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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS