“Eco-pirate” Paul Watson is losing a race against time to recover his flagship, the Steve Irwin, which has been impounded in Shetland, Scotland.
The world’s most radical conservationist, Watson is being sued for US$1.4 million by a Maltese fishing company, Fish and Fish, one of Europe’s leading tuna processors. The lawsuit against Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was filed last year after activists aboard the Steve Irwin freed 800 bluefin tuna from a pen in the Mediterranean.
Watson has just 10 days to raise the bond required to release the boat, which was named after the late Australian conservationist. It has been impounded in the harbor at Lerwick, Scotland, ever since the company sued him for damages. By late on Saturday, the society had raised about US$500,000, despite a global Twitter campaign and appeals to celebrities who have helped Watson in the past.
A co-founder of Greenpeace, Watson was picking up volunteer crew and restocking the Steve Irwin in preparation for a trip to protest against whaling in the Faroe Islands when he was served with the writ. The tuna cage that had been intercepted 64km off the Libyan coast in June last year held an estimated 35 tonnes of fish.
After a fracas in which there was hand-to-hand fighting between the two crews, Sea Shepherd sent in divers to release the 800 tuna.
Joseph Caruana, the owner of Fish and Fish, declined to speak on Saturday, but has claimed in the Maltese press that two of his divers were injured in the encounter, an allegation strongly denied by Watson.
“Sea Shepherd cannot continue behaving this way. My aim is for justice to be done. I wanted to show that we mean business and we will fight our cause,” he said.
Malta has become a global capital of tuna fishing, exporting £80 million (US$131.44 million) worth of the fish, mainly to the Middle East and Japan. Ships surround the fish with nets and then tow them to cages, where they are fattened for export.
Catches are limited to two weeks a year and ship owners have been given strict quotas to meet by governments, but, with little policing, the industry has been able to openly flout the law in Libyan waters.
Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) called last month for a suspension of the Mediterranean tuna fishing season, saying that stocks were at critically low levels.
“Mediterranean bluefin tuna is on the slippery slope to collapse,” Sergi Tudela of WWF Mediterranean said.
In a statement last week, Watson said that if Sea Shepherd could not raise the money, the Steve Irwin could be held indefinitely and possibly sold.
“This would not only be a financial hardship, but it could threaten our ability to defend whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary from the Japanese whaling fleet this December. Fish and Fish are claiming damages for bluefin tuna we believe were illegally caught after the season had closed,” he said.
In a separate incident, the Namibian government has declared Sea Shepherd a “threat to national security” after it tried to film the annual slaughter of 90,000 Cape fur seals on the west African coast. It is a crime to document seal clubbing in Namibia.
“The group tried to document the seal slaughter, but was detected by Namibian special forces,” Watson said. “It was a good plan, but Sea Shepherd is no match for the Namibian military.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion