Sushi chefs in Japan are keeping a close eye on Doha, Qatar this week as delegates at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) debate the future of their beloved bluefin tuna. The fish, a delicacy in Japan that can sell for more than $100,000 apiece, is being overfished, and convention delegates aim to prevent the tuna from becoming extinct altogether. The proposal on the table: A complete ban on international trade of the fish to allow stocks to regenerate.
The bluefin tuna ban was proposed by Monaco, and the vote will probably come up next week. Japan has already dispatched a delegation to Doha with the message that Japan won’t comply with a total ban, and would instead prefer a fishing quota. But quotas have failed to help the depleted bluefin tuna stocks thus far. Japan last year pledged to help meet an accord to slash the total catch in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean by 40 percent, although environmental groups charge that such quotas are routinely exceeded [AFP].
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While the oft-troubled Large Hadron Collider is starting back up today after a weekend glitch, another big physics project is under way halfway around the world. The British and Japanese researchers behind the project called T2K (Tokai-to-Kamioka) announced their first neutrino detection, the initial step in an experiment to understand these mysterious subatomic particles.
Neutrinos are tiny particles that rarely interact with matter, making them incredibly difficult to study. But physicists have done it by looking for the signature left behind when one of the torrent of neutrinos flying through the Earth at any given time happens to crash into the nucleus of an atom within view of a neutrino detector. Japan’s Super Kamiokande is one of the largest neutrino detectors, and now it has a new mission under the T2K project. The goal is to understand a strange kind of subatomic metamorphosis. These particles come in three types or flavours: electron, muon and tau neutrinos. From earlier experiments, physicists know that neutrinos spontaneously change their flavour, oscillating back and forth from one kind to another. But the details are still hazy [New Scientist].
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Is Paul Bethune a pirate? Bethune is an anti-whaling activist who boarded a Japanese whaling vessel on Monday, demanding to make a citizen’s arrest of the skipper; he reportedly planned to charge the skipper with attempted murder due to the collision between the whaling boat and the activists’ powerboat, the Ady Gil, last month. Not just that, he also slapped a bill on the captain, seeking $3 million dollars for the damage caused to the Ady Gil.
Bethune is now being held in the whalers’ custody, and may be tried in a Japanese court for charges of trespassing and assault. But one expert suggests that he also faces the possibility of being viewed as a pirate–for not just boarding a vessel illegally, but also making demands for money.
This incident is the latest in an escalating series of skirmishes on the high seas between anti-whaling activists of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, of which Bethune is a member, and the Japanese whaling industry. The whaling wars have also intensified a diplomatic tussle between Japan and Australian and New Zealand, with the Kiwis demanding a halt to the hunting and the Australian government saying it hasn’t ruled out the prospect of taking legal action against the whalers after gathering evidence that it’s presenting to the International Whaling Commission [BusinessWeek].
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You could’ve seen this one coming a mile away—the high seas tensions between Japanese whalers and the environmental groups that harass them degenerated into downright naval warfare this week. A Japanese whaling ship collided with a environmental group’s boat in waters near Antarctica yesterday, sparking finger-pointing, international bickering, and even more bad blood.
The collision late yesterday damaged the Ady Gil, a powerboat that is part of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society protest against the Japan’s annual whaling expedition to the Southern Ocean. Six crew members were rescued by another protest vessel and the boat may sink, Sea Shepherd said in a statement [Business Week]. The governments of Australia and New Zealand say they plan to investigate the crash; the Ady Gil is registered in New Zealand, which opposes the Japanese whaling.
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