Vancouver, British Columbia — Tens of thousands of people have signed online petitions for the release of environmentalist Paul Watson, the controversial activist arrested in Greenland on an extradition request by the Japanese government.

Watson’s latest legal journey started July 21 in Nuuk, Greenland, when he was arrested aboard his foundation’s ship, the John Paul DeJoria.

His arrest and extradition appear to be tied to alleged actions in 2010 against the Japanese whaling vessel Shonan Maru 2.

For the past several decades, Watson has been known to take severe measures, including the ramming and disabling of whaling ships, to stop the commercial harvesting of whales. Many of the ships were from Japan. He also gained further notoriety as the focus of the reality TV series “Whale Wars.”

The John Paul DeJoria’s captain, Lockhart MacLean, said it made a regular stop for provisions when Danish national police came aboard after a friendly visit by Greenlandic police. Greenland is a territory of Denmark.

“So, these were police that had been flown in from Copenhagen, came on board, and they had a very different attitude,” MacLean said. “They’re much more, much more aggressive and firm, and obviously, within a few minutes, they had taken Paul Watson in cuffs into a van, off the ship.”

MacLean said the ship will continue to travel via the Panama Canal into the Pacific Ocean in an effort to stop Japanese whaling.  

Watson, a 73-year-old Canadian American, has been arrested many times.

Among the original members of Greenpeace, created in 1972 in Vancouver, he split from that organization five years later to form the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Under that group, he garnered worldwide headlines for ramming whaling ships at sea. He formed the Captain Paul Watson Foundation in 2022.

Rex Weyler was the director of the original Greenpeace and co-founded Greenpeace International in 1979.

He says Watson’s arrests usually strengthen his cause.

“Paul Watson being arrested is one of his tactics, and it was one of our tactics at Greenpeace, which is to challenge what the whalers or sealers or other extractors of ecological resources were doing,” Weyler said. “And if they wanted to arrest us, that’s fine, because when they arrest us, it only heightens the story. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”

For Teale Phelps Bondaroff, research director of OceansAsia, Watson’s arrest was a surprise. Bondaroff, who has worked for Sea Shepherd in the past, said the arrest shows that commercial harvesting of whales still exists.

“Anything like this draws attention to the issue. One of the things I find is interesting is a lot of folks, when you talk about whaling, see it as something of the past and aren’t aware of the fact that there are still countries that are whaling today,” Bondaroff said.

MacLean said because of Watson’s age, a 15-year prison sentence in Japan would amount to a life sentence. He hopes that a freed Watson will manage to rejoin them on their campaign against Japanese whaling.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry was asked to comment on this story through the Japanese Embassy in Ottawa but did not respond.
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Warsaw, POLAND — Poland on Tuesday signed a $10 billion deal to buy 96 Apache attack helicopters from U.S. manufacturer Boeing in an upgrade to the country’s military capabilities.

Poland has sharply accelerated the modernization of its armed forces since Russia’s full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in 2022.

“This is the landmark purchase by Poland for its armed forces of … 96 state-of-the-art AH-64E Apache attack helicopters,” Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz told reporters.

“Today we are taking a milestone in the transformation and equipping of the army,” he added, speaking at the Inowroclaw air base, where the Apaches are to be stationed.

The deal is the latest in a string of contracts signed by Poland with the United States in recent days.

On Friday, Warsaw announced a deal to buy hundreds of AIM-120C AMRAAM air-to-air missiles. On Monay there was a contract to build 48 launchers for the U.S.-designed Patriot air defense systems.

Poland, a staunch ally of Ukraine, has announced it would spend more than 4% of its annual economic output on defense this year — twice NATO’s target of 2%.

The Ukraine war has also solidified the relationship between the United States and Poland, a country on NATO’s eastern flank that sees Washington as one of its main allies.

The Apache helicopter sale was approved last year by the U.S. State Department and Congress.

The deal “changes the face of the Polish army’s operations and complements” previous purchases, Kosiniak-Kamysz said, pointing notably at the Abrams tanks that Poland bought in the past years.

According to the Polish government, the Apaches are designed to work with the tanks.

“For the Abrams, the Apache is an essential element,” Kosiniak-Kamysz said.

In 2022, Poland bought 250 Abrams tanks in a modern M1A2 variant, which are expected to be delivered later this year. It will be the first country outside the United States with the tanks.

The attack helicopter agreement also envisages providing the Polish army with maintenance equipment, technical and training support, flight simulators and spare parts.

“Offset, purchase, leasing, pilot training, technology, armament — it was all negotiated together. It’s a historic day for helicopter aviation,” Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Bejda said.

“These $10 billion are the insurance of our country, the insurance of our freedom,” Bejda added, saying that the Apaches would serve the Polish efforts to “deter those who have evil intentions.”

The first U.S.-made helicopters are to be delivered in 2028, but some Polish pilots have already begun training on them.

The Apaches will replace outdated Russian Mi-24 helicopters.
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LONDON — British authorities have arrested more than 1,000 people following days of rioting involving violence, arson and looting as well as racist attacks targeting Muslims and migrants, a national policing body said Tuesday. 

The riots, which followed the killings of three young girls in the northern English town of Southport, began after the July 29 attack was wrongly blamed on an Islamist migrant based on online misinformation. 

Violence broke out in cities across England and also in Northern Ireland, but there have been fewer instances of unrest since last week after efforts to identify those involved were ramped up.  

Many have been swiftly jailed, with some receiving long sentences. 

The National Police Chiefs’ Council said in its latest update that 1,024 had been arrested and 575 charged across the U.K. 

Those arrested include a 69-year-old accused of vandalism in Liverpool and an 11-year-old boy in Belfast. 

