“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.
The Zumwalt Class stealth destroyers will be the first US warship to have long-range hypersonic weapons installed. USNI News reports that the new weapons will be installed on the destroyers USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) and USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001) during an upcoming repair period at Ingalls Shipbuilding.
For the last six years, USS Zumwalt has been a destroyer without a primary weapons system. Commissioned in 2016, the ship was the latest and greatest, most high-tech destroyer in the fleet. At a cost of around $4 billion dollars, it is also the most expensive destroyer ever built.
In its 34 years of service, the Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Albuquerque never visited its namesake city. Albuquerque, New Mexico sits in the high desert almost one thousand miles from the nearest ocean. Now, however, as the 362-foot-long submarine is being dismantled at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington state, the U.S. Navy is making the sail from the submarine available to Albuquerque, said Thomas Tozier, the city’s liaison for military and veterans affairs. The sail, referred to as a fin by the British, is the towerlike structure rising from the topside of a submarine.
Tozier said that three flatbed trucks would be needed to carry the pieces of the sail into the city. The sail is 19-foot-tall (5.7 meters), and weighs 52 tons, while the horizontal “wings” called fairwater planes span over 33 feet (10 meters). The city has allocated an initial $800,000 in its fiscal year 2023 budget for the project.
At the end of July, Ukraine and Russia signed “mirror” deals that allowed Kyiv to resume exports of grain through the Black Sea. The agreement was purported to allow millions of tonnes of grain, currently trapped in Ukraine by the war, to be exported.
The blockade of Ukraine’s grain has caused a global food crisis with wheat-based products like bread and pasta becoming more expensive and cooking oils and fertilizer also increasing in price.
Will the deal work? Here is a gCaptain video in which John Konrad discusses the agreement made with Russia, Turkey, and the United Nations.
How’s your Monday going so far? Odds are, it is probably better than the 40-meter superyacht MY Saga that sank rather dramatically last week off the coast of Catanzaro Marina, in southern Italy. Fortunately, the Italian Coast Guard rescued nine people from the yacht before she sank.
The Italian Coastguard rescued nine people from a sinking superyacht off the coast of Catanzaro Marina, in southern Italy.
Watch more videos from Sky News: https://t.co/8xyWy1V0ro pic.twitter.com/bE5oIqmLm3
— Sky News (@SkyNews) August 22, 2022
Thanks to Larry Witmer for contributing to this post.
The US has sent two Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers – the USS Antietam and the USS Chancellorsville – through the Taiwan Strait in a demonstration of freedom of navigation through international waters. The 100 mile-wide (160 kilometer-wide) strait divides Taiwan from China.
The BBC reports that the voyage is the first such operation to take place since tensions between Taiwan and China increased following a visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan earlier this month.
The 110-year-old Battleship 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. Over the last decade or so, the historic ship has been at the center of a pitched battle just to stay afloat at her berth in the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site in La Porte, TX. As the saying goes, rust never sleeps.
Soon, the venerable old ship will be moving to Gulf Copper Shipyard in Galveston for long overdue repairs. If all goes well, weather permitting, the ship will be towed to the shipyard on August 31.
Researchers writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science have concluded that the dugong, a mammal related to the manatee – said to have inspired ancient tales of mermaids and sirens – is now extinct in China.
Only three people surveyed from coastal communities in China reported seeing the dugong in the past five years.
Known as the ocean’s most gentle giant, the dugong’s slow, relaxed behaviour is likely to have made it vulnerable to overfishing and shipping accidents. It still exists elsewhere in the world but is facing similar threats.
Axioma, a $75-million superyacht linked to a sanctioned Russian steel billionaire, was auctioned on Tuesday in Gibraltar, court sources said, in what is understood to be the first sale of its kind since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
The 72.5-meter yacht was impounded by the Gibraltar authorities in March after U.S. bank JP Morgan said its alleged owner Dmitry Pumpyansky had defaulted on the terms of a $20 million loan.
