Midway Island

Richard H. Best, a former Navy bomber pilot who scored hits on two of the four Japanese aircraft carriers sunk in the critical Battle of Midway during World War II, has died. He was 91. Best, a retired security manager at the Rand Corp., died Oct. 26 in Santa Monica. The Battle of Midway--June 4-6, 1942--is considered the decisive battle of the war in the Pacific.

Seabee reservists from around the country--members of the first naval construction battalion called to active duty since Vietnam--have been moving out from Port Hueneme this week to military bases around the globe. Over the last three days, 757 members of Reserve Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 23 have left Port Hueneme to replace active-duty Seabee construction crews that were diverted to Saudi Arabia to build facilities for U.S. troops.

The once-mighty San Diego "bait boat" fishing fleet, which in its heyday numbered more than 240 tuna clippers and plowed the seas off Panama, Peru and the Galapagos Islands, is about to die. Only five boats--three of which actively fish--remain in the city that spawned and developed a method of commercial fishing that became the mainstay of the American tuna industry.

Fluor Corp. has signed a one-year subcontract to clean up environmentally fouled U.S. Navy bases scattered across the Pacific Rim, one of three contracts announced Tuesday that have a combined valued of more than $177 million. The Navy contract is the latest indication that Fluor Corp., an international engineering and construction company, is more aggressively marketing its environmental cleanup services, company officials and industry analysts said.

San Diego adventurer Ed Gillet completed a two-month solo kayak voyage Thursday from California to Hawaii, defeating loneliness, hunger and a near-collision with a fishing boat. "I'm very glad I did it, now that I'm here," Gillet said. "But there were times during my trip when I thought it was a terrible mistake." Gillet, 36, paddled his 21-foot kayak into Kahului Harbor at dawn after 63 days at sea, becoming the first person in recent memory to make the voyage in a kayak.

Call it the case of the stowaway seabird. A man driving through Los Angeles was alerted Friday to an enormous bird that had hitched a ride in the back of his pickup truck. With its white body, black wings and curved yellow beak, it might have been mistaken for a super-sized sea gull. But the bird, it turns out, was thousands of miles from home. It was a Laysan albatross, a seabird with an impressive 7-foot wingspan that normally nests on remote islands and atolls in the North Pacific Ocean.

USC classics professor Dick Caldwell will host a tour to Greece and Turkey this summer. Sporades Tours is offering 14 days in Greece (June 21 to July 4), which will include Athens, the Peloponnesus, northern Greece and two islands. Then it's 13 days in Turkey (July 5 to 17), which will include the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, a four-day yacht cruise and Istanbul. Cost: $3,480 per person, double occupancy, for both countries.

No one seems to know exactly who came up with the name or when it first was used, but they all seem to agree that it fits: gooney. As in gooney bird. More precisely, the Laysan albatross--about 1 million of which call Midway Atoll home. "I suppose that [terminology] was during the military days," said Tim Bodeen, the national wildlife refuge manager at Midway. "I suppose they were kind of gooney." Like thousands of little statues, they dot every acre of the landscape and transport visitors smack into what seems like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds."

Lawyer Ron Minkin, once the defender of men who shipped tons of marijuana into this country from such places as Thailand and Colombia, is a most unlikely volunteer in the war on drugs. For 15 years, Minkin smoked his clients' dope, shared their lavish meals, became godfather to their children. And as his core clientele of hippie dealers moved from small-time street deals on the Sunset Strip and became international drug barons, they paid him millions to keep them out of prison.