A couple of piracy links. Thomas Wiegold (German link) reports that India is very angry indeed about a group of Italian security men protecting a ship who fired on a fishing boat, thinking she was a pirate skiff, killing several people. Of course, the Indian Navy has form here, having destroyed a Thai trawler in…
Read More Pirate LinksProgress update on fixing the Vfeed. Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like “data-row2”, now, exactly half the flights are like that, they’ve been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so…
Read More oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yakStupidity about pirates. (Yes, this again. When will it end?) No doubt the usual suspects will already be drivelling about this story. Frankly, if you think the best opportunity to rescue the hostages was when they were between a tossing, fibreglass 40-odd foot boat and a 25,000 ton hijacked containership, using as your main equipment…
Read More arr!Meanwhile, this is good news. As more and more ships from various parts of the world – like China and Iran – arrive in pirate country, somebody’s made vaguely sensible arrangements to put them on trial in Kenya, which is what has been done with the ones captured by Northumberland. This is a much better…
Read More business in great watersPacker vs. Kilcullen in the New Yorker. Here’s the key paragraph: Police are another main issue. We have built the Afghan police into a less well-armed, less well-trained version of the Army and launched them into operations against the insurgents. Meanwhile, nobody is doing the job of actual policing—rule of law, keeping the population safe…
Read More a network of friendly militiasAn interesting document was turned up in the course of the row about John Brennan, the CIA officer who was the Obama team’s original choice as intelligence chief before he was dropped as being insufficiently opposed to torture, under a volley of criticism from the blogosphere. (“Opposition was mostly confined to liberal blogs,” said the…
Read More Is this the CIA? Is this the IRA? Is this the UDA? No, it’s the Grauniad…Quite a score for our reader “Ajay”, who I think is the first to spot that the Mumbai terrorist attack bears a very close resemblance to the coup plot in Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, which makes it the third and possibly fourth case of someone actually using Forsyth’s book as a practical handbook.…
Read More the world’s deadliest novel strikes againJust to note that one issue of the Sun this week managed to rehash the much debunked pirates will knifecrime our asylums!!! story, yet again. It’s still drivel, of course; after all, here are those excitingly amoral Frenchmen, about to wire their pirates up to the ship’s power bus….or not. The latest lot are heading…
Read More Piracy Drivel WatchSo, what if there was an airline that uses the Zimbabwean registry in order to get around most people’s idea of aviation safety, is almost certainly in cahoots with the Zimbabwean government, and was involved not just with running guns into the DRC in the late 90s but also with actual combat air missions, dropping…
Read More Avient, AgainDer Spiegel has an interesting story regarding the Colombian drug smugglers’ homemade submarines. These have so far been considered a curiosity, but apparently they are becoming more and more common, and the technology is developing fast. The biggest vessel captured so far displaced 46 tonnes, presumably surfaced, with a payload of 10 tonnes. Apparently the…
Read More dive! dive! dive!