Word: whaled
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WHILE ACADEMIC ECONOMICS roils in disagreement, Volcker has set the terms for a larger national debate from now till the 1980 elections. No one doubts that inflation is the American public's white whale, the unknown menace the government must first locate and then destroy. But experts and laymen alike disagree over where to begin looking. Liberal economists and their political bedfellows argue that narrow monetary policy can't solve domestic inflation when well over half that inflation traces its lineage to the tankered waters of the Persian Gulf. If OPEC intends further price hikes--as it apparently does--then...
...ships still slaughtering whales, none is more loathed by conservationists than the infamous Sierra. Flying the Cyprus flag and owned by a shadowy Liechtenstein-based company, possibly with Japanese interests, the pirate whaler ignores all whaling agreements, hunts indiscriminately and makes its kills in a particularly cruel way: instead of the explosive-tipped harpoons used by most whalers, it employs the unarmed type. These do less damage to whale meat but only prolong the agony of the great mammals, often attracting other whales who, in trying to help their beleaguered brethren, are themselves caught. Last week, in a dramatic reversal...
Sierra's Moby Dick-like nemesis was not a great whale, but the Sea Shepherd, a converted British fishing trawler purchased by Cleveland Amory's Fund for Animals. The conservationists' ship spotted Sierra 180 miles off the coast of Portugal and shadowed it toward Oporto, where it was expected to unload its cargo of whale products. Their probable destination: Japan. But when Sierra balked at entering the harbor, the leader of the antiwhaling expedition, Paul Watson, 28, of Vancouver, put Shepherd's captain and 14 crew members ashore, then headed back out to sea with...
Melodramatic as the battle of Oporto may have been, it was largely anticlimactic. Major whalers are already in retreat, having suffered a stinging defeat two weeks ago at a London meeting of the International Whaling Commission (I.W.C.), which overwhelmingly voted to ban hunting of all whales (except the still numerous minkes) by factory ships on the high seas; only coastal whaling will be permitted. The I.W.C. also approved creation of a whale sanctuary in the Indian Ocean...
...present, the IWC takes a rough guess at the numbers of a species and, using little more than simple arithmetic, decides how many whales can be killed without endangering the population's survival. But many scientists argue that the calculations should take other factors into account. Some of these marine mammals are believed to be monogamous, and the slaughter of one whale may break up a family unit, with a drastic effect on breeding. Since certain species have the largest brains of any creatures, they may be intelligent enough to fear such sounds as ships' propellers, even...