The New Zealand Navy was involved in a high-seas standoff with two suspected poaching ships in Antarctic waters yesterday after the vessels used “evasive tactics” to thwart boarding attempts, officials said.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully said the naval patrol vessel HMNZS Wellington had been monitoring three “illegal fishing vessels” sailing under the flag of Equatorial Guinea in the Southern Ocean this week.
He said authorities in Guinea believe the ships Yongdong, Songhua and Kunlun are operating illegally and have given the New Zealanders permission to board them.
Photo: AFP
“The HMNZS Wellington attempted to exercise its legitimate right to board the Yongdong and Songhua earlier today, but the vessels refused to cooperate,” he said in a statement. “Due to the conditions and the evasive tactics of the masters, it was not possible to safely board these vessels.”
McCully said New Zealand had strong evidence the vessels were involved in illegal fishing, even if the navy could not get aboard to check their records.
“What we have already achieved is significant photographic evidence of what these guys have been up to down there,” he said. “This is cynical international criminal activity and we need to stamp it out.”
While the ships are flying the colors of Equatorial Guinea, McCully said investigations suggest they are linked to a Spain-based syndicate.
He said New Zealand had asked Interpol and Spanish authorities to conduct further inquiries.
The vessels are operating in a protected area regulated by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, a multinational body.
They are believed to be targeting toothfish, also known as Chilean sea bass, a deepwater fish popular in expensive restaurants.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might