The Above Linkblogs Might Contain "Borrowed" links.
Linkblogs do not substantially contribute traffic to my blog that I can discover. They all go offsite, and are often accessed from my blog. It's possible to access them from the RSS according to my settings. Still, even if I were to get ads clicking on a linkblog from the RSS won't drive more people to my blog than otherwise because they leave my resources. (Note to self, do more posts, less LBs with sources I find). I explain because I sometimes borrow links from people at Twitter, and often forget who put them up. (To fellow Twitterers: If you have a link to your blog, I will point it there, but Twitter, being impermanent, cannot hold your link for people to discover from there. I only 'borrow' them to get news out to as many people as I can who might not have seen the reports and videos found by the smart people I follow at Twitter or find in search rooms.RSS Add-Me
Anti-Whaling Demonstrators Arrested on St. Kitts. Plus: Evidence of Japan breaking international law in bribing small nations to support it's whaling causes
Greenpeace activists buzzed ashore Tuesday in motorized rubber boats to plant cardboard tombstones on the beach in protest of the killing of nearly 2,000 whales a year despite a global ban on commercial whaling.
St. Kitts police officers, some armed with tear gas and machine guns, quickly arrested the 10 activists, though the protest was peaceful. They were expected to be held overnight and face a magistrate in the morning on charges of obstructing police officers and resisting arrest.
Interesting espisode of fascism. The IWC had agreed the day before that anti whaling groups had a right to protest. (Aparently that was the NGO resolution mentioned in an earlier post.)
St. Kitts and Nevis, host of this year's IWC meeting, joined five other Caribbean countries and about 20 developing states in Africa and the South Pacific to give Japan a one-vote majority on the nonbinding resolution.
The vote has no real influence on whaling because Japan and Iceland exploit a loophole that allows the killing of the mammals in the name of scientific research. Norway ignores the ban altogether.
"While we're all focused here on when and whether Japan will take over the IWC, they're headed to the Antarctic sanctuary to slaughter another thousand whales," said Greenpeace spokesman Mike Townsley as nine fellow activists shed life preservers and began planting black cardboard whale flukes scrawled with "RIP."
Several St. Kitts police officers descended on the protesters, wrestling them to the ground and stomping on the cardboard tombstones, which they deemed contraband because they had not arrived through a legal port. They summoned more than a dozen reinforcements, including flak-jacketed riot police officers and muscular young men without uniforms.
Hmm. Thugs without uniforms. How very exemplitive of an undemocratic Caribbean regime. Now I'm even less likely to think of taking a vacation to that pro-whaling country.
Two black Zodiacs bearing the name Greenpeace on their sides had carried nine protesters and the cardboard markers across about a mile of water from the group's vessel Arctic Sunrise. The former sealing ship was involved in a collision with a Japanese whaler in January, prompting St. Kitts authorities to bar it from entering Basseterre harbor last week on grounds that it was a threat to national security.
"A threat to national secrecy, maybe," said Patrick Ramage, spokesman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, as he watched police push the protesters onto the ground, cinch their wrists with plastic cuffs, then pull them up by their hair or bound forearms.
Townsley, who had stayed on shore to summon media coverage of the protest, was arrested with the other nine for what Sgt. Lionel Moore of the St. Kitts police said was "obstruction."
Asked why the demonstrators were being arrested when they had come to this Caribbean island legally through the airport, Moore said their importation of the cardboard signs was a customs violation.
"When garbage washes up on shore, we take it to the dump," he said of the protesters.
I don't know about that. Fascist cops and their goons are pretty much garbage to me, Sir, and I don't care to hang around beaches that have garbage on them.
Mexico, Panama, and Jamaica have some nice beaches and they didn't vote for the whalers.
Toon: The Dirty Whaler's side of town.
Meanwhile Peter Espeut in the Jamaica Gleaner tells us:
VOTE-BUYING in international organisations is not a new phenomenon, neither is it new to the Caribbean. But it is, of course, a breach of International Law. The 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the United Nations Charter states, inter alia, that "No State may use or encourage the use of economic, political or any other type of measure to coerce another State in order to obtain from it the subordination of the exercise of its sovereign rights and to secure from it advantages of any kind".
By all accounts Japan has provided upwards of US$100 million in fisheries aid to six eastern Caribbean states since 1998, and receives their voting support in the International Whaling Commission (IWC). This is my second IWC meeting (my first was in 1999) and over the period the support that Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) have given to Japan has become noticeably more resolute.
...
Japan has been able to co-opt about 30 other countries to its cause through strategic disbursements of foreign aid. Not all of it has been fisheries aid; Mongolia, for example, is com-pletely landlocked, and has no marine fisheries, never mind whaling.
In addition, Japan pays the (relatively high) IWC membership fees for all these countries (about US$12,000/year each), and covers all their costs to attend IWC meetings, including airfares, accommodation and subsistence.
From: Cockroach don't business
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