Japanese coast guard and police will inspect the country’s whaling fleet this week after the ships’ heated clashes with conservation activists in the Southern Ocean earlier in the year, media reported yesterday.
Investigations so far have eyed possible charges such as assault and obstruction of business through threats, although authorities will probably have a hard time identifying suspects, Kyodo news agency said.
The fleet returns to Tokyo this week after a tumultuous hunting season marred by several confrontations with hardline anti-whaling activists.
Last month, members of the Sea Shepherd group threw bottles and containers of foul-smelling substances at a whaling ship in an attempt to disrupt the hunt, resulting in three sailors complaining of eye irritation.
The incident followed a high-profile standoff in January in which two activists boarded another Japanese whaling ship.
The clashes led to a spate of diplomatic complaints between Japan and Australia, with the Australian government, while strongly opposed to whaling, urging both sides to show restraint.
Australia has promised to try to stop Japan’s whaling, and is considering international legal action, although the two countries have agreed not to let the issue hurt ties.
Meanwhile, Japanese and Chinese coastguards stepped up the search yesterday for 13 fishermen who have been missing since their boat collided with a freighter in international waters off southern Japan.
“We have dispatched a plane and patrol boat to the area for the search but we have so far no report of any finds,” a Japanese coastguard official said.
The freighter, believed to be based in Hong Kong, and the Chinese fishing boat collided late on Friday about 350km west of Takarajima island.
The fishing boat sank with the loss of three crew with 13 more missing, but two others were rescued by another fishing vessel.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS