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As the coconut dessicates, possibly terminally, John Winston Howard has uttered the D-word for, as far as I can tell, only the second time. (Here's my report of the first.)

It came in his virulent response to criticism of Australia's human rights record contained in the latest Amnesty International Annual Report (as I noted last week), where his use of fear for political purposes was compared to, among others, that of Omar al-Bashir.

Ah yes, the good old days of 1946. Japan was a ruined, beaten nation, humiliated after being forced to surrender at the conclusion of the Second World War. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were radioactive wrecks, Tokyo and many other cities devastated by more conventional bombing. The economy was ruined, the nation's infrastructure was ruined.

The Japanese people were starving. How to feed them until the nation's agriculture could be restored? The occupying powers (USA, UK, Australia etc... where does that sound familiar?) decided that the solution was to feed 'em whale!

"Any other scientific program in any other field that took this many samples without significant conclusions being reached would lose it's funding, and the same thing should happen here."

- Shane Rattenbury, Greenpeace International, on JARPA II (source: Greenpeace Defending the Whales blog, 30.5.07)

A few items relating to the gastronomic leg of the cetacean research cycle. Just in case you're contemplating researching some whale meat some time.

From National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition Saturday" of May 26, an audio report on the cooking of whale meat by the Inupiat people of Alaska's North Slope, a practice which is now safe until at least 2012.

Not on Youtube, but from Greenpeace and not embeddable here. "Whales After Dark", starring Australia's Malcolm Turnbull and New Zealand's Chris Carter.

View it here.

Greenpeace have set up a tent outside IWC59, where they are recording video blog entries for what they call the Whale Broadcasting Corporation. Their programming includes such items as "WBC News Update", "Good Morning Anchorage", and "Whales After Dark".

The latter sounds like a cetacean porn show, but Monday's premier episode was in fact a discussion panel including, among other luminaries, the Eastern Suburbs' very own John Howard mouthpiece, Malcolm Turnbull.

Aboriginal subsistence hunting of approximately 56 bowhead whales a year till 2012 has been approved on day two of IWC59.

Here's the background paper prepared for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Committee, and a paper submitted by Russia on behalf of the Chuktoka people. The "needs" statements for Japan and Greenland are yet to be discussed.

"We determined that addressing the challenges of energy security and sustainable development should be based on well-functioning markets that are progressively characterised by free and open trade, secure and transparent frameworks for investment, market-based price signals, market transparency, good governance and effective competition."

- Paragraph 5, The Darwin Declaration on Achieving Energy Security and Sustainable Development through Efficiency, Conservation and Diversity, 29.5.07