Researchers brave freeze to track whales

Researchers will embark on a voyage that will track the behaviour of the Antarctic blue whale. Source: AAP

AUSTRALIAN researchers will brave freezing conditions in small boats to prove that researchers don't have to kill majestic whales to study them.

Environment Minister Tony Burke says an inaugural voyage next week will estimate the abundance, distribution and behaviour of the colossal Antarctic blue whale.

"This research shows, in contrast to Japan's so-called "scientific whaling" program, that you don't have to kill these majestic creatures to get valuable information about them," he said in a statement on Tuesday.

Scientists from Australia, Chile, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States left Hobart on Tuesday on a mission in which they'll use small sonar buoys to track and find the elusive mammals across hundreds of kilometres in the Southern Ocean.

They will also use satellite tags on the whales.

Australian Marine Mammals centre leader, Mike Double, said the population of the critically endangered species had dropped significantly from the early 1900s to the 1970s, when it probably went down to around 300-400 whales.

"We think the population is increasing but we don't have good information on that," Dr Double told AAP on Tuesday.

"This is the start of a collaborative international effort to try and locate as many of these animals as we can, where we take photos and biopsies so we can identify individual whales."

Dr Double said the aim was to track the whales the best they could and also understand the role of these animals and krill fish in the Antarctic eco-system.

The whale grows to more than 30-metres long, weighs up to 180 tonnes and has a heart the size of a small car.

"Despite their colossal size we know very little about the animals," Mr Burke said, "including where they breed and feed, and how many remain in our oceans today after industrial whaling slaughtered more than 340,000 of them in the early 1900s."

The researchers will target areas thought to be frequented by the blue whales along the ice edge west of the Ross Sea.

Dr Double said he "sadly" would remain at home as he could not leave his two young children for two months.

Every summer, environmental group Sea Shepherd clashes with Japanese whaling ships in the Southern Ocean.

Dr Double said there is the possibility for his team to cross paths with Japanese ships.

"Certainly we don't wish to bump into these fleets and if we did, we would simply move away from those fleets and operate elsewhere," he said.

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Bali court sentences UK woman to death

An Indonesian court has sentenced British woman Lindsay June Sandiford to death for drug smuggling. Source: AAP

AN Indonesian court has sentenced a British woman to death for smuggling cocaine onto the resort island of Bali.

Prosecutors had sought a 15-year sentence.

Lindsay June Sandiford, 56, was found guilty by the Denpasar District Court and sentenced on Tuesday.

In its verdict, a judge panel concluded Sandiford had damaged the image of Bali as a tourism destination and weakened the government's drug prevention program.

Sandiford was arrested in May when customs officers at Bali's airport discovered 3.8 kilograms of cocaine worth $US2.5 million ($A2.4 million) in her luggage.

She told the court she was forced to take the drugs into the country by a gang that was threatening to hurt one of her children.

There are more than 114 prisoners on death row in Indonesia. At least 40 of them are foreigners, most of whom have been convicted of drug crimes, according to a March 2012 report by Australia's Lowy Institute for International Policy.

Five foreigners have been executed since 1998, all for drug crimes.

There have been no executions in the country since 2008, when 10 people were put to death.

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

YMCA chief erred over reference checks

Parents are concerned over YMCA's checks after a former worker was sentenced for molesting 12 boys. Source: AAP

THE YMCA NSW chief executive says he was wrong to assume the organisation did not conduct reference checks on a childcare worker who went on to molest 12 young boys during his employment.

Parents of the victims are upset over the conflicting accounts of the YMCA's practices.

The non-profit organisation says it checked two work references in Australia provided by the man, but it did not check on his overseas employment, which was terminated over similar allegations of child abuse.

Jonathan Luke Lord, 26, was sentenced on Friday in Sydney's District Court to 10 years' imprisonment with a non-parole period of six years for molesting 12 boys aged between six and 11.

The offences occurred from 2009, when he was first hired by the YMCA in southern Sydney, up until the day he was stood down in September 2011.

