Word: somali
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...prime mortgage” replaced “WMD” in the American lexicon. Recent history has been particularly depressing: Between Blagojevich and billion dollar bailouts, there has been little to be pleased about this past month. I still smile whenever I hear about the Somali pirates, but I have a feeling that even this may grow stale in the coming months...
...Western media’s focus on piracy off the Somali coast in the last few months has been light in tone since piracy ceased to be a serious problem in the Atlantic centuries ago. In the popular imagination, “pirates” remind us of either illegal copies of movies made in some lost developing country or the extremely successful Disney franchise Pirates of the Caribbean. Some gravity, however, is called for: This year alone, pirates with land bases in Somalia have attacked over 100 ships off the coast of Africa. Most notably, they have held...
...country and elements of the government are inclined to extort a share of the ransom payments - tens of millions of dollars this year alone - whenever possible. The International Maritime Board's Piracy Reporting Center says 14 ships and between 250 and 300 crew members remain in captivity along the Somali coast...
...giant Saudi oil tanker Sirius Star some 450 nautical miles out at sea - well beyond the pirates' previous range. One of the men involved in that raid, 24-year-old Mohamed Dashishle described a distinctly low-tech operation, though organized by men he said had once trained in the Somali coast guard. One of the pirates' "mother ships" spotted the tanker and deployed three small skiffs to surround it. Dashishle told TIME that the pirates simply had to brandish their rocket-propelled grenade launchers to intimidate the tanker. They never even fired a shot or boarded the ship before...
...dire has the piracy problem become that several international shipping companies have chosen to abandon the shortcut through the Suez Canal that requires their vessels to pass the Somali coast, and instead route them around South Africa. "As long as there is no firm deterrent, attacks will continue," said Noel Choong, chief of the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center in Kuala Lumpur. "The risks are low, and the returns are so high." And not only for the pirates, either...