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The Chinese fishing fleet is responsible for systemic illegal fishing and human rights abuses in countries bordering the Southwest Indian Ocean (SWIO), undercutting China’s claims of supporting sustainable development and thriving blue economies in the region, according to a new report published today by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF). All of the fishers interviewed by EJF who had worked on China’s tuna fleet in the SWIO reportedly experienced or witnessed some form of human rights abuses and/or illegal fishing.

China’s distant-water fleet (DWF) is by far the largest in the world, with a growing reputation of perpetrating egregious human rights abuses and illegal fishing. EJF has conducted extensive analysis of China’s DWF over years, revealing incontrovertible illegality and abuse.

EJF has been tracking the Chinese fleet since 2020, and has conducted multiple investigations into its illegal and unethical activities, including conducting 318 interviews with former crew who worked on at least one Chinese vessel, 96 of which were in the last 6 months. However, the extent of criminal abuses in the SWIO stands in particularly stark distinction to China’s professed interests in the region, it says. This new investigation exposes four deaths which occurred on Chinese vessels between 2017 and 2023, including one suspected suicide of a crew member said to have thrown himself overboard.

Whales will be recognised as legal persons under a declaration signed by New Zealand’s Maori king and native leaders across the Pacific.

The document seeks to legally protect the rights of whales, including “freedom of movement, cultural expression — which includes language — to a healthy environment, healthy oceans, and indeed the restoration of their populations,” according to Mere Takoko, a Maori conservationist.

Although a moratorium on commercial whaling came into effect in 1985, whales are still hunted in Norway and Iceland. Japan harvests them for what it contends is research.

The declaration, signed last week by the Maori king, Te Arikinui Tuheitia Paki, and 15 paramount chiefs of Tahiti and the Cook Islands, recognises whales as legal persons but will need the backing of governments to be enforceable.

Three Tanzanian peacekeepers deployed to eastern Congo as part of a Southern African Development Community (SADC) mission were killed by rebel mortar fire this week. Three others were wounded in the attack. Their deaths again raise questions about the capacity of the SADC Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, known as SAMIDRC, to neutralize the M23 rebel group in the country's conflict-hit east.

SAMIDRC is made up of forces from South Africa, Malawi and Tanzania. They started deploying in December after DR Congo, one of SADC's 16 members, sought support under the bloc's mutual defense pact.

The deaths of the Tanzanian soldiers are "very worrying," international relations analyst Gilbert Khadiagala told DW, because it shows M23's determination to continue their sweeping attacks across Congo's eastern region.

M23 (March 23 Movement) emerged from dormancy in late 2021 to take up arms again. It has since seized vast swaths of Congo's North Kivu province, including, more recently, several strategic towns on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Goma.

For months, aid groups have struggled to get food to an estimated 300,000 people in northern Gaza, where the world’s global authority on food security recently predicted a famine was either already happening or would begin before July.

The crisis worsened last week when the food charity World Central Kitchen, the only organisation outside the UN regularly providing hot meals, suspended operations after Israeli strikes killed seven staff members.

“WCK was feeding around 500,000 people each day with hot meals,” said Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the UN’s World Food Programme in Cairo. “We are feeding over a million people each month, and Unrwa [the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees] is providing food to people monthly. Between the three of us, we are really trying to push back this famine.

“But this will only work if humanitarian aid workers are operating in a safe environment – there has to be respect for their protection, because of the urgent need to access the most vulnerable throughout the Gaza Strip.”

Via @BrikoX

...In the upper bowels of the Ambler Theater, Jesse Crooks squats on the ground. Using a combination of muscle memory, meticulous attention to detail and on-the-fly dexterity, he carefully threads a strip of celluloid film through a projector.

“One of the most important things when you’re threading a projector is to make sure it does not touch the ground,” Crooks said.

For over a century, the formula for cinema magic remained the same: a trained projectionist, a 35-millimeter film reel and a projector. But now, thousands of feet of celluloid film strips have been replaced with an electronic file — nearly obliterating the role of a trained projectionist....

