Anyone who enjoyed Raffi Khatchadourian’s story on wild whaling crusader Paul Watson—read it online if you missed it, it’s worth it—will be interested in this story in the Times today. It begins:

Japan is dropping its plan to kill humpback whales in the seas off Antarctica, the country’s top government spokesman said Friday.

Japan decided to suspend humpback hunts at the request of the United States, which is currently chair of the International Whaling Commission, according to Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura.

”The government has decided to suspend hunts of humpback whales while talks to normalize IWC is taking place,” Machimura said. ”But there will no changes to our stance on our research whaling itself.”

In other news, here’s an intriguing post on the illustration and cartooning blog Drawn!:

This is not a new project, but it’s definitely worth mentioning. Richard Rutter is adapting principles in the classic design book, The Elements of Typographic Style to the web. The site is an ongoing project; Rutter is adding to the site in the order presented in Bringhurst’s book, “one principle at a time.”

Read on, and thanks to Carolita for the tip. Speaking of cartoonists, today’s Google Alerts led me to this mini-archive of stories about cartoon editor Bob Mankoff; here’s our coverage so far of the man behind “Is never good for you?”