The Office of the Admiralty Marshal in Gibraltar said on Tuesday that “63 bids have been received” for Axioma but refused to detail the value of the bids for the yacht, which features six luxurious guest cabins, a swimming pool, a 3D cinema room, gym, jacuzzi and a fully equipped spa. The bid selection process is expected to take 10 to 14 days.
Last January, a major underwater eruption of the Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Haʻapai (HTHH) volcano caused a tsunami that hit the Pacific country of Tonga. Now, the BBC reports that a robot vessel, the 12m-long Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV) Maxlimer, has returned from an initial survey, having completed a partial mapping of the opening, or caldera, of the underwater volcano.
The Maxlimer may be in Tonga, but it is being remotely controlled from 16,000km away in the small coastal village of Tollesbury in Essex. Everything is done over a satellite link.
In a dark control room, several large screens display live feed images from the 10 cameras on board Maxlimer. Operators, who work in shifts around the clock, watch as real-time data gets beamed in from the South Pacific.
Graphic: GCBSR.org
For more than 30 years, participants in the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race have been “racing to save the bay.” The race is intended to promote public awareness of the Chesapeake Bay’s maritime heritage and to encourage the preservation and improvement of the Chesapeake’s natural resources. Funds raised by the race help support a variety of conservation and education work on the Chesapeake Bay.
This year there will be two races — a Virtual Race and the Bay Race.
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We recently posted about “hunger stones” revealed by falling water levels in the Rhine and Elbe rivers, as well as the emergence of a graveyard of sunken German warships filled with explosives and ammunition in the Serbian section of the Danube River, all caused by a near-record European drought.
In the Extremadura region of Spain, a far less threatening historical structure has emerged from the receding waters of Valdecanas reservoir — a megalithic monument officially known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal but dubbed the Spanish Stonehenge, comprising a circle of dozens of stones believed to date back to 5000 BC.
One of the worst droughts in European history has exposed a graveyard of sunken German warships filled with explosives and ammunition in the Serbian section of the Danube River. More than 20 hulks have emerged near the port town of Prahovo, part of a Nazi Black Sea fleet that was sunk in 1944 while fleeing Soviet forces. More ships are expected to be found lodged in the river’s sandbanks, loaded with unexploded ordnance.
“The German flotilla has left behind a big ecological disaster that threatens us, people of Prahovo,” said Velimir Trajilovic, 74, a pensioner from Prahovo who wrote a book about the German ships.
Photo by George Sass.
A bit over a year ago, we posted about the construction of a new Maryland Dove by the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum shipyard. The ship, a reproduction of the 17th-century trading ship that accompanied the first settlers to what is now Maryland in 1634, has been completed after three years of construction and is on her way to her homeport of Historic St. Mary’s City.
The new Maryland Dove is the third replica of the historic ship to be built. The first was built in 1934 to commemorate Maryland’s tercentenary. The second, in 1977, has served as a floating exhibit for Historic St. Mary’s City.
There are reports that researchers from Nanjing University of Aeronautics in eastern China have developed a prototype flying submarine drone capable of operating underwater or in the air.
According to a report by the South China Morning Post, the flying submarine can support various military missions, including the detection of underwater mines.
Chinese professor Ji Wanfeng says the new drone will make it possible to disrupt the defense systems of enemy aircraft carriers. The drone can dive underwater to avoid radar. When detected by sonar, the drone can take off into the air. According to the professor, the simultaneous use of several such drones could overwhelm the computer systems of aircraft carriers.
Virginia Class Submarine
The Washington Post reports that a federal judge rejected plea bargains for a Navy engineer and his wife who allegedly tried to sell military secrets, saying the prison terms called for by the deals were too lenient for a couple accused of offering U.S. nuclear submarine data to a foreign government.
Last October, we posted about Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebbe, and his wife, Diana Toebbe, who were arrested after attempting to pass detailed secret information about the US Navy’s Virginia-class submarine reactors to foreign agents. The Toebbes left a 16 GB memory card containing submarine documents and plans, hidden in half of a peanut butter sandwich in a plastic bag at an agreed location in West Virginia. They thought that they were giving the information to a foreign country in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. Instead, the FBI had intercepted their correspondence and impersonated foreign agents.