Pacific Ocean

Dolphins served as attendants to the Greek god Poseidon. In days of yore, sailors regarded them as a sign of fair weather and good fortune. Peter Attia, therefore, felt reassured when a large pod tagged along with him for several hours early Tuesday morning during his attempt to swim from Catalina Island to the California coast, America's answer to the illustrious English Channel marathon. At the time, about three hours into the swim, he was fighting choppy seas and nausea. "They were as close as four feet away," recalls Attia, a 32-year-old surgical resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The World Jailed Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti ended his on-again, off-again campaign for presidency of the Palestine Liberation Organization, clearing the way for interim leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is favored to win the vote next month. A Chilean judge charged former dictator Augusto Pinochet, 89, with kidnapping nine people and murdering one of them during his military rule, saying that the former dictator was competent to stand trial and placing him under house arrest. Tests showed that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor A. Yushchenko had ingested dioxin, causing prosecutors to reopen an investigation into possible poisoning.

FEW THINGS spooked the collapsing Soviet Union more than the Reagan administration's fascination with a futuristic, Star Wars-type missile defense system. Communism may be gone, but Russia's acting President Vladimir Putin is equally worried about a similar, hugely expensive weapons concept being studied by the Clinton administration. The long and short of it is that the United States -- even after Tuesday's failed attempt to destroy a fake nuclear warhead above the Pacific Ocean -- has enough money to experiment with the high-tech concept.

Marylanders who bought sport-utility vehicles after the snow-choked winter of 1995-1996 may still be waiting for enough snow to engage the four-wheel drive.Meteorologists say they can blame La Nina for the third winter in a row of mild temperatures and trifling snowfall in Central Maryland.Temperatures at Baltimore-Washington International Airport averaged 37.6 degrees last month, almost 3 degrees above normal. December and January exceeded their norms by wider margins."In fact, you would have to go back four winters, to the winter of 1995-96, to find a [winter]

A Memorable Place Volunteer trip teaches valuable lesson By Thomas Kamrath SPECIAL TO THE SUN It is Day 2 of my volunteer adventure in New Zealand. I am lying in bed waiting for the 6:30 a.m. wakeup knock from Rochelle, our project leader. I hear the familiar sounds: From under the pole-framed house comes the swishing sound of shoes skimming across gravel, then the thumping of rubber soles up the wooden stairs. Any second now there will be a knock on the door. "Thomas, it's time to get up."

A Memorable Place Sculptures stir memories of the '60s By H. Hoover Yount SPECIAL TO THE SUN From 1967 to 1969 my wife, four young daughters and I lived in the San Francisco Bay area. As former Midwesterners, we were entranced by the magic of the area -- the many exotic restaurants; the delight of standing in one spot and seeing on the west the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, while on the east admiring the coastal mountain chain extending from horizon to horizon; Chinatown; and the variety of architecture, both modern and 19th-century existing comfortably together.

Imagine flying to Tahiti, then taking a cruise from there to Hawaii.Sounds like a super vacation, right? Seven scientists from the University of Maryland took off last week for the central Pacific Ocean with just that itinerary.But for the Maryland researchers and about two dozen others from around the country, there will be little leisure time as they prepare to embark Tuesday on their 37-day cruise. They will be scouring the sea for clues to the role oceans play in global warming."People think it's 'The Love Boat,' but everybody is working 18 hours a day," said Dr. Michael Roman, chief scientist for the cruise and a biological oceanographer from the university's Horn Point Environmental Laboratory in Cambridge.

It's time for our popular feature, Deceased Animals in the News. Our big story this week, as you have no doubt guessed, concerns the federal government's program to give away frozen oil-soaked semidecomposed animal carcasses.But first we need to issue the following safety advisory: Do not go outside.We base this advisory on a news item spotted by alert reader Katherine Keane in a newspaper called (really) the Tillamook, Ore., Headlight-Herald. The item is headlined: "Explanation Offered for Fish Found on Lawn."

Remember that Russian space probe, the one carrying a half-pound of highly radioactive plutonium when it came crashing back to earth last month?Initial news reports said the spacecraft fell harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean, about 1,000 miles southeast of Easter Island, and 2,000 miles northwest of Santiago, Chile. But on Nov. 29, the U.S. Space Command reported that the probe may have scattered debris along a path that's just 20 miles away from a Chilean city. The news release, which corrected the space command's earlier prediction about where the probe fell, went virtually unnoticed by the press.

Changes in the Pacific Ocean are making it more likely that winter weather in much of the United States will exhibit unusual warmth alternating with sharp cold, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reported yesterday. The researchers said the pattern, prevalent this winter and last, might predominate for 20 or 30 years. The finding was based on calculations of the movement and temperature of ocean surface waters, and the varying amounts of heat they bear, based on measurements made by instruments aboard the Topex/Poseidon earth satellite.