Free Republic

Just before the attack, there was a lull in the waves. In the calm, she played on her surfboard, kneeling on its face to practice balancing—and then she slipped. The majority of her body was back on her board, out of the water, when she screamed and jerked her feet upwards, kicking away from biting teeth. The shark surfaced then, rising above the water to reveal an eye, a belly, a fin. Then it disappeared. Natalie Jones, an Oakland resident and former reporter for the Light, suffered bites to both of her feet from a juvenile or subadult—likely 10 to...

As promised, the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. appealed to an expanded panel of a federal appeals court in San Francisco today to allow it to keep operating at Point Reyes National Seashore. The oyster farm and owner Kevin Lunny asked an 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a decision in which a smaller panel of the court ruled against the company by a 2 to 1 vote in September. In that ruling, the smaller panel upheld a federal trial judge’s denial of a preliminary injunction that would have allowed the oyster harvesting to continue...