This year, 56 million sockeye salmon swam hundreds of miles from the ocean toward the rivers and streams of the Bristol Bay watershed in southwest Alaska.
Many that escaped fishermen and bears leapt over waterfalls and used a mysterious combination of the Earth’s magnetic field and their own sensory memories to locate the exact streams where they were born — and then spawned, made gravel nests for their young, and died.
“It seems like a heroic — and perhaps tragic — life cycle,” said Thomas Quinn, a professor at the University of Washington who has been studying fish in Bristol Bay for 30 years.
The salmon’s incredible migration also sustains people: Nearly half of the world’s sockeye catch comes from this one region, which is one of the last, great salmon fisheries on Earth. The returning salmon and other ecological resources create some 14,000 full- and part-time jobs, generate about $480 million annually — and support 4,000-year-old Alaska Native cultures.
The NFL says that President Donald Trump was wrong when he tweeted Wednesday that the league is now demanding that players stand during the National Anthem.
Trump praised NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for taking a hard line on the National Anthem protests, even though that’s not what the Commissioner did.
“It is about time that Roger Goodell of the NFL is finally demanding that all players STAND for our great National Anthem-RESPECT OUR COUNTRY,” he said in an early-morning tweet.
But Goodell didn’t demand or order players to stand.
President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest-ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.
Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.
According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the buildup. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned.
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Did Trump’s call to expand nuclear arsenal lead to Tillerson’s ‘moron’ remark?
An elderly Napa County couple found dead from the devastating wildfires sweeping Northern California “were happy right up until the last minute,” one of their sons told ABC News.
Officials identified Charles and Sara Rippey as two of the 15 people killed from the 17 fires consuming over 115,000 acres across the state.
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Courtesy of Mike Rippey
An undated photo of Charles and Sara Rippey who died in the Northern California wildfires.
The toll from Northern California’s ranging wildfires continued to grow Tuesday evening as officials said the fires destroyed up to 2,000 structures and killed at least 17 people.
The devastating losses establish firestorms among the most destructive in California history. The estimated losses of homes, businesses and other buildings jumped from 1,500 to 2,000, and officials fear the death toll will also continue to rise.
Sonoma County alone has received about 200 reports of missing people since Sunday night, and sheriff’s officials have located 45 of those people, said county spokeswoman Maggie Fleming.
The majority of the fatalities are from Sonoma County, where huge swaths of the city of Santa Rosa were leveled by the Tubbs fire. Eleven people have died in Sonoma County as of 7 p.m. Tuesday, officials said. Two people have died in Napa County, three in Mendocino County and one in Yuba County, Cal Fire officials said.
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Penny Wright discusses the loss of her home in the Fountaingrove neighborhood of Santa Rosa, Calif.
The New Yorker’s stomach-turning article about Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein published Tuesday, which details several rape allegations, comes with newly released audio of Weinstein admitting to groping a model in 2015.
The way the interaction unfolds (listen below) is all too familiar. Weinstein, who was captured on tape through a police investigation, can be heard alternately pleading with and threatening the model, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, citing his own influence and power while trying to diminish her.
Harvey Weinstein stands accused of rape by multiple women, according to an explosive new story by The New Yorker magazine.
One of the accusers, Asia Argento, confirmed her account to CNN.
She also commented on the mountain of allegations against Weinstein by various actresses, saying, “This is our truth.”
Argento told reporter Ronan Farrow that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her, and she’s been haunted by the encounter ever since.
“Just his body, his presence, his face, bring me back to the little girl that I was when I was twenty-one,” she told Farrow. “When I see him, it makes me feel little and stupid and weak. After the rape, he won.”
Y. A. Tittle, the Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Giants to three consecutive National Football League championship games in the early 1960s after the San Francisco 49ers had discarded him as too old and too slow, died on Sunday night in Stanford, Calif. He was 90.
Louisiana State University, where he played his college ball, announced his death.
Tittle threw for dozens of touchdowns and thousands of yards, won a Most Valuable Player Award and was selected to seven Pro Bowls. But he endeared himself to New York not as a golden boy but as a muddied, grass-stained scrapper.
He was a balding field general with a fringe of gray who, at 34, in his old-fashioned high-topped shoes, had undeniably lost a step or two, but kept picking himself up off the ground to find a way to beat you, and New York cheered.
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Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle after being slammed to the ground by a Pittsburgh Steelers lineman in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20, 1964. The photograph immortalized Tittle in football lore as an image of the aging warrior who had finally fallen.Credit Morris Berman/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Associated Press
Sonoma County said it had received more than 100 phone calls to its missing person hotline as wind-powered wildfires swept through California wine country overnight, destroying at least 1,500 homes.
Officials said they were combing through the calls and believed some could be duplicates.
At least 10 people have died in the blazes as more than a dozen wildfires consumed parts of California wine country. Gov. Jerry Brown declared an emergency in eight counties, including Napa and Sonoma, and asked for a federal declaration of a major disaster for the entire state.
Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano said seven people had been killed there in fire-related incidents — and “that number’s going to change.” The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection confirmed that two people had been killed in Napa County, as well as one person in Mendocino County.
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A helicopter drops water on a wind-driven wildfire in Orange, California on Monday. Mike Blake / Reuters
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
EPA reversed salmon protection after CEO meeting
Media losing the thread on the NFL protests?
Penny Wright discusses the loss of her home in the Fountaingrove neighborhood of Santa Rosa, Calif.
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Harvey Weinstein
James' World 2 