like this are possible, but they haven’t yet conclusively found one.
“This paper reports the discovery and characterization of the transiting temperate exoplanet TOI-1452b,” writes a team of researchers led by astronomer Charles Cadieux of the University of Montreal in Canada in a paper published in The Astronomical Journal.
“The results of our interior modeling and the fact that the planet receives modest irradiation make TOI-1452b a good candidate water world.”
Here are two videos of the 110-year-old battleship USS Texas in drydock at the Gulf Copper Shipyard in Galveston. The Texas is the oldest remaining dreadnought battleship and only one of six surviving ships to have served in both World War I and World War II.
The first video is a 25-minute walk around the drydock floor led by Travis Davis, Vice President of Ship Operations at Battleship Texas Foundation. Travis explains the features of the hull as well as areas to be repaired during the current $35 million refurbishment. The video is a unique opportunity to stroll around under the hull of a more than one-hundred-year-old dreadnought without donning a hard hat, and a boiler suit, and without getting your boots wet.
The second video is under 2 minutes of drone footage that captures the entire battleship on the drydock.
The legend of the Kraken, a giant cephalopod from Greek and Norse mythology that attacked ships and dragged sailors to their doom, is many hundreds of years old. Here is an unlikely, but apparently true, story of the US Navy frigate USS Stein, whose sonar dome was probably attacked by a colossal squid in 1978.
USS Stein was underway when her anti-submarine sonar gear suddenly stopped working. On returning to port and putting the ship in a drydock, engineers observed many deep scratches in the rubber “NOFOUL” coating of the sonar dome. In some areas, the coating was described as being shredded, with rips up to four feet long. Large claws were left embedded at the bottom of most of the scratches.
Herbert “Bert” Jacobson was 21 when he died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Over 80 years later, he was finally laid to rest yesterday in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. He was one of 429 sailors and Marines on the battleship USS Oklahoma, who were killed in the attack.
In the years following the attack, only 35 of the 429 crew who died on Oklahoma were identified. In 2015, the Department of Defense announced that the unidentified remains of the crew members of Oklahoma would be exhumed for DNA analysis, with the goal of returning identified remains to their families.
In 2019, Jacobson family was notified that Bert’s remains had been identified. Hoping the burial could take place the next year, they were forced to wait, in large part because the COVID-19 pandemic delayed most gatherings, funerals included.
On the morning of September 4, at 7:35 AM, Leonard Glenn Francis, known as “Fat Leonard,” cut his ankle bracelet monitor and fled house arrest in San Diego. “Fat Leonard,” the 350 pound Malaysian businessman at the center of the largest bribery scandal in US Navy history, had been under house arrest in San Diego since his guilty plea in 2015, undergoing treatment for cancer — and podcasting.
At last count, the long-running fraud and bribery investigation has resulted in federal criminal charges against 34 U.S. Navy officials, with 33 defendants convicted of various fraud and corruption offenses, while a federal jury failed to reach a verdict on charges brought against retired Rear Admiral Bruce Loveless.
Cutting the monitor immediately sent an alert to U.S. Pretrial Services, the federal agency in charge of monitoring his home confinement. Nevertheless, it was not until approximately 4 PM, or over 7 hours later, that members of the San Diego Fugitive Task Force went to Francis’ residence to locate him. Leonard Francis was long gone.
The BBC reports that five people died in New Zealand after a birdwatching boat capsized, possibly after colliding with a whale. Eleven people, mostly from the birdwatching group, were onboard when the boat capsized on Saturday in Goose Bay near the town of Kaikōura.
Police declined to speculate on what had caused the accident, merely confirming the collision. But Craig Mackle, the mayor of Kaikōura, told reporters he believed the boat had hit a surfacing whale.
An updated repost. There is a line from a Paul Simon song, “these are the days of miracle and wonder.” One might not think to apply that lyric to the events of 9/11, 21 years ago today. Yet for at least part of that strange and horrible day, they fit. The great New York boatlift was part of the “miracle and wonder.” The wholly unplanned boatlift was the spontaneous maritime evacuation of an estimated 500,000 people trapped in Lower Manhattan in less than 10 hours. The boatlift has been under-reported by the media, which is all the more reason to remember the mariners of New York who stepped up to perform what has been called the largest sea rescue in history.
BigLift Baffin sailing from Cobh, Ireland
Three megamax container cranes have arrived in the Port of New York and New Jersey on the Netherlands-flagged heavy-lift ship BigLift Baffin. They will be offloaded and installed at the Maher Terminals in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
The new cranes, built by the Liebherr Group in Killarney, Ireland, are among the largest in the world. With a height of 150 meters, an outreach of above 53 meters, and a lift height of over 40 meters, the cranes each have a safe lifting load of 40-50 tonnes in single operations, 65 tonnes in twin operations, and 100 tonnes in tandem.
In addition to their impressive capacity, these cranes are designed to be lighter, relatively, which reduces power consumption. Also, the cranes generate electricity during the lowering process, which they then return to the grid.
Over the last few years, we have been posting about the return of humpback whales to the waters around New York harbor. Recently, nine humpbacks were sighted in the Hudson River.
If you can’t beat them, eat them. That is the idea at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources as one approach to managing the ongoing invasion of invasive carp in the Mississippi and connecting rivers. They even propose renaming the carp and marketing the fish as copi, to make the invasive species more palatable on restaurant menus and in store refrigerator displays.
The department has even created copi recipes to persuade restaurants to serve mouth-watering dishes such as “copi fresh fish tacos, a copi firehouse fish burger, and copi smoked fish dip.”
In the 1960s and ‘70s, four species of carp were introduced into the United States from Asia. The bighead, black, grass and silver carp were imported to eat algae in wastewater treatment plants and aquaculture ponds, as well as to serve as a source of food.
In a case with distinct echoes of the Navy’s almost decade-long “Fat Leonard” scandal, a former U.S. Navy director was convicted for his role in a bribery conspiracy and for lying to federal officials, according to authorities.
Stars and Stripes reports that Fernando Xavier Monroy, who worked as the director of operations of the U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command Office in Busan, South Korea, was convicted of engaging in a conspiracy to commit bribery with a South Korea-based company, according to a news release from the Department of Justice.
“Fat Leonard” Francis
When it appeared that the decade-long US Navy corruption scandal focused on Leonard Glenn Francis, known as “Fat Leonard,” was winding down, the saga takes a new turn. The Malaysian businessman, who confessed to directing a massive bribery scandal of US Navy officers, has cut off his ankle bracelet and fled from his San Diego home and is now reportedly on the run.
It comes three weeks before he was due for sentencing.
REUTERS/Sumaya Hisham/File Photo
A disturbing report from Reuters:
The already endangered African penguin is being driven away from its natural habitat off the east coast of South Africa due to noise from ship refueling, a scientific study has found.
The number of African penguins on St Croix island in Algoa Bay, once the world’s largest breeding colony of the birds, has plummeted since South Africa started to allow ships in the area to refuel at sea, a process known as bunkering, six years ago, the study found.
Situated in a busy shipping lane along South Africa’s east coast, Algoa Bay is rich in marine and bird life where southern right whales roam in its sheltered waters.
Sea Wave Energy Ltd, a Cyprus and UK-based R&D startup, has been working for the last decade to develop the world’s most efficient, low-cost wave energy converter.
Earlier this year, the company unveiled the prototype called the Waveline Magnet, which is fabricated from a series of floating platforms linked to each other that generate energy by undulating in ocean waves.
Seeing dolphins may not seem exceptional to non-New Yorkers. Nevertheless, the only thing I recall in the Hudson River when I arrived in New York some 40 years ago were the “Hudson River whitefish” that I saw that appeared to swim in the currents off the Battery. (The “white fish” were the condoms flushed down city toilets and dumped with raw sewage directly in the river.)
The return of dolphins to the river is indeed a hopeful sign.
Over two thousand feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, on the seamount Atlantis Massif, at the intersection between the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Atlantis Transform Fault, a jagged landscape of towers rises from the deep ocean gloom. Discovered in 2000, the Lost City Hydrothermal Field, often referred to simply as the Lost City, is an area of marine alkaline hydrothermal vents. It is the longest-lived venting environment known in the ocean. Nothing else like it has ever been found.
ScienceAlert.com notes that for at least 120,000 years and maybe longer, the upthrusting mantle in this part of the world has reacted with seawater to puff hydrogen, methane, and other dissolved gases out into the ocean. In the cracks and crevices of the field’s vents, hydrocarbons feed novel microbial communities even without the presence of oxygen.