Scotland considers tougher legal controls to protect birds of prey
September 23rd, 2010 by Grace
Ministers in Scotland are considering tougher legal controls to protect birds of prey on grouse moors as a new study claimed that last year was one of the worst for persecution of the wild predators by gamekeepers on record.
Senior ministers and officials in the Scottish government are closely studying proposals to licence grouse moors and make moor owners personally liable for the actions of their gamekeepers. The proposals, being studied in a new wildlife bill, could also mean that inspectors with Scotland's leading animal welfare charity would be given greater legal powers to investigate bird of prey cases – instead of the police.
The new measures were discussed by MSPs at the Scottish parliament as the RSPB claimed that 2009 was the second worst year for reported persecution cases across the UK in the last 20 years.
Its annual Birdcrime report said there 384 reported incidents involving poisoning, shooting, illegal trapping and nest disturbance against legally protected birds of prey last year. It said only cases reported in 2007 were higher, at 389 cases. The charity acknowledged that not all these reported cases were proven, but said there had been 85 confirmed incidents of poisoning and 32 confirmed cases of shooting against rare birds of prey such as golden eagles, sea eagles, red kites, buzzards, hen harriers and peregrines.
Leading landowners' organisations have repeatedly condemned the practice but last year there were 119 proven cases of persecution, compared to 89 in 2008 and a record 129 in 2007 across the UK. Many reported cases go unproven due to a lack of evidence.
Mark Avery, the RSPB's UK conservation director, said: "Wildlife crimes are an abhorrent feature of our countryside. We have to take more action to consign these crimes to history. Over time, egg collecting has diminished, but the killing of birds of prey is as big a threat today as it was two decades ago."
Avery urged UK ministers to introduce new powers of "vicarious liability" where landowners in England can be prosecuted for illegal persecution by their employees – similar to health and safety legislation which makes company directors liable for safety breaches in workplaces. This proposal is opposed by Scottish landowners groups who say existing laws are adequate but should be better enforced.
Similar powers are now being studied by Scottish ministers in the devolved government in Edinburgh for inclusion in a new wildlife and natural environment bill now going through the Scottish parliament.
Meanwhile, MSPs on the Scottish parliament's environment committee were urged by the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals (SSPCA) to give them added powers to investigate bird of prey persecution – a measure supported by the RSPB.
Unlike its English counterpart, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), the SSPCA already has authority to report alleged cases of cruelty against domestic and farm animals directly to prosecutors, independent of the police.
It now wants the same legal authority to investigate cases where birds of prey are shot, poisoned or illegally trapped to be introduced in the new bill.
The new measures were heavily criticised yesterday by Sheriff Kevin Drummond QC, a judge expert in wildlife crime. He told the environment committee the existing laws on wildlife crime were already very complex and unwieldy and suggested further powers would further confuse the situation.
He said giving SSPCA inspectors, who were members of a charity, further powers and making employers liable for illegal acts by gamekeepers raised substantial questions about liberty, standards of evidence, and their supervision by the state.
"This whole subject has to be looked at in the context of criminal law, the presumption of innocence, the concept of reasonable doubt and the rules of evidence. That sometimes gets lost sight off in the environmental point of view," he said.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
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Missing sailor found inside shark off Jaws beach
September 16th, 2010 by Grace
The remains of a sailor who disappeared off Jaws beach in the Bahamas, where the final film in the Jaws franchise was filmed, have been found inside a tiger shark.
Authorities used fingerprints to identify Judson Newton, who was last seen on 29 August swimming for shore after his boat's engine stalled, as the body found inside the 3.6 metre (12ft) fish's belly.
An investment banker on a deep-sea fishing trip caught the shark on 4 September. He said a left leg came out of its mouth as it was hauled on to his boat. When police sliced the belly open they found a right leg, two arms and a torso.
Authorities were awaiting DNA test results before formally identifying Newton, said Hulan Hanna, the assistant police commissioner.