Lord worked in before- and after-school programs and in a YMCA creche and found private babysitting clients through his job.

Some of the abuse happened on bus trips to and from YMCA daytime activities and at YMCA events.

YMCA NSW chief executive Phillip Hare on Tuesday clarified his earlier statement that he believed the organisation had not checked Lord's references.

"At that point in time I made an error because I did not know the process there," Mr Hare told AAP.

Mr Hare also clarified his earlier statements about the YMCA not checking Australian references.

"There are many policies in the YMCA and my level of knowledge of all those policies is not complete," he said.

"My view is to tell the truth all the time. I was unsure. I was unsure."

In a January 10 interview with AAP, Mr Hare said believed references had not been checked in relation to Lord's babysitting experience, the only Australian employment listed on his resume, and it was not necessarily the YMCA's practice to make calls to referees.

"No, we would not necessarily ring," Mr Hare said in the interview.

"We wouldn't necessarily ring randomly because even that tends to be generally a breach of confidence."

A week after the interview, the YMCA stated in an email that it had checked two references relating to Lord's work as a babysitter in Australia before hiring him.

After Friday's court proceedings, a letter was sent to about 600 YMCA parents that included the same information.

Mr Hare said in the January 10 interview the YMCA had learned after Lord's arrest that he had been dismissed as a camp counsellor in the United States over an allegation of similar behaviour.

Lord had listed the US camp job on his resume but did not specify where he had worked and did not provide contact information for the employer, the YMCA told AAP.

Mr Hare and the YMCA maintain the organisation does not have a practice of checking overseas references.

The father of Lord's main target agreed that if the YMCA had looked fully into Lord's employment record, it might have been more alert to warning signs he was grooming boys.

"It's like any criminal," said the man who is considering civil action against the organisation.

"He can be a drug dealer and sell drugs for 20 years before you get caught."

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Calm returns as Eritrea mutiny ends

ERITREA'S government says the capital Asmara is calm after armed mutineers seized the information ministry, with opposition websites saying the stand-off has been settled.

"All is calm today, as it was indeed yesterday," said Yemane Gebremeskel, the director of Eritrean President Issaias Afewerki's office, in a message to AFP.

Opposition website Awate.com, based in the United States but with close connections inside Eritrea, said that the commander of around 100 rebel soldiers had agreed to surrender.

It was not clear if the mutineers had formally surrendered.

Amanuel Ghirmai, an Eritrean journalist in Paris for independent Radio Erena, said army mutineers stormed the hill-top ministry - which towers over the capital of the Red Sea state - early on Monday morning.

They reportedly ordered news readers at the government-run television and radio station - the only source of media for the authoritarian state - to read a statement.

The state-run Eri-TV and radio broadcasts were taken off air on Monday, but had resumed broadcasting on Tuesday, several sources said.

"Eri-TV, under regime loyalists, has resumed broadcasting live," added Awate. "All Ministry of Information employees have been released."

Multiple sources reported that one of those held inside the information ministry was the daughter of Afewerki, who has ruled the Horn of Africa nation with an iron grip since independence in 1993, following an epic 30-year liberation war from neighbouring Ethiopia.

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Defence works on regional engagement

AS Australia prepares to withdraw troops from East Timor, the Solomons and Afghanistan, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is working on renewing its engagement with Asia-Pacific nations, Defence chief David Hurley says.

General Hurley refused to comment on the content of the upcoming Defence White Paper, due for release in the next few months.

But he said issues which prompted the government to commission the White Paper earlier than scheduled, including the end of long-running defence operations, would obviously feature in the new strategic document.

General Hurley said the headquarters Joint Operations Command had devoted much time over the last year in revamping and renewing the campaign plan for defence engagement in the region, and new frameworks had been put in place.

"We are not rediscovering the northern region but being able to build up our interaction," he told an Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) function in Canberra.

General Hurley said defence had maintained a very high operational tempo for the last decade but would end East Timor and the Solomons operations this year and reconfigure deployments in the Middle East.

