Anti-whaling activists yesterday said that they have captured images of Japanese ships killing protected whales inside an internationally recognized whale sanctuary, sparking criticism of the Australian government’s handling of the issue.
The aerial footage released by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society appeared to show the bloodied remains of three minke whales on board Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru as it sailed in the Southern Ocean. The group said it had information that a fourth whale had also been killed.
The images have raised pressure on Australian Minister of the Environment Greg Hunt, who has backed away from a promise made during Australia’s election campaign last year to send a ship to monitor Japanese whaling in the area. His plan to instead send an aircraft staffed by customs officials to randomly swoop over the area has been dismissed by activists as ineffectual.
Sea Shepherd Australia chairman Bob Brown called on the conservative Liberal Party-led government to honor its pledge to step up monitoring of the Japanese fleet.
“We’ve got a federal court ruling that this whaling is illegal and injunction to stop it,” he said. “I don’t know of any other entity or person in Australia who could simply thumb its nose at the Australian Federal Court with an Australian government saying: ‘We won’t police it.’”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
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