PLANE SAILING
The battery powered, remote-controlled aircraft has a range of 300km, and feeds back GPS co-ordinates, live video and still images to the activist ships to pinpoint the Japanese whaling fleet. It's already clocked up one victorious mission, with one sortie for the drone allowing the ship Steve Irwin to track a whaler over 28 nautical miles away. The three ships belonging to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society are all equipped with drones, donated by Bayshore Recycling, a New Jersey-based, environmentally-minded recycling company.
Once only used in high-tech military operations by the US air force and Israeli spies, drones are now becoming more and more commonplace, and affordable! You can pick one up for as little as £300 (google it if you don't believe us), control it with yer smartphone and use for whatever you wish. Now available to the general public, the mind boggles as to what new and inventive (and potentially terrifying) applications this technology could now have once dastardly people start customising and modifying them. Meanwhile after the drones found the whalers, Sea Shepherd engaged in a six hour stand off with one of the Japanese Yushin Maru 3. See www.seashepherd.org
* 2012 could well turn out to be the year of the drone (or UFO sightings), after November saw a drone sent up by activists in Warsaw to keep an eye on the Polski Police during protests, while Moscow's largest demo in December was also monitored from above. For footage and more see www.forums.whyweprotest.net
Just when we were all getting to grips with fracking, another mind-blowingly stupid and dangerous form of extreme energy extraction gains momentum.
Twenty one climate activists escape jail at sentencing after shuttng down coal fired power station for seven days
Residents of Balcombe, West Sussex, warn the frackers they're ready for direct action to prevent the first exploratory well from being drilled just south of their village
It's Hove vs Gove as the education secretary aims to concrete over recreation ground in the name of God.
Somerset's badgers are in the sniper's sights as activists vow to disrupt the cull.
UPDATE: They finally coughed up. After two days of consistent hassling by activists at the Department for Transport earlier last month, during which one person got nicked, the DfT sheepishly released the previously top secret (read: problematic and embarrassing) documents about the Bexhill-Hastings Link Road.
A member of the Old Berkshire Hunt pleads guilty to assault.
UPDATE: They finally coughed up. After two days of consistent hassling by activists at the Department for Transport earlier last month, during which one person got nicked, the DfT sheepishly released the previously top secret (read: problematic and embarrassing) documents about the Bexhill-Hastings Link Road.
