SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Japanese whalers on Tuesday celebrated what they described as a court victory in the US to end years of high seas clashes with anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd, which immediately vowed to fight on.

The arch enemies have waged a legal and public relations battle as Sea Shepherd has sought to disrupt an annual whale hunt in the Antarctic that Japan defends as scientific research.

However, the settlement between the US-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Japan's whaling body is unlikely to end the dispute as operations in Antarctic waters are mostly carried out by Sea Shepherd Australia, which does not come under the ruling.

[...] Sea Shepherd played down any suggestion of a global agreement, saying the settlement only applied to its US arm and that other branches, including its Australian office, would keep fighting.

"The ruling in the US courts affects ONLY our US entity," the group's global chief executive Alex Cornelissen said in a statement.

[...] Japan claims it conducts vital scientific research using a loophole in an international whaling ban, but makes no secret that the mammals ultimately end up on dinner plates.

It was forced to call off the 2014-2015 hunt after the United Nations' top court, the International Court of Justice, ruled in 2014 that its annual mission to the Antarctic was a commercial hunt masquerading as science.

The hunt resumed at the end of 2015, with the fleet returning to Japan in March of this year after having killed more than 300 of the mammals.

Original Submission