Thursday, November 1, 2007

Japanese fishermen in Taiji, Japan clashed with surfers from Australia and the United States. The location where dolphins are culled was moved to a secluded cove this year to hide the activity from television crews and protesters.

After successfully defending the hunt, by using boat propellers and boat hooks against the group of surfers, who were joined by actress Hayden Panettiere, the fishermen have started their annual cull.

Whaling in Taiji usually yields 2,000 dolphins per year using the dolphin drive hunting method. The dolphins are diverted from their migration route by banging metal rods. As fear can affect the taste of the meat, after being speared and bludgeoned to death, they are left to hang for a day before being cut up. Television crews and campaigners opposed to the culling were prevented by fishermen and local police from filming these activities.

Although the practice of aquatic mammal hunting is condemned by many groups worldwide as well as within Japan, whaling is seen by those involved as a long-practiced cultural tradition that should be defended. As the demand for whale and dolphin meat for use in sushi has declined, the Government of Japan now has to financially subsidize the industry to support the local economy. Japan argues that whaling is still carried out for scientific reasons, to understand species population numbers. This claim is disputed by the scientific community outside of Japan as well as by environmentalists.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller wants to sue the anonymous person who vandalised his article in the Wikipedia encyclopedia, a website resource almost anyone can edit.

An IP address from Josef Silny & Associates, a Miami education consulting firm, wrote a biased paragraph about him creating uproar from the golfer. The entry was posted twice: once sometime last year, and again in December 2006. The paragraph was removed last month, and deleted from the article history by Danny Wool, a staff member of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Zoeller is suing Josef Silny & Associates to find out who added this text.

“The Zoeller family wants to take a stand to put a stop to this. Otherwise, we’re all just victims of the Internet vandals out there. They ought not to be able to act with impunity,” said Zoeller’s attorney, Scott Sheftall.

The offensive edits, about which the suit is based, allegedly suggested that Zoeller admitted to consuming mass quantities of drugs and alcohol and beat his wife.

Through the court, Wikipedia can not be sued for a vandalous edit. The person or company, in this case, will be sued. In fact, the Wikimedia Foundation has not been contacted by Zoeller or his representatives about the lawsuit.

Monday, January 7, 2008

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the constitutionality of the use of lethal injection as a method for the imposition of the death penalty in the United States. Two men, Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr., who were convicted of murder in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and sentenced to death, sued the state in 2004 arguing that the use of lethal injection as a method of imposition of capital punishment violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Thirty-seven states and the Federal Government have capital punishment for some crimes, all except Nebraska (which uses electrocution) use lethal injection. The process uses three chemicals in a “cocktail”, which, by the procedures that are used to apply them to the condemned, (three injections given consecutively) allegedly “create a significant and unnecessary risk of inflicting severe pain that could be prevented by the adoption of reasonable safeguards”, their lawyers said in court papers. “Kentucky seeks to execute in a relatively humane manner and has worked hard to adopt such a procedure,” Kentucky Attorney General Gregory Stumbo has said. The state has also argued in its brief against supporting the plaintiffs’ appeal that it will lead to “an endless road of litigation. … Condemned inmates will never run out of ideas for changes to the procedures, drugs or equipment used during lethal injection.”

Baze was scheduled to be executed on January 8 after Governor of Kentucky Ernie Fletcher signed his death warrant, but the Kentucky Supreme Court suspended his execution on September 12, 2007, arguing it needed more time to examine arguments he had made in a separate appeal. He was convicted of killing Powell County Sheriff Steve Bennett and Deputy Arthur Briscoe in 1992 while the lawmen were trying to serve him with arrest warrants. Bowling was convicted of killing Edward and Tina Earley in Louisville in 1990.

According to the article on lethal injection in Wikipedia, the three chemicals used are Sodium thiopental to render the offender unconscious; Pancuronium/Tubocurarine: to stop all muscle movement except the heart, causing muscle paralysis, collapse of the diaphragm, and would eventually cause death by asphyxiation; and Potassium chloride to stop the heart. The chemicals apparently cannot be combined together as they could precipitate into a solid and be ineffective. It is argued that thiopental is a very short-term anesthetic and may wear off during the procedure, causing anesthesia awareness and excruciating pain from the effects of the other drugs.

In oral hearings today, the justices seemed skeptical that the chemical concoction causes extreme pain or that a better method was available. A lawyer for one of the plaintiffs argued that if insufficient anesthetic is given, when the inmate is given the paralyzing drug, they will experience agonizing pain, but be unable to react, and that it is even illegal in Kentucky to euthanize animals in this fashion. Some of the justices have considered sending the case back for further hearings to determine if a single barbiturate would be superior to the current method.

While the Supreme Court has examined the application of the death penalty many times over the past 40 years, this is the first time the court has reviewed the issue of the method of execution in 100 years, according to lawyers for the plaintiffs. A ruling is not expected until June. There are about 3,000 people on death row in the United States, and about 60 are executed each year. Since the case was accepted by the Supreme Court, all executions in the United States have been temporarily suspended pending the decision.

The case name is Baze v. Rees.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

At the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) conference, a resolution was passed that encourages the Government of Saskatchewan, Canada to place a moratorium on specialty livestock farms raising wild boar. All wild boars that have escaped to roam wild should be killed, according to the resolution.

Agriculture Minister Bob Bjornerud endorses a ban on wild boar farming. The wild boar population is expanding exponentially. There are over 2,000 feral Sus scrofa swine roaming the prairies. Two litters of approximately 12 piglets are sired by each wild boar sow every year. The Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation (SWF) likewise passed a similar resolution at their 79th annual convention to urge the Saskatchewan Government to declare the wild boar as a nuisance species which can be killed on sight.

3% of farmed “wild” boars escape. Cells of wild boars are ravenous creatures killing and eating everything in their path. Horses, cows, and other livestock run from wild boars, breaking through fences in the process.

Ostriches, emus, llamas, alpacas, reindeer, wild boar, and fallow deer were amongst the animals introduced to farms in Saskatchewan during the agricultural diversification program in the late 1970s. Production of wild boars was promoted throughout the 1980s.

According to the Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food 2001 statistics, there were 150 wild boar producers raising approximately 15,000 and 20,000 head. Of these there were about 2,700 sows. On the 2006 Census of Agriculture, 401 farms reported 4,926 boars.

The boar’s red meat is an export commodity to Europe and Asia. The live breeding stock are also sold to trophy hunt ranches. Full blooded wild boar and hybrid crosses are raised.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

One hundred and twenty detainees at an immigration removal centre in Oxford, UK, are on hunger strike. The protest started when some detainees refused breakfast on Wednesday 14th June 2006. A letter from the hunger strikers explaining why they are seeking to draw attention to their plight in this way has been reproduced in full below.

Those detained at the centre are mostly men who have sought asylum in the UK and whose asylum applications have been rejected. These people are then held without knowing how long they will be detained for – some end up being held for many years while awaiting deportation.

The removal centre, known as Campsfield, or Campsfield House is approximately 5 miles north of Oxford and has been in operation since 1993. It was managed on behalf of the UK Government by Global Solutions Limited, until may 2006 when it was taken on by GEO UK, the centre has a capacity of 198. Only males are detained at Campsfield.

According to the campaign group Barbed Wire Britain Over 2,600 individuals, mostly asylum seekers, are detained indefinitely in the UK without trial and with no automatic right to bail.

There have been reports in the UK press of the state taking people to detention centres without notice, in the early hours of the morning using excessively heavy handed tactics, taking children out of schools and separating families.

Many UK people and politicians express their disgust at the way detainees are treated, yet it continues. Perhaps this action by the detainees themselves will further highlight their plight and result in more UK electors writing to their MPs and demanding improvements to the way in which rejected asylum seekers are treated.

“We are detainees at Campsfield removal centre in Oxford. Most of us have been here for a long while now. There are people who have been detained for up to two years and down to three months. We are cramped in here like animals. We are treated like animals and moved around different detention centres like animals. The immigration service have taken husbands from their families and taken people who ran away from persecution in their various countries, and dumped everyone in here.

Once you are put in here the immigration service forget you. There are detainees who have applied to go back to their own countries that are still being held here for months without any news about their cases, just so that the private security companies get more money.

Detainees are asked to seek asylum and then refused. The immigration service also ask detainees to apply for bail. When you get a bail hearing date all of a sudden they serve you with removal papers that are not valid. There are many of these situations. In most cases the immigration service don’t take you to your court hearings. And then they tell the judges you refused to turn up, just so the hearing goes ahead in your absence. Many detainees have been served with removal papers and travel documents but nothing happens on the removal day.

Campsfield has become a slave house. We detainees are treated like slaves, to do odd jobs for officers. Detainees are handcuffed to see doctors or dentists in hospitals or clinic appointments. We have some racist security officers who make racist comments to detainees and go out of their way to make you feel like committing suicide. Detainees have to be at the point of death before they get to see the doctors.

The food is not worth eating. Even dogs would refuse to eat what we eat. But we don’t have a choice; every single day we eat the same food (the food we eat is rice, chicken, sandwiches, and left-over eggs)”.

• “120 Immigration Detainees on Hunger Strike at Campsfield IRC” — Oxford Indymedia, June 14, 2006
• UK Home Office webpage on Campsfield
• Close Campsfield Campaign
• “Dawn raid furore family deported” — BBC, September 29, 2005
• Barbed Wire Britain
• “Asylum seekers on hunger strike” — BBC, July 14, 2005
• “Construction/Building Press Releases” — PR Newswire, Oct 01, 2005