A 13-year-old girl pleaded guilty to violent disorder at Basingstoke Magistrates’ Court, prosecutors said, having been seen on July 31 punching and kicking the entrance to a hotel for asylum-seekers. 

“This alarming incident will have caused genuine fear amongst people who were being targeted by these thugs — and it is particularly distressing to learn that such a young girl participated in this violent disorder,” prosecutor Thomas Power said. 

The last time Britain witnessed widespread rioting was in 2011, when the fatal shooting of a Black man by police triggered several days of street violence. 

Fast and tough judicial action was viewed as helping quell the unrest in 2011, when around 4,000 people were arrested over several weeks.
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San Diego, Calif. — Belarus sentenced two more journalists to prison last week in what media groups say is a continuation of a crackdown on media since the contested 2020 election and protest movement. 

A court in the city of Mogilev sentenced freelance reporter Ales Sabaleuski to four years in prison and cameraman Yauhen Hlushkou to three years on extremism-related charges. Both were also ordered to pay fines of $2,450, according to media watchdogs. 

The charges are linked to the journalists’ work with the independent news outlet 6TV Bielarus, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ. Belarus had earlier labeled 6TV Bielarus as an extremist group. 

Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, condemned the closed-door trial that took place last Wednesday, calling the Belarusian judicial system “rigged.” 

The sentences are “yet another example of the Belarusian authorities’ relentless harassment of members of the press,” she said in a statement. 

Belarus-based human rights groups, including Viasna, issued a statement calling on authorities to release the journalists, and to stop using prosecution to limit rights and freedoms. 

Media and civil liberties groups say Belarusian authorities have used arrests and prison to target critics and opposition voices since the 2020 disputed presidential election. Mass protests spread across Belarus that year, after President Alexander Lukashenko was voted in for a sixth term. 

The election had been widely seen as fraudulent, with opposition leaders imprisoned or threatened. 

Belarus has since arrested dozens of journalists and labeled several media outlets as extremist organizations. 

Data collected by Viasna show thousands of politically motivated arrests in the past four years, with at least 1,385 still imprisoned. CPJ additionally found 28 journalists imprisoned in Belarus for their work as of late 2023. That makes Belarus the third-worst jailer of journalists in the world, after China and Myanmar, the watchdog says. 

The press office of the Belarus Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to VOA’s request for comment. 

Among those detained are Ihar Losik and Andrey Kuznechyk, who worked for VOA sister network, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

On the four-year anniversary of the election on Friday, the Belarusian Association of Journalists issued a joint statement with other watchdogs, calling on authorities to release all jailed media workers. 

“Lukashenko’s regime has been crushing free speech and stripping journalists of their freedom for too long,” the statement said. 

“We demand the immediate and unconditional release of our unjustly imprisoned colleagues, and express our solidarity with those who were forced to flee their country and still have to live in fear abroad. Belarusian authorities must stop harassing and intimidating journalists.”

Belarus ranks 167 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index and is considered one of the most dangerous countries in Europe to be a journalist.
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Ukraine took the fight to Russia in recent days, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed on Monday his army’s move to “push the war out into the aggressor’s territory” with attacks in Russia’s Kursk region. VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from Washington.
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ROME — Archaeologists in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii have discovered the remains of two more victims of the volcanic eruption almost 2,000 years ago.

The skeleton of a man and a woman were found in a small, makeshift bedroom in a villa which was being restructured when the eruption struck, the Pompeii archeological site said in a statement Monday.

The woman was lying on a bed with gold, silver and bronze coins around her, along with jewelry including gold and pearl earrings. The man lay at the foot of the bed.

The once-thriving city of Pompeii, near Naples, and the surrounding countryside was submerged by volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius exploded in 79 AD.

The eruption killed thousands of Romans who had no idea they were living beneath one of Europe’s biggest volcanoes which buried the city in a thick layer of ash, preserving many of its residents and buildings.

The latest victims discovered had chosen the small room as a refuge, waiting for the end of the rain of rock fragments which had blocked the door and prevented them from escaping.

They were eventually buried under the flow of lava and other boiling hot material from the volcano, the statement said.

“The opportunity to analyze the invaluable anthropological data on the two victims … allows us to recover a considerable amount of data on the daily life of ancient Pompeians,” site director Gabriel Zuchtriegel said.

Ancient Pompeii, rediscovered only in the 16th century, has in recent years seen a burst of archaeological activity aimed at halting decades of decay and neglect.
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San Marino, a landlocked independent republic surrounded by Italy, has been subject to scrutiny due to reports this year highlighting its ties to Russia. Although its officials deny wrongdoing, European Union regulators have expressed concerns that San Marino’s financial services sector could provide a back door into the EU trade bloc for illegal money from Russia. Henry Wilkins reports from San Marino.
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dubai, united arab emirates — Iran has put its long-range Mohajer-10 drones on display at a defense exhibit in Russia, Iran’s official news agency reported Monday. 

U.S. officials have accused Iran of sending drones to Russia, including the Mohajer-10’s predecessor, the Mohajer-6, that Moscow had used in its invasion of Ukraine. Tehran denies this. 

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency said the more advanced system was being shown at the Army 2024 International Military-Technical Forum, an event that runs from Monday to Wednesday in Patriot Park outside Russia’s capital. 

The report came as the Middle East braces for Iran’s threatened retaliation against Israel after the killing of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31. 

Iran released details of the Mohajer-10 system in August last year, saying it had an enhanced flight-range duration and could carry a greater payload. 

A video accompanying that report showed the drone alongside other military hardware, with text saying “prepare your shelters” in both Hebrew and Persian. 

According to Iranian media reports, the drone has an operational range of 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) and can fly for up to 24 hours. Its payload can reach 300 kilograms (661 pounds), double the capacity of the Mohajer-6, the reports have added. 
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