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Tsunami-Tossed Boat

Category: , By News Updater

A tsunami-tossed boat tossed by giant waves lies atop a building in the city of Otsuchi in northern Japan on May 7, 2011.

The day after the earthquake struck, Mayama was in the city of Yamato documenting the destruction when a woman approached him and led him to the mangled wreck of a car where her dead daughter was trapped.

Despite the devastation around them and no help in sight, she and her husband couldn't leave, and she continued to brush the girl's hair with a comb. "I could see only the hair," Mayama said. "She said it's my daughter, it's my daughter."

The woman explained that she had approached Mayama because she wanted him to take pictures to document their loss. "I've never forgotten that," Mayama said.

One year later, Mayama said he is still searching for the woman so he can give her the photographs.
 

Arrest after BPAS abortion advice service site hacked

Category: , By News Updater
A man suspected of computer hacking is being questioned by police after the website of one of Britain's largest abortion providers was accessed.

The 27-year-old claims to have links to hacktivist group Anonymous.

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) said no medical or personal information relating to women who had received treatment had been accessed.

But it took out a court injunction after details of people who requested information was compromised.

Police said they were alerted to allegations that the BPAS website had been hacked on Thursday.

Claims later appeared on Twitter that the culprit had accessed the names of women who had undergone terminations and was threatening to release them into the public domain.
'Rapid action'

The suspect was arrested on suspicion of offences under the Computer Misuse Act during the early hours of Friday, Scotland Yard said.

He is in custody at a West Midlands Police station after being arrested at a property in Wednesbury, West Midlands by officers from the Metropolitan Police's central e-Crime unit.

Det Insp Mark Raymond from the Met's e-Crime Unit said: "We have taken rapid action to identify and arrest a suspect involved in hacking. This was done to prevent personal details of people who had requested information from the BPAS website being made public.

"It should be stressed that the stolen data did not contain the medical details of women who had received treatment or why individuals had contacted the British Pregnancy Advisory Service."

BPAS said in a statement: "The website does store details (names, addresses and phone numbers) of people who have requested information from BPAS via the website, including those making personal inquiries as well as health and education professionals, the media and students.

"These may have been inquiries relating to contraception, pregnancy, abortion, STI testing and sterilisation. Relevant authorities were informed and appropriate legal action taken to prevent the dissemination of any information obtained from the website.

"While the confidentiality of women receiving treatment was never in danger, this episode was taken very seriously indeed."

BPAS is a non-statutory abortion provider and has a number of clinics across the country.

It also provides counselling for unplanned pregnancy and abortion treatment and gives advice about contraception, sexually transmitted infection testing and sterilisation.
 

What will be the true cost of London 2012?

Category: , By News Updater
It was only 10 days ago Olympics Minister Hugh Robertson declared that recent worries over the London 2012 budget were subsiding.

Pointing to the £500m of contingency untouched in the last three months, Robertson said he was as confident as he could be that the Games would not exceed the £9.3bn public sector funding package.


Today's report by the Public Accounts Committee seems to agree with him, with PAC chair Margaret Hodge insisting the Games are "on track to be delivered on time and within budget".

But then the report also contradicts that assessment by arguing that the true cost of the Games could be nearer £11bn once the £766m price tag for buying the Olympic Park land and £826m of legacy projects are taken into account.

Of course, it is not the first time we have heard this argument. And many people find it hard to understand why some elements of public expenditure fall within the £9.3bn funding package while others do not.

For example, there will inevitably be security costs beyond the £475m set aside in the Olympic budget. If that money comes out of the Metropolitan Police or Home Office budgets, should that be considered an Olympic cost?

And what of the funds spent by other government departments, such as the Foreign Office, whose job it will be to look after visiting dignitaries and heads of state. Is that an Olympic cost?

It used to be sufficient for the government to say the £9.3bn was an infrastructure budget, set up to pay for the venues of the Olympic Park.

But with that money now being used for so many different areas of the project - security, ceremonies and other operational requirements associated with the actual staging of the Games - that argument no longer holds.

So in that sense it is right that the PAC should question whether the real bill is much higher and to call for a full and thorough audit of all the public money that has been spent on putting on the Olympics when the Games are over.

On the two specific points raised by the PAC, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport is clear that they should be treated separately to the £9.3bn.

It says the £766m for the land acquisition will be repaid once the site is sold after the Games. Less convincingly perhaps, it argues that the £826m for legacy projects comes from "existing business as usual" budgets.