He said a key task for 2013 was resetting the ADF for the future and keeping it at a level of capability that would still allow it to respond to a government requirement to deploy troops somewhere in 48 hours.

General Hurley said at a time when the defence budget was under severe pressure, one reason to engage with the region was that it was far more expensive in the long run having to fall back on using defence capabilities.

"We have got to put the money where we are going to get the best bang for the buck at the moment and part of that will be shaping our environment and building up relationships and confidences in the region," he said.

General Hurley said defence was also rethinking how it operated in the Pacific, conducting the first meeting of south-west Pacific nation defence chiefs last year.

"We got that group together to say 'okay, how do we reshape the dollars we have all got, to do the best we can in terms of search and rescue, assisting with maritime security tasking, counter-piracy, the fishing industry'. We actually dragged Chile into that as well," he said.

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Five seriously hurt in Austria train crash

TWO packed commuter trains have collided head-on in the morning rush-hour traffic in Vienna, leaving five people seriously hurt.

"At the moment there are five people seriously injured and several people with light injuries," emergency services spokeswoman Claudia Gigler told AFP on Monday.

The Austrian automobile association said one person was trapped inside the wreckage.

Many passengers were suffering from shock.

Gigler said the cause of the crash was not known.

Austrian Railways spokeswoman Sarah Nettel said that the crash occurred at 8.45am (1845 AEDT) in the Penzing district of western Vienna.

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Japanese hostage describes Algeria terror

A JAPANESE hostage who narrowly survived the armed attack on an Algerian gas plant says he was sure he would die after seeing two colleagues shot dead in front of him.

The unnamed man described in a newspaper report on Monday how Islamist gunmen had dragged him from his barricaded room, handcuffed him and executed two hostages standing nearby.

In a chilling account of his escape, published Monday in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper, the Japanese hostage told colleagues he had been on a bus when it was attacked by a group of heavily-armed militants in the Sahara desert early Wednesday.

Seven Japanese are known to have survived the three-day assault, which ended in a bloodbath on Saturday - all of them connected to Japanese plant builder JGC.

The man said he was leaving a lodging house with other foreign workers in a convoy of buses when militants first swooped, according to JGC spokesman Takeshi Endo.

As the vehicle in front was hit by a hail of bullets, the driver of his bus slammed the vehicle into reverse and tried to flee.

But a wheel snapped off, stranding the bus and forcing passengers to run through the desert and seek refuge at the workers' formerly-secure lodging house.

The man barricaded himself in his room and cowered with the lights off, as gunmen began their rampage through the compound.

But a short time later the door splintered open as militants shot the lock apart and burst in, plucking the frightened man from his hiding place and clamping handcuffs on him.

He was frogmarched to a bright room with other foreign hostages where his captors began speaking Arabic with some of his Algerian colleagues.

The next thing he knew someone opened fire and two people slumped to the floor, dead, in front of him.

"I was prepared to die," Endo quoted the employee as saying.

The bodies of other foreigners lay on the ground as he and a Filipino colleague were bundled into a vehicle and driven off towards the gas plant.

Without warning the vehicle was sprayed with bullets, which pierced the windshield and forced the prisoners to duck down as low as possible to avoid being shot.

As their captors abandoned the vehicle the prisoners were left alone, not knowing who had opened fire.

In the hours that followed the Japanese survivor hid under a truck, trying to stay away from the gun battle that raged around him. As bullets flew past he saw a bus full of hostages -- some wearing JGC uniforms -- drive past.

He watched with horror as the vehicle came under attack, but said he had no idea of the fate of those on board.

After nightfall, when the shooting had stopped he began trudging through the desert, walking for an hour before he came across Algerian soldiers and safety.

Japan's Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reported it had spoken to an Algerian man who was taken hostage with about 20 foreign nationals, including six Japanese.

He said the foreigners were forced to link arms and then had their wrists and ankles bound with plastic ties, effectively forming a human chain.

