Word: icelander
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...despite being branded an international outlaw and threatened with an economic backlash, Norway insists that the whaling will go on. Its resolve is strengthened by the confidence that other countries may follow: Iceland, which quit the IWC last year over the same issue, says it will resume whaling next summer, ban or no. Japan will abide by the rules for now, but has lobbied the IWC to allow limited whaling. All three nations argue that the current policy is governed by emotion, not rational science. They contend that a careful harvest of relatively plentiful species like the minke is harmless...
With next year's Winter Olympics in Norway, the stakes for the tourist ^ industry are higher than ever. Another whaling nation, Iceland, has already quit the IWC but has not yet resumed the hunt for fear of the reaction from environmentally oriented tourists. This suggests that the real power to control whaling lies less in the IWC than in the pocketbooks and votes of consumers around the world...
Several factors made the Age of Exploration possible. Medieval cartographers piously placed Jerusalem at the center of the earth. But in the 15th century, Western scholars rediscovered Ptolemy's Geography, with its maps of a semispheric earth that (more or less) accurately located such distant places as Iceland and Ceylon. Improvements in rigging enabled the construction of larger, more maneuverable ships with both square-rigged and fore-and-aft sails. The development of the quadrant (an Arabic invention) and magnetic compass (possibly from China) made navigation more accurate; the stern- fastened rudder made ship handling easier...
Frustrated by the International Whaling Commission's reluctance to lift a six- year-old ban on hunting minke whales they say have since become sufficiently plentiful, Iceland has quit the IWC and Norway is defiant. Environmentalists fear that could lead to hunting other, more endangered whales...
...Iceland, Norway and Japan--the world's threeprincipal whaling nations--now say new scientificevidence proves that certain whale populations arenot in danger of extinction, and would be unharmedby regulated commercial whaling, Clapham said...