Most people will look at all this and find it meaningless to quibble over which department is spending what on the Olympics. Ultimately, it all comes from the same source and "Olympo-cynics", as Boris Johnson calls them, will say it is money that should not have been spent at all, especially when there is such a squeeze on the public finances.

The PAC report also flags up concerns about the pressure on the budget of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog), which was always supposed to be a separate and entirely privately-funded enterprise.

But almost £1bn of public money is now being spent through this committee (Locog), while the PAC says the government, as the ultimate guarantor, could end up on the hook for even more money.

With this in mind, it is still worrying that, despite all this taxpayers' money being pumped into the Locog, it remains subject to less scrutiny than government departments and publicly funded bodies like, say, the Olympic Delivery Authority.

Locog has already been heavily criticised by the London Assembly for being overly secretive on the controversial issue of ticketing. Perhaps the time has come for London 2012 officials to become much more open with us.
 

World seabird numbers still falling, says a new review

Category: , , By News Updater
Almost half of the world's seabirds have populations that are thought to be in decline, according to a new review.

The study, published in Bird Conservation International, found that 28% of species are considered to be in the highest categories of risk.

Conservationists are particularly concerned by the albatross family.

Threats to the birds include commercial fishing and damage to breeding colonies caused by rats and other invasive species.



Seabirds make up just a small proportion (3.5%) of the world's bird species. But researchers say they are an important indicator of the health of the oceans.

The review, carried out by BirdLife International, found that of 346 species, 47% are known or suspected to be in decline.

It says that seabirds are now more threatened than any other group of birds.

Prof John Croxall, Chair of BirdLife's Global Seabird Programme, told the BBC: "They are top predators in their marine systems. The fact that almost a third are globally threatened should really be telling us something about how we need to look after where they occur to breed on land and where they go to feed in the ocean."

BirdLife assesses the threat status of seabirds on behalf of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which compiles the internationally-recognised Red List. On that list, 5% of seabirds are in the highest category of Critically Endangered.

One of those is the Balearic shearwater, which can be found in UK waters in the summer.

The review also found that 17 out of 22 species of the albatross family are threatened with extinction.

Conservationists say commercial fishing is one of the key threats to seabirds with large numbers killed as a bycatch in nets and on lines.

Another is the impact that invasive species such as rats and feral cats have on breeding colonies, either damaging habitats or eating chicks and eggs.

Some of the most important breeding colonies are on remote islands in UK overseas territories. Last year an Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) project, part-funded by the UK Government, carried out a programme to eradicate rats on Henderson Island in the South Pacific.

Helicopters guided by GPS dropped rat poison pellets on the island, which is the only known breeding site of the endangered Henderson petrel.

Grahame Madge of the RSPB said: "Without projects like this, these seabirds would have a finite life. On Henderson Island the rats were bringing birds towards extinction."

A pilot study is being carried out to look at the feasibility of removing mice from another important breeding site, Gough Island in the South Atlantic.


 

ends whaling season short of quota

Category: , , By News Updater
Japan has ended its whaling season with less than a third of its annual target, said the country's Fisheries Agency.

The whaling ships headed home from the Antarctic Ocean this week with 266 minke whales and one fin whale, said the agency on Friday.

This is far short of the quota of about 900 set when they began the hunt in December 2011.

Japan's fleet sails south to the Antarctic in the autumn each year, returning the following spring.

There has been a ban on commercial whaling for 25 years, but Japan catches about 1,000 whales each year in what it says is a scientific research programme.



Critics say it is commercial whaling in another guise.

Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd which follows the Japanese fleet south every year in a bid to disrupt its hunt announced on its website on Thursday that the whalers had left the Southern Ocean.

There have been several clashes between the activists and whalers in the past months.

In January, three activists said they suffered cuts and bruises after clashing with a Japanese ship, the Yushin Maru No 2, about 300 miles north of Mawson Peninsula off the coast of Antarctica.

The Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), which sponsors Japan's whaling activities, said the activists were trying to ''sabotage'' the Yushin Maru, throwing ropes with hooks attached and also hurling glass bottles of paint.

The vessel was one of the security ships escorting the whaling fleet.

The week before the incident, Japan handed three anti-whaling activists who had boarded a whaling support ship back to Australian authorities.

"The catch was smaller than planned due to factors including weather conditions and sabotage acts by activists," AFP news agency quoted an agency official said. "There were definitely sabotage campaigns behind the figure."

The agency said the fleet had departed "as scheduled".