Newton, a 43-year-old sailor and part-time chef, was on a boating trip with friends off Jaws beach on New Providence island when the vessel had engine trouble. Three people remained on board while Newton and a friend swam to shore. Neither was seen again and they were presumed drowned.
One of Newton's friends, Samuel Woodside, 37, told AP he had doubted the drowning theory. "To me, he was always a strong swimmer. I don't know what happened."
Woodside said he and Newton were childhood friends and went fishing almost every weekend when Newton wasn't working on cargo boats or in restaurants. "He was a sailor, you see. Anywhere where he could get a fishing line, he would go there."
Films such as Thunderball and Into the Blue have been shot in the waters around New Providence but it was Jaws: The Revenge which is understood to have given its name to the beach on the western strand.
The third sequel to Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic, Jaws, features a giant great white shark which stalks the Brody family down the US Atlantic seaboard to the Caribbean. The tagline was: "This time it's personal".
Michael Caine played a washed up, amiable pilot named Hoagie who has a romance with Ellen Brody, widow of the character played by Roy Scheider in the original. The British actor claimed he never saw the film, panned by critics as one of the worst ever made, but that he had seen the house it bought and it was beautiful.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
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Chernobyl - 24 years on
September 4th, 2010 by Grace
A ferris wheel and carousel abandoned in the amusement park in the ghost town of Prypyat, adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
24 years ago today, the world woke up to news of the Chernobyl disaster - the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. Our photo essay looks back at the event and its devastating consequences.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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Victory for anti-whaling campaigners
September 3rd, 2010 by Grace
The controversial attempt to scrap the 24-year-old international moratorium on commercial whaling collapsed yesterday, to the delight of anti-whaling campaigners and the frustration of Japan, Norway and Iceland, the three countries which continue to hunt whales in defiance of world opinion.
Delegates from the 88 member states of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), meeting in Agadir, Morocco, were unable to reach agreement, after two days of talks behind closed doors, on the three-year-old proposal to abandon the official whaling ban in exchange for smaller, agreed kills by the whaling states. Britain was part of a European Union group that strongly opposed the plan.
The issue is now off the agenda for at least a year, until the next meeting of the IWC, but the result was greeted as a triumph by some environment groups who feared that the deal would put the future of the great whales in jeopardy once again.
"We have won the battle to keep the ban in place, but we must continue to fight to win the war on all whaling," said the chief executive of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, Chris Butler-Stroud. "Yes, the moratorium still stands but we must not forget that Japan, Iceland and Norway continue to whale outside of the sanction of the IWC, and that is a situation that has to change. Their whaling activities must come to an end once and for all."
The leader of the British delegation at the talks, the Minister for the Marine Environment, Richard Benyon, said last night: "We in the UK have been consistently clear that any new agreement must reduce the numbers of whales that are killed each year with the aim of a complete phase-out of all commercial whaling. We could not support an agreement that did not have conservation at its heart."
However, the Japanese whaling commissioner Yasue Funayama, said her country had offered major concessions to reach a compromise and blamed anti-whaling countries that refused to accept the killing of a single animal. "We must rise above politics and engage in a broader perspective," she said.
The deal which failed yesterday was originally proposed by the United States, which was seeking agreement with Japan to secure whaling permissions for its Inuit native peoples in Alaska, without the Japanese making tit-fot-tat trouble because of American support for the moratorium – something which had happened in 2002.
It would have allowed commercial whaling to be legitimised once again for a period of 10 years, with official IWC "quotas" set for the number of whales which each country would catch.
The sweetener of the deal was that these numbers would supposedly be lower than the number of whales actually being killed by Japan, Norway and Iceland outside the IWC, a figure currently running at about 1,500 a year, so in the end whales as a whole would benefit.
But no quotas had actually been agreed, and many of the anti-whaling countries thought such a deal would be virtually impossible to police, besides opening up commercial whaling to potential new participants, such as South Korea.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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