According to the The Shark Alliance’s petition page,

• The EU ban on ‘finning’ (slicing off a shark’s fins and discarding the body at sea) is among the world’s weakest due mainly to the strong influence of the EU’s top shark fishing nation: Spain.
• The EU finning regulation allows permitted fishermen to remove shark fins at sea and land shark parts separately, complicating enforcement. Spain grants more permits than any other EU country.
• Spain is working to further weaken the EU finning ban as the European Commission and other countries have called to strengthen it. Calls from concerned European citizens are needed to persuade Spain to change course.

If you support the cause of The Shark Alliance, you can sign the petition online.

False accusations against a blue shark persist.

While it’s not uncommon for details of breaking news to be sketchy, if not entirely inaccurate, most media outlets tend to follow-up on a story when it turns out the story has been falsely or incorrectly reported. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case with the following publications:

• The Daily Mail – British holidaymakers warned to stay away from Spanish beaches after shark attack on schoolgirl
• The Leader – BATHERS URGED TO REMAIN VIGILANT AROUND TARRAGONA BEACHES
• The Daily Star – COSTA GIRL IS SAVAGED BY SHARK

All three of these publications ran stories reporting a shark attack caused by a blue shark, yet none of them have any follow-up story clarifying that no such shark attack occurred, nor that the injured girl was bitten by a bluefish. It should be pointed out that The Daily Mail and The Daily Star both appear to be tabloid-style “news.” However, The Leader looks to be a “legitimate” news source. In addition to the three sources above, The Barcelona Reporter, ran a sensationalized version of the story, Blue shark bites girl in Spain, nearly severs foot, off Tarragona beach. To The Barcelona Reporter’s credit, they did add a paragraph at the end of their story mentioning that it was later concluded that the bite was consistent with a bluefish bite, but they didn’t change the headline of the story nor did they remove the content in the story claiming that a blue shark almost severed the girl’s foot.

While most of the publications that ran with this story seem to be far-from-reliable sources of news, the story and lack of follow-up illustrate how sensationalism and fear-mongering seem to be more attractive “news” than actually reporting the facts, whenever a shark is involved (or not involved, at all, in this instance).