Tacos

Former dolphin trainer, Ric O’Barry, from the ’60s TV series Flipper has filmed a new documentary titled The Cove revealing a secret cove in Japan where fisherman kill 23,000 dolphins and porpoises each year.

They battle Japanese police and fisherman to gain access to a cove in Taiji, Japan, where barbed wire blocks people from filming dolphin killings that begin in September each year.

The documentary opens in the United States on Friday but has yet to receive distribution in Japan, where O’Barry says 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are legally killed each year.

The Japanese government said it has done nothing wrong and cites cultural differences in response to the film.

Dolphin meat is eaten by a very small percentage of Japanese people.

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“The film is about leading an ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ kind of team into this secret cove to try to reveal its dark secrets,” said Psihoyos, referring to the popular Hollywood film about a top notch team who break into impossible places. “It was extremely scary.”

But it largely examines environmental issues, including Japan’s efforts to persuade the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to lift a ban on commercial whaling introduced in 1986. The ban does not apply to smaller cetaceans including dolphins.

It argues that toxic waste dumped into the ocean has caused higher levels of mercury poisoning found in larger species of ocean life, including dolphins.

A spokeswoman for the Japanese embassy in Washington, Izumi Yamanaka, said in an e-mail the area surrounding Taiji had traditional dietary habits of eating dolphin meat and that Japan adhered to IWC rules.

“The Japanese government believes that it is most important to recognize national and cultural differences,” she said.

A challenger has appeared! Competing with Malaysia’s anti-piracy dogs comes South Korea’s six drug-sniffing dogs cloned from a single Labrador:

South Korea has put cloned dogs on patrol to sniff out drugs at customs. Six genetic duplicates of a single Labrador retriever have been working at the country’s main Incheon international airport and three other customs checkpoints to deter drug smuggling after completing 16 months of training, the Korea Customs Service said in a statement Sunday.

They are part of a litter of seven born in 2007 through cloning a skilled drug-sniffing canine in active service. They were all named “Toppy” — a combination of the words “tomorrow” and “puppy” — but one dropped out of training due to an injury.

The cloning work was conducted by a team of Seoul National University scientists who in 2005 successfully created the world’s first known dog clone, an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

Leading the team was Prof. Lee Byeong-chun, who was a key aide to disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk, whose purported breakthroughs in stem cell research were revealed as false.

But independent tests later proved the team’s dog cloning was genuine.

The agency has said using clones could help reduce costs due to the difficulties in finding dogs who are up to snuff for the critical task of sniffing out contraband. Only about three out every 10 naturally born dogs it trains end up qualifying for the job.

In a surprise — possible questionable or at least very silly — move, U.S. Senators Sam Brownback and Mary Landrieu have introduced the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act of 2009.

“This legislation works to ensure that our society recognizes the dignity and sacredness of human life,” said Brownback. “Creating human-animal hybrids, which permanently alter the genetic makeup of an organism, will challenge the very definition of what it means to be human and is a violation of human dignity and a grave injustice.”

The Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act would ban the creation of human-animal hybrids. Human-animal hybrids are defined as those part-human, part-animal creatures, which are created in laboratories, and blur the line between species. The bill is modest in scope and only affects efforts to blur the genetic lines between animals and humans. It does not preclude the use of animals or humans in legitimate research or health care where genetic material is not passed on to future generations, such as the use of a porcine heart valve in a human patient or the use of a lab rat with human diseases to develop treatments.

Brownback continued, “This legislation is both philosophical and practical as it has a direct bearing upon the very essence of what it means to be human, and it draws a bright line with respect to how far we can go in attempting to create new creatures made with genes from both humans and animals.

This is an outrage! How am I and so many other proud Americans suppose to get our very own catgirl with a legislative move like this looming overhead? Unemployment is rising, troops are leaving Iraq only to be sent to Afghanistan, our new president can’t throw a pitch to save his life, but trying to ban the creation of catgirls is a high priority for over 20 U.S. Senators. Seriously!? Was Mew Mew Power a little too frightening for you?

I, for one, say this injustice needs to be tossed out faster than Nancy Pelosi smacking down Michael Jackson. How else am I going to raise money in my secret plot to build a weather controlling device to take over the world than by raising litters of catgirls to wear sexy clothes and be forced to work at my chain of “family friendly” restaurants around the world? Money doesn’t grow on trees and this job market isn’t going to be getting much better in the near future.

Tell Brownback & Landrieu to do something better with their time and save the catgirls!

Ladies and gentleman, may I present the world’s most insane men…

Almost three-quarters of South Korean male office workers feel uncomfortable when female colleagues show too much leg or cleavage in the workplace, a survey has revealed.

A poll of 1,254 employees by the job portal site CareerNet found that 74 percent of men felt upset with the attire of their female co-workers.

Some 56 percent of them cited micro-miniskirts as their chief complaint, while 51 percent objected to excessive cleavage.

Low-rise trousers that reveal women’s underwear, “killer heels” and flashy outfits in general were also cause for complaint.

Women meanwhile complained mostly of stains on the shirts and ties of their male colleagues.

Both sexes disapproved of colourful underwear under a white top, slippers or sandals and sleeveless clothes.

