A militant anti-whaling group said yesterday it attacked a Japanese whaling vessel with "stink bombs," frustrating the hunt, only an hour after two of its activists were freed from the harpoon boat.
Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel -- the Steve Irwin -- said his crew resumed its actions against the Japanese fleet shortly after the two men were handed to an Australian customs boat on Friday.
The pair -- Australian Benjamin Potts said Briton Giles Lane -- were held aboard the harpoon boat Yushin Maru No. 2 for two days after they clambered onboard on Tuesday to deliver a letter protesting the slaughter of whales.
"One hour after our people were released we then went after the Yushin Maru No. 2 and hit them with our stink bombs," Paul Watson, told reporters by telephone.
"What that will do is it makes it impossible to work on the deck for two days," he said.
The Sea Shepherd ship is in the icy waters off Antarctica to prevent Japanese whalers from carrying out their annual whale hunt, which this year will see about 1,000 of the giant creatures slaughtered.
Japan exploits a loophole in a 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling to kill the animals for what it calls scientific research, while admitting the meat from the hunt ends up on dinner plates.
The Japanese company which owns the whaling vessels, Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha Ltd, condemned the butyric acid attacks on its ships which it likened to the work of terrorists.
"We safely released to an Australian patrol boat the intruders without any harm, even though Sea Shepherd has long threatened our safety," company president Kazuo Yamamoto said in a statement.
"The night attack is nothing more than an inhumane act for which they deserve to be called terrorists as they show no sign of honor as human beings," he said.
Watson said he had sent out a smaller boat to deliver the butyric acid bombs, or "stink bombs," which were intended to make the smell on deck so unpleasant that the whalers were unable to work.
"We are not down here hanging banners and taking pictures, we are down here to save whales," he said. "We are going to keep hitting these guys... as long as we don't hurt anybody."
"The most important thing is this is day number nine that no whales have been killed," he said.
Watson said the Steve Irwin, which had to follow the Australian customs boat some 80km away from the Japanese ship to collect its detained crew, was now searching for the Japanese fleet.
"We will continue to disrupt their activities," he said.
The whalers are also being carefully watched by Greenpeace activists, whose vessel Esperanza is trailing the factory ship the Nisshin Maru, which the environmentalists claim to have kept out of the hunt for six days.
"No whales have been killed in that time," expedition leader Karli Thomas said in a statement.
"Now we've got two whalers out of the hunting grounds. If they try to begin whaling, we'll carry out peaceful direct action by putting ourselves in front of the harpoons to defend the whales," Thomas said.
Meanwhile, Japanese diplomats and government officials will hold an emergency meeting soon to discuss measures to prevent future attacks against whaling vessels, the online edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS