Hong Kong theme park denies capturing dolphins

(AFP) – – A Hong Kong marine park on Monday rejected environmentalists’ allegations that it was trying to capture dolphins in the Solomon Islands, possibly in breach of animal conservation rules.

The Washington-based Animal Welfare Institute has said the popular Ocean Park venue was believed to be importing 30 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins.

“These wild dolphins are believed to have been recently captured or about to be captured from waters surrounding the Solomon Islands. The importing facility is believed to be Ocean Park, Hong Kong,” several conservation groups told Hong Kong lawmakers in an April 16 letter.

The Institute said there was “mounting and irrefutable evidence” that dolphin imports from the cluster of islands near Papua New Guinea would breach the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Ocean Park rejected the allegations.

“Ocean Park has not deployed any team to capture the dolphins in the Solomon Islands,” it said.

The park’s executive director of zoological operations and its general curator met officials from the Solomon Islands during a research project in December and March, Ocean Park said.

They discussed “supporting a potential collaboration of scientific research on the whale and dolphin population, distribution and genetic diversity in the area.”

“This project represents Ocean Park’s wildlife conservation initiatives in the wild,” the park said.

Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) said it had not received any application from Ocean Park to import dolphins.

The daily South China Morning Post quoted a Solomon Islands government adviser as saying Ocean Park representatives met two government ministers and were expected to sign a memorandum of understanding under which “between 24 and 30″ dolphins would be sent to Hong Kong.

Any plan to acquire dolphins in the future would meet local and international animal conservation rules, Ocean Park said.

“If the dolphins (in the Solomon Islands) are not sustainable, we would go somewhere else,” Ocean Park chairman Allan Zeman told the Post last week.

“There are a lot of dolphins around, of different species.”

Ocean Park has 16 dolphins, almost half of them born in captivity through an artificial insemination programme, it said.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20100419/tap-hongkong-animal-conservation-dolphin-900e8df.html

Embassy rejects reports of Iranian drug smugglers’ execution

By Zhao Hongyi

The Iranian Embassy rejected reports circulating the past couple of weeks that nationals convicted of drug smuggling in China have been executed.

“Since three years ago, a total of 46 Iranians have been charged with trading in illegal drugs in China. Most of these people were not drug smugglers but were in fact ordinary airline passengers who were unaware o the narcotics packed in their luggage,” Iran’s Mehr News Agency quoted an embassy official as saying.

The embassy released a statement last Friday saying that “no Iranian has been arrested in the past year for drug smggling, or executed for that matter.” It said “Tehran’s embassy in Beijing is determined to defend the rights and interests of all Iranians residing in China.

The statement said a number of Iranian detainees received death sentences two years ago, but that the verdicts were still on appeal at the appellate court in Beijing. When contacted for further comment, a consul said he had no knowledge of the issue.

The embassy’s press officer Mohammad Ali Ziaei declined to comment on the “sensitive issue,” but willingly discussed another charge against Iranian nationals: an attack Tuesday against the search engiBaidu. Media reported that the site was defaced by hackers who left a message saying, “This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army.

Ziaei said the Iranian government condemned the attack and said it went against Iran’s pro-China foreign policy. “Iran condemns these actions and hopes it won’t bring any negative impact on bilateral relations,” he said, adding that perpetrators could also be foreign hackers operating from Iran.

Baidu was attacked Tuesday morning and was inaccessible for the rest of the day. Netizens said the hackers tampered with the search engine’s Domain Name System (DNS), redirecting traffic to another site. Baidu’s gineers later confirmed that the attack came from  hackers in Iran.