Polish authorities introduced the hunting plan to stem an outbreak of African swine fever (ASF), which is deadly to wild boar and pigs and was first spotted in the EU member in 2014 when infected boar entered from Belarus.

“Stop hunting, come down, you look like a good man,” 44-year-old animal rights activist Anna Ruszkiewicz said to a hunter sitting in a hunting tower in the middle of a forest southwest of Warsaw.

“Come over to the other side of the barricade, join people like us who are protecting animals instead of killing them,” the activist clad in a yellow vest added gently.

Ruszkiewicz, who works as a public servant in Warsaw, undertook the hour-long drive from the capital along with around 40 others to block the hunt in the forest next to the village of Wiatrowiec.

“We’ve been walking around. Picking mushrooms. We have the right, no? The forest belongs to everyone,” she said.

For the dozen or so hunters, it is yet another failed hunt: one by one, they climb down from the towers and leave the forest to put away their rifles and drive away with their dogs.

The animal rights activists follow in hot pursuit. For the rest of the day, the hunters will have them on their heels as they visit various spots around the area.

“The goal is to stop them from just going over to another forest to hunt,” said Anna Michajlow, who is the coordinator of the animal rights operation.

‘Vicious cycle’

On this day the activists come out on top, as not a single wild boar was shot in the area. The previous day only one was killed.

“The activists are keeping us from hunting. They blocked us yesterday, last weekend too. And again today they came in a few cars. We aren’t able to shoot,” said Ryszard Lewandowski, secretary for the Cyranka hunting association based in the central village of Jeziorka.

“It’s a vicious cycle. The (environment) minister is asking us to hunt wild boar to stop the ASF virus from spreading — and we can’t,” he told AFP.

“So the virus is heading ever closer to the west and reaching pig farms. If things continue as is, the virus will end up in Germany.”

According to data from the PZL hunting union, nearly 200,000 wild boar have been killed since early April, or 90 percent of the planned total.

But that is not enough for the government, which ordered them to step up their hunting efforts in January.

For each boar they kill under the scheme, hunters receive more than 600 zloty (140 euros, $160). Of that amount, 20 percent must go to the hunting association.

The agricultural lobby is strong, as Poland is one of the leading producers of pork in the European Union. In June 2018, farmers had a total of 11.8 million swine.

Since the virus was detected in Poland in 2014, 43,000 from affected areas have had to be shot dead, according to the country’s chief veterinarian.

‘Hunting ethics’

Police officers called to the scene take down the names of the activists. Though peaceful, the atmosphere is tense, with each group making accusations against the other.

The activists claim the hunters are “exterminating” a species. The hunters claim the activists are funded by anti-Polish lobbyists.

“Who’s funding you? Is it in their interest for ASP to spread, and for farmers to have to pay the price?” asks one angry hunter.

Boar which are killed are transported to a walk-in freezer where they are gutted and samples are drawn for analysis. Results arrive back a week later.

The virus is not dangerous to humans but is a threat to the pork industry.

“The situation is worrisome,” said Grzegorz Wozniakowski, head of the national laboratory in the eastern city of Pulawy.

“The samples collected from 24 boar shot in Grawolin, around 40 kilometres from Warsaw, all came back positive. One hundred percent of those boar were infected, compared to 10 percent in general.”

The hunters say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

“If we don’t reach the quota of 48 boar set by the (environment) minister, we risk consequences,” 42-year-old hunter Marcin Jakubczak said.

That quota is in addition to the annual 154 boar set out for their area of nearly 13,000 hectares in the regular hunting plan.

“Obviously we don’t fire on sows and their little ones. It’s against hunting ethics,” Jakubczak said.

The environment minister had requested to also shoot sows over the course of the year, without honouring the period of protection linked to procreation.

The tension led to the resignation of PZL head Piotr Jenoch, who made clear that he was opposed to the demands made on hunters.

The annual January 26 Australia Day holiday commemorates the arrival of the first British settlers in 1788, but for many Australians it marks the beginning of colonial oppression of Aboriginal people.

Several thousand joined the annual march in Melbourne Saturday chanting “Always was, always will be Aboriginal land”, and holding placards stating “Australia is a crime scene”.

Thousands more joined similar demonstrations in major cities around the country, calling for a change of date, or for the day to be abolished altogether.

“Why would you want to celebrate this concept called Australia? It is founded on lies, founded on genocide, founded on murder,” Melbourne protestor Dominic Guerrera told AFP. “There’s nothing to celebrate in that.”

Divisions have deepened in recent years with increasing calls to change the date.

Amid the heightened sensitivities this week Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced government funding of a voyage to mark the 250th anniversary of explorer Captain James Cook’s first journey to Australia.

Canberra pledged about $6.5 million to a circumnavigation of Australia in a replica of Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, which in 1770 brought the British into contact with eastern Australia and foreshadowed the colonisation of the continent.

The story of Cook’s voyage and his “discovery” of territory declared New South Wales on the east coast has stirred debate in Australia, with Aboriginal people inhabiting the land for more than 60,000 years before the first European explorers arrived.

Meanwhile, the uncovering this week in London of the remains of British explorer Matthew Flinders, who is credited as the first to circumnavigate the Australian continent in 1802-1803, has also added to the controversy.

An aboriginal aide to Flinders named Bungaree has been largely eclipsed by his British captain, but historians now believe he played a crucial role in success of the voyage.

