Wow. The International Whaling Commission has voted to change its role ' towards conserving whales, rather than managing how many are caught.' I was reading about this in the papers over the weekend and the belief then was that Japan and Norway had managed to amass enough pro-whaling votes to block this move, and maybe even overturn the moratorium on commercial whaling, so this is good news. However, I'm not an expert on whaling, so I don't know what the effect would be if Japan carries out it's threat to leave the IWC in response to this new direction.

Greenpeace are very happy about this, as you'd expect. They also have a good brief guide to what the new role of the IWC - the Berlin Initiative - involves.