Oceania

Environmental campaigners have attempted to stop one of the world's largest trawlers reaching Port Lincoln in South Australia.

The Greenpeace campaign group has launched an online petition to stop the Dutch registered FV Margiris from being allowed to trawl for fish off southern Australia, saying the vessel is too big and will cause damage to the environment.

A Greenpeace video showed a rigid inflatable boat (RIB) attempting on Thursday to tie up alongside the 143 metre-long trawler before a pilot launch pushed it out of the way.

At nearly 9,500 tonnes, the group says the Margiris will be the largest vessel ever to fish in Australian waters and says it can catch and process 275 tonnes of fish per day.

The operators of the vessel, Seafish Tasmania, say its size allows it to process and freeze its catch storing it on board for weeks at a time.

It also says so-called bycatch is minimal. Greenpeace says dolphins, seals and sharks will also be caught in its net.

The FV Margiris is scheduled to carry out fishing trips of six to eight weeks duration in deep waters south of Australia.


Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies

Australian police Sunday reopened inquiries into the 1982 bombing of the Israeli consulate in Sydney and a Jewish club, reportedly after interviewing an extremist jailed over a blast on a Pan Am flight that year.

No one was killed but two people were injured in the attacks on the consulate and the Jewish Hakoah sports club in Bondi on December 23, 1982 -- crimes that have gone unsolved for almost 30 years.

But police reopened the case Sunday, publishing photographs of two male suspects, after a review of the Sydney bombings reportedly led them to convicted extremist Mohammed Rashed, in jail for a blast on Pan Am flight 830.

A Japanese teenager died and 15 others were wounded when a bomb exploded on the flight from Tokyo to Honolulu on August 11, 1982.

"This review, and a range of enquiries here and overseas, were able to establish that there were sufficient grounds to warrant a formal re-investigation into the bombings upon the Israeli consulate and Hakoah Club in 1982," said assistant commissioner Peter Dein, head of the counter-terrorism squad.

"It was luck more than anything else that no one was killed in these bombings, and while it is almost 30 years ago we know there are people out there living with the knowledge or guilt of these crimes."

Dein refused to confirm the link to Rashed but several media reports citing police sources close to the case said the Jordanian-born explosives expert had been interviewed by officers in the US and was key to the case being reopened.

Rashed was part of an Iraq-based pro-Palestinian group, 15 May, that targeted US and Israeli interests in the 1980s, and he received leniency in his Pan Am sentence for cooperating with international authorities as an informant.

Sydney police have long believed 15 May, named for the date of the first Arab-Israeli war, was linked to the Hakoah club and consulate bombings.

Dein said the investigation would apply "new technologies and investigative procedures to an historical crime".

Two people, including a Hungarian holocaust survivor, were wounded when a bomb went off in a stairwell of the Israeli consulate in central Sydney at 2:00 pm on December 23, 1982.

The second bomb, detonated about five hours later in the Hakoah Club's carpark, failed to explode properly and did not injure anyone, but there was extensive damage to the car it was in and two others nearby.

There were a "large number" of athletes inside the building at the time, according to police.

A New Zealand man who fled to China after a bank mistakenly deposited millions of dollars into his account was jailed for four years and seven months Friday.

Hui "Leo" Gao and his then-partner Kara Hurring skipped the country when Westpac bank accidentally put NZ$10 million (US$8.1 million) into Gao's account in April 2009 after he requested a NZ$100,000 overdraft.

The error was discovered within days but by then Gao had transferred NZ$6.78 million into offshore bank accounts and the pair, dubbed the "runaway millionaires", had left the country.

Gao spent more than two years on the run before he was arrested at Interpol's request in September last year as he tried to enter Hong Kong from mainland China.

He was sentenced in the Rotorua District Court Friday after pleading guilty to seven charges of theft at an earlier hearing.

Hurring, who was convicted on lesser charges of money laundering, was sentenced to nine months home detention in the same court and ordered to repay almost NZ$12,000 she had obtained using Gao's credit card.

Hurring had a baby son to Gao while they were on the run but the pair broke up while they were fugitives.

She voluntarily returned to New Zealand in February last year and gave herself up.

The court was told that NZ$3.8 million of the money had still not been recovered and Gao had provided no explanation about what happened to it.

Judge Philip Cooper said Gao's offending was opportunistic, rather than pre-meditated, but the sentence reflected the fact that he deliberately moved the money offshore and avoided capture for as long as possible.

"You were arrested because you were located by Hong Kong authorities, not because you handed yourself in," he said.

 

 

A 90-year-old man accused of being a Nazi war criminal on Wednesday won his fight to stay in Australia, after the High Court blocked his extradition to Hungary.

Charles Zentai was allegedly one of three Nazi-backed Hungarian soldiers who tortured and murdered a Jewish teenager in Budapest in 1944, a crime for which he has always maintained his innocence.

"The effect of the High Court's decision is that Mr Zentai will not be surrendered to Hungary," a spokeswoman for Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare said, confirming that the decision was final.

"Mr Zentai cannot be surrendered for extradition because the offence of 'war crime' did not exist under Hungarian law at the time of Mr Zentai's alleged criminal conduct."