Morrison, who has resisted calls to change the date, said Saturday Australia cannot “walk away” from its past.

“Australia is the story of being overcome, to be able to see the better nature of Australians and the values we hold together, all races, all peoples, all cultures, all religions, all languages even,” he told reporters.

Aboriginal people remain the most disadvantaged Australians, with higher rates of poverty, ill-health and imprisonment than any other community.

Australia Day is also celebrated across the county, with picnics, traditional Aboriginal performances and citizenship ceremonies, where more than 16,000 new Australians pledged their commitment to the nation Saturday.

Malaysia has in recent months suspended several major projects signed under the country’s previous scandal-plagued regime, in a bid to cut the country’s massive one trillion ringgit ($251 billion) debt.

Economics minister Azmin Ali said Malaysia made the decision two days ago on the 81 billion ringgit ($19.6 billion) east coast rail link (ECRL) that would have connected the eastern and western coasts of the peninsula.

“The cost of the ECRL development is too big, so we have no financial ability at this time,” he told reporters.

He said that if the project was not terminated, Malaysia would have to pay an annual 500 million ringgit interest payment.

Malaysia’s previous government under Prime Minister Najib Razak had warm ties with China and signed up to a string of Beijing-funded projects.

But critics say many of these deals lacked transparency, fuelling speculation they were made in exchange for help in paying off debts from a massive financial scandal involving state fund 1MDB.

The scandal was a major factor in Najib’s shock electoral defeat in May last year that saw his former boss Mahathir Mohamad return to power.

Mahathir then ordered a review of mega-projects signed by Najib during his nine-year rule, adding he would discuss “unfair” terms supposedly set in these deals and high interest rates levied on Chinese loans used to finance the projects.

Azmin did not say how much compensation Malaysia would have to pay for cancelling the project, adding it would be determined by the finance ministry.

Najib and his cronies were accused of plundering billions of dollars from 1MDB, with the former leader charged with corruption over the scandal.

He will stand trial over these charges in February, and has denied any wrongdoing.

The tailings dam, owned by Brazilian mining giant Vale, broke apart “very violently, very suddenly,” sending a massive torrent of mud over the complex where hundreds of employees were working, Vale CEO Fabio Schvartsman told a news conference in Rio de Janeiro.

The deluge rumbled on to the nearby town of Brumadinho, located southwest of the city of Belo Horizonte, cutting a swath through vegetation, farmland and roads, and impeding access to the area.

The death toll was expected to rise, as rescue teams scoured through the disaster zone overnight into Saturday. Dozens of helicopters were being used.

Brazil’s new government led by President Jair Bolsonaro reacted to its first big emergency since taking office early this month by launching disaster coordination between the defense, mining and environment ministries and authorities in the affected state of Minas Gerais.

Bolsonaro and his defense minister were to fly over the zone on Saturday. His environment minister raced to the area late Friday.

An AFP photographer viewing the zone from the air described tractors, houses and a bridge submerged in mud, and emergency crews using earth-moving machinery to search for survivors.

Television images earlier showed helicopters being used to rescue people stuck in mud.

‘Human tragedy’

Schvartsman called the dam break “a human tragedy, because we’re talking about probably a large number of victims — we don’t know how many but we know it will be a high number.”

Schvartsman, who had his two-year term renewed last month by Vale’s board, said it was an “inactive dam” that was in the process of being decommissioned that burst apart.

Its contents — tailings, or mining byproducts mixed with water — cascaded into another dam, which overflowed, he said.

The liquid, brown mass barreled on towards Brumadinho, population 39,000, but did not deal it a direct hit.

The Minas Gerais government statement said 427 people had been working at the Vale mine at the time of the dam collapse, and 279 were recovered alive. The others were listed as missing.

“Where are our relatives?” wailed Raquel Cristina, one of several people demanding information in Belo Horizonte about their kin in the mud-hit area.

“My five-year-old nephew is asking me if his dad died. What do I tell him?” asked another, Olivia Rios.

Romeo Zema, the governor of Minas Gerais state, told reporters that, while all was being done to find survivors, “from now, the odds are minimal and it is most likely we will recover only bodies.”

Vale shares plunge

Shares in Vale plummeted eight percent in New York trading Friday. The Sao Paulo stock market was closed for a holiday.

The disaster recalled trauma from a 2015 dam break in a different part of the same state of Minas Gerais, in Mariana, in which 19 people died.

That accident three years ago released millions of tons of toxic iron waste along hundreds of kilometers (miles), causing what is considered the country’s worst environmental disaster. Vale was joint operator of that dam, along with the Anglo-Australian group BHP.

The Brazil office of Greenpeace, the environmental activist group, said Fridays dam break was “a sad consequence of the lessons not learned by the Brazilian government and the mining companies.”

It said that the incidents “are not accidents but environmental crimes that must be investigated, punished and repaired.”

Civil defense officials said people living in low-lying areas of Brumadinho had been evacuated after the collapse.

Vale issued a statement saying it had set up shelters for residents left homeless.

Brumadinho’s municipality issued an alert on social media warning residents to move away from the Paraopeba river that the dam had been holding back.

The town is best known to tourists for Inhotim, an outdoor contemporary art museum, which was evacuated as a precaution. The venue receives 35,000 visitors a month.