Via@jeffw@lemmy.world

The 1974 suspense thriller smartly predicted the increasing importance of technology and lack of privacy in our lives......"Produced between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, The Conversation was the only film that Coppola made in that peerless decade (which he ended with Apocalypse Now) that he scripted alone, without drawing from a literary source. As such, it feels uniquely personal, even for a director who famously invests so much of himself, creatively and financially, in his art. Though the film isn’t officially adapted from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up, Coppola does for sound what Antonioni did for picture, using one incomplete morsel of information to get at a truth that proves persistently elusive. It’s a potent metaphor for the movies themselves, which make an art of constructing reality from disassembled pieces, but it also speaks to a wider sense of unease that was gripping the culture at the time."

The Ethiopian military summarily executed several dozen civilians and committed other war crimes on January 29, 2024, in the town of Merawi in Ethiopia’s northwestern Amhara region, Human Rights Watch said today. The incident was among the deadliest for civilians during the fighting between Ethiopian federal forces and Fano militia since the outbreak of fighting in Amhara in August 2023.

The United Nations and African Union should consider suspending new deployments of Ethiopian federal forces into international peacekeeping operations until commanders responsible for grave abuses are held accountable.

“The Ethiopian armed forces’ brutal killings of civilians in Amhara undercut government claims that it’s trying to bring law and order to the region,” said Laetitia Bader, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Since fighting began between federal forces and the Fano militia, civilians are once again bearing the brunt of an abusive army operating with impunity.”

Ethiopia’s army “summarily executed several dozen civilians” and committed other war crimes in the northwestern Amhara region earlier this year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said, as it called on the United Nations to launch an independent investigation.

The incident in the city of Merawi in late January was among the deadliest for civilians since fighting began between Ethiopian federal forces and Fano militia in the restive region in August, the New York-based rights group said in a report on Thursday.

A coalition of opposition forces in Myanmar has taken control of the busiest border crossing into Thailand. The military regime which seized power in Myanmar three years ago has suffered another big defeat, this time on the eastern border with Thailand. Troops had suffered weeks of attacks by ethnic Karen insurgents, allied with other anti-coup forces.

Hundreds of troops guarding the vital border town of Myawaddy have now agreed to surrender. Most of Myanmar's overland trade with Thailand passes through Myawaddy.

On Friday, the Karen National Union announced that it had accepted the surrender of a battalion based in the town of Thanganyinaung, about 10km (6.2 miles) west of Myawaddy.

It posted a video of its jubilant fighters showing off a substantial arsenal of weapons they had captured.

Over the weekend, the Karen forces have been negotiating with the last remaining battalion inside Myawaddy, which has apparently agreed to surrender.

This is a serious setback for the military junta, which in recent months has also been driven out of large areas along the Chinese border in Shan State, and in Rakhine State near the border with Bangladesh.

Former Kivalliq Inuit Association and Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated president Paul Kaludjak sees the overall cost of living and the cost of transportation as still being two negatives for Nunavut. Kaludjak began with NTI as its vice-president of finance from 2000 until 2004, before becoming president from 2004 until 2010.

Now residing in Iqaluit, Kaludjak said the past 25 years of Nunavut have been a great journey for Inuit.

He said there’s still a lot of issues to be taken care of, but the territory is proceeding in the right direction.

“We have to engage the mining industry full scale, address the housing issues in Nunavut and play catch-up on transportation still,” he said. “As well, the overall cost of living has to be tackled big time.

“I was with the KIA when Nunavut became a territory in 1999 and seeing the process was quite gratifying. It hasn’t all been the success that we expected. Targets such as Inuit employment have never met the levels we wanted to see.

“Our Inuit organizations mandated for there to be 85 per cent Inuit employment within the Government of Nunavut (GN) and that has yet to be reached.”

At least 20 people have died, and more than 30,000 have been infected by a wave of dengue in Central America, where Guatemala and Panama have the highest death toll this year. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) warned last week that Latin America and the Caribbean will experience their “worst dengue season,” accumulating 3.5 million cases and more than 1,000 deaths this year.

The most affected in the Central American region is Guatemala, with nine deaths and about 10,200 cases, including 38 severe cases, according to data from the Ministry of Health. Last year, 118 people died in Guatemala, and 72,000 were infected by this disease transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

With man-made famines threatening both Sudan and Gaza, Al Jazeera breaks down how the body succumbs to starvation.