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.
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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
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
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