#3
I don't care how many prior offenses you have, 3 years in prison is pretty extreme for lifting 3 rolls of toilet paper. Lock her up for the weekend, but maybe reserve prison for the real bad guys.
A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2 -inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated at 115 to 130 years old.
"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Calculating a whale's age can be difficult and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It's rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.
The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was probably manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said. It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from escaping.
The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said. "It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a nonlethal place," he said. "He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years."
The whale hearkens to a far different era. If 130 years old, it would have been born in 1877, the year Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president, when federal Reconstruction troops withdrew from the South and when Thomas Edison unveiled his newest invention, the phonograph.
The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting.
"It's unusual to find old things like that in whales, and I knew immediately that it was quite old by its shape," said Craig George, a biologist for the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, who was called to the site after it was found.
Bockstoce said he was impressed by notches carved into the head of the arrow used in the 19th century hunt, a traditional way for Alaskan hunters to indicate ownership of the whale.
#1
pretty interesting. I'd be OK with a whaling ban, dunno why the Japanese are so set against it. The "research" harvest is an insult to any thinking person...
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/13/2007 20:24 Comments ||
Top||
#2
The Japanese harvest is as authentic as our Inuit whale hunts with speedboats, explosive harpoons and chainsaws.
Posted by: ed ||
06/13/2007 22:18 Comments ||
Top||
Searchers found the body late Tuesday of a sergeant who was missing for four days after he disappeared during a training exercise, an Army spokeswoman said. Sgt. Lawrence G. Sprader, 25, went missing Friday during a solo exercise testing basic map-reading and navigation skills.
Col. Diane Battaglia, III Corps spokeswoman at Fort Hood, said the body was found on the rugged Central Texas Army post. The body had been sent for an autopsy and the cause of death had not been determined, she said.
Sprader was one of nearly 320 noncommissioned officers being trained as part of a two-week leadership course. He wasn't the only soldier who got lost during the three-hour exercise, but nine others who were disoriented got back to the rally point safely by following the sound of a siren that blasts when time is up, Battaglia said.
Reached on his cell phone two hours after the exercise was over, Sprader told commanders he wanted to finish the drill.
Hundreds of soldiers scoured the rugged hills of the 15,000-acre training range; 800 were walking in marked grid areas Tuesday. Post officials said no other soldier had ever been lost on the heavily used range long enough to prompt such a huge search.
Motorists reported seeing a soldier matching Sprader's description near a road Friday evening. One sighting was on the eastern edge of the post and another on the far northern edge, making it difficult to concentrate the search in one area, Battaglia said. The sightings, and his score card from the exercise, were the last signs of him, although Battaglia wasn't certain where the card was found.
Sprader returned from an Iraq deployment in September and worked in the criminal investigation division of Fort Hood. The Prince George, Va., soldier had no orders for redeployment to the war zone.
#1
I read that it's been very hot, and Sgt. Sprader was carrying a limited amount of water --plenty for the three-hour exercise, but not neaerly enough for several days, poor man. May his memory be a blessing for those who loved him.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
