A group of Australian environmental campaigners were yesterday forced to withdraw from their high-seas pursuit of Japanese whalers to refuel, giving the harpooners a fortnight to hunt freely.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel has been tailing the Japanese whaling fleet for the past two weeks, chasing them some 2,000 nautical miles (3,200km) through ice, rough seas and fog off Antarctica.
UNDER PRESSURE
Captain Paul Watson says the pursuit has prevented the Japanese from spearing any of the giant sea mammals, by keeping the fleet under pressure and driving them east.
But Watson was forced to abort his campaign yesterday, as dwindling fuel supplies drove the vessel, the Steve Irwin, back to shore.
“We have engaged them, we have stopped their whaling activities for two weeks and we have successfully chased them out of the Australian Antarctic Territorial waters,” he said. “We now have to return to land to refuel. It will probably take us two weeks and then we’ll be back again.”
Watson expressed frustration that the Japanese would have two weeks to hunt at will, but said his crew had no choice.
LUXURY
“We don’t have the luxury of refueling at sea like the Japanese fleet has. We don’t have the resources to operate two ships down here and we don’t have the support of Greenpeace to relieve us,” he said.
“We are doing the best we can with the resources available to us and we are having a significant impact on their kills,” Watson said.
The conservation group is in its fifth year of trailing whaling ships in the Southern Ocean, where Japan kills hundreds of the mammals a year in the name of scientific research, bypassing an international commercial moratorium.
Whale meat is a delicacy in Japan and Tokyo accuses critics of insensitivity to its whaling culture.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
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,
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