The militants then wrapped explosives around their captives' bodies.

He said hostages were allowed to use the lavatory and were offered food, but none of the Japanese accepted because they were too scared.

The 45-year-old said he had made his escape on Thursday when the Algerian military staged its first assault.

He said he and other Algerians had run in the confusion, but the foreigners could not get away.

"I don't know what happened to them afterwards. I hope they survived," he was quoted by the Mainichi as saying.

JGC, which has 78 employees in Algeria, said Monday morning 17 of its employees who were at the plant are still unaccounted for -- 10 Japanese and seven others.

Witnesses have said nine Japanese people were killed in the 72-hour ordeal.

JGC spokesman Takeshi Endo told reporters in Japan that employees who were in the plant at the time of the siege but managed to escape before being taken hostage would help to identify anyone in the hospital.

"We were cautious about asking them to do this tough job, but they agreed to do it and as they were working closely with the colleagues who are still missing, it will surely be helpful," Endo said.

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

US ship ignored reef warnings: Philippines

A PHILIPPINES official has accused a US Navy minesweeper of ignoring warnings to stay away before it became stuck on a World Heritage-listed coral reef.

The accusation on Monday by the superintendent of Tubbataha marine park, Angelique Songco, added to growing anger in the Philippines over the incident.

The US Navy has apologised but may still face fines.

Park rangers radioed the USS Guardian to say it was nearing the Tubbataha Reef on Thursday, but the captain insisted they raise their complaint with the US embassy, Songco told reporters.

She said shortly after the warning, the 68-metre vessel became stuck on part of Tubbataha Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the Sulu Sea about 130 kilometres southeast of the western island of Palawan.

The site is protected by Philippine law, and is off limits to navigation, except for research or tourism approved by Songco's office.

Songco said it was too early to assess the damage to the coral.

The vessel was still stuck on the reef and being battered by big waves.

The commander of the US Navy's 7th Fleet, Vice Admiral Scott Swift, apologised in a statement from Japan on Sunday.

"As a protector of the sea and a sailor myself, I greatly regret any damage to this incident has caused to the Tubbataha Reef," Swift said.

He acknowledged that protecting the reef was vital, and that the navy took its obligations to preserve marine environment seriously.

He said the crew members had left the vessel, and there were no traces of any oil leaks.

The Philippine Navy said three of its ships had been put on standby near the area to assist in efforts to remove the Guardian from the reef. Two civilian tugboats had been contracted by the Americans.

The Guardian had been en route to Indonesia after visiting a Philippine port north of Manila when the incident occurred, according to the US Navy.

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Indian media hails Gandhi's promotion

Indian newspapers are trumpeting the elevation of Rahul Gandhi in the ruling Congress party. Source: AAP

INDIAN newspapers are trumpeting the elevation of Rahul Gandhi to second-in-command of the ruling Congress party and predict a showdown for the position of prime minister with opposition rival Narendra Modi.

"Party finally crowns prince," headlined the English-language tabloid Mail Today over a full-page spread that featured a smiling picture of the 42-year-old on Sunday.

The son, grandson and great-grandson of Indian prime ministers is now second in the party's hierarchy after his mother, party president Sonia Gandhi, who led the party to back-to-back victories in the 2004 and 2009 polls.

The move indicated that the Congress party was "not averse to pitting him against Narendra Modi and fielding him as its prime ministerial candidate," the Mail said.

"The party, it is evident, now feels that it will be in an advantageous position... in case of such a battle."

Gandhi was on Saturday formally named as the vice-president of the party, propelling his long-anticipated accession to power and paving the way for him to lead the party in general elections next year.

The Times of India said the stage had been set for a possible showdown between Gandhi and Modi, a hardline leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who is widely expected to run for prime minister in 2014.

"As number two in the Congress, he has been, for all practical purposes, pitched as the prime minister candidate of the party... thus setting the stage for a showdown with the Gujarat strongman," it said referring to Modi.

