A week after the U.S. lost a drone over the Afghan-Iran frontier, the Air Force announced Tuesday morning that one of its …
Somalia
Somalia: A Navy Without Boats
We’ve reported frequently on the Somali piracy infesting the Indian Ocean. The good news is that the Somali navy wants to do something about it. The bad news, according to a fascinating but dispiriting account in …
Good Economic News at Last
In theses times of layoffs, deficits and budget cuts, anything involving finances that grows at a 37% clip over two years is good news, right? Well, here’s the latest on the pirate front, from Kenya’s The East African:
Ransom payments paid by shipping companies to Somali pirates have reached nearly $110 million this year — a
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An Explosive Glimpse of the Future of the Long War in Africa
The militant Islamic group of north Nigeria, known as Boko Harum, takes credit for the deadly car-bomb attack on a police station in the capital city of Abuja yesterday.
You might not think of West Africa as a likely site for radical Muslim violence, but the map on the left, which I use in my current “global futures” brief, may …
Pirate Map!
Alas, there’s no X to mark the spot where the treasure is buried. This is the fascinating report — The Economics of Piracy — we cited a couple of weeks ago that noted Somali pirates can make up to $79K annually plying their trade. Finally got a copy of it, here, from the author, Peter Middlebrook of Geopolicity in the UAE.
He …
Piracy Pays…
We tend to think of the pirate tales out in the Indian Ocean as a throwback to earlier times of clipper ships and gold doubloons. But in 2010, it was a big — make that huge — business. According to a piece in Business Daily Africa on Monday, Indian Ocean pirates cost the world economy as much as $12 billion in 2010 in ransoms, …
