Japan’s whaling fleet is once more on the run in Antarctic waters after being tracked down by ship-borne environmental activists, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society said yesterday.
The group’s ship the Steve Irwin found the whalers after searching through fog and rough weather for nearly a week after a break to refuel in the southern Australian port of Hobart, captain Paul Watson said.
“We are seven miles [11.3km] from the fleet and approaching. We see the Nisshin Maru and two harpoon vessels the Yushin Maru 1 and the Yushin Maru 2,” Watson wrote on the group’s Web site.
This is the fifth year Sea Shepherd activists have trailed the whalers and attempted to impede their hunt, prompting Japanese authorities to accuse them of “eco-terrorism.”
An international moratorium on commercial whaling was imposed in 1986, but Japan kills hundreds each year in the name of “research,” but the meat ends up on dinner tables.
“When we found them this morning it looked like they were in the process of a whaling operation,” Watson told Australia’s national AAP news agency.
“As long as we’re chasing them they’re not going to kill whales,” he said. “Every day we can keep them from whaling and on the run is a victory for us.”
Watson last month offered to abandon Sea Shepherd’s aggressive tactics if Australia took legal action against the hunt.
The Australian government strongly opposes Japan’s annual kill of up to 1,000 whales in the Southern Ocean and has said it is considering taking international legal action against Tokyo to bring it to an end.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the