Japan finds mass graves on Iwo Jima
TOKYO — Two mass graves that may hold the remains of up to 2,000 Japanese soldiers have been discovered on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest and most iconic battlesites of World War II, a report said yesterday.
A team of Japanese searchers has already discovered the remains of about 50 soldiers in two areas listed by the US military after the war as enemy cemeteries, one of which could contain as many as 2,000 bodies, Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported.
The discovery of the remains would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in decades toward finding the bodies of roughly 12,000 Japanese who remain missing and presumed dead after the 1945 battle on the island.
Virtually all of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers defending Iwo Jima were killed in the battle.
No big deal because Amerika filled 'em up.
Also see: I Hear You, Hiroshima
Another slaughter that gets more ink:
Japanese villagers kill dolphins, spare young
TOKYO — The Japanese village notorious for the dolphin hunt documented in the film “The Cove’’ has slaughtered a pod of dolphins but spared the youngest animals, activists said yesterday.
Leilani Munter, an environmental activist visiting Taiji from Charlotte, N.C., also witnessed the hunt and saw the dolphins being cut up in the slaughterhouse.
“There is nothing to prepare you for seeing it in person. I saw these beautiful dolphins being driven into the cove, and they came out dead bodies,’’ she said.
For years, Taiji has held an annual dolphin hunt, which begins in September and continues through March. It has traditionally sold the best-looking ones to aquariums and killed the rest.
But the Oscar-winning documentary — which showed how herded dolphins were stabbed in a cove that turned red with blood — has intensified international opposition to the slaughter.
Activists are organizing a protest tomorrow at Japanese embassies around the world against the killings.
The Japanese government allows about 20,000 dolphins to be caught each year, defends the hunts as traditional, and argues that killing dolphins and whales is no different from raising cows or pigs for slaughter.
I'm tired of killing no matter what species.
Vitriol mars discussion on village’s dolphin hunts
TAIJI, Japan — An unprecedented meeting between conservationists and leaders of the dolphin-hunting village depicted in the Oscar-winning documentary “The Cove’’ ended in bitter disagreement yesterday.
The carefully organized meeting in Taiji was jolted beforehand when the film’s star, Richard O’Barry, said he would boycott it because severe restrictions had been imposed on the media covering the talks.
Taiji’s hunt each year draws a range of protesters who videotape the slaughter and occasionally scuffle with local fishermen. This season — the first since the Oscar was awarded — the attention has been particularly intense, and usually unresponsive town leaders agreed to a discussion at the community center.
But the two-hour meeting was acrimonious from the start.
Village fishermen defended the hunt as part of a centuries-long tradition, pointing out that Westerners kill other animals for food. Activists countered that the killings are barbaric and that dolphin meat is laced with dangerous toxins.
The hunts are legal under Japanese law.
Also see: Japanese Deaf to Dolphin Song
Japan Rubs Globalists Raw
Trying to make up for it I guess:
Japan offers $2b for developing nations’ ecological efforts
TOKYO — Japan offered $2 billion in aid yesterday to help developing nations reach species-preserving goals that are being debated at a UN conference, a move that could jolt the stalled talks forward.
With the conference of the UN Convention on Biodiversity scheduled to close tomorrow, delegates from 193 countries have made little progress toward reaching a consensus on the meeting’s most contentious objectives.
The two-week conference aims to set targets for 2020 to slow or stop the rate of extinction of plants and animals and damage to ecosystems. Scientists warn that unless action is taken to preserve species, extinctions will spike and natural interconnections could collapse with devastating consequences, from plunging fish stocks to less access to clean water.
I'm getting that old agenda-pushing feeling.
Watch: George Carlin- Saving the Planet
He has a point.
“We must stop this great extinction in our lifetime,’’ Prime Minister Naoto Kan of Japan said at the conference in Nagoya in announcing the $2 billion aid offer over the next three years.
These are the same guys corralling and killing dolphins?
On Tuesday, a study published online in the journal Science showed that one in five of the world’s vertebrates — mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians — are threatened with extinction, although efforts to save endangered animals are having an impact.
Related: Globe Endorses Government on Evaporated Oil From Gulf Gusher
I'm supposed to believe in the journal Science now, huh?
But participants said that delegates in Nagoya have been unable to agree in two of the meeting’s prickliest areas — setting a target for protected marine areas and setting up a system for equitably sharing the profits from genetic resources, such as plants that Western pharmaceutical companies have harvested to produce drugs.
Yeah, that's going to be a tough nut to crack.
Developing nations and indigenous groups have argued that they have seen little benefit from such resources, and delegates are seeking to create a legal framework for such “access and benefit-sharing,’’ in UN parlance, to rectify this.
Environmental ministers from the member nations were due to pick up the negotiations, some of which have been bogged down by concerns about how to pay for increases in protected areas.
Japan’s aid offer of $2 billion to help developing nations reach such goals, the biggest during the conference, could have “a catalytic effect,’’ said Russ Mittermeier, president of the environmental group Conservation International and a field biologist.
Related: UN biodiversity meeting yields progress
