close
Carl Freire in Tokyo
Associated Press
Associated Press
December 21, 2007
Japan is dropping its plan to kill threatened humpback whales in the seas off Antarctica, a Japanese official said Friday.
"The U.S. asked Japan to freeze planned humpback hunts" for one to two years to support its efforts as chair of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said.
The Hunt
Japan dispatched a whaling fleet last month to the southern Pacific in the first major hunt of humpback whales since the 1960s, triggering widespread international criticism.
Commercial hunts of humpbacks have been banned worldwide since 1966. The World Conservation Union considers the species "vulnerable," meaning it faces a high but not immanent risk of extinction in the wild.
The Japanese whalers had argued that the hunting ban didn't apply to them because their hunt was for the sake of science.
"There will [be] no changes to our stance on our research whaling itself," Machimura said Friday.
Australia
Australia announced earlier this week it was launching a new push to stop Japan's annual whale hunt, including sending surveillance planes and a ship to gather evidence for a possible international legal challenge. (See story.)
Earlier Friday, Japan's Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura told reporters he hoped to discuss the whale hunt and related issues with his Australian counterpart soon.
"This seems to be a problem of differences in national sentiment between Japanese and Australian culture," Komura told reporters. "It's not a matter that can be solved by appealing to one another through logic."
1. Antarctica 南極洲
2. humpback 座頭鯨
3. dispatched 派遣
4. fleet 艦隊
5. whaling 捕鯨
6. triggering 觸發
7. Union 結合
8. widespread 廣泛的
9. whalers 捕鯨者
10. surveillance 看守
11. counterpart 相對應之物
12. sentiment 觀點
全站熱搜
留言列表