South Koreans in general still dress conservatively in the workplace, with an emphasis on suits and ties among men.

I thank god every day that I live in America where dressing consevatively has died a little more every year since the last world war. All female South Korean workers wishing to wear their “killer heels”, micro-miniskirts, and flashy outfits in general are more than welcome to apply for a job here.

In order to combat poachers who steal sea turtle eggs to sell to restaurants, the Thai Navy has set up a conservation center to protect the sea turtle eggs. I know from experience spending several summers in the Florida islands that baby sea turtles need assistance. From making sure a nest is marked so it isn’t disturbed to shining flashlights toward the water after dusk so the baby turtles can find their way across the beach, everyone volunteers their free time to protect sea turtles.

All week I’ve been watching The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien — Dear Colbert god, please don’t smite me. On the positive side, Conan hasn’t changed too much since moving to LA and an earlier timeslot. On the odd side, I keep thinking the background behind Conan looks a little weird. You know, it seems almost familiar in some ways. It appears that Conan and others agree.

(Dear Hulu, don’t offer embed options for your video clips if you’re not going to let us actually post the video clip outside of Hulu. P.S., your TV commercials suck!)

We have dogs for drugs and bombs, should pirated DVDs be any surprise?

A DVD-sniffing anti-piracy dog named Paddy has uncovered a huge cache of 35,000 discs in Malaysian warehouses, many destined for export to Singapore, industry officials said on Wednesday.

The black Labrador helped enforcement officials who carried out raids last week in southern Johor state which neighbours Singapore, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) said in a statement.

Paddy was given to Malaysia by the MPA to help close down piracy syndicates who churn out vast quantities of illegal DVDs. The dog is specially trained to detect chemicals in the discs.

“Paddy led enforcement officers on a successful weekend operation to shut down the supply lines of pirated movie DVDs in the Malaysian state of Johor,” the MPA said in a statement.

“Post-raid investigations revealed that two of the targets were actively involved in exporting pirated DVDs to Singapore,” it added.

The raids carried out by officials from the MPA and Malaysia’s trade and consumer affairs ministry shut down six warehouses storing pirated products, it said.

The MPA said just-released titles such as “Terminator Salvation”, “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian”, “Angels and Demons” and “Star Trek” were among the movies seized.

It should come as no surprise that China has been moving to block multiple websites from its citizens as the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protest on June 4th approaches:

China is blocking access to Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, and its Hotmail email service, the company said ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

“Microsoft’s Bing.com, Live.com and Hotmail.com are among several Internet services that have been blocked for customers in China,” Microsoft director of public affairs Kevin Kutz said in a statement received by AFP.

“We are reaching out to the government to understand this decision and find a way to move forward,” Kutz said.

“Microsoft is committed to helping advance the free flow of information, and is committed to encouraging transparency, due process and rule of law when it comes to Internet governance,” he added.

Microsoft did not say when China began blocking the sites, but Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said it had been notified by Chinese Web users that access to the websites began being blocked inside China on Tuesday.

“Reporters Without Borders is outraged by the blockage of a dozen websites such as Twitter, YouTube, Bing, Flickr, Opera, Live, Wordpress and Blogger in China,” the media rights group said in a statement.

“The Chinese government stops at nothing to silence what happened 20 years ago in Tiananmen Square,” it said. “By blocking access to a dozen websites used daily by millions of Chinese citizens, the authorities have opted for censorship at any price rather than accept a debate about this event.”

Several years ago a professor of mine was trying to explain to the class the concept of living inside China where the media is tightly controlled. To understand this, he used “Tank Man” of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest as an example search using Yahoo! Images. Outside of China, you will quickly get multiple sources offering the famous picture of a man challenging a column of four tanks. However, inside China this search would return zero results. Why? Because talk of revolution and protesting the Chinese government is forbidden.

So, what would the next generation of Chinese children be like when they came of age in a world with tight government control and policies such as the one child policy? Web-savvy & cynical just like Generation X & Y everywhere else, of course. (more…)

Glowing monkeys are all the rage right now in Japan with this possible first step to curing diseases such as Parkinson’s and ALS. As the technology advances, we’ll probably start to see this crossover into the consumer world as money is what makes the world go round. We already create designer pets and clone animals, is it too much to ask for a catgirl?

Japanese researchers have genetically engineered monkeys whose hair roots, skin and blood glow green under a special light, and who have passed on their traits to their offspring, the first time this has been achieved in a primate.

They spliced a jellyfish gene into common marmosets, and said on Wednesday they hope to use their colony of glowing animals to study human Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS.

Erika Sasaki and Hideyuki Okano of the Keio University School of Medicine in Japan used a virus to carry the gene for green fluorescent protein into monkey embryos, which were implanted into a female monkey, and four out of five were born with the gene throughout their bodies.

One fathered a healthy baby that also carried the new genes, they reported in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

“The birth of this transgenic marmoset baby is undoubtedly a milestone,” stem cell expert Dr. Gerald Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and Shoukhrat Mitalipov, of Oregon Health and Sciences University, wrote in a commentary in Nature.

“Transgenic marmosets are potentially useful models for research into infectious diseases, immunology and neurological disorders, for example,” they wrote.