Hungary first requested the extradition of Zentai, an Australian citizen, in 2005 for the offence of "war crime", namely a fatal assault on young Jewish man Peter Balazs in November 1944 for not wearing a yellow Star of David.

He and two fellow soldiers in the transport unit of the Hungarian army, which was then allied to the Germans, were accused of beating Balazs and then tossing his body into the Danube River.

Alleged WWII war criminal Charles Zentai leaves the Perth Magistrate's Court after an appearance to fight against extradition proceedings instigated by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in 2006. Zentai was accused of the murder of a Jewish teenager in Budapest in 1944.

 

Zentai has always claimed he had already left Nazi-occupied Budapest by then and could not have been involved in the murder.

The Australian government agreed to send him to Hungary to face the allegations in late 2009, but he fought a legal battle against the move and the Federal Court eventually overturned his extradition.

Canberra pushed ahead with its case, despite pleas from Zentai's family that he was elderly and had health problems, appealing the Federal Court's interpretation of an "extraditable offence".

In late 2011, when the government was granted leave to appeal to the High Court, the nation's highest judicial authority, it said the matter raised "a significant issue for the administration of Australia's extradition regime".

It said Wednesday the High Court decision provided certainty about the interpretation of a provision of Australia's extradition treaty with Hungary but did not alter extradition arrangements.

Zentai's son Ernie Steiner has previously said his frail father, who has lived in Australia for almost six decades, was willing to answer questions from Hungarian police about the murder but did not want to leave the country.

Early last year, Steiner told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation his father was "quite devastated" by the government's decision to pursue him.

"We were hoping that this matter would have concluded by now and so it's a big disappointment," he said.

"It's really something he has to live with now potentially for the rest of his life."

Australia conducted war crimes trials of Japanese defendants between November 1945 and April 1951, but since then has not concluded a successful prosecution of a war criminal or extradited a citizen to face trial elsewhere.

A new report commissioned by the Australian government on how best to deal with asylum seekers is recommending that the state take in more refugees by official means in order to deter illegal entries.

An expert panel headed by former defence chief Angus Houston said on Monday that Canberra should introduce greater disincentives to stop would-be refugees from paying people-smugglers to bring them by boat to Australia.

Houston's panel also recommended that Australia increase its humanitarian intake from some 13,000 to about 20,000 places a year, and up to 27,000 within five years. This is to help deter boat people from risking their lives at sea, his report said.

Australian authorities have intercepted three boats carrying 178 asylum seekers in just the last two days. The interceptions take the number of asylum seekers picked up this month to 650.

The much-awaited independent report also said Australia should transfer asylum-seekers offshore to places such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea as part of a "comprehensive regional network".

It called on Canberra to work closely with Indonesia, a transit country for many boat people, and Malaysia to stem the influx of maritime arrivals as well as lift its annual humanitarian intake.

"Over time, a comprehensive regional framework will reduce the lure of irregular maritime migration but until then, the panel believes Australia needs to include the prospect of processing options outside of Australia," the report said.

"To support this, it is the panel's view that the Australian parliament should agree, as a matter of urgency, to legislation that will allow for the processing of irregular maritime arrivals in locations outside Australia."

'Sense of humanity'

More than 100 boats carrying over 7,500 suspected asylum-seekers have arrived in Australia so far this year, after the government failed to pass legislation aimed at deterring them by sending them to Malaysia.

The so-called "Malaysia solution" would have seen boat people arriving in Australia transferred to the Southeast Asian nation, with Canberra resettling thousands of that country's registered refugees in return.

The proposal was scuttled by the opposition and the Greens, who refused to pass laws allowing off-shore processing, prompting the government to ask Houston to review the policy in hopes of breaking the political deadlock.

Houston's panel then recommended the government lift its annual humanitarian intake to about 20,000, and consider increasing it further within five years.

"We recommend a policy approach that is hard-headed, but not hard-hearted, that is realistic not idealistic, that is driven by a sense of humanity as well as fairness," Houston said.

The retired air chief marshal said some 964 asylum-seekers and crew had lost their lives at sea while trying to making it to Australia since late 2001, with 604 of these perishing since October 2009.

"Like all Australians, we are deeply concerned about this tragic loss of life at sea," he said. "To do nothing is unacceptable."

The report also said those who arrive by boat should not be eligible to sponsor family members to join them in Australia.

Canberra should also consider turning back boats in the future, but only if operational, safety and legal conditions are met, the report recommended.

An unapproved drug taken as part of a medical study contributed to the death of a Christchurch man who was hit while riding his scooter home, a coroner has found.

Abu Dhabi: The UAE has signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Australia, which holds about 40 per cent of the world's uranium reserves, and making the country the biggest producer of uranium fuel in the world.

Detectives say they do not know why a married father of three was killed "execution-style" in bushland in south-western Sydney.

Sick patients are outnumbering hospital beds in parts of the country as staff struggle to keep up with a flood of winter-related illness.

The parliamentary stalemate on asylum seekers is set to continue, after Independent MP Rob Oakeshott's compromise bill on offshore processing was defeated in the Senate, 39 votes to 29.