The BJP -- which is the main opposition party in parliament -- is yet to name a candidate to take on the Congress-led alliance but clamour is growing for Modi to be pitched for the prime ministership after he won key state polls last year.

The Hindustan Times said the Congress had stopped short of naming Gandhi as the candidate for the country's top job "perhaps out of consideration for its sitting octogenarian PM Manmohan Singh".

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Snow causes chaos in China

Snow in northern China has forced the cancellation of over 100 flights and the closure of highways. Source: AAP

SNOW in northern China has forced the cancellation of more than 100 flights and the closure of dozens of highways, authorities say.

Beijing Capital International Airport's official website said on Sunday a total of 111 flights were cancelled at the facility, including 16 international ones.

Another 68 flights were delayed, with 11 of those on international routes.

More than 40 highways in northern China were closed due to the snow, the government's official weather website said. No accidents were reported.

As of 8:00 am Sunday weather authorities recorded up to 8.6 centimetres of snow in a mountainous part of northwestern Beijing near the Great Wall of China.

Much smaller amounts fell in central Beijing and had largely stopped by Sunday afternoon.

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Union slams privatisation of hospital pool

Staff at Sydney's Prince of Wales hospital will stop over moves to privatise the hospital's pool. Source: AAP

THE Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney is set to meet budget cuts by privatising its hydrotherapy pool but outraged union members claim it will jeopardise patient care.

Health Service Union (HSU) staff will stop work to protest the move at midday on Monday, said the union's NSW secretary Gerard Hayes on Sunday.

"How can patients at the Prince of Wales have confidence that their recovery will be the priority when a new private operator has commercial objectives to meet?" he said.

Mr Hayes said the pool "sell-off" would provide part of the $35 million in savings the hospital must find to meet the NSW government's $3 billion in health cuts.

It's believed it is the first move of its kind in NSW.

The hour-long protest at High Cross Park also marks the official launch of the HSU's "O'Farrell Cuts, We Bleed campaign", which will travel across the state for the next six months.

"Daily, our members are reporting cuts like these ones," Mr Hayes said in a statement.

The union is using the privatisation of the hydrotherapy pool as an example of how cuts to the health budget will devastate staff and patients.

Mr Hayes said the facility was crucial for people suffering cerebral palsy, post-polio syndrome, musculoskeletal conditions and breast cancer.

"Yet the O'Farrell government wants to turn the pool over to a private operator, whose main imperative will be to turn a quick buck," he said.

"We intend to fight him on this, every step of the way."

A

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Dotcom re-enacts raid for launch party

A HELICOPTER fly-by, men dressed as armed New Zealand police officers, and dancers and singers have all heralded the launch of Kim Dotcom's new "legal" website, Mega.

The new cloud storage website went live at 6.48am on Sunday, about the same time as the dramatic police raid on his Coatesville mansion got underway a year ago. He and three others were arrested on that occasion.

To celebrate the new website's launch, Dotcom hosted about 200 invited guests and media at a party and press conference at the mansion, north of Auckland.

Dotcom, speaking from a stage constructed on the forecourt of his home, told the crowd more than one million people had visited Mega within 14 hours of the site's launch and about 500,000 people had registered as users.

"The launch of Mega is not about mocking any government of Hollywood, it is about our right to innovate and start a new business," he said.

"What we are offering is a smarter, faster and more secure way of cloud storage and we are fully assured by our legal team that we are in compliance with the law."

The press conference, which was also streamed online, included a reenactment of the police raid, with men repelling down the sides of the house and a helicopter, with FBI emblazoned on the side, flying over the crowd.

Dotcom paid tribute to the support he's received from Kiwis in the year since his arrest on copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering charges related to the file-sharing site Megaupload.

"During the past year we had great support from New Zealanders; you have reached out to us and your voices have empowered us," he said.

Dotcom and his co-accused are still awaiting a court hearing to determine whether they will be extradited to the United States.

The extradition hearing, which has been delayed several times, is expected to take four weeks and is set down for August.

17.01 | 0 komentar | Read More