The president of a militant anti-whaling group has vowed to ‘do whatever it takes’ to disrupt a Japanese fleet planning to harpoon nearly 1,000 whales in the waters off Antarctica. Sea Shepherd, notorious for its aggressive tactics, has two ships and one helicopter stalking the Japanese vessels in the Ross Sea, south-east of Australia. Japan, which has been whaling in the area since mid-December, aims to catch up to 935 minke whales and 10 endangered fin whales this summer, supposedly for scientific research purposes. The Canadian-based conservation group, which Japan has denounced as an ‘eco-terrorist’ organisation, is promising a major confrontation. But first it has to find the fleet, which it says is using a new satellite tracking system to elude it. Sea Shepherd has offered a $25,000 (£13,000) reward to anyone who can provide the ships’ coordinates. It has also appealed to the New Zealand government, whose air force has filmed the fleet, it believes. But it has not yet received ‘anything conclusive’, Paul Watson, the group’s president and founder said yesterday. ‘We’ve covered a lot of ground so far,’ said Mr Watson, the captain of the flagship vessel Farley Mowat. ‘But it’s a large […]
NEW YORK — One in six Americans frequently have difficulty falling asleep, and 4.5 percent of them use some type of alternative medicine to treat their sleeping problems, a new study shows. ‘Most respondents who used herbal therapies or relaxation techniques found these therapies helpful for managing their insomnia or trouble sleeping,’ Dr. Nancy J. Pearson and colleagues from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland report in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Pearson and her team analyzed information from the 2002 National Health Interview Survey to find out how common sleeping difficulties were and how often people used alternative techniques to treat them. Of those surveyed, 17.4 percent reported that, over the past 12 months, they regularly had difficulty falling asleep or suffered from insomnia. The researchers found that 4.5 percent of those with sleeping troubles, or an estimated 1.6 million people, are using complementary and alternative medicine to help themselves sleep better. Herbs and relaxation exercises were the remedies most commonly used. About 60 percent of those who used alternative medicine for insomnia said they told their doctor they had done so. Alternative medicine use was more common among […]
MANAGUA — Cuba plans to send doctors and medicine to Nicaragua, extending its so-called medical diplomacy to the new government of leftist President Daniel Ortega, a longtime ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Cuba’s top diplomat in Nicaragua, Manuel Guillot, said on Wednesday the doctors would work along the Caribbean coast, the most impoverished part of a country second only to Haiti as the poorest in the Americas. He gave no more details but said the region had been ‘effectively abandoned in terms of sanitation.’ Castro, who has been seriously ill since intestinal surgery last year, has sent tens of thousands of Cuban doctors and dentists to help the poor in other nations, helping win friends for his communist government. Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla, was a close ally of Castro during the 1980s, when he led a Sandinista government that fought U.S.-backed rebels in Nicaragua’s fierce civil war. Cuba backed Ortega’s ambitious adult literacy drive after the Sandinistas took power in a 1979 revolution, although the civil war and a U.S. blockade eventually wrecked the economy. Ortega won Nicaragua’s presidential election last November, completing a remarkable comeback more than 16 years after voters […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
