The 59th meeting of the International Whaling Commission begins today at the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage. I intend to focus on this over the next few days.

Some relevant links to follow:

• The IWC's 2007 meeting site
• Greenpeace "Defending The Whales" blog
• IFAW "Stop Whaling" website
• WWF
• Anchorage Daily News
• Alaskan TV news: ABC, NBC and CBS.

Amnesty International does some spectacular name-dropping in the following paragraph from the foreword to their 2007 Annual Report, released yesterday:

Two items in the past 24 hours about The Empire On Which The Sun Never Set Till Nighttime:

Hundreds of Indian Ocean islanders who were forcibly deported from their homeland by Britain 40 years ago won a battle yesterday which could see them set sail for an emotional return within days.

The court of appeal in London found the British government guilty of "abuse of power" for attempting to prevent the Chagos Islanders from reclaiming land leased from under their feet by Britain to the US in the 1960s.

Far more serious than the caviar pirates of the Caspian are the outlaws that have been operating off the coast of Somalia for a number of years. The situation is now so serious that the passage of humanitarian aid to thousands of Somalians is in jeopardy.

This from the World Food Programme:

21 May 2007 - WFP today appealed for high-level international action to stamp out piracy in waters off Somalia, warning that the flow of relief supplies to the country was under severe threat.

As I just discovered this morning, Al Jazeera has been putting news clips from its English channel onto Youtube for about two months now.

Maritime pirates have been romanticised over the years, whether it's Errol Flynn as Captain Blood, Johnny Depp as Keith Richards, or Captain Feathersword as The Fifth Wiggle. But the fact is that piracy happens on the high seas even today and it's a pretty nasty business.

Ever worried about all these new anti-terrorist laws? Ever worried that their wide-ranging discretionary powers would be used for entirely non-terrorism related reasons? Well, it happened in Australia this week.

The Australian cricket team was threatened with action under the Australian Passports Act 2005 if they went ahead with this September's planned tour of Zimbabwe.

There can be no bigger news story in California than that of the poor little rich girl being sent to jail in Los Angeles. Well, actually there is. It's the story of the two humpback whales that have swum 150 kilometres up the Sacramento River and are refusing to go back to the Pacific Ocean.

The San Francisco Chronicle

LG.Philips LCD Develops World’s First Flexible Color A4-Size E-Paper. As someone who probably prints out more PDFs than he should, this looks like a great invention to me.

The http://www.lgphilips-lcd.com/homeContain/jsp/eng/inv/inv101_j_e.jsp?BOAR...

JOHN HOWARD: Well the Government, through the Foreign Minister, has written to the organisation, Cricket Australia, instructing that the tour not go ahead. [..]

BARRIE CASSIDY: What is the legal basis for this? How can you put out that instruction?