Word: seal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...harvest of corpses has raised fears in countries abutting the North Sea that all the seal pups in the region could be wiped out. The toll to date: at least 450 adults and pups in Denmark and an additional 50 in West Germany, out of a total population of 10,000 to 15,000 in the region. Many scientists strongly suspect that acute pollution of the North Sea is a major culprit. Says West German Zoologist Gunter Heidemann: "The dead seals we've found have shown high concentrations of heavy metals and chlorinated hydrocarbons...
Scientists believe the adult seals' immune systems have been weakened by chemical pollutants in the water, making them susceptible to pneumonia induced by a herpes-type virus. Such ravaging of a seal population is not unprecedented: a flu virus, for example, killed more than 500 harbor seals along the coast of New England from Cape Cod, Mass., to Maine over a period of ten months beginning in December 1979. This time, researchers believe, the deadly virus may have originated in slaughterhouse refuse deposited in open dumps along Sweden's western coast. It may then have been transmitted by sea gulls...
...from fertilizers are deposited in the North Sea by rivers and acid rain. An additional 250,000 tons of liquid chemical waste are dumped annually from West German ships into the sea. In Bonn Environment Minister Klaus Topfer last week refused to link man-made pollutants directly to the seal deaths, but he did admit to a "very serious suspicion" that industrial wastes may have played key roles. Topfer has promised to end offshore dumping by the end of 1989. Environmentalists are calling for an immediate...
Governor Michael S. Dukakis moved to the brink of victory in the Democratic presidential race last night, winning in New Jersey and waiting for California to seal his triumph in a coast-to-coast finale to the primary season. George Bush said he would stress "prosperity and peace" in his fight to hold the White House for the Republicans...
...when the literary journal Novy Mir published Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella of Stalin's prison camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But Arbat is of a different order: it is not only indicative of Mikhail Gorbachev's leash-loosening policies but also an official seal of disapproval on the past. Now every literate Soviet citizen can get a popularized characterization of Stalin as he broods about the brutal nature of power and dreams of rebuilding Moscow as a monument to his reign...